In Piru, That’s a Rap

A few years ago during shooting for an episode of the Angela Lansbury television series “Murder, She Wrote” a large truck stopped nearby and noisily dumped a load of manure.

Concerned about disruption to their expensive location shooting, the film crew asked if the work could be delayed, recalled Don Gallagher, a permit inspector with Ventura County’s Transportation Department.

No problem, the foreman said.

“He wanted $1,000 for every truck,” Gallagher said, “and he had 40 trucks.”

The film crew balked at the hefty price tag, but agreed on a $3,000 fee to suspend the work.

When county officials caught wind of the foul-smelling deal, however, the manure really hit the fan.

Concerned about such incidents besmirching the region’s reputation in Hollywood as a film-friendly locale, the county ensured most of the payoff was reimbursed, Gallagher said.

The incident entered Piru lore, but is by no means an isolated incident in a poor community that is accruing a reputation in the film industry for such tactics, residents acknowledge. County officials now warn those film companies that express an interest in shooting in the tiny burg of the potential for unsavory shenanigans.

Piru locals readily admit they try to extract every possible dollar from what they perceive as rich Tinseltown types.

“It’s a big game to them, it’s a big game to me, I don’t care,” said convenience store owner Jimmy Sanchez, who admits cranking up a jukebox to disrupt filming if he believes the compensation he has received is inadequate for the disruption to his business. “Everybody’s low-budget, but when they make the movie and they make $10 million in the first weekend--yeah, they’re low-budget.”

Given the impact of filming on their livelihoods, Sanchez and the handful of Piru business owners dismiss payoffs as appropriate. Others have another word for some of the tactics employed.

“It’s extortion,” said Anthony Saenz, location manager for “Spy Game,” a midseason replacement television series that in January spent two days filming in Piru.

Similar tales have surfaced throughout Southern California, from upscale Pacific Palisades to down-to-earth Santa Paula. Still, greed is a concern to officials like Carol Nordahl, president of the nascent Ventura County Film Commission, which was formed to lure more movie dollars here.

Bad experiences can be magnified in the word-of-mouth film community, ruining efforts to attract a larger share of the lucrative, transitory and environmentally friendly industry.

County Supervisor Kathy Long, whose district includes Piru and Santa Paula, worries that overzealous county residents may kill the celluloid goose that is laying greenbacks.

“We reached out to the community to say this is an industry we want,” she said. “We don’t want to extort from them, we want to work from them, we want to attract them. There’s still work to be done, obviously.”

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Saenz, the series location manager, would agree after reaching financial agreements with all but one business owner during his recent stint in the community. The businessman was paid to cover a sign on his building. He then began wielding a chain saw to cut up a fallen tree--in a rainstorm--to disrupt shooting.

At this point Saenz offered more money and signed a contract to ensure compliance. But once shooting restarted, the business owner resumed noisy construction work that included use of a saw to cut concrete on his sidewalk.

“It’s not free and I don’t expect free, it’s a very little town,” Saenz said. “I’m not the Easter bunny. I’m not going to open up my wallet and say ‘here.’. . . . The town isn’t exactly jumping. You would think they would encourage [filming] because they need the income.”

The focus of Saenz’s ire, Laundromat owner Bob McClain, tells a different story.

McClain said he had the necessary construction permits from the county and simply wanted to get his job finished, even in weather that was intermittently “misting.” A crane was en route, he said, to remove the tree. The film crew said the chain saw used on the tree was too loud, but approved McClain’s use of the saw on the sidewalk for a wheelchair ramp. And Saenz’s film crew was the third to come into town within a week, McClain said, causing a string of interruptions that hampered his work schedule.

“I’m not out to try and cheat nobody,” he said. “I don’t really see any big scam thing going on in Piru. It’s just people living their lives normal and if these companies want to interfere in what they’re doing then they should cough it up. . . . We’re not talking a big amount of money--$100 to shut up, big deal, right?”

