The Brief

As students at Maywood Academy High School in Los Angeles County prepared their backpacks to return to school, some packed additional items they never had before — government-issued documents verifying their legal immigration status and cards listing their legal rights.

These small details are signs of growing anxiety after deportations started hitting close to home.

Johanna, a student at the school, was arrested in June, alongside her mother and younger sister, while attending a scheduled immigration court appearance for their legal asylum case.

News of her arrest sent shock waves through the school, already on edge because of the omnipresent presence of immigration agents in and around their neighborhoods.

“It didn’t feel real, being completely honest, because we’re kids. We should be planning when to hang out but instead we need to identify which cars could be immigration and which cars can’t be; we need to be cautious; we need to know our rights,” said Chelsea Duran, a friend of Johanna’s.

Another student, Isaac, said as an immigrant, he always understood he needed to be careful, “but not to that point where I can’t speak Spanish, or I have to be scared just for the way I look or where I come from.”

The degree of fear he felt increased drastically this year in a way he and his friends had never experienced or expected.

“I’m not even safe in school. I’m not safe anywhere,” said Isaac. He and other students quoted in this story declined to share their last names out of security concerns.

Isaac shared that sentiment while sitting in a classroom filled with posters meant to empower students from immigrant backgrounds like his, in a school where, on the first day this year, the staff held a rally holding signs that read “Education not deportation.” But even that environment was no match for the summer he and his classmates endured.

Duran found out from her homeroom teacher that Johanna, 17, had been detained, and remembers seeing her teacher struggling to catch her breath, looking “like she had seen a ghost.” One classmate told Isaac he felt so afraid that he planned to run straight home as soon as school was out.

In a recent U.S. history class, teacher Yitzel Jimenez asked students to choose five events in their lifetime that they believe should be included in the history of the country. Her students mentioned Johanna and the fear in their communities.

‘She could have had a life here’

Johanna playing chess in school.

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Johanna’s peers said she is kindhearted, passionate, sociable, hard-working, and one of the best students at the school.

In the 18 months since fleeing violence in Guatemala, Johanna joined several clubs (hiking, chess, crochet), was one of the fastest competitive swimmers on the school team, and was on her way to being valedictorian. She had made up her mind to pursue a career in the medical field.

“She was really trying her best here,” said Francisco, a classmate.

Students Deserve MAHS, a school club the students interviewed for this story are part of, helped organize a walkout earlier this year to protest the immigration raids. After Johanna was detained, Duran shared her story at an LAUSD board meeting, asking the board to support their efforts. She said she never heard back from them. Students also helped Hector, Johanna’s father, publish a fundraising page that raised over $21,000 and made flyers that were shared widely on social media.

A flyer made by Students Deserve MAHS was shared widely on social media in the days following their classmate’s detention.

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But a month later, on July 5, Johanna, her mother and sister were deported.

“They jailed them to drive them to despair,” Hector said in Spanish.

Hector said that Johanna cries often when she thinks about her life in Los Angeles County. Her teachers called recently to inform her she ended last school year with top grades, despite being arrested before completing her final exams. The call left her in tears.

“She’s really worried because she’s now behind this school year,” he said. The school year in Guatemala begins in January, and they decided to wait for the new year to enroll.

“I tell her to be patient and that she’s going to start soon,” said Hector, who described Johanna as always having loved school.

Her older sister, Dulce, who also attended Maywood Academy, remains in the U.S. with her father. But, like Johanna, she did not return to the same school.

Hector and Dulce moved to the Bay Area, where he has work opportunities and immigration enforcement is not as heightened as in Los Angeles, he said.

But they have yet to grow accustomed to the loss of half of their family. Hector said Dulce has struggled to make friends at her new school.

Back at their former school, there are constant reminders that the sisters are missing. Duran no longer sees Johanna in the hallways on their way to class and can’t playfully race her as they did all of last year during swim practice, where they became friends after Johanna welcomed her into the team. Eduardo said seeing an event flier with a photo of Johanna recently was painful.

“It still hurts to know that she could have had a life here,” he said.

Widespread stress and anxiety

In the days that followed Johanna’s arrest, the neighborhood around the school was thrust into the center of intense immigration enforcement activity. Maywood Academy sits in the middle of a small cluster of predominantly working-class Latino cities with large immigrant populations in southeast Los Angeles County.

