Smiling for the Cameras

Fade in: Exterior, downtown Los Angeles, day. A scene of utter chaos--cars bumper to bumper and motorists leaning on their horns, out of their minds with anger and frustration at being gridlocked at the height of a Monday morning rush hour.

The cars are backed up so far that they block intersections and stretch into the 2nd Street tunnel and out the other end.

And that’s just what took place behind the banks of motion picture cameras during a shoot two weeks ago for the upcoming Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “End of Days.”

Cut to: The same downtown intersections, last Saturday.

The cars are gridlocked again. But this time, the only traffic jam is the staged one in front of the cameras--a jumble of autos, taxis and buses, all bearing New York license plates and driven by actors. A Huey helicopter hovers above them, and dangling from it is Schwarzenegger’s stunt double, fighting an invisible Satan and his minions during filming of the apocalyptic millennial thriller.

The real traffic outside the extended set is flowing freely, with the help of more than a dozen city traffic cops. There’s not an angry motorist--or even a minor traffic snarl--in sight.

What a difference a few days make.

Actually, what a difference the Entertainment Industry Development Corp. makes.

The nonprofit agency is a unique consortium of city and county officials and representatives of the entertainment industry that was created three years ago at the behest of Mayor Richard Riordan to stop the exodus of film and television production from Los Angeles.

The L.A. Film Office, as it is known informally, is responsible for balancing Hollywood’s interest in shooting on location with the needs and wishes of the residents and merchants who usually welcome film crews as if they were invading armies, only less politely.

On this day, the film office was doing more scrambling than balancing.

When the first irate calls came in to a 24-hour hotline the film office set up to field complaints, senior operations Vice President Michael Bobenko headed straight to the film shoot on 4th Street between Main and Spring streets.

Over the next day, he and other staffers would work frantically, with city officials and the film company, merchants and others to reconfigure their traffic management plan so the same thing wouldn’t happen the next day. The film office, Bobenko said, had planned for every contingency beforehand--except an unforeseen construction project that was also underway in the area.

For the most part, its efforts were successful; filming during morning rush hour the next two days caused few, if any, traffic snarls.

Keeping the Cameras Rolling

In all, during several weeks of shooting on the movie, traffic problems were kept to a minimum, film office President Cody Cluff said. Perhaps even more important, he had been able to persuade the producers of the $100-million movie and all its attendant revenues to stay in Los Angeles instead of going elsewhere like so many productions have in the past.

“This isn’t all out of the goodness of our hearts,” the film’s producer, Bill Borden, said recently as he surveyed the assemblage of signs, traffic cones, warnings and traffic cops that formed a perimeter around his outdoor set.

But it’s a small price to pay for filming on the streets of downtown Los Angeles, he acknowledges, where the brick tenement-style buildings look remarkably like the rat-infested bowels of New York City where the film is supposed to take place--without the enormous cost of moving the production to the Big Apple.

“They’re walking a tightrope at all times, and we understand that,” Borden said of the film office. “We have our own selfish priorities and we want to go in and just do what we want. Their job is to be sensitive to [those interests] and to the community, and I think they’ve been very fair.”

“It hasn’t been easy,” Cluff said, with understatement.

In the past, many production companies ignored curfews and permit requirements. They would keep the locals up all night with explosions and “midnight sun” filming lights and power generators, chew up neighborhood lawns and cause traffic jams and parking nightmares.

That created a backlash, and when local governments began to crack down on Hollywood in the late 1980s and require ever-more restrictive permits for each shoot, producers headed elsewhere. In droves, they flocked to cities and other countries that were so ravenously hungry for their business that they would allow them to do virtually anything, and for less money.

“There are easier cities to film in,” Borden acknowledged Saturday, as the military-style helicopter thundered ominously overhead. “Vancouver--we can close streets there in the middle of a workday and no one cares.”

And in Houston, Borden said, “there are so many empty skyscrapers, they’ll open one up and let us film in it any time we want.”

But by negotiating with local merchants, residents and labor unions, and gaining their cooperation, the film office has won many victories for Hollywood that had once been considered inconceivable--like allowing the recent shoot on the rush-hour streets of downtown. As a result, Hollywood is increasingly bringing its business back home.

“Cody has made it very easy for us to say yes to L.A.,” said Gary Martin, president of production and administration for Columbia/Tri-Star Pictures.

In the past three years, the film office has computerized the permit process and can now approve shoots in a matter of hours, not weeks--and it can coordinate the various city, county and even state agencies that must sign off on them.

Streamlining the System

Cluff also created a 45-member advisory board and an 11-member executive board, both composed of representatives from local governments, the entertainment industry and the labor and trade unions so they can develop policy and advise the film office staff.

And the film office has struck deals with some labor unions to make Los Angeles more competitive with right-to-work states such as Arizona that don’t require union workers on shoots.

