Episode 1: LOS ANGELES IS ON FIRE!

An update

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Fire is burning Los Angeles down as I write. We are a city of climate refugees. The tinsel of Tinseltown has gone up in flames. The Hollywood people love to hate, that on the surface is beautiful, but underneath, is a harsh and ugly place, is proving itself the opposite. Underneath, the people of this city are beautiful, coming together and showing up for each other as a community as the climate around us grows more harsh and ugly by the minute. By harsh and ugly climate, I mean not just our physical environment, but local politics, the fossil fuel industry and handful of billionaires profiting off of our unfathomable disaster, destruction and loss for their personal profit and gain. We are housing our evacuated friends and family. We are checking in on each other regularly. We are sharing all the up to the minute information we can about what’s happening, how to help, to donate, to rescue, to feed, house and make a difference. We are in a horrifying moment for the people of this city and the city itself that puts us in an extremely bad position as the most dangerous president takes office in this country in nine days. And yet, we know we are still lucky to be alive and that only ten people have died to date from this preventable, stoppable disaster as opposed to the millions who have lost their lives and are dying in preventable, stoppable wars.

There are many reasons why I chose this moment to write the LOVE IS A CRIME series set in Hollywood over three generations of my family, including the present. None of them have to do with wanting to act in this series or even direct it. That after years of preparation and development, I’m ready, have a gap of time between movies, love to write and want to write are my most obvious motivations. But now more than ever, I feel that the time is right for telling this story and the story is right for the times. If my curiosity about what will happen next to this country and the industry that is most synonymous with it, that it is most famous for, is at an all time high, then I imagine that other people’s must be too. But if I thought I would be writing a story covering Hollywood’s inception through the technological changes of today that may signal its end as the U.S. that was once building its democracy backslides into dictatorship —- I did not and could not foresee that these possible ends would come so soon and with the most dramatic and Hollywood of endings. It’s hard not to imagine it as a foreshadowing of what’s to come from Washington, D.C. in these first few months of 2025.

What rises from the ashes of this historically epic Los Angeles fire, and what horrors come from our epic failures of U.S. leadership, I will follow closely as I continue writing LOVE IS A CRIME and the story keeps unfolding before your eyes and mine. I’m determined to make a positive impact for future generations by giving this everything that I and my family have got in wisdom, knowledge, experience and understanding because disasters, wars, and violence are stoppable and preventable. I have faith that the good in all of us and our communities will prevail and that knowing our history and how it lives on and influences the present is key to a better future for all.