On Radford Avenue in Studio City, there is a soundstage on a lot where Seinfeld and Big Brother were shot. It is also where I first worked on Brooklyn Nine-Nine as a Directors Guild trainee. The lot sprawls over fifty-five acres, built over decades, with all the amenities a show could ask for. In 2021, near the peak of the streaming boom, a private equity firm called Hackman Capital Partners bought it for $1.85 billion, financed with roughly $1.1 billion in mortgage debt. This past January, after the production downturn left the lot covering about a fifth of what it owed each month, Hackman handed the keys to its lender, Goldman Sachs.1 Netflix , which is now in line to buy it, is paying a fraction of what Hackman paid.2 So why the fire sale on a century of accumulated infrastructure? Nothing is wrong with the lot. Shows are still booking the soundstages, and the mills and backlot remain bustling with workers. It was the financial machinations of commercial land barons gone awry. Ironically, the realest part of Hollywood, the part you can touch, became the most speculative.
The Directors Guild of America (DGA) is the most disciplined and, arguably, the most powerful union in the industry. As a member of the DGA, I always believed that our basic agreement (our triennial contract) was impeccable. We bargain first, settle early, almost never strike (except once for less than a day in 1987), and the deal we make becomes the pattern the writers and the actors are then pressured to accept.
In 2023 the order inverted: the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA negotiated first, walked out, and shut the town down for months. My guild had settled in June with a no-strike clause that obligated us to keep working. Many of us did, but I could not bring myself to cross a picket line. I told myself this was a personal choice rather than a verdict on the deal. The strikes that year won real things: contractual guardrails on generative AI, increased streaming residuals, and raised minimum rates among other gains. Do not believe anyone who says the unions are weak or ineffective. Business unionism worked. It worked the way it was built to work, which is to negotiate the best possible terms of employment from the people who own the industry. I no longer believe that is enough.
A contract governs the terms of employment. It does not govern whether there is employment. Following the wins of 2023, there were contractions in production and numerous layoffs. Work California had long taken for granted kept leaving for Vancouver or London or anywhere with a deeper subsidy. An unemployed assistant director who cannot find employment finds no benefit in higher wages or increased residuals.
I have heard colleagues in coffee shops and backlots say these actions are coordinated by the studio leadership to dissuade workers from asking for what they deserve in the future. What leftists would call a “capital strike”. I understand the appeal of that story. It has villains in it, and villains can be beaten. The truth is far worse and far simpler. No one had to coordinate anything: Hackman bought the soundstages with the illusion land prices would continue to rise fueling higher rents, interest rates rose, and the imagined profits became real losses. Every one of those things happened on its own, by the ordinary operation of finance capitalism.3
Business unionism cannot compete with the whims and fancies of board rooms and trading floors. We can sit across the room from the AMPTP (the studio’s collective representative) and win real gains in the contract, but it will not matter. What decides whether you work or not is not in that room. It is in a cubicle on a spreadsheet created by an analyst whose hand you will never shake.
While the guilds bargained over the terms of employment, the ownership of the industry was being rearranged over our heads. In February, the merged Paramount Skydance agreed to absorb Warner Bros. Discovery for roughly $111 billion, and, in June, the Department of Justice cleared the deal without conditions, concluding, against the objection of nearly everyone who works in the industry, that combining two of the largest studios in the country would somehow increase competition. Luckily, liberals know this fight and California’s attorney general has led a dozen states in suing to block the merger.4 I hope they win but a successful antitrust challenge changes who owns Warner Bros. It does not change the fact that Warner Bros. is owned, and it does not change its relationship with the workers who make it profitable. The best available remedy at the top leaves the structure of ownership exactly the same.
A second and more invisible consolidation is also happening now. Netflix spent most of two decades presenting itself as the asset-light future, a technology company that rented its stages and its Hollywood offices. That company, pockets heavy with the $2.8 billion breakup fee from its attempt to purchase Warner Bros., is now buying Radford.5 Seeing a land speculation (real estate) market hitting a bottom, Netflix has now decided to use the capital it gained from financial gamesmanship, not making content, to fortify its position in the industry. The physical capacity to make culture passing into fewer and fewer hands. Whoever owns the soundstage owns the gate, and the gate can be locked.
So… how do we take up the real fight? We can begin where European social democracies have operated for decades: workers on the board with real votes over closures, sales, and mergers.6 This can happen in the United States, and we should organize for it. A workforce that can vote on the sale of the lot it works on holds a different level of power in its industry.
A seat on the board is not the horizon, though, for the same reason the contract is not. It is a vote inside the commodity, and the problem in front of us is the commodity itself. A studio lot owned as a capitalist asset will be flipped, no matter how many workers sit on the board. We have spent a long time fighting for a better seat at the table so we should take every seat we can win, but the table itself can be taken off the market.
