A million of these posts exist, but I'm adding my voice, though it's only three LA years old, because it's something I wish I'd heard.
What do you do when you want to pursue a career in the film industry? How do you start? Every working writer, producer, editor, anyone I know in the film and TV industry tells you to move to LA or New York, but though I blindly followed their advice after college, I didn't understand why until I'd been here for over a year.
I have friends that ask me all the time why they would move somewhere without a guaranteed job, and on the surface, that sounds smart. The easy answer is that a million people are LA local and much better equipped to get to interviews than you are and to start tomorrow and the film industry moves fast, and while that's true, the real answer is more in depth:
Work as a creative this industry is inherently freelance because it's project to project. Even the most lucrative franchises end. Even if you work at a studio or network, job security is shaky at best, especially at the lower levels. You're replaceable, and hey, maybe you have a terrible boss and want to move to another company. Even if you move to LA with a job, you might not have one tomorrow. How will you react to that? Will you be able to cope? Do you have the humility to nanny or work at Starbucks, to work at your dream in the early mornings or late at night?
I moved to LA hoping to find a job right away. I applied and applied and I was stressed about the possibility that I would be working at Panera Bread for years... but the truth is that the time it took to find an industry job was the time I needed to grow and adjust and be peaceful about working alongside an industry rather than in it. It gave me the time to invest in relationships, routine, community, to find a neighborhood that I like to live in and a taco shop with the best steak tacos I've ever had.
Los Angeles, New York, any freelance industry, is about the long game, and I'm not talking about networking. It's about building real friendships and about disciplining yourself to be creative when you're not being paid for it, and about building a life that you'll be happy to live when you're between gigs and you're back to nannying for the fourth time. If you can't take this, then you're not cut out for freelancing, much less cut out for, by all counts, one of the hardest industries in the world.
How do you make it in LA? Take time, build a life, find peace. Be a barista and find another coffee shop to write at. Find people you'd like to be lasting friends with. Those people will lead to other friends, and sure, someone may be a "connection", but the important thing is that you now have friends in this lonely, busy city. It's going to be hard, and it's going to take time, but everything worth having always does. That's part of being an adult, and that's part of joy in the film & TV industry.