An experienced actor and aerial cinematographer went from being at “the heart of Hollywood’s golden age of streaming” to worrying about affording “a value meal at McDonald’s,” the BBC reported in a piece on how the industry’s writers’ strike impacted everyone else.
Before living on the brink of homelessness, Michael Fortin had built a successful business by transforming his hobby of flying drones into a service used to capture aerial shots for content hosted on major platforms such as Netflix, Disney, and Amazon Prime.
According to his LinkedIn, Fortin has run his company, CineDrones, in the Los Angeles area for over 12 years.
CineDrones was operating “nearly every day” before the Writers Guild of America (WGA) — representing 11,500 screenwriters — went on strike over a dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) in May 2023, BBC reported.
After the strike ended in September 2023, Fortin’s business did not pick back up. He has flown drones on only 22 days since.
In his side career as a background actor, he has only worked 10 days.
The cinematographer, along with his wife and two children, were evicted from his Huntington Beach home when they could no longer afford to stay in California. Now, they are about to be evicted from their Las Vegas apartment.
“It was a great wave, and it crashed,” Fortin told the U.K. outlet after landing his first drone gig since April.
“Things are coming in little by little,” he added, as he prepared to drive from the set in southern California back to Vegas to fight his eviction order in court.
Even with credits on notable television shows including NCIS: Los Angeles, The Grand Tour, and SEAL Team, Fortin’s business has never regained the volume of work it had prior to the strike.
Explaining just how far he had fallen, Fortin spoke of how his family went from being financially comfortable to finding himself in dire straits.
“We were saving to buy a house, we had money, we had done things the right way,” he said. “Two years ago, I didn’t worry about going out to dinner with my wife and kids and spending 200 bucks… Now I worry about going out and spending $5 on a value meal at McDonald’s.”
The problems are not just impacting CineDrones — the industry is down across the board.
The total number of productions being filmed in the U.S. dropped by nearly 40 percent in the first half of 2024 compared with the same period in 2022, data from ProdPro revealed.
Across the globe, a 20 percent drop was seen during that period.
On Tuesday, television network Paramount announced it would be laying off 15 percent of its workforce, Breitbart News reported.
“In order to set Paramount up for continued success, we are taking these actions, and after today, 90% of these reductions will be complete,” Paramount co-CEOS George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy, and Brian Robbins said in a memo sent to employees, as reported by The Wrap.
In April, it was reported that many other Hollywood workers had resorted to bartending and delivering food to make ends meet in the crashing industry.
“Hollywood gave me everything,” Fortin said. “But it feels like the industry has turned its back on lots of people, not just me.”
