Composer Morgan Doctor likes her high waist, wide leg pants, a donation after her home with wife Evil Timoner (“Last Flight Home”) was destroyed by the Eaton Fire. “She usually wears skinny jeans,” the documentary filmmaker said.
They zoom with me from the back of an airport car on the way to JFK. When the Eaton Fire exploded on January 7 in Altadena, they were going to bed in Rome, preparing to enter the interviews and scouted for an upcoming and untitled Nazi documentary in Budapest, Vienna and Florence before returning to Rome. Overnight, her home burned to the ground, along with a significant portion of her life’s work.
“I’m a little swollen from crying,” Timoner said. “I am so exhausted that I keep putting my cold hands on my eyes, because they burn so badly.”
The devastation of losing so much is overwhelming and unfathomable. But the peripatetic filmmaker continues to fulfill his professional obligations – shooting the documentary and promoting “YOU! XX,” heading to Sundance to privately screen “Inn Between” and “All God’s Children” for buyers and finding the strength to verbalize her grief in several interviews, including this one. For Timoner, the way out was.
Timoner and doctor left Rome for Budapest when they learned that their Altadena house was gone. Family members (including Timoner’s brother David, co-founder of their Interloper films) and assorted animals initially evacuated from their Altadena home to hers, but had to keep moving as the fire approached. Among the indestructible losses were her mother’s cat (which hid under the bed), a safe containing $40,000 and jewelry, and a crypto wallet worth $30,000.
“My job during that hour, besides getting to the airport, was to find a place to put five people and seven animals,” Timoner said. “I start asking around, and a couple of people can take two people, and most people can’t take the dogs, or some people can’t take the cats. And I’m trying to figure it out. And when I check in at the airport, Harry Vaughn, formerly of Sundance, now a producer in South Pasadena, “Take them all to my mother’s house.” I couldn’t believe it. I love Harry, and he swam in my pool just this summer, and he knows how beautiful that house was. ”
Timoner loved entertaining in the summer. “I hosted a whole outdoor screening series at my house, and we’d have potlucks,” she said, “and everyone would sit up in the yard, and we’d play movies, and then I’d have the director there talking. People would watch from the pool.”
Timons and doctors stuck to their itinerary; There was nowhere to go. “We went through the scout in Budapest all day,” Timoner said. “We checked the (fire) map. It never updated, until the next day, it said the house was still there. It said the fire was two blocks away. I heard from a neighbor, after coming back from scouting, that my house didn’t. Morgan cries, I’m in shock.
“When we found out mom and David left the cat (hiding under a bed) it was my first time crying,” Timoner said. “Because just thinking about Rosebud dying scared in our room was nightmares, and has been nightmares ever since. We have nightmares every night. Either everything is fine and then I realize it isn’t, or everything burns in the dream. “
The couple took a train to Vienna the next morning to interview a Holocaust survivor. “At this point, the production company that I work for said, ‘We understand if you have to cancel,'” Timoner said. “Well, I can’t cancel this Holocaust survivor because I had been in a concentration camp with him in November, and he was so traumatized to be there. He was there for six years when his father was murdered. And I was going to Vienna just for three hours on the way to Florence with the whole crew to document him.
“If I can do good work, I will continue, because my city is on fire,” she said. “There is nowhere to go. Everything has been destroyed, I might as well create something. So we went and I did it, and it gave me such perspective, and it made me feel, “Wow, I can still do something, even though it’s all gone.” I ended the interview and said, “We’ll continue.”
And then they went and shot in Italy for two days. As soon as it was wrapped, Timoner started vomiting. “I was mortally ill one day, conceived in Rome.”
When the couple arrived in New York, they continued to fulfill obligations (“I’m homeless now, where are you going to go?” Timoner said) as the magnitude of their loss began to sink in. She attended two screenings and Q & As for the sequel “You! Xx,” as oscilloscope screening at Sundance. She was also able to comfort her co-director brother’s 25-year-old son, Eli Owen Timoner, whose father’s home was reduced to rubble.
