Nithya Raman wants Los Angeles to stop acting embarrassed about Hollywood.
“Let’s celebrate making things in L.A. again,” the mayoral candidate and city council member tells me. “Let’s make it something that we want every studio to do.”
That may sound obvious in the movie capital of the world. But as local production craters — 42,000 jobs lost over two years, shoot days down 50 percent below the five-year average — Raman argues City Hall has treated the industry less like a civic treasure than a permitting headache, about as fun as the DMV.
“I feel like this city and this mayor have let the industry walk away,” Raman says of the current administration led by her incumbent opponent, Karen Bass. They have “not done enough to keep it here and to lobby for what we need… to ensure that production can stay here.”
Many of her constituents in District 4, which stretches from the San Fernando Valley to the Santa Monica Mountains, work in the industry — and her husband, Vali Chandrasekaran, is a longtime writer and producer, with credits on television comedies like Modern Family, 30 Rock and Netflix’s The Four Seasons.
Last week, Raman came by The Ankler offices for a conversation entirely about her plan to save the industry, and her thoughts on how we got here.
Before the mayoral primary earlier this month, I looked into each of the candidates’ plans to help save Hollywood — and the person who stood out to me was Raman, mainly because she didn’t suggest that the heavy burden of fixing the industry should be outsourced to some kind of czar.
“Staffing a real film office at the city is a priority. It needs to be headed and staffed by people who don’t just know the city, but who know productions and understand what productions need,” she tells me.
Born in India, Raman, 44, emigrated to Louisiana with her family at age 6. She attended Harvard University and earned a master’s in urban planning from MIT. After leading a project to improve sanitation in Chennai, India, she moved to Los Angeles in 2013 to work for the city administrative officer.
In 2017, Raman founded and headed SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, an outreach nonprofit for the unhoused. In 2020, she stunned the L.A. political establishment by winning a city council seat in one of the very, very, very few instances when a city council incumbent — in this case, David Ryu — has been denied reelection in the past half century.
On the council, she’s focused on, among other issues, tenants’ rights, homelessness and what she describes as the new approach to public safety — including developing “a multi-year plan to fully shift responsibility for nonviolent calls to unarmed civilians rather than armed officers, and to implement alternative models and methods for traffic safety enforcement that do not rely on armed law enforcement.”
In February of this year, Raman delivered another surprise, announcing her candidacy for mayor and challenging incumbent Karen Bass as a progressive alternative. She recently defied expectations further by advancing to the runoff, beating back an extremely online and right-leaning Spencer Pratt. Raman, a member of the L.A. wing of the Democratic Socialists of America, will now face Bass in the election this November — and, if she were to win, it would put the nation’s two largest cities under the leadership of a socialist, following Zohran Mamdani’s election to New York mayor last fall.
High on her list of priorities has been protecting and restoring Hollywood’s historic place as the hub of physical production and the seat of the entertainment industry. And that is the issue we discussed last week. Watch the full interview above, and read a lightly edited transcript of that very conversation below.
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