The Brief

Gov. Gavin Newsom stepped up to a lectern on a March day three years ago and proposed a new solution to one of the state’s most difficult problems: How to help the thousands of Californians sleeping on the streets while suffering from severe mental illness.

After all, he said, everything the state has done before has failed. One of the state’s prior attempts — a treatment referral program called Laura’s Law — helped just 218 people during the 2018-19 fiscal year, he said.

“That certainly is not demonstrable progress,” Newsom said. His new program would be different.

But in the nearly two years since Newsom launched CARE Court, it has reached only a few hundred people. That's barely more than the law he criticized, and certainly not the thousands he promised.

CalMatters requested CARE Court data from every county in California and conducted more than 30 interviews to compile the first detailed, statewide look at the program. Up and down California, the data show low numbers, a slow rollout and predictions that wildly outpaced reality.

The program was designed to allow family members, first responders, doctors and others to petition the courts on behalf of someone with severe psychosis who can’t take care of themselves. If the petition is accepted, that person can then agree to voluntary treatment, which can include counseling, medication, housing and more.

If they refuse, a judge can order them to participate in a treatment plan.

CalMatters received responses from all but four of the state’s 58 counties. Here’s what the data shows:

• While Newsom’s administration estimated between 7,000 and 12,000 Californians would qualify for CARE Court, just 2,421 petitions have been filed through July, according to the Judicial Council of California. Only 528 of those have resulted in treatment agreements or plans.
• San Diego County anticipated receiving 1,000 petitions in the first year and establishing court-ordered treatment plans for 250 people. But in nearly two years, the county instead has received just 384 petitions and established 134 voluntary agreements.
• Los Angeles County saw 511 petitions filed – the most in the state. Of those, 112 resulted in care agreements or plans. In 2023, officials predicted to news organizations the county could enroll 4,500 people in the first year.
• Courts across California are dismissing a significant percentage of CARE Court petitions – about 45% statewide, although that number includes the handful of cases in which someone has successfully “graduated” from the program. The rate is even higher in some counties, such as San Francisco, where nearly two-thirds of petitions are thrown out. 
• The allure of CARE Court for many supporters was the promise of court-ordered treatment plans that would encourage sick people to accept the help they’d been resisting. But the courts have ordered just 14 treatment plans so far, according to the Judicial Council. Instead, most counties are solely offering voluntary treatment “agreements,” which sick people are free to ignore.
• Very few people have successfully completed CARE Court. Despite the fact that it has the most petitions, Los Angeles County has had no graduations. Nine counties have been operating CARE Court long enough to have graduations (the program takes at least a year to complete). 

“It’s going much more slowly than we thought it would,” said Lisa U’Ren, a former member of the board of directors at the Solano County branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, who helped roll out the program in her county.

The stakes are high for Newsom, who has tied his legacy in part to big promises that he would address California’s twin problems of homelessness and inadequate mental health services. The establishment of CARE Court was followed by a 2023 law intended to make it easier for a judge to order someone into involuntary treatment. A successful 2024 ballot measure issued $6.4 billion in debt to pay for new mental health housing.

State officials say CARE Court needs more time to hit the goals initially set by the Newsom administration. Already some counties are doing an “incredible job,” said Stephanie Welch, deputy secretary of behavioral health for the state Health and Human Services Agency. She pointed to Alameda County, which has racked up 125 petitions — among the most in the state – since December.

“I think this has been a complicated program to implement,” Welch said, “and that’s something that we recognize and we’ve been doing our best to support the counties to be able to expand this program.”

A spokesperson for Newsom’s office said the administration is pleased with what the program has accomplished so far.

“Thanks to the CARE Act, thousands of people are engaging in critical behavioral health treatment through stabilizing medications, community-based care, and — if needed — housing,” Elana Ross said in an emailed statement.

But disability rights organizations say the low numbers are evidence that the program was a waste of money, a reactionary political gambit by a governor with presidential aspirations. And many families who initially threw their support behind CARE Court also say it has come up short.

Anita Fisher advocated for the program when Newsom proposed it, speaking on 60 Minutes about her family’s story and meeting with the governor himself, she said. When the program was piloted in San Diego County, where she lives, she felt hopeful about its promise to treat people with serious mental illness, like her son.