“You make a call to [the film office], and they will make it happen,” said Lisa Rawlins, vice president of studio and production affairs at Warner Bros. “They provide easy access to a very complicated system.”

Warner Bros. was the first to get permission to film a car chase downtown, through Pershing Square, a few years back for the Shaquille O’Neal movie “Steel.”

In the past, Rawlins said, no one had even bothered to ask for such permission, thinking it would never be granted.

But the film office got involved, just as it did when Warner Bros. wanted to use downtown Los Angeles to simulate New York and Washington, D.C., for scenes from the movies “Conspiracy Theory” and “Eraser,” respectively.

Film office liaisons persuaded reluctant city officials and neighbors to go along with the productions and all the explosions, gunfire and special effects that went with them.

All of them, Rawlins said, “came off without a hitch.”

As word of such successes got around, filming of movies, TV shows, music videos and commercials in Los Angeles County has surged by more than 65% since 1994, before flattening this year. The leveling off is attributed to the stronger U.S. dollar in Canada and overseas locations, as well as cutbacks in bloated studio film slates, the threat of a labor union strike in Los Angeles and economic uncertainty.

Total production days jumped from 26,698 in 1994 to nearly 34,000 the next year and 44,000 in 1996. By 1997, the film office staff had grown from 12 people to 35 to accommodate all the shoots, and local production was pumping $27.1 billion into the county’s economy--an increase of $1.6 billion for that year alone, according to Jack Kyser of the Los Angeles Economic Development Commission.

By comparison, some other cities have been big losers in the battle for Hollywood business, Cluff said. North Carolina did $391 million in film and TV business in 1996, but that figure dropped by $62 million last year, according to film office statistics. Film revenues in some other popular locations, such as Washington state, also dropped sharply, Cluff said.

Foreign locales such as Canada and Australia continue to see increased production, but Cluff said that has more to do with new TV cable shows and interactive ventures, and with the strength of the U.S. dollar abroad, than with whether Los Angeles is a good place for production.

In the past, film czars from other states made forays into Los Angeles and ridiculed the local red tape and the high cost of shooting, recalled television commercial producer Frank Scherma of @Radical Media.

“You had film commissioners . . . laughing about how much easier it was to shoot anywhere but L.A.,” said Scherma, incoming president of the film office advisory board. “Now the biggest complaint from those film commissions is that L.A. is doing too much for show business.”

Though the film office has been deemed a success, it remains squarely in the middle of an evolving detente between Hollywood and the communities in which it films.

As filming has flooded back into Los Angeles, so have the problems.

Last year, the City Council voted to block a television movie company from filming simulated automatic weapons fire near a flash point of the 1992 riots. Cluff intervened and negotiated with the producer to have the gunshots recorded elsewhere and dubbed into the location footage.

The film office also helped police X-rated film shoots and unsafe production procedures.

Patricia Garver of the Hancock Park Homeowners Assn. credits the film office with negotiating a “bill of rights” for residents, and for setting ground rules for how the cast and crew should conduct themselves, “so they don’t throw cigarette butts around and they don’t drag cables through the azalea bushes. And there’s [supposed to be] no loud swearing, and [caterers] in view. It looks awful if you’re driving down some beautiful street and see tables for 75 people eating a full-course meal.”

Garver said the film office still allows too many days of filming in neighborhoods like Hancock Park, where stately mansions and the lack of palm trees allow it to pass for almost any place in the nation.

When Business Takes a Beating

The film office also tries to be sensitive to the needs of local merchants, who often lose business when a crew shuts down their street. On “End of Days,” Borden paid merchants for their troubles.

Although Moon Lee, owner of Park’s Mini-Market on Main, received compensation, she said “some companies, they make a movie . . . then they run away.” She added that she has complained and that film office representatives “say they understand.”

“But then,” she said, “[the] same thing happens” soon afterward.

Because it is an evolving process, film office representatives say they’re still learning from mistakes--such as last month’s morning traffic jam.

The shutdown of several streets had been a compromise in itself; Borden wanted to shut down seven blocks of 4th, Spring and Main streets for 24 hours to film sequences of helicopters and automatic gunfire near the old Barclay Hotel. Ultimately, the film office brokered a compromise in which the city would close three blocks from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the three days before Thanksgiving, in the belief that traffic would be minimal before the holiday weekend.

It wasn’t.

Location manager Kokayi Ampah said he and film office officials already have huddled to see what they can learn from the experience, and said he’ll probably take out an ad in the local papers next time to make sure everyone knows of the impending traffic closures.

“We all learn from these,” Ampah said. “We learn, and [the film office] learns.”

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Days of Shooting

After the Los Angeles film office was launched in July 1995, production days in the county increased substantially that year and in 1996 and ’97 before flattening out this year.

* through November

Source: Entertainment Industry Development Corp.