The Brief

More than two decades after planning for the transformation of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art began — including more than a decade of work with architect Peter Zumthor and five years of construction — the new LACMA building is finally open to the public.

Well, sort of.

For a limited time (July 3-7), members of LACMA and local kids (on July 6) can get previews of the building — officially called the David Geffen Galleries — before the art is installed and the full museum opening, scheduled for April 2026.

The previews of the new concrete and glass building straddling Wilshire Boulevard kicked off in style last week with three nights of performances featuring composer, bandleader and saxophonist Kamasi Washington presenting his six-movement suite Harmony of Difference, with the help of more than 100 musicians.

The building has faced a fair share of criticisms — from the cost, to the choice of construction materials, to the look of the design. But it also has some big supporters.

We were curious to hear from attendees of the previews and people who live in the neighborhood about their impressions of the new building, so we got their reactions at an early preview night at LACMA this week:

‘It’s fabulous’

Holly Marie Lennon Durivage (L) and  Terrence Charles Durivage Lennon (R) outside the new David Geffen Galleries building at LACMA.

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“I love it” was North Hollywood resident Holly Marie Lennon Durivage’s first reaction to the look of the building’s exterior.

Her husband Terrence added, “I do too. It has kind of that Jetsons feel to it, you know? This new sweeping look of the gallery going across Wilshire. I think it's got a real nice aesthetic to it.”

Holly was pleased that the new building seemed to complement LACMA’s Pavilion for Japanese Art: “ I think this has a similar aesthetic. It's very low and curved and a lot of glass. I think it's fabulous, so we're excited to go inside. We're seeing this tiny bit, but I think it's exciting and I think it's great for Los Angeles.”

'Like it was AI'

LACMA members are getting a preview of the new David Geffen Galleries from July 3-7.

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Miracle Mile resident Pep Love’s first reaction to the building: “It  looks almost like it was AI.”

It also struck him as reminiscent of some “odd” buildings in Culver City designed by architect Eric Owen Moss.

Even though he saw the construction happening on the building every day, he said it took him a while "to actually connect that what they were building that was going over the road was also part of the new structure.”

His overall impression: “ It gives me a vision of like this futurist vision for L.A.”

'Amoeba monster'

Savannah Merritt (L) and John Buckley (R) were among the first to see inside the new David Geffen Galleries.

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LACMA members Savannah Merritt and John Buckley came from the east side for the preview and said they were impressed with what they saw.

Merritt said one of her first thoughts walking up to the building was: “Amoeba monster. It looks like this cool concrete creature that holds art.”

She added that on its own, "it's really, really cool, but together with the other buildings in Museum Row, it is much more iconic as this collective.”

As for the criticisms of the design?

“ It's easy when there's any sort of new building or public art, people like to kind of pick it apart and then years later they are totally fine with it and love it," Buckley said. "You know, the Eiffel Tower was this horrible, ugly thing when it was put in, and now it's one of the most beautiful things in the world.”

‘A bunker look,’ (but also) ‘It’s great’

Kin Lee (L) and Sywn Hsiao (R) before a preview event for LACMA's new David Geffen Galleries.

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“I think it's great," said Kin Lee, an Irvine resident and long-time LACMA member. "The old buildings were really kind of showing their age and this new building looks modern and maybe it'll be another landmark.”

He had some mixed feelings too.

“It doesn't seem to be as open and welcome as we’d hope, because it's kind of a bunker look here with all the concrete," he said.

But also, he hoped the single-story design of the galleries would be an improvement from the old buildings, recalling previously having to go up several floors to see the Latin American art collection:  “Who would be able to find that if you don't purposefully look and know there's a destination?”

Inside a preview of the new David Geffen Galleries on July 1, 2025.

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For now, Lee said he wanted to reserve judgment, for at least “three to five years” before making a call on whether the building would be “a failure or a success.”

“I mean, it attracts attention,” he said. “ But does it age well? We don't know.”

MacArthur Park will close every night once an 8-foot-tall fence goes up around the green space, with Los Angeles police officers sweeping the park for encampments and people sleeping there before the gates shut. The Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners approved the plan Thursday.

Construction of the green metal fence is expected to begin in November and continue through spring 2027, Recreation and Parks officials said during a public meeting.

The park will stay open while the fence is being built. Once construction is finished, the gates are expected to close from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. LAPD officers will patrol the park while it is open.

Officials said the fence is not intended to be permanent.

The Department of Recreation and Parks plans to review the fence after three years, looking at maintenance, crime and feedback from people who use the park. The department has set specific benchmarks that could eventually lead to the fence coming down.

The three-year review will include a comparison with Lafayette Park, which Recreation and Parks is using as a benchmark for maintenance and crime.

