On Jan. 16, it was all hands on deck at the IATSE Local 80 headquarters in Burbank, and not just within the entertainment crew workers’ union. Representatives from the Motion Picture & Television Fund and Entertainment Community Fund were on hand to accept applications for financial assistance. Grief counselors and insurance advisors were available for meetings on the second floor.
In the soundstage used to train new grips on the tools of their trade, Local 80 business manager DeJon Ellis, Jr. oversaw the distribution of food, water and other supplies. Representatives from the costume designers’ guild, Local 892, came with donations of clothes, many of them worn by extras on the sets of films and TV shows.
IATSE’s support fair came amid an ongoing campaign by Hollywood’s unions, nonprofit support groups and other organizations in the industry to provide aid to entertainment workers affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires, which were recently fully contained more than three weeks after they first ignited. The assistance ranges from such basics as clothing to housing to advice on insurance and tenant protection to finding interim work or mental health support.
Shannon Losinski-Holdt was one of the hundreds of attendees at IATSE’s support fair who received new clothes from Local 892. As the production attorney told TheWrap last month, she lost her Altadena home and nearly all her possessions in the Eaton Fire that destroyed more than 9,000 structures. The moment she arrived, a representative immediately sized her up and came back minutes later with clothes for her to wear. To her surprise, some of the shirts were emblazoned with the word “Montana,” her home state.
“I was blown away because I didn’t tell her I was from Montana,” Losinski-Holdt said. “I suspect that they were clothes donated from ‘Yellowstone,’ because there’s no other big show that is set there.”
IATSE is considering hosting another resource fair in the near future, but in the weeks and months ahead, the top priority for those affected will move away from food, clothing and other essential items and towards getting through the long, laborious process of finding permanent housing.
Although there has been an outpouring of support, from the FireAid benefit to the recent Grammy Awards, those seeking to recover are now pivoting from the most immediate needs to the daunting process of trying to rebuild, not knowing how long that could take and what the conditions will be with so many having been displaced.
The initial demand for support has been high. While the MPTF receives requests for aid for a multitude of reasons, insiders there say they have fielded more than 400 requests for financial assistance and case management that are directly related to the fires, with more still coming in.
Tobey Bays, business agent at IATSE Local 44, says that the core goal for support providers is to keep up with the evolving needs of wildfire survivors. The fair was created to help provide victims with the emotional, logistical and material support they need right after losing all they had in the fires.
“A lot of people came in shock. They didn’t know what they need, but they needed something,” he said. “We’re almost done getting people in touch with their locals and are getting a pretty good idea of how many members are affected, but we’re wrapping our heads around it as we go.”
Currently, groups like the non-Hollywood-specific Labor Community Services are providing assistance in securing temporary housing. The MPTF has opened up its campus for temporary housing and offers the same suite of social services that it has traditionally offered to entertainment workers in need, which was heavily utilized by people out of work during the 2023 strikes.
Meanwhile, the MPTF and ECF have held webinars (which can be viewed here) to educate people on the process of applying for insurance claims and for low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration towards building new homes or repairing ones that survived the fires but suffered smoke damage.
“It is very difficult for people who are in a state of trauma to sort through all the different resources that are possible, and they might be getting their first immediate assistance from a GoFundMe page or something like that,” said Keith McNutt, ECF’s western region director. “But our hope is that by everybody working together, everybody sharing resources, in terms of the institutions that are doing this work all the time, that the more collaboration we bring to it, the more individual people who need the help will understand how to get it.”
That atmosphere of collaboration is something that Miguel Berg, a longtime friend of Losinski-Holdt, has noticed as he helped her navigate through the insurance process.
“Sifting through the overwhelming amount of information to figure out what is important and what isn’t has been quite a challenge. With all of that stress, having the support of the film community that we saw at the IATSE event was such great help,” he said. “Without our community, we would be nothing right now.”
Relying on the film community is something that Losinski-Holdt realized she needed not just for dealing with the insurance process but also the emotional shock that comes with it. Proof of loss is part of the application, and going through the inventory of all the items in the home she moved into with her husband became an ordeal of reliving the most traumatic event in her life.
“It just puts you face-to-face with everything you’ve lost,” she said. “I met someone who said that it felt like putting her entire life on an Excel sheet.”
Rebuilding and insurance headaches
Like thousands of other residents of middle-class Altadena, Losinksi-Holdt is waiting to see if she will be able to get enough from insurance and possibly loans to afford rebuilding. Even if a substantial number can be received, it is unclear whether they can afford the spike in insurance costs. Last week, California’s top fire insurer, State Farm, called for a 22% interim rate hike for homeowners in the state.
