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Life & Times Transcript
08/10/06 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- What's more important? Train safety or peace of mind for residents? Mike Vogelvang>> When you get trains like that coming every night, sometimes three o'clock, five o'clock, four o'clock, whatever, it's just totally stressful. Val Zavala>> And then, our movie critics rate a mother-daughter survival story, a couple's second thoughts and America's tragedy as Oliver Stone tells it. These stories and more on tonight's Life and Times. Announcer>> 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 Zavala>> There are scores of songs about the romance of trains and yet living next to a train is another story. The noise can drive you crazy yet you can't just ask the engineer to hold it down. It's a classic case of public safety versus quality of life. So is there anything the residents can do? Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, has our story. [Film Clip] Roger Cooper>> Hear this sound and you know instantly what it means. A train is on the way and everything in its path had better get out of the way. By law, about a quarter mile before every grade crossing, the engineer punches this button for a very loud, very powerful series of blasts from the train's horn. Two longs, one short, then a long blast right into the crossing. Bells ding, gates come down and another freight or passenger liner roars by. For most of us, this is something we experience occasionally from our cars. But for the people who live in the neighborhoods alongside railroad tracks, it's a whole different matter. Jim Owens>> We have over four hundred eleven trains coming through here twenty-four hours, seven days a week. That's a huge, horrendous nightmare. [Film Clip] Isabel Reed>> You're sitting and enjoying the peace and quiet and suddenly you hear this blast, you know. It does. It increases your blood pressure (laughter). Mike Vogelvang>> When you get trains like that coming every night, sometimes three o'clock, five o'clock, four o'clock, whatever, it's just totally stressful. Roger Cooper>> After all those years of all those trains, all those horns blowing at all hours of the day and night, some Orange County residents have decided that they've had enough. They've gone into their neighborhoods with petitions. They're trying to get the trains to quiet down. Jim Owens of Orange lives in an historic house near a line with sixteen crossings in about a four-mile stretch. Jim Owens>> You get excessive, continuous and unnerving noise that affects your health. Roger Cooper>> You'll often find him down at the tracks with his sound meter. His group put together this video showing the sound meter on screen as it measured train horn noise. Jim says he regularly gets readings over a hundred decibels, right up there with the jackhammers and the rock concerts. Steve Wylie of Metrolink says the horns are required to be loud. Steve Wylie>> Trains have a requirement to blow whistles at a designated decibel level. It can't be lower. It can't be higher. Roger Cooper>> Isabel Reed lives in Santa Ana just a quarter block from the tracks. Her group recently handed the City Council petitions signed by more than seven hundred residents asking for help in stopping train horns. What's it like to be in your house when this happens? Isabel Reed>> My husband and I have a family room in the back of our house and, when we're sitting there enjoying a television program and it's right at the climax and you want to hear what the actors have to say and the train goes by, you miss the whole sequence. We have friends over and we're chatting away. All of a sudden, I see their eyes getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I ask them what's wrong. "Is the train going to come through the house?" I mean, that's how loud it is. [Film Clip] Roger Cooper>> For Steve Wylie and Metrolink, it's not just the crossings. They have to worry about the safety of a whole trainload of people. Steve Wylie>> To balance the interest of peace and quiet in a neighborhood and railroad safety and, of course, our emphasis is primarily on safety. Roger Cooper>> Metrolink knows all too well what can happen when a train plows into a vehicle in a rail crossing. This crash was staged as a demonstration to make a powerful point. [Film Clip] Roger Cooper>> Mark Challed of Connex has driven trains as an engineer and he thinks the horn is the most important safety device the engineer has. Mark Challed>> It's a heavy object and it takes a long period of time to stop. That's why the horn is essential because they have to have that to warn traffic. [Film Clip] Roger Cooper>> So what can be done about it? Well, just over a year ago, the Federal Railroad Agency approved a new program under which communities can apply to have their local crossing declared a quiet zone. Upgrade the crossing to meet higher safety standards and trains can go through without blowing their horns. That would make Mike Vogelvang of Orange sleep a lot easier. Right now, the night trains give him nightmares. Mike Vogelvang>> You really get kind of upset. You try to go back to sleep and almost you're back to sleep and the next train is coming. Art Brown>> They have a very valid argument about the noise. It is loud. Roger Cooper>> Metrolink Board Chairman, Art