It’s gonna be a long road back. But the entertainment business, which pumps an estimated $43 billion in wages into the California economy each year, will almost certainly play a key role in the L.A. recovery. How big? Hollywood has never fully engaged with the city around it, but here are a few ideas for how the industry can help build the impacted areas back.

Now here’s Peter on the politics of the fires and the role of Hollywood in the debate…

ANORA IS THE MOST ACCLAIMED FILM OF THE YEAR.   Awarded the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, it was crowned The Best Movie of 2024 in Indiewire’s poll of 177 critics.   It is now nominated for 3 SAG Awards and 7 Critics Choice Awards including BEST PICTURE, BEST ACTRESS, AND BEST DIRECTOR.   A culmination of twenty-five years of filmmaking from writer/director/editor Sean Baker, nominated for the Outstanding Directorial Achievement (Feature Film) DGA Award, ANORA is a film that ”reaffirms that movies are still capable of generating miracles." (Rolling Stone) Anchored by an electrifying Mikey Madison who delivers "the performance of the year" (Awards Radar), ANORA is a timeless and unforgettable cinematic experience.

People in Los Angeles are, for the most part, focused on helping their friends and loved ones who lost everything. They are also focused on helping strangers. On Sunday night in Arcadia, at a donation center in Santa Anita Park for victims of the Eaton Fire, volunteers had to stop accepting donations because there were too many people showing up to help. All over the city, Angelenos are sheltering pets. Firefighters are doing the lord’s work. A trio of my friends in Venice raised several thousand dollars over Instagram and Venmo to buy supplies for the neighborhood firefighters, just one platoon in an army of heroes who have been laying hose up and down the steep, brush-choked ravines of the Palisades to fight the blaze. My friends showed up at one Venice firehouse with pallets of water, but it turned out the firefighters wanted Zyns, Celsius, and breakfast food even more. So they went back out and bought those, too. Spreadsheets are being organized for victims and passed around in group chats, listing all those things you need but don’t think about taking with you when a fire is racing down a hill toward your home: underwear, toys, pet food, blankets, diapers, a yoga mat, something as simple as a nail clipper. This sort of fellowship and generosity, unusual for such a sprawling and diverse city which remains remarkably stratified by class and race, is what most people in Los Angeles are focused on. But there is the obnoxious and inescapable background noise of social media, too, with partisans and clout-chasers rushing to X and TikTok and elsewhere to post about why the fires are the logical outcome in the failed dystopia of liberal California. Even the incoming president, himself, couldn’t resist posting about Gavin “Newscum” and California’s supposedly incompetent leadership, as the death toll was rising in the nation’s largest state. Musk tried to prove this out in his own icky way, meeting with local firefighters on Sunday and streaming it live on X, trying to bait the first responders into saying they didn’t have enough water to combat the Palisades fire thanks to inept Democrats. But the firefighters wouldn’t bite. They told Musk they did, in fact, have enough water. It’s just that the blaze was so massive the water system couldn’t sustain the flow. It was an inconvenient truth for Musk, who, like other MAGA screen addicts last week, couldn’t resist posting about politics, rather than displaying a shred of humanity, even as the first plume of smoke rose up over the mountains. Babies’ cribs were incinerated, while grandparents watched a lifetime of memories turned into ash. I can report confidently, from multiple sources here on the ground, that most Angelenos would like the social media brigade to shut the fuck up. At the same time, Bass, elected mayor just over two years ago after years in Congress, has emerged as the singular public figure that even liberal Los Angeles is done with. It’s not because she may or may not have cut the fire department budget, or left a reservoir empty, or didn’t do enough to clean up brush and vegetation around the city, although those questions are fair. Voters in Los Angeles, generally, understand that their mayor has relatively little power compared to executives in other cities—that the City Council has the real muscle, and that Los Angeles County has its own services and responsibilities that overlap with the city’s or operate independently from it. Local government in L.A. is as balkanized as its neighborhoods. People understand there are no easy solutions, and it will take time to learn all the facts about why the blazes were so ruinous. The bigger issue—the main issue—is that Bass lost the public trust in spectacular fashion. The National Weather Service warned of dangerous fire conditions on Friday, January 3. Bass knew about it, because we all did. If you live in L.A., you got the weather alert, on the news or on your phone. The mayor’s office certainly did. Despite that, Bass boarded a plane the following day for Ghana as part of a delegation attending the inauguration of the country’s president. And as The New York Times reported over the weekend, Bass had promised during her mayoral campaign never to leave the country. It got worse on the return trip—a long way home—when a Sky News reporter happened upon Bass and an aide at the airport. The reporter asked Bass, repeatedly, to deliver a message to the city. Bass ignored him, on camera, for 90 painful seconds, in stone-faced silence. The clip is devastating, a campaign ad ready-made, the moment for which she will always be remembered. “If it is true that she left the country on a Saturday after the warning came out, that is a dereliction of duty,” Endeavor C.E.O. Ari Emanuel, who donated to Bass’s 2022 campaign, told me. Backers of billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso—Bass’s once and possibly future rival for mayor—also smell blood in water ahead of next year’s election, if a recall doesn’t come first, which is a real possibility, even though it would require a mountain of verified signatures from Los Angeles voters. But as one Democratic strategist told me, “You never know. The anger is there.” UTA superagent Jay Sures, one of Caruso’s biggest donors and loudest advocates in the 2022 mayor’s race, told me that Bass’s performance has been disqualifying and unforgivable. “To me, it’s utter  ncompetence at the highest level with the mayor’s office,” Sures told me. “The fact that she was not here on standby and ready to go? It’s unforgivable. At the end of the day, we elect leaders who are supposed to represent us and protect us and be there for us in times of need. That’s what we expect. Information should be forthright and available at a moment’s notice. Why are we getting all of our alerts from private apps? At the end of the day, we don’t need positive words right now. We need action. We need people to get in to see their homes.” Newsom, meanwhile, has been all over the news, and more or less acting like the de facto leader of Los Angeles in the absence of clear and consistent communication from the mayor. Even if he comes off as famously stiff, Newsom has been flooding the zone as people look for direction—meeting with victims, issuing executive orders, sending supplies, and saying yes to every interview. Bass? She’s been showing up at her news conferences, throwing to other officials, and posting every so often on social media, with banal talking points that no one wants to hear. “These fires across our region have changed lives forever,” went one X post on Saturday. “The days ahead will be challenging but we WILL get through this crisis, together.” How, though? Jonathan Vigliotti of CBS News asked Bass at a press conference over the weekend how the government can restore trust with locals who “are losing faith.” Somewhere in her meandering answer, Bass said that “success has been reported” and that “we are not going to let politics divide us.” Behind her, city officials shuffled around uncomfortably.

