As AMPTP Negotiations Drag on, Small Businesses Are Hit Hard, From ‘Yellowstone’ Costume House to ‘Masked Singer’ Dry Cleaners
variety.comJazz Tangcay Artisans Editor North Hollywood’s United American Costume Company has been dressing Hollywood since 1977. The company counts costume designers Sandy Powell, Arianne Phillips and Ellen Mirojnick among its clients, and has provided outfits for “Yellowstone” as well as “American Horror Story.” But with the writers and actors on strike, the business is in danger. “I could survive probably five months, but I would be left with nothing,” says the company’s owner, Diana Foster.
Across Hollywood and beyond, acute economic uncertainty is facing Foster and her employees and many other businesses. The shutdown doesn’t just mean that members of the actors and writers guilds are going without paychecks — in many cases, it’s left below-the-line workers out of work or fearful they may soon be jobless.
For the people who provide the ball gowns and suits of armor that actors wear onscreen, the situation is growing more dire. Foster’s father founded the company, and over four decades, United American has dealt with other strikes. “We were preparing for it,” says Foster, who started letting her staff know in February that a possible strike was looming. “I alerted them because you started seeing the slowdown,” she says.
Foster began cutting back on her overhead as much as possible. “When the writers went on strike, you saw a slowdown of new productions, but the ones that were still working, they continued as long as they didn’t have any rewrites,” she says.
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