This Feels Like the End of Something

David Chen

23 Oct 2025 — 5 min read

Los Angeles as seen from a plane. Image credit: David Chen.

For many years, I dreamed of moving to Los Angeles.

It was always a logical endpoint for me. I'm very into movies, after all – how they're made, how they're marketed, how they're talked about afterwards. Why not move to the place that's the nexus of the whole industry? It feels corny to say but whenever I drove through the streets of LA, its magic worked on me. Despite how rundown and old some of it looked and felt, it still always came off as the place where dreams came true. An unknown person could become a star overnight. And maybe that star could be you! You never know, but it probably could be. Definitely maybe.

I reflected on my former dreams during a recent trip I took there. A film I directed, The Primary Instinct, was playing at a small film festival at the Road Theatre in North Hollywood. I don't get many opportunities to go to LA (and my ability to go will soon decrease even further), but I have many friends and colleagues there whom I deeply value. I thought I'd use the opportunity to visit with many of them and reaffirm some of my relationships – both platonic and business – before heading off to the wild blue yonder.

The Primary Instinct is a concert film I shot with legendary character actor Stephen Tobolowsky (you may have seen him in films and TV shows like Memento, Silicon Valley, Groundhog Day, Californication, and many many others). We'd made a storytelling podcast together called "The Tobolowsky Files"(all episodes still available wherever you get your podcasts), which aired on multiple public radio stations around the country, spawned two books from Simon & Schuster, and ultimately led to us creating a film version of the podcast. As a result, Stephen and I have become friends and I often stay in a mother-in-law unit in his backyard when I'm visiting Los Angeles.

While in LA, I spent a lot of time visiting with my friends and colleagues who work in the industry. The overwhelming sense I get is that shit is dire. Hollywood seems like it's in total shambles. The entertainment industry is grappling with a triple whammy: The pandemic, the dual writers/actors strikes, and the ominous specter of AI, which threatens to eliminate a great deal of the hard work that human creative people currently do.

The net result is that people in the "middle class" of Hollywood are being squeezed out. Editors, artists, actors, audio engineers – you name it, and some massive proportion of people in that field are probably experiencing some kind of pain to the point where thriving in LA seems impossible.

The numbers bear this out. According to a recent damning report in The Wall Street Journal, the number of people employed in the motion picture industry in LA was down from 142,000 in 2022 to 100,000 by the end of 2024. "Nearly 30% fewer movies and TV shows with budgets of at least $40 million began shooting in the U.S. in 2024 than in 2022, according to data firm ProdPro," the article reads. "The first three-quarters of this year were down another 13%."

One of the most staggering images in the article is the following chart, which shows the occupancy rate of sound stages for studio productions in greater LA:

That is not a gentle decline. That is a precipitous and calamitous fall. And based on how the dynamics are shaping up, it doesn't seem like any relief is in sight. I spoke with several people who were questioning whether or not they could make a life in LA work. Many have already moved away and changed careers, leaving dreams of show business behind for calmer, more mundane pastures.

And yet.

Despite the overwhelming sense of doom, I still had a chance to see my movie screen at the festival (you can watch a vlog of my experience above/on YouTube). It was a small theater but it was packed, with several dozen people showing up. The audience laughed and cried. I got pretty emotional myself. I remembered a past version of me that dreamed about becoming a filmmaker. I recalled how special it was to capture the moments we captured on film. I felt so fortunate to be able to have been in a position to work with collaborators to create anything that still had the power to impact people in any way. And it's always a special experience to watch a movie you were part of play in a theater.

In other words, for a brief moment, I was seized by the wonder of movies again and I was reminded why this place still held my imagination captive.

On one of my last nights in LA, I was chatting with Stephen at his dining room table. He's generally enjoying life with his lovely wife Ann and he still works a healthy schedule, doing voiceover work, commercials, and the odd indie film every now and then. But he's seen the devastation of the recent era up close. So much production has moved out of the city and it's had cascading impacts; when we tried to find a restaurant for breakfast one day, many of his favorites had already shut down due to lack of business. He also bemoaned how the commercial business (i.e. business of filming commercials) used to be such a thriving aspect of LA life that has seemingly completely vanished. Most people probably don't enjoy watching commercials but commercials help incubate future waves of talent, not to mention provide a living wage for many creative folks.

Eventually our conversation turned to movies. I'm always in awe of Stephen's body of work. The man had been in Groundhog Day, one of the greatest and most profound comedies of all time. He worked with Christopher Nolan in Memento before Christopher Nolan movies became event films. He'd tussled with Robert Redford's crew in Sneakers. Many of his films formed the backbone of my love as a film fan.

But as we chatted, we both seemed to understand that movies have already faded from being the pre-eminent cultural artifact of our times. TV and Tiktok and YouTube and so many other things have replaced it. There are still great movies but they are fewer of them and they are harder to come by. Still, how great was it to be alive when movies were the biggest and best thing in the world? When they were interesting and profound and challenging and at their zenith of influence?

"How lucky are we? We got to be here for the best of it!" I told him.

"We really did," he said.

Dave Chen Travels

Welcome to the new Decoding Everything at decodingeverything.com! We've moved from Substack to Ghost so if you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe and check your spam filters.

Updates have been sparse around here because I've been frantically preparing for a big trip I'm about to take. I plan to share about it with great frequency and detail but who knows how things will play out. Creators plan and God laughs.

To get all the updates on my latest adventure, subscribe to DaveChenTravels.com and you'll get an email every time I post a new video.

Other Stuff David Chen Has Made

It was very fun to check out The Matrix: Shared Reality experience at Cosm with some friends while I was in LA. You can watch my reflections on that experience below.

My wife and I recapped every batch of Love Is Blind episodes this season on the Decoding Reality podcast. The season was an abject disaster but the podcasts were a lot of fun. You can listen to it on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
On Decoding TV, Patrick Klepek and I discussed The Chair Company (which we are both huge fans of) and what Tim Robinson is trying to say about how we behave in the workplace.