11/14/03

LC031114

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Made in the U.S.A. It's a vanishing label in Los Angeles's
furniture industry, especially when the market is getting
flooded with cheap Chinese imports.

John Sandberg>> The difference between the first four months of
2002 and the first four months of 2003, imports of wood bedroom
from China have gone up sixty-seven percent.

Val>> And then, the new way of shooting on location without
ever leaving the studio. We'll find out how a southern
California company is pioneering special effects that are
changing the face of television and your favorite shows.

All this and more straight ahead 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. Later in the program, we'll take
you inside the world of television special effects where new
technology is changing what you see.

But first, a story about competition from abroad, from furniture
makers. For years, local furniture makers have been struggling
to hang on in the face of rising imports from overseas, but now
a new glut of inexpensive furniture from China could be the last
nail in the industry's coffin. Philip Bruce tells us how one
local businessman is fighting back.

John Sandberg>> "We're just trying to look out for because we
appreciate your business."

Philip Bruce>> John Sandberg has spent his life in the
furniture business. He's president of the company his great-
grandfather founded eighty-five years ago. Sandberg Furniture
employs four hundred people in its plant in the town of Vernon.

John Sandberg>> We specialize in making bedroom furniture. The
ideal target price point for us is about $999 and under for a
set, which would be a dresser, a mirror, a bed and two
nightstands. Our customer base is principally what I would call
a blue collar worker. There are a lot of folks that are dual-
income blue collar workers, so their household income has gone
up quite a bit.

Philip Bruce>> The business may appear to be thriving, but
Sandberg's company is facing a major challenge from halfway
around the world, low-cost furniture from China that's flooded
the southern California market. The result? American
manufacturers say they can't compete. Over the past two years,
Sandberg has cut his workforce by twenty percent.

John Sandberg>> While it would be convenient to blame the
economy, the economy has not dropped that significantly. You
look at Chinese imports specifically and the difference between
the first four months of 2002 and the first four months of 2003,
imports of wood bedrooms from China have gone up sixty-seven
percent in just that short period of time, one year later.

Philip Bruce>> Check out the ads for Sandberg's bedroom sets
compared with the Chinese-made product. You may not see much
difference, but there's a huge gap when it comes to the cost of
labor here versus China. Sandberg says his people make about
nine dollars an hour. With benefits, that goes up to thirteen
or fourteen dollars. But he says Chinese workers making the
same furniture products average only three dollars a day.

Jack Kyser>> There is always the issue of cheaper labor, but
now cheaper labor and China are synonymous.

Philip Bruce>> Jack Kyser is Chief Economist for the Los
Angeles County Economic Development Corporation.

Jack Kyser>> If you look at what's coming in through the local
ports, you'll see a very, very significant dollar volume of
imported furniture and this is tough competition to beat.

Philip Bruce>> Conventional wisdom might say that the cost of
shipping furniture to the U.S. offsets what Chinese
manufacturers save on labor, but John Sandberg says that's not
the case.

John Sandberg>> A container here to southern California
probably runs in the neighborhood of $2,800 to $3,000 and, when
you're talking about a bedroom set that is maybe a $1,000
bedroom set, you're getting about eighteen to twenty of those on
a container, you're cost is about $100 to $125 per bedroom
group. So in the large scheme of things, the labor savings are
huge compared to the freight cost at only $100 to $125 or
perhaps as much as $150, depending on the size of the set.

Philip Bruce>> Sandberg is now part of a coalition of American
makers of bedroom sets. That group alleges that the Chinese
government has stacked the deck by keeping the cost of the
Chinese-made furniture artificially low. The Americans believe
the Chinese want to drive them out of business and the coalition
is filing a federal petition aimed at preventing China from
glutting the U.S. wood furniture market.

John Sandberg>> We feel it's important to level the playing
field. We're not looking for a handout. We're not looking for
an advantage over any of our competitors from anywhere in the
world. We're simply looking for a level playing field.

Jack Kyser>> It all starts out with the fact that the Chinese
currency is pegged to the U.S. dollar, so everybody is excited
that the U.S. dollar has eased somewhat. But if you're facing
Chinese competition, it doesn't help you. What they're saying
is that they have very, very low-cost labor and so they can
actually sell the product here for way under what domestic firms
can produce it at.