“I've watched my son suffer too many times: jail, prison, homeless,” she said. “And I said, ‘so if this can stop that?’ I said, ‘Yes, I'm all for it.’”

But now?

“I look at it as a total failure.”

A petition could be rejected because the person doesn’t meet the narrow eligibility criteria (only people with schizophrenia and other limited psychotic disorders qualify). When the subject of a petition is homeless, outreach workers sometimes have trouble finding them on the street. Other times, the client simply refuses services – and, CARE Court has little teeth to force them to accept, even after a judge’s order.

Making more people eligible for CARE Court

A bill making its way through the Legislature could boost CARE Court numbers by making more people eligible. If Sen. Thomas Umberg’s Senate Bill 27 becomes law, people who experience psychotic symptoms as a result of bipolar disorder would qualify for the program.

The program as it stands is not broken, the senator said, it’s a “work in progress” that needs some tweaking to reach its full potential.

“To some degree, expectations were raised, some that were accurate, some that were not accurate, that this was going to be a panacea,” Umberg said. “And I never thought of it that way.”

But it’s unclear how many more people could enter into CARE Court as a result of Umberg’s bill. His office has no estimate, and other guesses vary widely. San Diego County says the bill could increase its numbers by anywhere from 3.5% to 48.1%.

Many disability rights organizations strongly oppose the bill, saying it will significantly expand an ineffective program, doing nothing to solve underlying issues of housing shortages and inadequate mental health services

“They’re not trying to fix a problem, they’re trying to deliver political optics, and that’s all this ever was,” said Lex Steppling, a founding member of All People’s Health Collective.

Eve Garrow, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said that, “given what I consider to be the failure of CARE Court so far,” she expects Umberg’s bill is primarily an effort to increase the number of petitions.

“A court order doesn’t make resources appear out of thin air,” she said.

The jury box in a double-jury courtroom at San Diego Superior Court in downtown San Diego on Aug. 12, 2025. Jurors in these courtrooms participate in joint trials with multiple defendants.

(

Adriana Heldiz

/

CalMatters

)

The state spent $88.3 million on CARE Court in the 2022-23 fiscal year, and $71.3 million in 2023-24, according to a Legislative Analyst’s Office analysis. With fewer than 550 people receiving services through the program so far, critics accuse CARE Court of wasting state money.

The Assembly Judiciary Committee’s July analysis of SB 27 described CARE Court as a “very expensive” way to coordinate services.

But California counties say the low numbers of CARE agreements don’t capture the entirety of the program’s impact. Even petitions that don’t lead to official agreements have afforded counties the chance to connect with and offer services to people they hadn’t previously known.

“I would say that I think the whole idea of looking at the numbers, it sort of misses the point,” said Michelle Doty Cabrera, executive director of the California Behavioral Health Directors Association. “With anything coercive, the goal is to try to engage people out of their own free will into services.”

One of CARE Court’s successes, she said, has been in spreading the word about county services to people who might need them. If those people then express interest without the need for any coercion, “that’s a success and so far that has not been quantified,” she said.

The state has attempted to quantify that elusive number: As of December, people were diverted away from CARE Court and into other county services 1,358 times, according to a recent report from the Health and Human Services Agency.

Counties administering CARE Court also said it’s one of the few state programs that funds outreach. It can require a lot of attempts before outreach workers can coax certain people into services, they said, and this provides a mechanism to pay for those efforts.

A flood of petitions that never materialized

Eight California counties rolled out CARE Court at the end of 2023, as part of a pilot group. The rest of the state had the program up and running by December 2024.

As San Diego County counted down to the launch, officials worried they would be flooded with petitions immediately, said Amber Irvine, the county’s behavioral health program coordinator.

The county hired nearly two-dozen people, including 10 clinicians, two psychologists and support staff to meet the expected demand. The money for those new positions came from county funds, not from the state.

That flood of petitions never materialized.

Irvine thinks the process of filing a petition was harder than expected. Her team thought first responders, hospitals and behavioral health workers would jump at the chance to refer people into the program. But that didn’t happen. The petitioner has to attend at least the first court hearing, which is something many overworked first responders and clinicians can’t do, Irvine said.