The job of the Los Angeles mayor is, in many ways, ceremonial. You bring a political point of view to City Hall, and you show leadership when called upon. But it’s hard to find anyone in Los Angeles media or politics right now, including loyal Democrats, who thinks that Bass has done either of those things in the last week. She came into office promising to be an in-the-weeds problem solver, especially on homelessness. But now, with Angelenos looking for guidance and solutions, they’re more likely to get it from the WatchDuty app or a local news anchor or one of the many city and county officials Bass keeps deferring to during the city’s emergency briefings, televised sessions that began only after the mayor returned from abroad and the fires had already chewed through thousands of acres and hundreds of homes. “It feels like she isn’t built for this,” said one Democratic consultant working in California, pointing out that Bass has spent her entire career in the State Assembly and in Congress. “This is wartime. This isn’t like voting no on some appropriations bill.”

ANORA IS THE MOST ACCLAIMED FILM OF THE YEAR.   Awarded the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, it was crowned The Best Movie of 2024 in Indiewire’s poll of 177 critics.   It is now nominated for 3 SAG Awards and 7 Critics Choice Awards including BEST PICTURE, BEST ACTRESS, AND BEST DIRECTOR.   A culmination of twenty-five years of filmmaking from writer/director/editor Sean Baker, nominated for the Outstanding Directorial Achievement (Feature Film) DGA Award, ANORA is a film that ”reaffirms that movies are still capable of generating miracles." (Rolling Stone) Anchored by an electrifying Mikey Madison who delivers "the performance of the year" (Awards Radar), ANORA is a timeless and unforgettable cinematic experience.

