11/11/03

LC031111

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Setting fires and getting away with it. We'll ask why so many
major wildfire cases are unsolved and we find out how southern
California is resorting to an old method to prevent more
firestorms.

Doug Nickles>> We have a GPS hand-held unit we'll be using to
circumnavigate the perimeter so we can document how much
territory they've actually grazed. It's a little bit of a
mixture of goats and GPS (laughter).

Val>> And then, it's Los Angeles's latest experiment in
theatre, a high-tech multimedia sensory experience, and it's
part of Disney Hall. We'll show you the Redcat Theatre.

It's all next 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. If classical music is a little
too stodgy for you, we'll take you to a corner of the Disney
Concert Hall that is anything but. It's the Redcat Theatre and
it's made for the avant-garde.

But first, a look at arson and the wildfires. It could be years
before California fully recovers from the recent fires, but just
as troubling is the fact that the people who set those fires may
never be caught. Evidence burns up and trails go cold and, as
Philip Bruce reports, authorities have a thick file of wildfire
cases that remain unsolved.

>> "We're just south of Laguna Canyon Road and we see some
homes up on the ridge..."

Philip Bruce>> It started on a windy October day in the bone
dry chaparral that covered Laguna Canyon, a massive arson fire
that destroyed nearly four hundred homes as it raced across the
hills and toward the ocean. The flames caused a half billion
dollars in property damage and shattered scores of lives and, a
decade later, the fire still remains an unsolved mystery.

Scott Brown>> Yeah, that hurts. You talk to any firefighter
that was on the line, you talk to any of the families that lost
their homes, I'm sure they'll give you the same response.

Philip Bruce>> Scott Brown, now a chief for the Orange County
Fire Authority, was one of the first firefighters on the line
that day. A while back, he took us to the scene of the crime, a
dusty cattle trail just off Laguna Canyon Road, the place where
an arsonist sparked a disaster with a single match.

Scott Brown>> There was a plume that went hundreds of feet in
the air and it was obvious to us that we had a very significant
fire.

Philip Bruce>> Orange County authorities pursued hundreds of
leads that mostly led nowhere. All the physical evidence, if
there ever was any, burned to a crisp. Eventually, police did
arrest a man who confessed to setting the fires, but that turned
out to be just another dead end after investigators realized
that the man was far away in a Mexican jail the day the fire
broke out. Now the trail is stone cold and firefighters
bitterly admit that the arsonist got away with it.

Scott Brown>> You know, I wouldn't begin to speculate on the
person's, number one, his M.O. Obviously, he or she picked a
day that was conducive for that type of fire to ensue.

Philip Bruce>> The same is true for the costly Malibu fires
from that same year. There are some theories on who did it, but
not enough evidence to indict or convict. One of southern
California's top arson investigators says that's par for the
course when you're dealing with wildfires. They're the toughest
kind of arson to solve.

Captain Bob Reinhardt>> Most of the time, it ends up either
being a lighter or a match. It's quite simple to do. You know,
pull off a freeway or a road, get out, start the brush and drive
off. You're ten or fifteen miles down the road before anything
happens and anybody gets on scene.

Philip Bruce>> When you found these people, in your experience,
how have you found them?

Captain Bob Reinhardt>> Normally it's through witnesses.
Somebody seeing him, somebody getting a partial license plate,
usually that way. It's very, very difficult to follow back
through unless we get very lucky and get a device that does not
operate the way it's supposed to. He drops it off expecting it
to go off in ten or fifteen minutes, giving him enough time to
get down the road and, lo and behold, it does not ignite. Then
we have a good fingerprint and we have something to work on at
that point and that happens.

Philip Bruce>> And now a new mystery. Who started the deadly
inferno that raced across the mountains of San Bernardino
County? This was ground zero, Waterman Canyon, the place where
witnesses saw a white male tossing something out of his van
window into the dry brush.

Captain Bob Reinhardt>> It tends to be a white male usually in
his twenties or thirties. That is probably the average that it
ends up being. Women are very unlikely to use fire. It just
doesn't happen very often at all, especially with the young
juveniles. Male juveniles all the time, female juveniles very,
very rare.

Philip Bruce>> Even with a description to go on, finding the
person who set this fire is still like looking for a needle in a
burned up haystack, but Captain Reinhardt says many arsonists
fit a profile. Thrill-seekers who enjoy the rush of causing a
disaster or, unfortunately, firefighters who turn bad. For now,
the person who set this blaze remains a mystery man.