The department wants MacArthur Park to eventually have no more than about twice as many maintenance and repair requests as Lafayette Park. MacArthur Park covers about 35 acres, while Lafayette Park covers about 10 acres. General Manager Jimmy Kim said Thursday that MacArthur Park had a 230% higher rate of repair work orders than Lafayette Park.

A rendering shows a proposed green metal gate at one of MacArthur Park’s entrances.

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From January through August 2026, MacArthur Park also recorded 136 robberies and aggravated assaults, compared with 20 at Lafayette Park. Neither park recorded a homicide during that period.

MacArthur Park recorded 694 arrests during those eight months, compared with 36 at Lafayette Park.

The department also plans to survey park users and conduct another community survey through the council office as part of the three-year review. 

The nightly closures will also change how law enforcement handles the park. 

LAPD plans to sweep the park every night before the gates close, according to Capt. Ben Fernandes, who represented the Rampart Division at Thursday’s Recreation and Park Commission meeting.

“For right now, we will do a full sweep of the park before the gates close on each side of the park,” Fernandes said. He added that LAPD has been “very good about keeping encampments out of the park.”

Officers will monitor the park while it is open, working with LAPD’s Security Services Division, Fernandes said. First responders will have keys and access to the park at all hours.

Community members attend a Recreation and Park Commission meeting Thursday, Oct. 1, where commissioners approved final plans for a new fence around MacArthur Park.

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The nightly sweeps also raised the question of what will happen to people who are found sleeping in the park. 

Fernandes said the mayor’s office would provide service providers who can assist people struggling with substance use and people experiencing homelessness.

“So, if we do come across someone who is asleep in the park during our sweep, we will be able to hopefully make them be involved in those services and hopefully get them housed,” he said.

Recreation and Parks says the fence would give the department more control over the park after hours. The department said MacArthur Park had a 230% higher rate of repair work orders for lighting, plumbing and graffiti than Lafayette Park between January 2025 and June 2026, and that damage and vandalism typically occur overnight.

Those improvements are part of a larger list of changes planned for the park. Recreation and Parks plans to restore access through the tunnel connecting the park’s north and south sides, improve accessibility, add free Wi-Fi and replace some of the park’s existing lights with solar-powered fixtures.

The department listed more recreational programming, including run and walk events, movies in the park, sports and fitness classes, quarterly community events and the return of pedal boats on the lake.

Recreation and Parks plans to return to the community later this month with another update on the project.

The post LA will start building a fence around MacArthur Park in November appeared first on LA Local.

The second of two state-commissioned, independent reports on the 2025 L.A. fires has been released.

The analysis by the Fire Safety Research Institute details the effectiveness of the response to the Palisades and Eaton fires, which killed at least 31 people and destroyed more than 16,000 homes and buildings, mostly in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

Gov. Gavin Newsom called for an independent investigation into the response to the fires just a few days after they started on Jan. 7, 2025. His administration commissioned the nonprofit Fire Safety Research Institute to carry it out. L.A. County (via the McChrystal Group) and the L.A. Fire Department have released similar reports.

The 724-page analysis released today details “the effectiveness of prevention and alerting efforts, conditions influencing the original fire situation, attempts to stop its rapid progression, and evacuation efforts.” The first report by the Fire Safety Research Institute recreated the timeline of each fire’s progression and associated emergency alerts.

The latest report highlights the unprecedented weather conditions ahead of the fires, the chaotic nature of the fires themselves and a lack of planning and coordination among authorities, despite many heroic rescues by field deputies, officers and civilians.

In the Eaton Fire, the report includes that observations by paramedics of embers into West Altadena was not conveyed to incident command hours before the first evacuation alert was sent there. In the Palisades, the report found that the L.A. Fire Department did not have a proper protocol to ensure the Lachman Fire was out, and a lack of communication among authorities led to heavily disorganized evacuations. And with multiple major fires occurring across a heavily urban landscape, firefighting and evacuation resources were stretched beyond capacity.

“The fires revealed implementation challenges, operational limitations, and areas where policies and practices have not evolved at the same pace as the wildfire risk facing California communities,” the report states.

The report also lays out 266 recommendations to improve before the next fire.

Find the whole report here.

Police divers have found the body of a patient who went missing after a medical helicopter crashed into the Pacific Ocean off Catalina Island, bringing the death toll to three while two other people were recovering from their injuries, authorities said Friday.

Divers with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department found the victim’s body Thursday in the wreckage of the helicopter after searching more than 156 square miles (404 square kilometers) over 23 hours, the Coast Guard said in a statement.

Relatives of the missing person told ABC7 that the woman was being transported from Catalina Island to the mainland for medical care after having an allergic reaction. They also said her 20-year-old son went with her in the helicopter to help translate.

The helicopter with five people aboard went down shortly after takeoff and hit the water not far from the island, officials said. The cause is not clear and the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating.

First responders pulled four people from the water on Wednesday night.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said that authorities were not yet identifying the victims by name. But he described the two people who died as the male pilot and a female nurse. He also said another medic and a fourth person, a man, were hospitalized.

