Show Business Fills the Aerospace Employment Gap in Burbank

Amid the weeds and razor wire just north of Burbank Airport lies the hidden Hollywood.

Starting about 1990, aerospace jobs drained away from here like sand through a grate. Lockheed left. So did ITT, Weber Aircraft, Pacific Airmotive and countless small firms that supported them. Burbank officials calculate that 15,000 jobs were lost, a bloodletting that should have ravaged the city.

Instead, the dusty shops and warehouses have been quietly taken over by studios and the small, nearly invisible industries that feed on them. Burbank has gained as many jobs as it lost when the end of the Cold War sucked the life out of the city’s traditional defense industry.

Bruce Burns thought this was just another gritty industrial district when he moved his sound company to this nameless stretch of low-slung warehouses two years ago. He changed his mind when he looked out his second-floor window one day and saw a dinosaur’s head whip by--a mechanical model from the movie “The Lost World.”

The activity here reflects a regionwide boom in entertainment that has made over communities from Culver City to North Hollywood.

“You are really talking about an incredible transformation over five or six years,” said David Harding, a broker with CB Commercial, a real estate firm. “It’s mind-boggling the number of good manufacturing jobs--really good community jobs--that were lost. But only a few years later . . . there is almost no vacancy.”

Here one finds scrap metal, not stars; forklifts, not film crews. Companies in the area provide every service imaginable to the studios: script storage, printing, sets, directories, air conditioning, logistics for live shows, even medical equipment. Many of the companies are growing fast, often paying good wages, if sometimes without benefits or much security.

They serve a sprawling media business no longer limited to movie and video production but grown global to include theme parks, theme stores, restaurants, video games, casinos and entertainment-related merchandising.

From the street, it doesn’t look like much. Many buildings are rundown. There is litter and graffiti. There are almost no restaurants; workers still flock into the street at noon to buy food from lunch trucks.

But here and there, odd elements stand out. Outside Sunrise Sets, there is a boat-sized model of a hot dog alongside old tires and machinery left to rust. Down the street, an office building has been redone to look like a castle.

And in the parking lot behind Axel Studios there’s a Tiki-style cabana, complete with thatched roof and Polynesian statues. Famous pop singers relax here during rehearsals, cooled by mists while metal lathes roar in the shop next door.

Within these buildings there is growing wealth. Sales at Innovative Design, located in the castle, have grown from $250,000 four years ago to $12 million today. It has boomed, thanks to the growing number of theme parks, stores and restaurants that buy the company’s wall-sized video screens.

Lexington Scenery & Props Inc. has nearly doubled its revenues to $15 million since the early 1990s. Four-year-old CenterStaging, a company that provides equipment and rehearsal space to big-name bands, has been growing at a rate of 30% per year, said President Johnny Caswell, 57, a former singer who switched to equipment “because I got too old to be a rock star.”

Preferred Media Inc. stores scripts on racks in a climate-controlled warehouse, so that shows sold overseas can be dubbed in other languages. Business is growing at a rate of 15% per year, said President Jonathan Armytage.

The new companies have provided hundreds of jobs for people such as Alan Hartgraves, a 41-year-old former jig-and-fixture man for Lockheed. Hartgraves is now a metal fabricator for Lexington Scenery & Props Inc. He earns about the same $15 an hour that he did in aerospace, though without benefits.

“I had never even thought of the entertainment industry. But they hired me right away. I was surprised,” Hartgraves said.

A brawny, sunburned Burbank native, Hartgraves has worked by turns as a repo man, exterminator and baker. He was laid off four times by the aerospace industry.

Asked about those times, he hesitates, then admits he’s thinking of going back. “Entertainment is feast or famine,” he said. “In aerospace, you at least get a year or two [of steady work]. Here, you’re working along like a freight train for three months and then you look over your shoulder to see what’s coming up next, and there’s no work. I’ve already been laid off for like a month.

“I’m just trying to squeak out a living. . . . I want something that pays well and I don’t have to worry about the bills. Just for a year or two. Just so I can get caught up. That’s all.”

