Speaker 1: Welcome to Daily Variety, your daily dose of news and
Speaker 1: analysis for entertainment industry insiders. It's Wednesday, January seventh, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty six. I'm your host, Cynthia Littleton. I am co
Speaker 1: editor in chief of Riety alongside Ramin Setuda. I'm in LA.
Speaker 1: He's in New York and bridy as reporters around the
Speaker 1: world covering the business of entertainment. In today's episode, we'll
Speaker 1: hear from Jacob Soberoff, the NBC News and MS Now correspondent.
Speaker 1: He's written a book about the firestorm that devastated the
Speaker 1: Los Angeles area starting one year ago. Today, he'll unpacked
Speaker 1: his emotional journey of covering the incineration of his hometown
Speaker 1: of Pacific Palisades. But before we hear from Soberoff, here
Speaker 1: are a few headlines just in this morning that you
Speaker 1: need to know. The board of Warner Brothers Discovery delivered
Speaker 1: a blunt message to Paramounts Guidance early this morning. We're
Speaker 1: just not that into you, but we are into Netflix.
Speaker 1: As expected, Paramount's latest offer to buy Warner Brothers Discovery
Speaker 1: has been rejected. Paramount is still trying to court Warner
Speaker 1: Brothers shareholders with its existing tender offer to scoop up
Speaker 1: shares that expires on January twenty first, we'll keep watching
Speaker 1: this ping pong match between Melrose Avenue and Burbank. Fox
Speaker 1: is leaning hard into creators. It's launched Fox Creator Studios
Speaker 1: to nurture next generation content ideas from social media superstars.
Speaker 1: This is one more effort to marry the power of
Speaker 1: digital communities with the mainstream reach of TV. They're starting
Speaker 1: with the focus on food, and they've signed deals with
Speaker 1: a bunch of top stars in that realm. It's a
Speaker 1: big push for Fox Entertainment CEO Rob Wade. Here Comes
Speaker 1: Beef season two. Netflix has set April sixteenth as the
Speaker 1: debut date for the next installment of the anthology series
Speaker 1: about people having really Bad Days. The next edition stars
Speaker 1: Charles Melton, Kaylee Speeney, Carrie mu and oscar Isaac. All
Speaker 1: of these stories and so much more can be found
Speaker 1: on Variety dot com right now and now it's time
Speaker 1: for conversations with industry leaders about news and trends in
Speaker 1: show business today, as we mark the somber anniversary of
Speaker 1: the Los Angeles fires, we'll hear from someone who was
Speaker 1: deeply affected by this tragedy. Jacob Soberoff, your political and
Speaker 1: national correspondent for MS NOW, saw his hometown ravaged by
Speaker 1: one of the worst fire disasters in US history. It
Speaker 1: was cathartic for him to chronicle what happened in his
Speaker 1: new book, Firestorm, the Great Los Angeles Fires and America's
Speaker 1: New Age of Disaster. Jacob Soberoff, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for joining me, and congratulations on the publication of your book.
Speaker 2: Cynthia, Thanks so much for having me. It means a lot.
Speaker 1: I have not had a chance to read it yet,
Speaker 1: but I'm very much looking forward to it. But your
Speaker 1: book title is Firestorm, the Great Los Angeles Fires and
Speaker 1: America's New Age of Disaster, and I want to start
Speaker 1: by talking about the second half of that. But what
Speaker 1: in the reporting of this were some of the things
Speaker 1: that surprised you about what you describe as America's New
Speaker 1: Age of Disaster.
Speaker 2: I ended up covering the carbonization destruction, incineration of my
Speaker 2: childhood home and my childhood hometown and watching it happen
Speaker 2: in real time with my own eyes, and I couldn't
Speaker 2: comprehend at the time exactly what I was witnessing. And
Speaker 2: I think what I have come to learn in writing
Speaker 2: this book and spending the better part of twenty twenty
Speaker 2: five diving deep into the experience that I had and
Speaker 2: reflecting on it and reporting it out, is that in
Speaker 2: some measure it was the fire of the future. And
Speaker 2: so when I say America's New Age of disaster to me,
Speaker 2: it also is synonymous with the fact that I experienced.