Police and firefighters filed petitions when the program first started, but they were often dismissed — which made the first responders reluctant to file more, said Crystal Robbins, who manages a treatment referral program for San Diego Fire-Rescue.

“We quickly found out that it wasn’t a useful tool for the people that we see,” she said.

A homeless encampment on a sidewalk in San Diego, on July 31, 2023.

(

Mike Blake

/

Reuters

)

The process also is tough for families petitioning on behalf of loved ones, Irvine said. It requires them to prove their loved one has a qualifying mental health condition, but federal privacy laws can make that a big hurdle.

The county is trying to make the process less cumbersome, Irvine said. It is letting family members and some other petitioners attend court hearings virtually, for example. And in some cases, the court is allowing petitions to move on to the next step even if they don’t have all the required paperwork.

So far, San Diego County Superior Court has received the second-largest number of petitions in the state — 384, with 35% leading to CARE agreements.

But that’s still far behind initial projections.

The slow start could be a “happy accident,” Irvine said, because the low case load allows clinicians to spend more time with each CARE Court client.

But Anita Fisher isn’t the only family member who feels discouraged about the program’s roll out in San Diego.

Tanya Fedak said she has twice filed petitions in the county on behalf of her son, who continues to cycle between homelessness and jail despite being accepted into CARE Court.

“These are our loved ones,” she said. “It's our taxpayers’ money. There's no accountability. And it's frustrating to see it go down, because my son is going to end up dead.”

Orange County, which was part of the initial CARE Court cohort, expected to receive 1,400 petitions and establish between 400 and 600 treatment plans its first year. Two years later, it has received at least 176 petitions , reached 14 CARE agreements and ordered one CARE plan, according to the county’s behavioral health department. That doesn’t include additional petitions that could have been dismissed by the court before reaching the county.

Orange County was the only superior court in the state with a significant number of petitions that did not disclose its data to CalMatters.

Veronica Kelley, director of the Orange County Health Care Agency, said she never expected to reach as many people as the original estimate. She attributed that in part to the county already reaching many people with schizophrenia spectrum disorder through its existing assisted outpatient treatment program (the program created by the law Newsom criticized at the 2023 press conference), which provides similar services to CARE Court.

Kelley believes expanding the older program would have been a better use of the resources now going to CARE Court. In part, she said, that’s because Orange County’s assisted outpatient program makes it easy for people to ask the county for help, whereas filing a CARE petition is “a laborious process” that requires significant work from the petitioner.

Other people blame the low CARE Court numbers on a lack of awareness.

After CARE Court rolled out in Solano County, the local branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness hosted town halls to teach the community about the program. An in-person town hall drew about 10 people, said NAMI Solano County Executive Director Deb Demello. Two Zoom meetings drew about four people each. And they didn’t see people from the main group they were trying to reach: family members of people with a severe mental illness.

“We had very little turn out,” Demello said.

CARE Court use varies widely county by county, with some smaller counties appearing to struggle with the resources to implement the program. Colusa County, with a population of fewer than 22,000 people on the edge of the Mendocino National Forest, told the state last year that its courts weren’t prioritizing CARE Court because of court vacancies. The county has received just one petition.

Eight small counties, including Mendocino and San Benito, said they’ve had no petitions filed.

Some county courts refused to disclose their data to CalMatters because the numbers were too small, citing the California Rules of Court, which allow courts to withhold data if the sample size is so small that people could be identified.

Courts are required to report limited CARE Court data to the California Judicial Council, including the number of petitions submitted, number of agreements and plans, and number of dismissals. But the council would give only statewide totals to CalMatters, not a county-by-county breakdown.

Will expanding CARE Court help more people?

Even if someone becomes one of the few Californians represented in a CARE Court petition, it doesn’t mean they’ll get help.

In San Francisco, the majority of petitions filed end up getting dismissed – 49 of the 75 — or 65% — of those filed. That’s one of the highest dismissal rates in the state.

Some counties, including San Francisco, told CalMatters that people may still receive services even if their CARE Court petition is dismissed. But a state report released in July found that of the 160 people whose petitions were dismissed during the first nine months of CARE Court, 90 did not receive county behavioral health services.

