11/30/04

LC041130

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Our special report on surviving sprawl takes us to a place where
the car is not king.

Bev Perry>> People said we want a place to congregate, we want
a place to call our own. We want entertainment, we want places
to shop and eat. We want a gathering spot for the community and
I think that's what we got.

Val>> And then, a guide to the best films you never saw. We
talk with film critic, Kenneth Turan, about his favorite movies
that won't be coming to a theatre near you.

All that 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.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Southern California's population is expected to grow by
more than eight hundred people a day for the next twenty years
and the question is where will they all live? Now we could
cover every available foot of land with condos, apartments or
homes, or we could start thinking differently. Tonight in our
special series on surviving sprawl, Saul Gonzalez shows us an
alternative. It's called the new urbanism.

Saul Gonzalez>> Vast stretches of Southern California are being
covered in an expanding sea of suburban sprawl and as sprawl
grows, open space and farmland disappear, potential water
supplies dwindle and congestion worsens, turning drivers into
prisoners of their communities. If we somehow don't put the
brakes on sprawl, many experts fear disaster lies ahead. That's
the view of Katherine Perez, a transportation and land use
expert.

Katherine Perez>> What my concern is is that the legacy will be
an unlivable Southern California.

Saul Gonzalez>> Unlivable?

Katherine Perez>> Unlivable. A place where people don't want
to live, business don't want to be. You can't breath the air,
you can't drink the water and the resources are all used up, so
where are we going next?

Saul Gonzalez>> In an effort to stop sprawl from turning the
California dream into a nightmare, growing numbers of planning
and transportation experts are championing another way to plan
and build our communities. It's called new urbanism. New
urbanism is all about the search for alternatives to sprawl
through the creation of distinctive communities that give their
residents a sense of pride and place while also helping to
protect the environment. The key to doing that, say new
urbanism planners and architects, is to remember the past and
rediscover how we used to plan and build our neighborhoods and
communities.

Stefanos Polyzoides>> New urbanism invents little or nothing.
It just rearranges all the pieces of the built world in a
profoundly different way. It's everything in place and a place
for everything.

Saul Gonzalez>> Architects Stefanos Polyzoides and Elizabeth
Moule are leading practitioners and advocates of new urbanism.
They say its fundamentals are easy to understand.

Elizabeth Moule>> I think it's very simple. I think it's a
walkable city and it's a transit-oriented city. It's life with
an automobile, but also after an automobile. So it's very
simply said. It's making neighborhoods and towns compact,
pedestrian-oriented, mixed in use so that we don't have to jump
in those cars and make a small trip to drop our kids off at
school or to get a bottle of milk or what have you.

Saul Gonzalez>> New urbanists ask us to look beyond the homes
of many new suburban neighborhoods and recognize what we don't
see. No places to work, no stores and restaurants, no libraries
and post offices. These community essentials are often far
away, well beyond easy walking distance.

Katherine Perez>> We're putting houses down because of the
need, but we're not connecting to the other things that people
desire to have a full quality of life. That's the problem.

Saul Gonzalez>> Instead of designing sprawling low-density
communities that consume land and force residents to use cars to
get just about anywhere, new urbanists favor compact pedestrian-
centered development. An icon of this style of urban planning
is the community of Seaside on the Florida Panhandle. Seaside
is a kind of new urbanist Shangri La, a densely-zoned but
pleasant township where everything is just a walk or bicycle
ride away. Corner grocery stores, schools, churches and a host
of community services. Here the fascias of homes are graced
with front porches, not two-car garages. And to enhance a sense
of community, Seaside's designers also created ample public
squares and plazas where people can mingle. Yet for all of its
charms, can the planning principles that work in this modern-day
Mayberry work here?

>> "118 to West Los Angeles? Normally fifteen minutes. That's
taking forty-three to get through."

Saul Gonzales>> Auto-addicted and sprawl-covered Southern
California. One community that's done it on a more modest scale
is the city of Brea in North Orange County. It turned a once
dilapidated downtown into a vibrant new urbanist showpiece where
just steps away from the commercial main street is a village of
single-family homes.

Bev Perry>> It has been a bigger success. It's better than I
ever imagined it could be and I think, if you ask most people in
town, they'd tell you the same thing.

Saul Gonzalez>> An ardent supporter of new urbanism is Brea
City Council member, Bev Perry. She says new urbanist planning
has helped create a civic renaissance in her town.

