Malibu Revels in Splendid Isolation

For a while, after a big rock at Big Rock closed Pacific Coast Highway, the pace of life in Malibu just seemed to change. It felt, some residents said, like a flashback to the ‘70s, before massive mansions and congestion came to town.

“It’s like the old days!” said Rich Davis, 72, a surfer and development consultant who has lived in Malibu for 44 years. “This keeps people out.”

The change began Tuesday, after a boulder perched in the Big Rock area broke through a berm, sending mud and debris sliding onto the highway, the main lifeline between Malibu and Los Angeles. Getting in and out was doable but not easy.

For some, the closure amounted to a forced holiday that allowed them to slow down and smell the thick ocean air.

Tim Barry, a tennis teacher, sat outside a Malibu shopping center Friday morning talking with a friend. “This is the way Malibu was 30 years ago,” he said, pointing to the highway, where an occasional car cruised by. “It’s wonderful. If only they would bring back the old coffee shop, I’d be really happy. You would see Michael Landon sitting with Neil Diamond, and then there’d be homeless people over on the other end. It’s when Malibu had a wonderful mix of people.”

Keya Somers, 28, and her boyfriend strolled through a shopping center hand in hand, huge smiles on their faces.

“Actually, I took the day off,” said the boyfriend, a local resident who declined to give his name because he wanted to keep his job. “Yesterday we spent all day at the beach. It’s empty. It’s great. They should do this once a month.”

Somers, who also lives in Malibu, said the highway’s closure had its benefits.

“You’re forced to have downtime. We walked here, had coffee, and now we’re just going to hang out. It’s very spontaneous. No schedule. No structure.”

The closure also brought a halt to what locals call “Z traffic”: motorists who travel west over the Santa Monica Mountains to Pacific Coast Highway and south to Santa Monica and Los Angeles in a Z pattern that clogs the highway. In the evening, they zigzag back.

“There was no Z traffic 20 to 25 years ago,” said Richard Sol, an architect who has lived in Malibu 42 years. “Now I’ve become a slave to PCH.”

But the closure also hurt local businesses and created inconveniences.

Resident Ozzie Silna said that when he and his wife went out for dinner, service was unbearably slow because few restaurant employees could make it into town.

“The owner and the wife were there, and they had one person in the kitchen,” Silna said.

By 6 Friday night, it was all over; the California Department of Transportation said the work was done and that the road was open..

Still, it had been an adventure, and residents said they didn’t remember the highway’s being closed that long since the ‘70s, when a massive boulder was removed from the hills above a movie producer’s house east of the highway. During that operation, it was closed for at least three months.

“It was a bonding experience,” recalled real estate developer Larry Taylor, a 32-year Malibu resident. “We would park our cars on the side of the road and walk home together.”

For a while this week, some had wondered how much stress this would add to the lives of the many actors, directors and producers who live in Malibu and plan to attend Sunday’s Academy Awards presentation.

Still, that would pale in comparison to what happened in 1938. Flooding stranded so many Hollywood celebrities that year that Oscar officials postponed the Academy Awards for a week.

Gerry Baur of Ojai, daughter of director George Marshall, who was then directing “The Goldwyn Follies,” said recently that her family was marooned for days after the bridge over Malibu Creek went out and a landslide on Pacific Coast Highway prevented them from leaving their Malibu Colony beach house.

Baur, then 17, said the “film studios sent a boat to the Malibu Pier to escort my father to Santa Monica to resume filming.” But she and her mother were left to fend for themselves.

“We had no electricity for five days and cooked our meals in the fireplace,” she said. “It was quite an adventure.”

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Times staff writer Cecilia Rasmussen contributed to this report.