Mad About the Movies : People in Many L.A. Neighborhoods Are Up in Arms Over the Intrusions of Film Crews. A Few Are Figuring Out Ways to Make the Moguls Pay.

In the weeks preceding the outbreak of hostilities, the art gallery had gone through video hell.

The gallery is in Los Angeles’ industrial downtown, a neighborhood so favored by TV and movie makers for its all-purpose gritty-slummy-New Yorky-Philly look that film companies have been known to arrive there of a morning to find other film companies setting up at the far end of the same block.

Almost every week had brought another filmmaker to the gallery’s doorstep, another caravan of vans and trailers and equipment trucks. The crew filming “The Doors.” The crew shooting a commercial--they wouldn’t let a staffer cross the street to open for business until their shot was finished. The Disney company making “Filofax.” In pique, some local slipped Disney its own Mickey: a sketch on a cinder-block wall of Mickey about to become mousemeat via a bullet from an automatic pistol.

So it was that when a music video crew from Squeak Productions showed up unawares one recent morning, sentiment among some at the nonprofit multimedia gallery had reached critical mass. Hot words ensued over how long this would take, over whether the crew could film the building, over a car scraped by a film trolley, over music that could be heard inside the brick-walled offices.

At last, one staffer simply stood in front of the camera: by executive producer Pam Tarr’s account, to demand money; by his account, to stop the filming until he could get questions answered. By the time filming ended, $300 had changed hands, for the homeless writers’ coalition, the gallery employee said. “The money isn’t the point,” the man said. “I’d rather they move elsewhere” and not impede the life of the neighborhood. If they won’t, they “should leave something behind for the people most affected,” like the homeless.

Tarr’s small company tries to be “as courteous and cooperative as we can be. . . . If we had any idea how upset they would be, we would not have shot there.” However laudable the charity, the $300 hurt: “Sometimes we feel like whenever we shoot, Paramount Pictures has been there the day before with $10,000 petty cash to throw around.”

Lights, camera, action--reaction.

Something about filmmaking stirs up a cinematic “not in my back yard” syndrome. In the town that made movies, and was all but made by them, film crews can feel as unwanted as fill dirt from Chernobyl. Los Angeles cohabits with a beloved monster of an industry that does not always operate tidily behind factory walls. Resenting glitzkrieg invasions, town after town and neighborhood after neighborhood lays down rules and hikes up fees. Long Beach charges $250 for a film permit, $400 a day to shoot in the city, and $200 an hour for filming on city property. Beverly Hills, not known for coming cheap on anything, charges $759 a day, and a $125 business tax. Manhattan Beach, $1,500 a day.

That makes Los Angeles a bargain, and a draw. With a $130 permit, the right insurance and policing, you can film all day in the mayor’s office for $250. You couldn’t film a shoeshine stand for that. So movie makers are at City Hall at least once a week, passing it off as Congress or the Vatican or San Francisco.

Yet City Hall, disinclined to so much as ruffle the feathers of the golden egg-laying movie goose, now wants a bit more order in its own corridors, “to exert a little more control over the situation,” said Charles Weisenberg, director of the city’s motion picture and television affairs office. Garage worker Eddie Santillan has heard that the mayor, driving out of the garage, complains that they can’t see the traffic for the movie vans nosed along the street.

* The view from the canvas chair:

Film companies feel blackmailed by scams and greedheads. They’re visible, their shooting schedules leave them vulnerable, and from the weekly take from “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” some people think anyone with a camera is rich.

LAPD Traffic Officer Tim Wienckowski has worked for years on movie security. At a filming for Fox-TV’s “The Outsiders” at a San Fernando Valley construction site, a workman ostentatiously revved up a chain saw. The crew objected. I tell you what, the workman said, all sweet reason. For $300 I will stop. “That right there,” said Wienckowski, “is extortion.” But they were losing the light, losing several thousand dollars every hour that cameras were shut down. And so a guy Wienckowski was itching to arrest walked away with his chain saw and $300.

Location manager Cliff Roseman: “You have the horror stories and the sweethearts just like everything, the nice people who’ll bring out coffee and doughnuts, and then you have the goniffs. L.A. just seems to have more goniffs than other places.”

* The view from the front porch and the office window:

Locals feel bullied by Hollywood arrogance that takes cooperation for granted, that acts as if the words “We’re filming here” ought to command the same deference as “We’re curing cancer here.” A City Hall staff member, who asked not to be named, said that she doesn’t mind the snarls of cable so much as this: “I get resentful because of that sense of importance that dominates the movie industry--that a half-hour episode of ‘Hooper’ could be more important than anything I could possibly do here.”

In the rankings of urban unpleasantness, when movie shoots come in well behind real shoots--the semiautomatic kind--behind crack sales and smog alerts, life in a “hot spot” neighborhood can still try anyone’s endurance. A pediatric surgeon complained that he was kept awake long past midnight by filming. A major movie figure importuned a location manager to tell him how to keep away the movie companies that like to ply his own trade on his street. “Sometimes,” said another manager, “the worst are the people in the movie business.”

