L.A. Out of the Picture as Stars Back Candidates

It was election night in Los Angeles.

At stake: the top job in the nation’s second-largest city.

In a plot twist that left voters and mayoral candidates in suspense until the next day, a dense fog grounded the helicopters that ferry ballots downtown, slowing the count.

Despite the dramatic climax, some of the entertainment industry’s most passionate partisans, among them Paul Reiser of “Mad About You,” were gathered at a Westside home to focus on a different election: the 2006 U.S. Senate race in Rhode Island.

The ironic timing of that fundraiser underscores a curiosity of Los Angeles politics: Hollywood is both piggy bank and glamour factory for Democratic campaigns across the country, but when it comes to local politics, the stars and studio execs so active on the national scene are much scarcer.

When Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry came to Los Angeles last summer, Ben Stiller, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Jamie Foxx, Harvey Weinstein, Billy Crystal and Barbra Streisand attended a lavish gala at Disney Hall that netted $5 million.

In the race for Los Angeles mayor, only Streisand has contributed: the maximum $1,000 to Mayor James K. Hahn.

With a little more than five weeks to go until Hahn and City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa face each other in the May 17 runoff, both campaigns agree that the star wattage is expected to stay low.

“They’re pretty much focused on national politics,” said Parke Skelton, strategist for Villaraigosa’s campaign.

Still, he joked, “If Leonardo wants to go out there and walk precincts for us, we’d be glad to put him to work.”

Hollywood’s actors and moguls orbit in a world literally and figuratively removed from Los Angeles, often living atop hills in patrolled estates and working at movie studios outside the city.

The studios are deeply involved in issues at the national and international level, but don’t need as much from City Hall -- although they do employ it occasionally as a movie backdrop.

Stars, too, are drawn to the more dramatic national and international issues: Potholes aren’t as urgent as war, and would-be mayors aren’t as sexy as aspiring senators. Many stars are active in Democratic causes, but L.A.’s elections -- unlike New York City’s -- are nonpartisan.

The occupants of City Hall, meanwhile, have done little to draw Hollywood into local issues, rarely reaching out to recruit the industry to their cause.

Not all stars shun local politics, however.

Gregory Peck was a great supporter of former Mayor Tom Bradley, who attracted significant celebrity support during his quest to become the city’s first black mayor. And in the first round of this mayoral election, comedian George Lopez campaigned with his old friend, state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley), and Bill Cosby endorsed Councilman Bernard C. Parks.

Some have also contributed. Jack Nicholson gave $1,000 to Bob Hertzberg. Bradley Whitford, an actor on the television show “The West Wing,” gave $1,000 to Hahn. Sylvester Stallone gave $1,000 to Hertzberg last year and then $1,000 to Hahn after Hertzberg was eliminated in the March 8 election.

Executives from DreamWorks, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, Fox and other studios have also given to Hahn and Villaraigosa over the years.

Still, such contributions are minimal compared to the more than $13.5 million that flooded in to national political causes from Hollywood in the 2003-04 election cycle.

The divide between the entertainment industry titans and the city’s political establishment is as old as the movie business.

Although most of the world associates movies with Los Angeles, many studios are actually outside the city limits: Sony Pictures Entertainment is in Culver City. Disney, Warner Bros. and DreamWorks are in Burbank. Much of Universal Studios is in an unincorporated part of the San Fernando Valley.

Only two major studios, Paramount and Fox, are in the city, although many TV shows are produced in the real Hollywood.

That’s no accident. When filmmaking first began here in the early part of the last century, studios wanted to be free of regulation -- the better to blow things up, speed around in fast cars and create havoc without interference.

So some bought huge tracts of land outside the city and eventually became entities unto themselves, with their own fire departments and security forces.

Studio heads and movie stars also tended to be scattered in mansions and enclaves across the region, often in Beverly Hills, which, of course, is not part of Los Angeles.

Today, the reasons for Hollywood’s disengagement are not all that different, according to Lawrence O’Donnell, an MSNBC political analyst and a writer and producer for “The West Wing.” Like many of the city’s wealthiest residents, he said, the Hollywood elite doesn’t rely on local government for much.

“We have to remember, these people generally do not use the public school system,” he said. “They generally do not rely on the local police force for their security. They have their own ... that are much better and more efficient.”

Marge Tabankin, a longtime political activist and philanthropic consultant for Streisand and others, said it is the nature of Los Angeles, with its dizzying diversity, to cause people to retreat into the comfortable familiarity of their own communities.