Bev Perry>> People said we want a place to congregate, we want
a place to call our own. We want entertainment, we want places
to shop and eat. We want a gathering spot for the community and
I think that's what we got.

Saul Gonzalez>> The residential district is composed of
cottage-sized homes on small lots with quaint walkways between
them. Instead of big front yards, residents share a common
green space. They are planning touches meant to encourage old-
fashioned neighborliness.

Frank Welsh>> I've lived in California all my life, which is a
long time. I hardly ever knew my neighbor's names. I know all
my neighbors here. Everybody knows everybody.

Saul Gonzalez>> Frank Welsh retired here with his wife. In
comments that would be music to the ears of the new urbanist,
Welsh says he decided to move here because everything he needs
is just a walk away.

Frank Welsh>> I've got everything I need down here.

Saul Gonzalez>> You're not marooned at home if you don't have a
car?

Frank Welsh>> No, no. In fact, someday I will not have a car,
you know, if I live long enough. I'll get myself on a hotrod
wheelchair and go down there or have my wife drag me by the
heels. But it's there. It's neat.

Bev Perry>> One person told me, they said you know what? I
know I need my car during the week, but on Friday night, I drive
home, I park my car and, unless there's something that I'm going
out of town for, I don't have to get back in my car until Monday
morning when I go back to work.

Saul Gonzalez>> In spite of success in places like Brea, new
urbanism has critics, people who argue that its proponents can
be elitist, trying to impose their ideas on the way they think
people should live.

John Young>> I think people, including myself, want to be able
to have a little room, a little elbow room, to grow up in.

Saul Gonzalez>> John Young is a developer of single-family
homes in the Inland Empire, a place that's become synonymous
with sprawl. He says the majority of families buying homes want
to live in spacious subdivisions even if it means a long drive
between home and work.

John Young>> When you ask the public what they want, they still
want a back yard and a front yard. Eighty percent want to buy
out in the suburbs.

Saul Gonzalez>> They hate getting in their car, they hate
traffic, but they don't hate it that much.

John Young>> That's correct, because they want it. They want
it. They will drive an hour to get to it.

Katherine Perez>> Many developers will say, well, we're just
meeting the market demand. We're meeting consumer need. Well,
my response to that is you're not asking the consumers. You're
not giving consumers another choice. You're saying to them,
here, here's your one size fits all. If you want to buy a home,
this is what we're going to offer to you, disconnected from
anything else. You've got to own a car to get in and out of the
thing and you don't really have a choice in terms of how you
want to get around.

Saul Gonzalez>> However, new urbanist choices are popping up
all over Southern California from abandoned office buildings
turned into hip lofts in downtown Long Beach and Los Angeles to
an apartment complex over stores on Sunset and Vine in Hollywood
to the construction of residential and commercial projects just
steps away from the Gold Line trolley route connecting Los
Angeles to Pasadena. Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides'
architectural firm is responsible for the Gold Line projects.
Like other new urbanist architects, they hope their designs can
improve both our natural and social environments.

Elizabeth Moule>> What we're concerned about is bringing a
sense of community and a sense of togetherness back into cities
and allow people to walk and engage one another and to really
reduce their daily trips that they're taking right now in their
cars, and spending less time in their cars and more time with
one another.

Saul Gonzalez>> As our population swells, more suburban growth
is inevitable. However, suburbia's critics say that, if you
want to preserve the California dream as we grow, we'll need
greater imagination and innovation in how we create the
neighborhoods and communities of tomorrow. For Life and Times,
I'm Saul Gonzalez.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
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Val>> He came of age in the sixties, but Tom Hayden didn't just
watch them go by. He lived them. He joined the Freedom Riders,
the anti-war movement, and even spent some time in jail. Then
he spent eighteen years as a California lawmaker promoting civil
rights and working for progressive causes. Now at age sixty-
four, Hayden is retired and teaching at Occidental College.
That's where I met him to talk about a new book called "The
Sixties Chronicles". The coffee table book captures the sixties
with more than a thousand images and nine hundred essays. Tom
Hayden wrote the preface. Tom Hayden, thank you for spending
some time with us.

Tom Hayden>> Nice to be here.

Val>> You've written the preface for a book called "The Sixties
Chronicles" which, as you say, is your neighborhood, and you
describe them as "having risen from mysterious forces at the
margins of society and in essence re-channeling the mainstream."
That's quite a statement. A mysterious force? What do you
mean?