Unless you live in it, a movie shoot may amount to a traffic delay, a detour, a momentary scare when you see the helicopters and ambulances before you spot the cameras. KNX Radio traffic doyen Bill Keene recalls the evening rush hour in the Cahuenga Pass, when a video company started to inflate a Spuds Mackenzie balloon. “The Hollywood Freeway was absolutely locked, people looking at this dumb dog being blown up.”

Such is life in a company town. Weisenberg said, “If we lived in Dodge City, we’d have cattle drives.”

Agriculture, aerospace and tourism are richer, but movies and TV generate $5 billion a year for California, 90% of it for Los Angeles. Three billion more skips town in productions shot elsewhere, largely, the industry said, because of costs and more red tape than videotape. The city must meet the competition, they warn. Or we’ll go.

Angelenos have actor sightings enough, in delis, at the dry cleaners, in court. Who wants them cluttering up your block? Each day, 40 or 50 productions, from feature films to 15-second commercials, hit L.A. streets. Production concentrates in a 30-mile zone, most of the L.A. basin, beyond which overtime and location costs soar. Of the 94 cities in the zone, said California Film Commission Director Lisa Rawlins, perhaps 16 are constantly filmed, some more willingly than others. Los Angeles bends over to be accommodating:

Zoning laws prohibit business operations in most neighborhoods, the chief exception being the one allowing people to rent their homes for movies. Film crews can get permission to reroute buses and move bus stops. With $5-million insurance they can fly helicopters. The city’s charges are “minimal,” said Weisenberg, “intended to encourage filming here.”

The crew of “Diehard” had to wait one day for a Century City scene of tanks and troops thundering across Avenue of the Stars, guns blasting. President Reagan was due in that night and his security people “might not understand,” said Weisenberg.

The powers that be said yes when the crew of “Diehard 2” wanted to stage a predawn riot at the Tom Bradley Terminal. But they said “no” when a crew wanted to use plastic snow, lest it drift across the runway and be sucked up in jet engines.

Robert Gay is chief deputy to City Councilman Gil Lindsay. Movies are good fun, he said, but how far is fair? For another business, the city would insist on environmental impact reports on noise and traffic and parking. “Movie studios don’t have to do any of that stuff. They get basically carte blanche to do anything they want to.”

Walking down a City Hall corridor now and again, Gay has found himself grabbed by a crew member who pulled him out of the shot. A crew permitted to film Lindsay’s office wanted the staff to “come through the back door, and shut off our phones from ringing.”

This year’s St. Patrick’s Day gala--with Mayor Bradley, Ed McMahon, the former Lord Mayor of Dublin and two Aer Lingus stewardesses--ended with a parade of bagpipers and shamrocked preschoolers.

They marched out of council chambers--and into a smoky, half-lit hallway being filmed for a commercial. “OK, everybody back up against the wall!” the director shouted at his crew, and directed pipers and kids to daylight.

“What I’m saying is, what’s the limit?” said Gay. “When you come into City Hall, the actual seat of government where major policy is happening each day, the last thing you need when you’re trying to get somewhere is to have someone stop you, yank you into a bathroom, telling you to watch the cables or to shut up when you’re trying to have a business conversation. We’ve swung the pendulum so far, we’re so anxious to get them here.”

With the exception of a sound stage, Hancock Park is probably the most-shot part of Los Angeles. Its homes are big, architecturally varied, and lush with the kind of detail that no studio can afford to create. For several thousand dollars a day, they can rent it.

Producer Ron Gilbert was shooting there a while back, across the street from a man who “wanted money, even though we weren’t shooting (him) or disturbing him.” He drove his car across the street and turned up the radio to “blast.”

“I want you to know,” said Gilbert, “this guy lived in an estate . And he said he’ll turn it off for $500. It was the principle. I wouldn’t pay him.” At last, “his wife came and pulled him away.”

Every shoot adds to the anthology: a woman who cranked up her country-Western station and sat waiting for a payoff, not knowing the crew wasn’t shooting sound film. The man in a window flashing a light into the cameras to get them to leave. The contractor and homeowner who were paid big money not to start noisy repair work that they had no intention of doing anyway.

“I think the people who are mad are the people who don’t make money for it,” said Al Drouin, a Van Nuys man who let filmmakers use his house for “Real Men.”

“And let’s face it, they don’t pay everybody.”

No neighborhood, even Hancock Park, is uniform in its attitudes. But the homeowners’ association has drawn up regulations requiring advance notice, parking on only one side of the street, busing in the crew, and trucks arriving no earlier than the permit allows and leaving no later than it demands.

“People don’t care about seeing movie stars or television actors,” said its president, Marguerite Byrne. “It’s a question of the peace and quiet of your own home. It’s like whether you can sleep at night, have your family over. . . . I would say probably three or four times as many people turn down thousands of dollars to use their home for filming.”

In adjacent Windsor Square, a family near Harry Olivar’s house bought a house some years ago intending “to pay their mortgage out of the revenues” of renting it for movies, Olivar said. Neighbors complained at the ceaseless file of trucks and crews. The family became “somewhat indignant, that this was their divine right--’How am I going to pay the mortgage without it?’ What you have here is a few individuals benefiting in a monetary way, and a drawback to the community.”

