10/11/04

LC041011

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Crumbling buildings, missing money and unsupervised workers. Is
that any way to treat Los Angeles's birthplace?

Rushmore Cervantes>> Either we step up to the plate now and
take care of it or we're going to lose this treasure.

Val>> And then, who would have thought documentaries would be
the hottest ticket of the season? But are they entertainment or
politicking?

Those stories and more straight ahead on tonight's Life and
Times.

George W. Bush>> "Now watch this drive."

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's considered the birthplace of Los Angeles, the site
of the original Pueblo de Los Angeles, and today Olvera Street
is a colorful marketplace where Los Angeles shows off its Latino
roots. But recently, Olvera Street has been plagued by
allegations of sloppy, if not illegal, financial management.
Now a new manager for Olvera Street is promising to rescue this
popular tourist area from its financial troubles. Reporter Hena
Cuevas visited Olvera Street to see what needs to be done.

[Film Clip]

Hena Cuevas>> The sound of Aztec drums echo down Olvera Street,
symbol of the cultural roots of the birthplace of Los Angeles.
This is where California's largest city began in 1781. It's
estimated that more than two million people visit the area each
year admiring the architecture and enjoying the atmosphere
unaware that beneath the glaze on the Spanish tile lies a
crumbling financial foundation.

Laura Chick>> Olvera Street has been under-achieving and,
again, not because of the tenants and the business owners, but
because of the city not really managing it in the right way.

Hena Cuevas>> Laura Chick is Los Angeles's City Controller.
Last March, her office received a phone call claiming there were
serious problems at El Pueblo, the complex of twenty-seven
historic buildings that include Olvera Street. Rumors that
money was missing, employees weren't being properly supervised
and buildings were falling apart. Prompted by that call, Chick
sent a team of auditors to take a look. She says she was
shocked at what they found.

Laura Chick>> Cash in different desk drawers, boxes of unpaid
invoices, receipts all over the place, no sense of what was
going on in terms of revenue from the parking lots which are
busy parking lots. It was a mess.

Hena Cuevas>> The resulting audit painted a picture of
widespread mismanagement at El Pueblo. Not only is money
missing, but after years of neglect, most of the buildings are
in desperate need of repair.

Laura Chick>> To be performing the business functions and
operations of a Los Angeles city department in the way that we
found is not only embarrassing, it's disgraceful.

Hena Cuevas>> According to the audit, many of the businesses
owed back rent, almost a quarter of a million dollars. Also,
the four parking lots which bring in half of El Pueblo's revenue
weren't being properly supervised. There was no system in place
to track how much money was coming in or where it was going.
Who is being held responsible for this?

Laura Chick>> The mayor of the city of Los Angeles is the
person who is directly over general managers and the final buck
stops at the mayor's door. I'm very hopeful that, in jumping on
the audit recommendations, this is going to be turned around
now.

Hena Cuevas>> Following the audit, Mayor James Hahn responded
by appointing a tough former stockbroker and long-time city
employee to the post. Rushmore Cervantes took over after the
former general manager resigned.

Rushmore Cervantes>> We need to treat this place like a
business and treating it like a business isn't necessarily
always the easiest way. The one thing for certain is that we're
going to treat every merchant fairly and consistently, which
hasn't necessarily always happened in the past, and there will
be more changes down the road both from a capital improvement
side, but also the management side of how we work with each
individual merchant.

Hena Cuevas>> Does it sometimes feel to you like you have been
brought in to be the bad guy?

Rushmore Cervantes>> Well, addressing an audit of this
magnitude and having to make wholesale changes, yes, I am the
bad guy. You know, nobody wants to be the bad guy, but that's
my job and, you know, you're not going to make friends with
everyone.

Hena Cuevas>> As the self-proclaimed bad guy, Cervantes started
cracking down on the most obvious problem, all that rent money
that was past due.

Rushmore Cervantes>> As of July 1, there was about $227,000 in
rent.

Hena Cuevas>> That's quite a bit of money.

Rushmore Cervantes>> Yes, it is. Since that time, though, I'm
pleased to say that we've been able to aggressively go after
those merchants and really lay down the letter of the law in
saying that we need to have payment in full or agree to a
repayment plan.

Hena Cuevas>> To start collecting, Cervantes says he talked to
each merchant one by one. They all explained their reasons for
the late payment, but Cervantes was firm.

