Jacob Soboroff, a national correspondent for NBC News with deep roots in the community, showed viewers the remains of his family’s former home on Frontera Drive in Pacific Palisades.
This week, Soboroff visited the site of a nearby playground where he romped as a child. His father, longtime civic leader Steve Soboroff, had led the effort to renovate the recreation facility after it fell into disrepair. It was gone. The home of his pregnant sister’s in-laws, where she was staying during her own home’s renovation, was also leveled.
Soboroff no longer lives in Pacific Palisades. But he knows its now-unrecognizable streets as well as if he had a Google map in his head, he told The Times.
“The pictures don’t match the muscle memories,” he said. “I grew up here and we’d do … drills in school for an earthquake. It looks like what the city would look like after the Big One, not after a wildfire.”
Those feelings are now all too familiar. The world watched as large parts of the Los Angeles area burned this week, giving ample TV time to the national correspondents based in the city.
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The stunning devastation that engulfed Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other neighborhoods entered the national consciousness through wall-to-wall TV news coverage, overshadowing major news events such as the funeral of former President Carter and the sentencing of Donald Trump in his New York hush money case. The unprecedented inferno filled screens with shocking images since Tuesday.
Often the biggest challenge for the L.A.-based journalists, who worked around the clock since the blazes broke out, was coping with their own emotions, fears and feelings of loss as they reported on their home city’s transformation into scenes that resembled war zones.
Fox News correspondent Jonathan Hunt reported on the flames that encroached Palisades Charter High School, where his 17-year-old daughter is a student. While informing viewers about the threat, he privately worried she would be back to remote learning after losing a year in the classroom during the pandemic.
Fox News Senior Correspondent Jonathan Hunt reporting on the wildfires that leveled Pacific Palisades.
(Fox News)
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Hunt was relieved that the school “was largely OK,” but local landmarks where he spent time with his children were wiped out.
“I was just wandering around the village area just now and much of the retail is gone,” he said. “The Starbucks we used to stop at so many days after school is just gone.”
Longtime CNN correspondent Nick Watt told viewers on Wednesday how after he finished his reporting he was headed to his home in Santa Monica to hose it down, hoping it would deter embers from starting a blaze.
“It’s extraordinary to cover something like this in your own community,” he said. “I’ve been covering fires for a long time. You have sympathy for people. Now I have empathy.”
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Correspondents said they were deluged by West Coast-based colleagues, friends and strangers asking them to check if their homes were still standing.
Soboroff noted that having his reports stream on NBC News Now and social media sites such as TikTok brought in requests from around the world. In some cases, he didn’t have to check, knowing that whole blocks in Pacific Palisades were in ruins.
Hunt received inquiries as well, and went a step further for Kennedy, a former MTV host who is now a contributor at Fox News.
Kennedy, who was in New York, asked Hunt to enter her Palisades home, located less than 100 yards from structures that were gutted by the flames. She wanted him to gather certain framed family photographs and drawings made by her children. Hunt entered the undamaged structure, where he also retrieved a sword one of Kennedy’s relatives saved from World War I.
“I was dreading the idea of going to this friend’s house and having to send a photo of rubble,” Hunt said. “Thank God that I didn’t.”
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Nancy Loo, a veteran Los Angeles-based reporter for NewsNation, was on the case Tuesday morning as she and her camera operator Nathan Fiery had covered numerous wildfires along the West Coast since she joined the network in 2020. They started traveling toward the blaze when they saw smoke in the direction of Culver City.
NewsNation’s Nancy Loo covering the wildfires in Pacific Palisades.
(NewsNation)
Loo joined NewsNation so she could be closer to family members, who she said were spared from the danger and destruction. But Fiery had been evacuated from his Hollywood Hills home and worked with the fear that it would be gone. (It was spared.)
Loo made her bones as a local New York anchor who reported for eight hours straight during the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. She moved on to become a reporter on Chicago’s WGN, where she frequently started her day covering a homicide that occurred overnight.
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The destruction of Pacific Palisades is yet another traumatic scene she has to process, one of many over a long career.
