Show Business’ Role in the East Valley Is a Crowd Pleaser

Way out at the west end of the San Fernando Valley on a recent afternoon, presidential candidate Bob Dole bashed the entertainment industry for its godless, drug-loving, family-thrashing ways.

It’s a good thing the former senator from corn country didn’t stick around for the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. meeting that night.

The crowd overflowing the lobby of a Ventura Boulevard bank building would have made sure he knew he wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

Certainly, many in the three dozen rows of folding chairs had probably shown up to hear the heroic saga of how their association president had saved Sherman Oaks’ old-fashioned street lamps from downtown bureaucrats’ light-modernization program.

But many had shown up to hear from the night’s two keynote speakers, the president of CBS Studio Center and the head of Fred Sands Realtors.

The subject: how those dope-smoking, church-hating, child-ruining hustlers of screens silver and small had brought the east San Fernando Valley its biggest boom since the Cold War and revitalized the market for home sales.

Elsewhere, such homeowner meetings typically turn into festivals of no-growth naysaying that have added the acronym NIMBY--”not in my backyard”--to the American vocabulary.

In the East Valley, which has now thoroughly supplanted Hollywood as the capital of the entertainment biz, don’t be surprised to hear them say PLIMBY--”Please, in my backyard.”

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The speakers almost put listeners in the mood to forgive Mikhail Gorbachev for wrecking the local real estate market in 1989 by throwing in the towel on the arms race and sending the local defense industry the way of the riverboat and the buffalo.

“The entertainment industry is our savior--thank God for television,” said Elijah Rosenberg, a manager of 11 Melrose-area apartment buildings, who had driven over the hill to hear the spiel. “More than 60% of the people I rent to are in the business. Actually, more like 80%. May the business grow by leaps and bounds.”

Entertainment money has swept across the East Valley like a hurricane. .

CBS Studio Center President Michael L. Klausman said the industry is creating 11,000 jobs a year in Los Angeles. He said the industry buys $8.9 billion worth of goods annually--everything from lumber and books to sandwiches and flowers. Demand is so hot for what he called his “intimate, mom-and-pop” operation near Ventura and Laurel Canyon boulevards that it has launched a $50-million expansion.

The Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. and NBC in Burbank’s nearby media district are likewise laying plans to significantly boost production on their lots.

Klausman copped to the downside of growth. Already, he said, three sound stages have been erected on a former empty lot next to the Los Angeles River channel. Next will come a parking structure and later an office tower.

“It’s traffic, all right? Noise, all right? And I suppose you don’t want to see us put up big structures in front of your home, OK?”

Then came the pitch.

“But what’s the upside? Financial stability, all right? Even in the worst of times, people go see movies, OK? We grow no matter what. . . .

“And so all we’re asking for is a pat on the back when it comes time for our hearings at the city Planning Department. . . . Give us some credit, OK?”

CBS has managed to grow in peace in Studio City because it has reached out to the community and built mainly production facilities.

The experience of MCA Inc., farther east on county land in the Cahuenga Pass, has been much different, as home owners have loudly protested the company’s plans to build a vast theme park, replete with resort hotels.

Fred C. Sands, the dapper prince of Los Angeles real estate sales, told the homeowners that just as he was right when he predicted the 1989 crash in prices, he would be proved equally correct in saying now that the exploding entertainment business has ended the local real estate recession. The figures: Transactions are up 24% in 1996, nearly to the level of 1989, and prices are edging up too, he said.

With Realtor optimism, he added: “But hold on. We think 1997 will be a banner year.”

In Studio City, he said, 50% of his home buyers are in the entertainment industry; in Sherman Oaks, about 33%.

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In my own Studio City neighborhood, more than half of the people on my block are in the industry, as they say.

The nexus is even tighter at my children’s preschool. Every day there is a television show on the air that stars or was written, produced or directed by the parents of chums in their two classes.

The only problem with this infusion is that it’s ruining the housekeeper market, Sands said.

He complained that he had lost a maid to actor Tom Cruise, who right off the bat paid the woman enough to buy a house and a car phone.