Giving Birth to a Festival as Diverse as L.A.

Look at the schedule for LAMEC 2001, a festival at the New Ivar Theatre in Hollywood, and you wonder if it has a focus.

LAMEC stands for Los Angeles Media & Education Center--which doesn’t tell you much. Although most of the festival is theater-oriented, it also includes a series of Monday-night documentary film screenings, seminars on media and journalism, and a closing concert featuring the premiere of a symphony.

If you keep looking for a central theme, it might occur to you that many people search for the same quality in Los Angeles itself--where’s the center? And once this dawns on you, you’re getting close to answering your question.

“Two words tell me what we’re doing,” said LAMEC founder and President Robert Guenette. “Los Angeles.”

LAMEC is, in its modest fashion, trying to help bring Los Angeles together. The subject of most of the staged readings, documentaries and other programs is L.A.--or some particular aspect of what Guenette calls “the most diverse city ever in the history of the world.”

So how does that explain the prominence of Guenette’s “fully staged reading” of Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” a 1921 play by an Italian? Scheduled for the festival’s prime-time weekend slots, “Six Characters” is about a play rehearsal in which the characters take on lives of their own. The play has no references to Southern California.

Guenette freely admits that one key reason for doing the play is logistical: It’s set at a rehearsal, so it requires no permanent set or costumes, which might have gotten in the way of some of the festival’s other events--all of which share the same stage.

But returning to the subject of L.A., Guenette said the city reflects the play’s themes. “L.A. is the foremost city in the world that is fed by illusion in search of reality. That’s what drives us, and it’s not just in the movie business. A lot us came here, to the end of the continent, in search of freedom. A lot of it is illusory, but that illusion seeds our energy.”

Guenette, 66, moved from New York to L.A. in 1972. He had arrived in New York in the early ‘50s assuming he would be an actor, but “I never cracked the theater,” he said. He found acting “extremely difficult and unpleasant--so much rejection.” Instead, he joined what he called “the 16-millimeter explosion” and became a documentary filmmaker.

While in New York, he began working for L.A.-based television producer David L. Wolper, and by 1972 Guenette realized that much of the documentary market had shifted to the West Coast. So he and his wife, Frances, made the move “kicking and screaming, like many a New Yorker. But now, the more honest of [former New Yorkers] admit we prefer it out here.”

Guenette’s production company thrived on such fare as documentaries about Orson Welles, “Star Wars” and other big-budget movies. Perhaps the producer’s best-known project was the ripped-from-the-headlines TV movie “Victory at Entebbe.” Guenette took a brief detour into the L.A. theater scene, directing a 99-seat production, “Pieces of Time,” in 1982. He served as president of the International Documentary Assn. But generally he seldom strayed far from his lucrative work behind the camera.

He and his wife often discussed doing something in the nonprofit arena as a way of giving back to their community. He credits three factors with spurring him to take action: a 1985 TV movie he made about Dr. Lois Lee’s Children of the Night, the Van Nuys-based shelter for teenage runaways and prostitutes; the death of his wife from ovarian cancer in 1994; and the dedication of a younger colleague, Robert Leeburg. Without Leeburg, Guenette joked, he might have retired to an island off Spain.

Instead, Guenette founded LAMEC. Leeburg became its executive director. For the last four years, the organization has worked behind the scenes, conducting video training and improv workshops for a variety of youth groups and other community organizations.

So far, Guenette has provided most of the funding, not only from his business proceeds, but also from the 1998 sale of a Beverly Hills house he and his wife bought in 1972. He has looked into the possibility of grants, he said, only to be told, “Your mission is too broad.” Guenette hopes the group’s first festival will raise the LAMEC profile enough to diversify its funding sources beyond his wallet.

The cost of the festival will probably be more than $250,000, Guenette estimated--and this is with most of the staff working as volunteers (union rules require payments to the actors and musicians).

LAMEC’s mission has been, from the beginning, to help bring together the disparate communities of L.A. under nonprofit auspices. Guenette said he would like to see more gatherings of the L.A. public in areas in which commerce isn’t the main drawing card.

Only recently has theater become the biggest single discipline within the group’s programming. “There’s something wonderful about the process of bringing people together in the flesh,” Guenette said. “It’s a great way to communicate with people.”

His theatrical aims sound somewhat similar to those of Cornerstone Theater Company, which Guenette admires. He cast Omar Gomez, a star of Cornerstone’s recent production at the Mark Taper Forum, “For Here or to Go?,” in “Six Characters,” along with Sally Kirkland and other theatrical notables.

Guenette also shares a goal with the recent Edge of the World Theater Festival, parts of which he saw and liked: Both festivals strive to garner more attention for the L.A. theater scene. Besides “Six Characters,” Guenette is also producing Tuesday-night theater seminars and Thursday-night staged readings as part of his festival.

LAMEC 2001 is different from the other institutions, however, not only because Guenette has a relatively skimpy background in theater, but also because he uses only one performance venue. Cornerstone changes venues with each new production, going into the heart of various communities with which it works, while Edge of the World takes place in a variety of theaters that are smaller than the New Ivar, with its 284 seats.

Guenette said he considered a site in Echo Park, but he wanted a place that was likelier to attract people from the Westside and the San Fernando Valley (the LAMEC offices operate out of Guenette’s production company on Robertson Boulevard, just south of Pico). He also wanted an anchor theater that was big enough to accommodate a broad mix of people.

In addition to keeping ticket prices low and vowing “not to turn anyone away at the door,” he also plans to provide free bus service and free tickets to 45 people at each performance. He’s trying to use that nightly bus to bring in people who normally wouldn’t think about going to those particular performances.

Guenette had earlier attempted to buy the Ivar. After it was sold last year to California Youth Theatre, Guenette contacted the new owner and agreed to rent the theater for six weeks--which comes in handy, said California Youth Theatre artistic director Jack Nakano, whose group will participate in a LAMEC program Jan. 30 devoted to L.A. youth theater.

Nakano has so far been unable to schedule a production by his group in its new home because most of the money that could otherwise pay for production is now used for the mortgage, he said.

Guenette hopes the Ivar festival will become an annual event. However, “we don’t want to tie ourselves to one building,” he said. “We want to move around town. There are people who taste none of L.A.’s diversity. We want to provoke Los Angelenos to get around more.”

The producer now lives in Venice, a much more diverse neighborhood than his former Beverly Hills surroundings. Venice “helps feed my appetite for mixing it up with people,” he said.

“We want to help people break down fences and experience something new.”

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LAMEC 2001, New Ivar Theatre, 1605 Ivar St., Hollywood. Information: Call (310) 785-9312 or visit https://www.lamec.org.