Tinseltown Gadfly Plays the Role of Leading Man : Preservation: Robert Nudelman uses bulldog tenacity, elephantlike memory and mockingbird wit in his efforts to save the character of the area.

Robert Nudelman is a gadfly. Not the kind that bites livestock but a person who annoys others or rouses them from complacency, all in the interest of preserving gritty old Hollywood.

When not on the phone at his tiny but historico-politically correct apartment ($600 a month, built in 1927), he is buzzing around city offices or casting a quizzical eye on Hollywood Boulevard’s bums, punks and tourists from the ticket booth at the Guinness World of Records Museum.

Single and carless, a 36-year-old film fan and free-lance activist with few visible means of support, Nudelman has bulldog tenacity, elephantlike memory and mockingbird wit to any number of more or less successful causes--mostly the less successful kind.

But one of his more unlikely ventures paid off earlier this month when Procter & Gamble’s corporate historian announced the fate of the Max Factor Museum of Beauty, complete with color-coded rooms for women of different hair tones.

In the presence of notables including City Councilman Mike Woo, a one-time political ally with whom he has been feuding since 1986, Nudelman’s proposal for a History of Hollywood Museum at the Highland Avenue site won the day.

Never mind that the other two finalists dropped out of the competition or that Woo failed to join in the cheers and applause when Nudelman’s name was mentioned.

“We worked to convince them of what was best, and they listened,” Nudelman said of a committee that included city officials, company representatives and KCET personality Huell Howser. “My job from now on is putting the museum together.”

Is it a paying job? “I hope so,” he said.

The plan conceived by Nudelman with developer Gerry Schneiderman is to convert the four-story building into a museum-restaurant-theater-shopping complex. The Factor collection of motion picture makeup through the decades is to remain in place for at least three years. Then it is to go to the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, which has been under development since the mid-1980s.

Nudelman has been living in Hollywood since 1977, when he graduated from the University of Arizona with a theater degree. While there, he put on 33 theatrical productions in three years and gained a reputation for being able to find the perfect prop.

That was often a challenge, he said. “In Tucson, when you ask for an art nouveau chair they say, ‘Who’s Art?’ ”

The move to Hollywood followed easily, he said. “I’ve been going to the movies pretty much regularly--every weekend--since I was 3.”

The son of a professor and a psychologist with five degrees between them, the young Nudelman raised money for high school and college organizations by renting theaters and selling seats for showings of Laurel and Hardy and Three Stooges films.

Not long after he moved to Los Angeles, the nostalgia buff first witnessed the fate that often befalls historic Hollywood properties: MGM’s old Lot 2 in Culver City--featured in “That’s Entertainment”--was targeted for development. Nudelman and others tried in vain to save it.

“If I knew then what I know now, we could have saved that lot,” Nudelman said.

The MGM fight led to work raising funds for Greenpeace, designing museum exhibits, writing historical reports on threatened old buildings and selling tropical fish.

Meanwhile, he has become a regular at meetings of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, which plays a leading role in planning and development for downtown Hollywood.

Nowadays, he keeps his floors and closets stacked high with environmental impact reports and city planning documents.

“I keep track of it all with a primitive filing system and desperate memory,” he said. “As long as I can keep track of it better than the other side, it’s OK.”

Lately, he has been preaching against Metro Rail, depicting it as a Trojan horse that will “basically wipe this place out” during years of chaotic construction, then open the gate for developers and city bureaucrats to build a new Century City on the ruins of the old movie capital.

Isn’t that being just a little paranoid? he is asked.

“Nah,” he said. “It’s not so much paranoia. It’s just that when you’re trying to figure it out--what the other side is doing--when you piece it together, it’s often not about the surface issue.”

Over the years, he has sunk his teeth into fights for preservation and restoration of several private homes and commercial buildings, from the Hollywood Brown Derby to the El Capitan Theater.

“It’s a little like stopping cancer,” he said, as distinctive old structures are torn down and replaced with “awful-looking new buildings with a lot of vacancies.”

“Once it gets started it’s boom-boom-boom, so sometimes you’ve got to jump in to stop it before it’ll happen down the road,” he said.

He was elected to the redevelopment agency’s Hollywood project area committee in 1988. A year later, however, the City Council ordered the committee dissolved after Woo complained of its “wacky behavior.” The committee continues to meet despite its loss of official standing, and Nudelman still serves as its spokesman.

Although Nudelman supported Woo’s successful bid to oust City Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson in 1985, the two have been at odds for years, something that Nudelman traces to the arrival of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency in Hollywood. Woo’s office failed to return several telephone calls seeking comment for this article.

“I’d work part time to pay the rent and do this stuff at night,” Nudelman said. “I’ve done a lot of different things to pay the bills.”

Meals are often on the house at the Snow White Coffee Shop on Hollywood Boulevard, where a waitress brings him his regular breakfast--a tall Diet Coke--without being asked.

Even, so, he acknowledged, he still gets by on loans from his parents.

“I might as well have gotten into acting, living the way I do,” he said. “I was thinking more of a career of working in films, but a lot of people who come here expect one thing and end up doing something else.”

“It’s obvious that we’re on the wrong side of the issues for it to be financially rewarding,” commented Norton Halper, another CRA critic.

“I guess (Nudelman) really cares about architecture and Hollywood and knows every building, and that’s not what makes big bucks these days,” Halper said.

The golden ring seemed within grasp in 1984, when the prospect of hordes of tourists during the Olympics inspired Nudelman and a group of investors to launch a small showplace, called the Hollywood Museum, in an old bank building.

The museum attracted about 10,000 visitors before it went broke a year later, leaving mixed feelings among all concerned.

One of the investors, Peter Gordon, said: “For me it was a very substantial financial catastrophe, but I’ve never taken away from Bob his ability to generate enthusiasm and paint a pretty picture. . . .”

“Nudelman hasn’t seen a penny from all this,” added Gordon, an attorney whose office still gets dozens of calls a week from tourists looking for a Hollywood museum.

“I admire him,” he said. “It hurts when I think back on the personal losses. . . . But he’s a good guy and definitely a true believer in Hollywood.”