PGA Presidents 'Beseeching' Studios, Steamers & More To Bring Productions Back To L.A. Post Wildfires
At the top of tonight's PGA Awards, the guild's co-president Donald De Line made a plea to industry suits in the room to keep production in Los Angeles following the devastating fires.
'Now more than ever it's important that we gather together having just endured the most devastating fires in the history of LA. Sadly many of our members were profoundly affected,' said De Line.
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'Critical to rebuilding our city is bringing jobs back,' said the Ready Player One and Italian Job producer.
'We are beseeching studios, streamers, financiers, please help bring production back to Los Angeles,' De Line continued, 'The movie business made Los Angeles and now it's time for Los Angeles to make movies again.'
PGA President Stephanie Allain told the room that the guild established a fund for those who've been displaced, having raised over $450,000.
Accepting the Danny Thomas Award for Outstanding Episodic Television, Hacks co-creator Jen Statsky also echoed De Line's rally for more shoots in L.A.
Said Statsky, 'Hacks is a show that has shot in Los Angeles for 5 years now. So much of it on location, particularly in the community of Altadena. Altadena was where Deborah Vance's LA house was. It is where so many businesses that were so good and kind to our cast and crew.'
She added, 'The people in Altadena are good people. Our hearts are with them. The people in Los Angeles are good people, our hearts are with them. We need to bring production back to L.A. … that works for everyone, not just those at the top.'
Last night at the Critics Choice Awards, Statsky's fellow Hacks co-creator and star Paul W. Downs also called on industry folk at the Santa Monica Airport Barker Hanger to bring productions back to Los Angeles.
Shooting permit applications have reportedly dropped in Los Angeles since the L.A. Wildfires.
AppleTV+'s Shrinking is one of the LA-based shows to continue shooting in the fire impacted areas of Pasadena and Altadena.
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Time Magazine
34 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
First Look: Smoke Goes Inside the Mind of a Real-Life Serial Arsonist
The South Pasadena, Calif., hardware store thrummed with the usual rhythms of a Wednesday night: customers browsing shelves, cash registers chiming, the low hum of fluorescent lights overhead. Lurking in one of the aisles, a man quietly slipped an incendiary device, made from a cigarette, matches, and paper, into a section displaying foam rubber, with practiced ease. Fire roared to life minutes later, engulfing the store in a furnace of rising panic and confusion. The blaze at Ole's Home Center on Oct. 10, 1984, which killed four people, was one of nearly 2,000 suspicious fires across Southern California throughout the '80s and early '90s. Craft shops, department stores, and discount retailers struck by the arsonist all bore the same eerie signature: delayed ignition, maximum destruction, and a clean escape. Investigators were left grasping at smoke, trying to make sense of a pattern that felt deliberate but remained elusive. This true story, chronicled in the 2021 podcast Firebug, became the basis for Apple TV+'s new nine-episode crime drama Smoke, starring Taron Egerton, Jurnee Smollett, Greg Kinnear, Anna Chlumsky, and John Leguizamo, and debuting June 27. But it's no procedural retelling. It's a feverish descent into moral ambiguity, where duty and delusion, heroism and harm, become blurred in the heat of the blaze. 'What really drives my engine is always the human psyche,' Smoke creator, executive producer, and writer Dennis Lehane tells TIME. What captivated him wasn't the forensic detail of the fires, but the 'whacked out' emotional terrain that surrounded them. ' That's what I was locking on.' Lehane, whose literary canon includes the novels-turned-movie hits Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River, is no stranger to the fault lines of morality. When he first listened to Firebug, he wasn't immediately convinced it was a story he wanted to find his own way into. But the psychological undertones tugged at him. 'I really think this is about people who are turned on by the things that can kill them,' he explains. He approached Smoke not as a mystery to be solved, but as a dark drama where guilt, ego, and self-deception flicker and flare. A key decision was to set the story in the present day rather than tether it to the '80s and '90s, where its real-life roots lie. That shift allows the series to examine contemporary notions of trust, institutional failure, and existential unease. The show also marks a reunion between Lehane and Taron Egerton, who previously worked together on the 2022 Apple TV+ series Black Bird. In Smoke, Egerton stars as Dave Gudsen, an arson investigator in Umberland, a fictional town in the Pacific Northwest, whose life starts to buckle under the strain of a difficult case and a fragile home life. He's soon paired with Michelle Calderone (Jurnee Smollett), a sharp detective recently transferred from the metro police's robbery division. Because Michelle doesn't share the insular loyalties of the local department, her clear-eyed perspective proves essential as they track a pair of serial arsonists; she sees things the others don't. As the investigation intensifies, suspicion creeps closer to home. The evidence suggests one of the arsonists may have ties to the profession—perhaps a firefighter or someone from within the department itself—forcing Dave to consider the disturbing possibility that he may be pursuing a colleague, or worse, a friend. From the start, Smoke struck a chord with Egerton, who also serves as an executive producer. 