New Rash of Books, Films Focus on City of the Rich and Famous

Brace yourselves, Beverly Hills brethren.

Just when you thought it was safe to come out of your MacGuard-ed mansions and show your best face lifts to the world, here’s some bad news. After you were smirked at in the smash “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” and “Beverly Hills Cop” I and II, a new media blitzkrieg this summer is taking aim at you and your coddled community. And the weapons of choice among publishers and producers in this Invasion of the Life-Style Snatchers are sex, satire and stereotypes.

Consider, for a moment, the plots of just a few of the new books and movies that boast “Beverly Hills” prominently in their titles:

A New Age channeler buys a Beverly Hills hotel and transforms it into a mecca for mantra-chanters; a Beverly Hills estate plays home to a ring of call girls who also happen to be vampires; the bratty son of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon arranges for his own kidnaping just to get attention from someone other than his maid.

A handsome houseman bets $5,000 he can bed a Beverly Hills ex-sitcom queen; and a Beverly Hills mortician teams up with a mad scientist to bring the rich back to life--but only for a stiff price.

There’s even a porno movie with the title “Down and Down in Beverly Hills”--and what it’s about is anybody’s guess.

Yet while everyone else is seeing green over the profit-making potential of the Beverly Hills name, certain Beverly Hills officials are seeing red.

They’re mad about what they see as the less-than-factual manner in which their mannerly city and manicured citizenry are being portrayed.

Just wait until they discover that a new poolside potboiler titled “Beverly Hills” with a hefty hardcover printing of 100,000 was penned by an Englishwoman who thinks Beverly Hills parties are so lacking in glamour that she based her fictional one on a London gala, confuses restaurants on Melrose Avenue with those on Canon Drive, and airily declares that “I couldn’t live in Beverly Hills because it’s too neurotic-making.”

Or find out that murder, mayhem and even terrorism are considered as commonplace in their community as Rolls-Royces and Rolex watches.

Or hear jaded Beverly Hills teens saying lines like, “My idea of taking a risk is losing my birth control pills or shopping at Saks without a sale.”

So, Mr. Mayor, could a Beverly Hills backlash be far off?

“Let me put it this way,” Max Solter said, sighing audibly. “If you do the mundane and the average, nobody’s going to read the book or see the picture so therefore it has to be outrageous in certain ways.”

Herb Fink, president of the Rodeo Drive Committee of retailers, believes that “as long as these trashy books and movies put the words ‘Beverly Hills’ in something, they create a certain excitement for those people who live in a small part of the world where anything like driving a Rolls-Royce or wearing 50-carat diamonds to lunch is extraordinary, or ‘Wow.’

“But this sort of sensationalism has nothing to do with Beverly Hills. To me, Beverly Hills outside of the retail area is a sleepy little village.”

If these books and movies are to be believed, make that sleepy as in Porthault sheets, silk nightgowns from Neiman’s and sex with anyone except your spouse.

“I don’t know that the movie stars are doing anything that other people aren’t,” Fink insisted about their bedroom habits. “Look at all those politicians who are sex maniacs. So what’s the big deal about Beverly Hills? There’s more excitement in Washington.”

Beverly Hills Stereotype

And what angers Charles Reilly, president of the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce, are suggestions that the Beverly Hills life style produces Beverly Hills brats--which just happens to be the title of a new movie opening on Labor Day.

“One of the things that isn’t fully appreciated or understood from these kinds of stereotypes is by and large the people in Beverly Hills are hard-working professionals or businesspeople who love their children. And they care a great deal and spend a considerable amount of time and energy rather than simply dollars seeing that they maintain the kind of family life that most people in America try to have,” Reilly explained.

Still, he acknowledged, “I don’t think there’s a major crisis in anyone’s life because of the misimpressions conveyed by media exposure.”

So why single out this city in the first place?

Certainly, it has something to do with the fact that Beverly Hills, after beginning in a lima bean field and incorporating in 1914, quickly became home to moguls, movie stars and just plain millionaires. Or that its seductive combination of restaurants, real estate and Rodeo Drive has lured more visitors a year than even Disneyland, according to claims by officials.

Thus, it was just a matter of time before the media cashed in as well.

Over the years, the bevy of Beverly Hills-titled productions has ranged from the silliness of “The Beverly Hillbillies” TV show to the faddishness of “The Beverly Hills Diet” book. Currently, a TV cartoon series, “Beverly Hills Teens,” about a group of terminally spoiled young’uns, is broadcast nationally. And, while allowing for the occasional dud (Remember the short-lived NBC series, “Beverly Hills Buntz” or the blink-and-you missed-it showing of the movie “Troop Beverly Hills”?), the Beverly Hills name today is like money in the bank to the entertainment industry.

