Inside Hollywood Production Assistants’ Fight for Career Growth

About eight or nine hours into a punishing shoot, nerves were fraying, and Mike McGuirk was getting chewed out by a camera operator.

Then a production assistant — a famously low-paying, entry-level job on film and TV sets — McGuirk happened to be near the camera operator, who was talking on the phone, when a colleague radioed to ask him to attend a rehearsal. It was after McGuirk told the man twice that he was wanted that the crewmember erupted. “He just lets me have it,” McGuirk recalls. “He’s like, ‘You’re trying to keep me away from my family right now. Why are you doing this to me?’ ”

Though the shoot was taking place during a blizzard, McGuirk remembers walking around the block in subzero temperatures to collect himself. “It was so upsetting to me,” he says. At least, he thought, this stage of his career wouldn’t last long.

Like legions of dreamers before him, McGuirk started on film and TV sets as a PA, an often thankless job where random castigations from members of the cast or crew can be par for the course. But about two years in, he was accepted into the DGA’s highly selective Assistant Director Training Program, the aspiring AD’s equivalent of getting into Harvard. By the mid-2010s, he was a second second AD (that’s right, that’s a job title) on Prime Video’s Mozart in the Jungle as well as a second AD in New York on Universal’s Ted 2.

Now, however, the 37-year-old is back to occasionally working as a PA, taking a daily pay cut of several times his AD rate to help supplement his work line-producing independent films. He didn’t think he would be back here — until he needed to be. And he’s far from alone.

Around 2022, major Hollywood companies with streaming platforms began recalibrating from a business model focused on producing mass quantities of titles to lure subscribers to one focused on profitability. A marathon to compete with Netflix’s firehose of content suddenly became a sprint to trim costs. Executives canceled projects, throttled budgets and moved production overseas.

The contraction has been particularly brutal for Hollywood’s production assistants, many of whom are feeling stuck at what is supposed to be the starting line of their careers. Some, like McGuirk, already had worked their way up the hierarchy, only to return to the job when times got tight. Others haven’t gotten to the next step and are having difficulty finding consistent work. Some working PAs have paid their dues in the role for three, five, seven years, even longer. “It is an ecosystem. We do need to move up,” says Jon Hook, an in-demand L.A.-based PA, of the prospect of more PAs doing this long-term.

The tendency to shut out those without connections or family ties from one of the industry’s traditional entry points has become increasingly visible, with potential ramifications for its future. The industry subsists on fresh ideas brought by new talent. If those new entrants — generally considered some of the hardest-working people in Hollywood — face ever-mounting obstacles, will tomorrow’s cinematic superstars decide to take their talents to the gaming industry or YouTube or TikTok?

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If you were to poll denizens of an industry hotspot like Burbank or Studio City on what they know about PAs, you’re likely hear certain stereotypes: They’re early in their careers, they’re hungry to advance, they’re paid pennies on the dollar, and they’re hustlers but can be easily exploited because of their eagerness and naiveté.

There is some truth to the notion of PAs being the most poorly treated workers on sets, the occasional victims of power-mad creatives who act like shooting a popcorn thriller is the equivalent of negotiating a peace treaty between warring countries. About two dozen working PAs throughout the U.S. spoke for this story, most of whom were set PAs (as opposed to office PAs, postproduction PAs or writers PAs). They’ve uncomplainingly cleaned up feces and bile, dealt with demanding directors and temper tantrums, dodged a lit firecracker, and learned of actors who just didn’t like seeing them around.

But for every experience worthy of a dramatic retelling at an Eastside bar (or in Apple TV+’s The Studio), there also are stories of warmth and consideration on high-functioning sets and the sense among a few PAs that, overall, attitudes toward their group may be slowly improving. “As a PA, I’ve been screamed at, I’ve been sworn at, I’ve been belittled, but I’ve also been told when I would offer to get someone coffee, ‘That’s not your job. Don’t do that. Absolutely not. You’re more than this,’ ” says L.A.-based PA Addie Porter, who has been doing the job for around 12 years. “It’s a spectrum.”

For those who don’t come into the business with a sprawling contacts list or exhaustive understanding of production roles, being a set PA offers invaluable opportunities to make connections, interface with all departments and pick up idiosyncratic set lingo (a “bogie” is someone who has accidentally wandered into a shot, in case you were wondering, and a “hot brick” is a charged walkie battery).