'It felt like something that would be a stretch and a challenge,' he recalls. What intrigued him most was the contradiction at the heart of his character. Dave, he explains, is a man with a 'slightly self-aggrandizing image of himself' as a hero—yet his private life 'doesn't totally line up with that.' He's someone who regularly tests people's boundaries. To capture that duality, Egerton created a moral framework for Dave that doesn't necessarily align with conventional standards. 'He's the guy who has it all figured out and knows exactly what's right and wrong and knows what's for the best of everybody in there,' says Egerton, adding, 'I had to get under the skin of who he is and figure out what that very specific brand of morality is: What is OK for him and what's not, and also does that code of ethics apply when nobody's looking?' The actor's experiences mirrored his character's unease. Lehane recalls Egerton wrestling early on with how to portray the complexity of Dave. 'Those first two episodes he was in actor hell, I would argue,' recalls Lehane. But after their work together on Black Bird, Lehane already knew Egerton had the ability (and willingness) to push himself into emotionally raw places. 'When you find an actor who has the range to do anything you want to do, you hold onto that person, particularly if they're not just gifted, but as good a human being as Taron,' he explains. That discomfort ultimately served the role, lending Dave a raw, destabilized energy that captures a man struggling to hold his life together. A careful study of obsession The real story that inspired Smoke was even darker. By the late '80s, Southern California was in the grip of a firestorm—a wave of suspicious blazes that erupted with chilling regularity. They began quietly: a spark near a bolt of fabric, a flare in the foam rubber aisle, as at Ole's. But within minutes, these small signs gave way to catastrophe. Entire structures were gutted. First responders often arrived to find buildings fully engulfed, too late to save what was inside. As the fires spread, so did the sense that this was no coincidence. The ignition method was strikingly consistent: a crude yet effective time-delay mechanism, fashioned from everyday items like cigarettes, matches, and pieces of lined yellow notebook paper. The targets were just as deliberate: retail chains, mom-and-pop shops, and warehouse-style stores, all easy to access, lightly monitored, and filled with highly flammable merchandise. Over time, law enforcement homed in on John Orr, a former fire captain whose fingerprint was found on a partially unburned incendiary device. A federal jury convicted him in 1992 on three counts of arson, sentencing him to 30 years in prison. The following year, he admitted to setting three more fires. In 1998, Orr was tried again at the state level on 21 additional counts of arson and four counts of first-degree murder for the victims of the 1984 blaze at Ole's Home Center in South Pasadena, Calif. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The story didn't end with Orr's conviction. His disturbing legacy drew the attention of filmmaker and former HBO executive Kary Antholis, who had followed the case for decades. He was just as interested in the psychology behind the crimes as he was in the procedural details—not just how the fires were set, but why. His investigation became the foundation for Firebug, the podcast he created with Emmy-winning producer Marc Smerling. Through exhaustive research and a series of taped interviews with Orr and those who knew him, Antholis assembled a chilling portrait of a man who spent years crafting his identity through fire and fiction. One of the most revealing discoveries by law enforcement was a manuscript entitled Points of Origin, a novel Orr wrote with moments mirroring the real-life fires with uncanny specificity. 'He was doing this [lighting fires] for a very long time, so I think he wanted to take a bow for it,' Smerling explains. The result was more than a true-crime chronicle. Firebug became a slow-burning study of the seductive power of control. 'Orr had a strangely twisted ego that drove him to do these things,' Smerling continues. 'He had incredible feelings of powerlessness. This was his way to foster power.' Moving from ambience to 'action' Although Smoke takes creative liberties by reimagining characters, relationships, and story arcs, Lehane built a show that trades sensationalism for something more unsettling—a meditation on identity, obsession, and unraveling. Every episode opens with a visual and sonic elegy: a title sequence created by the studio Digital Kitchen, depicting objects consumed by flame and underscored by a new song from Thom Yorke called 'Dialing In.' Yorke's slow track twinkles with dread, setting the emotional temperature for what's to come. That precise tone—moody, dark, charged—was carefully calibrated. Kari Skogland, who directed The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and The Loudest Voice, oversaw the show's first two episodes. Lehane chose Skogland partly for her ability to draw subtle, nuanced performances from actors. 'I would be like, I want you to pull that from the actress,' says Lehane, adding, 'But I don't want it to be obvious. I want it to be on a second viewing that viewers catch it.' In a medium increasingly reliant on digital wizardry, Smoke leans into practical effects when possible. 