Lifestyle
Despite appearances, the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is on track for fall completion
To the 300,000 drivers who stream through Agoura Hills on the 101 Freeway every day, the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing looks relatively unchanged from last summer, except for some leggy native shrubs growing along the outer walls.
While activity seems to have halted on what is touted to be the world’s largest wildlife crossing, there’s been lots of slow, expensive work at the site that’s hard to spot from the freeway, said Robert Rock, chief executive of Chicago-based Rock Design Associates and the landscape architect overseeing the project. This includes:
- Moving power lines, water lines and other utilities underground — at a cost of nearly $20 million — along the south side of the crossing.
- Drilling at least 140 deep holes along 175 feet of Agoura Road and filling them with concrete to create the foundation for the tunnel over the frontage road. The tunnel will support roughly 3 million cubic feet of soil connecting the south side of the crossing to the Santa Monica Mountains, roughly enough soil to fill half of SoFi Stadium, Rock said.
- Reworking some of the project’s nonwildlife-centered designs to reduce ballooning construction costs. For instance, an underground tunnel that would have permitted utility companies to drive in and check on their equipment has been reduced to a large conduit just big enough for wires and cables to be easily pulled through.
Rock and Beth Pratt, California regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation and leader of the Save LA Cougars campaign, led a tour on top of the crossing during a sunny day last week to discuss the status of the long-awaited project, whose completion date was originally scheduled for the end of 2025.
Crews work on 70-foot-long wire rebar cages that were dropped into holes along Agoura Road and filled with concrete to create the foundation for a 175-foot-long tunnel over the frontage road that will support the south shoulder of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing.
Record rains in 2022 and 2023 created significant delays, pushing the expected completion of the wildlife crossing to the end of this year.
“We want rainfall. We want water because that’s part of making these landscapes healthy and vibrant,” Rock said, “but when you have 14½ inches of rain in 24 hours and an open excavation for the foundation of a massive structure that fills up like a giant bathtub and you’ve got to vacuum all that sludge out of there three separate times and re-compact the soil … you’re going to have delays even if the contractors are moving at lightning speed.”
Rock said the new completion date in November or early December is “aggressive but doable” since the utility moving is now completed, and he expects work to move more rapidly once the the tunnel foundations are completed. The concrete tunnel will be built on-site and then covered with soil this summer. Most of the earth is coming from a small hill on the north side of the crossing that was created when the freeway was built in the 1950s.
The second and final phase of the project — attaching the shoulders that will permit animals to use the crossing — started last summer and is progressing on schedule, Rock said, but it’s also painstaking, expensive and largely invisible work moving overhead power lines underground and drilling thick holes about 70 feet deep. Once a hole is dug, a tall crane slowly slides in a rebar cage that resembles a wire mesh dinosaur spine so the hole can be filled with concrete.
The work is hidden from most freeway passersby and those driving below since Agoura Road is closed during weekday working hours.
Birds, lizards and insects have already been spotted at the top of the uncompleted Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which rises 30 feet above the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills. “Build it, and they really do come,” said Beth Pratt, California regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation and leader of the Save LA Cougars campaign, as she looked east at the 101 Freeway traffic from the east edge of the crossing.
This project has more complexities than others around the country, Rock and Pratt said. Other crossings are typically located in more rural areas and chosen based on ease of construction. The location of this crossing was locked in — a slim passage of wilderness in a largely urban area between the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills — so it faced challenges other crossings usually don’t such as moving utilities, skirting heritage oaks no one wants to remove or working around huge numbers of cars. “If we could have closed Agoura Road and the 101, I could have built it in a year,” Pratt said, laughing.
Rising construction costs have been another complication. The expected cost of the entire project, $92.6 million, held until last spring when the bids for the second phase “came back through-the-roof high,” Pratt said.
The contractor C.A. Rasmussen’s bids for Stage 1 of the project came in 8% below Caltran’s estimate, but the bids for Stage 2 pushed the costs about $21 million higher than expected, increasing the total projected cost to about $114 million.