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Zelma Welcome, 41, has found a new life as general manager of Shades of Light Studios, a far cry from her old job as a car saleswoman.

Welcome cuts an elegant figure in three-inch heels and platinum toenail polish. A self-described party maven, she also has the iron fist of a school headmistress. Both are needed for a job that is part sales and part baby-sitting.

Left to their own devices, production crews can wreak havoc, picking fights with the truck drivers next door or moving other people’s cars without permission, she said. Eyeing the homes down the street, she adds: “We have Motley Crue coming in and I’m worried.”

Her boss, Geneva Nash-Morgan, 39, grew up the daughter of a Compton steelworker and now lives in the Hancock Park area. She helped start the studio with her husband, a director of photography whom she met on the television show “Soul Train.”

Not far away in Sun Valley is Alpha Medical Resources Inc. Earlier this year, Alpha moved into a plant vacated by Burbank Aircraft, said Alpha President Frank Uchalik. When Burbank Aircraft moved, the area lost 350 jobs, he said. In its place, Alpha employs 25 workers.

The company provides medical equipment and furniture as props for television shows such as “ER” and “Chicago Hope.” Among those who have found new careers at Alpha are a registered nurse who is secretary-treasurer and several medical technicians.

The technicians coach actors on how to look like medical professionals. They earn more than they did doing real medical work, Uchalik said.

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Skepticism of the new entertainment companies is common among the longtime manufacturing workers who remain in the area.

Around the corner from Shades of Light, white-haired machinist Don Deatrick stares out his window at a litter-strewn parking lot and in the distance the sunbaked Verdugo Mountains.

He is not happy with the view. It came with the demolition of the Weber Aircraft plant next door. Weber was one of his best customers.

Born in Burbank, the son of a machinist, Deatrick, 54, learned the family trade at 14, riding his bike from school to local shops. Among the metal parts crafted in his shop--with its punch clock and posters of tanks--are components for the terminal boards in NASA’s Mars rover Sojourner.

Deatrick once employed 50 people. Now he employs 15.

Eric Steinhauer, a vice president at Industrial Metal Supply Co., doubts that entertainment will be the area’s savior. “A lot is moving in, but it can also move out,” he said.

Nearby L.A. Gauge has the same faded rockets on its sign that it had 40 years ago. This year’s sales of $5.75 million nearly match those of the peak years in defense. There’s plenty of business to be had now in satellites and other space ventures, said President Jim Hunt.

L.A. Gauge makes parts so intricate their dimensions can be altered by the warmth of a human body. Said Hunt: “In defense, you know you have created something pretty spectacular--a satellite or an airplane. I don’t think you can get the same rush when you do something for a theme park.”

A few blocks away, Jonathan Katz, chairman of Cinnabar--a company that makes sets for theme parks and TV commercials--listens intently when told of Hunt’s comments. Whereas Hunt wears a tie, the lanky Katz, 49, wears a faded T-shirt, sandals and a beaded belt. Katz oversees a vast warehouse full of screeching machines and stacks of lumber. Recently, his company designed models and miniatures for the upcoming movie “Godzilla.” Some jobs are done on computers, but mostly the work here is sweaty labor.

Where aerospace workers labored under precise specifications, Cinnabar workers “store feelings,” said Katz. “A director will come in and look at a set and say, ‘It just doesn’t feel right.’ ”

That means employees--their creativity and intuition--are irreplaceable, he contended, adding: “It’s going to mean prosperity for L.A. for a long, long time.”

But Katz also understands why some think his industry is superficial. He once dreamed of building solar-powered cars, and worked on developing alternative energy sources under Gov. Jerry Brown. Now, though he commutes to work in an EV-1 electric car, he oversees a booming company that helps make commercials for sport-utility vehicles.

Katz loves the pace and the risk. But he is sometimes troubled by what Hollywood produces.

“It’s not that good,” he said. “That’s the whole irony of the entertainment industry: satisfying jobs, producing nothing.”