'The fire in Event Horizon is spectacular,' says Lehane, also citing the visceral realism of films like Backdraft and Only the Brave. 'Right from the beginning, I said to my team, this is what I want it to look like. I don't want to endanger anybody, but we have to find a way to do practical fire.' To bring that vision to life, the production team constructed a sprawling 'burn stage' in Vancouver, where fires could be safely set and controlled. In addition to using fire-resistant materials and having safety-focused crew on set, members of the city's fire department were stationed close by during filming. This wasn't just technical bravado, but a commitment to realism. The fire had to feel alive, volatile, and credible—a force the actors had to confront in real time. The opening scene in Smoke's pilot episode showcases one of the series' more complex and technically demanding moments. In the scene, Egerton's character navigates a hoarder's house overtaken by flames. Achieving the effect required precise teamwork—all while the actor navigated the growing inferno. 'Taron, God bless him, man,' Lehane says. 'There are no special effects in that scene. That's just Taron on the burn stage with pipes all around him shooting actual fire.' Egerton, for his part, welcomed the production's commitment to realism. 'I think we all feel a little bit of fatigue when things are heavily reliant on computer generated imagery. There's a real value in storytelling to things that feel tangible and practical,' says the actor. 'It was obviously a challenging sequence to do, but things that are worth something are normally hard won. It really does have a kind of magic to it.' What tragedy leaves behind In Smoke, fire isn't just a destructive force, it's the show's emotional grammar: how guilt simmers, how ego combusts, how lies catch and burn. The series draws its fear and unease from a chilling idea: the sense that dangerous people often hide in plain sight. 'We just miss them. We don't see them, because we're not looking very hard on a psychological level,' Smerling says. 'You have to understand people at a deeper level than the surface.' It's a notion that resonates deeply with Egerton, who sees the world of Smoke as a dreamscape of moral distortion. 'It resembles our world, but it's also a kind of slightly darker, heightened version of it,' he explains. As the episodes unfold, the narrative mutates, and what begins as a crime story bends into something more abstract, more interior. 'It really shifts, changes, and distorts over time,' he says. 'It becomes something much more psychological and weird.' For Lehane, the truest devastation lies not in what the fire takes, but in what it reveals. The show's most haunting moments are its most intimate: the quiet reckonings, long-deferred truths, characters unable (or unwilling) to look themselves in the mirror. 'I hope it leads people to question a lot of these paths they're going down,' says Lehane, adding, 'I wish we could all just admit, 'Hey, we're all messed up—every single one of us.' And if you're not, you're lying to yourself and to everybody else. So just strive to be a little better every day.' That is the core of Smoke. Beneath the fire and ash, beyond the secrets and suspense, it asks the simple, difficult question: What does it cost to live in denial? 'Every single person in the show lies to themselves, and it only leads to grief,' Lehane continues. 'There's not a single person, with the exception of [one], who's honest with themselves—and look how much pain is caused by that.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Wicked: For Good trailer to debut tonight
A long-awaited trailer for Wicked: For Good will be released tonight, giving fans a look at part two of the musical movie. Wicked was one of the most talked about films of the year, and so far just a teaser picture has been released. Fans were treated to a first glimpse of the 'For Good' poster today, alongside a new video showing our favourite characters in the lead up to the new trailer. The clip shows Elphaba's transformation as she gains full control over her powers and is named as an official 'enemy of the state'. She is followed by Jonathan Bailey's character Fiyero, Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible and Jeff Goldblum's character The Wizard. Marissa Bode who plays Elphaba's sister Nessarose Thropp appears on the screen and the clip ends on Ariana Grande as Glinda, who waves her wand and the film title appears. Thank Goodness! ✨ #WickedForGood trailer Thursday. — Universal Pictures UK (@universaluk) June 3, 2025 So when can fans expect more? Universal Pictures UK has said that the trailer for Wicked: For Good will drop this Thursday (5 June). According to reports, the trailer is being screened at around 6pm (11pm UK time) in select cinemas across Canada and the US and will be published online shortly after this. The movie, which will again star Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande as the leading ladies, arrives in cinemas this November and is set to pick up where they left off - with the closing scenes showing Elpheba flying off into the wilderness already being painted as the 'baddie' of the piece after singing the hit 'Defying Gravity'. 'For Good' is one of many musical numbers fans can look forward to in Part Two, with other anticipated soundtrack songs including 'No Good Dead', 'As Long As You're Mine' and the reprise of 'I'm Not That Girl'.
