Under Surveillance? : ‘S.I.S’ Producers Wonder If LAPD Unit Is Focusing on Them

The producer of a movie shooting in the Los Angeles area about a secretive Los Angeles Police Department unit believes his phone has been tapped.

Some crew members feel their work is under surveillance.

The film company received an unsolicited letter from an LAPD detective criticizing plot points in what supposedly had been a closely-held script.

For most of the six weeks the movie has been shooting, it’s had a fictitious name.

Midway through the shoot, one member of the company was approached by people who say certain city employees aren’t happy that the film is being made.

Is this the fictional plot of a thriller? Or the real thing?

In L.A., you can’t be sure anymore. So it’s been a bit surreal on the set of “S.I.S.,” as the movie about the LAPD’s 25-year-old Special Investigation Section shifted from the San Fernando Valley to Venice to downtown. And reality mixed with fiction.

In the $8-million movie, which Santa Monica-based Trimark Pictures will distribute next year, actors Lou Diamond Phillips and Scott Glenn are cast as two LAPD detectives who come into conflict with each other over S.I.S. tactics. Mark L. Lester (“Firestarter,” “Commando”) is directing.

In real life, the 19-member SIS is considered an elite surveillance unit that shadows the most dangerous and violent criminal suspects. A Times investigation of the unit in 1988 found that while conducting surveillances, its officers often did not take opportunities to arrest suspects until after burglaries or robberies occurred--in many cases leaving terrorized or injured victims.

The movie producers now wonder if the SIS has turned its skills on them.

“I don’t think I’ve gotten to the paranoid stage, nonetheless the SIS still exists,” said “S.I.S.” producer and screenwriter Frank Sacks.

“There are a number of things that occurred over the last couple of years that made us think this,” he said. “We anticipated obstacles and we eliminated many of them because, like the SIS, we kind of went underground. We called the movie ‘The Arica Project.’ ”

Arica Productions is the name of the company he and partner Wolf Schmidt established for this movie and used in applying for location permits in L.A., so as to not easily be identified. But one source suggested that the attempt at keeping a low profile also was an attempt to avoid unions, since the movie was a non-union project.

Sacks said that one of the “intimidating” factors was a letter he received a year ago from 15-year SIS member Jerry Brooks, who had gotten a copy of the script despite their efforts to keep it secret. “It was a critique of my writing style and his opinion on whether the events in the script were authentic or balanced,” Sacks said. He found the mere idea of the letter, coupled with the SIS’s reputation, chilling.

Staunch SIS critic Stephen Yagman, an attorney who has advised the filmmakers and has a small role in the movie, read Brooks’ letter. “If that letter had been sent to me I would have interpreted (it) as an attempt to either influence me or intimidate me,” he said.

Brooks, in an interview, acknowledged he has read two versions of the script and considers both of them “far-fetched” with inaccuracies in regard to basic SIS procedures. He said both scripts closely subscribe to critics of the unit who say SIS is a trigger-happy death squad.

But Brooks denied that SIS members are conducting a surveillance of the set.

Director Lester, however, reported seeing undercover police cars watching during the company’s shooting on location in the Venice district.

And Yagman, who has brought several suits against the SIS, said he knows all SIS members by sight. He said he saw an SIS officer watching the production from down the street the day he was on the set.

The experience illustrated the blurring between “S.I.S.” the movie and SIS the reality.

On the day Yagman was on the set he had his hands up over his head and was standing on the wrong end of a robber’s gun. The robber took the money from the cash register, ran from the nightclub, and was promptly shot down by SIS members.

“It’s a case of art imitating the taking of life,” he said. “I like the paradox of my appearing as a victim of a robber who is killed by the SIS.”

The next day, Yagman was in his Venice Beach office taking the depositions of real members of the real SIS in a lawsuit in which he calls them a “death squad” that killed three robbers and injured a fourth outside a San Fernando Valley fast-food restaurant two years ago.

In the movie, Phillips plays a suspended street cop who is recruited into the SIS by a detective-friend, played by Glenn. Eventually the Phillips character begins to take issue with the movie’s SIS procedures: provoking suspects to fight and refusing to allow them to surrender peacefully, which then provides the SIS with the justification to shoot.

