09/13/04

LC040913

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

He's been called Los Angeles's favorite developer, but can Rick
Caruso survive a tough political fight over his latest retail
vision?

Rick Caruso>> They don't want to solve the problem. They want
this project to go away. They don't want the competition and
that's a bad thing. It's a bad thing for Glendale. It's a bad
thing for our industry. It's a bad thing for the economy.

Val>> Plus, we'll meet one of Hollywood's great composers, Hans
Zimmer.

It's all coming up 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.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> It may be the most expensive ballot measure in the city
of Glendale's history. The question? Whether or not to build a
high-end retail and residential development right in the heart
of Glendale. Both sides, large corporations, have spent
millions on glossy flyers and direct mail trying to convince
voters to vote their way. The man at the helm of the project is
Rick Caruso, the same man who brought us The Grove near the
Farmers Market. Philip Bruce met Rick Caruso who may not have
expected his project to turn into an election issue.

Philip Bruce>> In a world of cookie cutter shopping centers and
faceless developers, he's the odd man out. But being different
has been no mistake for Rick Caruso. It's made him very, very
wealthy.

Rick Caruso>> Look at this. It's the stroller brigade
(laughter) and you've got to love that. I mean, right? Where
do you live?

>> Where do we live?

Rick Caruso>> Right.

>> We come from La Cienega.

Rick Caruso>> From where?

Philip Bruce>> From La Cienega.

Rick Caruso>> Good. I mean, that's what it's about.

Philip Bruce>> Caruso's pride and joy has earned him even more
riches. He loves to show how The Grove at Farmers Market has
become a thriving destination in what had been a tired old
neighborhood and it all starts with the concept that unwinds the
notion of going to an indoor mall.

Rick Caruso>> We understand pretty well what people want. What
they want is to go back to a time that was safer, streets were
cleaner, you ran into your neighbors, your kids could run around
with some freedom. There wasn't just sort of this shopping
Mecca in your face. Environmentally, it was pleasant. You
know, you had trees and grass and fountains. And we're finding
areas in urban cores that had for whatever been not abandoned
but maybe passed by and there's a real opportunity in that.

Philip Bruce>> The Grove's success has helped make Caruso
something of a rock star among retail developers, but in Los
Angeles, he's just as well-known as a political figure.
Remember when the city's police commission decided to dump
Bernard Parks as chief of the LAPD? Well, the man in charge of
that commission and the one in the spotlight of the controversy
was, you guessed it, Rick Caruso. Fast forward to a possible
time when Bernard Parks could not be a city councilman, but
possibly the mayor of this city.

Rick Caruso>> I probably won't be a police commissioner
(laughter). That's probably a good bet.

Philip Bruce>> Whatever political muscle Caruso has will soon
be put to the test, but this time he'll be fighting to save his
latest creation, a sweeping new take on what he built at The
Grove, only bigger with more shops, more green space and, for
the first time ever, luxury condos and townhomes thrown into the
mix. It's called the Americana and some claim this one-of-a-
kind shopping complex could revive downtown Glendale the way The
Grove revived the Farmers Market area.

Rick Caruso>> All the things that worked great at The Grove are
going to be included in Glendale and expanded like a bigger
park, more outdoor services. We just cut a deal with Turner
Classic Movies which is really exciting to us. In the park,
we're going to have outdoor movies on summer nights so you can
have a picnic and come and watch a movie at no cost. So all the
community services are going to be expanded because we have more
room to do more things.

Philip Bruce>> But there's just one problem. Glendale already
has one of the biggest malls in Southern California and the
people who own it have launched an all-out war to stop Caruso's
latest vision, the Americana, from getting off the drawing
board.

Carol Jacobs>> But it's really about having a town center that
has streets that are open, adequate parking, really provides a
true connection between Brand to the town center and to
Glendale's Galleria as well.

Philip Bruce>> Meet Carol Jacobs, one of the top managers of
the Glendale Galleria, a place that gets twice as many visitors
as Disneyland. She works for General Growth Properties, the
company that owns the mall. Jacobs insists that General Growth
isn't worried about new competition and she claims the mall
strongly supports the notion of building a town center in the
city-owned vacant lot next door to the Galleria. But there's
just one hitch. Jacobs' company doesn't seem to want Caruso to
be the one who builds that town center. A lot of people may
have backed away from this. He seems to consider it such a
personal fight that he's not going to back away?

Carol Jacobs>> You know, I guess I'd rather focus on how we
approach this. We have really not taken it -- it's not a
personal issue. It's really what makes business sense and
what's the right decision to make for Glendale, for the Glendale
Galleria, and so I don't think it would be fair to comment on,
you know, his position in this.

