Humble Hollywood bigwig raising funds for victims of wildfires
The sight of a couple on TV, talking about the loss of their home because of a wildfire burning in B.C.’s interior, really caught Larry Sugar.
Sugar, a retired movie executive who lives in Vancouver, said the image threw his mind back 40 years, to when he and his young family lived in Los Angeles.
He and his then wife were taking sons Michael and JB out for a family dinner; 20 minutes later, some sort of electrical fault sparked a fire and the home was quickly gone.
“I was watching TV, and I saw a family get interviewed, they’d lost everything, they talked about how the loss of things is traumatic,” Sugar said Monday. “The replacement of everything you own is an overwhelming task. I know.”
“Having to go shopping for everything from a tooth brush to a vegetable peeler ... I felt very empathetic.”
So, Sugar decided to set up a table outside Urban Fare in Yaletown this past weekend to collect donations. The store was immediately eager to help and Sugar also thought to call up local artist Wendy Williams-Watt to see if he could borrow her Big Love Ball to draw attention.
The ball is exactly as it sounds: a large inflated pink ball, which has the word “love” written prominently on it.
As of Monday morning, Sugar said that although the manager of Urban Fare told him it had been one of the slowest weekends of the year for the upscale grocery, he’d still raised a couple thousand dollars — and other interesting donations, including an entire homes-worth of furniture.
“This young man came by and said he’d just sold his home in Merritt,” he said. “They said they were going to donate the furniture.”
Others have donated goods; everything is destined for the Red Cross.
Sugar has lived in Vancouver since 1995, when U.S. cable network Showtime ordered a series of nine TV movies and sent him north to supervise.
Born to a Canadian mother, he lived in Toronto as a boy until he was 12, when the family moved to the U.S.
“Vancouver’s been wonderful to me. B.C.’s been wonderful to me. I would have done this in L.A. too,” he said.
Now retired — “best job I’ve ever had, though I do miss my cheques,” he said with a laugh — Sugar admitted the poor air quality caused by the smoke hanging in the air above the city is getting to him, but he’s undaunted.
He’s had several friends who said they’ve been inspired to run their own donation drives.
“I’m going to do it again next weekend,” he declared.
Look for Sugar and the Big Love Ball outside Urban Fare in Yaletown next Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. till 2 p.m. or so.