What Hollywood Lost in the Fires

Reporting by Jem Aswad, Matt Donnelly, Angelique Jackson, Elsa Keslassy, Gene Maddaus, Marc Malkin, Pat Saperstein, Michael Schneider, Tatiana Siegel, Jazz Tangcay, Chris Willman and K.J. Yossman.

Before mid-afternoon on Jan. 7, the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles was a salt-air oasis tucked into the second-largest city in the country. It was “a kind of Mayberry,” in the words of one resident, that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, lying between Santa Monica to the east and Malibu to the west.

By late afternoon that day, the Palisades had turned into an unimaginable hellscape. The community that had long home to hundreds of entertainment industry workers was engulfed by a wildfire whipped into a merciless inferno by 80-mile an hour winds. The force of the howling gusts sent embers flying for miles. That ensured that the devastation would spread far and wide, as tiny molten torpedoes landed indiscriminately on roofs and patios, in backyards and front yards and tree houses and on vehicles abandoned in the “pure chaos” that erupted as Palisades residents were ordered to evacuate.

A few hours later, about 35 miles to the east in Altadena, a similarly tight-knit community in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest, the same dangerous wind conditions drove another firestorm that has left the residential area north of Pasadena looking like a war zone.

The causes and the aggravating factors of both blazes will be investigated, studied and debated for years to come. The accusations of wrongdoing and neglect aimed at state and local officials emerged as fast as the black-gray smoke and ash that blanketed both areas.

But for now, however, hundreds of thousands of displaced fire victims are still wrestling with their immediate loss – a crisis made that much harder by a cascade of feelings that run the gamut of numbness and shock to panic, gratitude and fury. And even those who weren’t in the direct path of the destruction are coming to grips with the magnitude of all that has been lost.

“That’s an area bigger than Manhattan that just got leveled,” said music producer Greg Wells, who lost his home and recording studio in Pacific Palisades. “It’s like a small nuclear bomb went off.”

Kathryn Frazier, owner of public relations firm Biz3, raised two sons as a single mother in her “sacred oasis” in Altadena. She’d planned to retire in the home that burned to the ground.

“It’s just unbelievable,” Frazier says. “Our entire community is gone — every house, shop, school — even the fire department itself.”

Matt Gutman, a veteran ABC News reporter who has covered war overseas and countless natural disasters, is shaken by the experience of covering the devastation in the Palisades, an area he knows well from family members who resided there. He watched his aunt’s house go up in flames while thinking to himself, “This is where we do Thanksgivings.” When he returned the next day, the landscape of the fire-scarred neighborhood looked eerily unfamiliar.

“It’s this sea of naked chimneys without houses wrapped around them, and this desert of ash and gray in what had been a place of great color and liveliness,” Gutman said. “It’s very jarring.”

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Fire Relief Resources for Entertainment Industry Workers

The Los Angeles fires are expected to rank as the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, and will impact every sector and industry in Southern California and beyond. Entertainment and media businesses have no special immunity. In fact, the high volume of industry insiders – from CEOs and A-listers to IATSE members and character actors — who called the Palisades and Altadena home means that the pain and ripple effects across Hollywood and the creative community will be severe and long-lasting.

“Overnight, I had clients from out of town who were being evacuated from hotels along Sunset Boulevard, and everything started breaking down and pivoting,” said Andrew Colon, chief operating officer of Smuggler, a commercial production house. “We just ramped down for safety. Some are going to postpone indefinitely, and a couple of the projects that need to be produced on a shorter timeline and don’t have the luxury of a longer postponement are going to have to go to a region that’s not subject to this fire danger.”

Wildfire activity in California and other Western states in recent decades has been intensified by the effects of climate change. Drought conditions in Los Angeles made the area a tinderbox – flammable conditions exacerbated by the fact that Southern California had unusually wet weather in 2021 and 2022. All that rain made local vegetation blossom as if on steroids, only to become dry and ready to ignite at the first spark in 2023 and 2024 when drought conditions returned to the often-arid region.

The fire spurred sudden shutdowns of production and the temporary closure of movie studios. Universal Studios, Warner Bros. and Disney abut canyons and the Hollywood Hills. It also temporarily closed the Universal Studios theme park. For workaday Hollywood, the ravages of fire are the latest blow for largely freelance workers who already faced huge hits to income during the pandemic and months of no work during the 2023 writers and actors strikes. Then last year was marked by a significant downturn in overall production activity, particularly in TV, as studios sought to rein in spending.