Philip Bruce>> American furniture makers have never been a
tight-knit group. They're known for their independence and some
American companies are taking advantage of China's cheap labor
themselves.

Mark Popel>> Though still ninety percent of what we produced,
well, this year, is going to be done right out of our own
factory here. About ten percent will be imported. Last year,
that number was only five percent and very likely it will go up
to twenty percent next year.

Philip Bruce>> Mark Popel also grew up in the business. His
parents owned a furniture store. He and his brother started
their own company twenty years ago. Today their south El Monte
plant employs seventy workers, but Popel also contracts with
foreign companies to make some of his products. He admits he
doesn't love doing it, but calls it survival in a tough market.

Mark Popel>> It's unfortunate because it's not an easy
challenge. The dollar is involved, the level of supervision or,
you know, when we put our name and stamp on something, you know,
we like to know that it's been done properly and you can't
always guarantee that, so consistency is an issue. A major
factor for us as well is that we've prided ourselves on being
able to change the product and give the consumers exactly what
they want. Of course, in an import environment, you're more
limited to, you know, kind of what you see is what you get.

Philip Bruce>> So far, Popel and his brother haven't laid off
any of their workers and they don't want to, but they say they
may have to.

Mark Popel>> We've got a lot of money and time invested in our
own factory and our people. You know, we have seventy people
that depend on us. Well, seventy employees and, of course, all
their families. So it's not -- you know, we don't feel
comfortable just, you know, cutting the rug out from under them,
so to speak. It's not what we do, but we are looking at it.

Philip Bruce>> Many American companies have actually closed
their factories in favor of contracting with the Chinese.

John Sandberg>> They thought if they could reduce their price,
they would sell more, but subsequently everyone just began doing
the same thing and just a huge amount of our product -- when I
say our, as an industry -- the product is now made in China as a
result of it.

Philip Bruce>> But Sandberg Furniture has no plans to join the
crowd. John Sandberg says he'll stick it out here and hope for
the best.

John Sandberg>> A lot of the import products generally have to
be brought in containers. They take a longer lead time and the
quality quite simply just isn't as good. They've improved their
quality from where they were just a few years ago, but you get
things where drawers are out of square and therefore they stick.

Philip Bruce>> But Jack Kyser says the path won't be easy for
American companies competing with the Chinese.

Jack Kyser>> It's really tough. We figure that we've lost
about 4,600 manufacturing jobs in furniture in Los Angeles
County over about the last four years.

Philip Bruce>> And it's not just the furniture business. China
has become a major force in virtually all the products that
typically have been made in America.

Jack Kyser>> Probably China is going to be the big game for a
long, long time. If you're in an industry, manufacturing,
you've got to be very, very cautious. You've got to look over
your shoulder at what's happening in China.

Val>> As Philip reported, local furniture makers have filed a
federal petition to prevent China from dumping huge quantities
of cheap products onto the California market. If U.S. officials
grant the request, China's manufacturers would have to pay a
sizable import fee on all the furniture passing through our
local ports and that would make local manufacturers very happy.

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Val>> Southern California's premier resource is ebbing away.
We're talking about our world-famous beaches. Every day, a
little more of our shoreline washes out to sea, the result of
erosion. As News Hour correspondent, Jeffrey Kaye, tells us,
it's not only our beaches that are eroding. Time is running out
as well.

Jeffrey Kaye>> California's beaches are the sun-soaked icons of
the good life. Millions of people flock to them each year for
fun and frolicking, rest and relaxation, but many of
California's wide sandy beaches like beaches around the country
are in jeopardy. They're washing away because of growing levels
of coastal erosion, erosion that threatens seaside homes and
businesses. In California, one of the places in greatest danger
is Solana Beach near San Diego. During high tide, the sandy
beach vanishes completely underwater and waves begin eating away
at towering coastal bluffs, threatening the homes that sit atop
them.

Paul Santina>> Every one of these houses is in severe emergency
situations of not only losing the property, but losing the
buildings.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Paul Santina is President of the Beach and Bluff
Conservancy which represents 2,500 Solana Beach residents. He
says, because of beach erosion, he and his neighbors are
literally living on the edge.