USA Today
2 hours ago
- USA Today
'Stick' star Owen Wilson says golf can make you 'crazy,' and wants to earn his own meltdown
'Stick' star Owen Wilson says golf can make you 'crazy,' and wants to earn his own meltdown Show Caption Hide Caption Owen Wilson talks new Apple TV+ golf comedy 'Stick' While promoting his new golf comedy series, Owen Wilson reveals the funniest golf meltdown he's ever seen while playing the game with brother Luke. LOS ANGELES — Owen Wilson readily admits that his golf game was already washed up when he agreed to play over-the-hill pro Pryce Cahill in the comedy "Stick." "The Wedding Crashers" star, 56, who says he's more skilled on tennis or pickleball courts, couldn't quite relate to the PGA meltdown on national TV that ended Cahill's promising career in the Apple TV+ series (three episodes now streaming, then weekly on Wednesdays). 'I've definitely tossed a tennis racket, but I haven't gotten good enough at golf to toss a club yet,' Wilson tells USA TODAY. 'If I hit a good shot, it's like, 'Whoa! Where did that come from?' Once you get a level of competence where there's an expectation and then you don't meet that — that's when you have a meltdown. But there is something about golf that can drive you crazy." Wilson is still working to get to 'Stick' golf status Wilson has his reasons for his subpar game, which never flourished while he was growing up in Dallas, with golf-loving father Robert Wilson and actor brothers, Andrew and Luke Wilson. Owen was left-handed in a right-handed house. 'My dad didn't see enough in my game to invest in lefty clubs, so I was left to hack away with righty clubs,' he says. 'That was my excuse to myself.' When "Stick" creator Jason Keller rolled up with the series' boyishly optimistic golf-guru role, Wilson seized the part and pushed himself to improve his game drastically. He hit the links as if it were his full-time job. Working with golf consultant Nathan Leonhardt, however, was more financial strain than golf gain. 'Nathan didn't give me much. He took my money more," says Wilson. "We'd bet on shots and putting matches, and he wouldn't give me much of a handicap.' Pryce Cahill's 'Stick' meltdown sinks marriage to wife Amber-Linn (Judy Greer) The actor already possesses the good-natured gravitas of a down-on-his-luck former golf star who still hangs with his loyal caddy Mitts (Marc Maron). Pryce, known as 'Stick' for his former prowess, has personal reasons for the TV meltdown 20 years earlier. The nightmare haunts him on YouTube and contributed to the end of his marriage to wife Amber-Linn (Judy Greer). But he takes a shot at golf redemption, hitting the road to mentor free-swining phenom Santi Wheeler (Peter Dager) while keeping the peace with Santi's mother Elena (Mariana Treviño), girlfriend Zero (Lilli Kay) and Mitts. When mentor Pryce steps up to hit on camera, Wilson had a blonde-wigged "swing double" professional step in or focused solely on the smooth motion for the camera. "In golf shows, they have you swing a lot without the ball," he says. Owen Wilson plays pickleball in Apple TV+ golf series 'Stick' "Stick" is about teen golf prodigy Santi Wheeler (Peter Dager) learning from coach Pryce Cahill (Owen Wilson). But there is pickleball. Wilson has seen Woody Harrelson get burned in pickleball Wilson feels he's earned the right to act heated during a "Stick" episode featuring a pickleball match. He's got skills from being a regular pickleballer at his Maui, Hawaii, home with a group that includes actor Woody Harrelson. 'Woody has played longer than any of us. But still, when someone came to watch us play recently, they asked Woody, 'Was this your first time today?' That did not go over well,' says Wilson. 'That'd be like someone asking me that same question after seeing me tee off. I've been spending 40 hours a week on this game for more than two years.' Wilson beat pro golfers in a glorious putting contest After all that practice, Wilson savored tooling around with PGA stars Max Homa, Wyndham Clark and Collin Morikawa, among a slew of "Stick" pro-golfer cameos. While competitively putting with the group, Wilson insists he sank a clutch 10-foot putt that the pros missed. 'I made the putt, they didn't. So that was satisfying,' says Wilson. 'That's one of golf's alluring things, making a shot that even a pro would be happy with.' The upstart was brought back to Earth when Morikawa, winner of six PGA tour events, dropped a putt in front of scores of spectators while cameras rolled. 'When the pressure was on, in front of a grandstand of extras, Morikawa sank this incredible putt,' says Wilson. 'I did not.' Still, Keller has hopes for Wilson's golf game that could be unleashed in a potential Season 2. 'I just played 18 holes with him. He's still finding his game, but the golfer I saw Tuesday was a completely different golfer than the one we started with," he says. "That swing was super smooth.' An earned golf meltdown is surely within Wilson's grasp. During a recent outing with brother Andrew, 60, things got so heated that the duo stopped talking to each other for 13 holes. 'Even though we'd driven to the course together, he took an Uber back because we weren't speaking,' says Wilson. 'We even won that day, but he just made me so mad, and apparently I made him so mad that it became this argument.' In a page out of Pryce's playbook, Wilson apologized to make peace. "I took the high road, even though I didn't owe an apology," says Wilson. 'I just said, 'Why aren't we celebrating this win that we had today?' He was like, 'Yeah, you're right!'"
