#Picking up the pieces movie#
#Picking up the pieces tv#

We learn about policeman Matt Gates, whose devotion to the town is admirable but takes a toll on his own family, and school psychologist Carly Ingersoll who helps students cope with trauma, even as she must deal with her own personal anxieties, including delaying having children due to Paradise’s poisoned water.

There’s the superintendent of the Paradise Unified School District, Michelle John, who realizing education is a backbone of the community, campaigns to restore learning and to ensure Paradise High seniors can graduate at their beloved if damaged campus. There’s 74-year-old Woody Culleton, the town’s former mayor, who he says, rose “from town drunk to town mayor,” and persists in constructing a new house to replace the one burnt to the ground in the conflagration. Rebuilding Paradise personalizes the tragedy with a number of real life, finely etched characters. Photo courtesy of National Geographic.īut on the whole the film focuses on ordinary people, on how Paradise’s devastated townsfolk are trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, battling displacement, economic hardship, government bureaucracy. On the whole the film focuses on ordinary people, on how Paradise’s devastated townsfolk are trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. Steve “Woody” Culleton rebuilds his home in Paradise, CA after losing it to the 2018 Camp Fire.

#Picking up the pieces movie#

Erin Brockovich - the consumer and environmental advocate who Julia Roberts portrayed in a 2000 movie based on Brockovich’s courtroom crusade against Pacific Gas & Electric for leaking toxic Chromium 6 into Hinkley, California’s groundwater – addresses a mass meeting at Paradise after it’s revealed that sparks from PG&E transmission lines started the Camp Fire. Some famous people are quickly glimpsed in Rebuilding Paradise, including California’s then-Governor Jerry Brown, current Governor Gavin Newsom, and President Trump, who in front of the press makes a typically foolish Freudian slip, calling Paradise “Pleasure” during his brief visit to the disaster scene. Howard’s longtime partner since Night Shift (1982), Brian Grazer, produced Rebuilding Paradise. “The news of Paradise was of extra interest to me because I have a lot of relatives in Redding, California, and they’d had the Carr Fire up there just several months before” in 2018, he says. Although he’s best known as an actor and for directing big budget Hollywood features such as Splash, Cocoon and Apollo 13, Howard has also lensed a number of documentaries. “From the moment the crisis began… Howard led a filmmaking team to the city and would go on to spend a year with Paradise residents, documenting their efforts to recover what was lost,” says the film’s press notes.

#Picking up the pieces tv#

Howard, who won a Best Director Academy Award for A Beautiful Mind (2001) and an Oscar-nomination for Frost/Nixon (2008), masterfully helms Rebuilding Paradise, combining his camera crew’s original cinematography with TV and radio news clips, cellphone footage, material shot by local filmmakers, home movies and vintage films. It was the deadliest fire in this country 100 years and the worst ever in California’s history in terms of damage to life and property,” according to press notes. The NovemCamp Fire “killed 85 people, displaced 50,000 residents and destroyed 95 percent of local structures. and this is what it looks like” – pitch black due to thick smoke. An astonished voice remarks, “It’s 11:38 a.m. We need your help, Lord.” Firefighters desperately try to battle the blaze burning wildly out of control. A terrified townswoman cries, “Please pray for us. We see frenzied families trying to flee in cars but getting ensnared in a fiery traffic jam and hospital patients in wheelchairs being evacuated. We hear a puzzled resident comment, “Honey, there’s stuff falling from the sky,” as the fire begins to sweep through the town, laying waste to homes, buildings, wildlife and landscape. Piles of debris from burned buildings close to an antique mall in Paradise, CA.

This well-directed National Geographic Documentary Films production opens with sweeping aerial vistas of Paradise, a scenic, rustic haven in Northern California, and a glimpse of a wooden welcome sign stating: “May you find Paradise to be all its name implies.” However, the Arcadian ambiance is swiftly swept away in a lengthy, harrowing sequence showing how the 2018 Camp Fire rapidly spread through the town, transforming Paradise into hell on Earth. Ron Howard’s Rebuilding Paradise is a tour de force depicting how a small town is engulfed and impacted by the climate crisis. 31 National Geographic Documentary Films will donate $1 of each sale or rental of Rebuilding Paradise to California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Relief Fund in support of the Butte Strong Fund (up to $50,000).

NOTE: During National Fire Prevention Month through Oct.