8/29/03

LC030829

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

It was supposed to be the next big thing in Los Angeles. What
happened to the cultural boom in North Hollywood?

Anthony Pascuzzo>> We've got people that are roots, down-home
business owners that are willing to put their butt on the line
to make this happen and I think it's just a matter of time.

Val>> And then, the ups and downs of a tell-all book that
accused George W. Bush of using cocaine. We'll meet the
directors of the film that goes behind the scenes.

All that and more on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> Hello, I'm Val Zavala reporting from the Metro Station in
North Hollywood. This is one of the stops in the subway's
Redline connecting the San Fernando Valley with downtown Los
Angeles. It's all part of the city's plan to turn this area
into a major center for cultural and commerce, but what ever
happened to the rest of the plan? The neighborhood has seen
only a fraction of the new development that's been promised for
years. But as Toni Guinyard tells us, that may be about to
change.

Toni Guinyard>> At first glance, the NOHO arts district appears
to be nothing more than an eclectic mix of theaters and
businesses separated by vacant lots, but residents and merchants
see something here that can't be seen by the naked eye. They
see what this area could be. They envision North Hollywood as
the next Southern California hub of artistic and cultural
expression.

Amy Roth>> I envision this as what Melrose was at one time or
maybe SOHO, New York. I really think that there is great
potential for this area. I think that this could be more of a
tourist attraction than Hollywood itself.

Anthony Pascuzzo>> We've got people that are roots, down-home
business owners that are willing to put their butt on the line
to make this happen and I think it's just a matter of time.

Toni Guinyard>> Time is an issue. In 1979, the city targeted
North Hollywood for revitalization. Since then, more than $74
million dollars in incremental property taxes have been spent,
but promises of development have gone unfulfilled. New
businesses opened shop with the expectation the transformation
would attract customers. The wait has been a lot longer than
expected.

Jason Leib>> It's just a district that's being ignored and
they're just not doing anything with it as of right now.

Toni Guinyard>> Wait a minute. They have all these plans on
the board.

Jason Leib>> Yeah, but nothing is getting done right now. I
mean, they're just talking about it. They're fighting with the
locals around and I'm not very clear, but I don't see anything
getting done. It's just a bunch of talkers right now.

Lillian Burkenheim-Silver>> There is a lot that's already
happened. I don't think that we were ever planning on making
North Hollywood a metropolis.

Toni Guinyard>> Lillian Burkenheim-Silver is a North Hollywood
resident. She is also the Project Manager for the NOHO
redevelopment plan. She knows the area, she knows the people
and she has seen the problems.

Lillian Burkenheim-Silver>> We spent years going around asking
people, don't you want to come to NOHO? North Hollywood's
great, and they go, yeah, yeah, go away.

Toni Guinyard>> She and Bud Ovrom, head of the Community
Redevelopment Agency, took us out to the office balcony to point
out a few changes that have already been made.

Lillian Burkenheim-Silver>> Well, I think that you're already
beginning to see more because, as you look down the street at
the different businesses that are starting to locate along
Lankershim here --

Bud Ovrom>> -- The very heart, the very dead center, ground
zero, of North Hollywood at Lankershim and Chandler is the MTA
portal.

Toni Guinyard>> With the subway and the bus system, North
Hollywood is being promoted as a transit hub with mass transit
providing easy access to the community. The Redline station in
North Hollywood is the northernmost end of the line on the
route.

Bud Ovrom>> It is also the easterly terminus of what is going
to be the future east-west line going from North Hollywood to
Warner Center on the other end of the San Fernando Valley, so
it's like the Mississippi and the Missouri crossing in terms of
mass transit business. This area really suffered through the
construction of the Redline. I think the Redline is going to be
a tremendous asset for the community, but holy mackerel, while
it was being built and all the disruption and things like that,
so this area suffered a real hardship because of the
construction of the Redline, but now it's time to reap those
dividends.

Toni Guinyard>> He embraces the belief that, with the right mix
of businesses and an emphasis on the arts, people won't hesitate
to use the subway to get to and from North Hollywood. They're
pinning their hopes on the planned NOHO Commons, a mixed-use
development scheduled to be built in the core of the business
district, but even that is cause for debate.

Amy Roth>> This is an alternate area. This is an art district
and we're trying to build an art district. We're not trying to
build Third Street Promenade. We want this to be an art
district, so we want to see more of a night life. We want to
see more art stores, music stores, bookstores, things that will
encourage creativity and encourage art.

