In times of crisis, the Timoners stick together. When family patriarch Eli Timoner suffered a debilitating stroke in 1982 – at the height of
In times of crisis, the Timoners stick together.
When family patriarch Eli Timoner suffered a debilitating stroke in 1982 – at the height of his business career as Air Florida, the airline he founded in Miami, was flourishing – it was mom Lisa who rallied the spirits of their children – Rachel, Ondi, and David.
“Mom invented the T Team” (T as in Timoner), recalls Ondi. “Mom is the one who said in the wake of dad’s stroke, when she’s looking at an 8-year-old, a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old, ‘We are going to run races together. We’re going to be strong together… We’re going to overcome all this and it’s going to be great and we’re going to have the best time. We are the T Team.’”
Almost 40 years after his stroke, with his health degenerating, Eli Timoner decided to bring his life to a close as allowed under California’s End of Life Act. Again, the Timoners came together to support Eli’s decision, his final days captured in Ondi’s Emmy-nominated and Humanitas Prize-winning documentary Last Flight Home.
“The reason Last Flight Home is uplifting,” Ondi observes, “is there’s this love and there’s this light in the film that is not unique just to our family. In a death that actually people turn towards and face, there is that light.”
Ondi Timoner surveys the remains of her home in Altadena, CA
Courtesy of Ondi Timoner
Since January, the Timoners have been facing another extraordinary challenge. When the Eaton Fire broke out on January 7 in Los Angeles County, it tore through Altadena, destroying building after building. Ondi’s home and David’s home, a mile apart, burned to the ground.
“Seventeen people died between his house and mine,” Ondi says. Without quick action by David to rescue his mother, who lived near Eaton Canyon, Lisa Timoner might not have escaped.
“I pulled up to mom’s house and it was raining ash, no power,” David remembers. “There were firemen with crazy lights and bullhorns saying, ‘Evacuate now! Evacuate now!’ Everybody was running for their lives basically. Traffic jam, the wind was howling.”
He managed to safely evacuate his mother along with her pets except for one cat who hid inside the house amid the chaos and couldn’t be coaxed out. Within hours, David and Ondi’s houses were gone, the fire consuming irreplaceable treasures like artworks by David’s wife Kelly, Ondi’s journals, and family heirlooms.
“I had a stack of love letters with a ribbon that they [Eli and Lisa] had written to each other that was on the bar in the house that burned,” Ondi says. “One of the letters was mom apologizing for going over budget on their one-year anniversary. She bought this double happiness heart, and then had it broken in half and dad wore one side and she wore the other.” Fortunately, Ondi was wearing the half of the pendant she inherited from her father. “You see it on me all the time,” says Ondi. Adds her mother, “I’m so glad it was on her.”
Before the fire: Morgan Doctor at the pool behind the home she shared with Ondi Timoner
Courtesy of Ondi Timoner
After the fire: a view across the pool to the remains of the house
Courtesy of Ondi Timoner
Ondi and her wife, musician-composer Morgan Doctor, were in Europe when the fire struck, at work on Ondi’s latest film, a hybrid documentary with scripted elements that tells a story related to the Holocaust.
“It’s for Legendary [Entertainment]… We were scouting [in Budapest] the day the house burned down,” she says, noting that they returned later to shoot in the building they had scouted.
“It was definitely eerie to go back there to make this film, but it was also very heartening actually,” Ondi comments. “It was heartening to realize that we could come together as artists and make something, even with all of the horrible destruction in our world right now, all of the senseless loss from the fires. But also, clearly, we’re not the first climate refugees you are going to know personally because this is just the beginning of the unraveling of our planet.”
She adds, “Politically, we’re in such a terribly dark place and the rise of the right all over the world… It was so revitalizing to us to be able to be on set with great artists and making beautiful imagery that’s important and haunting and it’s going to be, I think, really important work.”
‘Dig! XX’
Kelly White
Timoner has been making essential work in the narrative and documentary spaces for 30 years now, sometimes in collaboration with her brother David. As the family coped with the devastating loss from the fires, they reassembled earlier this month in Miami, where the Timoner kids grew up (only Rachel, who is a rabbi in New York, couldn’t be present; she is currently on sabbatical, traveling in South America). The occasion: a retrospective of many of Ondi’s films put on in her hometown by the Miami Film Festival.
“We’ve got not one, not two, not three, but four,” notes festival executive director James Woolley. “So, we’re very proud.”
Among the films screened by MFF — Last Flight Home and DIG! XX, the latter documentary an updated and expanded version of DIG!, which won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. The film, exploring the friendship and rivalry between up-and-coming rock bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols, is considered one of the greatest music documentaries ever. David Timoner served as a cinematographer and co-producer on the original DIG! and he edited the 20th anniversary updated version.
Rev. Robert Waterman and Rabbi Rachel Timoner in ‘All God’s Children’
Interloper Films
MFF also screened Ondi Timoner’s two latest documentaries, THE INN BETWEEN and All God’s Children. AGC features Ondi’s sister Rachel — senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn – and Dr. Robert Waterman, lead pastor at Antioch Baptist Church in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. Together, the rabbi and the preacher took on the noble if precarious task of bringing their congregations together to build bridges, promote peace, and attempt to heal centuries of antisemitism and racism.
