Where else to preserve an old film...

Where else to preserve an old film studio but in a storage facility?

That’s the fate of the 80-year-old Mack Sennett Studio in Echo Park, a crumbling complex that looks these days as though it might have been trashed by the Keystone Kops during one of their misguided chases.

The one-time headquarters of such comedy stars as Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle and Mabel Normand will be preserved as part of a Public Storage Inc. facility, according to an agreement reached between the company and Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo.

Woo proclaimed it a victory for developers and preservationists, not to mention pack rats.

“Now Public Storage gets a lucrative new site for business, and the people of Los Angeles get to keep a landmark that was decaying and unused,” he said.

Sennett purchased the Glendale Boulevard studio in 1912 in the days when Echo Park, also the home of several other film companies, was as big as Hollywood in the film business. (No one was inspired to write the song “Hurray for Echo Park” though.)

Later, the facility was a roller-skating rink, a window frame factory, a theater group’s headquarters and the projected home of the “Soul Train” television show.

The complex, bereft of any marker or sign of its historic status, will be decorated with a monument as well as a photo display.

“It was once used to store props, and it’s going to continue to be used that way,” pointed out Kelly Nesheim of Public Storage. “Only now it’ll be things like people’s old dinette sets.”

Gender bias was the topic of a local hearing called by the California Judicial Council, the administrative arm of the courts, so you knew that feminist attorney Gloria Allred would be there.

In addition to arguing again that more should be done to force fathers to pay court-ordered child support, Allred came up with a new proposal: The courts should provide diaper-changing tables in both women’s and men’s restrooms. “I’ve seen mothers changing diapers on the floor, which is extremely unsanitary,” Allred said.

It was just a suggestion from the litigious-minded Allred. For now.

Hotels boast of offering golf pros and tennis pros, but softball pros?

The new downtown hotel Checkers says in a newspaper ad that job openings still available there include “second base and shortstop on the hotel’s softball team.”

Spokeswoman Charlene Nagel says it’s true--with one proviso: Applicants “must also be bartenders or accomplished valets.”

More and more lately, meetings of the Los Angeles City Council have dragged on past the lunch hour. Clearly, it was time for drastic action. And on Tuesday, council members tentatively agreed to muzzle themselves.

They voted 12-0 to reduce the amount of time that they may speak on a topic from five minutes to three. “Sometimes the debate goes on and on and so many people talk that you lose track and you’re not able to get the attention of the council because the point someone made was so long ago that nobody focuses in on your rebuttal,” Councilman Marvin Braude declared in a sentence that, itself, took nearly 15 seconds to say.

In order to prevent the council from getting carried away, a city ordinance requires that members vote twice on most issues before they become law, so the lawmakers have to approve the muzzling again next week.

Buttoning the council’s collective lip before the lunch hour would be good news for taxpayers. Then the members won’t have to have lunch brought into the chamber at public expense, as they often do.

The King is dead. (Or, at least, on sabbatical.)

But El Vez, the Latino-style Elvis impersonator, will be swiveling his pelvis at a Valentine’s Day benefit for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, a nonprofit interdisciplinary artists’ organization.

El Vez is expected to perform such hits as “You’re El Diablo in Disguise”; the holiday classic, “Blue Navidad”; and, of course, his biggest hit, “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Chihuahua.”