As of 10 days ago, however, most of the tree still lay beside McClain’s Laundromat.

Few Film Permits Issued in Ojai

Exacerbating the temptation to extract some extra cash is the disdain many Southern Californians feel toward the supposedly glamorous industry.

Ojai residents actually marched in the streets when film crews took over Libbey Park a few years ago and kept people out, City Manager Andy Belknap said. As a result, the city rarely issues film permits.

“The council has historically not been favorably disposed toward commercial filming,” Belknap said. “Anybody who wants a permit in Ojai has to come before the City Council and give a very detailed presentation of what they’re doing. As a consequence, we get very few applications for filming.”

That antagonism, however, may be melting in the wake of the money that the Oprah Winfrey movie, “When Women Had Wings,” spent in the city during shooting over the past month. The council now intends to revisit its strict regulations governing the industry, Belknap said.

In contrast, the sheer volume of film companies that have used photogenic Hidden Valley near Newbury Park the past two years has exceeded levels any resident would have imagined possible, said Rick Principe, chairman of the local homeowners’ association.

The rural area sees more filming in a year than the rest of the county combined, he said.

The association is supposed to receive $500 a day for any filming that occurs along Potrero Road, though Principe says the incidents of payoffs reported elsewhere have not to his knowledge occurred in Hidden Valley. Residents of the affluent area are struggling to come up with filming guidelines acceptable to locals who must deal with the onslaught of movie crews.

“We are aware there are problems in Piru and a few other communities,” Principe said. “It seems like it’s at the expense of those neighbors who are right there where the filming is being done and maybe some sort of compensation should go back to them in the form of a tax rebate or something like that.”

In perhaps the most severe expression of hostility toward Hollywood, the Santa Paula City Council on Monday night placed a moratorium on downtown filming until completion of a revitalization project that will tear up streets and inconvenience shoppers. Some merchants have complained bitterly about the traffic, restricted customer access and other problems related to filming.

The problem has become so bad that merchants who had voiced support in a city survey for the film industry have now turned against it. The film liaison for the local Chamber of Commerce quit in disgust over the antics of some store owners. And chamber officials are viewing the moratorium as an opportunity to develop guidelines governing filmmaking in the community.

Santa Paula, Film Companies at Odds

The relationship between the business community and filmmakers has degenerated since shooting for the feature film “Leave It To Beaver” in 1996 and the children’s television series “Beetleborgs,” which has spent the past year virtually making Santa Paula a co-star of the production.

“Both sides end up accusing the other of not telling the truth and making promises that can’t be kept,” chamber President Elaine Musselman said.

Saenz concedes people in the film industry can be insensitive to the needs of the community where they are filming, and can act like they’re “curing cancer.”

But the unrealistic demands of natives in Santa Paula, Piru and elsewhere don’t help either, some locals admit.

Bob Lupucki, location manager for Bug Boy Productions, which makes “Beetleborgs,” said the city’s moratorium has the company reevaluating whether it can continue using Santa Paula as a locale. He estimates the low-budget show has paid $12,000 in location fees to various property owners over the past year.

Movie crews don’t object to paying business people who lose money or who must make allowances for film shoots, said Patti Stolkin Archuletta, director of the California Film Commission.

But there is a fine line between compensation for the genuine inconvenience of cameras rolling in a neighborhood and residents wringing every last dime from a movie makers’ budget, Archuletta said. In one well-publicized episode earlier this month, a Pacific Palisades resident declared a one-woman war on a movie production she considered annoying, turning on her home burglar alarm during a shooting sequence.

The company paid her $200 a day in consolation fees.

‘Harass-for-Cash’ Tactics Cited

Similar tactics have been employed in Santa Paula. “Unfortunately, there are a couple or a few businesses [that] are not open six days or even seven,” Musselman said. “They always try to open up when there is filming there and then claim their business has been impacted directly and have their hands out for money.”

So-called harass-for-cash schemes have become so widespread that many production companies routinely include money in their film budgets for payoffs, Archuletta said.