Rushmore Cervantes>> You have a really easy decision to make.
Either you pay or you leave.

Hena Cuevas>> The added pressure worked and the money started
coming in. Now Cervantes says that, out of the more than
$220,000 that was overdue, only $5,000 is left.

Rushmore Cervantes>> As painful as it may have been for some of
them, in the long run it is in the best interest for Olvera
Street and El Pueblo.

Hena Cuevas>> Another problem? Eighty percent of the tenants
hadn't signed leases.

Laura Chick>> Well, that creates liability risk for the city
and also we should be charging fair rents and we should be
helping the businesses to thrive and make money, to keep track
of the money. This is public money. It belongs to the public
and the city.

Hena Cuevas>> To resolve the parking issue, Cervantes
established checkpoints to monitor the flow of money.

Rushmore Cervantes>> We took care of some of the glaring
problems and that was primarily how to handle the cash, making
sure that we had two people going out at all times, making sure
that it was secured properly, reducing the number of people who
had access to the safes, changing the combination of the safes,
changing the alarm system access code.

Hena Cuevas>> These are all positive changes for long-time
merchant, Steve Feria, but he's taking a wait and see attitude.
His family has been selling leather goods on Olvera Street since
1941. He says he's seen it all before and El Pueblo has had six
general managers in ten years.

Steve Feria>> It's like having another step-parent. You know,
let's see how long this one stays.

Hena Cuevas>> He wonders how dedicated Cervantes is.

Steve Feria>> Fifty years of mismanagement basically. We've
had so many managers come here. They go, they're here, most of
them about three or four years, and then they leave. The street
does not get any better.

Hena Cuevas>> Cervantes has taken a hands-on approach to his
job. Today, it's looking at extensive water damage in one of
the stores. With buildings this old and so neglected, it's
almost a daily occurrence.

Rushmore Cervantes>> "Now we've just got to get an estimate of
the product damage."

Hena Cuevas>> He's only the interim director, not sure how long
he'll be in his post, but he says the city is committed to El
Pueblo.

Rushmore Cervantes>> It's not so much just getting it to run
better as far as operational-wise. I'm talking about promoting
it, getting this place back to its original luster and glory, to
make this place just a goldmine that it is and have more people
come in and realize the beauty of this place.

Hena Cuevas>> He'll have a year to turn things around. That's
when Chick's office will once again be knocking on his door.

Laura Chick>> I want to give them enough breathing room and
time to pull a messy operation back up to high quality, but I
will be back.

Hena Cuevas>> And she's not the only one who will be watching.

Steve Feria>> We'll see. I take a wait and see attitude. Most
of the time, it's more of the same. We'll see. It could
happen.

Rushmore Cervantes>> Either we step up to the plate now and
take care of it or we're going to lose this treasure.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts
and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most
interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life
and Times".

Val>> She was a newspaper reporter who longed to escape the
congestion, concrete and urban ills of Los Angeles, so she moved
to Malibu. You would think this beautiful seaside community
would fulfill her love of nature and small-town life, right?
Wrong. Penny O'Malley learned first-hand the truth about
Malibu. I met Penny Grenoble O'Malley at Dutton's Book Store in
Brentwood where she talked about her experience as a reporter
and resident of Malibu. She's written about them in a book
called "Malibu Diary" where she says it is possible to destroy a
place by loving it too much. Penny, you moved to Malibu to
escape all the vices of city life, traffic, congestion, smog,
thinking it was going to be utopia.

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> Right, and I discovered that there is
no such thing as utopia. I had the idea that I wanted to be
closer to nature, although I wasn't sure what that meant at the
time. I had an idea that I did want to get out of the city.
You know, it's that typical dream that we have that, you know,
we'll chuck this here and we'll go there and everything will be
fine. What I found was interesting because I went to Malibu at
the time that the community was just becoming a city, just
incorporating as a city. I didn't know much about that to begin
with. I didn't really want to know much about it all, but I'm a
journalist by profession, so, of course, the juices got flowing.

Val>> Give us an example of a conflict that occurred.

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> Well, we had a very fundamental
conflict about how much the community should grow. You know, I
don't know how much you've followed all of this type of slow-
growth stuff, but it's kind of axiomatic of slow growth that one
of the ways you control growth is not to have a sewer system in
your community, to have septic tanks. For all the reasons that
are obvious, you have sewers, you can build more, whatever.