“It’s been really hard because every time I feel like I’m making some sort of momentum and things are pushing forward, there’s another hurdle,” said background actor Evan Shafran, who lives in the Burbank area and kept a close eye on fire conditions. He didn’t earn enough in 2024 to qualify for SAG-AFTRA health insurance this year. He hoped the new year would bring more opportunities.

“We need the jobs even more now that this fire has happened,” Shafran said. “People don’t realize how much the lack of work here is affecting everybody and the trickle-down effect. Everybody is suffering.”

Another immediate impact for showbiz has been the up-ending of the usual parade of award shows, premieres and celebratory events in January and February, culminating in the Academy Awards set for March 2. Already, the Oscar nominations announcement date has been postponed nearly a week (to Jan. 23) because of the upheaval.

While the loss of kudocasts and red carpet moments seems a superficial concern in a time of tragedy, the hard truth is that every one of those events means a day or more of lost pay for Hollywood’s gig workers – job categories that range from security guards to caterers to florists to servers to a host of technical and artisan specialists whose efforts are vital to producing a big event. Organizers of the Grammy Awards, set for Feb. 2 at downtown L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena, are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure music’s biggest night in light of the devastation.

For those who have lost their homes and most of their possessions, there is a level of shock that will take time to overcome, even as they recognize their good fortune to have survived. It all happened so fast.

“I went out that morning for an optometry exam and I never went back,” music producer Wells observed. Like many others, Wells acknowledged that he maintained a level of denial even as residents packed essentials and ran to their cars.

“We kind of just arrogantly thought, ‘There’s no rush’ — like, “This is gonna be OK,’ ” Wells said of his attitude on Jan. 7 before all hell broke loose. “And then I got a call from one of my older kids who grew up in the Palisades, and he said, ‘You guys have got to get out right now,’ showing me some photos of the smoke and just how close the flames were. And so my wife got out with our passports and that was it. But we just thought, “We’ll return. We’ll be back when the dust settles.” … There’s just that weird thing of not having closure, of not saying goodbye to a thing.”

In Altadena, talent manager Alexander Shekarchian and his fiancée, Dr. Moogega Cooper, a NASA engineer at the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had a similar response.

“I packed with the mentality that it’s never going to get to us. It’s going to stop,” Cooper said. Shekarchian added, “We had time to pack some clothes, but unfortunately, we didn’t get most of [Cooper’s] keepsakes, so that’s the more heartbreaking part of it.”

Mia Ammer, a veteran communications executive who is a VP at Sunshine Sachs Morgan and Lylis, lost the home she bought in the Palisades in 2015. When she and her family were finally able to return and see the charred remnants of their home, all they were able to recover was a small ceramic bear that her 17-year-old daughter Annie made in elementary school and the doorknob to Annie’s old room.

“We’ve lived through so many of these fire warnings and you don’t know how seriously to take it,” Ammer said. “My house has never really been in danger. All my neighbors were thinking the same thing — we’d just return. That’s why so many people left with just the clothes on their back,” she said.

Undoubtedly, every fire victim will have to contend with the loss of irreplaceable items. For Ammer, that includes the ashes of her late husband, movie marketing executive Geoff Ammer, and keepsakes she treasured after his death in 2012. “It’s truly the only thing I cared about. There were some memory books that friends put together with photos and handwritten letters about what Geoff meant to them. It was the only thing I wanted for my kids and it’s gone,” Ammer said.

It will take time – more than a few days – for the hard reality to sink in.

“It’s juggling a lot of different trauma,” Shekarchian said.

The toll also includes many local businesses and landmarks, from beloved restaurants and shops to recreation areas such as Will Rogers Park and its famous horse stables.

“I’m absolutely devastated by how much history we’ve lost. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever,” said Alison Martino, who runs the VintageLA Facebook page and reports on historic Los Angeles for Spectrum News 1. “I don’t think I’ve accepted it all yet.”

Martino says she will especially miss the oceanfront restaurant Moonshadows, in Malibu along Pacific Coast Highway, which she used to visit with her late father, singer Al Martino. “The beauty of the sunset — every time I went out there it was paradise,” she remembered.

Actor Merrin Dungey has a daughter who is a junior at Palisades Charter High School, which was damaged by fire. The school is a hub of the community and big source of the small-town feel that made the Palisades feel like such a refuge from the hustle and bustle of the industry.

“We lost the community that we’ve grown to love,” Dungey said. “My daughter is an ambassador at Pali, so she’s a school representative. And we were watching in real time [on TV], our community burn. You’re like, ‘Oh my god, there’s this store,’ and ‘There’s that yogurt shop’ and ‘There’s the Starbucks where I pick you up on Tuesdays.’ I’m watching with my daughter and we’re sobbing. You’re just watching this horror show.”

