“As a TV writer with no huge overall deal at a major studio, Morenike Balogun (How to Get Away With Murder, Blue Sky) was hit hard by the historic 148-day writers strike in 2023. Then came the death of her grandmother last year, and then her mother passed away just five months ago. And with the”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Then came the death of her grandmother last year, and then her mother passed away just five months ago. And with the start of the new year came the Palisades Fire, which has burned through more than 23,000 acres of the Palisades in Los Angeles County, including Balogun’s dream home she and her husband had been renovating.
“I saved my pennies to be able to afford this dream house in our dream location,” Balogun, whose other credits include Vampire Academy, Jupiter’s Legacy and Berlin Station, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “They say, ‘Buy the worst house on the block’ and fix it up, so that’s what we did. The house was kind of falling apart, and my husband lovingly did a lot of the renovations by himself. I did a lot of things to it, and it just became a haven in this mad, mad city.”
The Palisades, while home to many celebrities and the wealthy, is also considered home to working-class people and those who have inherited homes from their grandparents or parents, explains Balogun. “It’s not just the rich: this city is very diverse. It’s very complex, and there’s so many different reasons why people live in the Palisades and in Malibu.”
Living in the Palisades, Balogun, her husband and their two kids have seen evacuation orders from time to time, but this one felt different, she says. The sky had turned apocalyptic after warnings had begun to make the rounds, and the windows (that hadn’t been replaced in the renovation yet) began to rattle from the high winds. Balogun started packing up her car.
“I mostly packed the car with [my kids’] things… I packed some stuff for my dad,” she explains. “I packed a few of my things. I didn’t think my house was going to burn down, so I didn’t pack the things that I really, really would have gotten. I got my baby book. I got my mom’s scarf, which still had some of her hair in it.”
However, she wasn’t able to grab her dad’s sweaters. Her father, who has been living with them, is terminally ill and was evacuated to a nursing facility before the fires started picking up. “There are things of his that I’ve seen him wear my whole life, and are really precious to me and my siblings, and none of that stuff made it,” she says. “His writing… He’s a writer, and he had a lot of things that just didn’t make it through the fire. I only grabbed his essential stuff, like medicine and things he would need that day.”
On the day they were evacuated, she recalls a firefighter telling her husband, Arno, to cut some shrubbery in an effort to potentially save their home, so her husband stayed behind while Balogun left with her kids. “Part of me kind of knew, he’s this crazy German dude, that he’s gonna stay,” she says with a hint of laughter. “And funny enough, the only other person who stayed to fight the fire, and she ended up staying in her home, was also a German lady. Her name is Rosemary, so the two Germans stayed to fight the fire.”
Her husband ended up staying at the house with their dog, fighting the fires, until the next morning, and informed Balogun that he had saved the house. “God bless him, because honestly, after the strike, we’ve just been holding on to that house by our fingernails, working and doing whatever we can. We even borrowed from family… it was everything we had. So I know he felt this desperate need to save everything. Until I got staffed again, that was all we had.”
Thinking their house was safe, he set off to check on his neighbors’ houses. But by the time he came back, maybe an hour later, their house was engulfed in flames, with firefighters battling the blaze. Thankfully, firefighters, who arrived in the nick of time, had seen the dog inside and rescued him before it was too late.
Balogun and her family evacuated to a nearby hotel, and have been moving back and forth between Redondo Beach and Westlake Village since the fire took their home. Her father is at a nursing home in Ventura, so Westlake is close to him.
While she was able to save her mother’s scarf and her baby book, there are things she will never get back: Like her mother’s antique vanity that she had thrifted when Balogun was a child, filled with photographs of her parents when they were younger, of her as a child, and her with friends.
“Every once in a while, I looked through them, and it was so surreal to see all the things that [my parents] dealt with as immigrants coming to this country versus all the advantages I have because of them,” says Balogun. “It always gives me perspective, and especially after losing my mom… I know my sister has her photos. My brother has a few, but you take your own photos. And I don’t have those anymore, but I know they’re in my head somewhere.”
She adds: “Hopefully we can get back in — we still aren’t allowed in — because I want to see if anything survived, if there’s a laptop, and maybe there’s a hard drive that we can use, or something like that.”
Recovering from the writers strike, she says a motto she and her writing colleagues lived by was “survive to 25,” which seems bleak now given the way 2025 started. To help the industry recover from not only the strikes but from these wildfires, Balogun urges studios to bring productions back to the City of Angels.
“So much production has been taken overseas, and now those places have these thriving studios and production centers there, and I worry that that has been at the expense of this town,” Balogun, who also serves as a producer, says. “Of course, you want to shoot things that are authentic, and if it has a location to it, you want to go there and shoot that location for what it is. Absolutely, I understand that… But it’s gotten to the point where it’s tough for them to even promise to bring back jobs. I don’t see how they can make that promise that jobs are going to come back. I know that Gov. Newsom did a huge, super-sized credit recently to try and lure some jobs back here, and I hope that works. But I think studios and everybody just needs to really take a pause and think seriously about bringing as many jobs back here as possible, those that can be brought back, because they’re needed with crew. They’re needed with everybody below the line. And writing rooms being exported overseas also hurts… I really think we need to prioritize shooting in Los Angeles and keeping productions here, because if we don’t, I don’t see how we recover.”
Since the fires (including Eaton and Sunset) ravaged the city, communities near and far have been coming together to support victims of the fires, and Balogun and her family have seen that support firsthand, including through a GoFundMe set up by her friends.
“I’ve had so many people reach out to me, so many people care about us and ask us how we’re doing and what they can do to help us and support us, and it’s been so humbling,” she says. “So I know this town has it in it to really be caring and compassionate for each other. I know during the strikes, it felt very combative. It was like executives and studios on one side, all the artists on the other side, and it didn’t feel like a city that you love and in a place that you want to be. But now, it feels like everyone’s coming together, across all those lines, it’s just this one big city that loves each other and wants to care for each other, wants to recover. And I think you can apply that to the strikes, because although there were no like physical wounds, those wounds are still there as well. And for people right now who have lost their income and their livelihood through the strikes, and then now having this one-two punch with the fires… It’s devastating. So I think there has to be a support there, and a way for people to help people get jobs, help get people back to work, and do it in the same way that they’re helping with donations and things like that.”