Ondi Timoner Lost Many Things in the Los Angeles Fire, but It Left Her Work Ethic Untouched
Composer Morgan Doctor likes her high-waisted, wide-legged pants, a donation after her home with wife Ondi Timoner (“Last Flight Home”) was destroyed by the Eaton Fire. “She usually wears skinny jeans,” said the documentary filmmaker.
They are Zooming with me from the back of an airport town car en route to JFK. When the Eaton Fire exploded January 7 in Altadena, they were going to bed in Rome, preparing to embark on interviews and scouts 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.
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“I’m a little bit swollen from crying,” said Timoner. “I’m so exhausted that I constantly put my cold hands on my eyes, because they burn so hard.”
The devastation of losing so much is overwhelming and incalculable. However, the peripatetic filmmaker continues to fulfill her professional obligations — shooting the documentary, promoting “Dig! XX,” heading to Sundance to privately screen “The Inn Between” and “All God’s Children” for buyers, and finding the strength to verbalize her grief in multiple interviews, including this one. For Timoner, the way out was through.
Timoner and Doctor were leaving 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 homes to hers, but then had to keep moving as the fire approached. Among the irreplaceable losses were her mother’s cat (who hid under the bed), a safe with $40,000 and jewelry, and a crypto wallet worth $30,000.
“My job over that hour, besides getting to the airport, was finding a place to put five humans and seven animals,” said Timoner. “I start asking around, and a couple 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 by the time I’m checking in at the airport, Harry Vaughn, formerly from Sundance, now a producer in South Pasadena, is like, ‘Bring them all to my mom’s house.’ I could not believe it. I love Harry, and he was swimming 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 potluck,” she said, “and everybody would sit up on the yard, and we would play movies, and then I’d have the director there talking. People would watch from the pool.”
Timoner and Doctor kept to their itinerary; there was nowhere to go. “We went through the scout in Budapest all day long,” said Timoner. “We were checking that [fire] map. It never updated, actually, until the next day, it said the house was still there. It said that the fire was two blocks away. I heard from a neighbor, after getting back from the scout, that my house didn’t make it. Morgan is crying, I’m in shock.
“When we found out that Mom and David left the cat [hiding under a bed], that was my first time crying,” Timoner said. “Because just to think of Rosebud dying scared in our room was nightmares, and it’s been nightmares ever since. We have nightmares every night. Either everything’s fine and then I realize it’s not, or everything’s burning in the dream.”
The couple took a train to Vienna the next morning to interview a Holocaust survivor. “At this point, the production company I’m working for said, ‘We understand if you have to cancel’,” said Timoner. “Well, I can’t cancel on this holocaust survivor because I had been at a concentration camp with him in November, and he was so traumatized being there. He was six years old there when his father was murdered. And I was going to Vienna just for three hours on my way to Florence with the whole crew to document him.
“If I can do good work, I’m going to continue, because my town’s on fire,” she said. “There’s nowhere to go. Everything’s 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 make something, even though everything is gone.’ I finished the interview, and I said, ‘We’re gonna go on.'”
And so they went, shooting in Italy for two days. However, as soon as it wrapped, Timoner began to vomit. “I was deathly ill for a day, laid out in Rome.”
When the couple arrived in New York, they continued to fulfill obligations (“I’m homeless now too, where are you going to go?” said Timoner) as the magnitude of their loss started to sink in. She attended two screenings and Q&As for sequel “Dig! XX,” which Oscilloscope is 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 our film [“The Inn Between”] about the only hospice for the homeless in the country (which is ironic because now we’re homeless) and that’s at 5:45 PM so we thought since our flight was routing through New York to do these appearances, we should do that and kind of buffer and recalibrate before we go back to the ruins of our home and no home.”
