Woody Culleton

Film captures a town’s post-blaze comeback

If Ron Howard had invented “Rebuilding Paradise” as fiction, Woody Culleton would be ideal.
He’s a sturdy, folksy-seeming guy who’s been around. He’ll tell you frankly that he went “from town drunk to mayor.”
And he’s a real person, a handy symbol for Howard’s documentary movi (shown here), which debuts at 9 and 11:47 p.m. ET (6 and 8:47 p.m. PT) Sunday (Nov. 8) on the National Geographic Channel.
That’s exactly two years after the Camp Fire roared through Northern California towns. It killed 86 people, destroyed 8,200 buildings and touched virtually everything in Paradise. A few months later, the town – listed at 26,000 people – had shrunk to just over 2,000. Read more…