Captain Bob Reinhardt>> What we hope for is that somebody close
to the person is going to recognize that, yes, this is my
friend, relative, neighbor, whatever he may be, and have enough
of a conscience to understand that what he did was terribly
wrong. That there are hundreds of people that are without a
home now and a lot of wildshed vegetation that's gone because of
this foolhardy act. Hopefully, they'll get that conscience
going and turn him in.

Philip Bruce>> If there is a bright side to this grim story, it
may be the things that cities and counties are doing to stop
fire starters before they can strike. In that war, they've
enlisted a four-legged foot soldier. With every mouthful, these
goats in Glendale are taking a bite out of a potentially deadly
crime. They're clearing the hills of brush and weeds and
robbing would-be arsonists of an easy target. Meanwhile, you
know they will eat just about anything.

Doug Nickles>> Well, we've noticed that, yeah (laughter).

Philip Bruce>> A baseball, or what used to be a baseball.

Doug Nickles>> At least the outside part of it there
(laughter).

Philip Bruce>> So how long would it take them to chew this up?

Ian Coch>> It depends on how hungry he is, I guess (laughter).

Philip Bruce>> A professional herder stands watch as nature's
eating machines do their work clearing acres of hillside in a
way that hand crews couldn't. They even eat the cactus and the
poison oak.

Ian Coch>> The best part about the goats is that they only eat
to what they can reach, so they don't rip the root out. They
just eat down to what they can reach. You can see the bamboo
they've eaten, but they don't rip out the root. That's the best
part. That's what holds up the hillside. When it's rainy time,
these things can re-sprout, but the hillside is not going to
come down because the roots are still in the dirt.

Philip Bruce>> In Glendale, the goats are an experiment, but
elsewhere in southern California, they've already got a proven
track record. Remember the Laguna Beach fire? One year after
flames swallowed these neighborhoods, the city started using
goats to clear brush from the local canyons and hillsides. It
now costs the city of Laguna Beach $200,000 a year to keep the
goats, but considering the cost of a big fire, it's a bargain.
And considering how quickly the trail can turn cold, it's a lot
easier to prevent a major fire than it is to catch the person
who sets one. In Glendale, this low-tech solution has been
paired with some high-tech tools, satellite readers that help
the city map out a path for the goats and keep track of their
progress.

Doug Nickles>> We have a GPS hand-held unit that we'll be using
to circumnavigate the perimeter so we can document how much
territory they've actually grazed. It's a little bit of a
mixture of goats and GPS (laughter).

Philip Bruce>> (Laughter) Whatever works.

Ian Coch>> Maybe we should catch one of these goats and keep
track of them and see where they've been.

Val>> The California Department of Forestry says about ten
percent of all the wildfires are started by arsonists. A much
more common cause of wildfires are accidents.

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Val>> We bring you now the poignant and emotional story of a
search, a daughter's search for a father she never knew. Tracy
Droz Tragos was only three months old when her father died in an
ambush in Vietnam. At age thirty-two, Tracy began to look for
her father. The search began on the Web and ended as an
independent documentary called "Be Good, Smile Pretty". We met
Tracy at a coffee shop in Westwood to find out how this powerful
film changed her life.

Tracy Droz Dragos>> I always had a photograph on my dresser of
my father in his dress uniform and I knew the statistics from
his obituary. I did have a relationship with his family in his
home town of Rich Hill, Missouri, so I would visit them. They
had more pictures than I had at home of him, but there wasn't a
lot of talking about my father and I didn't want to bring him up
because I didn't want to cause my family more pain than they'd
already been through.

On March 16, 2001, I took a break from this script that I was
writing and I just started randomly entering family members'
names into a search engine. It was a Friday night, I was bored
and I really had no intention of finding anything other than,
you know, I was just fooling around. I took my name and my
mother's name and my husband's name and I took my father's name.
I didn't even enter Donald Glenn Droz, his full name. I just
entered Don Droz and up came an account of how he was killed in
Vietnam.

This was information no one in my family had ever known before
written by a man who was on his boat and had witnessed him die.
I didn't even know if my mother knew the details that it
contained, so I kind of sat on it for two days and then, in
retrospect, it was pretty cowardly. I didn't know how to tell
her. I didn't know how to ask her, so I just e-mailed it to her
and said I don't know if you're up to this, but here's this
article that I found. She called me within like an hour of
getting it and was in tears and it all kind of spiraled from
there.