Tom Hayden>> Well, I mean mysterious in a couple of ways. I
say this because I teach the history of progressive social
movements and there seems to be a pattern. On the one hand,
they're mysterious in the sense that they're unpredictable.
They happened without announcement. No professor, no pundit, no
analyst has ever predicted such a movement before it began.

Secondly, it's mysterious when you look into, well, why did four
African-American students decide on the tactic of sitting in at
a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina on
February 1, 1960?

Val>> So you mentioned that it does have implications for
today. What are some of the lessons or thoughts about the
sixties? How did they influence us?

Tom Hayden>> Well, you saw in the recent presidential election.
People couldn't get away from it. John Kerry with shrapnel in
his body being accused of being weak on national defense.
Vietnam at the center of the debate even though it was thirty
years ago. Many of the issues on the table are issues that were
put there by social movements in the thirties, you know, like
collective bargaining, social security, etc., or the sixties,
regulation of corporate power, environmentalism and so on.

I once thought the sixties were over and now, in my old age,
I've begun to think that these things never end, that we're in
the struggle over the meaning and the memory of the sixties, and
it determines the political agenda.

Val>> Now a phrase that you use in your preface is "might have
been". Things, events, progress that might have been, had it
not been for a series of assassinations and some of the more
dramatic moments of the sixties.

Tom Hayden>> That's a phrase of the journalist, Jack Newfield.
He said it after the murder of Robert Kennedy that, instead of
has-beens, we were doomed to become might have beens. In the
sixties, which is quite a kaleidoscope of events, it's often
forgotten how many assassinations there were at key moments
equivalent to the killing of Lincoln at the height of the Civil
War, the two Kennedys, King, Malcolm X and so on.

If it were not for the assassinations, it's my conclusion that
Dr. King would have rallied the Peace Movement, the Poor
Peoples' Campaign and the Civil Rights Movement into a very
broad force, that it may well have elected Robert Kennedy in
1968 or that, going back, if John Kennedy had lived, the
evidence is that he would not have escalated the war in Vietnam.

So our lives, my life, your life, the history of America, would
have been changed in a different way were it not for the
assassinations. A lot of theorists of social movements or
writers about society just don't include assassinations as
having political effect. They think of them as freak accidents.
But I think the assassinations prevented the sixties from coming
to a progressive majority.

Val>> Now you're teaching about the sixties now, but for you
it's not a theoretical experience. You lived it in a variety of
ways.

Tom Hayden>> Well, I'm an adviser on social studies for some
ninth graders and I teach here at Occidental College. I try to
be present. I mean, when I give a test, I notice that, when the
students list achievements of the sixties, usually the first is
the eighteen year old vote. That's simply because it's the one
thing they have a personal connection to that happened as a
result of the sixties. They voted this November. Or maybe
affirmative action if they're a woman or an Asian. They feel a
personal impact of the sixties on them.

For the most part, though, it's history so ancient that it's
just unbelievable. I try to relate it to the present, to the
global justice movements of today and to the anti-Iraq movement
of today to help students understand that there is this process.
But if you look at American society, it's very interesting.
Most things that we treasure as Americans were fought for by
people who are not really well remembered anymore and were
considered very radical and ahead of their time.

Val>> What's your most poignant memory of the sixties? I know
you spent time in jail, you were part of the Peace Corps
movement.

Tom Hayden>> Well, there are highs and lows. The high that,
you know, any young person will tell you is finding yourself in
a situation where you're tested, where you're beaten up, where
you're thrown in jail and where you're completely discredited
and termed disreputable. That's an experience I actually think
everyone should have because it puts you in touch with most
people on earth who are hurting. Then the low would be the
murders. The murders just were Shakespearean.

Val>> So politically, do you think that we're headed toward a
greater divide and perhaps another sixties decade in the future
or do you think we're managing to synthesize and come together?

Tom Hayden>> I think we're in a divide. It will either become
greater or it will be resolved by having a greater democracy. I
don't know. But certainly if the war in Iraq, certainly if the
income gap and wealth gap grows, certainly if the environment
starts to deteriorate further, certainly if the world turns its
back on our ventures, the great divide will be unfortunately the
future. On the other hand, it's always possible, because these
periods come and go with great velocity, that we'll move more in
a direction of a greater democracy, corporate accountability and
so on. Who knows, but certainly the past is never done with us
and it repeats.