Paul Santina>> Here in Solana Beach, we've probably been having
a major bluff collapse once a month for the last eighteen
months. This room right here was hanging out over the bluff
after the collapse by seven to eight feet and we had to actually
remove this bedroom so that the lady wouldn't go down the bluff
with the bedroom.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Nationally, as many as 1,500 coastal structures
are lost annually because of coastal erosion according to the
Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA estimates that, by
2010 as beaches retreat, the number of lost buildings could jump
to 10,000. Coastal development from flood control channels to
homes to highways is not only imperiled by erosion. Development
also accelerates damage to the beach. It does so by blocking
the supply of new inland sediment that reaches the coast in
runoff, sediment that replenishes beaches as material for new
sand. Without that sediment, sandy beaches get narrower and
eventually wash away completely, eliminating an important
protective buffer between the open ocean and coastal properties.

That's what happened in Solana Beach. Some residents, including
Santina, have built private seawalls to protect their
properties. But to protect the entire seaside neighborhood,
Santina's homeowners group wants the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers to both widen the beach and, more controversially,
construct more seawalls. The project would cost $20 million to
$40 million dollars in public money. But without it, Santina
predicts the homes in his seaside neighborhood face oblivion.

Paul Santina>> Well, they'd fall into the ocean just like this
property right here. It's ready to go. They fall into the
ocean. They disappear. The property is gone.

Jeffrey Kaye>> But seawalls and other so-called coastal
armoring projects which already cover more than a hundred miles
of the California coastline have drawn criticism from
environmentalists. For one thing, they argue, taxpayers wind up
paying to protect private property. For another, they say,
seawalls speed up the disappearance of beaches by preventing
even more sediment from being turned into sand. Chad Nelson is
the Environmental Director for the coastal ecological group, the
Surfrider Foundation, which has sued to fight seawall projects.

Chad Nelson>> Coastal armoring protects the land. It's great
for property owners, but it doesn't protect the beach. So from
the perspective of saving the land, armoring is a good solution.
From the perspective of saving the beach, it's a terrible
solution.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Nelson also criticizes government-subsidized
programs that have encouraged beach development.

Chad Nelson>> On the national level, there is the National
Flood Insurance Program. This is a federal insurance program
that allows coastal homeowners in high erosion areas that have
already been deemed really hazardous to get home protection
insurance for this erosion. Whereas, if they had to get it
privately, it would probably be unaffordable because the risks
are so high.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Past zoning decisions that allow people to build
in unsafe coastal locations have contributed to putting people
in harm's way, says Mary Nichols, California's Secretary of
Natural Resources.

Mary Nichols>> I think the pressure to allow construction right
on or right above the beach has been almost irresistible. We
certainly have in the past allowed too much chock-a-block, wall-
to-wall development in many communities and that's because, as a
society, we prefer in general to err on the side of letting
private property owners exercise their right to enjoy their
property versus having the harsh hand of the government
regulating what people can do.

Jeffrey Kaye>> The Surfrider Foundation has proposed an
alternative to seawalls called Planned Retreat. They want the
government to buy up threatened properties and tear them down,
returning parcels of land to a pre-developed condition. But
many seaside property owners say any serious consideration of
planned retreat would cost billions of dollars and would send
coastal real estate values plummeting. Santina says protecting
existing coastal properties in Solana Beach and other coastal
communities is cheaper and in the interests of both owners and
beach visitors.

Paul Santina>> We want it to be safe. We don't want our
children to die under a bluff collapse. I know that's a radical
concept, but safety is kind of a good idea in our opinion. So
this is not just about the people who live here. You know how
many people use the beach?

Jeffrey Kaye>> Such arguments make it difficult for public
officials to oppose requests for new coastal armoring projects,
says California's Resources Secretary Nichols.

Mary Nichols>> The gray area really has to do with existing
structures and existing communities. If you've got three beach
houses next to each other and two of them have seawalls and the
one in the middle doesn't, how do you tell that person the next
time there's a big storm that, well, it's too bad, you've got to
lose your house, but these other two folks are okay because we
let them put the seawalls in?

