Billy Crystal stopped by Wednesday night’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to explain the origins of his new, one-man Broadway show and reveal why he is “so grateful” that he gets to actually bring it to audiences.
Crystal titled the show “860,” which was the street address of the house that he and his family lived in for 46 years before it was destroyed last year in California’s devastating Palisades Fire. In the aftermath of his home’s destruction, Crystal said he began to impulsively film and document every moment on his phone, starting with shots of first responders’ planes flying overhead to drop water on the fires.
“I started filming the planes coming over and all that stuff, and I never stopped filming. Whenever there was another event happening, I would just capture everything,” Crystal said, adding, “I started, in my mind, writing a narrative about everything that was happening. I didn’t know what form it was going to take. It might have been a documentary. It might have just been for us, you know? It kept the pain away from me.”
“Over time, I started writing stories that went along with the videos that I was taking,” Crystal continued. “It started to be not only very dramatic, but also really funny because most of it takes place inside the house.”
You can watch Crystal’s full “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” interview yourself below.
Crystal used a photo he had taken years ago with a 360-degree camera of his old office to create the set of “860,” which he says is a recreation of the office as it was captured in that years-old image. Kimmel, for his part, remarked that walking onto that set for the first time must have been “so strange” for Crystal.
“Every moment that I’m in that room, I’m there again, but yet it’s make-believe. So it’s great and it’s sad at the same time,” Crystal responded, adding of the one-man show, “I have to say, it’s really funny, wrapped around our escape and our coming together at this point in our lives.”
“It’s also very inspirational, I think, because it’s about starting over again. We’re not kids. At this age, to believe that we have a new chance, a new beginning, and that’s for all the people, the 7,000 homes that were lost in the fires,” Crystal noted. “We all have this common experience of: One second’s great, the next minute, ‘What do I do with my life?’”
“I am so proud of the show,” he concluded. “And I’m so grateful that I get a chance to do it and explain to people what this loss has meant not only to me, but to all of these other people who’ve gone through the same thing.”