Of the 130 petitions dismissed in Los Angeles County between December 2023 and February of this year, 43 were dismissed because the person was already receiving “adequate mental health services,” according to a report by the county’s department of mental health. It’s the most common reason for a dismissal in that county.

State Sen. Tom Umberg in the Senate chambers of the state Capitol on Dec. 5, 2022.

(

Martin do Nascimento

/

CalMatters

)

Umberg wants to address that with his bill. Currently, someone can’t qualify for CARE Court if they are already “clinically stabilized” in another treatment program. Umberg’s bill would clarify that just being enrolled in an outside treatment program doesn’t mean someone is stable. He hopes that will cut down on the number of people whose petitions are dismissed even though their mental illness is not under control.

His bill would also make it easier for the criminal justice system to funnel people into CARE Court, by allowing a judge to refer someone directly into the program if they are charged with a misdemeanor and deemed incompetent to stand trial.

Irvine, San Diego County’s behavioral health program coordinator, is not thrilled about Umberg’s plan to expand CARE Court. The California Behavioral Health Directors Association also opposes the bill.

Irvine takes pride in the amount of time and energy her staff put into each CARE Court client. She says they spend weeks or even months getting to know them, bringing them their favorite foods, and helping with minor tasks, such as getting a new phone, before finally convincing them to participate in the program. In at least one case, that process took as long as five months, she said.

By some accounts, San Diego County’s approach is working. It has had 10 graduations so far, the most of any county that reported that metric to CalMatters.

Adding a lot more people into the program would give clinicians less time to spend with each client, Irvine said. And Umberg’s bill doesn’t come with money to hire more staff.

The county data in this story is based on public record requests to California county courts and behavioral health departments about CARE Court usage. See full methodology and download the data.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Federal officers handle security screening at all but a small fraction of U.S. airports, but the Trump administration is hoping to change that. Under the Transportation Security Administration's new program called TSA Gold+, private companies would play a much larger role in airport security than they have in decades.

The TSA is set to host officials from airports and security contractors to an "industry day" at its Springfield, Va., headquarters on Thursday, as it looks to develop TSA Gold+, a public-private program that the agency calls "transformative."

The agency is billing the program as an update to the Screening Partnership Program, or SPP, in which 20 U.S. airports currently use private security screeners rather than federal workers.

"TSA Gold+ marks a significant evolution in the agency's approach to aviation security," a TSA spokesperson told NPR via an emailed statement.

The agency says airports that opt into the program would be able to tailor security systems for their facility — and avoid the TSA staffing shortages that became a very public headache at airports during the recent government shutdown over Homeland Security funding.

It also says the program would bring "the latest technology" such as AI tools to airport screening operations, to increase capacity and cut wait times, although the agency did not specify how those gains would be achieved. From the details shared so far, the equipment would be the contractors' responsibility — a departure from the current SPP system, in which TSA controls the equipment and oversees the security contract. The TSA says it would perform the oversight role it currently does.

"Industry partners can manage equipment and introduce innovations, while travelers enjoy a smooth, predictable, and bespoke experience," the TSA said as it unveiled TSA Gold+.

Airports currently using the private Screening Partnership Program range from San Francisco and Kansas City to Sarasota, Fla., and Atlantic City, N.J., along with smaller facilities in Montana, Wyoming and other states.

Calls for privatizing airport security screening have come from President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress, echoing a recommendation in the conservatives' Project 2025 handbook for a second Trump term. But there are also signs of bipartisan interest in some level of private control over airport security, as seen in Atlanta, where city leaders recently voted to explore joining the Screening Partnership Program.

Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, touted that bipartisan interest on Wednesday during a hearing on TSA Modernization. But Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees union, which represents TSA officers, said he opposes further privatization — including the TSA Gold+ program, warning that it would hamper accountability and transparency.

Under the new program, Kelley said, contract workers would earn less than TSA officers. He added that while many transportation security officers hold security clearances, under the new plan, the government "would be ceding direct operational control of the most sensitive technology in the aviation security enterprise to private vendors."

The White House budget released last month promises to save some $52 million by privatizing airport screeners and requiring small airports to enroll in the SPP.