Toni Guinyard>> The historic El Portal Theatre seems to be the
one project most in this area used as an example of what's
right. Renovated after the Northridge earthquake, it is the
largest of nearly two dozen theatres in the NOHO arts district.

Jay Irwin>> Tooting my own horn here, we like to think of
ourselves as the linchpin of the district.

Toni Guinyard>> Irwin is looking forward to construction of
NOHO Commons and the foot traffic it could bring.

Jay Irwin>> We're really looking forward to it.

Toni Guinyard>> But is it happening quickly enough?

Jay Irwin>> You know, you're asking the wrong guy. Me? I wish
it were done tomorrow, sure. We all do, but now I understand
there are so many things that I don't understand about the
process and I know there is a lot of red tape involved, but
people want it down here and we think there is a lot of
potential.

Tom Labonge>> I have faith that this will take place and I'm
pushing very hard whether it's with the CRA, whether it's with
the developer or with the business community, to bring something
good to a very needed area of North Hollywood.

Toni Guinyard>> While you hear a lot of talk about potential,
there are also concerns about what will be lost as development
progresses.

Joel Larson>> Then they create an area around it that's filled
with artists and then that slowly gets gentrified and people
move in and they take over all the residential areas and they
push the poor people further and further away.

Toni Guinyard>> In some ways, growing pains have begun.

>> They're complaining. Please don't touch the garbage cans.

>> I'm not making a mess, man.

>> Don't touch --

>> -- I'm just bored, trying to make money.

Toni Guinyard>> With development, there is no doubt the
demographics of this community will change as it has over the
years.

Lillian Burkenheim-Silver>> North Hollywood was built up mainly
around World War I, World War II, as Lockheed built up.
Particularly during the wars, they built up temporary housing.
It was a farming community. They turned those farms into
temporary housing and nobody came by and made permanent housing
out of them. So as I walk into some of the old houses, at my
five feet, I could reach up and touch some of the ceilings. I
could not only touch the ceilings, I could push them up because
they were cardboard and they had wires running across the top.

Toni Guinyard>> The redevelopment project includes construction
of housing. The plan includes affordable housing, one part of
an overall plan to blend residential with commercial ventures
while redefining North Hollywood as an arts community.

Bud Ovrom>> What is it that people want the community to be?
That's what's really important to me. What is the vision of
what we want for North Hollywood?

Val>> Will North Hollywood become the next big thing in Los
Angeles? Hard to say now, but we're told that several private
developers are looking for land and making deals in the
neighborhood even as we speak.

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Val>> We're about to preview a new film that takes us behind
the scenes of a major political drama. It's all about the book
that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine. "Fortunate Son"
hit bookstores in the fall of 1999, but was soon yanked off the
shelves after the reporter learned that the author was a
convicted felon. Tonight the story of how that book was brought
back from the dead by a scrappy young publisher who clearly
didn't know what he was getting into. In a moment, Philip Bruce
talks with the directors of "Horns and Halos", but first here's
a clip from the film.

>> "For George Bush out on the campaign trail this past week,
it was the question that wouldn't go away."

Senator Orrin Hatch>> "If George W. Bush has not used cocaine,
he ought to say it. If he has, he ought to say it and then say
how he overcame it."

Philip Bruce>> So tell me about the title "Horns and Halos".
What's that all about?

Michael Galinsky>> Well, "Horns and Halos" is all about trying
to keep things really balanced. Hatfield, the writer of the
biography of George Bush, says at some point in the movie, well,
if someone wrote your biography, you'd want them to write horns
and halos, the good and the bad, because then it's actually
relevant and it's balanced.

J.H. Hatfield>> "I'm offended when they say it's negative. If
a biographer's going to write a book that's right, you write
horns and halos. If somebody wrote a biography of your life,
there would be parts you would say I really don't want them to
go there, so you want me to make it out to you, Jane?"

Philip Bruce>> This was supposed to be about the horns and
halos of George W. Bush. It became more about the horns and
halos of Jim Hatfield, didn't it?

Suki Hawley>> It did. In fact, it became more about the horns
and halos between the relationship of the book with everyone in
their lives except Bush pretty much. Hatfield, the author, had
a relationship with the new publisher, this sort of lower east
side punk rock publisher, Sander Hicks. We sort of followed
what happened on their adventures toward republishing this book.

Sander Hicks>> "Hi, I'm Sander Hicks. This is the
controversial biography of George W. Bush that St. Martin's
originally did in October 1999 and they killed."