Yet there is Malibu having very fragile resources, the Malibu
Lagoon, Surfrider Beach, that really should be protected by a
sewer system rather than septic tanks. We just couldn't get
past that idea that, on one hand, we wanted to protect the
environment and, on the other hand, somehow or another we
couldn't get past the idea that the way for slow growth was to
stay with the septic tanks --

Val>> -- so does it have a septic system now?

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> No, it doesn't have a system.

Val>> Even to this day?

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> No, even to this day.

Val>> Now another point you make is that you looked over the
landscape that you personally love, but you also realized that
humans can destroy something by loving them too much, which is
what happened in Malibu?

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> Well, in some cases, yes. Because
all of Malibu -- this is interesting -- this is the only city in
the country that was completely surrounded by parkland.

Val>> Completely surrounded by --

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> -- except, of course, the Pacific
Ocean. It is completely surrounded by publicly-owned land of
some kind or another. That's why people go out there because
they like that, but they have the risks of the fires and the
floods.

Val>> Are people naïve about what it takes to live in an
environment like that?

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> Oh, absolutely, absolutely. There's
no doubt about it. I mean, the whole idea about wild animals,
rattlesnakes --

Val>> -- fire danger.

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> Fire danger, building on steep slopes
because the view is beautiful. That's part of loving the land
too much. You know, we get up there and we think, oh, it's all
out there in front of me and yet we're not helping the landscape
by building large houses and so on and so forth. The
interesting thing about Malibu is that the city has been very
reticent to do what I was just talking about, building
environment like commercial buildings and to develop the
downtown and so on and so forth.

But they have allowed single family buildings to the point
where, if you're on the beach and you look up -- when I first
went to Malibu, you saw pretty blank hills. Now you see huge,
great big "McMansions" a friend of mine calls them. So that's
kind of an example of what I meant, that you can love it too
much and want to have it and, in some cases, you can't have it.

Val>> Now you went through a personal evolution politically and
maybe philosophically. What was that evolution? From what to
what?

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> Well, I was pretty naïve when I went
to Malibu. I thought, as I say in the book, I considered myself
an environmentalist. You know, that meant saving the whales and
that sort of thing. I had never had to do anything in my own
life that changed my way of life radically or made me
inconvenienced based on what -- I really -- you know, it's the
old joke. Writer, check your Green Peace and buy your SUV. I
didn't have an SUV (laughter).

I really was naïve and I was very arbitrary in the way I thought
about things. As I said, no piece of land should be developed.
I think the thing that environmentally really was important to
me that I realized -- and this is a terrible word to use among
environmentalists and still is -- you have to compromise. You
have to realize that this land is owned by somebody and they do
have plans for it. And how much better to come together, the
landowner and the city or whatever, and do what I was talking
about before. Come up with something creative and interesting
and unusual that uses infrastructure better, that is more
attuned to the place.

I think of a couple -- there's the Nature Conservancy down in
the San Diego area that has a program where they buy property,
then they sell it to what they call conservation buyers. They
sell it at below-market price, so you're buying ordinarily very
expensive property and you buy it at less a price because you
have a conservation easement over it. But also, because this
particular chunk of land happens to be in a wildlife corridor,
you can't use all of it. You can't use all of your property, so
what you're getting is, if you have that kind of an innovative
program going on, you're getting people who are naturally
interested in living with the landscape the way the landscape
needs to be lived in.

Those are the types of things that I suddenly realized we have
to be spending more time thinking about, this way of dealing
with things instead of standing there with our sword and shield
and saying, no, we're going to sue, we're going to sue, we're
going to sue. We've done a lot of suing in Malibu and Malibu is
not unique to that. That's the first thing people do. I went
up to Pacifica up in northern California to do a talk and a
book-signing and they've got very similar problems. You know,
they've got a piece of land nobody wants anybody to build on and
they've spent millions. They could have bought the property for
the amount --

Val>> -- for the amount they spend on the legal fees.

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> Right, and I think it's time for an
evolution in our environmental way we're trying to stand for the
environment. I think for years we needed to say no, no, no, no,
but you know, we're running out of land. Developers are running
out of land to develop. I have a good friend who is a planner
and she says that developers would rather know exactly what she
wants them to do and they would rather do less than get into
these battles where they get halfway through a project or
halfway through the approval of a project and you start changing
the rules.

