Some entertainment industry executives are defending their “essential” category in California as other businesses are forced to shut down, reports The Hollywood Reporter.
“We are not a bar where everybody sits around with their masks off,” Momita Sengupta, Netflix’s vice president of physical production, told the news outlet.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom last week ordered non-essential businesses shut down amid a surge in positive COVID-19 cases. He included those “supporting the entertainment industries” as essential.
One top official told THR it “bodes well for the industry that it made it through this round.”
The shutdown has angered many small business owners. Angela Marsden earlier this week made national headlines when she made a video showing a film crew setting up next door to her restaurant, the Pineapple Hill Grill & Saloon, in Los Angeles.
“They have not given us money and they've shut us down. We cannot survive, my staff cannot survive," Marsden said to the camera.
One official who spoke with THR argued that the entertainment industry “is a crucial economic engine that is very well-served by the fact that over the course of several months they have been exemplary. The real hope and anticipation is that this can be maintained.”
Entertainment and digital media is California’s biggest creative employment sector, with 740,000 workers, according to a study published by the Otis College of Art and Design.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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