2 Arts Showplaces Expected Despite Need for Funding

A professional fund-raiser’s pronouncement last week that the San Fernando Valley Cultural Foundation cannot raise $70 million in the next five years to build two major arts and theater complexes, as the foundation had earlier hoped, did not come as a surprise to the small group of business leaders and arts activists who have been nursing that dream.

Privately, the foundation’s backers have been wrestling for months with the tough realities of cultural fund raising in the 1980s. Increasing numbers of cultural groups are asking for more dollars from corporate donors but the donors often say they have less to give.

Aware of the problems before them, leaders of the foundation have been lowering their expectations while continuing to talk optimistically about the start of the long-awaited project.

But they now foresee a step-by-step process, stretching years into the future, to build the ambitious arts complexes in the Sepulveda Basin and at the 20-acre Warner Park in Woodland Hills.

‘Time to Lay Bricks’

“It’s time to lay some bricks and mortar,” is a phrase heard often from Luke Bandle, general manager of the foundation formed in 1980 by two Valley arts groups to draw the plans, raise the money and build the facilities.

When she said that, Bandle meant something far less grand than immediate construction of the four theaters, lakes, an outdoor amphitheater and artists’ workshops that are depicted in formal plans that the foundation has displayed for more than three years.

The foundation was already quietly developing a plan to allow it to begin some construction even before any major donations roll in.

Consequently, it was received as good news--in a silver lining sort of way--Thursday when a consultant for San Francisco-based Jerold Panas and Associates told the foundation’s board of directors that they could reasonably start a campaign to raise $12 million to $15 million over the next five years.

Expectations Confirmed

“I think he confirmed many of the things I felt and was never positive of,” said H. F. (Bert) Boeckmann, chairman of the foundation’s board and one of the project’s primary supporters.

The consultant’s meager promise may have actually buoyed the scaled-back plan that was taking shape.

That plan is to build the theaters in phases so that each step, even if it proved to be the last, would leave some usable facility completed, Bandle said.

“It will probably be in increments, never losing sight of the fact that the whole project is a major project but that this is going to be done in pieces.” Bandle said. “Every piece we do will be completed so that it can stand alone if we never raised another dollar.”

Organizers have not said what will be built first. But interviews with Bandle and other members of the foundation’s board produced a picture of a relatively modest project made possible by limited private donations and a $2.6-million federal grant that Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Los Angeles) ushered through Congress and President Reagan approved in September.

The grant will pay for the Army Corps of Engineers’ construction of the lake that is the main element in the design for Arts Park L. A. in Sepulveda Basin. A matching grant from the City of Los Angeles will be used to build a pumping plant that will fill the lake with purified water from nearby Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant.

Other donations would be sought to build an amphitheater next to the lake and the necessary roads and parking lots.

At the same time, the foundation hopes to build a $1-million outdoor pavilion with sound equipment and a full wooden stage in Warner Park as the first part of its other project, Warner Performing Arts Square. The pavilion would replace a makeshift stage that has been set up in Warner Park for seven summers for the Concert in the Park series sponsored by Warner Center business leaders.

The Sepulveda Basin lake, the Warner Park Pavilion and the amphitheater--called an outdoor performance glen by the foundation--would be the first effort. Work on them should begin late next year and be finished as early as spring, 1987, Bandle said.

From then on, Bandle said, the foundation’s building program would shift to completing Warner Performing Arts Square.

If the plans work out, Warner Park Pavilion would eventually be incorporated into the structure of a three-theater complex consisting of a 1,200-seat concert hall, 650-seat theater and an artists’ “black box,” an empty room with 150 movable seats for flexible performances, Bandle said.

3 Theaters to Be Linked

A preliminary design and master plan for that complex has been prepared by the architectural firm Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates. It pictures the three theaters surrounding a central, covered courtyard.

Together, the three theaters could accommodate symphony concerts, dance performances, light opera, musicals and plays and experimental presentations, as well as rehearsals.

Like the rapidly growing business and hotel district surrounding Warner Park, the tone of Warner Performing Arts Square is decidedly upscale.

It is meant to be a world-class facility, attractive to the world’s most prestigious performing groups. To meet that goal will cost about $26 million, Bandle estimated. The price tag is about twice what the outside consultant estimated the foundation could raise in the next five years, but foundation members consider it a necessary expense.