“From a motion picture standpoint,” explained Paul Bartel, the director of the scabrous spoof “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills,” now in release, “the success of ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ and ‘Down and Out in Beverly Hills’ established an almost supernatural belief among film marketers, distributors and theater owners that the name Beverly Hills in a title guaranteed some kind of success.”

Bartel, whose film is the first of this summer’s Beverly Hills flock, claims he came up with his title even before he co-wrote his 1982 black comedy, “Eating Raoul,” and long before the release of “Beverly Hills Cop” in 1984 or “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” in 1986.

“The story went through a number of permutations, but the title always stayed the same,” said Bartel, who in “Scenes” plays a Beverly Hills diet quack who likes to refer to himself as a “thinologist.” “But when it came time to distribute it, I was so sick of hearing Beverly Hills in titles that I suggested to Cinecom Pictures that we call it ‘Scenes from the Class Struggle in Southern California,’ or ‘North America,’ or whatever.

“And they said, ‘Are you crazy? Absolutely not! It’s got to be Beverly Hills.’ ”

In keeping with his insistence that Beverly Hills be the “bait” for his movie’s wicked depiction of inhuman human relations, Bartel tried to stay faithful to the look and feel of Beverly Hills as he and screenwriter Bruce Wagner knew it. So, aside from the Latino servants and the foul-mouthed leading lady who’s a fading TV star, the plot hinges on the fact that her best friend’s mansion is being tented for fumigation. Not to mention the genuine Perry Ellis fashions, Louis Vuitton luggage, Steuben glass, Wedgwood china, Waterford crystal, Moet et Chandon champagne and Mercedes autos that are scattered around every scene.

And since no self-respecting Beverly Hills sexpot would dare to be seen unadorned, Harry Winston jewelers lent more than $3 million worth of gems to the production--as well as a guard.

Novel Setting

For Pat Booth, the 42-year-old author of the best sellers “Palm Beach” and “The Sisters,” setting her newest novel in Beverly Hills seemed natural enough since she was writing about a pink palace that closely resembles the Beverly Hills Hotel, an actor not unlike Warren Beatty who couldn’t keep his hands off women, a real estate mogul modeled after David Murdoch, and an Amazon-turned-New Age channeler with the body of Brigitte Nielsen.

Still, it was Booth’s publishing company, Crown Books, that first suggested calling the book “Beverly Hills.”

“They asked me, ‘Do you like this for a title?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.’ But what I wrote isn’t a book about Beverly Hills. It’s basically an entertaining summer beach read, which pertains to a town. It’s not about the town Beverly Hills.”

The reason is that this former London fashion model and photojournalist, who boasts about being a “seminal figure” in Britain during the ‘60s along with the Beatles, feared farming what she says was the same “obvious” Beverly Hills territory as two better-known and locally based trash-and-flash novelists, Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz.

“I’m not somebody who lives the life like Jackie or Judy,” Booth explained. “But I still think I have a bead on it because I’ve got the clear perspective of an outsider.”

Though a frequent visitor to Beverly Hills over the years, Booth spent only three months of 1987 doing on-the-scene research for her book, including a three-week stay in Howard Hughes’ former residence--Bungalow No. 9 at the Beverly Hills Hotel--with her husband, clinical psychiatrist Garth Wood.

Going to the Source

Drawing on conversations with her “many friends in the film industry,” including Richard Donner, Alan Parker and David Puttnam, she was able to write “knowledgeably” about the deal-making process of Hollywood, she maintains. She also met with several L.A. psychics and channelers, “as well as a whole group of Insight people” who participate in those transformational-type seminars conducted by John Roger, in order to include detailed descriptions on a trendy cult led by one of her characters.

But when she writes specifically about Beverly Hills, she fails to give readers any special flavor into fixtures such as Rodeo Drive--”I find it very boring”--or the ladies-who-lunch crowd--”I totally ignored them because they’re deeply dull”--or even the kind of women “who wear big leather jackets with rhinestones on them. I’m simply not interested in them.”

For instance, when she writes about parties in the book, “they’re parties I experienced, but not in Beverly Hills,” she admitted, noting that one glitzy black-tie gala described in detail is actually the Phantom of the Opera ball she attended in London several years ago.

“I’ve been to a ton of parties here over the years,” she quickly added. “But they’d have to be fantasized on somewhat because they really aren’t that glamorous.”

OK, so what would readers of her book learn about Beverly Hills?

“Well,” she said, thinking hard, “I’m very, very aware that it has the best climate in the world, whereas if you live here a lot like Jackie and Judy, you don’t ever write about the weather in California because you take it very much for granted.”