The week after Johanna’s arrest, Kristi Noem, the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, brought a film crew to an immigration raid at the home of a pregnant U.S. citizen, and videos surfaced of violent arrests by immigration agents at the local Home Depot and car washes. A few days later, a group of people in Johanna’s former neighborhood, including one of Duran’s friends, were tear-gassed as they watched ICE agents arrest a teenage U.S. citizen at the same time as another group of agents arrested an aspiring Marine and U.S. citizen just a few minutes away. That same day, armored military vehicles drove along main street intersections.

Eduardo was in Mexico over the summer, but he kept getting messages from friends back home, saying: “ICE is literally one block away from me,” or “ICE is at the Food 4 Less,” or “ICE is here.”

Students Deserve MAHS helped fundraise to cover Johanna’s legal fees. On a recent school day, they shared information about students’ legal rights and printed posters with messages such as “Education not deportation.”

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Francisco moved from Mexico two years ago, joining his mother and sister, who had migrated to the United States two decades prior.

“I felt free,” he said about when he initially arrived. “I always thought that this state, this country, was the land of freedom.”

But things are different now. “I feel scared and threatened every day of my life,” he said.

Isaac recalled when immigration agents were one block away from his house recently. “I remember being scared for my mom, mostly because she still has to go to work,” he said. “It was so scary to think, ‘What if they get her? What am I gonna do?’ I have nobody but her to take care of me and my sisters.”

Eduardo noted the fear goes both ways: “It must be so hard sending your kid to school. I’m not a parent, so I don’t know how it feels, but I can’t imagine how scared you’ll be for your kid the way I fear for my mom getting deported.”

As the summer came to an end, Duran feared that, because the school calendar is public knowledge, immigration agents would plan a raid for the first day of school.

Returning is always nerve-wracking, she said, but her concerns were new this year. “Would we be safe? Are we able to go home to our families? Go to school safely without getting detained, getting questioned?”

She remains afraid, “it feels like you have to keep your guard up no matter what.”

‘A hurricane that blows through’

Research shows that immigration raids increase stress and anxiety among children with undocumented parents, and also among neighbors and community members, even when those people are U.S. citizens.

A recent report published by mental health professionals at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine characterizes the mental health impact of immigration raids as a public health emergency.

One of the authors, Dr. Lisa Fortuna, said the deportation of a classmate, like Johanna, heightens the anxiety students are already experiencing simply because they live in neighborhoods where people have been detained because they look Latino or speak Spanish.

“If you have a peer who’s taken away suddenly, even if you’re not their close friend or have been interacting with them, it’s still something within your school environment where students are at risk,” said Fortuna, who chairs the department of psychiatry and neurosciences at UC Riverside. “And there are lots of other students who may have their own risks or their own experiences on top of that. So it just becomes this cumulative stressor.”

Fortuna said teachers, too, need mental health support because they are also experiencing stress from witnessing detentions in their community and working with families who have experienced the detention or deportation of family members.

“It’s like a crisis or like a disaster situation, because you really have something that is in a concentrated way affecting people in your community,” said Fortuna. “It’s similar to if you have a hurricane that blows through.”

Jimenez said, “This year it does feel more exhausting to come back.”

Some of Jimenez’s students are now practicing a play for Día de los Muertos, a cultural event that honors the dead. Their performance will inform peers of their rights in case they are stopped or questioned by immigration officials.

“Although it feels like there’s so much going on, I do feel like you find the most hope in the classroom,” Jimenez said. “Despite all the despair that’s happening, you still find a lot of hope and resilience in the kids.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced several significant rule changes for the 99th Oscars, including AI protections for actors and writers as well as expanded eligibility for international films.

In a statement to NPR, the Academy on Saturday said the changes are in response to listening to the global filmmaking community and addressing barriers to entry in its eligibility process.

The Academy added that its rules and eligibility standards have always evolved alongside technologies such as sound, color, and CGI, and that AI is no different. Awards rules and guidelines are reviewed and refined each year.

A blow for Tilly Norwood 

Among the most noteworthy changes, the Academy now explicitly states that only roles, "demonstrably performed by humans with their consent" are eligible for Acting awards. In other words, AI creations like the much-hyped Tilly Norwood cannot hope to win a Best Actress Oscar anytime soon.

Particle6, the production company behind Norwood, did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment on Saturday about its creations' ban from consideration. In March, Norwood commented, "Can't wait to go to the Oscars!" in an Instagram post announcing its newly released music video.

The Academy also requires screenplays to be "human-authored" and said it reserved the right to investigate the use of generative AI in any submission.