I went up to visit my mother and she was talking about my father
in a way that she had never talked about him. There were
stories that I'd never heard before and then we took this trunk
out of the garage and there was all this stuff in it that I'd
never known existed before. There was footage of my father
holding me on R&R in Hawaii. I heard his voice for the first
time in these reel-to-reel audio tapes. My mother had recorded
a phone conversation.

[Film Clip]

There was just all this stuff and I was overwhelmed with this
feeling like, you know, something's going to get lost. All
these stories are coming out and I'm in such a state, my mother
is in such a state, you know, it's going to get lost. So I
picked up a camera and started capturing these stories.

>> "As I look at some of the -- in reading some of the letters
this morning, like it takes me back to a happy time and then
when I have to close them up and sit down and realize that, you
know, that it's gone."

Tracy Droz Tragos>> I didn't want it to end there. You know, I
sort of felt like there was so much out there that I'd never
known, you know, that I'd known about before that I wanted to
know everything. Like I'd finally gotten a taste of it, so I
went to his family in Missouri and I met the men that served
with him that rescued his body and the man that wrote the
article.

In June of 2001, I went to the Wall for Father's Day and that
was, for me, when I really felt like maybe I should do this for
more than just me and my immediate family and maybe three other
people because, for the first time in my life, I met other
children who were adults like me who've lost a father. But they
talked about, you know, the exact same things that I had felt
and experienced. If everybody else was kind of like me, feeling
like they were alone, I thought I should share this story.

I mean, there was just a tremendous amount of stuff out there.
It was very strange to realize that it had been out there all
this time. I had wanted to know all this stuff, but I had just
never kind of put the pieces together and really, for me, that
was what it was about. You know, putting these pieces together,
going to his hometown, going to the places -- you know, kind of
walking in his footsteps as much as I could.

One of the other discoveries for me was that, you know, it
wasn't just my mother who hadn't grieved. It was also a lot of
these veterans. A lot of my father's friends had never talked
about their experience.

>> "It wasn't until I sat on the edge of my bed and read a
little Stars and Stripes item about the ambush in which Don was
killed and then subsequently discovered that, well, my best
friend had gotten killed while I was sitting on my ass in a
hospital and I've lived with that all these years."

Tracy Droz Tragos>> And I think in order for me to get to where
I needed to go, in order to learn about my father, I had to sit
through those tears. I had to say it's okay to cry, but I'm
still going to continue to ask. It was important for me to do
that, even though as an audience, it's sometimes kind of hard to
see that. I felt a responsibility to share that because that
was the truth.

Tracy Droz Tragos>> "Have you felt very, very alone in all of
this?"

>> "I am alone."

Tracy Droz Tragos>> "What about me?"

>> "What do you mean, what about you?"

Tracy Droz Tragos>> "I mean, don't you know we have each other?
No?"

>> "The grief that I feel is different from the grief that you
feel and the grief that you feel is different from the grief
that I feel. What you grieve for is partly that he died, but
more so that you didn't have his memory in your life."

Tracy Droz Tragos>> And for the first time, you know, I have a
sense that my father was kind of like Bill Zaladonis said in my
film, that he was kind of a smart ass and he had a good sense of
humor and that, you know, he was constantly telling jokes. You
know, these are things that I can now -- sounds strange, but
when presented with the challenges that life will present you,
you know, I can even now have that sort of pretend dialogue in
my head. You know, what would my father tell me now? Well,
he'd probably tell me to lighten up or, you know, don't take it
so seriously, have a little fun. You know, I get to have that
dialogue in my head and I get to maybe be more like I would be
if he had come home and been my father.

Val>> A few months after the film was finished, Tracy, her
husband and her mother went to Vietnam to visit the place where
her father had been killed. If you'd like to read the diary of
that trip, you can do so on their website.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
by mail at this address:

Life and Times
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Val>> If the Disney Concert Hall is Los Angeles's living room,
think of the Redcat Theatre as the basement where that artsy
teenager of yours explores his creativity. Redcat stands for
Roy and Edna Disney Cal Arts Theatre and it's a place where
high-tech theatre meets imagination. Call it a big black box,
an experimental multimedia high-tech black box, a cube on the
cutting edge. Whatever you call it, it's like nothing else in
southern California or beyond.

Mark Murphy>> I don't know of any other place in the United
States that rivals the unique qualities that we have here at
Redcat. It's a unique gift to the contemporary culture.

Val>> The Redcat Theatre sits just below Disney Concert Hall on
the corner of Second and Hope, but it's nothing like its more
mature classical parent upstairs.