I think what's going on globally today is very much like what
happened in the sixties. Instead of civil rights in the south,
we have sweatshops in the south of the planet and in our own
cities. We have an idealistic generation of activists who are
trying to do something about peace and justice. We have some in
the administration who want to create a kind of fortress
America, a kind of an empire. We live in danger of a repeat of
the final part of the sixties when the divide really deepened
very, very dangerously. But who knows? I was more depressed
then and we're still here (laughter). You just don't know. The
tradeoff will be a more stable America, but only if it's based
on greater justice and democracy. We will see.

Val>> Well, Tom Hayden, thank you so much and thank you for
bringing us a beautiful book. Appreciate your time.

Tom Hayden>> Thank.

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Val>> It's the season for the Hollywood blockbusters and, while
big movies like "The Incredibles" and "Alexander" get all the
press, there are a lot of small movies that come and go without
much fanfare. Well, Los Angeles Times critic, Kenneth Turan,
felt compelled to remedy that by spotlighting some of his
favorite small films. He talked with Vicki Curry about his new
book called "Never Coming to a Theatre Near You".

Vicki Curry>> Kenneth Turan, the subtitle of your book is "A
Celebration of a Certain Kind of Movie". What kind of movie
exactly?

Kenneth Turan>> Well, it's the kind of movie I think that we're
really looking for and it's kind of says something about movie
culture today that it's rare. This is a film that engages us.
That's intelligent, that's sophisticated, that's entertaining in
the broad sense, that doesn't insult the audience, that really
involves us, all aspects of our mind. These films are rare.
The studios are not interested in these films. They come from
smaller places, documentaries, independent films, foreign
language films. We all know these films when we see them, we
all forget their names. They come and go very fast. This is a
way to really capture them, to see them again, to remember them.
You can rent them on DVD.

Vicki Curry>> You break the films down into four different
groups: English language, foreign language, documentary and
classics. Why don't you tell me what some of your favorite
English language films are?

Kenneth Turan>> Well, one of the points I think with the
English language films is "The Station Agent" and I think of it
because sometimes this is an experience I know ordinary viewers
have where you hear about a film and say, well, this isn't for
me. As a critic, I have to go to these films and often they're
really wonderful. "The Station Agent" was at Sundance. It's
about the hero who is a man who's four feet five inches tall,
who's tired of human society and he goes off to an abandoned
train station in New Jersey.

[Film Clip]

Kenneth Turan>> This sounded like bad Ingmar Bergman to me. I
said, do I have to see this? This sounds really dreadful. I
went to see the film and I was captivated. It's very funny,
it's very wry, it's got a great sense of humor, it's got a great
supporting cast including Patricia Clarkson, Bobby Cannavale.
It's a wonderful film.

Vicki Curry>> Speaking of Sundance, another film on your list
is one that I saw at Sundance many years ago called "Safe". It
was an early film with Julianne Moore and done by writer-
director, Todd Haynes.

Kenneth Turan>> "Safe" is a film -- we saw these films and "Wag
the Dog" is another film. These films start to seem more
prescient as the years go on. "Safe" is a film about a woman
played by Julianne Moore -- I still think one of her best
performances -- who is kind of like, in some indefinable way,
attacked by modern society. This modern life kind of wears her
down. She gets really, really ill. It's about an attempt to
find out what's wrong with her and the attempt to make her
better. But it's not a problem movie. It doesn't resolve in
the way a classic studio film would resolve. It's really more
the examination of the innocent.

Vicki Curry>> One you also mentioned, "Wag the Dog", which is
actually a fairly large movie with major stars. So why is this
one in the book?

Kenneth Turan>> "Wag the Dog" had major stars, but it was a
smaller film and, because it was a very pointedly political
film, it didn't really get the push and it didn't get really the
audience interest it should have had.

[Film Clip]

Kenneth Turan>> I think people maybe thought it was too
whatever. You know, often films that we think if we've seen a
film and our friends have seen the film, everyone has seen the
film. I've found, when I've talked to people about this, well,
no, they've heard about it, they know all about it, they haven't
actually seen it.

Vicki Curry>> Moving on to foreign language films, what are
some of your favorites?

