Shooting War : Film: Two Hancock Park homes served as movie locations so often that neighbors beefed. Now there’s a moratorium on their use.

Complaints from neighbors have prompted Los Angeles city officials to impose a one-year moratorium on the use of two side-by-side homes in Hancock Park as film locations.

The moratorium, the longest imposed by the city’s Motion Picture and Television Division in at least eight years, is the result of a heated quarrel that has shattered the seeming tranquility of an impeccably maintained stretch of South Hudson Avenue.

Both homes had recently been movie locations, and the shoots, which sometimes lasted several weeks, filled the block with trucks, trailers, film crews, generators and spotlights, infuriating neighbors.

Disputes over filming are hardly new to the Los Angeles area or to Hancock Park. But what happened on South Hudson Avenue is a story of extremes: two adjacent homes that are ideal film locations, a vigilant neighborhood association, and neighbors who complained for so long that relationships frayed beyond the point of mending.

Dirk Beving, the city’s filming permit officer, said imposing a moratorium on a home or a neighborhood is a drastic but occasionally necessary step. Before neighbors become so angry that a moratorium is the only measure that they will accept, he said, his office tries to address their concerns by limiting parking by the film crews or restricting filming to certain hours. On South Hudson, however, there seemed to be no alternative.

The two homes in question are a 13,000-square-foot Tudor-style brick house belonging to Toni and George Thomas, and a slightly smaller Spanish-style house next door belonging to Esther Bresee. The Thomases and Bresee were notified by Beving’s Motion Picture and Television Division office in late February that any permit applications for filming at their homes would be denied until February, 1992.

It was a stretch of particularly heavy shooting late in 1990 and early this year that finally caused things to boil over, and prompted the Hancock Park Homeowners Assn. to ask the city to crack down.

Last September and October, crews descended on the Bresee house for 13 days to shoot a remake of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” starring Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave, a TV movie that aired in March.

Then the Thomas house was used for three days in November to shoot an episode of “Murder, She Wrote.” Crews returned to the Thomases’ for nine more days in January and February, mostly to shoot a Warren Beatty movie that has the working title of “Bugsy.”

Toni Thomas, who is black, contends that her neighbors, in complaining, are motivated by jealousy and racial prejudice.

“I feel it was a prejudicial determination, racially prejudicial,” she said of the moratorium. “If (neighbors) were getting some of the money, they would feel better about it. If we were doing it for free, they would feel better about it. It’s about money and about prejudice.”

Nonsense, says neighbor Vaggi Lieberman, who lives down the block. “What do I care what color they are? I care about the trucks. . . . This is a residential neighborhood. I didn’t move here to look at trucks and toilets in front of my house.”

Other residents complained that filming had become such a regular practice on their block that it seemed the neighbors had turned their homes into money-making enterprises.

“Would you want to live on the back lot of a studio?” said Laurette Nitka, who lives across the street from the Thomases and Bresee. “Some people made a business out of their homes, and this is a residential neighborhood.”

Thomas said it’s none of her neighbors’ or the Hancock Park Homeowners Assn.’s business what she does in her home. She and her husband, George, a physician, consider themselves good neighbors because they are quiet people and maintain their home impeccably, she said.

“Homeowners associations are going to get in trouble all over the country if they keep interfering with people’s personal, private business on their own property,” she said.

Beving, the film permit officer, said some neighbors seemed to complain more vociferously about filming at the Thomas residence than at the Bresee house or at others nearby that have been used as film locations. He said neighbors told him that they felt Toni Thomas abused the practice.

“There’s always the possibility of neighborhood squabbles getting mixed up with the filming, and that doesn’t make our job any easier,” Beving said. “There’s no way of knowing what an individual’s motivations are.”

Beving said there is a nine-month moratorium now in effect on two blocks in Brentwood, where several films and TV shows were shot. The yearlong moratorium on Hudson Avenue, which Beving said was the longest in his eight years on the job, takes into consideration the long history of filming at the two homes, the fact that they’re next-door to each other and the irritation among neighbors, he said.

“We have to demonstrate . . . that we are willing to take action when the situation is serious enough to warrant it,” he said.

Beving’s office each day considers applications for 40 or 50 filming locations, and must weigh a neighborhood’s level of tolerance for filming against the desire of the city to accommodate an industry that he said employs about 100,000 people in the region and generates several billion dollars a year.

“The studios can decide, and often do, to make a movie or TV show in another part of the country,” Beving said.

Anyone who wants to film at a residential or commercial location in the city, except for news crews, must apply to Beving’s office and pay a $130 application fee. Approval is usually routine, he said, unless the request is “extraordinarily problematic” in terms of duration, late-night filming or use of special effects.

Hancock Park, however, has always had an uneasy relationship with the entertainment industry, mostly because it suits the needs of location managers so well.

It is close to the studios and full of houses that could as easily be in Philadelphia or Atlanta as Los Angeles. Its trees are sycamores and firs as often as palms. If a studio wants to do a show about a family in Texas, it can find a house in Hancock Park that looks the part. In fact, one regular location for “Dallas” was a mansion on South Hudson.

“Hancock Park has its Tudor style and Colonial-style homes, and if there are no palm trees showing, you think you are in New York or Chicago,” said Walter Roshetski of Real to Reel location managers, which acts as an agent for homes and commercial sites interested in being filmed.

Roshetski represents the Thomas home, among others, and said it is a popular location because Toni Thomas is very helpful to film crews and because the house can pass for almost anywhere in the world.

Gary Herman, president of the Hancock Park Homeowners Assn., said most residents tolerate, and even welcome, some filming. “But when there is so much of it that it really adversely affects the quality of the neighborhood, we get complaints,” he said.

Esther Bresee’s son, Alan, who grew up in the tile-roofed Spanish house, said he believes the inconvenience and the money were double irritants for neighbors.

“I think a lot of them get upset because they’re not getting any money,” said Bresee, whose family has lived in the house 39 years. “They’re getting grumpy in their old age.”

The money is not inconsequential. Roshetski said daily fees for homes in Hancock Park range from about $1,500 to $5,000. Thomas declined to say what she charged.

Thomas is quick to point out that she didn’t invent location filming and that she’s not the first person in Hancock Park to do it. Herman of the homeowner association agreed. The association, he said, has been mediating disputes among neighbors for years. In the mid-’80s, the association suggested that residents limit filming at their homes to once a year and that they discuss projects with their neighbors before signing contracts.

Not all the neighbors on South Hudson are opposed to filming. Asako Arafune, wife of the consul general of Japan, said they are not disturbed by filming across the street at the Thomas residence.

“When they’re taking a picture, they always notify us beforehand. If we have guests, they change the time of the filming,” she said. “Sometimes it’s good fun for my children because sometimes they’re making snow there.”