Helping the arts fly in L.A.

They say in Hollywood that a film won’t fly if you can’t sum it up in a sentence.

By that test, L.A.’s Cultural Affairs Department would be a nonstarter. The government agency aims to champion the arts by issuing grants, offering classes, running neighborhood centers and -- well, a lot of other things that can’t be put pithily.

Margie J. Reese, the department’s general manager, counters: “If you could describe it in 25 words or less, we’d be in bad shape.”

But a few weeks ago, Reese faced having her department simplified out of existence. Mayor James K. Hahn’s budget team had it pegged for possible elimination as part of a cost-cutting drive. The threatened agency got out the word, and the arts community mobilized, arguing against a move that many feared would revive old jokes about L.A. as a cultural wasteland.

Hahn ultimately promised to keep Cultural Affairs but said he wanted spending cuts and a greater focus on promoting the arts as revenue-generating magnets for tourism. He set up a special advisory council to examine the department and recommend possible changes -- starting with a public City Hall hearing at 9:30 a.m. today.

The panel, headed by Music Center Chairman John Emerson, is stepping into a domain of government-backed arts that is complicated, diverse and, compared with other major cities’ programs, meagerly funded.

Just as there is no simple definition of L.A. culture, Reese says there can be none for the cultural agency. Since it was founded in 1980, its mission has been to embrace Los Angeles’ diversity and sprawl and try to seed the arts from neighborhood to neighborhood. It provides classes, performances and exhibitions in 22 city-owned facilities and reaches into a profusion of ethnic enclaves by helping to finance, plan and promote community festivals.

That’s a mandate that would challenge the many-tentacled reach of a Jules Verne sea monster, yet Cultural Affairs’ $11.8-million annual budget barely qualifies it as plankton in the food chain of a $5-billion city government. The department packs less inflation-adjusted buying power than it did in 1993, and at $3.19 per capita, L.A.’s government arts spending is dwarfed by New York ($14.60), San Francisco ($27.81), San Diego ($7.80) and San Jose ($6.37).

Within that budget, it must operate two of L.A.’s most distinctive and vulnerable landmarks: the Watts Towers, a multicolored fantasia of spires and sculptures that was the single-handed, 33-year labor of Simon Rodia, an unschooled immigrant from Italy; and Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1921-vintage, Maya-influenced Hollyhock House, closed since 2000 while the city scours for funds to finish restoring it after earthquake damage and decades of wear and tear.

The department also is responsible for maintaining another art treasure: a widely scattered collection of more than 2,000 murals on buildings, viaducts and freeway walls that must continually be renewed against damage from the elements and vandals. Cultural Affairs gets a say as well in the preservation of historical landmarks and the architectural aesthetics of the city government’s building projects.

Arts partisans are particularly adamant about preserving the $3.3 million in annual grants that Cultural Affairs issues to organizations of all sizes based on recommendations by panels of experts.

When the department bestows a grant, “the funding goes much further than the actual dollars awarded,” says Jan Karlin, founding executive director and viola player of the Southwest Chamber Music Society. “It’s a Good Housekeeping seal of approval” -- an imprimatur that reassures other, potentially higher-rolling donors that an organization is fiscally responsible and well regarded. Karlin says support from Cultural Affairs helped lift Southwest Chamber Music from a fledgling group with a budget of about $100,000 to its current success as the $500,000-plus orchestra that won the 2004 Grammy Award for best small classical ensemble performance.

Apart from funding, says Chris Aihara, managing director for programming at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, the Cultural Affairs Department is a nerve center for the L.A. arts scene, a place to call, for instance, when she wants to find artists who can add other nationalities’ flavors to the annual Rice Festival. “They’ve helped us connect with each other and established more of an arts community.”

Still, there is no lack of contention in Cultural Affairs’ far-flung but thinly funded empire.

N.J. “Bud” Goldstone, a structural engineer and long a leading advocate for Watts Towers preservation, thinks that the experts the department hired after ending his consulting contract four years ago are using the wrong techniques. The city, he says, is wasting the $184,000 a year it currently spends to maintain the landmark. Judith F. Baca, a leading muralist, says that enough is not being spent on mural restoration and that, even if it were, the Cultural Affairs Department would fail because it isn’t teaching neighbors, especially spray-can-toting youths, to value the works as statements of local heritage and pride.

