Why L.A. Was on ‘Fire This Time’ : Movies: Randy Holland went out ‘to see things for myself’ as the city burned in 1992, and hopes his documentary will help others understand the causes of the riots.

During the 1992 riots, when most Angelenos were hunkering down at home, writer and filmmaker Randy Holland was out driving around, just trying to fathom all the fury and rage behind the fires, looting and destruction that he saw.

“I had to see things for myself,” Holland, 46, explains during an interview in the Marina del Rey home he shares with his wife, Julia, and their two young children. “I was shocked. I was blown away. I wanted to find out why it was happening.”

It was that urge to learn more about the causes of the riots that led Holland to make “The Fire This Time,” his documentary that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and will open Friday at the Monica Laemmle for a weeklong run.

When the rioting ended, Holland drove to South-Central Los Angeles to see what was happening in the aftermath. There, he met Lillian Mobley, executive director of the South Central Senior Center, and started talking with her about the riots. When he went back the next day with donations of clothes and toys, Mobley asked him why he was there.

Holland replied, “I’m really here because I want to understand.”

“Then she took a moment and just looked at me,” Holland says. “She said, ‘Somebody needs to tell the truth about what’s going on down here.’ ”

Holland, who has written articles on urban issues for L.A. Weekly as well as scripts for episodes of “Quantum Leap” and “Murder, She Wrote,” had never directed a movie, but nonetheless decided he would make a short documentary about the underlying causes of the riots.

“I figured I’d rent a camera, put it on Mrs. Mobley, she’d tell her truth and that would be my duty--I’d be done,” Holland says.

Soon thereafter, Holland was invited to a closed community meeting, where he met Dr. Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, and Bobby Lavender, the co-founder of the Bloods. As he shot footage of them and others in the community, his “weekend movie” gradually turned into an ambitious full-length project: a film about social problems in Los Angeles that looks at the riots from a historical perspective.

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Holland wrote, directed and produced “The Fire This Time” and managed to make it for less than $300,000--most of it borrowed--because most of the other people who worked on the film donated their time.

The film, which consists mainly of historical footage--beginning with the arrival of the first blacks in California in the 1850s--with narration and interviews with black community leaders, does not focus on the rioting itself, and the Rodney G. King verdicts are barely mentioned. Instead, the film concentrates on the social problems that led to the unrest, especially what he sees as the failure of the government to improve on the conditions that led to the Watts riots of 1965.

Archival footage, for example, shows the early days of the Black Panthers and the Watts Writers Workshop and the services those groups provided to the community, as well as Holland’s contention that government intervention fragmented those groups. And the so-called 25-Year Plan, conceived in the wake of the Watts riots, called for parks and libraries to be built throughout South-Central L.A., yet the ’92 riots--coming just about on the 25th anniversary of the 25-Year Plan, made it clear, Holland believes, that the plan never really took hold.

“The most important thing is to look at the total scope of the problem,” says Holland, who has lived in Los Angeles for most of his adult life. “It’s about a chain of events that has been building for a long time. It’s not about angry guys on the street throwing a brick at a trucker.

“What is in the minds of those people? What brought them to that? That’s something we really need to look at as a society.”

Although Holland is clearly on the liberal end of the political spectrum, he says he is disillusioned with politics, and the film offers no easy answers. Holland says he didn’t make the film with a political agenda in mind, only a desire to find out more about the riots and a drive to share what he learned with others.

What he concluded is that most of what he sees as the root causes of the Watts riots--underemployment, urban violence, poverty--were never really addressed and that those same problems still aren’t getting much attention today--even in the aftermath of the 1992 rioting.

“Even though I was political, I was naive about all the elements at play,” Holland says. “I’m no longer the same. Everything I write for the rest of my life will be affected by what I went through making this film.”

Holland hopes his film will change other people’s perspectives as well, and he already has shown it on college campuses, including USC and UCLA. While “The Fire This Time” hasn’t yet been picked up for distribution, it will be shown on Cinemax and on a few public television stations. He is still hoping to get a theatrical release for the film in other cities.

While Holland doubts that showing the film will fix the urban problems it discusses, he still thinks it’s a step in the right direction.

“It’s an important thing, allowing yourself to be sensitized to all these issues,” Holland says. “I don’t have any illusions that I’m going to change the world, but it’s exciting to get these issues on the table.”

* “The Fire This Time” will be shown Friday through May 5 at the Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd Street, Santa Monica. (310) 394-9741.