California legislators were racing on Thursday to rewrite the state’s film and TV tax incentives before the session ends on August 31, after a deal that would have carved out exceptions for some productions stalled late in the day. The setback left Rick Chavez Zbur, who represents District 51 from Glendale to Santa Monica, still trying to salvage a fix for SB 122.
The urgency is easy to see in Los Angeles, where production has been leaving the home of Hollywood and around 50,000 film and TV jobs have been lost over the past four years. The annual incentives now in dispute could reach about $750 million by 2030, which is why the bill’s fallout has become one of the state’s most closely watched Sacramento fights this week.
SB 122 had already been signed into law, and the fight now is over how to blunt its effect without reopening the entire program. The draft deal that was in place on Thursday morning would have created exceptions for independent productions and for some studio and streamer productions, but it stalled while final language was being put into place by Zbur’s office.
Then legislative leadership told Zbur they were taking a different approach. By Thursday, sources said there were signs from Gavin Newsom’s team that Zbur’s proposal was not what they had in mind. That left the effort to fix the law, which caps business and corporate tax credits over $5 million, still unfinished and short on the one thing it needs most: a version that can pass quickly enough to matter.
Zbur said he was working very hard with the governor, legislative leadership and partners in the Senate, and he said he was optimistic they were very close to a solution that addresses the impact of SB 122 on California’s Film and Television Jobs Program. He said the priority was protecting the thousands of workers and small businesses that depend on the industry and preserving the progress California has made in bringing production and good-paying jobs back.
What comes next is now the narrow question that matters: whether lawmakers can settle on a different carve-out before the August 31 deadline. If they cannot, the state’s effort to steady the Film and Television Jobs Program will end with the same problem it was meant to solve, and the losses in LA will keep defining the story.
