Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : MISCELLANY / NEWSMAKERS AND MILESTONES

Once a week for 11 years, undercover private investigator Robert McGuire would sit in the Mitchell Brothers Theatre, Santa Ana’s only X-rated movie house, and conceal a small, 8-millimeter movie camera in a towel on his lap.

McGuire, 53, a former Los Angeles police officer, was paid $30 an hour by the City of Santa Ana to provide explicit reports on the adult films in the city’s decade-long effort to close the theater. But last Wednesday, as McGuire was photographing the big screen and recording the dialogue on a concealed recorder, theater security discovered him and escorted him from his seat.

“It is against our policies to bring in cameras and tape recorders,” theater manager Phil Brady said. “And he is hostile to us, which isn’t a good situation either.”

On Monday, an attorney for the city will argue in court that McGuire should be allowed to return to the movie house and resume his filming and taping.

Theater management had known that someone named McGuire had been spying on them because his reports, tape recordings and photographs have accumulated in Orange County Superior Court files.

“It was no big deal, but it was a frustrating thing for us,” Brady said. “Nobody wants an undercover spy in his business. He’d gotten in every week for 11 years, right under our nose.”

For his part, McGuire said he “didn’t want to get emotionally involved in what’s going on in there.”

During the past 11 years, McGuire has worked on similar cases in North Hollywood, Buena Park, Duarte and the suburbs of Seattle, Wash., for attorney James J. Clancy, who represents Santa Ana in the Mitchell Brothers’ Theatre case. In all, he estimates he has seen about 2,000 X-rated movies.

“My view is strictly from the mechanical part,” McGuire said. “As far as going to see movies like that personally for pleasure, I wouldn’t bother.”