Rick Caruso>> They don't want to solve the problem. They want
this project to go away. They don't want the competition and
that's a bad thing. It's a bad thing for Glendale. It's a bad
thing for our industry. It's a bad thing for the economy.

Philip Bruce>> What started as a commercial venture has now
become a political food fight. In an effort to stop Caruso, the
mall owner bankrolled a controversial petition drive that forced
Glendale to put the town center issue to a public vote, and the
mayor of Glendale is angry. He claims he discovered firsthand
how the mall's signature-gatherers misled the public with half
truths and full-out lies.

Bob Yousefian>> The evidence is me. Just walking to the
signature-gatherers and having to stand there and having them
tell me that I took money under the table, that the city was
faulty in getting this project done, that the city council by
approving this is going to cause the Galleria to shut down and
the city will lose millions of dollars and so on and so forth,
and then ask me to sign the petition. I told them I can't sign
the petition and their question was why. I said I'm the mayor
of the city who you accused me of taking all the money.

Philip Bruce>> Mayor Yousefian says the mall has benefited for
decades from the same kinds of concessions Glendale is now
offering Rick Caruso and Yousefian isn't buying the argument
that General Growth, the mall owner, only wants what's best for
the city, not when they've got a lock on business in a downtown
that's otherwise fairly bleak. In the meantime, Caruso is
launching what amounts to his own political machine to win the
vote in Glendale and move forward with his Americana project.
And it's costing him plenty, millions to battle a shopping
center giant whose pockets are much deeper than his.

Rick Caruso>> The only person or group that is sort of ahead of
the game right now is General Growth owning the Galleria.
Because the longer they can avoid having to reinvest in that
mall -- it's a thirty year old tired mall -- they're saving
money. But they need to reinvest in it and I would tell them
that we're going to bring more customers to their front door,
being next to them, and they'll end up having a better mall once
they invest some new dollars and fresh capital and make that
place a little bit more interesting.

Carol Jacobs>> It shouldn't be a political battle. It really
should be what's right for Glendale. And part of what's right
for Glendale is what's right for the Galleria. You know, we're
the largest single taxpaying entity in Glendale and that's one
thing. It should be right for the Galleria, but even taking
that further, it's got to be right for the whole city of
Glendale.

Bob Yousefian>> It's not about design, it's not about the
streets, it's not about the fire station that's dilapidated.
It's not about any of that stuff or the money. They could care
less how much the city spends or whether we give land away or
not, like we gave more land away to them and we spend more money
on their Galleria. But it's more about the control of the big
chain stores. They want to make sure that some new developer
doesn't come in and take them out of their malls.

Philip Bruce>> So far, Southern California is ground zero and,
even as Caruso wages war in Glendale, he's bracing for another
potential fight near Pasadena where he's announced plans for
another Grove-like development next to the historic Santa Anita
Racetrack. There the main opposition is another mall which
operates within sight of the horses. You're really now going
beyond a developer having to get into the business of politics,
like it or not.

Rick Caruso>> Right.

Philip Bruce>> How is that going to affect what you're able to
build? Does that hurt the bottom line eventually?

Rick Caruso>> Well, I think the decision that we're making is,
if we want to be in great urban cores and there is an existing
mall, we know that that mall most likely is going to challenge
us and spend a lot of money to stop us from being there because
they don't want the competition. So we're going to have to
build it into our pro forma not only in terms of money, but in
terms of time, and we're going to have to be experts in
campaigning.

Bob Yousefian>> Well, I think Caruso is a fighter. I think
it's in his blood. He's not one to shy away from a fight and,
to an extent, I think Caruso's probably fighting for other
developers that are his size or a little bit even larger who are
trying to build shopping strips or malls or lifestyle centers.

Val>> Voters in Glendale will give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down
to the project. If they approve it, General Growth has promised
to continue challenging the project. If they reject it, then
four years and millions of dollars of Rick Caruso's will be for
naught. The vote is tomorrow.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
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Val>> They are survivors of the Holocaust. With the passing of
each year, their numbers are dwindling. But a new short film
called "Memory and Videotape" shows how the survivors' stories
are being preserved forever. It's part of the Veritas
Collection. The filmmaker is Ray Greene.

Ray Greene>> Memory for most of us is something we carry around
inside of our heads.

Narrator>> "Inspired by the filming of Schindler's List,
Stephen Spielberg established survivors of the Shoah
Foundation."