Still, the PA’s lot is to perform some fairly menial tasks for low pay. For around $230 to $300 for a 12-hour day on major film and TV shoots in the L.A. area, set PAs might be tasked with escorting talent, overseeing radios, wrangling background actors, ordering and delivering food and/or keeping a location clear and quiet for a production to film. On a nonunion film or TV set, they might drive production vehicles. Some jobs are more specialized than others — being a day player, or someone brought in for a single day or few days of work, is very different than working as a key PA, who oversees all their peers — but generally, set PAs are tasked with doing the things no one else wants to do.

“Overall, PAs are really there to help in any way, to make the lives of everyone on production that is above us easier,” says Austin Mitrione, who’s been a New Jersey-based PA for about three years.

All the while, PAs often adhere to certain unspoken rules that can feel like relics of another era — because they are. At certain workplaces, it’s frowned upon to sit, to appear idle or to gather around in groups. To dissuade excess loitering, more demanding creatives have perfected a tactic called “PA bombing,” according to one PA. “They throw a walkie battery at you to try to get you to disperse,” says L.A.-based PA Kira Robbins, who has worked in the role for around three years, adding that the missile is supposed to hit the ground and not a person.

Idleness is unacceptable. Nicole Gaitan, who worked as a daytime talk show PA during the 2010s, recalls attempting to appear “crazy busy” by running or walking fast while doing tasks. (She is now an execution producer for integrations at Amazon.) Alison Brown still remembers the pressures in the role during the early 2000s. “I do think being a PA is maybe the hardest thing you’ll do in the industry,” the writer and executive producer on Emily in Paris says. “After that, it’s not as hard, when you’re actually in your career doing the stuff you want to do.”

Some PAs described performing an array of side jobs to make ends meet while PA-ing, like working as a line cook at a local college, as a brand ambassador and as a staff member at a resort.

It’s not a glamorous gig. But amid the slowdown in opportunities, the competition for available roles is fierce in top production cities. PAs describe reaching out to contacts on a frequent basis, scouring industry Facebook groups and keeping an eye on group text threads — after all, if a call for PAs goes out, the one with the fastest response time may get the job, says Atlanta-based PA Dorothy McConnell, who works on union productions.

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“It really is crab theory,” asserts one L.A.-based PA who asked to remain anonymous. “You put a bunch of crabs in a pot, no water, but the heat is on. What are the crabs going to do? They’re going to die. But who’s going to win the fight to the top? Who’s going to climb over all the other crabs and inevitably kill them in order to survive? That is what I believe is happening right now, at least for PAs.”

Faced with a work slowdown, PAs might cross over into commercials, but even some of those jobs are fleeing the U.S., and L.A. in particular, because of the steep costs of doing business. Elaina Levy was an in-house production coordinator at a fast-fashion company before she switched to freelancing as a PA in the commercials and photo shoot space about five months ago. “It’s been very rocky. You can tell where the industry stopped [being] willing to bring in new people or willing to bring in larger amounts of PAs,” she says. She began getting more work a month or two ago, but “it’s still pretty slow.”

There is grumbling, too, about the prevalence of so-called “political hires” in the film and TV hiring pool. These are essentially the nepo babies of the PA crowd — people who have been employed primarily because of family or friend connections. Powerful creatives have been hiring friends’ kids since the dawn of the entertainment business, but the situation is more salient to PAs now that there are fewer of these roles available. “I’ve lost out on so many jobs to political hires,” says Porter with a sigh, who adds that she’s not salty about it. “Nepotism in Hollywood? Shocking.”

Adds another L.A.-based production assistant, “Honestly, it’s just the same issue that Hollywood has been facing for a long time now, just exacerbated because there’s so much less money to be spent.”

For PAs looking to advance in their careers, 2025 is not an auspicious time. One classic path up for a film and television set PA is to become some form of assistant director, which they can transition to organically on non-union projects if someone hires them in the role — or they can attempt to qualify for the DGA. In L.A., production assistants often must work hundreds of days on eligible shoots doing eligible work to make it onto the DGA’s qualifying list for commercials as second ADs. ADs typically rise up through the PA ranks. But with some in the role now stepping back down into PA jobs, people who once might have been interested in taking the AD path can feel that there aren’t enough opportunities to merit all the legwork.

The same problem exists for set PAs who are looking to jump to specific production departments that already are overrun with underemployed creatives. Says L.A.-based Sean Maydoney, who has been working as a PA on big sets for about six years and is attempting to move into the camera department, “Camera work’s hard to find right now, too. Across the board, you have people who are very overqualified who are taking work that they maybe haven’t done for several years.”

