West Hollywood Keeps the Global Vision Thing

Case closed: Forget Al Gore and Ross Perot. At last comes the voice fence-sitters have been longing to hear in the down-to-the-wire debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement.

West Hollywood’s.

A month after weighing the fate of jailed spy Jonathan Jay Pollard, the City Council on Monday takes up the matter of international trade.

According to plans, it will side with Perot--against NAFTA. That’s not as incongruous as it sounds. The liberal city tends to back organized labor, the main force against the pact.

Larry King won’t be there--just the city’s cable channel.

Maybe someone will send a tape to U.S. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), whose district includes West Hollywood. Late last week, Waxman was undecided.

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Rodeo Drive reptile: There’s a reason you’ve never seen a movie called “Down and Out in Palos Verdes Estates” or “San Marino Cop.” When Tinseltown needs a symbol of wealth, glamour or wretched excess, nothing beats Beverly Hills for name recognition--and never mind that there are half a dozen or so cities in L.A. County with higher average household incomes.

In a few months, Beverly Hills will be back on the big screen yet again. Blending two of Hollywood’s most distinguished genres--the dinosaur movie and the always popular dysfunctional-family film--the new effort, “Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills,” is scheduled for release in spring.

In it, Beverly D’Angelo stars as the wife of a UCLA paleontologist (Brad Wilson) who finds herself turned into a pterodactyl as a result of a curse cast by a Native American after her husband goes ahead with a dig at a sacred burial ground.

From there, “Pterodactyl Woman” examines the reactions of D’Angelo’s neighbors in their north-of-Santa Monica mansions to her condition, their fears it will lower property values, and its impact on her teen-age children (Aron Eisenberg, Sharon Martin). The cast also includes Moon Unit Zappa as a TV talk-show host and Ruta Lee as a shocked neighbor.

Philippe Mora, the film’s writer/director/producer, said the project is one he has been “working on for years,” and was inspired by his children’s love of dinosaurs. He said he decided to set it in Beverly Hills because that would make for a “funnier premise.”

“The movie is a metaphor for real dysfunction, like alcoholism or drug abuse,” said Mora. “The movie has a healthy message that a family has to stick together.”

“Pterodactyl Woman” recently completed filming in Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica, and will be released in March or April, Mora said.

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Phone-in government: Beverly Hills residents will soon be able to talk to the City Council while wearing their bathrobes and bunny slippers.

For years, concerned citizens have been able to watch council meetings on cable TV, but starting Dec. 7, they will be able to call during council meetings and say what’s on their minds.

Councilman Thomas Levyn said he got the idea for the phone-in service while he was campaigning last year. Residents told him government needed to be more accessible.

A lot of elderly people and parents with young children can’t go to council meetings, he said. “This will be an experiment in government and democracy.”

The council will start the program by taking three or four calls during the portion of the meeting in which residents may talk about topics not on the agenda, Levyn said. The council hopes to expand the call-in program to include public testimony on agenda items.

“It’ll be nice to open up the process as completely as we can,” Levyn said. The phone-in number is (310) 285-1020.

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The thought never crossed their minds: Surely it is just a matter of convenience. And surely it is just coincidence that the change will prevent one of the Los Angeles Airport Commission’s most persistent critics from attending its meetings.

Whatever. The commission’s recent decision to change its meeting day and time has raised a few eyebrows inside and outside City Hall.

Until recently, the commission’s twice-a-month meetings were held at 1 p.m. on Mondays--a time that never conflicted with the City Council’s regular meeting days of Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

But now the commission, reconstituted with new members appointed by Mayor Richard Riordan, has changed the meeting time to 9:45 a.m. on Tuesdays--only 15 minutes before the council’s start time.

The new time, of course, means that Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, a frequent critic of the commission, will have a tough time attending its meetings. And that has not gone unnoticed.

More than one longtime observer of the airport commission has wondered, privately, if the change was made to prevent Galanter’s appearance. “It just seems strange,” said one.

Galanter, meanwhile, joined the questioners. “I’ve wondered the same thing myself,” she said when asked about the change in meeting times.

Airport department spokesman Tom Winfrey scoffed at such speculation. “The change was made for the . . . convenience of all the members of the commission,” he said. “This was when all of them could get together.”

Maybe so. Let’s wait and see how long it takes for them to fail to muster a quorum.

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Come hell or high water: While Malibu burned, a group of real estate developers sent the city a tersely worded missive that basically said “see you in court.”

The action ended a cease-fire between the city and the Malibu Village Civic Assn. over the city’s interim zoning ordinance, the temporary law that regulates development until the city can complete a General Plan.

City officials and the association, a group of about 16 civic center-area property owners led by the Malibu Bay Co. and Pepperdine University, had been meeting to negotiate a settlement to keep the case out of court.

The proposed agreement was presented to the City Council on the night before the fire. It called for the association to drop its lawsuit; in return, the city would immediately begin the public process leading to a development plan for the civic center area.

The City Council agreed to start the ball rolling on the specific plan even though the General Plan has not been completed.

The City Council, however, balked at other provisions that would have speeded up a zoning review of residential and commercial property in west Malibu owned by the Malibu Bay Co., the community’s largest commercial landholder, and other property owners in the area. Less than 12 hours before the fire started on Nov. 2, the council voted to revise that portion of the agreement.

Assistant City Atty. Christi Hogin said the association responded by putting the city on notice that the cease-fire was over and it intended to resume the legal process leading to a court date.

Despite the turn for the worse, Hogin said last week that the city has been getting signals that the association wants to resume negotiations. Association leaders could not be reached for comment.

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Council meetings this week:

* Beverly Hills: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, 450 N. Crescent Drive (310) 285-2400.

* Culver City: 7 p.m. Monday, Interim City Hall, 4095 Overland Ave. (310) 202-5851.

* Los Angeles: 10 a.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 200 N. Spring St. (213) 485-3126.

* Malibu: no meeting (310) 456-2489.

* Santa Monica: no meeting (310) 393-9975.

* West Hollywood: 7 p.m. Monday, West Hollywood Park Auditorium, 647 N. San Vicente Blvd. (310) 854-7460.

Contributing to this week’s report were staff writers Ken Ellingwood, Steven Herbert and Greg Krikorian, and correspondent G. Jeanette Avent.