production shots: palisades fire doc

how did a single spark end up incinerating the perfect neighborhood?

A mystery spark in the Highlands mountains.

Hundred-mile-an-hour Santa Ana winds.

Vast, menacing smoke blotting out the sun.

And then, Pacific Palisades -- one of the wealthiest, most beautiful parts of Los Angeles, an “end of history” neighborhood filled with moguls and movie stars -- is gone. Thousands of homes are now ash.

The Palisades fire is one of the biggest natural disasters in modern history. The initial news cycle was predictably jammed with cheap partisan point-scoring. On the right: blaming the LA mayor’s trip to Ghana and rules protecting smelt fish. On the left: climate change hysteria and a “this was an exceptional circumstance” shoulder shrug.

I was born and raised in the Palisades. I was baptized at Palisades Lutheran Church and caught my first fly ball playing Little League in the Palisades Park. This is my homeland — and we’re working on what I hope will be the definitive take on what wiped it out, a documentary providing a detailed timeline of the fire -- from spark to ruin -- and identifying the precise policy failures of the city’s establishment that enabled this catastrophe.

We just got back from a week-long shoot in the motherland:

Mom in front of the dirt pile and fenced-off pool that used to be our house:

Alan was the very first person to spot the fire:

George, who probably saved my childhood church with a garden house:

Intrepid local investigative reporter Sue Pascoe at the church George saved:

Ronnie snuck into the Palisades on the second day of the fires and saved about a dozen homes:

-rob