“I think the stupidest thing in the Valley would be to go out and build what would be perceived as a second-class building,” Boeckmann said. “I think the Valley has matured well beyond that point.”

A timetable for completion of Warner Performing Arts Square has not been drawn up, Bandle said. But 1988 would be the earliest possible date for construction to begin, she speculated.

Barring an unforeseen large contribution earmarked for Arts Park L. A., that project would not be finished until after completion of the Warner Park complex, Bandle said.

A preliminary master plan for Arts Park L. A. by the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill envisions a museum jutting into the lake, a row of several artists’ workshops and, as the centerpiece of the complex, a 2,500-seat concert hall, only slightly smaller than the 3,000-seat Dorothy Chandler Pavilion downtown.

Until receiving the report last week from their fund-raising consultant, foundation members remained optimistic that all the elements could be built. It is clear to them now, they said, that it may take 10 years to complete them all.

“I am confident we will get our theaters built in Warner Park,” board member Ross Hopkins, director of public affairs for Lockheed California Co., said in an interview recently. “I’m optimistic we will have a 2,500-seat theater in Arts Park,” he said. However, he conceded that it is the least likely of the elements to be built.

It could be 1995 before the last chandelier is hung, fund-raising consultant Kirkman told the board.

Even then, he said, the effort could fail unless the foundation accomplishes a lot in the meantime to strengthen its image. It has to compete better, he said, for donated corporate dollars. Those dollars have been drained by a fund-raising campaign for the Orange County Performing Arts Center and are soon to be tapped again when the Music Center begins an anticipated $100-million expansion campaign.

More competition can be expected soon from a civic group that is trying to build a 3,000-seat theater in Thousand Oaks.

To stay in the race, Kirkman said, the foundation would have to become much more visible. Instead of going after the $15 million in major donations immediately, the foundation should begin a series of $1-million annual campaigns to get its name and message out and recruit 2,000 small contributors in the next 12 to 18 months, he said.

He told the foundation’s board that executives of many major corporations told him they were unaware of the foundation’s ambitious cultural plans.

More than a dozen major corporate trust directors interviewed during the past several weeks gave an even gloomier assessment of the foundation’s prospects.

Several said they think that Southern California has become saturated with cultural facilities, that the charitable dollar is already stretched too thin and that they doubt whether the Valley can supply the audiences to support sophisticated cultural events.

“I think they will find they got more than they bargained for,” said ARCO’s Anna Arrington, one of the few who did not ask that her name not be used.

Corporate donors also mentioned that many major downtown corporations have been committed to the Music Center over the years, gave heavily to the Orange County arts center--and find another outstretched palm an unpleasant prospect.

That is even the case for one of the Valley’s most generous firms, Lockheed Corp. While Lockheed California public affairs director Hopkins sits on the foundation board, the parent Lockheed Corp.--which makes far larger donations--remains closely tied to the Music Center. Lockheed’s retiring chief executive officer, Roy Anderson, also recently retired as chairman of the Music Center’s annual fund-raising campaign.

To lure people of Anderson’s stature, the foundation must overcome an impression that the Valley does not have the social structure needed to support a world-class cultural institution, several corporate trust directors said.

Inability to Organize

One trust director, who asked not to be identified, scoffed at Valley society, recalling an experience in which a major Valley arts group had been unable to provide a capacity audience for the ritzy party her company threw for a department store opening. In her eyes, it was a measure not so much of the Valley’s lack of cultural sophistication as its inability to organize behind a cause.

Valley leaders, long sensitive to such comments, concede some truth in them but assert that times are changing.

“I think if you look at the United Way, I think you’ll see that the people in the Valley are really becoming educated in giving,” Boeckmann said. “I think if you go back and look at political contributions coming out of the Valley you would see tremendous growth. . . . The Valley does have the ability to pull together for something once they can see it. The problem in the past, I think, has been giving the Valley something to really pull toward.”

Not a Fan of the Arts

Boeckmann, owner of Galpin Ford in Sepulveda, reputedly the world’s largest auto dealership, frankly admits that he is not a great fan of the arts.

He has given heavily to diverse political causes and spearheaded an unsuccessful Valley independence movement, but has now turned his attention to culture, personally pledging at least $1 million to the cultural foundation. His motivation is his feeling that the Valley is his turf.