Speaker 2: What one senior career emergency management official who has spanned
Speaker 2: Democratic and Republican administration said to me was something not
Speaker 2: only that was a look obviously into my past, at
Speaker 2: my childhood, but also into my own children's future. And
Speaker 2: so what the new Age of disaster is and what
Speaker 2: the fire of the future is is a conflagration excuse
Speaker 2: the term of several things. There is not one proximate
Speaker 2: cause to natural disasters like the one we experienced in
Speaker 2: La the costiest wildfire event in American history, and in
Speaker 2: this case with the Great Los Angeles Fires, it was
Speaker 2: obviously the global climate emergency, as when you read the
Speaker 2: book you'll see Captain Jonathan White explained to me. But
Speaker 2: it's also the degradation of our infrastructure. It's also changes
Speaker 2: in the way we live. You know, I went back
Speaker 2: and listened to a lot of audio and watch video
Speaker 2: of my reporting and heard electric car batteries exploding all
Speaker 2: around us. And I think maybe most importantly, it is
Speaker 2: the misinformation and disinformation the charge political moment that we're
Speaker 2: living in that makes the recovery of and from events
Speaker 2: like this all the more difficult and actually all the
Speaker 2: more painful. Instead of the opposite, which is what I
Speaker 2: think we all expect.
Speaker 1: Is there such dispute over the basic facts of what
Speaker 1: happened exactly. We even saw that writ large on of
Speaker 1: all things, the Rose Parade this here. That was a
Speaker 1: neon sign as to how raw and how difficult this is.
Speaker 1: In doing all of this investigative reporting, with incredible sourcing
Speaker 1: that you have, did you find things that helped you
Speaker 1: understand where that infrastructure and that shared set of understanding
Speaker 1: is just breaking down.
Speaker 2: What you'll see in the book, in particular, is the
Speaker 2: relationship completely falling apart between Gavin Newsom, who was the
Speaker 2: governor of California, and actually Donald Trump, the president elect
Speaker 2: at the time. Joe Biden, a lot of people might forget,
Speaker 2: was actually here in la in southern California when the
Speaker 2: fires broke out. He was going down to the Coachella
Speaker 2: Valley and the Chuckwalla National Monument to dedicate the final
Speaker 2: national monument of his presidency in Gavin Newsom, as you
Speaker 2: will see, was literally on his way driving there, getting
Speaker 2: ready to meet Joe Biden, and their relationship actually, interestingly
Speaker 2: was critical to the major disaster declaration being declared almost
Speaker 2: immediately because the two of them were in person together
Speaker 2: and the President of the United States was here, but
Speaker 2: Donald Trump almost inexplicably by But I guess may sound
Speaker 2: foolish saying that now anybody that watches this President injected
Speaker 2: himself from the moment that the fires started and started
Speaker 2: sowing the seeds of misinformation and disinformation about who was
Speaker 2: to blame, about whether one person could be to blame
Speaker 2: for something like this, And of course he blamed a
Speaker 2: newscum and Mayor Karen Bass, but also pointed a finger
Speaker 2: at the water supply, saying that there was some magical,
Speaker 2: mystical source of water from the Pacific Northwest to could
Speaker 2: quote unquote flow down with a tap that would open
Speaker 2: and it would have stopped the fires or prevented them
Speaker 2: from happening in the first place. I'm not absolving local
Speaker 2: political leaders at all. Gavin Newsom promised me when I
Speaker 2: interviewed him for Meet the Press, a Marshall Plan two
Speaker 2: point zero for Los Angeles. I haven't seen that materialize.
Speaker 2: Karen Bass, of course, was in Ghana on that presidential delegation,
Speaker 2: and there are lots of questions about what could have
Speaker 2: been done differently operationally, whether it's deploying firefighters to different
Speaker 2: places in the Palisades or taking down those big steel
Speaker 2: lattice towers in Altadena that were inactive but that were
Speaker 2: the source of the eaton fire. All of that there
Speaker 2: is right for decades, frankly, of investigative journalism that's happening
Speaker 2: from our colleagues in the local media and Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: But what this book will show you is that, in
Speaker 2: real time, minute to minute, what it was like to
Speaker 2: be there, and what it was like to feel elon
Speaker 2: Musk by the way down at Zooma Beach talking to firefighters,
Speaker 2: pressing them on a live stream, and Gavin Newsom watching
Speaker 2: and having to respond in real time, what it was
Speaker 2: like for residents to experience this confusion about information, where
Speaker 2: it was coming from and what the source of it was,
Speaker 2: and how to even figure out when and how to evacuate.
Speaker 2: I think all of it combined sowed the seeds for
Speaker 2: the travesty that we all experienced together collectively and the
Speaker 2: trauma they think that we're all trying to still recover from,
Speaker 2: which is again part of the reason I wanted to
Speaker 2: do this is I've never had to process a story
Speaker 2: I have personally covered in the way that I had
Speaker 2: to cover this one, and so for me it's as
Speaker 2: cathartic as I hope it might be for people reading
Speaker 2: it in Los Angeles and around the world to want
Speaker 2: to learn about this event and what it really meant
Speaker 2: to the people, in my opinion, the greatest city in
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 1: I remember talking to emergency people saying, this was a
Speaker 1: hurricane with fire. We can debate all the things that
Speaker 1: maybe went wrong, but at some point on the seventh
Speaker 1: than the eighth, there was no helicopter that was going
Speaker 1: to be able, Like there was just no There was
Speaker 1: just no getting around this. Being your hometown, it might
Speaker 1: have been hard to sort of hear critical things, But
Speaker 1: I remember in the moment talking about people looking and saying, Wow,
Speaker 1: maybe there should have been more accessibility. Maybe we should
Speaker 1: have insisted on more easier ways to get out of
Speaker 1: that central court of the Palisades that was so devastated. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was that hard to hear.
