People and Events

It’s been a long time since filmdom’s famous had themselves paged while lunching beneath their caricatures in the Hollywood Brown Derby on Vine Street. About the only folks to drop in since a destructive fire last August have been those with nowhere else to sleep.

The boarded up old Derby was scheduled to be razed by developers Larry Worschell and George Ullman, who a couple of months ago asked City Councilman Michael Woo for his help in obtaining a demolition permit. Woo first went to two community organizations, Hollywood Heritage Inc. and the Los Angeles Conservancy, to find out whether they regarded the site as historic.

Clark Gable, after all, proposed to Carole Lombard in a booth there.

On Friday, Woo stood outside the gutted restaurant to announce that an agreement had been reached with the developers to preserve one of the four buildings in the complex, including an archway on Vine Street. The northern part of the complex, however, was too heavily damaged by the fire and by last October’s earthquake. It’s going to come down.

“We came dangerously close to seeing this entire building destroyed,” said Woo. He urged the city’s Community Development Agency to let the public know whenever a possibly historic Hollywood building is threatened in the future.

The developers were unavailable to say what the agreement does to their plans.

In any event, a new Brown Derby restaurant is operating less than a block away at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. Woo sees that as a sign that Hollywood is being revitalized.

Several reels of movie film gave off such a noxious odor in Beverly Hills that they had to be destroyed.

No one, however, seems to know what the movies were.

“Chinook the Snow Dog” perhaps. Or “Port Said,” which appeared to have been filmed in a motel room with fezes on the heads of the actors to suggest a location shoot in the Middle East.

Friday morning’s fumes wafted from the third floor of Beverly Hills Transfer and Storage Co., where, Beverly Hills Fire Department personnel said, 200 to 300 cans of film were stored. The stink arose, they said, because film in seven of the cans was deteriorating. It was nitrate-cellulose film manufactured before the advent of safety film in 1952.

Fred Mason Jr., president of the storage firm, said there was no flame and no smoke--only gas caused by the deterioration.

The sheriff’s bomb squad took the seven reels to an isolated area and burned them. They didn’t burn easily. Deputies had to pour fuel oil on them to set them afire.

Actor Stacy Keach did not, as reported here, pay the fare for Dutch singer-composer Leo Koewe to come back to Los Angeles International Airport and stage a new fast on behalf of the pet dog that was killed when it escaped from an airliner baggage area three months ago.

Koewe’s benefactor was James Stacy, also an actor, who is joining with Koewe in a campaign demanding that airlines be more careful in their handling of pets in transit.

“This is always happening to Stacy (Keach) and me,” said James Stacy, the actor who lost his left leg and left arm in a 1973 motorcycle accident. He recalled that when Keach was arrested in London in 1984 for possession of cocaine, “one of those papers over there used my name.”

An ad appearing in the UCLA Daily Bruin--as well as other college newspapers here and elsewhere--urges students to join the Ed Meese Fan Club and get one of various items, including a T-shirt and “a money clip that keeps getting filled without you knowing it.”

Or a videotape of President Reagan reaffirming his support “for our Ed over and over and over. . . .”

A telephone number in the ad led to David Rives, 44, of Ventura, who said he is a businessman without affiliation to any political organization, but who is “a gadfly . . . naive enough to think you can do something like this without any repercussions.”

Although he has had a lot of calls, he said, no one has yet offered to send in the $25 membership fee or the $15 for the T-shirt. “I would say about 40% just hang up when you answer ‘Ed Meese Fan Club,’ ” he said. “They just want to see if it’s a real number.”

He described the reaction to his club as “mixed, to say the least.”