But officials at the hearing urged lawmakers to preserve airports' ability to choose.

Chris McLaughlin, CEO of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, noted that the SPP has been in place since aviation security underwent drastic changes following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which led to the creation of the TSA and the SPP system.

"We've had federalized screening for 25 years, almost," McLaughlin said. "Large airports like San Francisco have had an SPP program for 25 years."

Both airports' arrangements work well for them, he told Garbarino.

"The system has been safe for 25 years," he said. "It's important that airports have options."

The new "Gold+" program echoes the Trump administration's promise to bring a "golden age of travel" to the American public. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy touted those plans earlier this week, as he unveiled $970 million in funding to improve passengers' experiences at airports, from adding family-friendly security screening lanes to improving restrooms and children's play areas.

The money for those projects comes from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a Biden-era law aiming to update airports' aging infrastructure.
Copyright 2026 NPR

A marine layer will cover mostly the coastal areas today, lowering temperatures a degree or two. Otherwise expect a sunny afternoon elsewhere across SoCal.

L.A. County beaches will see temperatures in the lower 70s today, whereas Orange County could reach up to 79 degrees along the coast.

More inland, the valleys will see highs in the mid 80s. The Inland Empire will see highs from 83 to 91 degrees. In Coachella Valley, temperatures are expected to reach up to 100 degrees.

Happy long weekend! The Late Show with Stephen Colbert plays the funnyman’s swan song tonight, so my calendar is booked to stay up past my bedtime. Closer to home, the Yoko Ono exhibit (which comes to us straight from the Tate Modern in London) opens just in time for Memorial Day weekend, so watch this space for more on that.

There’s music for lovers of every genre this week, according to our friends at Licorice Pizza. On Friday, Yungblud and special guests Warning rock the Greek, and Dethklok plays the Palladium; jazz trumpeter Chris Botti begins his residency at the Blue Note.

Saturday, Bright Eyes performs I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn in their entirety at the Hollywood Bowl with openers the Moldy Peaches; American Football is at the Wiltern; Belgium’s Ultra Sunn plays the Belasco; Italy’s Mina is at the Echoplex; DJ KSHMR plays the Palladium; and then, for a different sort of “Kashmir,” Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening takes over the Greek.

On Sunday, brush your teeth with a bottle of Jack for the millennial dance party of the week at the Forum with Kesha, Chromeo and Sizzy Rocket. There’s also the big Day Trip afternoon concert at L.A. State Historic Park with Joseph Capriati, Toman and Cole Terrazas. For a more mellow Sunday, singer-songwriter Katelyn Tarver is at the Echoplex, R&B singer-songwriter Eric Bellinger plays the Novo, or classic crooner Paul Anka is doing it his way at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

Elsewhere on LAist, you can check out four new food halls, wander around a favorite new Sundays-only bookstore, and yes, I’ll remind you again — make your upcoming Election Day picks with the help of our Voter Game Plan.

Events

L.A. Fleet Week

Through Monday, May 25
Pacific Battleship Center
250 S. Harbor Blvd., San Pedro 
COST: FREE; MORE INFO 

(

Courtesy L.A. Fleet Week

)

Tour the U.S.S. Iowa and check out the three visiting battleships at San Pedro’s Pacific Battleship Center during L.A.’s annual Memorial Day weekend Fleet Week on the waterfront. Plus, there are exhibits to walk through, food stands to try and music for the whole family. Not to mention those cute sailors in their whites.

Topanga Days

Saturday to Monday, May 23 to 25, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
1440 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga
COST: ADULTS $31.80; MORE INFO

(

Fadeout Media

/

Topanga Days

)

Topanga Days is the easiest way to time-travel back to a simpler time when folk musicians roamed the hills, winning a yodeling contest was the biggest bragging right and you spent all year coming up with your parade costume. Those days are here once a year at Topanga Days, headlined on Saturday by New Orleans icon Cyril Neville and peppered with cherry-seed-spitting and bubble-gum-blowing contests, tons of other music, food, and, of course, the parade.

