Hollywood Dropped Ball in Post-Riot Aid, Critics Say

Few who watched television in the weeks after last year’s riots could miss the recurring image of actor Edward James Olmos, broom or walkie-talkie in hand, leading cleanup brigades throughout South Los Angeles and dispatching hundreds of volunteers to blighted street corners.

At the time, celebrities seemed to be everywhere, rallying at the First AME Church, taping public-service announcements at a distant Warner Bros. sound stage in Burbank. Because of that visibility and because Hollywood can cast such a wide net, initial hopes were high that a collective Hollywood magic would materialize--a creative synergy that would attract money to reconstruct the broken homes and dreams of the inner city.

In the year since, there have been numerous contributions from a variety of film, television and musical artists that have generated good will and millions of dollars for the rebuilding of Los Angeles. But the kind of industry-wide effort envisioned by many did not happen, leading some community leaders to suggest that Hollywood has dropped the ball in its own back yard.

* In the film industry, many artists responded with both money and time. Barbra Streisand, citing the “hopelessness and disparity” she witnessed during the riots, donated $100,000 for relief. And such high-powered executives as Creative Artists Agency President Michael Ovitz, Walt Disney Co. President Frank Wells and Warner Bros. Vice President Dan Garcia joined the board of directors of Rebuild L.A., the task force charged with revitalizing the inner city.

A number of studios instituted hiring programs to more closely reflect the makeup of Los Angeles’ growing minority population. But corporately, only Disney stepped up with a substantial investment in the community. The company invested $1 million in Crenshaw’s Family Savings Bank, opened a Disney store at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, set up a $1-million loan program to help small businesses and hired 250 young people from the inner city for summer and holiday jobs at Disneyland.

* In television, the riots were addressed in programming: Several series spun the unrest into episodes last fall. But after that flurry of activity, the networks and cable TV generally failed to follow through with concrete contributions to the rebuilding effort.

* In pop music, Michael Jackson donated $1.25 million to form Heal L.A., providing drug prevention, health and counseling services to inner-city children. And country music star Garth Brooks, whose gospel-tinged song “We Shall Be Free” was inspired by the riots, raised $1 million with two Great Western Forum concerts on Jan. 29 with co-sponsorship from the National Football League. Brooks’ donation will be combined with $1 million from the United Way and the National Football League to create a youth community center in South-Central Los Angeles.

But several attempts to organize major fund-raising concerts fizzled.

It was on the heels of the Garth Brooks announcement that Herb Carter, president of the United Way in Los Angeles, publicly scolded the rest of Hollywood for not pulling together or digging deep enough.

He is not alone.

“What really concerns me is the amount of money made by the entertainment industry in this town through movies and television and music,” said Johnnie Cochran Jr., an African-American civil rights attorney on the board of RLA. “In many respects, the African-American community has been the cornerstone of some of these industries.

“I see it as disproportionate--what the entertainment industry takes out of the community in profits and what they’re putting back in, from the standpoint of rebuilding the community. Clearly, I think there’s an obligation to be good corporate citizens.”

Even some within the film industry have expressed dismay. “Rage in Harlem” director Bill Duke said the riots did not really have the effect of a wake-up call in Hollywood.

“I think the studios, if they were aware of the overall implications of not helping, they would do more,” he said. “If you wake up, you wake up. You don’t go back to sleep. What they don’t understand is: This is not a movie, this is a real deal. Unfortunately, people don’t want to look beyond their Jacuzzis or their swimming pools.”

But Barry A. Sanders, co-chairman of RLA, believes that Hollywood bears an unfair burden of responsibility and that charitable contributions of any size should not be disparaged.

“When you say Hollywood, it creates the impression of a single force,” he said. “And you couldn’t imagine an industry that is more diverse and less capable of single description than Hollywood. There’s records, television, movies, and within each of those there are different companies, which have different approaches. Some of them are companies headquartered here, some are headquartered in Tokyo.”

Producer George Jackson (“New Jack City”) said that expectations were too high: “I don’t think that because a few celebrities swept some streets or bagged some groceries that anybody should have thought the status quo was going to change. It’s unfair to heap that kind of responsibility on the entertainment industry itself. The entertainment industry is not the government.”

Entertainment industry figures who have remained active in the struggle to improve conditions in Los Angeles say that the magic is happening, but most of it occurs behind the scenes or with very little publicity.

As part of a movement toward recycling at the film studios, for example, Fox Inc. gave lumber from the movie set of “Jack the Bear” to renovate houses in South-Central. Warner Bros. threw a party for 400 inner-city children on the USC campus.

Sony Pictures Entertainment is backing a multimedia road show featuring CityKids, a group from New York that staged performances in assemblies at local high schools. The Hollywood Radio and TV Society is coordinating a drive to raise $20 million to start a TV and radio school for economically disadvantaged students.

Debbie Allen, an actress, choreographer and TV director, has been instrumental in a project to salvage two libraries that were burned down during the riots. For the first event she held last May--a small gathering at Every Picture Tells a Story, a children’s bookstore on La Brea--comedian Sinbad performed, and Sidney Poitier, Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze showed up for support.

“I refused to let my publicist paper this event,” Allen said. “It’s like anything that happens in your community. When the Girl Scouts come to sell you cookies in your neighborhood, you don’t call Jet so you can get your face on the cover for buying Girl Scout cookies. You do it because you want to help your community.”