“I’ve learned to compartmentalize because it does take an emotional toll,” Loo said.
Forget the “video game movie” curse;The Mortuary Assistantis a bone-chilling triumph that stands entirely on its own two feet. Starring Willa Holland (Arrow) as Rebecca Owens, the film follows a newly certified mortician whose “overtime shift” quickly devolves into a grueling battle for her soul.
What Makes It Work
The film expertly balances the stomach-churning procedural work of embalming with a spiraling demonic nightmare. Alongside a mysterious mentor played by Paul Sparks (Boardwalk Empire), Rebecca is forced to confront both ancient evils and her own buried traumas. And boy, does she have a lot of them.
Thanks to a full-scale, practical River Fields Mortuary set, the film drips with realism, like you can almost smell the rot and bloat of the bodies through the screen.
The skin effects are hauntingly accurate. The way the flesh moves during surgical scenes is so visceral. I’ve seen a lot of flesh wounds in horror films and in real life, and the bodies, skin, and organs. The Mortuary Assistant (especially in the opening scene) looks so real that I skipped supper after watching it. And that’s saying something. Your girl likes to eat.
Co-written by the game’s creator, Brian Clarke, the movie dives deeper into the demonic mythology. Whether you’ve seen every ending or don’t know a scalpel from a trocar, the story is perfectly self-contained. If you’ve never played the game, or played it a hundred times, the film works equally well, which is hard to do when it comes to game adaptations.
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Nailed It
This film does a lot of things right, but the isolation of the night shift is suffocating. Between the darkness of the hallways and the “residents” that refuse to stay still, the film delivers a relentlessly immersive experience. And thankfully, although this movie is filled with dark rooms and shadows, it’s easy to see every little thing. Don’t you hate it when a movie is so dark that you can’t see what’s happening? It’s one of my pet peeves.
The oh-so-awesome Jeremiah Kipp directs the film and has made something absolutely nightmare-inducing. Kipp recently joined us for an interview, took us inside the film, discussed its details and the game’s lore, and so much more. I urge you to check out our interview. He’s awesome!
The Verdict
This isn’t just a cash-grab; it’s a high-effort adaptation that respects the source material while elevating the horror genre. With incredible special effects and a powerhouse cast, it’s the kind of movie that will make you rethink working late ever again. Dropping on Friday the 13th, this is a must-watch for horror fans. It’s grisly, intelligent, and genuinely terrifying.
A former executive at Live Nation, the world’s largest live entertainment company, is suing the company, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after he raised concerns about alleged financial misconduct and improper accounting practices.
Nicholas Rumanes alleges he was “fraudulently induced” in 2022 to leave a lucrative position as head of strategic development at a real estate investment trust to create a new role as executive vice president of development and business practice at Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised “serious and legitimate alarm” over the the company’s business practices.
As a result, he says, he was “unlawfully terminated,” according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
“Rumanes was, simply put, promised one job and forced to accept another. And then he was cut loose for insisting on doing that lesser job with integrity and honesty,” according to the lawsuit.
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He is seeking $35 million in damages.
Representatives for Live Nation were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week after a federal jury in Manhattan found that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly over major concert venues, controlling 86% of the concert market.
Rumanes’ lawsuit describes a “culture of deception” at Live Nation, saying its “basic business model was to misstate and exaggerate financial figures in efforts to solicit and secure business.”
Such practices “spanned a wide spectrum of projects in what appeared to be a company-wide pattern of financial misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,” the lawsuit states.
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Rumanes says he received materials and documents that showed that the company inflated projected revenues across multiple venue development projects.
Additionally, Rumanes contends that the company violated a federal law that requires independent financial auditing and transparency and instead ran Live Nation “through a centralized, opaque structure” that enables it to “bypass oversight and internal checks and balances.”
In 2010, as a condition of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the newly formed company agreed to a consent decree with the government that prohibited the firm from threatening venues to use Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department found that the company had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.
Rumanes contends that he brought his concerns to the attention of the company’s management, but his warnings were “repeatedly ignored.”
At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.
When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.
