01/07/05

LC050107

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

While most of Southern California has lost touch with its
agricultural roots, one area is determined to protect its
farmland.

Steve Bennett>> If you want to develop, you have to come to the
citizens and get all of the citizens to vote in favor of this
urban sprawl project.

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>> Are we destined to become a metropolis of concrete, wall
to wall malls, subdivisions, freeways and factories? Well, in
our special series on surviving sprawl, we look at the
alternatives and take you to a county that has moved
aggressively to save its open space. But as Saul Gonzalez
learned in Ventura County, even limits have their limits.

Saul Gonzalez>> The Los Angeles of today is a metropolis, a
place synonymous with congestion and sprawl, yet only a couple
of generations ago, Los Angeles County was an agricultural
breadbasket. In fact, up until the 1950's, it was the leading
county in the nation in farm production, growing everything from
oranges to alfalfa.

As Los Angeles's population mushroomed in the last half of the
twentieth century, the groves and fields quickly vanished,
replaced with bumper crops of homes, shopping malls and
freeways. And as development continues today far outside Los
Angeles, so does the decline of Southern California agriculture
and open space. That's especially true in San Bernardino and
Riverside Counties. Here, land where citrus groves and
vineyards once grew is rapidly being replanted with suburban
sprawl.

John Young>> These homes are all under construction. They're
probably about, oh, a good forty-five days from delivery.

Saul Gonzalez>> Inland Empire home developer, John Young, was
born here. He acknowledges that little remains of the rural
landscape he knew as a boy. What was this region like when you
were a kid?

John Young>> Orange grove trees, fields, farms. Almost all the
Inland Empire was known for farming, orange groves, what you
call dry crops that didn't take much water, those types of
things, but mostly a rural farming area.

Saul Gonzalez>> And in your lifetime, it's changed before your
eyes, hasn't it?

John Young>> Oh, yeah. It's changed immensely. The population
has increased, more housing, more shopping, more freeways, more
things that happen when you have growth.

Saul Gonzalez>> In just one recent two-year period, over 36,000
acres of Inland Empire farm and grazing land were lost to
development, an area larger than the city of San Francisco. Yet
as growth consumes more agricultural land in Southern
California, one place has taken a stand to protect its wide open
spaces and farm heritage: Ventura County.

Agriculture is still a multi-billion dollar industry in this
county of over 800,000 people supporting farmers and field
hands, packers and shippers. This farm economy also sustains a
semi-rural way of life here evident in sights that have long
vanished from other parts of Southern California: farmers
preparing their fields for replanting, roadside stands selling
locally grown produce and wide citrus groves separating
communities.

Steve Bennett>> Ventura County is unique in Southern California
because we still have a sense of place.

Saul Gonzalez>> Steve Bennett is chair of the Ventura County
Board of Supervisors and a long-time land use activist. He's
made it his mission to protect Ventura County's rural life from
development.

Steve Bennett>> Every time you leave your city, you travel
through open space and agricultural land before you go to the
next city. Every time. So you have people constantly making
references so that, if 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, we didn't grow up
in this sort of urban area where you spend all of your time in.

Saul Gonzalez>> In the 1990's, activists concerned about
increased suburban growth in Ventura County and the clout of
developers to get projects approved came together to plot
strategy. Their goal was to radically change the politics of
development in the county.

Steve Bennett>> I was not interested in fighting this project
or that project. Instead, what I was attracted to was saying
how can we actually change the rules of the game? Because it
was my belief that the game was stacked against us. Local
politicians are dominated in most areas by the pro development
industry and those are the people that are paying attention
every day because their livelihoods are based on their
relationships with those local city officials that approve
development and all of that stuff.

Saul Gonzalez>> They set the rules of the game.

Steve Bennett>> That's right.

Saul Gonzalez>> The rules of the game were changed when
activists successfully convinced voters to pass a series of
countywide and municipal initiatives known collectively as
S.O.A.R., or Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources. The
S.O.A.R. initiatives put strict growth boundaries around Ventura
County communities. If developers wanted to build in rural land
beyond those boundaries, they had to go to the voters for their
approval.