The main obstacle to this is not legal or financial. It is that we have been conditioned to believe private ownership of the soundstage is the only way. Mark Fisher called this capitalist realism, the sense that there is no alternative even when the alternative is standing on fifty-five acres in front of us.7 So look at what is actually possible. When a studio lot defaults, as Radford defaulted, the public has an interest in what becomes of it that no private buyer shares: an interest in keeping the physical capacity to make film and television in Los Angeles. A place where independent creatives and cooperatives can produce art without being forced to pay monopoly rents to the consolidated majors. California already spends enormous public money on this industry. It spends it on film and television tax credits, with the goal of keeping jobs in state, to private companies whose output the public has no ownership of.8 The same money, or a fraction of it, could buy something instead. It could capitalize a public trust, or a low-interest acquisition fund, that gives the workforce a right of first refusal when these assets fall into distress. We could build a permanent public infrastructure for culture.
None of this will save Radford. The City of Los Angeles did not move, Goldman did not wait, and Netflix is at the closing table. Radford will not be the last lot for sale since the conditions which broke it, overleverage and declining production, are structural and ongoing. Will the next lot sold host private or public soundstages? This proposal, acquiring and operating a studio lot as public infrastructure, feels like a thing the City of Los Angeles could do, with city money and city authority, on land inside the city. Whether it can do so cleanly, or whether the state tries to constrain it the way Article XXXIV of the California constitution constrains public housing, is a real question.9 The type of question used to close the conversation rather than open the work.
The strikes were not a mistake. They were the most that the contract could win, and in winning it they showed us the ceiling. You can secure the best terms of employment in a generation and still not secure any future employment. We must keep bargaining, but we must also keep our eyes searching above that horizon.
I came up on the Radford lot, in the guild that perfected the art of bargaining. The terms on which we are employed are worth fighting for. I am proud of that tradition, but I am also done believing, every three years, that is all we can do. We must have more ownership of the means by which work gets made. That part is being decided right now on the fifty-five acres where I learned to do this, without us in the room. My demand, which is simple to state but hard to win, is this: when the lot (and its soundstages) go up for sale, the public and the people who work on it should be able to own it. We learned how to win a contract. The lot on Radford Avenue is the next thing to learn.
"Radford Lot to Be Turned Over to Goldman Sachs After Hackman Defaults," Variety, January 15, 2026, https://variety.com/2026/film/news/radford-lot-goldman-hackman-capital-partners-1236631832/. Hackman Capital Partners acquired the lot, formerly CBS Studio Center, from ViacomCBS for $1.85 billion in 2021, financed with a $1.1 billion mortgage; revenue from the property covered roughly 21 percent of its debt service as of mid-2025, and Hackman ceded the facility to a lender group led by Goldman Sachs after efforts to restructure the debt failed.
"Netflix Is Under Contract to Buy LA Studio Lot Seized by Goldman," Bloomberg, June 18, 2026, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-18/netflix-is-under-contract-to-buy-la-studio-lot-seized-by-goldman. The price is close to $400 million, against the $1.85 billion Hackman paid in 2021, with the transaction expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.
"Radford Lot to Be Turned Over," Variety. Studio owners have struggled to lease space amid a sharp downturn in film and television production volume since 2022.
"Justice Department Clears Way for Paramount Skydance to Buy Warner Bros. Discovery," CBS News, June 12, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paramount-skydance-warner-bros-discovery-antitrust-justice-department/. Paramount Skydance agreed in February 2026 to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for roughly $110.9 billion; the Department of Justice closed its antitrust review without imposing conditions. On the state challenge, see "Attorney General Bonta Files Lawsuit to Block $110 Billion Warner Bros./Paramount Merger," California Department of Justice press release, July 13, 2026, https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-files-lawsuit-block-110-billion-warner-brosparamount. California led a coalition of twelve state attorneys general in filing suit under the Clayton Act, and the coalition stated it would seek a temporary restraining order if the companies moved to close the merger before the case concludes.
"Netflix Paying $400M for Foreclosed LA Studios amid Shift to Property Ownership," The Real Deal, June 22, 2026, https://therealdeal.com/la/2026/06/22/netflix-buys-foreclosed-l-a-studios-at-huge-discount/. Netflix was paid a $2.8 billion breakup fee by Paramount Skydance, which prevailed in the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery after Warner Bros. Discovery had initially entered a merger agreement with Netflix in December 2025.
The reference is chiefly to German co-determination, or Mitbestimmung. The Mitbestimmungsgesetz of 1976 gives employee representatives close to half the seats on the supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat) of companies with more than 2,000 workers, though the board chair, in practice a shareholder representative, holds the casting vote in a tie, which keeps the model just short of full parity. The earlier Montan-Mitbestimmungsgesetz of 1951 established genuine parity in the coal, iron, and steel sectors. That even the stronger version stops short of worker control is worth keeping in view, since it is the point: the board seat is a vote inside the firm, not command over it. For these institutions in comparative context, see Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009).
On the California Film and Television Tax Credit Program, see the California Film Commission's program materials. The passage of Assembly Bill 132 in June 2025 increased the state's annual appropriation to $750 million per fiscal year (up from the previous $330 million cap) beginning in July 2025 and running through fiscal year 2029-30.
Cal. Const. art. XXXIV, requiring majority approval by local voters before the development of publicly funded low-rent housing. Whether this provision, or any other feature of California law, would bear on the municipal acquisition and operation of commercial studio property is precisely the legal question that would have to be resolved.