Jeffrey Kaye>> Many coastal communities believe there is
another way to fight beach erosion, a method that avoids the
drawbacks of both coastal armoring and Planned Retreat. It's
called Beach Restoration. Millions of cubic yards of sediment
are dredged up offshore and then pumped onto the shoreline.
When the slurry dries, the beach is re-carpeted in a new wide
swath of sand. At a cost of $17.5 million dollars, San Diego
County has restored six miles of coastline this way. That money
is considered an investment in the area's all-important tourism
business, says Rob Rundle of the San Diego Association of
Governments.

Rob Rundle>> Beaches are one of the main destinations of people
coming to the regions, of tourists coming to visit our beaches
as well as residents. All the local businesses, the hotels,
everyone benefits from that, so it's really important that we
have healthy beaches that really do stand for what everybody
thinks of when they think of San Diego.

Jeffrey Kaye>> But Beach Restoration which has been used for
years on the eastern seaboard and southern beaches has its
critics who complain about mammoth costs. The budget watchdog
group, Taxpayers for Common Sense, has estimated that, along the
Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, beach replenishment programs over the
past eighty years have cost the Federal Treasury $3.5 billion
dollars when adjusted for inflation. There are also concerns
about beach replenishment's long-term effectiveness.

Chad Nelson>> You're really treating the symptom, not the
problem. The problem is a loss of sand supply to the beach. If
you keep supplying the sand, you're going to be stuck constantly
for fifty years, every three to five years, adding sand to the
beach. We liken it to heroine addiction. Once you start, you
can't stop.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Conflicts over how best to protect California's
and America's beaches are expected to become sharper as growing
numbers of people live and build along the nation's coasts.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
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Val>> When you think of special effects, you usually think of
high-budget feature films, but more and more computer imagery is
making its way onto television. In programs like "CSI" and
"ER", there are special effects that you may not even detect,
which is the whole idea.

Vicki Curry>> Audiences have become pretty savvy to big special
effects like this.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> But most viewers are probably oblivious to the
digital magic that's now regularly popping up in television
shows.

Sam Nicholson>> It's photo-real virtual reality meets
production, so that when we need to go to a remote location like
Chicago for "ER" or Boston for "Crossing Jordan", we actually
shoot locally with the actors on green screen and then we build
an entire virtual reality of Chicago or Boston or Washington,
D.C. so that we bring the location to Hollywood rather than the
other way around.

Vicki Curry>> Stargate Digital is one of the companies leading
the way in television special effects. They specialize in
creating sets and locations that they call the virtual back lot.

Sam Nicholson>> The virtual back lot is advantageous both
economically and for just practical shooting reasons. If you
want to stage a scene in the middle of Hope and Wilshire,
stopping traffic and the logistics of shooting that are very
difficult. For the new "Las Vegas" show where shooting in a
casino is a very difficult situation, we build that as a 360-
degree virtual environment which is a combination of real
photography computer graphics. It's essentially a living
environment.

Vicki Curry>> The virtual back lot is most useful for certain
kinds of scenes like ones outside where you have to worry about
weather and lighting, or a big production that would need
elaborate sets and lots of extras. But more and more, the
virtual back lot is being used for seemingly mundane settings.

Sam Nicholson>> It started out as very large-scale events like
being on the fifty-yard line at the Super Bowl and now it's
become so economical and we're getting so good at it that we
say, well, isn't it easier to add those buildings of downtown
than to go downtown? And it is.

Vicki Curry>> Forms of this technology have been around for
years, but it evolved so quickly that what it can do changes all
the time.

Sam Nicholson>> Photo-real blue or green screen photography has
been around and developing for quite some time. We've just
taken it off a limited screen and made it into a complete,
immersive environment. We've been seriously developing the
virtual back lot since 9/11, actually, because what happened to
a lot of shows was that the actors didn't want to fly. So we
went to Chicago with a small team and developed this technique
and it's truly come of age because of the computer horsepower
and the capabilities of storage and processing that we have here
at Stargate.

Vicki Curry>> Now the virtual back lot has become the location
of choice for many television shows, which usually have a tight
budget and a frantic schedule.

