State Legislator Nick Schultz to Introduce Bill Incentivizing Postproduction in California

State Assemblymember Nick Schultz has committed to carrying a bill aimed at creating a standalone postproduction tax incentive in California, a field representative for his office announced at a town hall for Hollywood professionals on Wednesday night.

Amanda Faissal said that the state representative will soon introduce legislation in a bid to return more editing, sound mixing, VFX and other post work to the state. Though postproduction expenses can qualify for tax credits in California if physical production is also done in the state, it is not currently eligible for incentives on its own — even as other states and countries offer this perk to cost-conscious companies.

The initiative follows a successful lobbying effort from Hollywood unions and grassroots groups in 2025 to more than double California’s film and television tax credit, expanding the program from $330 million to $750 million. Like that effort, it aims to make the state competitive with rivals like New York and Georgia and countries like the U.K. and Australia, which all offer highly competitive postproduction incentives.

“We’re very excited about this announcement, I had butterflies all day thinking about it,” Faissal told the audience of postproduction creatives and executives, without going into detail on the language of the bill.

Faissal’s news drew loud applause during a town hall for the California Post Alliance (CAPA), an organization dedicated to attracting more postproduction work to the state. Like physical production, local postproduction has withered amid increasingly competitive incentives offered by other jurisdictions and studio and streamer cost-cutting.

Wednesday’s event at Evergreen Studios in Burbank was the latest example of the postproduction industry responding to a sharp drop in work over the last few years. Conversation around the issue ballooned after an open letter from Encompass Music Partners and Encompass Creative founder Peter Rotter circulated among insiders in early 2025. The letter, which warned that “the infrastructure of the L.A. recording industry [was] about to fail,”led to a town hall in April 2025. At the event, production insiders raised deep concerns that Los Angeles was becoming another Detroit in that it was losing ground on its signature industry.

The mood during Wednesday’s event was only slightly more hopeful — even as CAPA leaders discussed potential solutions, they detailed the impact that the downturn in work has had on local labor and companies. In a speech opening the event, Rotter said that the slowdown was “killing our community, the heart and soul of it.”

He added, “Families can’t pay their rent on what little work is left. Editors are driving Uber instead of cutting reels. Sound designers are selling gear just to eat. The whole ecosystem is bleeding out and no one’s coming back.”

Two-time Oscar-winning sound designer Karen Baker Landers (MaXXXine, Scream VI) said that she had lost four to five jobs due to California not offering the standalone postproduction credit that other jurisdictions do. Trevanna Post and Trevanna Tracks founder Jennifer Freed, whose company has offices in London and New York as well as in L.A., said that she had witnessed the production exodus on her own balance sheet. “As the studios seek tax incentives and lower overhead, the production map is just being redrawn,” she said.

California’s share of U.S. postproduction work declined more than 11 percent between 2010 and 2024, according to data shared by CAPA on Wednesday. During that same period, California sustained a nearly 17 percent decline in payroll employment while the U.S. overall saw a 2.5 percent uptick.

An early economic model from CVL Economics founding partner Adam Fowler estimated that 4,451 jobs have been lost in the last 15 years in addition to $1.63 billion in annual economic input in California.

He mentioned the entertainment industry’s particularly high retention rate, or how much money spent in motion picture industry stays in the economy — 93 cents in the case of Hollywood. ”As companies leave and the supply chain starts to thin, that retention rate erodes and the multiplier effects weaken for everyone that remains, and that becomes a self-perpetuating cycle,” he warned.

One of his slides read, ominously: “California built this industry over 100 years. Losing it would take less than a generation.”

CAPA’s solution to this dire situation lies, at least initially, in advocating for the Schultz-sponsored bill. To accomplish that, the group has hired a lobbyist and a publicity firm, one of whose publicists encouraged attendees on Wednesday to post about the event on social media. CAPA also encouraged attendees to join as members and financially support the effort.

One of the hurdles the group will grapple with in lobbying for Schultz’s bill is bringing the often low-key work of editors, composers, sound mixers and others in their cohort to the attention of policymakers. Said CAPA president Marielle Abaunza, “We need to come out of our dark rooms… We need to now take a moment to turn the camera and the light and shine it on us. We now need to tell our stories.”