When the Silver Screen Courts the Blue Knights

Roll call, p.m. watch, Paramount Division, LAPD:

“OK now, lissen up. Owing to the fact that so many officers are being approached for the movie rights to their busts--and I hear one of you got called in the field by your agent last week even before the coroner showed up--we got a new department policy here.

“No more deals with the movies. No treatments, no screenplays, no consulting gigs. That includes TV.”

“Cable too, Lieutenant?”

“Hell, yes, cable too. The way I read this, you cannot even see a cop movie until it’s out in video.

“Anyway, you cannot do lunch or take a meeting or whatever it is those movie people do.

“You get a call from any of these folks--producer, director, script girl--you tell ‘em to call directly downtown, to the Joe Friday section, Parker Center, Room 714.”

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The LAPD and the movies--now there’s a love match of long standing, between two of the most visible and self-absorbed occupations in town, maybe surpassing even journalism and politics.

It’s been cozy since the Keystone Kops ran merrily amok in Echo Park, and mutually profitable. The “blue knight” hagiographies of “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” burnished the LAPD mystique and gave it a TVQ the Supreme Court would envy. Jack Webb, whose crew once counted the spots on the linoleum in the LAPD’s press office so his set would be accurate, got complete access. In return, the LAPD got complete script control.

So there’s handsome movie money to be made by cops, from the ranking vice officer who wrote a screenplay called “Hollywood Vice Squad” to the P-2s who bag bucks working security on a movie shoot--one of the rare occasions that LAPD officers may be allowed to wear the uniform off duty. Some former SWAT guys have put together Call the Cops, an outfit selling technical police advice to movie companies.

The biggest winner was Joseph Wambaugh, whose extraordinary tales of ordinary men gave just about every beat cop the idea that he had a story to sell, and just about every producer the belief that every beat cop would want to. Someone even now is probably spending his days off at his computer, tapping out a screenplay about the Rampart Division scandals.

It’s no surprise that movie makers would come courting Det. Tom King.

King’s team had tracked and arrested a fugitive, the former Kathleen Soliah, more than 20 years after she allegedly planted pipe bombs under two LAPD cars to avenge the bonfire of her friends in the Symbionese Liberation Army. That shootout was directed by King’s father, Mervin, now retired from the LAPD. Fiction does not contrive such symmetry as fact was offering up here.

While you can’t control who calls you, you can control what you do about it. King signed no movie deal but told his boss about the call. The brass wanted not even the whiff, much less the fact, of a conflict of interest in a case already crumbly with age and tough to prosecute. They took King off the case.

This space has learned that Det. David Reyes, who worked for King, had, according to LAPD Cmdr. Peggy York, also had “contact with this producer.” While “there is no indication of any misconduct on his part,” she said, “we just wanted to be sure there was not even the appearance of conflict.” On Sept. 13, Reyes too was reassigned.

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You’d think it was spelled Ju$tice, the way the big bucks can get in on the big cases.

O.J. Simpson prosecutors found a woman who would have testified to seeing Simpson almost hitting her in his Bronco and glowering at her right after the murders--except that she sold her story for $5,000 to “Hard Copy,” making any testimony suspect.

Mark Fuhrman’s taped chats with a screenwriter, along with the multimillion-dollar O.J. book deals signed practically before the jury box emptied, also leave people wondering just whom they’re working for, even unconsciously--the case or the screenplay.

But oh, when producers show up with big fluttery fistfuls of money, when a cop may have 50 bucks and a child-support payment standing between him and payday . . .

George Evans is a greengrocer in Eagle Rock. I met him long ago, when he and his then-wife helped two Soviet dancers defect from the touring Bolshoi Ballet. Within 12 hours, Evans’ policeman brother-in-law had put them together with the FBI. And soon thereafter, an ex-cop-turned-producer was at their door with a big, clean cashier’s check for $24,000, all made out for them, for the rights to their story.

“It killed me, but I told them no,” Evans said. “You never know what these people are gonna write or do. It was such a good thing that happened, but the movie deal left a sour taste in my mouth.”

It’s getting harder and harder to keep saying, “It’s only a movie.”

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.