Mark Murphy>> Frank Gehry has been quoted as saying that Disney
Hall is the new living room for Los Angeles, and I think of
ourselves as the basement laboratory, you might say.

Val>> Mark Murphy is Redcat's Executive Director.

Mark Murphy>> Having that juxtaposition both in the same
building is exciting to me.

Val>> So what will you actually experience if you step into
this theatrical laboratory? Well, I went to a rehearsal of the
Japanese ensemble, "Dumb Type", and my first sensation was
blackness, complete, almost tangible blackness, but it didn't
last long.

[Film Clip]

Val>> "Dumb Type" is from Japan and they are, to understate it,
unconventional.

[Film Clip]

Val>> The performance is called "Memorandum". They describe it
as "an impossible investigation into the unstable
neurophilosophical events of memory itself." I just called it
pretty amazing.

[Film Clip]

Val>> The name "Dumb Type" connotes several things. First,
they don't use words. The director, Shiro Takatani, is from
Kyoto.

Shiro Takatani (interpreted)>> Some believe that they don't
have the ability to perform like normal theatre performers.
They use their voice and their face as an acting ability and
they are trying to create a message using lighting and sound and
other techniques besides just voice.

Val>> They do use writing. That's right, just writing and more
writing which was, after a while, strangely mesmerizing.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Of course, dumb also means stupid or idiotic which they
say, and I'm quoting again, "is a cynical antithesis to the more
refined and established world of high art." Translation?
They're rebels.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Dumb could also simply be the way you feel when you tell
a friend that you saw a bear onstage vacuuming up hundreds of
little pieces of paper.

[Film Clip]

Val>> But there is one thing that makes perfect sense. The
Redcat Theatre is the ideal space for adventurous performers.

Mark Murphy>> Well, we don't get information the same way as
when some of the classic plays were written a hundred or five
hundred years ago. We receive information through media bites
and information through rapid flying images.

Val>> At times, the performance reminds you of images from a
dream. They're actually produced by computer manipulation of
video and human interaction. The Redcat Theatre has state-of-
the-art equipment, top of the line 35mm projectors, three
hundred seats that can be arranged traditionally or in the round
and a mission that reflects the operator, Cal Arts.

Mike Murphy>> It's my hope that the technological capabilities,
that the unique setting, that the mission devoted to
experimentation in the arts, as well as the exposure to some
artists who are leading the way in that sort of experimentation
through our visiting artist program, will together inspire
people to work here with the understanding that it's a safe
zone, it's a safe haven, for experimentation.

Val>> "Dumb Type" started as a group of frustrated college
students, frustrated at having to stay within the strict bounds
of their fields such as architecture, painting or music. They
were inspired by emerging multimedia and conceptual artists.
Redcat's mission is to blur the boundaries between artistic
discipline.

Shiro Takatani>> I hear about Los Angeles people have this kind
of theatre because, in Kyoto, it is very difficult to find this
kind of, how can I say, of course, we have theatre, but it's not
for the experimental.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Redcat will also give Cal Arts students a chance to
perform closer to Los Angeles's hip downtown culture.

Mark Murphy>> And it's exciting for Cal Arts which is located
in Valencia, thirty-five miles to the north, to have an
opportunity to share with a larger audience in Los Angeles some
of the remarkable visiting artists who have always been guest
teachers and guest lecturers at Cal Arts, but not able to
actually present their work in Los Angeles.

Val>> So is Los Angeles ready for the creative collision of
stage, screen, music, video, acting, dance and who knows what
else? Mark Murphy thinks so.

Mark Murphy>> I think some people may leave Redcat thinking
that they loved what they just saw and some may leave thinking
that they really hated it or that it wasn't successful. But I
hope that no one leaves thinking with a shrug, well, that was
just fine, because that's not what we're here for. We're here
to challenge perceptions and to try new things.

[Film Clip]

Val>> The Redcat Theatre is throwing its opening celebration
this weekend. It goes for twenty-four hours, so you can show up
at midnight or two o'clock and there will be plenty going on.
And on Sunday, there are loads of free family activities.
That's our program. I'm Val Zavala. 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>> Tomorrow on Life and Times, he's barely out of high
school himself, but he's already won a seat on a local school
board.

>> I know Mr. Ramirez. Mr. Ramirez is no one to be trifled
with. If other board members believe that they're going to be
able to run roughshod over him, intimidate him or get him to do
things that he doesn't support or he doesn't believe in in his
own heart, I don't think they're going to get very far. I can
tell you, I was his teacher and he is an independent-minded
person. He's soft-spoken, but he's got the heart of a lion.

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