Ray Greene>> Memory is how we know who we are. If we had no
memories, we would have no identity. The same thing is actually
true of the memories that we encode in videotape. If we didn't
have the interviews on tape, we would have no memory of the
events that we record and that would interfere, it seems to me,
with our identities not simply as Jews or those who are Jewish,
but really for all of us as human beings.

>> "Welcome, welcome to the Foundation. Follow me, please.
The Foundation was established in 1994 and it was essentially an
outgrowth of the movie "Schindler's List". Stephen Spielberg
was in Poland and he literally had survivors approach him on set
wanting to talk about their life experiences in the war. He was
so moved by that experience that he wanted to do something about
it and he did. He established the Shoah Foundation charged with
the mission of collecting testimony from survivors and other
witnesses of the war."

>> "Half of my body is always there."

>> "Now in eight and a half years, a little more at this point,
we have collected nearly 52,000 testimonies worldwide. That's
in fifty-six countries and in thirty-two different languages
that will take you over thirteen years to view and that's
twenty-four hours a day. We're now focusing actually on our new
mission, which is to overcome intolerance, prejudice and bigotry
through the educational use of the Foundation's visual history."

Ghi Hart>> My name is Ghi Hart and I'm working here as a
volunteer at the Shoah Foundation for the last eight years. The
memory for me is, well, I don't have to go far. When I wash my
hands or something, the number reminds me every day of my
experience.

>> "Well, that will be fun. I'll meet him."

Ghi Hart>> Mr. Spielberg made fifty thousand tapes. When you
think of it and when you listen to all of them together, it's
all the same story. To get rid of the race. You see it in
Yugoslavia where the Serbs killed the Muslims, you know, and in
Rwanda or wherever, you know. They're killing hundreds of
thousands of people, women and children, for what? Why?

>> "What I'm going to do now is I'm going to play a few minutes
of footage for you to give you an idea of what it is I'm talking
about."

>> A videotape, in a way, changes when different people watch
it. I think about the survivors that I've watched on the video
and then find out that they've passed away. You realize that
that's just a moment in time captured. You know, it's sort of
like holding two mirrors up to each other because it's also, in
that moment in time, capturing that moment in time that they're
telling us about. I don't know if "Memory and Videotape" is the
title I would choose because both of those things feel very
static. I just feel that the work I do is so organic.

>> "This is what we call our robot."

Ray Greene>> Any technology can be used for evil. Any
technology can be used for good.

>> "Behind these glass panels, all of the testimonies are
stored."

Ray Greene>> The video camera is a tool that can be used for
good or for evil.

>> "Our entire archive -- and I'm not very technical -- covers
180 terabytes actually."

Ray Greene>> I think that that interaction, that experience of
looking into a television screen and seeing somebody look back
at you and say let me tell you what happened in my life is an
experience that changes you absolutely irrevocably. The day
will come when Stephen Spielberg isn't here anymore, when I'm
not here anymore, when nobody who works at the Shoah Foundation
will be here anymore, when all the survivors will be gone, but
the 52,000 testimonies have to be permanent. They have to exist
for all time.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
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Val>> You may not know his name, but if you watch movies, you
definitely know Hans Zimmer's music. For the past two decades,
he has scored dozens of movies and he's won every major award in
film and music. Vicki Curry shows us how Hans Zimmer creates
the sounds that Hollywood loves.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> His music is as epic as the images it
accompanies.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> Or as intimate as the moment requires.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> These are the sounds of Hans Zimmer, film
composer and creator of sonic landscapes as varied as the people
and places on the screen.

Hans Zimmer>> Every time somebody comes with a project, it's a
whole new world of adventure. You get to go on these journeys.
You get to go and visit centuries. You know, you get to live in
a fantasy world.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> Hans Zimmer has scored over a hundred films
covering the spectrum in scopes and styles. He's particularly
known for his innovative use of synthesized music.

Hans Zimmer>> I just thought computers and synthesizing was a
better tool. They are technologies just like a violin is
technology. I mean, if it makes a gorgeous noise, use it. You
know, if it can tell a story, if it looks like it's appropriate,
use it.

Vicki Curry>> His interest in synthesizers began early in his
career. Born in Germany, Zimmer made his way to England and
joined The Buggles, the group behind the first music video aired
on MTV.

[Film Clip]

Hans Zimmer>> I instantly got bored with the whole thing
because the problem is, as soon as you have a hit record, the
record company really asks you to repeat yourself ad nauseam. I
love film. When I was about twelve, I saw "Once Upon A Time In
The West". I snuck into the cinema even though I was definitely
not allowed. It just blew me away and that idea of music and
pictures together sort of stuck with me. You know, you can have
all these lights and colors and tell a story with music and
images.