Before our zoom, Timoner texted me: “I also have an appearance on ABC News Live tomorrow for ours film (“The Hearth House Between”) about the only hospice for the homeless in the country (which is ironic because now we’re homeless) and it’s 5:45 p.m. so we thought since our flight routed through New York to do these performances, we should do that and a kind of buffer and calibrate before we go back to the ruins of our home and no home. ”
In New York, documentary filmmakers Liz Garbus and Dan Cogan nursed doctors and Timons, bringing digchel bags full of clothes—like those wide-leg jeans. “The love for friends and our film community has been so incredible,” Timoner said. “There’s so much support that it was enough to bend us to be able to function and not just want to give up completely, because there’s no way to wrap your head around the loss. (The house) was my sanctuary. It was my safe place. That’s where I worked. It was Morgan’s studio. It was my studio. “
A friend quickly set one up Gofundme For Doctor and Timoner, who read: “As documentarians and musicians, they lost not only their home but irreplaceable pictures, family archives, all their cameras and instruments and every sentimental and priceless item you can think of. They lost their history and future work, all carefully collected over years…overnight. “
Timoner has lived in Altadena for 13 years. Her house, studio and pool were nestled in the foothills of the mountains. “It’s absolutely gorgeous there,” she said. “And I love my city so much that my heart is torn open for it. It was the greatest place to live. We had wild peacocks in the garden, little peacocks that grew and gave birth. You would open the front door to let someone in and there would be a mating dance that would happen. ”
Timoner’s primary Interloper Films office in Pasadena did not burn that night, but there is smoke damage. The day after the fires broke out, a member of Timoner’s support staff ran into Interloper to grab the Nexis and several computers. The office is still closed due to smoke damage. There may be more devices there. After that office suffered an electrical fire last May, Timoner moved her most important personal archives to her house.
“I left my journal for the last two years next to my bed for safekeeping because I had notes in it that I needed to transfer still to digital,” she said. “I’m in love with the cloud now. I used to not really like the cloud at all and get pissed off about it, but now I’m a big fan because it’s all gone. “
It’s what can’t be backed up that hurts. Every time Timoner adds to the insurer’s list of their belongings, she is stabbed with what she has lost: her son’s hand-drawn birthday card, framed and hanging in the bathroom. (She found one on her iPhone.) Her giant David Bowie poster. Her various awards, especially the two Sundance Jury. Publicist Chris Albert has promised to replace all his prizes. “I don’t do movies for that reason,” she said, still tickled by the gesture.
Among the items lost in Ondi’s home were 500 hours of video footage of her father Eli, the subject of her 2022 documentary “Last Flight Home,” Which crowned the last weeks of her sick father’s life, as surrounded by his wife and family, prepared to legally die from medical support.
“You’re not going to put dad’s life story in (two hours), you can’t fit it in,” she said. “Thank God for” the last flight home. ” But the pictures that I shot during the 15 days with dad, that’s probably gone.
“My first movie ever, ‘The Beast,’ about a woman in a Connecticut prison, all that’s gone. There is a digitized copy, thank God. But my first films that I made at the Public Access Station when I was 19, I don’t know that they exist anymore. And I had 100 tapes of my son growing up, and I might make a documentary about him one day. I had them all on the shelf to be digitized, to be backed up, and they never got backed up.
“I would have taken all the hard drives I could get my hands on and thrown them in the trunk, and I would have taken some of the pictures of my father off the wall,” she said. “And we lost these two scrapbooks that my mother had put together of my father’s airline, because I’ve been working on a scripted version of ‘Last Flight Home’ for ten years. Some of the footage that may have been lost now is me reading him the script on his deathbed and getting his last notes and words. We wrote it together on the phone, me on my couch in that place in my house I used to love to sit and write and look at the trees and him in his chair.”
Timoner doesn’t want other filmmakers to make his mistakes. “Back up everything. Duplicate everything, she said. “Keep them in different places. We lost the raw footage from ‘Brand,’ ‘Mapplethorpe,’ and ‘Jungletown.’ Thankfully, the two films I’m making right now are being destroyed. They were backed up on LTO, which is a bap backup. And if you love something, take a picture of it. I value every photo of the house. “
Arriving in LA on January 17, Timoner and Doctor picked up their car and headed to Vidiots in Echo Park for a sold-out “YOU! Xx “Preview. They now have temporary shelter at Warren Beatty and Annette Bening’s boarding house. Bening recently attended another Timoner screening at the Museum of Tolerance, “All God’s Children.” This documentary follows her older rabbi sister Rachel’s struggle to make nice with a well-meaning Brooklyn Gospel Pastor and his Baptist church. (There is an obstacle to sweetness and light: Jesus.) Timoner’s older sister, on sabbatical in South America, has called every day with grief counseling. “It helps to have a rabbi in the family, I have to tell you,” Timoner said.
On January 20, armed with a press briefing from Indiewire and a HazMat suit, Timoner went to his house. It was ash and rubble. A page from a religious book floated in the pool. The safe was burned to a crisp with everything in it. So was Crypto Wallet and the Sundance Awards.
While the insurers sort it out, Timoner works. After Sundance, she’s headed to the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where “All God’s Children” plays Feb. 6 and 7. She is preparing a documentary, “All We Are”, about screenwriter Lesley Patterson (“All Quiet on the Western Front”) and her husband Simon Marshall’s adaptation of “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Austrian psychologist and Auschwitz/Dachau Survivor Viktor Frankl.
“He said that we can’t have happiness in our lives without meaning, and the only way we can have meaning is through work, love or suffering,” Timoner said, “and that suffering is how we reach our greatest human potential.”
