Lights! Camera! Reaction! as Residents Fight Filming : San Pedro: There was plenty of melodrama along Bluff Place this week, where residents say they have been virtual prisoners of a film company that has taken over their neighborhood.

Claude and Arlene Harrison are relaxing in their home on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. It is late evening. The only sounds are the wind and the waves. The nighttime sky is lit only by the moon.

Suddenly, the serenity is shattered by a light so intense the walls of their home seem almost transparent. The sky is lit up, Claude thinks, like an explosion. There is the light. And then there are the sounds. The sounds of machinery. Like engines.

Stirred from their home, they rush to the street along with several of their neighbors. There, they see a giant cluster of klieg lights sitting atop a boom, surrounded by generators and trucks, a mass of equipment, a maze of cables.

Someone is filming a movie.

At first, they try to negotiate with a member of the film crew. They tell him the lights and noise are irritating. No one can sleep. No one can think.

“What do you want me to do?” he yells. “Do you want to go to a hotel?”

Claude walks up to an off-duty policeman hired for the filming. “They have a permit,” the policeman tells Claude.

“Does that mean I have no rights?” Claude demands.

“I guess not,” the officer says.

For a melodrama made in San Pedro, it was hard to beat the plot twists and raw emotion that unfolded this week along Bluff Place just below Pacific Avenue.

There, where the film “Color of Evening” is being shot, residents say they have been lied to by filmmakers, insulted by off-duty Los Angeles police officers and ignored by City Hall. Worst of all, they say, they are virtual prisoners of a film company that has taken over their neighborhood with an arrogance legendary to the motion picture industry.

“It used to be (film crews) would be mindful of the neighborhood. Now it’s like, ‘We own it. You get out,’ ” said Irene Goldstone, who has lived in the 4000 block of Bluff Place with her husband, Robert, for 20 years.

“It’s just gotten out of hand,” said Arlene Harrison. “We have to make a stand.”

The claims are adamantly denied by members of the film’s production crew, who are amazed that the complaints come over a movie they say will be a quiet, serious drama. “We’re shooting a drama, a love story. This isn’t some film with explosions and cars going off cliffs,” said director Steve Stafford.

The ire of the dozen or so Bluff Place residents, most of them retired, was sparked by the filming that has taken place where Bluff winds down from Pacific, near Cabrillo Beach. The filming, originally scheduled to be completed last month, only recently got under way in a home rented for the feature.

When shooting started, the heavy trucks that transport equipment and the trailers used for cast and crew clogged the narrow street and gobbled up the precious parking in the neighborhood, even extending to a public parking lot at the tip of Pacific. Just as aggravating, residents say, was the noise of film crews remodeling the home rented for the film.

Finally, the last straw, residents say, was the nighttime filming that last week included huge klieg lights atop a boom. Several residents say they did not agree to the nighttime filming as is required by the City of Los Angeles. Others may have signed forms allowing the filming, but those forms, according to Harrison, did not include the 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. shooting schedule that began last week.

The complaints come at a time when San Pedro’s downtown businesses are discussing whether film companies should face tighter restrictions in the community’s central business district.

At a hearing called by San Pedro’s Downtown Business Assn., merchants differed over the value of filming to the community. And while the business owners disagreed among themselves over the issue, a handful of Bluff Place residents steered the discussion to their neighborhood and filming in residential areas.

“None of you are watching what’s going on. None of you give a damn what’s happening,” resident Jean Meyers told the panel of city officials at the hearing.

Others charged that San Pedro’s businesses and residents have been exploited, with movie companies paying less money to film in the community and city officials paying less attention to what happens during the filming.

That claim drew vehement denials from the several city officials on hand at the hearing.

“I can assure you San Pedro does not suffer from a different set of rules than any other part of Los Angeles, rich or poor,” said Charles Weisenberg of the city’s Office of Motion Picture and Television Affairs.

Nevertheless, the complaints of Bluff Place residents were serious enough to persuade Dirk Beving, director of the city’s Motion Picture Coordination Office, to visit the filming location after the meeting.

By the time he arrived, the crews were preparing another night’s filming, though director Stafford and co-producer Scott Thomas had already resigned themselves to making changes in the schedule.

The complaints, they said, were not being ignored. The crew had been cut to about 50 people, about half the normal production crew for a feature film. Four or five nights of filming were also being eliminated, so that nighttime shooting would end Saturday night. And until filming ends Sept. 8, they said, production vehicles will be parked farther away so that streets will remain clear.

“We’ve tried to do everything we can to eliminate any inconvenience,” Thomas said.

Both he and Stafford were clearly irritated by the complaints of some residents, insisting that claims about problems have been exaggerated and that no one was misled about the hours of filming.

“As far as duping anybody, the amount of nighttime work was always on the schedule,” Stafford said.

Although acknowledging that the production had inconvenienced some residents, Stafford said those situations were unintentional. “If we blatantly did things to bother people, that would be different. But that’s not what happened,” he said.

Likewise, Stafford said some of the inconveniences were unavoidable consequences of filmmaking. “If you go into a dentist’s office, the drill makes noise,” he said.

But now that the complaints have been aired, Stafford and Thomas said, their crews have been as quiet, and the production as inconspicuous, as possible.

“I’ve been in the business 20 years now. And this is the smallest impact I’ve ever seen on a neighborhood,” he said.

Regardless, the complaints have persuaded city officials that the production company must immediately return to neighbors and receive their written permission by today to continue filming at night.

“They have an obligation to work to keep the neighborhood satisfied because they are the guests there,” Beving, of the city’s motion picture office, said late Thursday. If that does not occur, he said, the company will either be forced to limit its filming to daytime or lose its permit.

Whatever happens with this film production, residents at the top of Bluff Place say they will not put up with similar situations in the future.

On Thursday, Arlene Harrison said a handful of the most vocal residents were making plans to organize sufficiently to, at best, block future productions or, at least, insist on every restriction that city law allows.

“We won’t let it happen again,” she said.