New Documentary Blames Newsom & LA Mayor Bass for Wildfire Failures

A new documentary is raising questions about how California officials handled the devastating wildfires that struck Los Angeles and the Pacific Palisades in January 2025. The film, titled Paradise Abandoned, shows residents describing what they say were government failures that left their homes and communities unprotected.

The documentary highlights repeated warnings about wildfire dangers in the Pacific Palisades, which had already been labeled “a region of maximum fire risk.” Despite those alerts, according to the film, few additional emergency resources were put in place before the fires swept through the area. The blaze destroyed more than 23,000 acres, leveled nearly 7,000 buildings, and killed 12 people.

Wath the trailer here: 

Director Rob Montz, who also lost his childhood home in the fires, said the project aims to expose how early mistakes worsened the disaster. “This film will be a success if the people of the Palisades feel seen by it,” Montz told Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart. “There is not yet the definitive investigation of why a couple embers in some dry brush two miles from my childhood home grew to the point they incinerated the most desirable real estate in Los Angeles. This film sets out to do that — to identify precisely what human errors mattered on the first day of the fire, and to describe the secret scandal of the second day of the fire, a scandal that’s been missed by all the existing coverage.”

One scene in the documentary shows a man describing the moment when Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appeared at a press event as the Chase Bank Building burned nearby. “The mayor and the governor were in the middle of town, doing a news conference. And in the background, you see the Chase Bank building burning to the ground,” he says in the film. “They weren’t doing anything. The whole thing just burned right to the ground, with the mayor and the governor within a block of the place.”

Footage in Paradise Abandoned shows those scenes, capturing a striking image of state and city leaders standing close to a fire that, according to the film, stood as a symbol of a larger government breakdown. Montz’s production presents the account as a story of negligence that compounded the suffering of local residents.

The fallout from those fires continues to affect thousands across Los Angeles. Reports say less than ten percent of affected homeowners have received permits to rebuild. Many others, frustrated by delays and red tape, have sold their damaged properties instead of attempting to recover what they lost.

Paradise Abandoned is scheduled for release soon on Rob Montz’s YouTube channel.

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