When it does work, as it did for Al Drouin, big disruption is balanced by big bucks.

Drouin’s neighborhood had already starred in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” MGM-UA came back to blow up the garage across the street for “Real Men,” and it needed Drouin’s house to launch the missile.

Seventy-five people out there, shooting past midnight, noise, trucks, lights, but at $500 a day, “the money is good, let’s face it.” By the time the crew left, the Drouins had a new front fence and a nice little nest egg. A neighbor confined to a wheelchair had a video of the enterprise, recorded by Drouin’s son and paid for by the film crew. And one neighbor had a new color TV, won in a drawing set up by the film crew.

Good manners and occasional cash flow: location manager Brian Haynes has offered to kennel dogs during an explosive gunfight, and hired a vet to stand by when the scene was shot. He hands out studio tour tickets as thank yous. He replaced a $6,000 wooden floor when a fish tank leaked during a fistfight. Like his fellow location managers, he sometimes finds that a judiciously placed $50 bill can shut off a lawn mower, or a radio, or a complaint.

Since January, any company wanting to stop traffic on Main Street in the rustic town of Fillmore must put up $15,000 for the merchants, a figure City Councilman and Assistant Fire Chief Roger Campbell thinks is too high. Some merchants must think so, too. Paul Hogan’s company spent months there, and were so courteous some merchants gave the money back. “If all film companies were as good as (Hogan’s),” said Campbell, “we wouldn’t need any ordinance.”

Their ordinance, two years in the making, was a defense measure for a town overwhelmed by filmmaking, some of it fine, like “La Bamba,” some outrageous:

* The day Campbell and the police chief checked out a car roll-over stunt and calculated it would smash into the back of a house. “The (stunt) guy said ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ” He took off, and crashed into the house. Campbell was furious. “That was the pure intention of the stunt.”

* The morning an apparently driverless car, steered from under the dashboard, was to careen down Main Street and crash into a fake barrier. It looked harmless enough until the fire chief noticed a film crewman standing by with a five-gallon bucket of gasoline, “to throw it as the car went by and light it.”

* Last November, when a music video company “had a guy and a girl doing things that shouldn’t be done except in the privacy of their own home,” at an open-air shoot with kids hanging around. A lewd-conduct regulation was worked into the ordinance, too.

The ordinance also requires script approval to make sure that what they say they will do and what they intend to do are one and the same, and a $500 fee, partly refundable, for the city’s paper work. The state film commission “sent very strong suggestions as to what was wrong with our ordinance,” said Campbell. “We didn’t pay attention to them.”

As balm to raw feelings, Rawlins’ office and movie makers have worked up a code of conduct that sounds as simple as a high school’s. Pick up your trash. Wear ID badges. Be polite. Arrive when you’re supposed to, leave on time. For that’s the rub, when “just one hour” becomes five, when “a few people” become 50.

In the recent movie snafu in the Mojave Desert, filmmakers assured authorities that markings they wanted to paint in an ancient limestone cavern would wash off, and then they didn’t. That kind of intrusion is what brings 15 or 20 complaints a week to Rawlins’ office. Cash blandishment “wears thin after a while,” said Rawlins. “I think the industry had become very accustomed to throwing money at a problem,” and “will have to adopt a much stronger (public relations) position.”

In South Pasadena, film companies already donate to local projects, and “local attitudes have changed recently simply because of this,” said Rawlins.

Local attitudes were taken into account when “Heat Wave” came to South Central, a place that sees as little of film companies as it does of chain stores. L.A.-based Avnet/Kerner Production Co. is making the cable feature about the 1965 Watts riots, and it prides itself on its responsible films. They always intended, they say, to arrange a community benefit tied to a “Heat Wave” screening, but in part through Assemblywoman Maxine Waters and Lindsay deputy Gay, the neighborhood got more.

When they filmed the Pueblo housing projects, they filmed the Pueblo people too, as extras, at $40 for eight hours’ work. The disgruntled were offered motel rooms and meals. Twelve hundred dollars went to a local exterminator, after crews found their working interiors around 33rd and Central aswarm with rats. Buildings got painted, buildings got cleaned up, all by paid locals, all of a piece with the agreement to “leave the area as good or better,” said lead producer Jordan Kerner.

For an hourly $15 each, Louis Farrakhan’s Fruit of Islam followers were enlisted as round-the-clock security. Lead producer Jordan Kerner: “They were just tremendous, very easy to work with.”

A socially responsible, expensive shoot. It cost “a lot more” for this “very important movie,” Kerner said--$100,000 over budget for the Fruit of Islam alone. Now “it’s just a matter of how much we’ll lose.” Yet there are other kinds of profit; the newsmagazines and news shows have come knocking.

“The saturation, the volume of films, the amount of filming done on a daily basis, and the lack of cooperation from people, and the greed”--it makes for misery on both sides, said Roseman. But Los Angeles “will say ‘damn’ when it’s gone.”

As far as Campbell is concerned, the upheaval “can be justified if the city gets the benefit” in something tangible, like recreation projects. “People do not like having their daily lives disrupted, and just to make a movie is not a good enough reason to do that.”