Speaker 2: About because I think that it's obvious to me that
Speaker 2: we all live in the wildland urban interfaces in LA
Speaker 2: and I think what you mentioned just brings two things
Speaker 2: to mind for me. One is, I can't wait for
Speaker 2: people to read the scenes in the book about LA
Speaker 2: Fire Department air support having to figure out that they
Speaker 2: had to ground themselves. This is not something that anybody
Speaker 2: that is in that line of work. And by the way,
Speaker 2: in the LA Fire Department, they were all once firefighters
Speaker 2: in addition to now being pilots anything that they take lightly,
Speaker 2: and so the decision to ground those choppers really does
Speaker 2: show the severity of the conditions at the time, and
Speaker 2: then as it relates to the building materials and the
Speaker 2: fact that we all in some way put ourselves in
Speaker 2: harms way that's not new. In the nineteen sixties, when
Speaker 2: after the Bell Air Fire, the LA Fire Department produced
Speaker 2: a documentary called Design for Disaster, and it literally talked
Speaker 2: about how the ways in which we live in Los
Speaker 2: Angeles are primed to make us all victims of massive
Speaker 2: wildfire events like happened in the sixties and happened again
Speaker 2: in early January of twenty twenty five, and so now
Speaker 2: I think it's more acute and more sort of obvious
Speaker 2: than effort to everybody. The question is when we come back.
Speaker 2: If we come back, and there are big questions about that,
Speaker 2: how do you build back?
Speaker 1: Is it a.
Speaker 2: Decision that everyone will make To want to live in
Speaker 2: such vulnerable circumstances is part of the paradox of living
Speaker 2: in a place that's as unbelievable and as deadly as
Speaker 2: Mike Davis has told us all about Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: City of Courts.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: Do you think there is the political will to say
Speaker 1: not everybody can rebuild that maybe in these foot hill
Speaker 1: areas that in hindsight, what we know now about our
Speaker 1: modern life that you know, maybe not everybody should rebuild.
Speaker 1: That's going to be a tough thing to say.
Speaker 2: I don't think so. When you read the personal stories
Speaker 2: of the people in the book, whether it's the firefighters
Speaker 2: Tim Larson from These in the palis As or Eric
Speaker 2: Mendoza from sixty nine, it's guys who just literally laid
Speaker 2: on the concrete in the middle of the street because
Speaker 2: it was a thousand plus degree heat and tried to
Speaker 2: save any house that they could and get as close
Speaker 2: as they could to open their hoses as wide as
Speaker 2: they could. Or the people in Altadena I met Kate Hennigan,
Speaker 2: the JPL engineer, or Herbin Lloyd and Wilson who worked
Speaker 2: at UPS and lost their home on McNally Avenue. You
Speaker 2: can't tell FOE firefighters that you're not going to be
Speaker 2: fighting fires in these areas, or residents that you're not
Speaker 2: going to be coming back. These are very personal, deep
Speaker 2: decisions that people are going to make, and I think
Speaker 2: that the idea that politicians would get in the way
Speaker 2: of that at this point, they think that ship has sailed.
Speaker 2: The question is do we now have a different understanding
Speaker 2: of what the Big One might be? In la The
Speaker 2: pages in these book I think will certainly make that
Speaker 2: clear that I think we all expected it to be
Speaker 2: the earthquake that I trained for when I was in
Speaker 2: elementary school and had to get under the table. But
Speaker 2: really I think that we've experienced a form of the
Speaker 2: Big One together already, and so now what do we
Speaker 2: do individually, not just collectively, in terms of being prepared
Speaker 2: for the next one? Because there will be a next one.
Speaker 1: Of course, Hollywood is a big hometown business. I would
Speaker 1: say the hometown business ripple effects. Do you get into
Speaker 1: any of how these fires ampered the entertainment industry amfered.
Speaker 1: One thing we saw, of course, was right afterwards, a
Speaker 1: lot of calls for hate. We need more tax incentive,
Speaker 1: we need more government support to keep industry here, and
Speaker 1: for a moment it seemed like, is there going to
Speaker 1: be some good that comes out of this for the industry.