“All of my neighbors that I have talked to, as they’re diving deeper into their policies … they’re realizing that they’re not insured to the level that they need to be to recover from this,” she said. “You wouldn’t think that the estimates provided to us would be off by more than 50%, but when something like this hits and then the building costs go up, those rebuild estimates just become crazy. Add the fact that we don’t know when we can rebuild because there isn’t an estimate on how long it will take to clean up the debris, and everyone is in a transitionary state where they can’t make longterm choices.”
Her advice to Palisades and Altadena residents: Check to make sure that their policy provides replacement value or actual cash value, as the former will provide more money while the latter takes depreciation into account. One of her professors at Chapman University also encouraged her to find others with insurance coverage similar to her own.
The response from Hollywood workers has extended far beyond the fire zones. Dan Lake, a post-production coordinator whose credits include The CW’s “Jane the Virgin,” sprang into action shortly after the fires erupted. A downtown LA resident, Lake wasn’t directly impacted, but he knew many who were.
“I think everybody knows somebody who lost something. I have a show that’s starting next month, but it was postponed because at least one of the actors lost their house,” he said.
Outside of work, Lake has been a longtime volunteer with the Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter and with Keep LA Housed coalition, a group of organizations such as the LA Tenants Union, LA Community Action Network and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment that has fought for tenant protections in the county.
Fighting rent gouging
On Jan. 29, Lake joined dozens of coalition members at City Hall to support an eviction moratorium and a rent freeze to safeguard against the wave of evictions expected to come from landlords looking to clear rooms for displaced Angelenos that can pay higher rents. Such a trend unfolded in Maui after the destruction of Lahaina in 2023, where residents who lived or worked in the historic town saw their rents increase by as much as 50%, according to Capital & Main, with homelessness in Hawaii nearly doubling a year after the fires.
Lake accompanied friends who said they were being pressured by landlords about higher rents. “They had never given public comment before,” he said. “We felt that the city council needed to hear their story.”
The moratorium and freeze faced significant pushback from landlord organizations such as the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, who argued that the moratorium was too broad.
The LA City Council voted 10-3 to return the motion to its housing and homelessness committee, which removed the rent freeze but sent the moratorium back to the council with amendments.
A handful of protections have been put in place, including rules that protect tenants from being evicted for housing more people and/or pets than allowed on their leases. This was done to protect residents sheltering family and friends displaced by the fires.
State attorney general Rob Bonta and LA district attorney Nathan Hochman have also pledged to crack down on rent gouging, enforcing laws against raising rent prices by more than 10% during a state of emergency. But so far, only real estate agents have been charged by Bonta, while more than 2,800 instances of illegal price gouging have been reported by the grassroots activist group Rent Brigade.
“The fact that we have this many instances of rent gouging and only two people have been prosecuted means it doesn’t matter what the penalties are, and it doesn’t matter what strong language the public officials use,” Chelsea Kirk, policy director for Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, told the LA Times. “Statistically, what is two out of 2,800?”
For much of Hollywood’s working class, higher housing costs will be another turn of the screw after years of weathering the pandemic, strikes and studios’ pullback on local production. According to a report from CVL Economics published in 2023, 45% of arts and entertainment workers in Los Angeles spent more than 30% of their income on housing.
“I think we’re going to have to use our political connections to make sure our members are protected, particularly coordinating with the LA County Federation of Labor and the State Fed as well,” Tobey Bays said.
As the weeks of recovery turn into months, Keith McNutt said a key goal of the ECF will be to ensure that the current outpouring of people and organizations that want to help doesn’t slow to a trickle as fire coverage wanes, especially from groups offering items that aren’t needed now but will be needed in the future, such as donated furniture from prop houses and stores.
“People are going to need that furniture, but first they need to find stable housing, and that is going to take some time,” he said. “We’re trying to tell people who have called us offering furniture, ‘Can you hold that for a while?’”
Finding jobs
Along with housing, many of these workers need employment. New groups like Stay in LA have sounded the alarm bells, calling for state and local officials to expand their plans for production tax credits and to help relieve costs for permits, insurance, and other hurdles that make filming in Southern California more expensive than other production hubs.
With such help still months away at best, the ECF’s career center is getting filled with requests from industry workers trying to use their skills in other ways as they try to find a spot in the diminished production opportunities still available.
“There’s a lot of questions from people who don’t know how much work there’s going to be in the next six to 12 months,” McNutt said. “So our Career Center is working to show people what transferable skills they may have that they don’t realize could be valuable in other industries that other employers might be looking for, whether it’s part time, full time, in a transitional employment kind of way.”