Allen has raised $200,000 with help from the defunct L.A. Style magazine and the Writers Guild of America, West, which rallied such screenwriters as Lawrence Kasdan, William Goldman and Paul Mazursky to auction off personal, annotated movie scripts. The Junipero Serra branch library reopened last month.

Responding to the Hollywood critics, Allen said: “I can just say that they don’t know the whole story. There’s a lot of things the Hollywood community does quietly, just to help. Carsey-Werner (the producers of “Roseanne”) didn’t put an ad in Billboard when they gave me $10,000 to help rebuild the libraries. They just care. They’re parents. They have children, too.”

Other largely unnoticed goodwill efforts since the riots include:

* The Hollywood Policy Center, the nonprofit arm of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, launched an arts education program for young children in Watts. Donations to the program included 1,000 books from “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening.

* Producer Ray Stark (“Lost in Yonkers”) approached Father Gregory Boyle, an East Los Angeles Jesuit priest whose work with gang members had become legendary in the community. Through his discussions with Boyle, Stark wound up buying and refurbishing a bakery across the street from the Dolores Mission, where Boyle was then pastor, and developing a program to train young people to make gourmet breads.

* L.A. Works, a volunteer group launched two years ago with money from actor Richard Dreyfuss, marked the anniversary of the riots Saturday as 1,500 people descended upon Los Angeles to perform tasks such as painting, landscaping, cleaning, planting trees and providing food to the homeless.

Within the pop music industry, however, the goals were much loftier and the failures were more marked. Many had hoped for one or more concerts in the spirit and scope of Live Aid for famine relief. A group of major concert promoters banded together just days after the riots to plan a series of concerts, set to start last July, to benefit RLA.

But the talent was just too tough to line up, they say. Representatives of artist after artist--from Bruce Springsteen to Michael Jackson to Neil Diamond to Diana Ross--told the promoters that they would love to get involved, but they had a tour commitment, or they wanted to wait to see who else would be performing.

Valerie Fields, Mayor Tom Bradley’s arts and entertainment coordinator, received countless calls from TV and film actors offering their services within a week after the riots, but only one pop music figure, James Brown, called. Brown was proposing a concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum--a concert that never happened, for reasons Fields said remain unclear.

One large-scale concert came closer to reality. Tickets were actually sold for “HomeAid,” scheduled at the Coliseum last September, with R&B; group Bell Biv DeVoe, rapper Heavy D. and singer Tevin Campbell on the bill at the 70,000-seat venue. There were further expectations of guest stars, possibly even the Jacksons.

But only about 1,000 tickets sold--not even enough to justify a downsized version of the concert--and the event was scrapped.

“What killed us was the lack of one superstar artist . . . the inability to secure one truly A-level performer,” said Rick Bratman, president of Fluid Marketing, the Los Angeles sports management firm that co-sponsored the doomed event with four L.A.-area radio stations. Other smaller-scale benefits did materialize:

* A Tom Waits-headlined concert at the Wiltern Theatre just a month after the riots raised $40,000 for four community organizations.

* Comedy clubs across town have held fund-raising performances, including two nights of comedy topped by Jerry Seinfeld that brought in $70,000 for RLA.

* The USA Harvest group flew in 80,000 pounds of canned food, obtained in part through a May concert starring rapper Hammer, to South-Central Los Angeles.

* Bonnie Raitt earmarked many of the best seats for her Sept. 15 Hollywood Bowl concert for four grass-roots, inner-city programs.

Olmos, a board member of RLA, said he goes to a community meeting or fund-raiser almost every night, whether in Los Angeles or in Tucson, where he filmed “Roosters.” He rejects the notion that Hollywood has failed to fulfill expectations: “The Hollywood community has always been in the forefront. . . . (There is) a countless amount of people who have given of their time.”

Still, some community leaders maintain that Hollywood could be doing more. John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, said he believes the entertainment industry lags behind other corporations in responding to the community’s needs and all too often responds to “pet causes” of individual celebrities rather than taking a longer view.

“Our entertainment businesses and institutions, as well as personalities, need to wake up to some of the hard facts of life--that there are urgent needs that must be met,” he said. “Everyone’s future is intertwined. Their ability to do business in the future is closely related to the future health of the city.”

In the first month after the riots, when the bulk of relief offers came pouring in, RLA had compiled a computer database with more than 2,500 offers to contribute money or volunteer services. Fewer than 20 of those offers came from the Hollywood community, said a frustrated source with RLA.

“One of the things I was absolutely stunned about was the complete lack of what I felt were celebrities and sports personalities,” said the source, who asked not to be identified. “I was shocked by the entertainment industry’s failure to come to us in the first couple months when we were collecting this data.”

On the other hand, several people suggested that RLA could have taken a more proactive stance in getting Hollywood involved.

“If you’ve got a movement of this magnitude, which I think is no different from a political cause or presidential campaign, when you don’t access the entertainment industry and its celebrities and its behind-the-scenes powers, then you’re forfeiting a real resource,” said a senior official at one of the major talent agencies.

“All I know is that nobody from that group (RLA) has contacted me for anybody that I’m working for,” the official said. “And a large portion of this roster is people who have a tremendous social conscience. They just haven’t reached out.”

RLA does not deny that. Rocky Delgadillo, project manager for RLA who works with the Hollywood community, said almost everyone he has dealt with so far has come to him on their own, and there are still a lot of projects on the drawing board.

“When you have every industry (in Los Angeles) coming to you wanting to get involved, you only have time to deal with so much,” Delgadillo said. “If we had a bigger staff, we might have operated differently.”

Free-lance writer Steve Hochman contributed to this story.