“There is a true segregation in Los Angeles, by neighborhood and by sector,” she said. “Hollywood has created its own community. Most of the people in the industry stay in their own world.”

Hollywood, too, has a different set of priorities than the politicians who work in City Hall.

The biggest Hollywood studios are part of international entertainment conglomerates that are worried about such issues as copyright infringement and worldwide video sales.

“Their concerns tend to be more global,” said Andy Spahn, a DreamWorks executive who oversees the firm’s government relations as part of his responsibilities. “They don’t tend to interact much at the city level.”

The gulf between Hollywood and Los Angeles politics mirrors the disengagement between Silicon Valley and that region’s city halls and between Wall Street and New York’s City Hall. Both have more at stake nationally and internationally than at home.

And for stars, directors and producers, Spahn said, “the issues addressed at the national level, issues of war and peace, the environment, choice, the economy, they are much more compelling than traffic and potholes.”

That could explain Hollywood’s interest in Matt Brown, who held his Westside fundraiser on L.A.’s election night.

The Rhode Island secretary of state is solidly pro-choice, which prompted Victoria Hopper, who is married to actor Dennis Hopper, to write a fundraising letter on Brown’s behalf.

“There is only so much energy that any normal citizen brings to politics,” said MSNBC’s O’Donnell. And given the “tremendous, inordinate” attention many in Hollywood pay to presidential politics, he asked, is it any wonder there’s little energy left for local politics?

Still, some do find time for New York City’s mayoral races and its high-profile civic campaigns.

Streisand and many other celebrities campaigned for David Dinkins, who in 1990 became New York’s first African American mayor. And Mayor Michael Bloomberg has enlisted Meryl Streep, Whoopi Goldberg and Matt Damon in the campaign to bring the 2012 Summer Olympics to the city.

Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and the author of a forthcoming book on former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, noted, “A New York mayor’s race is high on the national liberal agenda.”

Los Angeles, where local elections are nonpartisan and the major candidates are often all Democrats, is not on the A-list. It also doesn’t help that this amorphous city, which bleeds seamlessly into its many neighbors, has never developed much of a cult around its mayor.

“People feel more passionately about who is the mayor of New York,” said Ken Sunshine, a New York-based publicist who represents DiCaprio and Affleck. Both have donated thousands of dollars and hours of their time to causes around the nation; neither of them returned phone calls to talk about Los Angeles politics.

Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge, who represents a swath of the celebrity-heavy Hollywood Hills, said he views the lack of celebrity involvement in local politics as a positive sign.

“Los Angeles basically works,” he said. “Water and Power delivers water and power. Trash gets picked up.”

LaBonge and others also noted that many celebrities, including DiCaprio, are involved philanthropically in their communities -- they just stay away from local politics.

Tabankin, the Hollywood consultant, offered another reason for the political disconnect. She says local politicians have not come courting with the same ardor as national ones.

“Nobody really works Hollywood from the City Hall level,” she said. “Very few of the local politicians have really bothered.

“It’s sort of perplexing to me.”

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, a former government affairs executive at DreamWorks, agreed that local politicians tend to take the industry -- which injects up to $30 billion a year into the local economy -- for granted. And she wants that to change. “I think people forget the role the industry plays in creating jobs,” she said.

Last year, Greuel worked with the entertainment guilds to trim the city’s business taxes on small- and medium-size production companies and eliminate business taxes on writers and directors who make less than $300,000 a year. City officials have also tried to address issues that are a growing concern to the industry, such as piracy and the exodus of production companies shooting overseas and out of state.

Despite the remove between Hollywood and City Hall, some celebrities do make frequent visits to the seat of municipal power, an elegant Art Deco building that has doubled as the halls of Congress, countless courtrooms and even the Vatican.

Over the last 14 months, there have been more than 50 days of filming in the building, much of it in the ornate rotunda that connects the mayor’s office to the council chambers.

With the real-life drama of city business and the mayoral race swirling around them, Tim Allen, Robert Downey Jr. and Danny Glover have recently roamed its high-ceilinged halls.

And in an ongoing blend of politics and artifice, the cast of “The West Wing” has spent hours in City Hall, pretending its marble corridors lead to congressional offices.

But writer-producer O’Donnell, who has created some of the most gripping political moments on television, said he has never been tempted to dramatize Los Angeles City Hall itself.

“I think Michael J. Fox got it right,” he said, alluding to his role as a deputy mayor of New York on the television show “Spin City.” “The only way you can write City Hall is as a joke.”