Lights, Action, Protest : A band marched up and down the narrow street while screen extras cheered

I’m not the kind of guy who complains very much about neighborhood activities that others find offensive.

Loud parties, barking dogs, family fights and wild sexual encounters on the road behind our house leave me unruffled because I know you can’t party, bark, fight or grapple in heat forever. At least I can’t, though God knows I’ve tried.

But while I might tolerate an occasional family fight and secretly admire sexual virtuosity, endless loud disruptions of my domestic serenity are not likely to meet with passive acceptance.

Which brings me, however circuitously, to the Nightmare on Kelsey Street.

Kelsey is a pleasant, tree-lined thoroughfare in Studio City. It roughly parallels the Los Angeles River and is composed of homes in the upper middle price bracket. There are no sidewalks on Kelsey, which gives the tiny street a rural tone in an urban setting.

It’s the kind of neighborhood Norman Rockwell might paint or George Bush might perceive as a prototype encampment in his vision of the American dream, chock-full of squealing kids and chirping canaries.

There’s only one thing wrong. Kelsey Street has been turned into a studio back lot.

Film crews of up to 150 men and women have been to one particular house on the street at least twice a month for the past two years, shooting everything from taco commercials to feature films.

They clog the street with cars and trucks loaded with the necessities of cinematic production, including but not limited to camera, lighting and sound equipment.

They bring portable dressing rooms and portable toilets and portable generators and food catering trucks and megaphones through which to holler Quiet on the set! and whatever else facilitates production.

In one instance, a band marched up and down the narrow street while screen extras cheered, and in another, dogs barked through take after take of a kibbled-meal commercial.

To say that all of this has caused unhappiness on Kelsey Street is to define global warfare as a civil spat. The people in the neighborhood are up in arms, thanks to a new guy on the block who happens to be a lawyer.

His name is Bob Corbin. He moved into the neighborhood last August and discovered, to his dismay, that the man next door, Kurt Rachman, ran a kind of cinematic safe house--which is to say he rented it on a regular basis to production companies.

The discovery came about one otherwise pleasant morning before dawn when trucks and personnel began gathering outside to set up for a Progresso Soup commercial.

Corbin, as far as I know, has nothing against Progresso Soup, but he and his wife moved to Kelsey in the first place to find peace and happiness, not to abut a sound stage.

He looked into the situation and found that Rachman had rented his house out 25 times in 1987 and 22 the year before. Corbin thought this outrageous and determined to do something about it.

Other neighbors were similarly upset, but what really pushed them over the edge occurred on an evening they gathered to discuss the problem.

They were in mid-meeting, as they tell it, when band music suddenly poured in through an open window.

They looked out onto a circus.

Disney was shooting a television two-parter called “Rock and Roll Mom” which, in the true spirit of the studio that created the Mouseketeers, embraced a good deal of chirpy felicity, to wit, the high-stepping trombonists on Kelsey Street.

Corbin’s Commandos almost instantly demanded a meeting with Rachman, who admitted that the “Disney thing” might have been a mistake.

He agreed to cut the rental of his house for filming to 12 days a year, but that wasn’t good enough for the Commandos. They wanted it cut to no days a year, but would settle for six.

Rachman said to hell with that, and the whole thing is now being mediated by the city. If the neighbors lose, they’ll go to court.

It’s no secret that California is on the brink of panic about losing film production to places like Georgia and Tennessee, where real people live, and L.A. is naturally in the center of the panic.

That’s how the Nightmare on Kelsey Street was allowed to develop in the first place. We’re so anxious to accommodate film companies that streets are blocked and neighborhoods commandeered to facilitate production of a “Rock and Roll Mom,” God help us all.

I say to hell with that.

There are roughly 700,000 houses in the City of Los Angeles, any number of which could probably be made available for filming at about $1,500 a pop.

The city ought to insist that film companies search elsewhere for their safe houses and end the carnival on Kelsey Street. The right of a community to domestic tranquility has been trampled in the stampede to satisfy an industry.

A little moaning and thrashing on a back road behind the house isn’t bad, but no one wants the calamity of a marching band, however chirpy, screwing up the peace of a whole neighborhood.