Vicki Curry>> He made the switch to film music with the help of
composer, Stanley Myers, but Zimmer soon broke out on his own
and his career took off when he came to Los Angeles to score
"Rain Man".

Hans Zimmer>> We actually made a rule up right at the beginning
which was whenever you see people driving in a car across
America, either jangling guitars or the fingers sweeping, so no
jangling guitars or no strings (laughter).

Vicki Curry>> His next big picture was "Driving Miss Daisy", a
completely electronic score.

[Film Clip]

Hans Zimmer>> I originally set out to write a big orchestral
score for "Driving Miss Daisy" and I just realized that it
became a sort of heavy thing which I think young people love the
classical music with older people and I realized I was killing
the actors. I thought, hang on, she's feisty, she needs
something, you know, so that's why we came to this little thing,
this little pulse, this little nagging thing going on all the
time which came straight out of hip-hop or electronic or
whatever.

Vicki Curry>> Zimmer hasn't shied away from using orchestras in
his other scores or whatever sound suits the film.

Hans Zimmer>> I tend to read scripts less and less and have the
director tell me the story because you get what his vision is.

[Film Clip]

Hans Zimmer>> But at the end of the day, I think my job is to
surprise them, to write something that I think they can't
possibly think of themselves. That's the job. You know,
otherwise they can do it themselves. I never write anything
down. I do most of my writing in my head and a lot of it
happens in the tub at home or whatever. I always think, you
know, if I can't remember it by the time I get to the studio, it
can't have been any good.

I never approach film as a musician, really. I always approach
it as a filmmaker. I always approach it from the story and
stuff like that because that's what interests me. It just so
happens that the language I speak is music. I mean, here you
are sitting across from a German who's trying to sort his
English out somehow or the other when really what I know is, if
we could just speak in music, we'd be having a much better time
here (laughter).

Vicki Curry>> Before he gets around to writing, Zimmer spends
months and sometimes years researching the subjects of his
films.

Hans Zimmer>> I can give you a thousand theories on every
little nook and cranny of "Gladiator" or "The Last Samurai".
You know, I spent forever trying to research Japanese culture,
Japanese music, and surrounding myself with pictures and such.
So I got something that then just pops into my head, you know.
Try to write your melodies from yourself, you know, informed by
Japanese aesthetics, at which point I went "What does that
mean?" You know, I'm giving myself even more punishment. So
the second thing that popped into my head which was slightly
simpler was hang on, they hired you to invent, so invent. Stop
with all that other stuff and write from the heart. It might
not be the universal language, but there is something. There is
a common humanity that we can all understand, that we can get to
with music.

Vicki Curry>> Zimmer works out of a state of the art studio in
Santa Monica that is also home to many young musicians. Called
"Media Ventures", it's a kind of cooperative of composers
sharing resources and ideas. It's his version of the mentoring
he received in Europe.

Hans Zimmer>> That vent of apprenticeship didn't really exist
in Los Angeles, so I really put this place together with friends
who were musicians, composers, you know, and try to get them off
the ground in one way or the other. The other thing is,
composing is something for lonely persons. You know, usually
you just sit there and knock your head against a wall and hope
things happen. It's great having other composers around,
especially because they come in and they're merciless. "Oh,
Hans, you can do better than that" or you walk into their room
and they're doing something and you go, "Oh, this is great. I'd
better crawl back into my room and see if -- you know, throw
everything out."

Vicki Curry>> And what is the purpose of music in film?

Hans Zimmer>> It's a question I find impossible to answer, you
know. A man walks down the street and you hear music. Why do
you hear music? What's it supposed to tell you? It can tell
you things.

[Film Clip]

Hans Zimmer>> I have no idea how this works. I have no idea
how to write a score. I have no idea how to say anything in the
scene that is remotely meaningful. You know, how am I going to
get through this? Most of the time, you know, you're just
desperate. It's only twelve notes. That's all we've got and
everybody seems to have played all of them. Beyond that, you're
trying to actually describe something indescribable. It's this
funny process that I can never quite work out, but there comes
that moment when you suddenly go, hang on, this is right and
literally you will not have an argument from anybody.

[Film Clip]

Val>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at
Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

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.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times, she's driven to help kids
succeed and it all begins with one good book.

>> It's like we tell them, okay, here are some crackers, here
is some water, now go gain weight. So we're saying go learn how
to read and go be good readers and go be good testers when we
give them nothing to help them, and what we give to help them is
books.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.