Reese responds that winning hearts and minds for the murals would be a good idea if the department had the money. All that is available now, she says, is the $1.7 million from the state that is targeted for restoring murals along the freeways. As for the Watts Towers, Reese says she is satisfied with a 2003 state parks department finding that the conservation methods were “quite solid.”

The common thread in the city’s custodianship of the Watts Towers, the murals and Hollyhock House is its consistent failure to do major maintenance and repairs unless it can corral money from state or federal sources. That’s symptomatic of a general lack of planning for the upkeep of cultural facilities, says Reese, who held a similar post in Dallas before former Mayor Richard Riordan hired her in January 2001. Many of the city-operated arts centers and theaters are in old buildings that the city has bought and refurbished piecemeal since it established Cultural Affairs.

“I stand in awe when I think about the shortsightedness on our part when we acquired these buildings, of not having the operating capital safely tucked away to keep those buildings first-rate,” Reese says. One of her biggest headaches -- consuming a quarter of her time, she estimates -- is cajoling other departments that are supposed to do maintenance and repairs on the buildings Cultural Affairs runs.

During an interview, Reese can be bland and cautious. But she also speaks passionately, with folksy inflections, about the haven that after-school art and music classes provide for latchkey kids living in tough neighborhoods.

Yet some say that Reese, who hails from Baton Rouge, La., has failed to be a high-profile advocate for the arts in L.A.

“I don’t know Margie’s vision. I don’t know anything about her, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s a statement,” says Susan Rubin, artistic director of the Indecent Exposure Theater Company, which has received a number of city arts grants stretching back to the tenure of Reese’s far more visible predecessor, Adolfo V. “Al” Nodal.

“My personality is not to be out front, and maybe that’s a negative and something I need to work on,” Reese concedes. “If I’m in a room talking businesspeople into supporting the arts because that is good for commerce and trade, I think my voice has spoken as loudly as it can speak at a photo op.”

Laura Chick, the city controller, credits Reese with playing a deft hand when the Cultural Affairs Department was threatened with the ax.

“In a very diplomatic manner, she’s been working her supporters and fighting for the arts in L.A. without declaring civil war on the mayor’s office” -- a necessary restraint given that Hahn didn’t appoint Reese and she serves at his pleasure.

Nodal agrees that Reese was a savior, and he says he thinks that lends her the stature to be a more prominent advocate. In running such a small department, he says, “the only thing you’ve got is your lungs.”

The arts community is vowing to generate more lung power during the coming budget deliberations: Reese says the mayor’s staff has asked her to cut 20% to 30% for the next fiscal year. Jan Williamson, co-executive director of the 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica, says a move is afoot to organize district-by-district meetings so that arts constituents can urge their City Council members to resist disproportionate cuts.

Eli Broad, the billionaire arts patron Hahn turned to for advice when howls began over the possible elimination of Cultural Affairs, thinks the whole arts equation in L.A. could change with the creation of a high-profile government post: arts commissioner. He envisions a “household name” capable of galvanizing the city and making the national media look at L.A. through the prism of its cultural offerings, ever overshadowed by the entertainment industry. Broad is chairing an eight-member, Hahn-appointed search committee, made up of arts and business leaders and actor Sidney Poitier.

Meanwhile, the new Mayor’s Council for the Arts will review the Cultural Affairs Department. Emerson, its chairman, expects to issue findings and recommendations by mid-May. Broad, the Emerson panel’s honorary chairman, says preliminary ideas include having one of the city’s museums oversee the Watts Towers and the Municipal Arts Gallery in Barnsdall Park. Emerson says another idea is “a United Way for smaller cultural programs.”

The Cultural Affairs Department already drums up donations to augment its activities. Will Caperton y Montoya, the department’s director of marketing and development, says it has raised about $769,000 in cash and donated goods and services this fiscal year. Reese hopes to raise more than $1 million for a three-year international exchange program that would send L.A. artists and city-sponsored performers and exhibitions abroad in an effort to advertise Los Angeles as a destination for arts-loving visitors.

“This is an exciting time for the department,” Nodal says. “It’s only grown through adversity. When there’s a test, people get behind it. From the corporate leaders at the opera to the homeless artists on skid row, many people from many walks of life are touched by it and care about it. It’s about the kinds of intangibles other departments don’t deal with -- the image and spirit of the city.”