This isn’t the first time that film and television workers have taken positions below their usual spots on the production hierarchy just to keep working, and it certainly won’t be the last. But the scale of the industry slowdown is vast. On-location filming days in L.A. fell to the lowest levels that local film office FilmLA has seen since it began tracking the data (not including 2020, during the pandemic) in 2024, and so did soundstage shoot days in 2023. There may be some relief on the horizon: During the second quarter of 2025, production tracking service ProdPro found that U.S. production overall was up slightly (2 percent) because of features increases making up for episodic declines — but that same report found that spending was down 29 percent year-over-year.

“I think the PAs are having issues moving up because there is no work,” says nonfiction co-executive producer Deb Whitcas (iCrime With Elizabeth Vargas, Crime Exposé With Nancy O’Dell), who PA’d for The Jerry Springer Show in 1998. “Everyone’s taking a step down to be able to work. We all want to be able to pay our bills.”

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PAs long have been one of Hollywood’s most idealistic workforces, powered by a potent blend of crafty coffee and the pure love of cinema to stand and/or run around for 12 hours a day on set. But a sense of foreboding about the future of the business has begun to infuse even certain corners of this typically uncynical group.

Some PAs who spoke with THR expressed little faith in industry execs to create a bright future for the business and, by extension, their cohort. Some aren’t convinced that attempting to climb the ranks on set will pay off at a time when competition is so cutthroat and the future of the business is so wobbly. “You graduate college right now, and your best option is to go work at a talent agency getting on a desk, because while work is slow all around, stuff is still getting made. It’s just not made in America,” says one resigned PA based in L.A.

Jack Arruda graduated from film school at Burbank’s Woodbury University last year and has been working as a PA in L.A. He feels grateful that he has been able to make money using his degree since graduation, since the same can’t be said for many of his fellow classmates. “There’s a lot of us thinking, ‘Should we go back to school and just try a completely different profession and give up on film?’ Because some of us would feel a little bit hopeless,” he says.

Hollywood’s loss could be Madison Avenue’s or Silicon Valley’s gain. “I feel like I’m more likely to get work on a TikTok set for some sort of online brand rather than television or film, which is what I set out to do,” notes Arruda.

To be clear, though, it’s difficult to keep a good PA down. Many are following in the tradition of famous alums of the job like Paul Thomas Anderson and Bill Hader and attempting to realize their Hollywood dreams for themselves. Several PAs spoke of raising their own capital, writing their own scripts and shooting their own projects with friends. Take Savanna Trujillo-Poelma: After three years, she’s pivoting from pursuing regular gigs as a PA in L.A. to working primarily as a budtender at a cannabis dispensary and preparing to shoot her own webseries.

“Talking to so many creatives in our community, everyone is doing their own side hustle and their own projects, and they’re just making it happen because they want it so bad,” she says. “And it’s inspired me.”

Other PAs are responding to the vagaries of the modern entertainment industry by coming together to unionize. The grassroots Production Assistants United movement, born partially out of the 2023 strikes, got the backing of a local laborers union in 2024. In July, the group went public with its first workplace organizing attempt on HBO Max’s popular medical drama The Pitt. One of the group’s core pushes with its campaign, beyond improved wages and access to a union health and pension plans, is to create structured career pathways for PAs.

“There are department heads who are looking out for PAs, but it’s sometimes tough for them to do so — they can only do so much, and that’s totally fine. And so I think a union comes into play because for some people, it’s a long time [working as PAs],” says Ronan Morrissey, an L.A.-based PA who has worked in the role for about four years. “So we should be able to get those resources put together, not just for the PA’s sake but also for the studios’ sake and the networks’ sake. It’s just as beneficial to the studios and the networks to have that line of communication with their PAs.”

With no certified unions under their belt yet, it remains unclear whether Production Assistants United might be able to crack the code on formalizing career paths for this group. If they do, that effort could take years before it would affect a wide array of PAs. In the meantime, some in this cohort are coming to terms with the notion that their careers may not advance in any kind of linear fashion as the industry recalibrates.

“The truth is, longevity in this business isn’t about a perfect upward trajectory,” McGuirk, the AD who has returned to doing some PA work, writes in an email. “It’s about resilience, versatility and the willingness to keep showing up no matter what the credit says.”

Antonio Solorzano is another Hollywood professional who has taken a step back by returning to work as a PA. After moving out to L.A. in 2018 and working his way up from postproduction PA to assistant location manager on the second season of Euphoria, NCIS: Los Angeles and a couple of other major projects, following the strikes he’s picked up PA work again, primarily on commercials.

When he first made that shift, “It did feel like I was getting stuck,” he says. “But over the past couple of weeks, my perspective has been changing because it’s like every day that I’m here, I’m still working. That’s a victory in and of itself.”

This story appeared in the Sep. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.