‘THE INN BETWEEN’
Interloper Films
THE INN BETWEEN, meanwhile, centers on a unique hospice in Salt Lake City that provides care for unhoused people. The project came about after Ondi’s mom spotted an article on the hospice published in the L.A. Times and shared it with her daughter. Says Ondi, “She’s my scout.”
THE INN BETWEEN played to a packed house at MFF. “The crowd went crazy for it,” Ondi reports. “I think people need hopeful stories of peace and community right now.”
For the Timoners, being in Miami provided some healing after so much recent loss. “Seeing friends and feeling the warm embrace of our community,” says David, “it’s been amazing. Miami is a really special place. There’s very few vernacular places left in America. Things are so homogenized. Miami will never become the Midwest… It’s just always going to be its own special mix of crazy.”
L-R Morgan Doctor, Ondi Timoner, Lisa Timoner, David Timoner, interviewer Matt Carey in Miami Beach, FL. On the table is the tennis racket fashioned into a cane favored by Eli Timoner, now used by Lisa Timoner.
Courtesy of Ondi Timoner
Sitting down with Deadline at the historic Biltmore Hotel in Miami Beach, Ondi and David reflected on growing up nearby.
“There’s a lot of things about Florida that I totally am embarrassed by politically but there’s a free-spiritedness,” David observes, telling his sister it may explain “why you’re as much of a rebel as you are. It certainly supports your rebel spirit. Like, it’s a lawless place, Miami.”
Ondi and David admit that as teenagers they may have contributed just a bit to that lawless vibe. “What do we want to say?” David muses. “I want a statute of limitations!”
There was that scavenger hunt stunt they pulled off back in the day. “You had to get things like street signs, pick up a set of twins,” recalls Ondi.
We’re not talking a game of “I Spy” where you spot something and move on. No, this involved persuading a set of twins to go with them, as well as removing street signs and prying off a manhole cover. Ondi: “You had to take it back to the party.” David: “Honestly, it would have been an amazing documentary short.”
Their mother didn’t turn a blind eye to these adventures in high school or later, when they became budding filmmakers. More like an innocent eye.
“Ondi would say, ‘We’re traveling with the band, a rock band.’ And I would say, ‘Oh, that’s nice darling, have fun.’ I had no idea,” Lisa Timoner recalls. “And then when I saw DIG!, David was commenting on it. My sweet son said, ‘I tried everything on the table. Drugs!’” Lisa says. “I was very naïve.”
“She found my marijuana pipe once,” David recounts. “She said, ‘What’s this?’ And I said, ‘Oh, it’s just a little sculpture…’ She was so naïve. And it was wonderful.”
Eli Timoner, Lisa Timoner and kids on the steps leading into an Air Florida aircraft
MTV Documentary Films
The family suffered considerable economic hardship after Eli Timoner’s stroke. He was forced out as chairman of the board of Air Florida, the result of narrow-minded thinking in that era when it was just assumed a person with a disability couldn’t run a business enterprise (a board member told Eli at the time, “We need to come from a position of strength, and what do you think Lehman Bros. will think of an airline run by a cripple?”). Despite that reversal of fortune, Eli and Lisa didn’t pressure the kids to curtail their dreams.
“I honestly think if I were losing all my money, I would’ve been telling my children, ‘Go to f**king law school,’ or ‘Get a job that pays,’ because I would’ve been terrified that I wouldn’t be able to support them,” David says. “But they were just like, ‘Whatever makes you happy, I believe in you.’”
Ondi achieved her dream of becoming a filmmaker. She’s at work now not only on the Holocaust-related film, but on a narrative adaptation of her father’s story documented in Last Flight Home (the filmmaker tells Deadline she worked on the script with her father for 8 years, and read the current draft to him on his death bed). And after the wildfires struck Los Angeles, Ondi did what Ondi does – she picked up a camera.
Ondi Timoner at the remains of her house in Altadena, CA. She’s wearing the half of the “double happiness heart” pendant inherited from her father.
Courtesy of Ondi Timoner
“We’ve been making a documentary ever since, talking to our neighbors who ran for their lives,” Timoner shares. “Looking at Altadena post-burn, it’s really something extraordinary to behold. You can’t believe it. There’s literally nothing left… That’s why I was calling the movie Bonded by Fire. Because in a way, anybody who’s going through this right now — which there are sadly 16,000 households going through this and 50- to 70,000 climate refugees — it doesn’t matter. It looks the same. We all have this sludge that’s kind of monochromatic and amorphous, but we’re also bonded by fire… Our lives all turned upside down right as the year started.”
During this incredible test, the Timoners can count on one thing – the family bond. Ondi’s wife Morgan Doctor, the newest member of the family, first witnessed that at a wrenching time for them when Eli was preparing to say farewell.
“It can often bring out the worst in people, not the best,” Doctor says, “and I just found that this family has always been strong and steady, and I was so surprised during this massive change and upheaval… the family, it was still just so solid and tight.”
COMMENTS