For Arts, It Was a Very Good Year

It seems a millennium ago, but it’s only been a year since we were all worried about Y2K. As we all knew by dawn of the new year, Y2K was the problem that wasn’t. Commerce did not come to a halt, electronic records did not vanish into the ether and even that Great Satan my bank managed to get through it without dropping a digit or anything else untoward.

If Y2K was the international focus of Jan. 1, 2000, the local cultural preoccupation was the millennial fete at the Van Nuys Airport.

Call me a cynic, but I thought the organizing Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department overreached when it dubbed the party the San Fernando Valley Spectacular. True, some 20,000 tickets were given out at area supermarkets and other venues, and a crowd as large as 75,000 was predicted.

But did the organizers really expect thousands to turn out to see such low-wattage luminaries as B.J. “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” Thomas and perennial bad boy Jan-Michael Vincent? When only 500 people showed up for the $300,000 event, the disappointed planners blamed the rain that fell intermittently all day. My guess is people decided to stay home when they learned the merriment would include 2,000 line dancers doing the electric slide with scores of Lear jets in the background.

Despite that inauspicious start, 2000 was a pretty good year in terms of local culture. In June more than 100,000 people took part in the eighth NoHo Theatre & Arts Festival, in spite of temperatures that would have tested the mettle of a desert tortoise.

Finding cold water was very much on the minds of attendees, but so was the vast array of free theater--almost 100 performances--that hinted at the quality and range of theater now available in the Valley.

Angelenos are always wondering aloud why this city doesn’t have a larger, livelier theater scene, given the unrivaled concentration of acting and related talent. But as the NoHo festival reminded us, the area has dozens of interesting small theaters and gifted acting companies. Peter Greene, who publishes a bimonthly theater guide to the Valley, puts the number of local theaters at 44. “We have the largest concentration of Equity-waiver theaters in the country today, more than Greenwich Village,” he points out.

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One laudable feature of the theatrical sampler served up at the festival: the mature, possibly courageous decision to include adults-only offerings as well as family fare.

The NoHo Arts District has been improving steadily ever since the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences opened in its heart in 1988. Every year there seems to be less graffiti and more restaurants and other amenities.

Two major advances this year were the opening June 24 of the Metro Red Line subway’s North Hollywood station and the premiere season at the East Valley’s first mid-sized theater in recent memory, El Portal. In fact, the refurbished movie palace includes three performance spaces and serves as home to Actors Alley, one of the Valley’s most respected theater groups.

The area around the TV academy is still no reborn Times Square, nor is the new subway a magic carpet delivering hordes of devotees of Equity-waiver theater to North Hollywood. But it is one more positive step in the evolution of a full-fledged arts district or districts in the Valley.

Joe Hooven, the new president of the Universal City-North Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, says the subway has already helped retail businesses in the district, and he believes it will eventually have greater impact on its cultural life, especially if theaters and other cultural venues start programming to attract people from elsewhere in the city.

Hooven, an art collector as well as a businessman, thinks the growing number of visual artists and other creative people in NoHo are central to its vitality and continued development. “The arts make us aware of who we are, and they sensitize us to the culture around us,” Hooven says. “They make us more human.”

Since 1998, the West Valley, too, has had a mid-sized theater, the 499-seat Madrid in Canoga Park. So far the Madrid has functioned mostly as a rental space, and some community culturistas say, though rarely for attribution, that it is too closely controlled by bureaucrats from the city’s Cultural Affairs Department.

But the Madrid is something around which a genuine cultural district could coalesce. And a first step was taken in 2000 with the opening of a new, 170-seat facility--the West Valley Playhouse--in a former Masonic lodge a few blocks from the Madrid.

Every new cultural amenity helps. You can make fun of the assembly-line ambience of the Starbucks that have popped up all over the country. But just look at how the new Starbucks at the corner of Victory Boulevard and Coldwater Canyon Avenue in North Hollywood has already become a sorely needed community meeting place and a haven in the previously all but amenity-free neighborhood. It’s not the high cost of latte that has locals packing the parking lot all day long.

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Several of our major cultural institutions had a very good year. Tickets to the annual Cowboy Poetry & Music Festival in Santa Clarita in March were all but impossible to get. They were snapped up in advance by that fringed and booted coterie of people who love everything about the West, real and imagined.

So many of the movies and television shows that shaped the world’s perception of what the West was were shot here, by people who live and work here, that this festival has an improbable but undeniable authenticity. Only the annual cowboy poetry festival in Elko, Nev., has comparable or better bona fides.

The Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Griffith Park is also firmly rooted in both the West and Hollywood. The museum is already planning upcoming shows that exploit its unique expertise in both the imagined and historical frontier, including exhibitions on black cowboys and spaghetti westerns.

This year also saw the inauguration of the Burbank International Children’s Film Festival, to be held every October. Founder and artistic director Chris Shoemaker argued that Burbank--home to Disney, Warner Bros., the Cartoon Network and other major players in children’s entertainment--is the perfect place to showcase high-quality programming for kids.

In a world in which festivals are increasingly important in launching films, Burbank has the potential to become a real player, a kind of pint-sized Sundance. The inaugural program included a couple of speakers noted for chiding Hollywood for irresponsible marketing to children, but Shoemaker has proven himself able to juggle conservative views about children and the media with savvy about the importance of compelling story and top-notch production values.

He is founder and artistic director of the annual Santa Clarita International Film Festival--a popular G-rated event that will be 7 years old in March.

This year the neon-outlined Alex Theatre in Glendale celebrated its 75th anniversary. The Alex is a splendid example of how important a single institution can be to the cultural life of a community.

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The former vaudeville theater and movie palace is now home to the Alex Film Society and one of the few places in Los Angeles where people can see vintage movies on a large screen with a live audience--the way they were meant to be seen. It is the site of the animation industry’s annual Annie awards--a cartoon-bright venue for celebrating an increasingly rich art form and important local industry. The Glendale Symphony and other major community cultural groups perform here.

In 2001, let’s fight for an Alex or its equivalent in every one of our communities. All our lives would be better for it.