When their landlord decided to sell their house, they knew something had to give. “We’ve been surviving for several years on one income,” Piantanida says. “We’ve drained a lot of savings just trying to keep this dream alive. ... If we were able to find something for the same price, that would be great, but everything like this house would be close to four grand. Work is so slow right now that I couldn’t justify spending four grand a month that I don’t have on rent. We’d be taking money out of my wife’s retirement in order to stay in L.A.”

When Piantanida first arrived in the city nearly a decade ago, the streaming business was in full swing and opportunities for an aspiring filmmaker appeared relatively plentiful. He had spent the previous seven years honing his filmmaking skills in Jackson, Mississippi, where he’d studied fine art in college, starting a full-service boutique production company for documentaries, shorts, music videos and branded content. Although he had plenty of experience behind the camera, Piantanida had no real connections to draw on in L.A., and his pay initially took a hit.

“I moved from Mississippi, where I made $2,500 a day shooting commercials, to L.A., where I was lucky to get $500 or $800,” Piantanida says. “It was very challenging to get plugged in. I’m chronically bad at selling myself and there’s so much gatekeeping. Everything I’ve ever done has been through word of mouth.”

Gradually one job led to another, and Piantanida found his footing. But good-paying, creatively fulfilling work has become increasingly hard to find. In the last three years, Piantanida has created about 20 to 30 sizzles — short, promotional videos used to pitch TV shows — but only a few have been sold in a market that favors cheaper, trendier content like TikTok-style reality series and game shows over high-end documentaries. Making matters more difficult, companies are producing content internally, reducing freelance opportunities for someone like Piantanida, who has no representation and has never quite managed to amass the requisite hours for union membership.

Piantanida has poured much of what he has made into equipment, at an annual cost of $20,000 to $50,000, which he is able to count as a business deduction on his taxes. “There’s so much expense in staying up with the latest stuff,” he says. “All this stuff would change if I went union. I would make as much money as I could, and I wouldn’t spend it on gear — I would spend it on savings. But when you own your own business and you’re an S-corporation, I was raised and told by tax guys, ‘Just buy equipment while you can. That’s stuff that you can use and make money with.’ So I’ve always put money back into the business.”

To raise cash, Piantanida has been selling some of that equipment lately; he is trying to offload $30,000 worth of lenses. “That would greatly improve our situation,” he says. “But it’s not really a buying market right now.”

In Texas, Piantanida and his family will be paying $350 per month to live in a cottage on his parents’ 12-acre property and taking advantage of free childcare from his parents and sister. In addition to getting back into more lucrative corporate work (a recent job for a mental health start-up paid him $30,000), Piantanida is hoping that Texas’ generous tax incentives for film production, which the state raised last year to $200 million from $45 million, will help bring local work his way.

“California is ruining the industry, and now Texas is making its move, kind of like Louisiana and Atlanta did 15 years ago,” says Piantanida, who is developing a project for PBS Austin featuring atmospheric visuals paired with his own original ambient music. “There’s a good amount of work in Texas, and it looks like a good move for us.”

Still, going from Southern California to East Texas is a major adjustment. “I love the climate in L.A. and the access to the mountains and the beach,” Piantanida says. “We’re going to miss it a whole lot. ... I need to change my plates, too, because we’re in Trump country now, and if we drive around with a California tag, we’re going to get harassed.”

In a year or so, if the film and TV businesses pick up again and his wife lands a new job, the plan is to try to move back to the West Coast and buy a house, possibly in Lake Arrowhead, California, or in the Bay Area or Seattle.

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