Exit the King

Through Sunday, May 31
A Noise Within
3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena
COST: FROM $49.75; MORE INFO 

(

Craig Schwartz

/

Lucy PR

)

The name of this Eugène Ionesco classic alone — Exit the King — should give you some sense of where the always-on-point folks at A Noise Within were going when they chose it at this moment. The political satire borders on the absurd, with the L.A. Times likening the vibrant characters to “those in a deck of wild cards designed by Salvador Dalí.”

K-Expo

Saturday and Sunday, May 23 to 24
L.A. Live 
1005 Chick Hearn Court, Downtown L.A.
COST: FREE; MORE INFO

(

Courtesy BLND PR

)

K-Pop fans will flock to the K-Expo at L.A. Live, where you can see free exhibitions and events featuring 100 Korean brands and companies across content, beauty, food and technology all weekend long. Stick around Saturday night and grab a ticket (from $47) to the mega K-Pop concert at the Peacock Theater, featuring Jay Park and P1Harmony.

MAINopoly 

Sunday, May 24, 1 p.m. 
Main Street, Santa Monica 
COST: FROM $28.01; MORE INFO

(

Courtesy MAINopoly Santa Monica

)

Eat your way down Main Street in Santa Monica at the annual Monopoly-themed food festival, which this year will allow drinks while you walk and eat thanks to a new city permit. The popular food-and-bar stretch near the beach is experiencing a little revival with the reopening of dive bar favorite Circle Bar, plus newish hot spots like Triple Beam Pizza and June Shine. I also heard a rumor that something new is finally coming into the old World Cafe space (!!).

Arroyo Secodelic Festival

Friday to Monday, May 22 to 25
Various locations, Highland Park
COST: VARIES; MORE INFO

(

Courtesy Arroyo Secodelic

)

As LAist's Robert Garrova reports, a new four-day music festival takes over Figueroa Street in Highland Park this weekend. The Arroyo Secodelic Festival will feature 65 bands, with acts hailing from Los Angeles, Mexico and as far as France and Holland. Highlights include Flamin' Groovies, Fear and Adolescents.

Angel City Chorale Spring Concert 

Sunday, May 24, 4 p.m.
Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center 
1935 Manhattan Beach Blvd., Redondo Beach 
COST: FROM $17; MORE INFO 

(

Mel Stave Photography

/

Angel City Chorale

)

Enjoy the healing sounds of Angel City Chorale as they perform a new show with the theme "The Red Thread" as “a tribute to the beloved age-old parable and celebration of the invisible threads that connect as humans, our hopes, joys, resilience in the face of adversity, connection to nature and a shared planet Earth.”

Kevin Morby

Friday, May 22, 8 p.m.
The Wiltern
3790 Wilshire Blvd., Koreatown
COST: $50-$60; MORE INFO 

Kevin Morby plays the Wiltern on Friday.

(

Jim Bennett

/

Getty Images

)

The nouveau bard of Kansas City returns to his once-adopted hometown of Los Angeles on the heels of his newest release, Little Wide Open. Morby's latest effort might be his most realized, fully embracing the Technicolor sweep of his indie-Americana sound — striking the sonic equivalent between a Terrence Malick film and Robert Frank's roadside photographs, seen through a passenger car window of a cross-country train. This time, Morby tapped Aaron Dessner of The National to serve as producer — who has most recently done the same for Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams and Sharon Van Etten — alongside a constellation of collaborators, including Justin Vernon, Lucinda Williams, Katie Gavin, Mat Davidson and Meg Duffy. Brooklyn-based Liam Kazar opens. –Gab Chabrán

UCLA JazzReggae Festival

Monday, May 25, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
UCLA Wilson Plaza
COST: $26.14; MORE INFO 

Three little birds told me to get down to the UCLA JazzReggae Festival on Memorial Day. The yearly music fest draws students and neighbors alike for a full day of sunshine, food, music and jammin’. The fest is fully organized and run by student volunteers, and has been since its founding 40 years ago.

Forest Lawn Memorial Day remembrances

Monday, May 25 
Various locations 
COST: FREE; MORE INFO 

Forest Lawn in Glendale is one of several locations hosting Memorial Day events.

