A property is destroyed by the Palisades Fire along Sunset Boulevard in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on Jan. 10.John Locher/The Associated Press
What was your first reaction to seeing a multimillion-dollar Malibu mansion burn to the ground?
This week, as social-media feeds became overwhelmed with apocalyptic images of Los Angeles – nightmarish scenes that appeared conjured from the kind of audacious blockbusters that Hollywood itself sells – I couldn’t help but notice an ugly, barely disguised sense of glee among certain commentators. People who view natural disasters as some kind of moral comeuppance, believing that the rich rarely suffer, or that extreme virtue has extreme costs.
To the more callous and unkind among us, the wildfires that arrived in California last week like a righteously cleansing force. Why, the thinking went, should we care that the rich and celebrated elite have been rendered homeless? There are exponentially bigger tragedies in the world every day, non-stop.
Without a doubt, yes. But there is a particular ugliness, a virulent ignorance, to the reaction in this case that speaks to a broader sense of unease in the culture. Call it anti-artist or anti-imagination or even anti-success, but it boils down to this: As long as there are those among us who choose – often at great personal cost – to follow their artistic dreams, there will be others who delight in kicking them when they are down.
Certainly, some of those who lost a home this week have a second, or third, to go running toward. They will, ultimately, be fine. But they are not beyond the reach of human emotions, either, nor were they awarded their privileges by luck. Anyone who can claim success in Hollywood does so in an almost-impossible-to-enter business, be they actors, directors, producers or even (yes, a few) writers. Many fought tooth and nail, through rejection and heartache, to get where they are. They don’t need your pity, but it shouldn’t be asking too much to check the lack of bare-bones sympathy.
And it is when these blinders are put up that truly irrational emotions start to surface. Hollywood isn’t just the work of stars, and it’s not just celebrities who are affected by the fires.
The hardest-hit neighbourhood of Pacific Palisades, for instance, was home to thousands of the everyday working artisans who keep the entertainment industry humming. These people provide for their families by providing our culture. Production designers, makeup artists, lighting technicians, camera operators, painters, visual-effects artists, publicists, editors, musicians, sound engineers – they make Hollywood’s dream factory run. You’ll never see their names on a marquee, but they are still there, deep in the credits, clocking in and out while pursuing their callings, their dreams. They are what makes the city the city. And now so much of their lives has been swept away.
The union that represents behind-the-scenes workers in film and television reported that more than 8,000 of its members live in areas that have burned down or been evacuated. Production on series and movies has ground to halt, studios have temporarily shut down and absolutely no one is in the mood to negotiate the many deals that make the industry go round.
And while it may seem superficial to note that the blazes have also led to the cancellations of dozens of Oscar-season soirees – luncheons, cocktails, screenings, lower-level awards galas – every one of those events provided essential employment for the many ancillary businesses (catering, security, beauty, hospitality) that support the town’s flashier, red-carpet sector. Show business pumps about US$43-billion annually in wages into the California economy alone.
After enduring a series of tectonic crises – the pandemic, the strikes, the recessionary-spiked production slowdown – all of Hollywood was looking forward to a new, more hopeful year. “Survive till ‘25” was the mantra. And then everything burned. Who will be left to come back from this? The entertainment industry is built on resiliency, but there are only so many knocks you can take. And there are other threats looming, too.
Late last week as Malibu burned, a viral photo began making the social-media rounds: an obviously AI-generated pic of the Hollywood sign, its giant white letters set against a blazing inferno. Despite its egregiously dubious quality, the phony image was quickly and distressingly embraced as the real deal – providing solid proof that the world still desperately needs genuine artists, not artificial-intelligence-enabled hacks, to reflect our world back to us.
Let’s hope that the worst of the wildfires are over – and that there is still something left of L.A. for those artists to go back to.