Suki Hawley>> Well, we were actually out of the country when
this controversy happened, so we didn't hear anything about it.
We were flying back from Asia and looked in the back of the
Herald Tribune and there was a very small article about it. You
know, book alleging Bush cocaine arrest pulled from shelves.
Both of us, you know, looked at each other with raised eyebrows.
It was like why is this story so small? You know, this seems
very fortuitous. Lots of questions were raised, but they
weren't answered in that article. I guess it was a week after
we had returned, Sander Hicks sent out a press release saying
that he would republish this burned book.

>> "The publisher, St. Martin's Press, Inc., halted publication
of the book after the Dallas Morning News reported the author
was convicted of attempted murder in 1988."

George W. Bush>> "Obviously if he's a convicted felon, his
credibility is nothing, but his credibility was nothing with me
to begin with because his story was totally ridiculous."

Michael Galinsky>> The centerpiece of the whole thing, the
reason the book got pulled in the first place is because, when
Hatfield was confronted about his past, he denied it and that's
what gave St. Martin's the easy out to say, oh, we can't trust
you anymore. Because it was true. He had been convicted of a
felony in the past.

Philip Bruce>> Attempted murder.

Michael Galinsky>> Attempted -- well, solicitation of a capital
murder, hiring somebody to kill somebody else. He denied it
when it came out in the papers and I think that was the defining
moment because that decision is what really killed the book.

J.H. Hatfield>> "They asked me and, of course, I denied it at
that point."

Michael Galinsky>> And we reported it in sort of a very small
story in the paper and everybody else just went kind of nuts on
it. It was on the front of the Washington Post, the New York
Times. I'm not sure if it went on the front of the Times, but
it turned into a big story. In fact, the publisher recalled the
book.

Sander Hicks>> "We have the right to publish what we're going
to publish. The George Bush campaign has been saying that it's
'libelous and untrue', as if they have to be redundant in their
lying about us. When this book comes out, the only way they're
going to bring us down is like saying who are these left of
center, punk rock, you know, flibbertigibbets? We're going to
have to say that we're Soft Skulls."

Philip Bruce>> Talk to me about the relationship between Sander
Hicks, the young publisher, and Jim Hatfield, the guy who wrote
the book. What was that like?

Suki Hawley>> It was very up and down. It was very complex. I
mean, Jim Hatfield was a very complex character. He was
extremely charming in person and then, as you said, writes e-
mails damning, you know, every action that Sander Hicks
undertook at one point.

Sander Hicks>> "You know, if you really want to see the real
Hatfield, we can go back. I can show you like on the tenth of
November. I think this is when we hit rock bottom. This is
when I pulled some of these e-mails and titled it "Hatfield
Flips Out". I wrote him a letter saying, urgent, checking
Asimov award. I said that we were having trouble finding this
guy that gave him the Isaac Asimov award.

He said what you got was all I over got. A year and a half ago,
an e-mail and then, several weeks later, the award shows up.
I've got at least two to three other awards from sci-fi
appreciations clubs. It was not my idea to have this award
mentioned in the book. St. Martin's did it to promote me as a
biographer.

But guess what, Sander. I'm frankly sick and tired of your
emotional roller coaster. Everything is something new with you.
Reactions to rumors, more e-mail disclaimers. If you're this
damn nervous before the book comes out, then what are you going
to do when it's published January and the Bush's get real ugly,
even uglier than before?"

Philip Bruce>> If this were a Hollywood film, the little guys
might have won and lived happily ever after. This was not a
story that had a happy ending, was it?

Suki Hawley>> No. It had a pretty tragic ending,
unfortunately.

Philip Bruce>> We won't reveal that here, but it wasn't good.

Suki Hawley>> No, and the only thing about that was that, you
know, we're talking about definitive actions. That became a
definitive ending for the film. You know, nothing was happening
definitively with the book, so it became when is this going to
stop and it eventually did stop.

Philip Bruce>> And give me the thumbnail of Jim Hatfield. What
kind of character? He seems very volatile in your film and from
looking at the episode where Sander Hicks is reading the e-mail
that he gets from Jim Hatfield. He seems like a loose cannon.

Michael Galinsky>> He had a lot of horns and a lot of halos.
He's a really interesting character. You know, a lot of the
reviews kind of point out that he's kind of straight out of
Arthur Miller. He was very American in some ways, very deeply
American, and had like a desire to have things and status. I
think that's one of the things that really kind of brought him
down in the end really. It really was hard for him.

Philip Bruce>> What does this film and this book say about
George W. Bush? How did he come out of this thing?