About $77 million of the construction costs will be paid by state money, including a recent infusion of $18 million to help cover the shortfall, “primarily from conservation funds such as voter-approved bond measures or mitigation dollars,” Pratt wrote in an email. Private donors have provided the remaining $37 million, about 32% of the project’s overall construction costs. About $29.4 million of those private donations came from Wallis Annenberg, the crossing’s namesake, who helped kick-start the campaign with $1 million in 2016, after a “60 Minutes” report about the existential peril facing Los Angeles County’s freeway-locked cougars, Pratt said in an interview Friday.
Annenberg, who died last year, contributed $35.5 million for the project, including the $29.4 million specifically for the crossing construction as well as funds to cover design costs, ongoing wildlife research in the region and the project’s native plant nursery.
Construction costs have gone up everywhere over the past year, in large part because of uncertainty about what even the most basic materials such as concrete will cost, said Rock.
“If you’re putting together a bid for a project and you don’t know what the cost of something is going to be a month from now, let alone six months to a year from now, you’re going to roll that speculation into the cost of your pricing, even when you’re talking about something that should be a fairly stable [cost],” Rock said.
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1. Landscapers place hundreds of native buckwheat, sages and other plants on top of the wildlife crossing. 2. Robert Rock stands along flags marking places for plants to be placed on top of the bridge. 3. A landscaper loosens the roots on a purple sage just removed from its gallon pot to prepare it for planting. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Some of that uncertainty is based on the wildfires that decimated large swaths of Altadena, Pacific Palisades and Malibu last January, he said, because the heavy equipment needed for the project was suddenly in huge demand to clear burned properties. And tariffs on Canada and Mexico, two of the country’s largest suppliers of cement, an essential ingredient of concrete, further increased prices on one of the project’s key materials, even among domestic providers, he said.
The project has enough money now to complete construction, Pratt said, but Save LA Cougars is still fundraising, trying to raise another $6 million to cover other non-construction costs including $2 million for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which owns the land, to maintain the crossing habitat (such as removing invasive nonnative black mustard plants that have taken over the north side of the crossing in the Simi Hills).
In an email outlining the costs, Pratt said the money will also provide $1.5 million to the National Park Service to continue the wildlife research that led to the creation of the crossing, when scientists discovered that the freeways crisscrossing the region were making it impossible for cougars and other wildlife to find suitable mates. It will also be used to fund education programs, maintain the crossing’s nursery and train volunteer docents leading popular tours around (but not on) the crossing.
“As this is being regarded as a global model for urban wildlife conservation and connectivity, we have to ensure the research and educational efforts continue for the long-term,” she wrote.
The project’s rising costs have created anxiety for her. “When I saw the Stage 2 bid, I almost had a heart attack,” Pratt said last week. But during the tour, she was too distracted by the progress on the crossing to dwell on the stress. In midsentence, she’d suddenly break off to excitedly note a young kestrel flying near the crossing or a honeybee foraging among some early flowers.
These days the top of the crossing is busy with workers planting hundreds of native plants grown from seed at the project’s nursery nearby. There are plugs of grasses and gallon pots of white sage, purple sage, California buckwheat, long-stem buckwheat, deerweed, narrow leaf milkweed and coyote bush. The top is divided into 10-by-10 grids bristling with small colorful flags designating where the plants should be placed.
Habitat restoration is a huge part of this project, especially since a wide swath of the area was destroyed by the Woolsey fire in 2018, allowing invasive mustard plants to get a firm hold especially on the north side of the crossing. The native plants selected for the crossing all grow nearby, but Rock said the builders also want to make sure they plant the sages, buckwheats and grasses in the same groupings you would find in nature.
Pratt’s stuffed cougar, representing the late P-22 whose bachelor life trapped in Griffith Park helped inspire the project, sat placidly amid workers moving native plants onto the site. She brings him to tours she said, to help remind everyone what the project is ultimately about — saving wildlife.
Native vegetation is being planted at the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Agoura Hills.