“If I were to say to you, ‘I’ll meet you down on Main Street at 12 o’clock tomorrow,’ where would you go?” Boeckmann asked, reflecting on the Valley’s disorganized layout, which he said needs unifying elements.

If Boeckmann sees the Valley as his turf, Bandle, general manager of the foundation, sees culture as hers.

Bandle, a sophisticated, well-credentialed professional in her own art--building cultural monuments--surprised her colleagues last year by taking a job in the San Fernando Valley at a salary she refused to disclose.

Developed Center in Oregon

She was fresh from a success as the creative force behind the development of Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene, Ore. She also came with extensive East Coast arts experience. She was director of marketing for Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts in Virginia and director of public relations for the Opera Society of Washington, which produced opera for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

It was a long jump from her earlier posts to the Valley, where previous civic highlights included attempting to secede from Los Angeles and fighting off construction of Olympic facilities.

Bandle takes that as a challenge.

Upon her arrival in October, 1984, she decorated her office with photos displaying her high-culture connections, and quickly whipped out a motto for the foundation that was by then a $250,000 enterprise that skeptics liked to point out had never turned a spade of soil.

The motto is: “Some things have to be believed to be seen.”

Difficult Beginning

Bandle’s first year of trying to make the Valley’s 1.2 million people into believers got off to a tough start.

Early this year, Bandle broke an ankle, an injury that slowed her for months and still slows her stride. She also ran into a roadblock in the foundation’s vestigial relationship with the two organizations that created it in 1980 to unify and pursue their separate cultural goals.

One of these, the Valley Cultural Center, was formed by a group of West Valley residents and business leaders who assumed responsibility in the 1960s for building cultural facilities at Warner Park. The land was donated to the City of Los Angeles by Warner Development Co. when Warner Center was being laid out.

The other group, the San Fernando Valley Arts Council, is a grass-roots organization of artists and cultural activists. The arts council made plans in the mid-1970s to convert a portion of Sepulveda Basin into an art park modeled after Wolf Trap, in Virginia near Washington, which has a large outdoor theater with seating on the grass.

When the two groups consolidated their plans under the aegis of the cultural foundation in 1980, questions about control of programming and ticket prices in the two facilities were left hanging.

Settling those questions proved unexpectedly tough, members of the three organizations said. This fall, after several months of negotiations, the Valley Cultural Center signed a contract with the foundation. Essentially, it leaves responsibility for programming at Warner Performing Arts Square to the foundation but guarantees the cultural center first choice of performance dates when the cultural center wants the facility for its own productions.

The contract also provides a blanket requirement for reduced, though still unspecified, rates to other Valley nonprofit groups that wish to use the theaters, said Don Vilbrandt, cultural center president.

Arts Council Negotiating

A similar agreement is still being negotiated with the arts council, said Bandle and Fred Greenblatt, the council’s attorney.

In the midst of those distractions, Bandle was unable to confront a more obvious challenge awaiting her leadership--determining what will be put in the theaters once they are open.

Although it may seem early for such worries, builders of arts facilities elsewhere said that knowing the kind of productions the buildings will house is almost essential to designing them properly. And until the theaters exist, it is impossible to book any major artistic groups, Bandle said. Similarly, there is no solid indication of the kind of programs the Valley itself would generate for the theaters.

Observers point out that the Valley lacks the built-in programming and audience that the respected South Coast Repertory Group provided in Orange County or the Joffrey Ballet could give the Music Center in its expansion drive.

Keeping a Distance

Several leaders of the Valley’s thriving small-theater movement said their contact with the foundation has remained distant.

One group, the Back Alley Theatre of Van Nuys, even disdains what one of its producing directors, Laura Zucker, called the foundation’s high-gloss pretensions. The Back Alley prefers a sparse and flexible setting, such as a converted warehouse, and plans to raise $500,000 to build a theater of its own, Zucker said--adding to the competition for funds.

Aggravating the uncertainty over programming, Bandle conceded, is the nagging necessity of creating some record of mass cultural appreciation among Valley residents.

Bandle scored one symbolic victory this spring by persuading Valley business leaders to support a Pacific Rim Festival that featured food and cultural activities of the nations that border the Pacific. Public events of such a decidedly cosmopolitan bent historically have occurred over the hill in the central city. Bandle said she hopes to make the festival an annual event.

