Los Angeles

In the past two days, fires in and around LA County have destroyed 27,000 acres and counting — sometimes as fast as three football fields every minute. It's an astonishing amount of land to go in such a short time. More than 130,000 lives uprooted. People left with nothing.

My thoughts are with friends in Pacific Palisades, Woodland Hills, Santa Monica, Studio City, Beachwood Canyon, and Lake Hollywood, which are currently on fire or bordering neighborhoods that are burning.

I haven't been to California since 2019, but I've lived in all of those places, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. I lived in Santa Monica for almost a year... spread over a decade. I know a lot of good people who call those cities and neighborhoods home.

In 2017, I lived on the Beverly Glen-Bel Air border when the Skirball Fire decimated Bel Air, burning 422 acres. It was a terrifying and clarifying place to be.

The next year, I was talking with my friend, Artur, who was bartending at the Fairmont Miramar in Santa Monica, when a Malibu resident just displaced by the Woolsey Fire sat next to me. He wore cut-off jeans, flip flops, and a ratty t-shirt, his face and hair grey with soot. "I just ran," he said. His house was gone, his car. He asked to borrow my phone and then just stared at it, realizing he didn't know anyone's number. "Do you have your wallet?" I asked. He nodded and realized why I was asking. He asked Artur about vacancies. So many people were fleeing, it was possible every room was taken — if you looked north over the hotel pool, you could see the smoke above Malibu, which lies just beyond Pacific Palisades. It was that close. Artur picked up the bar phone and within a few seconds was giving the man a thumb's up. The man looked at my drink and asked what it was. "A Two-Legged Dog," I said and motioned for Artur to fix him one, but the man signalled for him to stop. "Just water," he said. "Lots of water."

A few days earlier, I'd accepted an invitation to stay at a friend's loft in DTLA. I wished the stranger luck, said goodbye to Artur, and headed to the Expo. I was at the loft in a little over an hour. My friend had completely forgotten about the invitation and was packed to head north for a few days, along with a mutual friend, documentarian Nirvan Mullick. They were going to document the Camp Fire in Paradise and asked if I'd help. I knew in my bones I couldn't again be close to that kind of devastation. I declined.

Be safe, California friends.

A few bonus reads:

I Saw the Beginning of Hell by Lucy Sheriff (Intelligencer, January 8, 2025)

A Running List of Resources to Help Artists Impacted by LA Fires

Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End by David Wallace-Wells (Intelligencer, May, 2019)

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn by Mike Davis, from his book, Ecology of Fear, 1998. Davis was also the author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles and other fantastic books.

One of the many reasons I'm so down on Toronto is just how oppressively hot it can get. I've lived in some hot places (Los Angeles, Southern Spain, Vanuatu, Cuba, the Dominican, Melbourne...), but Toronto, in my opinion, is the hottest. I don't care what the number on the thermometer reads — I care how I feel. How I sweat. What a slog it is to get from place to place as a pedestrian — and, to me, there is no worse place than Toronto in the summer. (It also has the worst traffic, but that's another post.)

Anyway, there's a great long-form piece by Sam Bloch in Places Journal about Shade.

Alison Martino's oldskool blog about LA is worth a visit for anyone who loves that city, or hopes to. I wish she'd update it more frequently.

Alison is the daughter of crooner / actor Al Martino, who played Johnny Fontane in The Godfather.

She's also got a YouTube channel.

Alison Martino’s “Vintage Los Angeles”

Vintage Los Angeles

BloggerAlison Martino

I've been a fan of Lem Dobbs since around 1987 or '88, back when he was known throughout Hollywood for writing Edward Ford, which many consider to be the greatest unproduced screenplay of all time. That script is one of the first things I sought when I got on the internet in the early 90s.

Today, Dobbs is likely best known as the writer of The Limey. Steven Soderbergh directed the film and Terance Stamp starred in it. I believe it's not only a great "gangster picture," it's also Soderbergh's best and one of the most accurate film portrayals of memory.

If you have the chance to listen to Dobbs' commentary on The Limey DVD, I highly recommend it.

There's a notorious 90 second scene in The Limey, which you can watch here:

In the commentary, Dobbs uses this scene to highlight a problem with film critics — and perhaps the public's understanding of filmmaking in general.

Dobbs notes that the film's negative press often referred to it as "underwritten," while the positive press praised Soderbergh's "brilliant direction." Many of them cited this scene and how the camera waits outside, forcing the viewer to imagine what's happening inside while increasing the menace as Stamp's character approaches after exiting.

The irony is that the script was not underwritten. Soderbergh cut out much of what the critics wanted. Furthermore, in the screenplay, which Dobbs wrote years before Soderbergh was involved, Dobbs instructed the camera to remain outside:

Dobbs took the blame for what Soderbergh changed and Soderbergh received credit for what Dobbs envisioned.

Such is the life of a Hollywood Screenwriter.

All this to alert you to this lengthy interview with Dobbs. Admittedly, not the prettiest website, but an interesting read nonetheless.

Anecdote Alert

For years, I used the name Dobbs as one of my heteronyms. Both Lem and I took the name from the same source: Humphrey Bogart's character in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. (Lem's birth name is Anton Kitaj. He is the son of painter, R. B. Kitaj.)

I have another very odd connection here. The scene in the clip above was filmed at the far end of this street in downtown Los Angeles:

To get to it (just prior to the clip), Wilson walks past the building on the left, which happens to be owned by a friend of mine. I've spent a great number of American Thanksgivings there over the years — the best dinner parties I've been to in my life have all been in that building.

On one of the first trips I took after my stroke, I ended up crashed here while my friend was out of town filming the devastation of the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. Another friend of his, filmmaker Noaz Deshe, was also staying there at the same time. I have fond memories of deep discussions of film history with Noaz. What was particularly delightful is that they were the first signs that my memory wasn't completely shorted-out from the stroke — something that had been deeply troubling me. In particular, we had a mutual fondness for Miklós Jancsó's films, The Red and the Black, and Round Up (posters below). Good times.

Footnotes

If you want to read the screenplay for The Limey, you can find a PDF here.

You can also get a PDF of Lem Dobbs' celebrated, unproduced script, Edward Ford.

If you're a fan of Terance Stamp, I recommend the audiobook for one of his memoirs: The Ocean Fell Into the Drop, which is unfortunately an Audible Exclusive.

1988 documentary from the Los Angeles History Project: Raymond Chandler's LA.

A while ago, I received a text from my friend, Nirvan Mullick, asking if I was going to be in LA soon as he was working on a film project he thought I might want to join in. "Sort of a flash mob situation." Unfortunately, I was in going to be in Toronto on the event date so wasn't able to participate.

Lo-and-behold, the film is now finished and it's lovely:

Update for A Tiny Bell :

You probably had already seen that video as it went crazy viral, inspired a movement, and resulted in this sequel:

What's Nirvan up to now? His latest project is What a Trip: The Rick Doblin Story. You can watch the trailer below and donate to the film on its GoFundMe. More films and info at Nirvan.com.