Suki Hawley>> The book is separate from the film. The book is
a great compendium of all the published information about George
W. Bush that was out there. It was basically a clip job and --

Philip Bruce>> -- by that, you mean what?

Suki Hawley>> A clip job being that you compile all of the
known articles, the information about the history of Bush's life
in one place, in this book. The film, on the other hand,
doesn't actually deal with the facts of George Bush. It deals
with the human relations between the publisher and the author.
Bush is in the film, but he's sort of a reminder in the
background.

Philip Bruce>> He's a supporting player. He's not the star.

Suki Hawley>> Exactly.

Michael Galinsky>> But it's interesting. I want to answer that
question too because actually many people who read the book who
didn't like Bush end up liking him a lot more because it
humanizes him. Hatfield is very much a folksy writer, so there
is a lot of stuff about him that really humanizes the man much
in the way that Alexandra Pelosi's film "Journeys with George"
does. You're going to see someone who's not just this media
creation. So in a lot of ways, people who really hated him like
him a lot more afterwards, but it does have some of the negative
stuff about Bush that wasn't really discussed before the
campaign.

J.H. Hatfield>> "There's not a day goes by that I don't regret
this book. I wish I would never, ever, ever have sent in a
proposal to do a biography of George W. Bush. It's been a
nightmare. It's been nothing but a nightmare. I can't even
begin to tell you how much trouble this book has caused me."

Val>> The film has some surprises. The biggest one may be when
it reveals the source of the cocaine allegations against George
W. Bush. We won't spoil it for you, but you can see it for
yourself at a theater near you.

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Val>> Black, brown, Asian or white, Los Angeles has had its
share of racial strife, but some people say it's time to look at
race relations through an entirely different lens. They say the
focus on discrimination is misplaced and passé and that hate
crimes are over-emphasized and that it's time to focus on larger
problems like jobs and education. This is the mission of a new
organization called "Community Advocates". It's headed up by
David Lehrer, formerly with the Anti-Defamation League, and Joe
Hicks who used to be with the Los Angeles Human Relations
Commission. I talked to both of them at Café Pinot's in
downtown Los Angeles.

Val>> So, Joe Hicks and David Lehrer, you've started a whole
new organization in trying to convince people in Southern
California to look at race through a whole different prism.
What is the new prism that you hope to get people to use?

Joe Hicks>> Well, the new prism is looking at race relations as
they actually are today. There's been amazing progress over the
last thirty years when all too many of the civil rights and
human relations groups are focusing what appears to be about
thirty years ago when this nation was in fact submerging in
racism and discrimination. Thirty years has made a lot of
difference in the way we relate to each other as well as laws
that are on the books and a paradigm that we think has shifted,
yet their focus on the problem has not. That leaves a lot left
to be done today.

Val>> So thirty years ago, you're talking about explicit
discrimination which no longer exists, like Jim Crowe.

David Lehrer>> Well, Jim Crowe was already waning. Thirty
years ago, it was more or less gone. But there were still
problems with social club discrimination, the notion of voting
for someone who wasn't of your same race or ethnicity was fairly
unusual, there were a handful of minorities elected to Congress,
State Senate or the House in California. I mean, things have
really changed. In fact, the Federal Circuit Court in
California said the record over the previous decade shows the
people willing to vote, for example, for Latino candidates if
they thought they were the right candidate. Whether they were
Latino and they weren't Latino was really an irrelevancy.

Joe Hicks>> The Ninth Circuit being the most liberal court in
circuit in the nation, by the way.

David Lehrer>> So what we're saying is that, if people want to
focus on old problems, that's okay. The problem is, you're
diverting energy and resources from dealing with real issues
that are there today. It's one thing to be against hate crimes,
but thank God, the laws are on the books and law enforcement
takes them seriously. Hate crimes are not the problem that most
stands in the way of minority groups in Southern California.
There area real issues that, to the extent we focus on the wrong
issues, were being diverted from dealing with the issues that
really are up front which tend to be socio-economically based
and not race or ethnicity based.

Val>> How about affirmative action? Where does affirmative
action fit in to this shift in the paradigm?

Joe Hicks>> Well, I think that's one of the debates we need to
be having. I think we missed another milestone. The Supreme
Court and the debates around it, I think offered another
opportunity. For instance, say, wait a minute. What's changed
in thirty years? What's causing in fact the need for
affirmative action?

Val>> Because affirmative action was initially established to
fight discrimination and now I understand it's being used to
promote diversity. That's a very important shift, isn't it?