Wild animals seem curious about the status of the project. A small herd of mule deer have been spotted nosing around the site of the tunnel construction on Agoura Road and in October, a young female cougar named P-129 was briefly captured and collared in a glen of oaks near the south side of the crossing, said Pratt.
Animals can’t easily get on the crossing now unless they can fly. The top is about 30 feet above the freeway, and the north edge is roughly 50 feet from the hills where it will eventually be connected.
Those sides will have to be carefully filled in, a little on one side, then a little on the other to keep the structure from rocking and falling over, Rock said. Once the soil is packed into place, workers will have to add more native plants to cover those shoulders, about 13 acres in all.
Pratt has immersed herself in wildlife for decades. She recently completed writing a book, “Yosemite Wildlife: The Wonder of Animal Life in California’s Sierra Nevada,” about the wildlife near her home in Northern California, and she’s excited about the prospect of insects, birds and other critters investigating the plants now covering the crossing’s top.
The recent wildlife sightings have caused her to rethink which wild animal will be the first to cross. Originally, she said, she was betting on a coyote, but now she’s putting her money on mule deer.
Rock was quieter. He’s happy about the progress, he said, “but I’m more riddled with anxiety than pride right now because there’s still so much work to be done to make sure we’re giving everything the best possible chance for success.”
Navigating the obstacles while upholding the project’s goals such as creating a self-sustaining native habitat over one of the country’s busiest freeways is critical, he said, because the outcome will influence decisions about future crossings.
The project has had some serious problems, he said, “the kind where people go back into their shells because things are difficult, and they’ve hit a roadblock. But I’m hoping that what we’re doing can become a catalyst for people to take a chance and continue to push down the path even though things are challenging.”
A screenshot from George Mélière’s Gugusse et l’Automate. The pioneering French filmmaker’s 1897 short, which likely features the first known depiction of a robot on film, was thought lost until it was found among a box of old reels that had belonged to a family in Michigan and restored by the Library of Congress.
The Frisbee Collection/Library of Congress
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The Frisbee Collection/Library of Congress
The Library of Congress has found and restored a long-lost silent film by Georges Méliès.
The famed 19th century French filmmaker is best known for his groundbreaking 1902 science fiction adventure masterpiece Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).
The 45-second-long, one-reel short Gugusse et l’Automate – Gugusse and the Automaton – was made nearly 130 years ago. But the subject matter still feels timely. The film, which can be viewed on the Library of Congress’ website, depicts a child-sized robot clown who grows to the size of an adult and then attacks a human clown with a stick. The human then decimates the machine with a hammer.
In an Instagram post, Library of Congress moving image curator Jason Evans Groth said the film represents, “probably the first instance of a robot ever captured in a moving image.” (The word “robot” didn’t appear until 1921, when Czech dramatist Karel Čapek coined it in his science fiction play R.U.R..)
“Today, many of us are worried about AI and robots,” said archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger, in an email to NPR. “Well, people were thinking about robots in 1897. Very little is new.”
A long journey
Groth said the film arrived in a box last September from a donor in Michigan, Bill McFarland. “Bill’s great grandfather, William Frisbee, was a person who loved technology,” Groth said. “And in the late 19th century, must have bought a projector and a bunch of films and decided to drive them around in his buggy to share them with folks in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York.”
McFarland didn’t know what was on the 10 rusty reels he dropped off at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Va. A Library article about the discovery describes the battered, pre-World War I artifacts as having been, “shuttled around from basements to barns to garages,” and that they, “could no longer be safely run through a projector,” owing to their delicate condition. “The nitrate film stock had crumbled to bits on some; other strips were stuck together,” the article said. It was a lab technician in Michigan who suggested McFarland contact the Library of Congress.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, who heads up the Library’s nitrate film vault, in the article.
Willeman’s team carefully inspected the trove of footage, which also contained another well-known Méliès film, Nouvelles Luttes extravagantes (The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match) and parts of The Burning Stable, an early Thomas Edison work. With the help of an external expert, they identified the reel as having been created by Méliès because it features a star painted on a pedestal in the center of the screen – the logo for Méliès Star Film Company.
