Downtown: a Dream Location

FADE IN

Dawn. A drizzly day. Two women, one with binoculars, both dressed like the queen of England at a horse show, stand at the inland edge of a coastal marshland. MARCIA, the one with binoculars, is only half-listening to her sulking childhood FRIEND.

FRIEND

It’s wet out here. I’m freezing. Marcia, this is a swamp. You gave up your business to rescue this? You had money! You lived in a beautiful house! Now you have to have a roommate.

MARCIA

(Untroubled, watching flying creatures through her binoculars) Two roommates.

FRIEND

Oh fine. And you had that great car.

MARCIA

(Still with the binoculars) It was a Subaru.

FRIEND

But it had a phone. It was loaded. Now you’ve got that horrible Geo. The only thing holding the bumper on are Sierra Club stickers. And the backseat loaded down with pamphlets and studies--Marcia, you’ve pissed off everybody. Even the governor said that when he was mayor, he would have sold his family to get a project like this. And you’ve screwed it up.

MARCIA

I never met the governor. Look. (She strips off the binoculars, hands them to her friend, still talking as if to persuade herself of what she has just seen.) I never thought it’d happen. They’ve come back. The light-footed clapper rails have come back.

*

Let’s take a meeting. Hollywood loves true-life David and Goliath stories. So what about Marcia Hanscom, who gave up her comfy former life to lead the fight against a mega-corporation to save the Ballona Wetlands and give it all back to the birds? Remember that Chico Mendes movie, the guy fighting to save the Amazon rain forest? Or Sigourney Weaver rescuing those gorillas?

So who did this Marcia woman take on? Exxon? General Motors? Wait--Dow Chemical, right?

Nope--DreamWorks SKG. DreamWorks, part of the vast project to build high-tech studios, sound stages and a fiber-optic model community in Playa del Rey. The same DreamWorks whose principals--Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen--make millions every year, donate millions to good works (and thousands to politicians) and sign millions worth of paychecks every month.

Wouldn’t touch that script with a 10-foot boom mike. Ciao, don’t slam the door on your way out.

The Playa Vista project is an $8-billion vision--a lot of money even in Metro Rail dollars--and so promising that the city endorsed it with $70 million in tax breaks.

It is planned for the 1,000-acre basin between Marina del Rey and the bluffs of Westchester; in the environmental handbook, that is red-flag territory--wetlands.

Marcia Hanscom and the many groups of the Wetlands Action Network have been waiting for Hollywood to show the same ardor for the Ballona Wetlands that it has for the rain forests of Brazil and Canada, for whales, spotted owls and the ozone layer.

This fall, Graham Nash and Bonnie Raitt gave a benefit for the Bolsa Chica wetlands in Orange County, an event slightly marred by the noisome presence of a dead fin whale. But Bolsa Chica is owned by a real estate company, not by Hollywood players who, besides their wide-reaching charitable donations, sign recording artists to contracts, make enormously popular movies and produce TV shows like “Ink,” starring Ted Danson, the most ardent defender of the Santa Monica Bay.

Meanwhile, the land lies fallow, which is not altogether bad, for a wetlands is a biological factory, as major a player in the ecosystem as DreamWorks is in Hollywood.

*

Every wetlands project is submerged in rancor and spin, in dueling studies and tiptoe compromise, and DreamWorks is no exception.

The third lawsuit against the project, this one alleging inadequate federal review of the impact on ecosystems, was filed last week. The irony is that none of that may come to matter. There is talk that financing is getting tricky, that frictions have emerged, and DreamWorks may look elsewhere to build its cutting-edge shop.

Good generals try to choose good battle sites. Unlike MCA, facing a pitched battle in the hills over expanding Universal Studios, DreamWorks has a choice.

Here’s mine: take downtown. Please.

It is a ready-made back lot of Mission-style buildings, rail yards and warehouses, film-noir office buildings, Angel’s Flight, the L.A. River and a skyline made exotic by St. Vibiana’s tower.

Downtown would be a bargain. You would assuage those displeased at the $70-million tax break for the already thriving Westside. Think of it as rescuing downtown in the last reel.

Those thousand acres--such a little fragment of what once was there--could be left for the schoolkids to marvel at red-tailed hawks, for the short-cut drivers to LAX to breathe a little slower, for the light-footed clapper rail to take possession again.