Sam Nicholson>> The most expensive part of production is
principal photography, so if you can speed up principal
photography and deliver a better look through managing your
digital assets in post, then it's a win-win situation. We
generally get one day in a parking lot with a big green screen
and we make everything happen in one day, so the idea is to
maximize that. Get the best performance you can in principal
photography and then, with a much smaller team, work it in post
to refine it and add all the things that are much more finesse-
oriented. The crowds, the buildings, the set extensions, all
those things that enhance the acting.

Vicki Curry>> That means that most of the show is made not on a
Hollywood soundstage, but in a place like this.

Sam Nicholson>> This is digital mat painting. This is where we
develop the master look for the film. It's like an illustration
in a way. What we do is we continue that into the 3-D world so
that we can travel through that world. Tim starts the
production by giving it the look, so he works with the principal
photography production designer to determine what's real and
what isn't.

Vicki Curry>> So this room is the 3-D room?

Sam Nicholson>> This is all 3-D computer graphics, so this is
the futuristic version of what used to be a model shop. And all
these elements are taken and put together by the compositors.
This gives you an idea of how many layers are in that shot.
There are all different digital layers there.

Vicki Curry>> Right, adding person after person, detail after
detail.

Sam Nicholson>> This is a fabulous shot from "ER". He's got a
green screen on. That whole arm is computer graphics. He
wasn't too interested in us cutting off his arm for the series
(laughter), so we decided to go with the green screen sleeve and
do a computer-generated arm.

Vicki Curry>> So every scene he's in, this arm needs to be
generated here in your office?

Sam Nicholson>> Absolutely, absolutely. So this shot would
take Cecil B. DeMille, you know, a week to set up and we did it
with twenty people in about twenty minutes. It makes it
actually quite easy to shoot because what's being put in there
are the expensive parts.

Vicki Curry>> Right, extra bodies and extra buildings.

Sam Nicholson>> Man, I'll tell you, to build that whole city
would be something.

Vicki Curry>> Special effects are clearly changing the way
television looks, but they're also changing the creative
possibilities and taking audiences places they've never been
before.

Sam Nicholson>> The writers have to get hold of the fact that
they can go anywhere and do almost anything on a television
budget and schedule where they couldn't do that before, so a lot
of it is conceptual and they push their writing staff to take
advantage of this technology which is really opening the dynamic
and the dramatic impact of television. This is a fly on a golf
ball, which is for "Las Vegas".

Vicki Curry>> So this is where you talk about expanding
creativity with something never having been thought of before.

Sam Nicholson>> Absolutely. You wouldn't shoot a fly and track
him onto a golf ball and then follow the golf ball.

Vicki Curry>> Right, but now that the technology exists, why
not?

Sam Nicholson>> We can do it, yeah. We create these looks that
we call signature looks for shows like the snap scene on "SCI".

Vicki Curry>> Oh, wow. So you can again really go beyond what
anyone would have thought before because here you're going
inside the wound and seeing close-ups.

Sam Nicholson>> Right. Well, this is from "Las Vegas" and
you'll see this on the air in a couple of weeks. But their
signature look is through the security camera, the idea of going
through the wire, through the lens, and transitioning from one
environment to another.

Vicki Curry>> As the virtual back lot becomes more common,
actors are having to adapt to it.

Sam Nicholson>> It does require a lot of acting because you
have to imagine that you're there, but the directors
particularly. Robert Altman loves the technique because he can
spend more time directly with his actors. You can actually get
a better performance from your actors because it's really a one-
on-one experience and you aren't worrying whether your eight
hundred extras are going to get it right at the same time your
principal actor gets it right.

Vicki Curry>> Some might disagree and complain about the
increasing use of digital imagery in entertainment, but Stargate
Digital says special effects will always depend on reality.

Sam Nicholson>> You can't beat the imperfections of reality, so
what we do is enhance it. We don't necessarily replace it.
We're not after replacing actors or replacing sets or anything
like that. We're after augmenting them and expanding them and
making them much more and bigger and cooler than they would be.

Val>> And 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>> Monday on Life and Times, Arnold's big day. We'll cover
his swearing in as Governor and hear from the experts on what
California can expect. That's Monday on Life and Times.