Loving fire with fire: Humor, horniness and happiness inhabit post-CZU film

Five years after the fact, memories of and reflections on the CZU Lightning Complex fires in Santa Cruz County almost always come through a scrim of tragedy and loss — though, as time goes on, that sense of tragedy is, for many, ripening into a kind of fatalism or bittersweet wistfulness.

But joy? Humor? Sensual delight? Those are not notes you usually sense in remembering CZU.

As longtime residents of Boulder Creek, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle experienced CZU close up and first-hand. But they are also among Santa Cruz County’s most adventurous artists. They are colorful, outré, carnal and defiantly at odds with an emotionally numbed, zipped-up, sexually uptight mainstream culture. They are essentially lovers — of each other, of the creative spirit, of their community and, most explicitly, of Mother Earth. 

So, if anyone were to put a counterclockwise spin on the mood looking back at CZU, it’s these two. 

This year, the artists are debuting their new film, titled “Playing With Fire,” a look back at not only their personal experience with CZU, but an effort to pull back and bring into focus a new emotional orientation to fire itself. It’s full of humor, horniness, even happiness. It’s a fragrant bouquet designed to chase away the acrid smell of survivor’s guilt and PTSD.

It is perhaps obligatory to insert here the caveat that Stephens and Sprinkle are in no way diminishing the pain and loss of CZU. In fact, both women, individually, have had traumatic and painful experiences with fire long before CZU. As a child, Stephens watched her grandparents’ home burn to the ground. Sprinkle’s Sausalito houseboat and most of her possessions were destroyed in a fire. Though the home they share in Boulder Creek was spared in the CZU fires, their community and many of their closest friends were traumatized by loss. 

Beth Stephens is an artist, performer, author and filmmaker with a deep connection to UC Santa Cruz as a longtime professor and two-time chair of the art department. Annie Sprinkle is a former sex worker, porn performer and stripper who, like her partner, also went on to earn a Ph.D. Together, they have fused their passions, both domestically and professionally, and created an identity as a duo that has rivaled their individual accomplishments with performance art and films that explicitly celebrate sexuality, including queer sexuality, as a central part of human expression. In the process, they have done their fair share of taboo-busting. 

Much of that Sprinkle Stephens collaboration has been built on the idea of “ecosexuality,” an unlikely blend of ecology and sexuality, the Earth and the earthy, that aims to undermine the widespread assumption that love for the planet is some abstract, exalted form of love. 

“Ecosexuality just means you love the Earth, the ecosystem” said Stephens. “Human beings are a big part of that. I mean, we’re made of water, we breath in air, we’re made of calcium, all kinds of critters live in our biome. We’re not separate from nature and we feel that these hierarchies have been created to make people feel better than nature, which allows us to use and abuse nature without thinking about.”

As artists, the two often aim to redefine and rethink what is often derogatorily referred to as “tree-huggers.” 

“We try to bring the body back into it,” said Stephens, “in close proximity. Now, we’re not actually having genital sex with trees. But we do play with these ideas and metaphors.”

“Playing With Fire” is actually the third in a series of films that explore the concept of ecosexuality (following the autobiographical “Goodbye Gauley Mountain” and the water-focused “Water Makes Us Wet”). Like the first two films, the new film will be a centerpiece of the Santa Cruz Film Festival in October.

“Fire” chronicles the couple’s experience with CZU, their weekslong evacuation from their home and the return to the devastation of much of the mountain community they call home. A kind of third collaborator in the film is the famous white peacock in Boulder Creek named Albert, playfully given a human voiceover. (Albert became a symbol of hope and rebirth in Boulder Creek. He survived the fires only to be killed last November in a mountain lion attack.)

For Sprinkle and Stephens, before CZU, it was never in the plans to make a third film. “It was done,” said Stephens. “Documentaries are really hard and really expensive. One of them took us five years to finish.”

But the CZU trauma changed their minds. “We’ve always done life as art,” said Sprinkle. “We turn our life into art projects. Beth and I have been collaborating artists for 24 years. Early on in our relationship, I got breast cancer. And we made art out of it.”

The stresses of CZU and the many changes it made to life in the San Lorenzo Valley after the fires inspired the two to turn their creative eyes to the experience. They took the tack of falling in love again with fire. And like many instances of falling in love, that entailed having sex and getting married.

In the former instance, Stephens and Sprinkle in the film visit with a practitioner of erotic fire play, and both experience flames placed in alarming proximity to their bare flesh. “We knew it would be safe,” said Stephens, “and we felt like it would be a fun adventure, which it was.”

There were scenes of the two artists, dressed in their most ornate finery, touring the post-CZU forest in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, encountering the scarred redwood trees in a much more sensual way than your everyday tourist, often lying atop a downed tree and even tasting its bark. 

The film’s climactic scene finds Stephens and Sprinkle “marrying” fire. The two are well known for theatrical weddings with enormous nonhuman things. They have married the Earth, a lake, and the Appalachian Mountains. In this instance, with many friends and fellow artists, all of them dressed in fiery shades of red, orange and yellow, Stephens and Sprinkle performed a ritual wedding with fire, “the kiss of death and the spark of life.”

“At first, we thought it was just a joke,” said Stephens of that first Sprinkle Stephens wedding with the Earth years ago. “But then we realized that there were a lot of people who resonated with it. And it just became this very useful platform for doing environmental work with a completely different attitude, one of love and joy and caring, as opposed to fighting and critiquing and feeling like you were losing all the time.”

On their first trip back to Big Basin since the fire, Stephens and Sprinkle acknowledged the pain and sorrow of seeing all the devastation, but they also were drawn to the new shoots of growth in the redwoods. As artists are fond of doing, they teased out of that biological process meaning metaphors for human survival that is just as meaningful navigating the political trials of 2025 as they were for making peace with CZU.

“Going out to the burnt forest, and connecting with that,” said Sprinkle, “it was heartbreaking but seeing the new growth was incredible. It’s a metaphor for what’s happening today. Old systems are being burnt down with AI and politics, and things are rapidly changing. And how are people going to navigate? Just keep your eyes on the prize. There will be new growth eventually.”

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