Steve Bennett>> The change we came up with and fortunately the
courts have ruled as constitutional, we said if you want to
develop, you have to come to the citizens and get all of the
citizens to vote in favor of this urban sprawl project. And if
you can't convince the citizens of it, then you can't build the
project.

Saul Gonzalez>> Since the S.O.A.R. initiatives passed in 1998,
supporters say they've shown Ventura County residents that
suburban sprawl isn't inevitable.

Steve Bennett>> The record has been that, if they are smaller
projects that somebody can make a common sense argument for, the
citizens approve it. And if it is a big massive development
where somebody thinks that they can just come in and spend a lot
of money on a campaign and that they'll hoodwink everybody into
it or they'll sort of bribe everybody into it with some vague
promises about what they'll do, those don't pass.

Saul Gonzalez>> However, not everyone in Ventura County rallies
around the S.O.A.R. solution. The biggest critics of this
county's revolution in land use planning comes from people you
might think would embrace efforts to keep real estate rural:
Ventura County's farmers.

Rob Roy>> We believe that, as farmers, it's their inherent
right to use their property in a reasonable way and as they see
fit and it shouldn't be subject to the electorate to decide for
the farmer what they're going to be doing with their property.

Saul Gonzalez>> Rob Roy is President of the Ventura County
Agricultural Association. He argues the S.O.A.R. initiatives
prevents farmers in the troubled agricultural economy from
getting their properties rezoned and selling them off to
residential and commercial developers for a large profit. To
Roy, S.O.A.R. means public meddling in private property rights.

Rob Roy>> Because what's happening here is you've got ballot
box zoning. We elect officials to deal with these complex
issues. We've got planning commissions and building commissions
and now what we're doing is allowing the electorate to decide in
every instance whether someone who has private property over
here can rezone their property in order to build something on
their property that they choose to do. Now however you wish to
characterize that, that's certainly up to you.

Steve Bennett>> What we contend is that nobody has a right to
demand their land be rezoned for development. We live here in a
residential neighborhood. I might be able to say, you know, I
can make a lot of money if I could put a McDonalds right here in
my front yard, but that's not fair to my neighbors who bought
houses in a residential neighborhood. The same thing is true of
farmers. If they buy a farm in the middle of a greenbelt, they
shouldn't say, well, you know, I can make a lot of money by
putting a subdivision here. That's going to impact every other
farmer around there. That's not the farmer's right. The farmer
can make that as a request, but that's not their right.

Saul Gonzalez>> The development community, both in and outside
of Ventura County, argues that efforts to curb growth like
S.O.A.R. cripple its ability to meet mushrooming housing
demands.

John Young>> In the state of California, we think we need
250,000 units built per year and we're building about 200,000
right now. So what does that do? You keep adding that up for a
year, in ten years that's 500,000 homes that we need. So it
accumulates every year that we don't build enough homes.

Saul Gonzalez>> So what's a consequence of that?

John Young>> Higher prices. Market prices go up. That means
the homebuyer coming in here today will pay a higher price next
year if we cannot as an industry build more homes and keep the
supply-demand ratio even rather than out of whack where you have
much more demand than you do supply.

Saul Gonzalez>> As Southern California struggles to meet
exploding housing demands, Ventura County has chosen a unique if
controversial response to development predators. The passage of
years will determine whether suburbs and farm fields can
peacefully coexist here. For Life and Times, I'm Saul Gonzalez.

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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 and 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 deepens, 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>> You're welcome. Thank you.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
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Life and Times
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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 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
so 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 films 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 that 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
really 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 new existed
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 social history, film history. The films are a treat
to see and it's got a wonderful sense of humor. I always 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 --

A group of teenagers commit a senseless act of animal cruelty.
Is there a way to turn their crime into a positive lesson for
kids?

>> Three bad boys killed a sting ray and two sharks.

>> I think it's going to take us some time to figure out why
these kids did what they did.

>> I think that big things can come out of little people. If
you care enough about the community and what's happening around
you, big changes can be made by anybody.

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