That’s it?

“Also, people who have read the book so far, like my publicist, said they didn’t know Morton’s wasn’t open for lunch.”

Then again, they also might be interested to learn that Morton’s restaurant is located in West Hollywood, not Beverly Hills. Booth made a similar geographical error when name-dropping another popular eatery, Cha Cha Cha, which is located along Melrose Avenue.

The low-budget movie “Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers” also takes license with the city’s locales. This comedy’s opening shot shows the Beverly Hills Cemetery and its motto, “Rest in Prosperity.” So just where is the Beverly Hills Cemetery?

“There isn’t one,” director Jon Mostow laughed.

Maintaining that his movie--about an attempt to bring the rich back to life--is a Frankenstein-meets-Fred Hayman sort of farce, Mostow describes Beverly Hills as a “very silly place where the ethic is you can buy anything, so we’re extrapolating that to mean a place where you can even buy immortality.”

Mostow wasn’t aware that any other movies this season would bear the Beverly Hills brand name. “Oh, it’s so depressing,” he said glumly when informed. “We were actually one of the first movies to do it. Why can’t these other people go out and get their own titles.”

Then, there’s “Beverly Hills Brats,” the brainchild of one-time Mrs. Howard Hughes, Terry Moore, who produces and also stars in this little comedy slated for release on Labor Day, which, according to its publicity, “doesn’t have to work to get laughs.”

The story of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and his socialite wife, the film focuses on their son Scooter, who already has a chauffeur, a butler and a maid and so hires his own kidnaper just to get his philandering parents to pay attention to him.

“The message is that money isn’t everything and the family has to be a strong unit,” producer Jerry Rivers explained. “It’s all very tongue-in-cheeky.”

Still another film scheduled to be shown in August is “Beverly Hills Vamp,” a horror movie spoof about a bevy of very beautiful Beverly Hills call girls who just happen to be vampires. And when the Beverly Hills chief of police visits their mansion to dine with their madam, he ends up being the main course.

But there’s more. “Beverly Hills Ninja,” a project that’s been kicking around so long that even its producer/director, Stan Dragoti, can’t remember when it was first conceived, “is not another Beverly Hills rip-off,” he assured.

A classic fish-out-of-water Hollywood scenario, it’s the story of a Beverly Hills boy who is lost off Japan, rescued by a Ninja master, returned home finally and “looks conspicuously like Rick Moranis,” Dragoti said.

Unsure if “Ninja” will ever get made, Dragoti registered surprise that so many other projects were being planned with Beverly Hills in their titles. “Well,” he muttered, “that’s one reason not to do it.”

Still not had enough? Well, if negotiations continue without a hitch, then Arnold Schwarzenegger will star in Nelson Entertainment’s “The Taking of Beverly Hills,” which is set to begin shooting this fall. Once again, this movie doesn’t sound like a promising cinema verite about the Beverly Hills scene; its plot is a standard hostage thriller in the “Die Hard” mold, with Schwarzenegger as the muscular hero.

Among other projects reportedly in the works is “The Terror of Beverly Hills,” “The Phantom of Beverly Hills” and “The Beast of Beverly Hills,” which sounds suspiciously as if the producers of the CBS series “Beauty and the Beast” are moving Victor the Lion-faced out of the sewers of Broadway and into the valet parking lots of Beverly Hills.

Will it end there? Probably not, as even the city fathers acknowledge. “Because Beverly Hills is a glamorous community associated with the entertainment industry, affluence and beauty, as well as the benefits of a marvelous climate, it’s inherent in having so many unique and attractive features that you would receive a lot of attention,” Chamber of Commerce president Reilly said.

Nor is Mayor Solter surprised by all this interest in Beverly Hills “because there is a magic to the name. Though I haven’t yet figured out why.”

But one thing is certain. Nearly all the movies, except those with lavish budgets, will be made everywhere but Beverly Hills because of the stiff fees and strict rules which govern filming within that city’s limits. “We didn’t shoot any of it in Beverly Hills, not a single frame,” Bartel noted almost proudly about his movie, which more aptly should be titled “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Brentwood and Hancock Park.”

In fact, the only complaint that Bartel received about his movie wasn’t from someone living in Beverly Hills. It was from the owner of one of the Hancock Park houses that Bartel shot for exteriors. “He said to me, ‘How could you shoot such a scandalously outrageous picture using my house? You’ve besmirched Hancock Park.’

“And I said, ‘Listen, the picture is not called ‘Scenes From the Class Struggle in Hancock Park.’ It’s called, ‘Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.’ And what may seem shocking in Hancock Park is old news, everyday occurrences, in Beverly Hills.

“So, shut up and forget about it!”