In real life, SIS members have been defendants in numerous civil rights suits, some of which have not yet been resolved.

Last week, the Los Angeles City Council voted to pay a $600,000 settlement to the family of William J. Bachwich III, who was killed in 1986 by an SIS officer. According to police, Det. Gary Strickland accidentally fired his shotgun at point blank range into Bachwich’s back while arresting the 25-year-old robbery suspect. The settlement and cases before it prompted City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas to ask new Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams to review procedures used by the unit.

Williams has said he is conducting reviews of all units in the Police Department as he becomes familiar with his job.

Before the Bachwich case was settled, the SIS was the subject of a highly publicized trial earlier this year over the officers’ actions during surveillance of robbery suspects, which ended with all four being shot, three fatally.

A federal jury awarded the lone survivor and the families of the three dead robbers $44,000 in damages, agreeing with the plaintiffs’ contention that the SIS officers used excessive force when they opened fire on the robbers in their getaway car. The plaintiffs’ three attorneys, including Yagman, were awarded $387,000 in legal fees.

Despite the controversies surrounding the SIS, the unit remains in use by the department. In recent weeks they have made arrests of suspects in the slaying of a Maywood police officer and suspects believed responsible for a series of violent follow-home type robberies in the San Fernando Valley.

Speaking of the movie, Yagman said: “It seems to accurately depict how they operate. I don’t think it takes sides.”

Sacks, who co-wrote the script with Bob Boris, said he met with a detective who advised him on the script. He declined to name him for what he described as “obvious” reasons. The detective, he said, “was or perhaps still is a member of the LAPD.”

Producer Schmidt said: “It touches very important ethical, legal, moral and constitutional questions--it’s a very important movie. One of the basic questions is how far can or should the police go in doing their job?”

Schmidt says the film draws no conclusions. “Our story examines the conflicts that must be discussed. Somewhere along the line, this unit seems to have appointed itself judge, jury and executioner,” Schmidt said.

But Brooks had a different view. “If the film is done according to the scripts I read, it is one-sided.”

He conceded that most police-action movies are fraught with inaccuracies, violence and bloodshed, but said this film should be more concerned about accuracy because it carries the name of a real unit.

However, even if the filmmakers had sought SIS officers as advisers on the film, it is unlikely they would have gotten anything but a negative reply. The unit has routinely attempted to avoid publicity and scrutiny by the media. Brooks’ brief comments to The Times were a rarity.

Brooks acknowledged that he wrote and signed the four-page letter to the film’s producers but denied it in any way was intimidating and provided a copy to The Times.

The Aug. 26, 1991, letter points out inaccuracies that Brooks said he saw in an early script that was made available to him. (Brooks declined to say how he got either that script or an updated version this year.)

“I guess my main concern is that the script shows a distorted view of SIS and its officers as do numerous news articles and statements from some attorneys,” Brooks wrote. “The script is one-sided and indicates a unit that is out of control and is only into killing suspects. I realize that when you make a movie it’s got to be exciting and action-packed, but how about truthful facts?”

Brooks concluded: “Maybe the next movie, with better facts, could be called ‘S.I.S. the Real Story.’ ”

Truth or fiction or both, “S.I.S.” was considered an easy sell with international distributors at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, which was held only a week after the riots in Los Angeles. Sacks and Schmidt sold the overseas rights to 20 different distributors. “The foreign buyers on this picture were all kind of shocked that a unit like this operated anywhere in the United States,” Sacks said. “The riots last April sent the project into orbit.”

Throughout the six weeks of shooting, there has been no problem dealing with the city on locations, which included Los Angeles City Hall. But one place the “S.I.S.” production never attempted to use was police headquarters, Sacks said. “For those scenes, we built our own. In that sense, we were a little gun-shy.”

Speaking by telephone late last week, Sacks said that if the interview had taken place a week earlier, “you would have heard clicking.”

“Every time I’d talk about the SIS, I’d hear a click on the line. It was bugged. But I don’t know if it was the SIS.”