Luna said the helicopter wreckage was about 200 feet (60 meters) deep in the water.

The helicopter’s operator, REACH Air Medical Services of Sacramento, confirmed that two of its crew members died and a third was recovering at a hospital. The company declined to provide more details.

“In the days ahead, our focus will remain on caring for our people, supporting their families and honoring the lives and service of those we have lost,” REACH said in a statement.

A memorial service was held on the island to honor the victims.

The crash came 11 days after a firefighting helicopter went down, killing two pilots in Yosemite National Park in California, and two weeks after a news helicopter crashed in Los Angeles, killing two people.

Emergency personnel were called to the Catalina crash shortly before 8 p.m. on Wednesday. Two people were pronounced dead at the scene, and two, in stable condition, were brought to hospitals on the mainland, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said.

The helicopter landed on the island shortly after 7 p.m., following a 24-minute flight from an airport in Oceanside, according to the flight tracking service Flightradar24.

At Signature Post in Burbank, Mariella Abaunza, the post-production company’s executive vice president for business development, shows off a photo of her talking to Gov. Gavin Newsom at the recent signing of AB 2319 at the Television Academy in North Hollywood.

Marielle Abaunza holds a photo of her and Gov. Gavin Newsom at the signing ceremony for California's new stand-alone post-production tax credit.

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She was there with the coalition that lobbied for the creation of a new stand-alone tax credit for post-production work done in California.

“It definitely restored my faith in government. ... Advocacy works,” she said.

It was a sizable coalition. Abaunza is president of the California Post Alliance, the post-production industry’s trade group. Leaders of the Motion Picture Association and the Editors Guild were there too.

The post-production tax credit is aimed at stopping the flight of TV and film work to other states and countries, attracted by generous tax incentives.

While there are existing tax credits for filming in California, under the new law, productions qualify for a 35% to 50% tax credit if post-production work such as editing, color correction, scoring and sound mixing is done in California, even if the filming was done outside the state.

But industry advocates acknowledge there’s a weakness in the law: Proponents initially asked lawmakers to set aside $100 million for the post-production tax breaks. By the time Newsom signed the bill into law, that amount had been drastically reduced to $10 million.

“That's going to get used up in a couple days. … It's not hard to allocate $10 million in post-production in California,” said Stephen Weizenecker, an entertainment lawyer based in Atlanta who advises TV and film productions on how to take advantage of tax credits in U.S. states and overseas.

But he said that regardless of the much lower cap, the credits will make California more competitive.

Abaunza hopes it will be a boost for Signature Post. The 6-year-old post-production company, which mixed sound for films and shows like  "Everything Everywhere All at Once," "American Fiction," and "Lessons in Chemistry," has been experiencing a slowdown, like many others.

“We're still ahead of the game, and we still have the largest concentration of post-production talent of anywhere in the world,” Abaunza said of Southern California.

But she said that post-production advantage has been eroded by new facilities and worker talent in the U.K. and Canada, among other countries.

Monica Levinson, executive producer of FX’s "Love Story," "Say Nothing," and many other TV and film projects, points out that those countries have another advantage: a lot more government social services.

She compared that to the U.S. “The one thing that this country has are unions, and it has health insurance, and it has pension plans, and the things that need to be put into the budgets of productions,” she said.

Weizenecker also noted that as much as producers might want to keep production in California or the U.S., they may not be the ones making the decisions about where work is done.

“ If Netflix only gives you so much to spend on the production, including post,” he said, “you're gonna go where it's the most cost-effective.”

Federal game changer

While the California tax credit is a step in the direction of keeping productions in the state, a much bigger tax credit is now making its way through the federal legislative process that may be even more transformative.

It’s called the Motion Picture, Television and Entertainment Revitalization Act and was co-authored by U.S. Sens. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, and Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina. President Donald Trump has also said he supports it.

If the bipartisan birth and early life of the bill isn’t enough to raise eyebrows, what it promises may be: a 20% federal, labor-based tax credit to U.S. TV and film productions where 75% of the days spent on principal photography happen in this country.

The bill would also favor post-production work and extend benefits to productions in some rural areas and places affected by disasters.

Marielle Abaunza is executive vice president of business development for Signature Post in Burbank.

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“These things could be real game changers to bring back the work here,” Levinson said. She’s the co-chair of the legislative committee for Producers United, a 3-year-old group that advocates for established TV and film producers. That position led her to join the coalition of groups working to get the federal bill passed.

TV and film production and post-production used to be dominated by California, and L.A. County in particular. But Hollywood, as it refers to what you see on the big and small screen, is a national business now.

“Everybody in this country is behind this federal incentive. And therefore, that's why it's become such a bipartisan effort because there's production in every state right now,” Levinson said.

Supporters have not said how much less money would go to public coffers if this federal tax credit passes.