Westside Watch : Beverly Hills High School Remains at Center Stage

If there were a lifetime achievement Oscar for high schools, Beverly Hills High would have to be a leading contender.

Its most famous movie role was as Bedford Falls High School in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the late Frank Capra’s classic 1946 tale of an angel and a savings and loan bailout.

The school also appeared, as itself, in 1977’s “The Chicken Chronicles.” That film, starring then-unknown Steve Guttenberg, was based on the true exploits of screenwriter Paul Diamond when he worked at a now-defunct South Doheny Drive chicken take-out establishment.

Another example of the school’s “work” can be seen at 6 p.m. Sunday and at 2 and 8 p.m. next Friday on cable’s American Movie Classics. In the 1947 RKO Radio Pictures release, “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer,” Beverly Hills High portrays Sunset High School.

The exterior of the school along Moreno Drive appears in an early scene. The only noticeable difference between then and now is that are no skyscrapers behind the school. (In 1947, what is now Century City was part of 20th Century Fox’s back lot.)

Two scenes were filmed in the school. In the first, visiting English painter Dick Nugent (Cary Grant) addresses a school assembly, where 17-year-old Susan Turner (Shirley Temple) finds herself smitten. The two have a conversation afterward and Nugent departs through the first-floor mathematics department corridor. (That same corridor was used last year for a scene in “The Beverly Hillbillies.”)

In the second scene, Turner and Nugent get together at a Sunset High basketball game, with Beverly Hills High School’s Swim-Gym serving as Sunset’s home court.

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NEW FACE, OLD NAME: It worked for Kenneth P. Hahn. The Los Angeles County assessor’s election victory was attributed in part to name recognition. Not his own, but that of Kenneth J. Hahn, a long-time Los Angeles County supervisor.

Now comes Bruce M. Margolin of Beverly Hills, seeking the Democratic nomination for the state Assembly seat now held by Burt Margolin, no relation, who is running for state insurance commissioner.

“I’m not just jumping on the bandwagon because my name is the same as his,” said Bruce Margolin, 52, a criminal defense attorney who has tried four times to win election to the Legislature.

Still, he said, it doesn’t hurt: “It’s a name identification I appreciate having.”

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MONEY MAN: State Sen. Tom Hayden and his aides have always been coy about whether he would bring his financial firepower to bear in the campaign to block the Santa Monica Civic Center redevelopment plan.

A partial answer can be found in financial statements filed with the Santa Monica city clerk. They show that Hayden ponied up $2,000 of the $4,790 raised to mount a successful petition drive to put the Civic Center issue on the ballot.

Hayden also was out in supermarket parking lots gathering signatures. The question now is whether his quixotic quest to become governor has eclipsed the local issue or whether he will remain the mainstay of the opposition to the Civic Center plan.

Proponents of the Civic Center plan, by the way, raised $1,302, a figure that includes small loans from Santa Monica City Councilman Paul Rosenstein and Planning Commissioner Eric Parlee.