In the year since Pam Elyea was last interviewed by the Business Journal, a lot has transpired with her business.For one, the entertainment industry has opened up again and History for Hire, where Elyea is vice president, finds itself busy again with prop rentals. The North Hollywood prop house was shut down for more than two months starting last March.
“While we were shut down and because our customers are production companies, we did not charge anybody rental on anything until they started production again,” Elyea said. “So that meant some clients had our props for seven to eight months and we did not see any income on any of those. We started rentals up once that client started filming.”The company got a Paycheck Protection Program loan to pay employees while money was not coming in. After reopening in the last week of May, the staff busied itself in revamping the History for Hire website and putting its inventory online, something that had never happened before, Elyea said.
In Burbank, fellow prop house owner Keith Marvin of Lennie Marvin’s Prop Heaven closed his business down from March 19 until early July. But he admitted there was not a lot of business being transacted for the next two months.
Then around Labor Day, as more pro sports teams began to play again, the work started to pick up, Marvin said. This was due to Prop Heaven supplying objects for television commercials, he added.
“As time went on, toward the end of last year, more and more shows were coming back,” Marvin continued. “Even more so now, especially with the streaming shows, the Netflix and Apple shows and HBO and Showtime. They seem to have the best protocols and are more aggressive in moving ahead to film safely.” Prop Heaven is back to full staff and is pretty much close to normal, Marvin said.
“It is amazing how well it has picked up,” he added. “I’m super pleased about that. It was unexpected but Hollywood was determined to come back and find a way to film safely. And they did.”Rob Gibson is a location manager in Santa Clarita who has worked in the industry for more than 21 years.After going through a period of having no work to do, in September, things began to pick up again. Since October, Gibson said he has been super busy. Among the projects he has scouted locations for are “Ambulance,” a Michael Bay action movie, and for the third season of “The Orville.” “There is a need for content right now, so there is no shortage of work,” Gibson said. “With the new players that we have now, between Apple and Netflix and Amazon coming into the game, it is wide open and not just the usual players anymore.”When scouting locations for use in “Ambulance,” Gibson said that there were people who did not want the filmmakers coming into their homes. But he did admit this was during the post-holiday surge in COVID-19 cases in late December and into January and early February.
“Then we had people who were welcoming us back and were grateful we were back to work and were grateful to have a little bit of income from us,” he added.
The entertainment industry is holding itself to a strict standard when it comes to taking precautions to prevent the spread of coronavirus and is absolutely setting the standard, Gibson said.
That was an opinion shared by Daniel Veluzat, an owner and manager of Melody Ranch Motion Picture Studio in Santa Clarita.
Once protocols had been established by the industry, the work has started to pick back up, Veluzat said, adding, “We are working pretty regularly now.” The production companies that film on the ranch property must hire nurses and other medical professionals to do COVID-19 tests and temperature checks.“They have put together real good teams of people that are watching over everything and making sure people are following the rules,” Veluzat said.