Hello, is Anyone Driving the Bus?
Once again, the community careens towards crack-up
For those looking for a way to contribute, here’s a terrific list of fundraisers for local crew members impacted by the fires. This is money that goes straight to the people in our world who need it most. Have a look and let’s all do all we can.
I’m getting tired of writing “this was the end of something.” I’ve had too many occasions to write that over the past few years not to know there’s always room for one more disaster around the corner.
Of course, there are disasters, and there are Disasters, and this one belongs in the latter camp. For the neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades and Altadena, “the end of something,” is literally the case. But the city and the industry have had too many ends lately to believe that anything ends here.
That Joan Didion quote, “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” has gotten a lot of airtime lately. The truth is that the image of the city burning is a lot of writers’ deepest image of the city, particularly those who spend too much time wallowing in the maudlin depths of the gothic. Writers are taught that anything good must be sinister, that every happiness is a trap door. Glowering on the sidelines, writers certainly nourish an image of the city burning.
But I don’t think too many people living last week in Altadena or the Palisades held secret fantasies of seeing their world burn to the ground.
Another popular metaphor last week: “Like a scene from a Hollywood movie . . .”
But in a movie, the scale of the sadness is contained by the film’s running time. However great the onscreen tragedy, there can’t be much more than two hours of it. In the past week, however, the misery and the waste just kept coming, pouring into our lives like water from a broken pipe, gushing over everything.
Even for those of us who are “fine” — who weren’t in danger, who didn’t even get an evacuation warning — the proximity to so much destruction and suffering has just left us exhausted, before we’ve even begun to wrap our heads around what the aftermath of this will be like.
As is the case with every event in the digital era, the conversation has been similarly draining. In a tragedy this big, there was a villain at hand for everyone’s choosing: Mayor Bass’ alleged negligence, Rick Caruso and his private fire force, illegal alien arsonists, looters, McMansions, entitled movie stars. Whatever your priors, there’s been a bad guy available to blame this whole thing on.
I’m sure there will be plenty of blame to go around for poor planning and bad behavior before, during and after the inferno. I’m also confident that in time, that will all be sorted through. (Actually, I’m not particularly confident of that, but I’d like to believe it.)
But when you have nine months with no rain and 100-mile-per-hour winds, a spark turns to a fire tsunami. And when a tsunami comes, there is nothing to do but get out of the way, if you can.
The areas of Pacific Palisades and Altadena weren’t risky little outposts on a hilltop, encroaching into the middle of the forest. They were established communities that had been there for 100 years. So all our finger-pointing, all our literary metaphors, wouldn’t change the fact that a wildfire ran over these two enclaves. When people start waxing poetic, you’ve got to take into account that most of this happens no matter who the mayor is or whether Rick Caruso hired help. Most of the narratives stop dead there.
Coming together in times of tragedy used to be the one thing we could always be counted on to do, the perennial silver lining. Not forever — not letting anyone off the hook eternally — but just saying that for a few days, we’re going to focus on the people who are suffering; coupled with a general sense that to intrude on that moment of grief with political polemics was fairly obscene.
Chalk that up as another corner of civilization that the digital world has taken from us.
So all that said, admitting that this was a natural disaster, not a manifestation of hubris or God’s revenge, or even the consequence of incompetence; granting the hideousness of real-time finger-pointing and the banality of literary metaphors, this week leaves me with a real sense that the bottom is just falling out of this whole entertainment community/extended universe experiment in every possible way.
Too Much Turmoil — And No Plan
When you look at the list of upheavals this community has gone through in the past decade — some for good, some mixed, some terrible — taken together, it’s a lot.
Since 2017, we’ve gone through: the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the #MeToo reckoning; #OscarsSoWhite and our fallout after the George Floyd murder; the streaming revolution; the end of the cable bundle and the dismantling of our entire financial model; production fleeing California and the U.S.; the Covid shutdown of the entire industry; the strikes; and now the destruction of two entire communities populated largely by members of this industry, including one of the signature prestige addresses of today’s executive class.
As I say, that’s a very mixed bag. The #MeToo reckoning was brought on ourselves, and I would argue that the impact was hugely for the good. There’s no upside to the burning of Altadena or the Palisades.
But whether the upheavals produce positive change or senseless tragedy, there’s a sense that our world has gotten away from the people running it, that whatever is brought their way they have no answer to it, no plan. To channel the hysteria that this week seems to bring rising up in the back of my throat: We’re careening down the hill and no one is driving the bus. Leadership is an illusion.
In our political life, for decades now, L.A.’s political leaders have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. There hasn’t been a major problem — or even a minor one — where they’ve risen to the challenge. Generations of elected officials have come and gone without laying a finger on any of the problems of this city, or even really talking about them with anything more than legalistic bromides.
We’ve elected leaders for all kinds of reasons: technocratic bright lights, Hollywood likes them, representation, tough on (fill-in-the-blank), virtue signaling, the face of the future. They all show up on the steps of City Hall brimming with promise and ability and excitement to take on the big challenges — and that’s the last you ever hear of them.
As for our industry leaders, they have managed to get through the above list of upheavals without anything resembling a plan, a vision or even a good talking point.
The fire has widened our imaginations as to how bad things can get. Whole neighborhoods don’t just get wiped out in the blink of an eye. Entire sections of the city don’t just disappear.
There are so many things that 10 years ago seemed impossible, and in so many ways, we are finding out how unstable things can get. All of which would be the price of doing business, or living in paradise, if we had some sense that someone had a plan at the bottom of this, that someone’s steering as we race downhill. Nah, we’ll just turn it over to tech moguls and developers and . . . hope somewhere along the way our interests align with theirs . . . a little bit?
Roll Out the Telethon Tote Board
As a first reaction from Hollywood, the pledges to help have been impressively unimpressive. Here’s what the studios have committed to donating to recovery efforts so far:
Netflix: $10M
Disney: $15M
WBD: $15M
NBCU: $10M
Paramount: $1M
Sony: $5M
Amazon: $10M
Fox: $1M
Total: $67M
Collectively, they are pledging one-third of the marketing budget of one tentpole film.
On the table now, there’s the proposal going around that has been gaining traction to turn all or some of the Oscars into a telethon to benefit victims of the tragedy. During the Covid shutdown, I wrote about 50 columns suggesting they do this then, in a year when there were no movies and no one was going to watch anyway. But back then, our imaginations were still limited regarding how bad things could get, and the idea of compromising the Oscars for one year was unthinkable. Since then, our horizons have expanded.
My first reaction to the telethon plan: Oscar ignored a global pandemic but was going to stop everything for a local disaster?
But taking it in, we’ve got to start somewhere! If we can’t help with suffering in our own house, as it were, then when are we going to? Oscar putting aside handing out trophies for a year to focus on something other than how wonderful we are might just be the reset we all need. Like a year of public service. Or reform school.
We need a precedent of thinking beyond our own short-term, don’t-rock-the-boat, kick-the-can-down-the-road approach to problem solving. Maybe this catastrophe can let us take stock and give us the reboot that’s long past overdue.
Can’t afford The Ankler right now? If you’re an assistant, student, or getting your foot in the door, and want help navigating the craziness of this business but don’t have the money to spare, drop me a line at richard@theankler.com and we’ll work it out. No mogul or mogul-to-be left behind here at The Ankler.
Thought this was an interesting and sober take on the situation. Thanks Richard.
This is spot on. Thank you for saying the quiet things out loud.