Los Angeles is burning again. Some combination of dry hillside, wind, and an as-yet unidentified spark has set the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades on fire. This happens from time to time, and people who don’t live in Los Angeles always ask the same question: Earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires? Why do you people live there?
There’s no real answer to that, except to say that if you’ve ever flown from a snowy, bitter-cold East Coast to Los Angeles, landed at LAX on the evening flight, headed into town in a taxi, and rolled down the windows to smell the night-blooming jasmine, well, that’s one big reason right there.
Another reason is this: If you’re in show business, it’s really the only place to live. Los Angeles is where opportunities happen in the entertainment industry, and if you’re kicking off a career in Hollywood or trying to keep one going, there’s no better place to be than Los Angeles. And the neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades is the best part of the best place to be — it’s where the executive class of the entertainment industry lives. The people you see at the grocery stores and the dry cleaners are the people who make decisions about which script to buy and which actor to hire. So it’s not just an expensive part of town that’s burning in Los Angeles, it’s the central nervous system of show business that’s displaced and up in smoke.
Natural historians insist that this kind of thing would happen twice a year at least, and it did before people and irrigation dotted the brown hills with million-dollar houses. They tell us that this isn’t really a place for people to live and work. And it must be true: Los Angeles does its best to drive us all out and back to where we came from with all sorts of biblical weapons — fire, mud, shaking the earth beneath us. But we stick around and write our scripts and make our movies, we go to yoga and our therapist, we eat salad and drink Vitaminwater. And we try not to notice the place burning and shaking and sliding.
As the news of the Palisades Fire broke, I made a mental list of the friends and colleagues I know who live in the evacuation area and texted each one to ask if they were safe. Some of the people I contacted are close friends, but some of them I haven’t talked to in years. One producer on my list, for instance, I worked with nearly a decade ago on a project that went nowhere. He has since gone on to enormous success.
“Hey, it’s Rob Long,” I texted. “Hope you and the family are safe.”
He immediately texted me back with the bad news that they had lost their house but also the good news that he and his family were safe and sound. We chatted for a bit over text and caught up with each other’s lives. It was nice to reconnect.
It was nicer, though, when he texted this: “Have a project you might really like. Are you available these days? Can I send you some material and set up a call for next week?” Los Angeles, in other words, is the place to be if you want to work in the entertainment business.
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And while of course that wasn’t the reason I reached out to my friends who live in the Palisades, I have to confess that after that happy exchange, when I was done texting everyone on the first list, I forced myself to come up with a second list of names even more distant to check in on. You never know who needs to be reminded that you’re around and available.
Look, everyone in Los Angeles knows that it makes no rational sense to live in a place so dangerously unstable, just as it makes no rational sense to work in a business where fortunes are made and lost at the whim of a focus group — or a serendipitous text in the middle of a major disaster. But for those of us who work there — that is, for those of us who realize, deep down, that we have no other marketable skills — you adjust to each disaster, whether natural or career. You refuse to see symbols in the earthquakes. You ignore the message in the mudslide. You keep the business wheels turning.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.