Worldwide box office slumped 10 percent, to $30.5 billion, in 2024, according to Gower Street Analytics, making domestic a bright spot with a decline of just 3.3 percent. F.Y.I., global was $42.3 billion in 2019. [Bloomberg] Big week for Saudi Arabia and Ari Emanuel, who once famously returned an investment in Endeavor from the journalist-beheading country. Endeavor’s TKO is creating a boxing league with a company owned by the Saudis’ Public Investment Fund, while its WWE unit is taking the Royal Rumble to Riyadh. [NY Times] Antitrust crusader Matt Stoller counts the real reasons Mark Zuckerberg has climbed into Donald Trump’s tight trousers. [BIG] From Derek Thompson’s “The Anti-Social Century”: “In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.” [The Atlantic] In which Lorne Michaels compares himself to Thomas Edison and William Shakespeare. [New Yorker] Night Shyamalan has been accused of stealing ideas in the past, so I’m definitely watching the jury trial that began today over similarities between his Apple TV+ series Servant and a 2013 indie film. [Copyright Lately] Too funny: According to Nielsen, Golden Globes ratings were down from last year, but not if you read the trade media owned by Jay Penske, who also co-owns the Globes. Those outlets reported a “rise” in viewership for last Sunday’s show—but that boost was according to data from VideoAmp, not the industry-standard Nielsen. The most amusing part is that Penske’s Dick Clark Productions, which produces the Globes, is a Nielsen client. So even though broadcaster CBS is in a contract dispute with Nielsen, DCP had the actual number on Monday and chose to send its sister outlets the VideoAmp stat, which was dutifully reported as an “increase” over last year’s Nielsen number. Facepalm!  [NY Times] I’m no John Krasinski, but we do need some good news: Two child actors from the 2003 Jack Black film School of Rock just got married, and nine of their castmates were there. [NY Times]

My 2025 predictions (and mixing up Logan and Jake Paul) sparked interesting conversations in my inbox. Some examples… “As an animation producer and someone who’s been in the business for three decades, I really hate your No. 23 prediction [that you] ‘wouldn’t be surprised if a full-length A.I.-generated animated film is acquired by a major distributor this year.’ The talented creatives who work in animation, from the designers to the storyboard artists to the animators, can’t easily be replaced by generative A.I., and shouldn’t be. Animation is a collaborative medium, and every artist who works on a project brings something unique to it. Generative A.I. doesn’t think, and the result of someone relying on A.I. to make an animated feature is going to be flat and uninspired. Audiences are going to pick up on that quickly, so here’s my prediction: Animated shows and movies that have the tag ‘human-made’ will outperform anything A.I.-generated.” —An animation producer “It’s hard for me to tell what’s a prediction and what’s something that you know is happening but you can’t say yet. [For instance], the NBC moves [you predict] are actually happening!” —An NBCUniversal employee  [Ed. note: That’s why I said these predictions were based in part on my reporting!] “You know Zaz is gonna flip-flop on Sopranos just because you said it will go to Netflix, just like he did on West Wing [which was pulled from Max and reinstated days later].” —A producer “Lachlan [Murdoch, C.E.O. of Fox Corp.] should tread very carefully on Fox Sports. His stock is up 33 percent in the past six months in part because he has steadfastly kept his premium content exclusive to the cable bundle, where it is still generating very strong linear ratings, rather than licensing out NFL and Fox News to other streamers. [A decision to put Fox Sports content on ESPN’s coming Flagship service] might lead to a ‘fat check,’ as you put it, but Fox would further erode that linear bundle, thus damaging the premium content assets it has paid so heavily to broadcast.” —An investor “I love it when you conflate or confuse the Pauls. Knowing the difference is about as important as distinguishing Zsa Zsa from Ava.” —A non-industry reader

Warner Bros. needs some help with Mickey 17 (March 7), Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to Parasite, which is stuck at 13 percent awareness on The Quorum’s early tracking chart, despite a trailer and multiple release date changes…

Have a great week, Matt Got a question, comment, complaint, or want to donate to fire relief? Click here or email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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