(

David McNew

/

Getty Images

)

Honor veterans across Los Angeles as Forest Lawn hosts Memorial Day remembrances at each of its six Southern California locations: Cathedral City, Covina Hills, Cypress, Glendale, Hollywood Hills and Long Beach. The parkwide events will celebrate the lives of those who served, with patriotic music, wreath layings, presentations and retirings of the flag, keynote addresses, presidential proclamations, invocations, giveaways, coffee and sweet treats. All events will include American Sign Language interpreters.

You could call it a fulfillment of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous promise from the first Terminator movie in 1984: “I’ll be back.”

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the bigger budget, multi-award winning follow-up to that first film is coming back to theaters in Los Angeles starting this weekend, in celebration of the film’s 35th anniversary.

Considered one of the best action films and best sequels of all time, it’s also celebrated among film experts for its groundbreaking use of CGI visual effects — most notably for the T-1000 character, a liquid metal cyborg masquerading as an LAPD officer, played by Robert Patrick.

Where to watch ‘T2’ on the big screen

While the American Cinematheque’s first two 35th anniversary screenings of Terminator 2 are already sold out, as of this article’s publishing time, tickets to screenings on May 29 (at Los Feliz 3) and May 30 (at Aero Theatre in Santa Monica) are still available.

Tickets for screenings on May 22 at The Ojai Playhouse and June 6 and 7 at The Vista in Los Feliz are also still available, and Rialto Pictures also lists screenings on July 2-5 at The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana.

And while the screening at The Academy Museum on May 27 (with the film’s Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren in person) is sold out, we have you covered with some highlights from Muren’s interview with LAist below.

Making the impossible possible with CGI

Terminator 2, director James Cameron’s follow up to his surprise 1984 hit, The Terminator, was the first (and still only) movie in what would become the six-film Terminator franchise to earn an Oscar win or nomination.

Ultimately, the film took home four Oscars — for visual effects (for Dennis Muren, Stan Winston, Gene Warren, Jr. and Robert Skotak), makeup, sound, and sound effects editing — and also earned nominations for cinematography and film editing.

The visual effects studio responsible for the T-1000 character’s CGI effects was Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), founded in 1975 by Star Wars creator George Lucas. Dennis Muren headed up their Terminator 2 team, which consisted of about 35 artists.

Muren remembers first being taken with visual effects at the age of 6 or 7, watching The War of the Worlds (1953) in Los Angeles. He made his first film — a “creature feature” called Equinox — the summer between his freshman and sophomore years at Pasadena City College, and would go on to work for ILM on visual effects for movies like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, and (fittingly) the 2005 version of War of the Worlds.

A scene from 'Terminator 2' (1991).

(

via film-grab.com

)

ILM and Muren began development on the CGI techniques that would be needed to pull off Terminator 2’s T-1000 character in movies like 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes and 1989’s The Abyss, which was also directed by James Cameron.

“ILM has been so good at being able to really do the impossible,” Muren said. “And we kind of joke about that, but we've got many different ways of doing things.”

When the opportunity for Terminator 2 came up, Muren had also just returned from a year-long sabbatical he spent studying computer graphics, and said he was confident ILM had the tools needed to make the T-1000 character a reality.

“We were ready to input the film digitally,” Muren explained. “[To] do all the manipulation in a computer instead of with optical film running through printers and going to labs for processing.”

And when ILM got that digital system for “compositing” — combining live-action images, practical and CGI effects — working seamlessly, Muren says, “That was an incredible tool.”

But that didn’t mean that pulling off a shiny, shape-shifting, liquid metal character successfully would be easy.

“It's just complicated,” Muren explained. “You've just got this reflective material [and] how are we supposed to be able to see depth or shape when it's deforming?” But at the same time, Muren said, “that's what was exciting about it.”

Muren says the trickiest scene for the team to figure out is when the T-1000 walks through a cell door made of metal bars. While it happens in a matter of seconds on screen, it amounted to 14 to 16 weeks of work for the visual effects team.

“I always said that shot, even as we were doing it, and we got close to finishing, I said, ‘This is an absolutely impossible shot,’” Muren explained. So when they got it right, he said, “It was like a new world.”

Today, while he says Jurassic Park (1993) is the film he’s now asked about most often, he always reminds people: “T2 was really the breakthrough film.”