In 1995, a state senator sponsored legislation that would enable so-called nuisance-mongers to be ticketed. But the film industry itself withdrew support for the bill, Archuletta said. The enormous publicity the proposed law generated prompted fears of an epidemic of copycat blackmailers. Moreover, the industry was concerned about a possible public relations backlash.

“The film industry realized in short order that it was not in their best interest to wage war with residents,” Archuletta said. “It made more sense to bring education to bear on the economic advantages of filming and it made more sense to do this with a scalpel than a sledgehammer.”

The problem prompted Archuletta to pen a “good neighbor” code of conduct as a companion to the already existing filmmakers’ code of professional responsibility.

The code suggests people who receive a direct financial benefit from a shoot recognize the toll that filming exacts on neighbors who receive no reimbursement, and suggests giving “something back to your community for the inconvenience,” ranging from a charitable donation to local organizations to a backyard barbecue.

The attention focused on scam artists has led to reports of such activity tapering off, Archuletta said.

Such tactics can backfire on entire communities. At one time filmmakers avoided Hermosa Beach after some bad experiences, Archuletta said.

Jean Warren, the Piru Neighborhood Council’s film liaison, believes the industry has similarly blacklisted Piru in the past.

“We’ve been blackballed for two or three years at a time. It happens,” she said. “The merchants don’t want to listen to me. . . . They wait until I’m gone and then they play their little tricks.”

But filmmakers find sleepy Piru’s status as a living back lot irresistible.

An abandoned gas station in the town’s center remains standing solely because film crews use it extensively. Piru’s plain, yet charming row of brick downtown buildings--reconstructed through federal grants at a cost of $580,000 after the Northridge earthquake--are largely vacant, enabling production companies to dress them up according to need. Moreover, because Piru is hidden off busy California 126, traffic and celebrity watchers are almost nonexistent.

The clincher is that while Piru is technically just outside what is called the zone--an area within a 30-mile radius of Hollywood that enables film companies to forgo paying union per diems and other expensive benefits--the community is treated as if it were inside the zone. That makes Piru an attractive, relatively inexpensive, convenient locale unique in Southern California.

Only Hidden Valley and the Lake Sherwood area exceed Piru in the volume of county film permits issued, said Frank Ugolini, the county’s film permit coordinator.

In addition to county film permit fees, Ugolini said a $325 a day is collected on behalf of the Piru Neighborhood Council--the only unincorporated community that has such an arrangement with the county.

Then there are the individual deals struck by Piru’s canny locals, who--far from being backward bumpkins--understand the value of their community with a sophistication that can sometimes take unwary film crews by surprise.

“Let’s be reasonable, why do they come to a small town?” asked Elva Hernandez, owner of one of the community’s two convenience stores. “Because people don’t ask for as much money. . . . If they’re upset with us and they’re pretty angry, it’s very simple: Don’t film here.”

Hernandez is well-known among locals, county officials and film crews as being among the most vociferous property owners in Piru.

On April 4 she stood on the sidewalk outside her store with a wireless phone complaining loudly to Ugolini about the film crew in town shooting the $10-million comedy, “Dead Man on Campus.”

Shooting for the film--starring Tom Everett Scott, the drummer in the fictitious rock group in “That Thing You Do!” and Mark-Paul Gosselaar of the canceled television show “Saved By The Bell”--meant converting the old gas station into a Greyhound bus terminal and placing false facades on downtown storefronts.

Shooting was blocking the street, impeding customers’ access to her store. The crew was shooting before the time allowed on its permit. Why, she wondered, were the owners of vacant storefronts who were renting them to the film company for $1,000 a day making more than the $850 she was being reimbursed for the loss of business at her store? Hernandez contended she should be reimbursed not only for lost sales, but “inconvenience.”

“Are you going to have a movie company come not to make a little profit?” she said, at the same time conceding Piru has a “bad name” in the industry for its excessive demands. “I want to be fair to them and not be money-hungry.”