So I think it's a good time. I think it's an opportune time for
Malibu, for anybody that's got a local community problem. You
know, we think about Malibu because it's so high-profile, but
there are communities throughout the Santa Monica mountains.
There are little neighborhoods where they're trying to do the
same thing, trying to preserve their piece of homes that they
have defined for themselves, and they're taking their own
actions. I think they need the input from the outside. They
need the help from the outside to go ahead and do that.

Val>> So a lot fewer attorneys and a lot more just talking to
each other.

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> Right, a lot more creative thinking.

Val>> Well, Penny Grenoble O'Malley, thank you so much for
"Malibu Diary".

Penny Grenoble O'Malley>> Thank you. It was nice talking to
you.

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

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or
contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> It's something few film critics would have predicted even
a year ago. Documentaries are not only a hot ticket at the box
office, but they've entered the political fray and are
influencing the presidential election. It all began with the
phenomenal success of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9-11" and now
the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative company, will pre-
empt its primetime programming on sixty-two TV stations in order
to air an anti-Kerry documentary. So how did films become part
of political campaigns? Vicki Curry talked with filmmakers who
are wielding a new political weapon.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> The documentary has stepped out of the shadows
and into the spotlight. Michael Moore has become a celebrity
and his film, "Fahrenheit 9-11", has grossed over a hundred
million dollars at the box office.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> Now there are more than a dozen other political
documentaries playing, like "Bush's Brain" made by Michael Shoob
and Joseph Mealey.

Joseph Mealey>> And Michael Moore helped us a lot by showing
that he could make a documentary that was really entertaining,
but also about very serious subjects.

Robert Greenwald>> If I sat here a year ago and said to you
that a documentary about the war is going to gross a hundred
million dollars, you would have committed me to an institution.
I mean, it was inconceivable. But he did it and it broke all
the rules and it opened up every single door.

Wayne Slater>> "You may not see his fingerprints on everything.
You see what some people call the mark again and again."

Vicki Curry>> Digital cameras and editing have made filmmaking
affordable for anyone, but it's more timing than economics that
made this the year of the political documentary.

Robert Greenwald>> The specific period of time we're living in
politically is incredibly complicated. At the same time, the
primary media has become a thirty second sound bite media.

Vicki Curry>> Producer Robert Greenwald built his career on TV
movies, but recently turned to documentaries. He's behind
"Outfoxed" and the trilogy, "Unprecedented", "Uncovered" and
"Unconstitutional".

Robert Baer>> "I was the chief in collecting information on
Iraq through the mid-1990's. I know what we had and what we
didn't have and I'm here to tell you there was no information."

Robert Greenwald>> They are a response to the times we live in
and the craving from people for information at the same time
that the mainstream media has primarily given up its former role
of being a provider of information.

>> "The so-called 9/11 Commission has already been meeting.
This is not what did he know and when did he know it stuff. Do
not turn this into Watergate."

Peter Broderick>> I think there is more dissatisfaction among
people about sort of mainstream media coverage of the elections
and the issues than any time I can remember.

Vicki Curry>> Film executive, Peter Broderick, created a
website called "filmstoseebeforeyouvote" in response to the
large number of political documentaries.

Peter Broderick>> All of a sudden, people have an alternative.
They say, well, there are independent films out there. There
are filmmakers that have a point of view and have information
that we're not going to get otherwise.

Spc. Thomas Borden>> "There is certain stuff we could and we
couldn't take. I'm not going to go into detail about that
because we all got a little something."

Vicki Curry>> Many of these films will never play in theaters.
The major studios shy away from controversy, so most of the
filmmakers bypassed the Hollywood system and found a new way to
distribute their films.

Peter Broderick>> They're using their own websites and selling
tapes or DVDs off their websites directly to consumers and that
can be done not just in the United States, but globally.

Robert Greenwald>> We spread the word on the internet. We set
up a website. We were in business. We didn't need a big
studio, we didn't need a television network and we could get the
word out there very quickly.

>> "The administration chose Guantanamo as an island outside
the sovereignty of the United States, but subject to our
exclusive control and they did that for the specific purpose of
avoiding the law."

