“Everywhere I go, people ask me the same question: What stars have I met?” said Stephen Cheung, the president and chief executive of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. “Nobody would ask me that if I were from another city.”
Born in Hong Kong, Mr. Cheung, 44, said that he saw his first real celebrity in Los Angeles when he was about 10, through a car window. “We were near the convention center in downtown, and all of a sudden, a car pulled up and I saw Madonna get out.”
Many also know stars the way anyone knows anyone in the nation’s second-largest city: as neighbors or fellow parents or people walking their dogs. Entertainers sponsor local schools, embark on second careers as politicians, stump for state ballot initiatives and occasionally get into scrapes with the mayor for trying to fill their own potholes.
Democratic leaders throughout the liberal state have long been supportive; earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California extended a $330 million-a-year film and television tax credit program to encourage studios to keep productions at home.
Certain communities share a special bond.
“We have a lot of studio people who live in Burbank,” Mimi House, a retired medical clinic administrative worker, said on Thursday while lunching with a group of fellow retirees in the Los Angeles suburb’s “beautiful downtown” shortly after leaders of the actors’ union, known as SAG-AFTRA, announced the walkout.
Without the entertainment industry, Burbank would be a “ghost town,” added Virginia Bohr, a retired accountant at the table with Ms. House. Local officials recently renamed their airport Hollywood Burbank, though Hollywood is technically a neighborhood in Los Angeles, a separate city.
The region has long attracted show business aspirants from around the world who hope to catch their big break. Many scrape by for years before they find work outside the entertainment industry.