Living Your Movies in Real Life

I love this piece that’s framed about movie tariffs but ultimately is about quality of life in cities in the United States. Angelino Dave Schilling wonders why movie makers and workers would want to film in Los Angeles when a good chunk of their day is spent in traffic. Why not go abroad to somewhere they’ll be happier to film?

If you really want studios to come back and film in American cities, why not make the quality of life and the actual day to day living in American cities better? Not just because someone taxed you into it. Who wants to be stuck in traffic to go to a sound stage when you could film in some exotic locale that feels more like a work trip?

My parents lived in Rotterdam for a year while my dad was moved there for work. Every weekend they were in some other major city experiencing the cultures of Europe. That’s not quite the same in the Houston suburbs where I grew up, which wasn’t all bad, but even with a good trail system the transportation and access was limited.

I can also say from my own experience visiting my wife’s family in China for a month that it’s pretty great to go to another country and work during the day and experience a different way of living at night and on the weekends.

I like to think I’ve curated that kind of different life here in walkable San Francisco, but why can’t everyone have it? Of course vacation is different with different spending limits and expectations and somewhat less responsibilities, but maybe everyone should be able to live in a place that isn’t just the stripped down embodiment of the containerization of human life. Is that too much to ask?