Kenneth Turan>> Kind of as a film culture, Americans are kind
of in some ways resistant to foreign language films. We don't
like to read subtitles and we don't like dubbed films. A lot of
countries don't like to read subtitles, but they accept dubbed
films. Americans don't want either, so it's a hard sell to get
people in to foreign language films. But again, I view them as
kind of windows on other societies.

There's a Japanese film I really love because it's alphabetical.
It's the first film in a foreign language section. It's called
"Afterlife". It's a very delicate idea. The notion is that,
after you die, you go to kind of a way-station. In this way-
station, what happens is that the people who work there, their
job is to help you select one memory from your entire life, your
happiest memory, and this is the memory you take with you for
eternity. All your other memories are blocked out and, for
eternity, you just live with this one wonderful memory. It's a
wonderful idea. It's a very delicate, unusual idea. It's
brought beautifully.

Vicki Curry>> Several documentaries have been quite successful
in the last year or two, but I'm certain there are other
documentaries that were made in the years before that that you'd
like to mention.

Kenneth Turan>> Oh, yeah. I mean, we do live, as you say, in a
golden age of documentaries. I think the fact that they can be
made more cheaply, they can be made using digital cameras,
that's really helped the documentary field a lot. But some of
these films, I mean, there's one that I really love talking
about because it was such a treat to see because it illuminates
a kind of little-known facet of film history. It's a film
called "East Side Story". It's a documentary about musicals
made behind the Iron Curtain.

[Film Clip]

Kenneth Turan>> This is something I only vaguely -- it's both
in Russia and East Germany. There was an entire industry making
Soviet musicals, making musicals where people kind of dance on
tractors and sing next to Harvester machines. You know, it's
not like there were one or two films. There was a whole
industry. Stalin loved these films. It's just a fascinating
focused film history. The films are a treat to see and it's got
a wonderful sense of humor. I was love at the very end when the
credits crawl at the very end of the film. The last thing you
see on the screen is it says "This film is dedicated to Karl
Marx without whom none of these films would have been
necessary."

Vicki Curry>> You have a section in your book about classic
films, but haven't we heard about all the great classics?

Kenneth Turan>> Well, again, some of them we know about, but we
may not have gotten around to seeing. It always surprises me
when I talk to people about the classic films. They know it's a
great film, but there's never an opportunity to see it. Some of
the films that I list as classics are really kind of unusual
films that people may not have seen.

There's a wonderful French kind of horror film called "Eyes
Without a Face". It's just a wonderful spooky film. It's about
a mad scientist whose daughter has her face destroyed in a car
accident and he decides he wants to transplant peoples' faces.
He kidnaps young women, takes their faces and tries to
transplant the skin on his daughter's face. You never see
anything. This is a film that there's no blood, there's no
gore. You see nothing but the creation of mood, the creation of
unease. The woman without a face spends the whole movie walking
around with like a Japanese no-mask over her face and wearing
these enormous Givenchy housecoats. The imagery in this film
will just absolutely put you away.

Vicki Curry>> At the end of your book, you have a section
called "Retrospectives". What's that?

Kenneth Turan>> "Retrospectives" are a chance -- because of
showings around town -- a chance to look at the work of older
directors en mass. You know, sometimes The American Cinemateque
or UCLA will show like ten or twelve directors' films. For me,
if watching too many of the current films can be dispiriting,
watching great old directors' films en masse is very energizing.
It really makes me feel like excited all over again about films.
There's a great American director named Anthony Mann from the
forties and fifties and very few people, you know, see his films
anymore. There's a great French director, Jean-Pierre Melville.
Directors that, you know, film buffs know, critics know all
these people, but most viewers, even film fans, haven't had
reason to be exposed to these people. So these pieces are a way
to get people to say, look, here's a director who's done really
interesting work. You can rent all his films. Everyone can do
what I did. I mean, that's the wonderful thing about DVDs. You
can rent all of them. You can put on your own festival.

Vicki Curry>> Kenneth Turan, author of "Never Coming to a
Theatre Near You", thank you so much for your time and your
knowledge.

Kenneth Turan>> Well, thank you. This was fun.

Val>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at
Life and Times, thanks so much 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 --

Taking a stand for farmland. Our special report on sprawl takes
us to a place where open space is a way of life.

>> You get that psychological relief from that sense of
relentless urbanization that is not natural. That's not the
natural state of man. I mean, he didn't grow up in this sort of
urban area where you spend all of your time in.

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