In New York, documentary filmmakers Liz Garbus and Dan Cogan nurtured Doctor and Timoner, bringing duffel bags full of clothes — like the wide-legged jeans. “The love of friends and our film community has been so unbelievable,” said Timoner. “It’s so much support that it was enough to buoy us to be able to function and not want to just give up totally, because there’s no way to wrap your head around the totality of the loss. [The house] was my sanctuary. It was my safe place. It was where I worked. It was Morgan’s studio. It was my studio.”
A friend swiftly set up a GoFundMe for Doctor and Timoner, which read: “As documentarians and musicians, they lost not just their home but irreplaceable footage, 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 stunningly gorgeous there,” she said. “And I love my town so much that my heart is ripped open over it. It was the greatest place to live. We had wild peacocks in the front yard, little baby peacocks growing and being born. You’d open the front door to let someone in and there’d be a mating dance happening.”
Timoner’s primary Interloper Films office in Pasadena did not burn that night, but there’s smoke damage. The day after fires erupted, 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 drives there. After that office suffered an electrical fire last May, Timoner moved her most important personal archives to her house.
“I left my journal of the last two years next to my bed for safekeeping because I had notes in it that I needed to transpose still on to digital,” she said. “I’m in love with the Cloud now. I used to not really like the Cloud at all and be pissed off about it, but now I’m a big fan because everything’s 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’s lost: Her son’s hand-drawn birthday cards, framed and hung in the bathroom. (She found one on her iPhone.) Her giant David Bowie poster. Her various awards, especially the two Sundance jury prizes. Publicist Chris Albert has promised to replace all her awards. “I do not make movies for that reason,” she said, still tickled by the gesture.
Among the things lost at Ondi’s home were 500 hours of video footage of her father Eli, the subject of her 2022 documentary “Last Flight Home,” which chronicled the last weeks of her ailing father’s life, as surrounded by his wife and family, he prepared to legally die by medical-aid-in-dying.
“You’re not going to put Dad’s life story into [two hours], you can’t fit it in,” she said. “Thank God for ‘Last Flight Home.’ But the footage that I shot over those 15 days with Dad, that’s most likely gone.
“My first film ever, ‘The Nature of the Beast,’ about a woman in prison in Connecticut, all that is gone. There’s one 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 was going to maybe 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 grabbed every hard drive that 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 dad’s airline, because I’ve been working on a scripted version of ‘Last Flight Home’ for 10 years. Part of the footage that has possibly been lost now is me reading him the script on his deathbed, getting his final 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 her mistakes. “Back everything up. Duplicate everything,” she said. “Keep them at different locations. We lost the raw footage of ‘Brand,’ ‘Mapplethorpe,’ and ‘Jungletown.’ Thankfully, the two films I’m making right now are not destroyed. They were backed up on LTO, which is a tape backup. And if you love something, take a picture of it. I treasure every photo of the house.”
When they arrived in L.A. on January 17, Timoner and Doctor retrieved her car and headed to Vidiots in Echo Park for a sold-out “Dig! XX” preview. They now have temporary shelter at Warren Beatty and Annette Bening’s guest house. Bening recently attended another Timoner screening at the Museum of Tolerance, “All God’s Children.” This fascinating documentary shows her older rabbi sister Rachel’s struggles to forge meaningful bonds with a well-intentioned Brooklyn gospel pastor and his Baptist church. (The serious impediment to real communion: Jesus.) Timoner’s older sister, now on sabbatical in South America, has called every day with grief counseling. “It is helpful having a rabbi in the family, I have to tell you,” said Timoner.
On January 20, armed with a press assignment memo from IndieWire and a hazmat suit, Timoner went to her house. It was ash and rubble. A page from a religious book floated in the pool. The safe was burnt to a crisp with everything in it. So were the crypto wallet and the Sundance awards.
While the insurers sort it out, Timoner works. After Sundance, she’s off to the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where “All God’s Children” plays February 6 and 7. She’s prepping a documentary, “All That 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,” said Timoner, “and that suffering is how we reach our greatest human potential.”
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