Vicki Curry>> The documentaries seem to be heavy on interviews
and light on production value, which doesn't seem to matter to
audiences. With sales topping 100,000 DVDs, political groups
have taken notice.

Robert Greenwald>> We want to reach people. Even though I
love, love, love to read, it's a whole lot more effective. You
have a house party with a film. You don't have a house party
and have people read a book to you.

Michael Shoob>> We want them re-engaged in the process and I
think Michael Moore's films, Robert Greenwald's film, our film,
are all doing that.

Robert Greenwald>> People start showing it and making copies
and showing other people and discussion and taking action and
it's doing its work.

>> "In Miami, the demonstration was led by Republican
staffers."

Robert Greenwald>> The canvassing board, when they did
reassemble publicly, just decided to stop counting altogether.

Vicki Curry>> These filmmakers want their movies to have an
impact on the political process, so they help each other out.
They show their films together, share experience and have links
to the other movies on their website. It's all very supportive,
but maybe that's because they're all liberals. Did the
Democrats plan this wave of documentaries?

Joseph Mealey>> What did not happen was that there's this left-
wing leftist conspiracy out of Hollywood to make a bunch of
documentaries to get George Bush out of office. We both started
this on our own with our own financing just as a way to express
ourselves and our political views.

Peter Broderick>> There's been a tradition with documentary
filmmakers for years to make films that are critical of whatever
the conventional wisdom is and to try to, you know, raise other
points of view. I don't think there's the same impulse in, you
know, on the conservative side.

[Film Clip]

Robert Greenwald>> The films and the books have been more from
the progressive side and it's because we don't have a Fox News.
We don't have talk radio, so that's where our means of
expression go.

Vicki Curry>> However, there have been a few attempts by
conservative filmmakers to counter the documentaries. One has
positioned itself as an alternative program to "Fahrenheit 9-
11".

>> "One Hollywood filmmaker who claims to be nonpolitical has
written and produced what he calls a documentary that many
critics quickly disclaim is pure propaganda, dedicated to the
sole purpose of damaging the president's image."

Vicki Curry>> Seeing films from opposite ends of the political
spectrum raises the question: Can the information in them be
trusted?

Robert Greenwald>> I feel a greater responsibility on these
films that on any other films I've made to make sure everything
is really researched and really checked into.

>> "Republicans appeared five times as often as Democrats on
one-on-one newsmaker interviews. That means that Republicans
made up eighty-three percent of the partisan guests while
Democrats made up just seventeen percent."

Peter Broderick>> In a way, I think that a lot of the
independent films are like Op Eds and I think that's certainly
true of "Fahrenheit". I think when it's a filmmaker with a
point of view who's open about that point of view, then you can
sort of factor that in when you're considering the information
that, you know, he or she is marshaling in their argument.

Michael Shoob>> I think it would be ludicrous to say, as a
filmmaker, you make a movie and you don't have a point of view.
We have a strong point of view.

Joseph Mealey>> We don't hope to change everybody's mind. We
just hope that we get people talking about the ideas.

>> "There was a sense in Washington that Clinton was not their
kind of person."

>> "The strategy was to use anything to inflict damage to his
presidency."

Vicki Curry>> People do seem to be talking. These films are
getting attention around the globe from political campaigns, the
movie business and the press. The filmmakers are taking this
moment in history to speak their minds.

Robert Greenwald>> You know, there's a huge amount of interest
in these films because they are about something and part of the
job is to use those opportunities to talk about this. Films
allow you to talk about the issues and that's partly what you
want to do. Talk about the movies that you love, how you made
them and also talk about the issues that are why you made the
film.

Michael Shoob>> I think the worst thing as a filmmaker you can
experience is have somebody leave your film and say, well, that
was good. End of paragraph. That's the end. You know, with
our film, they're talking, they argue with us, they argue with
each other. You know, they want to go out and have a discussion
for an hour and a half. That's what moviemaking should be
about.

George W. Bush>> "I call upon all nations to do everything they
can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this
drive."

Val>> As Vicki Curry mentioned, there's a website that links
you to nearly all the political documentaries. It's
www.filmstoseebeforeyouvote.org. 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 --

DNA is a powerful crime-fighting tool, but should everyone
arrested have to provide a sample?

>> We might as well just take the DNA of everybody in
California and just put that on the internet and make it
publicly accessible because that's what Proposition 69 is going
to do.

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