Meanwhile, qualifying flesh-and-blood human actors can now be nominated for multiple performances in the same category if those performances get enough votes to land in the top five. So, someone like Anne Hathaway, who has five major movies scheduled for release in 2026, could now theoretically sweep the nominations – though that outcome seems extremely unlikely.

"If an actor has an extremely prolific year, might we even see someone swallow up three of the five nominations?," wrote Deadline's awards columnist and chief film critic Pete Hammond about the changes. "Probably won't happen, but it's now possible."

Under previous rules, an actor could only receive one nomination per category. If they had two high-ranking performances in Best Actor, for example, only the one with the most votes would move forward.

International films prioritizes filmmakers over countries

While international films can still be the official selection of their countries, now they can qualify by winning the top prize at a major international festival such as the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the Golden Lion at Venice, or the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Historically, countries "owned" the nomination, and only one film per country was allowed. The new rules allow multiple films from the same country to compete if they are critically acclaimed, and it shifts the honor from a geopolitical entity to the filmmakers themselves.

Largely positive response

The changes have prompted a largely positive reaction from the film community on social media, such as on the popular The Shade Room entertainment and celebrity-focused Instagram feed, where commenters widely praised the "human-only" move to protect creative jobs.

The Academy's Awards Committee oversees the rules in tandem with branch executive committees, the International Feature Film Executive Committee and the Scientific and Technical Awards Executive Committee.

The rules are scheduled to go into effect next year, covering films released in 2026.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Los Angeles changes fast, and oftentimes that means some of the architectural relics of our shared past get swept up and paved over in all the "progress." (RIP Garden of Allah.)

But there are still places where you can find ruins that tell a tale, like a long-forgotten speakeasy reputedly for old Hollywood near La Crescenta.

The ruins are still there 

On a recent afternoon, author and local historian Mike Lawler led me just beyond the boundary of Crescenta Valley Park. Joggers like me might have seen an old, towering stone arch shrouded by bushes there — and wondered what lies beyond.

Turns out there was once a place called the Verdugo Lodge back there and Lawler has spent years excavating its history.

A car speeds away from the lodge onto New York Avenue. The stone archway that still stands can be seen in the background.

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“It was a very high-end speakeasy for a time,” Lawler, who also helps run the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley, said. “An amazing thing. And all the ruins are still here, just like this arch.”

Lawler said we don’t know exactly when the lodge was built, but we do have some of the picture starting in the late 1920s. The place was set up kind of like a timeshare where people bought 10 x 10 foot ‘tent lots’ that gave them access to on-site amenities. There was a golf course, stables, trout stream, a swimming pool — and a lodge with gambling and alcohol.

“The Crescenta Valley in the teens and '20s was a hotbed of moonshine, prostitution, all that stuff," Lawler said. "It was a quiet little community. But in all these canyons up here, stuff was going on. Illegal stuff!”

We don’t have a full guest list, but Lawler said it’s likely at least a few Hollywood types had gone up to the lodge to circumvent Prohibition era laws.

In some ways, it was kind of like the original glamping. Lawler said patrons probably weren’t doing much sleeping, though.

“They might have been unconscious!” he said with a chuckle.

Lawler led me to a road that swooped around a meadow. We passed by a massive swimming pool nestled into the hillside.

Once known as the “Crystal Pool,” it’s now empty and fenced off, with pitch black locker rooms below.

The exterior of the locker rooms for the old Crystal Pool.

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We continued our journey up the hill and eventually arrived at a cascading stone stairway.

And at the top, the big show: overgrown with orange monkey flowers and goliath agaves lies the foundation of the old Verdugo Lodge, with lofty stone fireplaces the only guardians keeping the surrounding oak trees at bay.

Lawler takes out a floorplan that one of the former owners drew up for him.

“This is what it was laid out like on the inside. So a dancehall, and band stand on that side... And then upstairs was the gambling,” Lawler said.

Lawler had in hand a copy of a Los Angeles Times article from 1933 he found. The headline reads: “Revelers Flee in Lodge Raid.”

“The police that raided it were here at 3 o'clock in the morning. And there were still 500 people here. And they said it was the classiest joint they had ever raided... Anyway, people were diving out of windows and everything,” Lawler explained.

In a ruin like this, covered with moss and overgrowth, the imagination can run wild, too.

The archway that still stands outside of what's now known as Mountain Oaks.

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Lawler pointed out a questionable door jam below the old dancefloor that’s been cemented over.

