Hearing Full of Sound, Fury : Development: The Community Redevelopment Agency’s last public meeting on the Hollywood project was rancorous. Now old foes hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

It may be an extremely ugly affair.

Every two years, the seven commissioners of the Community Redevelopment Agency hold a public meeting to solicit input on the CRA’s $922-million Hollywood redevelopment project, a beleaguered undertaking that has met with more opposition, scorn and bad publicity than perhaps any other project in the redevelopment agency’s history.

The next biennial meeting is set for Oct. 25 at 7 p.m., in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, to allow the public to address the plan, its progress (or lack of it), and its problems.

As the meeting approaches, some neighborhood activists are organizing, leafleting, making phone calls and canvassing door-to-door in a call to arms.

Already, Hollywood boosters are fearing the worst, citing the chaos and rancor at the last biennial meeting, held in October, 1988, in the auditorium of Hollywood High School.

At that meeting, “the anti-redevelopment junkies were out in force,” Larry Kaplan, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, said in an open letter to chamber members. “They shouted down reasonable people . . . they insulted our leaders, impugned the integrity of the staff, patronized residents, and were just downright crude and unruly.”

“WE CANNOT,” Kaplan wrote in boldface capital letters, “ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN AGAIN.”

In their organizing efforts, the anti-redevelopment forces have been “scaring well-intentioned business people and residents with wild tales akin to Sherman’s march to the sea.”

But this time, like any good Hollywood sequel, the ending will be different, Kaplan predicts. Because this time, Hollywood boosters intend to fight back.

“You fight fire with fire,” Kaplan, a vocal booster of the revitalization effort, said in an interview last week.

The chamber has sent flyers to its 1,500 members appealing to them to spread the word and show up at the meeting. Kaplan’s personal letter has gone out to 400 of the chamber’s most active members, asking them to “be ready to speak loud and clear in favor of development.”

Kaplan, the former top aide to Councilman Michael Woo, said he plans to use all his organizing skills to marshal a significant pro-development side, to show the CRA that many in Hollywood support its efforts.

But there are some activists who can barely contain their glee at the prospect of having a shot at the CRA officials for several uninterrupted hours.

They will finally be permitted to seize the limelight and say things they have been saying in private for the last two years: that the redevelopment agency is failing in its job of redeveloping the city’s faded movie capital.

“I’m looking forward to hearing them answer to us,” said Laura Dodson, founder of the Beat Keepers neighborhood group and former leader of United Streets of Hollywood coalition.

“They haven’t done anything. But since they don’t have any answers, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Dodson said. “I don’t think anybody is going to get physically hurt. But I would not want to be in their shoes. Would you?”

Citizens are permitted to address the CRA commissioners at their downtown meetings every few weeks, and there are other forums for public input. But the public is limited by time and by subject matter in those forums.

In the past several years, several neighborhood groups have sued the redevelopment agency and the city to block the massive Hollywood project. Some, including members of the renegade Project Area Committee, say they have been illegally kept out of the process by the CRA and by City Councilman Michael Woo, who represents Hollywood. Woo replaced the committee last year with his handpicked group of advisers after calling it a “forum for wacky behavior.”

At the 1988 meeting, the first biennial meeting on the redevelopment project since its City Council approval in 1986, several speakers called the commissioners everything from drug dealers to fascists. Most, however, accused the agency of lying about specific development projects, catering to real estate interests, slighting preservation needs and forcing the 30-year redevelopment project on unwilling Hollywood residents.

Many, if not all, of those concerns still exist and will be articulated, said Robert Nudelman, chairman of the Project Area Committee, which still meets.

Of particular concern to some is the fate of the Project Area Committee itself, whose ouster by Woo, some critics say, is just one of many indications that the public is being left out of the redevelopment process.

“This is the community’s chance to talk, and the commissioners will have to listen,” Nudelman said. “This is the only time the doors are open and the community can go down and address all the issues on Hollywood.”

Donald Lippman, president of the Endangered Property Owners of Hollywood, said he intends to offer constructive criticism.

“A lot of people say what bad guys they are (at the CRA), how evil they are. But I want to point out several areas where they have done things illegally,” said Lippman, whose group recently joined the Project Area Committee in its lawsuit against the CRA and the city.

Officials at the CRA say they hope the meeting takes on a more positive tone than the one in 1988.

The CRA commissioners may try to preempt the crowd’s anger by addressing some oft-articulated concerns, if not by downright apologizing, said CRA spokesman Marc Littman.

“We are going to acknowledge that the progress has not been what we would have liked,” Littman said. “We’ll be very candid about that. But there have been some successes.”

For example, Littman cited progress on a proposed $30-million Hollywood Galaxy commercial complex at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Sycamore Avenue and a new $80-million KTLA-TV entertainment center that would replace KTLA’s existing facility on Sunset Boulevard between Van Ness and Bronson avenues.

Also, the CRA has helped build nearly 500 units of new affordable housing, Littman said, and 400 more units of housing are planned.

The Hollywest mixed-use project to build low-cost senior citizen housing and retail stores on Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue is under way, and the restoration and expansion of the historic Dunning House at 5552 Carlton Way, Littman said.

“I think 1990 is really a turning point,” Littman said. “We have shifted from the planning stages to taking concrete action.”

Because of some activists’ concerns that the meeting room will not be big enough, the CRA is making efforts to book extra rooms and hook up loudspeakers for anyone who wants to listen.

Still, there are some activists who say choosing a smaller room than the one booked two years ago is just one way of trying to reduce confrontation.

“There are some people who want to tar and feather them (the CRA commissioners), run them out of town,” Dodson said. “They’re going to have to answer us sometime.--They can’t keep slipping out some back door.