A pioneering filmmaker
Méliès was one of the great pioneers of cinema. The scene in which a rocket lands playfully in the eye of Méliès’ anthropomorphic moon in Le Voyage dans la Lune is one of the most famous moments in cinematic history. And he helped to popularize such special effects as multiple exposures and time-lapse photography.
This moment from George Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) is considered to be one of the most famous in cinematic history.
George Méliès/Public Domain
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George Méliès/Public Domain
Presumed lost until the Library of Congress’s discovery, Gugusse et L’Automate loomed large in the imaginations of science fiction and early cinema buffs for more than a century. In their 1977 book Things to Come: An Illustrated History of the Science Fiction Film, authors Douglas Menville and R. Reginald described Gugusse as possibly being, “the first true SF [science fiction] film.”
“While it may seem that no more discoveries remain to be made, that’s not the case,” said Prelinger of the work’s reappearance. “Here’s a genuine discovery from the early days of film that no one anticipated.”
Joshua Jackson
I Got the Eye of the Tiger!!!
Published
BACKGRID
Joshua Jackson may have picked up a thing or two from “Karate Kid: Legends” … we got video of him going H.A.M. in a boxing gym with a trainer.
Watch the video … the 47-year-old actor ditched his shirt for the workout, really working up a sweat as he bobbed and weaved in the ring while throwing in some pretty impressive jabs!
He later goes to work solo on a speed bag like an old pro.
Joshua has publicly said that starring in “Karate Kid: Legends” in the role of a former boxer was a dream for him, but there’s no word on whether he’s training for another role or just really fell in love with boxing.
Either way … you’re looking great, Joshua!
Tracy Morgan, left, and Daniel Radcliffe star in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.
Scott Gries/NBC
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Scott Gries/NBC
Tracy Morgan, as a presence, as a persona, bends the rules of comedy spacetime around him.
Consider: He’s constitutionally incapable of tossing off a joke or an aside, because he never simply delivers a line when he can declaim it instead. He can’t help but occupy the center of any given scene he’s in — his abiding, essential weirdness inevitably pulls focus. Perhaps most mystifying to comedy nerds is the way he can take a breath in the middle of a punchline and still, somehow, land it.
That? Should be impossible. Comedy depends on, is entirely a function of, timing; jokes are delicate constructs of rhythms that take time and practice to beat into shape for maximum efficiency. But never mind that. Give this guy a non-sequitur, the nonner the better, and he’ll shout that sucker at the top of his fool lungs, and absolutely kill, every time.
Well. Not every time, and not everywhere. Because Tracy Morgan is a puzzle piece so oddly shaped he won’t fit into just any world. In fact, the only way he works is if you take the time and effort to assiduously build the entire puzzle around him.
Thankfully, the makers of his new series, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, understand that very specific assignment. They’ve built the show around Morgan’s signature profile and paired him with an hugely unlikely comedy partner (Daniel Radcliffe).
The co-creators/co-showrunners are Robert Carlock, who was one of the showrunners on 30 Rock and co-created The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Sam Means, who also worked on Girls5eva with Carlock and has written for 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt.
These guys know exactly what Morgan can do, even if 30 Rock relegated him to function as a kind of comedy bomb-thrower. He’d enter a scene, lob a few loud, puzzling, hilarious references that would blow up the situation onscreen, and promptly peace out through the smoke and ash left in his wake.
That can’t happen on Reggie Dinkins, as Tracy is the center of both the show, and the show-within-the-show. He plays a former NFL star disgraced by a gambling scandal who’s determined to redeem himself in the public eye. He brings in an Oscar-winning documentarian Arthur Tobin (Radcliffe) to make a movie about him and his current life.
Tobin, however, is determined to create an authentic portrait of a fallen hero, and keeps goading Dinkins to express remorse — or anything at all besides canned, feel-good platitudes. He embeds himself in Dinkins’ palatial New Jersey mansion, alongside Dinkins’ fiancée Brina (Precious Way), teenage son Carmelo (Jalyn Hall) and his former teammate Rusty (Bobby Moynihan), who lives in the basement.