“That is a door. So what is behind there? So there’s a room in there that got walled in for some reason,” he said.

What we do know is that, sometime after the raid, the tawdry Verdugo Lodge and the surrounding land were purchased and then renamed Mountain Oaks by the Kadletzes — an entrepreneurial family who had run everything from a Turkish bath to a mini golf course. Over the next few decades, the family would rent the place out to local groups for recreational retreats.

The future of Mountain Oaks 

After they sold it in the ‘60s, Lawler said Mountain Oaks faced a “nightmare” of development threats. Over the years, some of the subdivided "tent lots" had been combined and sold off, Lawler said. A dozen private homes now stand on these pieces of land, next to the ruins of the Verdugo Lodge.

A map showing the Mountain Oaks public property acquired by The Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA).

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Last year, with help from the City of Glendale, a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant among other funding sources, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) put up $6.1 million to acquire 33-acres of the land — not including the private lots where the homes stand — so the public can continue to roam the meadow and ruins.

Paul Edelman, MRCA's director of natural resources and planning, said his group will continue to manage the land, doing things like brush clearance, trash pickup and sign maintenance. And he said there are no current plans to remove the ruins or make any major changes to the property.

“If somebody comes up with a grand idea where they can find some funding for us to do something to enhance it, we’re always open to it,” Edelman said.

The purchase was good news for local preservationist Joanna Linkchorst.

“I grew up directly up the hill. But I always saw the sign that said ‘private property’ and didn’t really think about it until several years ago when I finally asked Mike. And he said, ‘Oh yeah, we got a resort speakeasy down the street,’” Linkchorst said standing among the oaks and overgrowth.

Linkchorst, who founded the group Friends of Rockhaven to preserve another nearby historic site, said it’s been amazing to see all of the decaying structures that were still hiding out at Mountain Oaks.

“There’s almost like these little ghosts in your head as you imagine what it was like when there was a beautiful wood floor and there was a second floor that people came jumping out of,” Linkchorst said.

Now, let’s check in to the Overlook Hotel.

That’s the fictional place Stanley Kubrick brought to life in his 1980 film The Shining, loosely based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name.

A local architect who hails from South Pasadena meticulously crafted a 3D model of the iconic space so Shining fans everywhere never have to check out.

‘I just couldn’t stop’ 

At his day job, architect Anthony Chieh mainly works on residential and boutique commercial spaces. But over the course of five months, he spent his nights meticulously recreating a virtual replica of the Overlook Hotel from the film that first scared him when he was 12.

Of course he started with the deeply haunted Room 237. That’s where Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, has a terrifying encounter with a ghostly woman.

Chieh's 3D rendering of Room 237

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“But once I started, I just couldn’t stop,” Chieh told LAist.

“I ended up modeling the Colorado Lounge, and then after that I was thinking maybe I should make the lobby and then arriving to the Gold Room, and then Grady’s bathroom.”

“It’s like a rabbit hole,” he said.

Users who download Chieh’s free 3D model can fly through all of those spaces, immersed in atmospheric sounds and music from the film.

“It’s interesting to dive into these kind of fictional environments and try to make sense of it,” Chieh said. “And the hope is people will get a different perspective once they’re in there.”

Kubrick’s take on the Overlook was famously inspired by real hotels like the Timberline Lodge in Oregon and the Ahwahnee in Yosemite. But the interiors you see in the film were created on sound stages in England.

“Real architecture, physical buildings, are built for people to live. And for movies, these are more meant to express the emotional aspect of things. It’s a psychological construct,” Chieh said.

In a recently published video essay on YouTube, Chieh dives deep into those psychological constructs and how, as he puts it, “Kubrick designed the Overlook Hotel not as a backdrop, but as the film's true villain.”

How spaces scare 

Chieh said during the monthslong process he was reminded of the power of architecture and design in the real world too – whether it’s an uncomfortably repetitive carpet design or a claustrophobic hallway.

“A physical construct can affect your emotion,” Chieh said.

“You can use it in a way to make people feel comfortable and you can also use it in a way to create fear.”

Chieh's 3D rendering of the Torrance's apartment in 'The Shining'

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What’s next for this architect moonlighting as a 3D modeler?

Chieh says he’s thinking about giving the spaceship from “2001: A Space Odyssey" the virtual treatment next. Or maybe turning to a local non-fictional space, like the Stahl House.

That is, of course, if he can ever escape the Overlook.