The vibe in the Palisades was “almost like from another time, a kind of Mayberry,” Wells observed. “I loved all the little mom-and-pop shops in the village. I loved how close it was to the madness of Los Angeles, but removed from it.”

Altadena has historically been a relatively affordable place for working class and middle-class families, many whom work in creative fields.

Farisai Kambarami, a second camera assistant on films like “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and “Horizon,” moved to Altadena in November because he and his wife needed a larger place to accommodate newborn twins. They left home when the power was knocked out, taking just an overnight bag to stay with his wife’s sister.

When they got back into the neighborhood a couple days later, they found their house was destroyed. So was the car they left behind.

“Everything was flattened to the ground,” he said.

The couple did not have renter’s insurance, because they had just moved. He had just transferred about $10,000 worth of equipment out of a storage unit.

“Being in the industry, you have so much gear and stuff,” he says. “I just finished putting all my kit into the garage. That’s all gone.”

Other lost possessions had more emotional resonance.

“I worked on ‘Top Gun.’ I had a slate signed by Jerry Bruckheimer and Tom Cruise. It’s gone. Those are things you can’t get back.”

Actor Spencer Treat Clark bought his home in Altadena two years ago. He’d put a lot of sweat and muscle into fixing it up.

“I found Altadena after I did an episode of ‘Criminal Minds,’ ” Clark said.

“I was so charmed by the community, and I thought if I’m ever in a position to buy a house one day, I’d love to put up ground there. I feel like, if you work in this industry long enough, you’re bound to film in Altadena. It has this really unique charm that doesn’t quite feel like Los Angeles. It kind of feels like a little mountain town at times.”

The impact of the loss stretches beyond California and the United States.

Patrick Bruel, the French singer and actor, bought his now-burned house in the Palisades eight years ago. None other than Johnny Hallyday, the late French crooner, encouraged Bruel to buy property there and become his neighbor. Hallyday’s house, where his widow Laeticia lived with their two daughters, was also destroyed.

“It’s a small village, a beautiful village, a village in which we felt extremely comfortable,” Bruel said. “It’s hard for me even to talk about it in the past tense. I was there five days ago. It’s very overwhelming.”

The enormity of the loss has inspired an immediate surge of fundraising and charitable donations for relief efforts. Corporate donations such as the $15 million pledged by the Walt Disney Co. and $10 million apiece from Comcast and Netflix will support regional initiatives. Overnight, spreadsheets, emails and text messages began bouncing around Hollywood inboxes with lists of Go Fund Me and Kickstarter campaigns to help individuals.

“It’s become a text chain of like, ‘OK, this person has this resource, and this person needs a puppy looked after, and this person needs shoes and clothes.’ There’s a whole chart we have for rentals and things,” Dungey said. “It’s remarkable — the light that can come from a tragedy.”

In dark times, a dose of gallows humor also never hurts. A friend of Shekarchian and Cooper met the couple at their Altadena home after the fire. As they reminisced about parties held at the house, the friend noted that their outdoor refrigerator was still intact – and still stocked with adult beverages.

“He said, ‘Guess what? The Modelos in the back refrigerator are still there,’” Cooper recalls. “I said, ‘No way!’ Because one of the things that I enjoyed most at that house was throwing parties — having people over and just celebrating anything — and I would have an outdoor refrigerator filled with beer or champagne. Somehow the beers inside were able to survive, so we thought, ‘We’re gonna crack them open and drink from these ashy beers.’”

Michael Greene, who runs the Greene & Associates boutique talent agency, marveled that his beach house on Pacific Coast Highway was spared in the Palisades fire. His close friend, manager Joannie Burstein, wasn’t as fortunate, nor was his client Rosanna Arquette. Greene had been the longtime agent for actor Chadwick Boseman, the beloved “Black Panther” star who died in 2020.

Greene said he felt the presence of Boseman as he surveyed his decimated neighborhood. “Chadwick was watching over,” Greene said. “I know he’s watching.”

As was the case with Boseman’s untimely death from cancer, the wildfire storm that has changed Los Angeles forever is a reminder of the transitory nature of life.

“I’ve never seen something affect our business so greatly,” Greene observed. “You work your life away to be able to have the luxury of Malibu or Pacific Palisades, these beautiful communities. Everybody thinks money is going to make you happy and be free, but at any moment, it’s taken away from you.”