With All Quiet on the Set, Board of Public Works Has Its Day in Lights

In an exciting development Wednesday, the Los Angeles city Board of Public Works actually met in the Board of Public Works hearing room.

No, honest--don’t stop reading.

The Board of Public Works hearing room, Room 350, is a place of gorgeous civic dignity--all tiled walls and marble columns and vaulted ceilings. A lot of business is conducted there. A lot of it, however, is not necessarily public business.

Room 350 is misnamed. It is as capacious as the lobby of an elegant hotel. A good part of the time lately, it has been rented to movie makers at about the cost of an elegant hotel room, $250 a day.

Just this summer, it was fitted as a San Francisco courtroom, its desks dismantled and carted away, so Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte could film scenes for “Another 48 Hrs.”

Almost every court-and-tort legal series to come down the Hollywood Freeway has slammed a gavel in this splendid room.

When that happens, the rightful tenant, the Board of Public Works, packs up its nameplates and its storm drain specifications and weed abatement particulars and shuttles through City Hall, bureaucratic nomads alighting in this vacant room one day, and that room the next time.

Evidently tuckered out by all the to and fro-ing, the board recently decided that it shall not be moved. Much.

Board secretary James A. Gibson said the board decided it will not be evicted on more than one occasion--a day, or a week of consecutive days--each month.

“We went through a period when we were out of the board room for a couple of months straight, then in for a week, then out for another month,” Gibson said. “It was really kind of crazy.”

Ah, but there was Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the stars were gone and the commissioners were back.

“This is the miraculous month of May,” said board President Steve Harrington. “We haven’t had a movie shoot in here.”

He looked over at Charles M. Weisenberg, the city’s motion picture and television affairs coordinator.

“I commend Charles for doing his work; for keeping them out of here. We were getting homesick.”

Weisenberg, whose job is to keep movies in L.A., not keep them out, went to the microphone. He smiled. Don’t get too comfortable, he gave them to understand. Barney Rosenzweig, producer of “Cagney and Lacey,” has another series ready to roll. No more New York shot between palm trees. In this production, Sharon Gless will play a prosecutor. In L.A. In City Hall.

There was some rolling of eyes as this registered.

Board Vice President Dennis N. Nishikawa had already remarked that “more damage has been done to this room by movie studios, or movie companies, than by earthquakes . . . But the earthquakes don’t pay as much.”

The movies don’t pay much either. Apart from last month’s one-time $5,000 contribution from “Another 48 Hrs.” to a fund to keep City Hall beautiful (and filmable), Los Angeles--as compared to other Southland cities, such as Long Beach, which charges $200 an hour to film on city property--is a bargain.

It will still be a bargain after July 1, when a fee hike, actually more of a fee consolidation approved Wednesday by the board, takes effect. Filming on city property will cost a flat $300, instead of $200 for exteriors and $250 for interiors.

What concerned the board more than fees was a May 9 incident. A company filming a stunt for a Clint Eastwood movie sent a car blasting out of the exploding fifth floor of a downtown building. The explosion broke a window a block away, and scattered debris in a public alley that had been blocked without a permit.

“Did you see that letter from Pat Howard (the Bureau of Street Maintenance director) about the car going out the window?” Harrington asked Motion Picture Coordination Office Director R. Dirk Beving. The letter evidently addressed safety and city supervision of filming.

As the board has felt the impact of filming, so has the public, Harrington said.

“We’re getting an awful lot of complaints about it . . . I agree with Pat (Howard),” Harrington said. “We either have to control our streets, or give them up.”

Not to mention hearing rooms.