Film executives and creatives joined environmental advocates to discuss production incentives, high-speed rail links, and storytelling at the 2026 Hollywood Climate Summit in Los Angeles.
California film commission director Colleen Bell told a panel discussion on infrastructure on Thursday that the state’s upgraded tax credit programme was a vital job creator that dovetailed with tourism in showcasing a wide range of ecosystems.
“Entertainment is big business in California,” Bell said in reference to the allure of incentives offered by other states and the international arena. “It’s extremely important for job creation and job sustainability in the state. There is no reason California should be losing any market share,”
Bell added, “We have the best crews in the world [and] depth [of crews]. Our infrastructure, equipment and confluence of landscapes are all here. We need to invest and invest deeper and it’s paying off.”
Last year version 4.0 of the programme came into effect and more than doubled the programme’s annual allocation from $330m to $750m, making California’s offering the third highest in the United States after New York and Georgia, whose programme is uncapped.
Bell said producers told her that without the 2025 upgrade – proposed by the outgoing governor Gavin Newsom – they would have taken their productions elsewhere. The commissioner added that 133 projects greenlit by the programme were on track to generate more than $5bn in economic activity in the state and created jobs for more than 28,000 cast and crew.
“My vision for California is to continue to build on the momentum and not give up,” she said. ”My hope is our next elected administration has the same level of commitment and sees it for what it is – an important job generator and preserver of the diverse and unique storytellers in California.”
Carter Lavin of the Transbay Coalition who advocates for the state’s publicly-funded high-speed rail train network that is under construction and expected to begin testing in 2028, said: “Details matter, whether that’s a tax incentive or modernising it, whether you’re a film producer or a boom operator.
“One of those details is the cost of transport for people who need to be in a certain neighbourhood to get work […] If you can live anywhere [and move around at an affordable cost] in California it becomes easier and you can take that side job or say no to that soul-sucking job [because you can move around freely].”
In a more abstract Wednesday session called ‘From Apocalypse To Adaptation’ panellists talked about how they framed storytelling around climate speculation.
Westworld and Fallout director-writer-producer Lisa Joy said she tried to avoid clichéd tropes on Fallout, the videogame adaptation on Prime Video that takes place after a nuclear catastrophe. “It’s about what happens after the bad things have happened,” she said. “How do you build up and move on.”
Joy said production designer Howard Cummings has been a key collaborator. “You have to think about what the environment will look like, what energy sources will look like,” she added. “On Westworld when we were looking at the future we thought the problem was humans; the world looked pretty good but we had to clear it up.
“We realised there would be greater need for community and shared public spaces, We studied the cost of having cars and how much room they’d take on a street […] So in the design of our future cities, we made them mostly car-free.”
Alison Tatlock, a writer and executive producer on the Apple TV show Pluribus, said, “We are sorely lacking public spaces for communities to gather […] We can make an example of [living in a certain way] and people might want it through adoption.”
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