When the wildfires hit at the beginning of this year, the devastating impact on industry members was immediate. One Palisades resident who had to find shelter immediately was Adam Lorenzo, a veteran comedy writer and filmmaker who got his first gig in 1999 as a staff writer by sending jokes to David Letterman. In the world of late-night TV, Adam also worked on Saturday Night Live and found a mentor in Al Franken, who pushed him to write sitcom spec scripts – which came in handy when he shared a barber with Ray Romano. (Adam ended up selling his first script to Everybody Loves Raymond.) “I freaked out bouncing around from one hotel to another,” he says of his experience keeping a roof over his head in the aftermath of the fires. “I was talking to an emergency service when I had to get out within 48 hours. 
They said if I had nowhere to live, MPTF might have a place open.” MPTF welcomed him to the campus where he first moved into a bungalow that had been the home of another writer, Tony Lawrence, whose wife, Madi Smith, still lives nearby on the campus.
“To be able to have a bed to sleep in, food to eat, and friendly smiles really puts it all in perspective,” he says of his time here. He also had time to regroup when a film project he was working on, a high-concept romantic comedy called The Break-Up Pill, got sidelined by the wildfires. Now the directorial debut of Tom Arnold, the film (which has now wrapped and will be coming soon) got back off the ground and even shot scenes here on the MPTF campus, including the John Ford Chapel and the Louis B. Mayer Memorial Theater. “It’s humanity at its best,” he says of the experience. “The nicest people, the nicest community. I get emotional when I think about it.”
All photos by Julian Stephens