If you’re thinking this means Reggie Dinkins is a show satirizing the recent rise of toothless, self-flattering documentaries about athletes and performers produced in collaboration with their subjects, you’re half-right. The show feints at that tension with some clever bits over the course of the season, but it’s never allowed to develop into a central, overarching conflict, because the show’s more interested in the affinity between Dinkins and Tobin.
Tobin, it turns out, is dealing with his own public disgrace — his emotional breakdown on the set of a blockbuster movie he was directing has gone viral — and the show becomes about exploring what these two damaged men can learn from each other.
On paper, sure: It’s an oil-and-water mixture: Dinkins (loud, rich, American, Black) and Tobin (uptight, pretentious, British, practically translucent). Morgan’s in his element, and if you’re not already aware of what a funny performer Radcliffe can be, check him out on the late lamented Miracle Workers.
Whenever these two characters are firing fusillades of jokes at each other, the series sings. But, especially in the early going, the showrunners seem determined to put Morgan and Radcliffe together in quieter, more heartfelt scenes that don’t quite work. It’s too reductive to presume this is because Morgan is a comedian and Radcliffe is an actor, but it’s hard to deny that they’re coming at those moments from radically different places, and seem to be directing their energies past each other in ways that never quite manage to connect.
Precious Way as Brina.
Scott Gries/NBC
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Scott Gries/NBC
It’s one reason the show flounders out of the gate, as typical pilot problems pile up — every secondary character gets introduced in a hurry and assigned a defining characteristic: Brina (the influencer), Rusty (the loser), Carmelo (the TV teen). It takes a bit too long for even the great Erika Alexander, who plays Dinkins’ ex-wife and current manager Monica, to get something to play besides the uber-competent, work-addicted businesswoman.
But then, there are the jokes. My god, these jokes.
Reggie Dinkins, like 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt before it, is a joke machine, firing off bit after bit after bit. But where those shows were only too happy to exist as high-key joke-engines first, and character comedies second, Dinkins is operating in a slightly lower register. It’s deliberately pitched to feel a bit more grounded, a bit less frenetic. (To be fair: Every show in the history of the medium can be categorized as more grounded and less frenetic than 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt — but Reggie Dinkins expressly shares those series’ comedic approach, if not their specific joke density.)
While the hit rate of Reggie Dinkins‘ jokes never achieves 30 Rock status, rest assured that in episodes coming later in the season it comfortably hovers at Kimmy Schmidt level. Which is to say: Two or three times an episode, you will encounter a joke that is so perfect, so pure, so diamond-hard that you will wonder how it has taken human civilization until 2026 Common Era to discover it.
And that’s the key — they feel discovered. The jokes I’m talking about don’t seem painstakingly wrought, though of course they were. No, they feel like they have always been there, beneath the earth, biding their time, just waiting to be found. (Here, you no doubt will be expecting me to provide some examples. Well, I’m not gonna. It’s not a critic’s job to spoil jokes this good by busting them out in some lousy review. Just watch the damn show to experience them as you’re meant to; you’ll know which ones I’m talking about.)
Now, let’s you and I talk about Bobby Moynihan.
As Rusty, Dinkins’ devoted ex-teammate who lives in the basement, Moynihan could have easily contented himself to play Pathetic Guy™ and leave it at that. Instead, he invests Rusty with such depths of earnest, deeply felt, improbably sunny emotions that he solidifies his position as show MVP with every word, every gesture, every expression. The guy can shuffle into the far background of a shot eating cereal and get a laugh, which is to say: He can be literally out-of-focus and still steal focus.
Which is why it doesn’t matter, in the end, that the locus of Reggie Dinkins‘ comedic energy isn’t found precisely where the show’s premise (Tracy Morgan! Daniel Radcliffe! Imagine the chemistry!) would have you believe it to be. This is a very, very funny — frequently hilarious — series that prizes well-written, well-timed, well-delivered jokes, and that knows how to use its actors to serve them up in the best way possible. And once it shakes off a few early stumbles and gets out of its own way, it does that better than any show on television.
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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