After L.A. Fires, 200,000 Living in Limbo: ‘I Cannot Get My Bearings’
Six months later, ‘there are no good decisions,’ says music producer Greg Wells, as the displaced battle insurance, emotion & toxic ground
Directors Guild of America president Lesli Linka Glatter was in a work meeting on that horrible morning of Jan. 9 this year when a friend called to say there was a TV interview taking place in front of her Pacific Palisades home, which was no longer standing. Her entire Alphabet Streets block was destroyed, wiping out a neighborhood heavy with industry players: Glatter’s neighbors included A-list directors and writers who worked with her on Homeland, where she was an EP and directed one-quarter of the spy drama’s episodes.
With her computer and a single Hoka sneaker — the only possessions she was able to grab before evacuating — Glatter stayed with her adult son and then found a rental in Outpost in the Hollywood Hills. “I guess I’m so used to being on location that as an itinerant film worker, I approached it as though I were going on location,” she tells me. “I wanted to be in a new neighborhood where I could explore the city in a different way. So, psychologically, I did that to myself.
“I have this amazing view and I think for right now it was the right choice for me. Everyone deals with this differently. A lot of my friends chose to stay close by the Palisades. I did the opposite.”
The grief, disbelief and sense of loss “come in waves,” she says. “On one level, I’m like, ‘Okay, I don’t want much anymore. I don’t want 20 pairs of blue jeans. I need two.’ It’s been a shift in priorities and in some ways a forced reinvention, trying to find the opportunity in something that is so damaging. I feel like that’s my only path forward. Otherwise, I would just be in sadness all the time.”
Six months after the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires, 200,000 Angelenos remain displaced in a world where attention has moved on to the gazillion other panic-inducing news crises du jour since. In particular, the ICE raids and arrival of National Guard troops in L.A. has become the city’s latest nightmare. Yet for those affected by the January fires, the sense of displacement that ripped through Altadena and the Palisades has only grown more acute. Although Mayor Karen Bass recently posted an Instagram photo of a house going up along with the proclamation, “Rebuilding in L.A. is already underway in the Palisades, we will get you home” — and she and billionaire developer Rick Caruso momentarily put aside their differences to hold a ceremony announcing the rebuilding of the neighborhood’s Rec Center with private and public money — things behind the scenes are less cheery.
“People are not okay,” says Jennifer Acree, founder and CEO of the communications firm JSA+Partners, who lost her family home in the Palisades fire. It’s a sentiment repeated to me over and over as I spoke to fire survivors from the Palisades and Altadena, including Glatter, screenwriter Meghan Malloy (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse), screenwriter Will Beall (Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Aquaman); Kirk DeMicco, head of music for Victory Live Jed Weitzman, and music producer Greg Wells (Wicked, The Greatest Showman), all of whom described living in a surreal state of limbo, deeply exacerbated by the slow and frustrating pace of still tangling with insurance half year later.