Hahn Should Act Like the Leading Man He Is

Look, I could have done this the same old way.

I could have rung up all the talking heads in civic politics, and said to each of them, “Hey, it’s July--Jim Hahn has been mayor of L.A. for one year. How’s he doing so far?”

And they would have ticked off a list of laudable deeds, the Boy Scout merit badges Hahn has earned these twelve months past:

He’s whittled some of the deadwood out of the permit process, promising a money-back speedy-service guarantee that even a drive-through burger chain wouldn’t dare to match.

He’s worked to kick neighborhood councils into gear.

He’s revved up a popular after-school program.

He’s handed over his juicy sinecure as head of the MTA board to work at keeping the city from divorcing itself.

And he’s buying a fleet of “Pothole Killer” urgent-response trucks that promise to be to gaping holes in the asphalt what 911 is supposed to be to violent crimes.

The talking heads would be right, for all these are true, all worthy.

But listing them no more describes Hahn’s first year in office than laying out a carefully detailed chain of precise biochemical triggers and responses would describe falling in love.

Something important is missing. Call it charisma, call it style, that elusive chemical something that puts the capital-L into “leader.”

Who knows this better than the experts?

Not the talking heads. The other L.A. experts, the people who match personalities to the roles they want to play.

Casting directors.

These days Bonnie Pietila is a producer of Fox’s animated phenom “The Simpsons,” but before that, she was the casting director who put together the ensemble of Simpsonian voices that has become the vox pop of the world’s televisions.

So--how about that Jim Hahn? Would you cast him as mayor of L.A.? Or even mayor of Springfield?

“I would probably,” she said diplomatically, “want someone who had a known greater comedic flair. It’d be great if I could see where his sense of humor lies.... I don’t see where it comes out. I think he needs to engage us on that level.”

Another casting director who’s been matching actors to roles in feature films and television for two decades doesn’t want his name used, which is just as well, because he’d never give Hahn a job, or, after this, vice versa.

If Hahn showed up at a casting call, here’s what this man would write down:

“A real good actor at least sinks his teeth into a character. Hahn hasn’t sunk his teeth into any issue ... to me he compromises way too much, which as an actor you never do.... As an actor he’d last about three seconds.

“And if you were going to look at him from the standpoint of a character actor, at least a character actor is watchable, at least a character actor is interesting. To me, the mayor is vapid.... He’s not watchable, he’s not charismatic.

“You can see a shallow actor when they walk into your office, someone who hasn’t made strong choices, hasn’t committed to a character. Every time I see Jim Hahn that’s what I think. To me he’s a background player who got lucky.”

Thank you, Mayor Hahn. We’ll be in touch.

Do we really need that? Do we need a mayor who can also play one on television?

Damned right we do. This is a city built out of imagination, a world city sprouted on a landscape that burns and floods and shakes, a flea-bitten flyspeck of an outpost that became the world capital of imagination.

It’s the coin of our realm, and if Hahn wants Los Angeles’ attention, he needs to catch its imagination in order to win it over. So far, as the unnamed casting director said, “He’s never gotten the audience on his side, and as a performer, that’s what he’s got to do.”

Hahn probably hates this part of being mayor. Maybe it seems phony to him. But if he’s wanted this role all his life, surely he realized what it takes to do it.

His father, the late Kenny, county supervisor and before that city councilman, had a genius for this sort of thing. Once he fielded a phone call from a woman whose trash had not been picked up. Hahn pere drove to her house, picked up the trash and took it to the dump. Not only did Kenny pick up the trash, he made sure people knew he did it.

It isn’t enough that Hahn loves L.A., though he does. He has to make all the rest of us love it, too.

It isn’t enough for Hahn to be the First Bureaucrat, boasting after his first 100 days of landfill reforms and shortening a neighborhood council application form from 21 pages to six. He has to make us excited about landfills, to make us want to fill out that form for a neighborhood council.

There is no one mayoral model, not in New York, where Fiorello LaGuardia read the comics to the kiddies over the radio, and Rudy Giuliani reinvented himself sometime after breakfast on Sept. 11, and not here. Mayor Sam Yorty’s buffoonery belied the hardest of hardball political players. Tom Bradley, the Sphinx of Spring Street, conveyed a reassuringly Zen-like civic serenity. Mayor Richard Riordan could be, in Bonnie Pietila’s phrase, “inadvertently funny,” and it got people to listen to him.

It’s Sunday morning on the city’s calendar. The sermon topics are secession, and security, and the meaning of a great city.

The bully pulpit, like the city car, comes with the job. If Hahn doesn’t step into the pulpit and preach like he really means it, someone else will.

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