Over time, she said, such efforts may answer by example some of the questions about the Valley’s support for cultural activities.

In that context, the prospect of a long, dragged-out capital campaign could even be a blessing.

“It may be,” Bandle said, “because it’s going to take all those arts groups at least that long to take a look . . . and say, ‘Oh, that’s going to be a really nice place. So we want to up the level and the quality of our performance so that it matches the quality of the hall.’ ”

If the Valley has to live five years with nothing but two open-air theaters, that too may be a plus, she said. If nothing else, Bandle said, she will try to put a military band in the Arts Park amphitheater every Sunday and hope other groups, such as the currently inactive San Fernando Valley Symphony Orchestra, would look upon the new facilities as a step up.

“It’s not much fun to be playing in a high school one day and a college the next and the church the next and nobody knows where to find you,” Bandle said. “It’s terrible for fund raising and terrible for building audiences. If everybody knows that Sunday at 3 o’clock the symphony is going to be on stage in either one of those outdoor facilities the next two or three years, then you develop a subscription program.”

She said she could see local musical and artistic groups “being able to do special concerts with outside people, building a subscriber base before the Warner Performing Arts Square opens.”

This should broaden the project’s appeal and build a larger audience, helping to attract large grants and donations, she said.

On the success or failure of that theory rests the future of the Valley’s cultural monuments. WARNER CENTER The Warner Performing Arts Square Concept: an elegant theater complex in the cradle of the West Valley’s new hotel and high rise business district. Phase one (spring, 1987): an outdoor performance pavilion with seating on the grass for up to 2,000. Future (1988-?): a 1,200-seat concert hall, a 650-seat theater, a flexible “black box” room with 150 moveable seats and a rehearsal hall surrounded by plazas, fountains and grass. SEPULVEDA BASIN Arts Park L.A. Concept: an indoor-outdoor arts and performance park set amidst 164 acres of grass and artificial lake. Phase one (spring, 1987): 2,000-seat amphitheater and parking lot. Future (1990-?): a 2,500-seat major performance hall, a 2,000-seat amphitheater, museum, restaurant and four to six artists’ workshops. The Prime Movers BERT BOECKMANN Chairman of the board “Let’s assume . . . you went out in the community today and said, ‘Guess what, we’ve got some ideas, we want $70 million to do this.’ . . . I think you’d have an extremely difficult time doing it.” Boeckmann, a self-made multimillionaire, powerful political donor and inveterate promoter of Valley causes, has turned his attention to the Valley’s cultural identity. He has personally committed himself to giving at least $1 million to the foundation and hopes to procure similar contributions from friends. The question is whether Boeckmann can win over corporate executives outside the Valley. LUKE BANDLE General Manager ‘It’s time to lay some bricks and mortar.” Bandle was hired by the Cultural Foundation to get the project into high gear. She is known for building the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene, Ore. She has worked with the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts in New York and the Opera Society of Washington. She says that booking of programs is the fun part of running a performing arts center but no major acts can be booked until there is a facility to hold them.

THE COMPETITION

Music Center A major expansion is planned on parking lot south of Dorothy Chandler Pavilion consisting of a repertory theater house, a dance and opera hall and a “black box” for flexible use. Prestigious groups such as Joffrey Ballet and Gordon Davidson Repertory Company are waiting to use the facilities. The design and fund campaign await approval by the county Board of Supervisors but are expected to get under way this year. The Music Center has proven ability to raise up to $100 million for the project. Orange County Performing Arts Center A 3,000-seat, multi-purpose theater is already rising in South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. A 1,000-seat hall is scheduled to follow. Orange County developer Henry Segerstrom led the way by donating the land and $6 million. A fund campaign has topped $70 million. The main theater is scheduled to open October 1, 1986. Backers plan world-class programming. Negotiations underway with L.A. Philharmonic and New York Metropolitan Opera. Thousand Oaks Cultural Center A single 3,000-seat theater is under consideration by a city-appointed committee planning a cultural center for a downtown redevelopment project. Two sites have been recommended. One of them is this parking lot of The Oaks shopping center near City Hall. Construction money would come from the redevelopment project. The land and a permanent endowment fund would have to be acquired through donations. Programming has yet to be decided.