Joe Hicks>> Well, Justice O'Connor explicitly stated in her
ruling that it wasn't about discrimination. She said in fact
it's about diversifying the classroom. That's a different issue
if you're talking about the aesthetics of a classroom, that
there is some inherent value to having black and brown people in
a classroom, and it may be. But certainly that's a different
argument that you would have been making thirty years ago that
people were being kept from classrooms because of their race.

David Lehrer>> The issue that is really more telling is that
this achievement gap persists after about thirty years of
affirmative action.

Val>> Achievement gap in schools.

David Lehrer>> In schools. That there is really a relatively
small number of blacks and Latinos who would have qualified for
admission to the University of Michigan Law School strictly on
the numbers. What we ought to be looking at is why does that
achievement gap persist when discrimination is probably not the
cause? Justice O'Connor said affirmative action ought to lapse
after the next twenty-five years. Are we going to still have
that gap? That's really, at base, the gut issue that we have
kind of papered over and not really looked at.

Val>> So you want to basically redraw the battle lines?

Joe Hicks>> We do, we do. We want to say, listen, affirmative
action has been in place for thirty years. We're in a post-
civil rights era. You know, 1965 can be viewed as the last
year, the last major piece, of civil rights legislation put into
place. It's time to assess all of that. As long as you're
focusing thirty years ago, you can't address the things that are
taking place. Gangs, violence, households often in cases are
fatherless. You know, the need for a revitalized economic base
in many communities. Jobs, political input, I mean, there are a
number of things we need to be looking at, but certainly racism
as it was classically believed is not what is at the root of
most of our problems as we face them today.

Val>> You also have a definite comment on the focus on reports
of hate crimes and, you know, the headlines that make --

David Lehrer>> -- well, we think, for example, there was a good
deal of attention paid in the wake of the Operation Iraqi
Freedom about the alleged wave of backlash hate crimes against
Muslim-Americans. Well, we looked at the data with the FBI,
with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, with the LAPD. The
fact is, mercifully and thank God, there wasn't a wave of
backlash hate crimes and Americans really do get it. They got
it. They're not angry at the Iraqi grocer down the street.
They're not angry at the Pakistani cab driver. They're angry at
Saddam Hussein.

In a county of nine million people, that there were five alleged
hate crimes, one of which was a felony, as tragic as those cases
are, the fact is, with nine million people and we were at war,
Jihad was declared against us, we did pretty well. We think
there ought to be an acknowledgment that there really has been
this transformation and lets get about recognizing that people
have different attitudes, reinforcing those attitudes and
building from there, not constantly suggesting that there is
this aquifer of bigotry underneath the surface that's just
waiting to pop to the surface. I don't think it's there.

Val>> Final question. What is your organization going to do to
move these ideas forward in real life?

Joe Hicks>> Well, I think the battle, primarily, is in the area
of ideas. How do we challenge people to try to rethink things
in new ways? As much as we can bring to that agenda, we will.
But beyond this, neither one of us are, you know, ivory tower
kind of gentlemen. You know, we're at large activists. So
we're also engaging in a leadership training program that tries
to challenge what does it mean to be a leader in this era?

We're engaging in a major citywide volunteer effort that brings
people that has them cross all kinds of lines to volunteer in
neighborhoods all around the city. We do some media seminars to
try to expand the bully media to generate new stories and to
meet new leaders and to find new sources because people can't
continue to go back to that old rolodex and interview the same
faces over and over again.

We want to do things that really do kind of exemplify how we
think about these issues. We also want to bring in as many new
speakers. We've partnered with Town Hall to bring in new
writers who've contributed new works around race, ethnicity,
whatever, and bring them into the Los Angeles area to, again,
spice up this discussion that we think has gotten very stale and
very old and we need to begin to think some new thoughts about
this.

David Lehrer>> I agree. I mean, we're trying to meld the realm
of ideas, an on-the-ground real people-to-people kind of
interaction. It's a challenge, but I think we're beginning to
make some progress.

Val>> It all starts with peoples' perceptions and ideas anyway.
Joe Hicks, David Lehrer, thank you so much. Best of luck to
you.

Joe Hicks>> Thank you.

Val>> Among its programs, Community Advocates sponsors a
volunteer day where people of all races come together on
projects that improve the community.

I'm Val Zavala reporting from the North Hollywood subway
station. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> Monday on Life and Times, they witnessed the world's only
nuclear attack and lived to tell the tale, but not without some
lingering scars.

>> I didn't see myself what happened at that time, but I can
see other people. Just horrible, just like hell.

Val>> That's Monday on Life and Times.