Since the start of the year, Brandy Hernandez has applied to nearly 200 entertainment jobs.
The 22-year-old film school graduate said that for most of those applications, she never heard back โ not even a rejection. When she did land follow-up interviews, she was almost always ghosted afterwards.
โI knew that I wouldnโt be a famous screenwriter or anything straight out of college,โ said Hernandez, who graduated from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in 2024. But she thought she would at least be qualified for an entry-level film industry job.
โIt shouldnโt be this hard,โ she kept thinking.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a widespread production slowdown, the entertainment industryโs recovery has been delayed by the dual Hollywood strikes, some of the costliest wildfires in Californiaโs history and an industry-wide contraction.