Spencer Pratt’s Hollywood-honed theatrics have made the Los Angeles mayoral race national news. Meanwhile, a behind-the-scenes industry player is attempting to secure the third-most-powerful elected job in the city with a notable campaign that’s so far received little attention.
Zach Sokoloff, on leave from his top executive role at Hackman Capital, where he manages the firm’s Television City and Radford studio lots, is running for Controller — L.A.’s fiscal watchdog, independent auditor, paymaster and accountant. A Democrat who’s sewn up a slew of party endorsements, he’s hoping to knock out incumbent Kenneth Mejia, a progressive upstart who took office in 2022.
“I decided to run because the city is broken,” Sokoloff says during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in which he criticized Mejia for being ineffective: too passive in confronting multiple civic crises and too uncollaborative in his dealings with fellow elected officials. “I bring an outsider’s perspective and an outsider’s experience.” He adds, “I think I embody the independent spirit of the Office of Controller — I’m not beholden to anybody.”
The definitions of outsider and independence are in the eye of the beholder. Sokoloff, who’s been a registered lobbyist with the city to pursue his Hackman real estate work, is a scion of the L.A.’s financial overclass. His father Jonathan Sokoloff, a former lieutenant to Michael Milken, is a private equity heavyweight. “My dad is a great question-asker who always taught us that God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason,” he explains.
Sokoloff, 37, grew up in a Holmby Hills mansion alongside neighbors like Hugh Hefner and Larry Gagosian, and attended the prestigious local private school Harvard-Westlake before graduating from Yale. He now lives with his wife and two children in Westwood.
Sokoloff’s list of campaign contributors, which is heavy on non-Angelenos, provides a window into his rarified world. They include maxed-out donations from a slew of billionaires and heirs: Bobby Kotick, Steve Roth, Howard Schultz, Stewart Resnick, Ben Ashkenazy, Eli Bronfman and Matthew Winnick. There’s also plenty of other finance folks, including Saul Goodman, Ken Moelis and Dan Levitan — plus legendary attorney Alan Grubman, Universal Music Group head Sir Lucian Grainge and several CAA agents.
Michael Klausman, left, long time lot manager at Radford Studio Center, and Zach Sokoloff, asset manager at Hackman Capital Partners, along New York Street, where ‘Seinfeld’ was produced at Radford Studio Center on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023 in Studio City, CA.
Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
The most notable name, though, is Sokoloff’s mother Sheryl. Since late April, she’s donated — from her address in the tony ski town of Big Sky, Montana — $4 million to an independent expenditure committee in support of his candidacy. Her contribution on its own is more than twice the total raised in any previous campaign for L.A. Controller.
Mejia has criticized the donation, which already paid for a mudslinging ad against him. He’s said that “my opponent, his rich mom and his billionaire elite friends” are “buying elections.” To THR, Sokoloff first characterized questions about his mother’s financial support of his run as a “personal attack,” then pointed to other examples across the state of wealthy families backing a relative’s bid for office, including current San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie (heir to the Levi Strauss fortune), California lieutenant governor Eleni Kounalakis (daughter of a real estate magnate) and San Diego area U.S. Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (her grandfather founded Qualcomm).
Sokoloff — who is wonkish, earnest and spreadsheet-centric — has garnered other supporters, too, including local Democratic clubs and politicians, as well as a passel of union chapters. (Notably absent are any of the major Hollywood unions, including SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, which threatened legal action over their picketing conditions at the Radford lot during the 2023 dual strike.) Most meaningfully, he’s earned endorsements from the former L.A. controllers Laura Chick and Wendy Greuel.
“Laura is not known for being a go-along-to-get-along type — she’s very forceful,” Sokoloff observes. “But she says the most important relationship that a Controller can build is with the Mayor, because it’s the Mayor’s team which executes the recommendations and the findings that the Controller produces.”
Sokoloff believes that politically strained relationships between Mejia (a former Green Party member who is now a registered Independent) and City Hall’s elected Democratic Party leadership have hamstrung the Controller’s office. He points to retaliatory budget cuts — by Mejia’s own accounting, of 25 percent during his first year in office — which resulted in less auditing personnel.
“When you have your budget being set by the Mayor and the City Council, it is not in the interest of the people of Los Angeles to go around pissing them off,” notes Sokoloff. “You have to balance accountability with collaboration. You can speak truth to partners and have hard conversations about the efficacy of a program or a department. But there does need to be an understanding that you’re trying to find common ground and you’re working in the same direction.”
Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia was elected in 2022.
For his part, Mejia tells THR, “We’re working collaboratively with the Mayor and City Council on issues like stabilizing the City’s affordable housing portfolio and updating our antiquated $1 billion procurement process. When we disagree with what’s happening in City Hall, like in 2023 when they signed an LAPD contract the City can’t afford, we’re not going to stay silent. We have been advocating for a Charter change to protect the independence of the Controller’s Office by ensuring a fixed budget for the Controller, insulated from political retaliation.”
Mejia, who shocked L.A.’s political establishment with his landslide 2022 victory over a term-limited city councilman, has touted his efforts in office to investigate fraud at a homelessness services provider, push the LAPD to be more transparent about its use of military equipment and force the Department of Transportation to refund incorrectly issued parking tickets.
Sokoloff scoffs at Mejia’s first-term record. “I believe that the office is much more capacious,” he says. “There’s a lot more you can do within the chartered authority of Controller.”
Sokoloff believes Mejia should’ve wielded his office more proactively, especially by leveraging its bully pulpit, to address the city’s homelessness and production crises. He becomes most heated when THR brings up how Mejia has knocked him for presiding as asset manager at Hackman over a $1 billion valuation loss of the Radford lot in recent years as the streaming boom went bust and more competitive tax incentives in other states and countries led to tanking local shoot days. (Netflix is now in talks to purchase Radford; Mejia tells THR, “It’s clear big banks don’t trust Sokoloff with their money, and neither should the people of L.A. While Zach was raising rents on his stages, we’ve been working with City Council, labor, and industry groups to make it easier to film in L.A.”)
“I would ask him to look in the mirror,” Sokoloff responds, “and question whether during his time in office, when he had the power to help an industry that was so clearly struggling, did he do anything to make a difference? Did he even have the judgment to identify that this was an issue that his office should be looking into? The answer clearly is ‘no.’ So, I think he bears responsibility himself.”
Sokoloff continues, “the fact that we have had incumbents who did not clearly see this issue early enough and act swiftly and aggressively enough was for me part of the calculus in feeling like we need new blood. We need folks who will change the way that business is done in L.A.”