Speaker 2: Well, a good point I think often I've said this
Speaker 2: before that big catastrophic events like this, whether they're humanitarian
Speaker 2: or natural disasters, can kind of expose the fissures or
Speaker 2: what's really going on below the surface in our society,
Speaker 2: And the ones I often think of are that, you know,
Speaker 2: we have more undocumented people who are suffering greatly at
Speaker 2: the hands of the immigritation policies of this administration while
Speaker 2: trying to rebuild the city, and also the unhoused almost
Speaker 2: population in La This is a place now that affordability
Speaker 2: will be further exacerbated by the shorter supply of housing
Speaker 2: and you're already seeing I think something forty percent was
Speaker 2: the recent study I saw of lots being sold or
Speaker 2: being sold to corporations, not to locals. But you raise
Speaker 2: a great one too, what it meant for the entertainment
Speaker 2: industry and what it meant for our neighbors who work
Speaker 2: in Hollywood and who have been really suffering. I think,
Speaker 2: and perhaps for a moment, it did open the eyes
Speaker 2: to the policymakers that this is a time where we
Speaker 2: need to incentivize people to continue to come to work
Speaker 2: in southern California and in Los Angeles because of how
Speaker 2: clear it was after the fires, how bad the industry
Speaker 2: was hurting. And I think that that same story can
Speaker 2: sort of be extrapolated as well to the defensive immigrants
Speaker 2: that we're seeing in the city while they're rebuilding, or
Speaker 2: the realization that la is one of the most unaffordable cities,
Speaker 2: not only in the United States but on planet Earth.
Speaker 2: And all of these things are issues that needed to
Speaker 2: be addressed before the fire, but I think in the
Speaker 2: wake of the fire is sort of crystal clear for
Speaker 2: all of us how acute those issues are.
Speaker 1: Jacob let me close by asking you have you and
Speaker 1: your family found a way to memorialize or just process
Speaker 1: all that you lost.
Speaker 2: There's a physical memorial as far as I'm concerned, and
Speaker 2: you'll read about it in the book. Outside the Recreation Center,
Speaker 2: the building that was built around World War Two in
Speaker 2: the Palisades is a giant bronze plaque about the rebuilding
Speaker 2: of the park, the Palisades Park in nineteen eighty six
Speaker 2: when I was two going I'm three years old, that
Speaker 2: my dad, and my mom and my four grandparents all
Speaker 2: participated in the fundraising for after my dad, when I
Speaker 2: was a little kid, hit his head and cut it
Speaker 2: open and decided he wanted to renovate the Palisades playground.
Speaker 2: That plaque still stands, And when I go back there,
Speaker 2: I see the names not just of my mom and dad,
Speaker 2: and my grandpa Irv and Grandma Evelyn and Anita and Myron,
Speaker 2: shirts are my mom's parents, but I see the names
Speaker 2: of so many neighbors, some of whom lost their homes
Speaker 2: in the fire, some of whom hadn't thought about in
Speaker 2: a long time, some of whom are no longer with us.
Speaker 2: But the fact to me, on our very personal level,
Speaker 2: that that plaque still remains, and that that story is
Speaker 2: so central to my I guess Palisades origin story. It's
Speaker 2: where I go every time now, I go back to
Speaker 2: the Palisades because it reminds me of what that place was,
Speaker 2: not just in the days before the fire, because it
Speaker 2: had changed, but what that place means to me. And
Speaker 2: I hope that everybody can find something like that for them,
Speaker 2: because we try to move forward from this, and I
Speaker 2: think that the book hopefully can be that for a
Speaker 2: lot of people.
Speaker 1: I have no doubt that those deep roots are going
Speaker 1: to show through in the pages. I'm very much looking
Speaker 1: forward to reading it. Jacob. Thank you for your work,
Speaker 1: and thank you for your time.
Speaker 2: Thank you always, Santa.
Speaker 1: As we close out today's episode, here's a few things
Speaker 1: we're watching for. Two big TV shows return on Thursday night.
Speaker 1: The Pit begins its second shift on HBO Max. The
Speaker 1: Traders begin Treachery anew on Peacock. Of course, Sunday is
Speaker 1: the Golden Globe Awards. My colleague Michael Schneider has a
Speaker 1: good interview with with host Nicki Glazer that you can
Speaker 1: find on Variety dot com. Right now, before we go,
Speaker 1: congrats to Adrian O'Hara. She's been named executive vice president
Speaker 1: and chief Communications Officer for Discovery Global. That's the planned
Speaker 1: spin off of CNN, TNT, and other Warner Brothers Discovery
Speaker 1: cable channels. She comes to the company after working in
Speaker 1: communications for Gap Inc. And Old Navy. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: This episode was written and reported by me Cynthia Littleton.
Speaker 1: Stick Snack's hick Picks. Please leave us a review at
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