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