Brown, says Metrolink is willing to move toward quiet zones. Art Brown>> If we can do that safely where it both helps the citizen with the noise and do it safely where we don't have to worry about the train hitting a car or a pedestrian crossing the right-of-way, then I think it's a great idea. If we can accomplish both, then let's do it. Roger Cooper>> Placentia is about to become one of the first cities in southern California to implement quiet zones. Two extra crossing gates are now being added, and installations they call quad gates. They prevent anyone from weaving between the crossing arms at the last moment. And how quiet are quiet zones? Listen to this one in Texas, all bell and no blast. Other versions of the quiet zone use medians to keep cars from slipping around gates. Still others sound a small horn installed at the crossing instead of on the train, confining the blast to the immediate area. Steve Wylie>> We want to work very closely with communities who are interested in implementing quiet zones. Roger Cooper>> Even in quiet zones, engineers still have the right to blow the horn when they spot an emergency on the tracks ahead. Mark Challed>> It's probably the most nerve-wracking thing not knowing whether or not they're going to make it across in front of you or cars that go around the gate that they may or may not make it across. Roger Cooper>> But activist, Jim Owens, emphasizes quiet zones will be safe. Jim Owens>> In quiet zones, the quad gate is equal to or will exceed safety requirements of blowing a horn. Roger Cooper>> The one thing that could derail quiet zones is the cost. Isabel Reed>> To meet the quiet zone standards, they'd need an additional five million dollars. Now when we went before the City Council, they stated that they do not have that money available. In fact, Santa Ana is in the red as far as budgeting. Roger Cooper>> And the city of Orange is still trying to figure out where to get seven and a half million to quality its sixteen crossings. Will it be financially possible to have many quiet zones? Steve Wylie>> Well, I think so. A lot of communities are jumping on the bandwagon right now because the rule is in effect, but crossing improvements are not cheap. Roger Cooper>> There's an urgency in this quest for quiet zones because, over the next several years, even more trains will be coming down the tracks. Art Brown>> So as the trains increase, as the horns are going to increase, and people are really going to insist on quiet zones. Roger Cooper>> The clamor for quiet zones is getting louder. It may take time and money, but thousands of residents along the train tracks from Santa Ana to Placentia can't wait for train horns to become a blast from the past. In Orange County, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times". Val Zavala>> Police Chief, Bill Bratton, has been Los Angeles's top cop for more than four years now. He came from New York where there are twice as many officers per resident as there are in Los Angeles. One of Bratton's biggest challenges has been to increase the number of officers on the force. First, it was a money issue, but earlier this year, this Los Angeles City Council approved a hike in trash pickup fees. The additional millions will go to boost the force from about nine thousand officers to ten thousand. But qualified applicants are few and the competition among cities is fierce. In July, a minor feud broke out between Bratton and the City Council over drug policy for recruits. Some council members criticize the policy. Bratton responded by saying they "don't know what the hell they're talking about." I sat down with Chief Bratton to hear what he has to say about city politics and the recruitment challenge. One of your biggest challenges is recruitment. You want to hire a thousand new officers over the next five years. Why is it so hard? Chief William Bratton>> Well, we have three challenges right now. We have our normal attrition of three hundred some odd officers a year. That's going to be compounded by a program that was initiated several years ago that officers who are retiring agree to stay on for an extra five years. We have this year alone an additional three hundred officers that will be leaving under that program. So almost all the officers I'll hire this year will be to replace what's going out the door. The reason it's going to take us so long to hire the thousand officers is that we have to take care of normal attrition, that extra attrition, and then try to get new officers. But the challenge is that we only hire about one out of every twelve or thirteen applicants. We have very high standards. But we'll do it. The beauty of the trash fee is that we know that we can hire without interruption for the next five years and that's critically important. As for the last several years, we've been stop and go, stop and go, and young kids aren't going to wait around. They're going to take a job someplace else if they don't know with certainty that they have a job waiting for them at the end of the process. Val Zavala>> Is it more difficult in general, given our society and the values in society or how young people perceive police work? Is it harder to get young people interested in police work these days? Chief William Bratton>> There are a number of difficulties we're facing in the police profession and not just in Los Angeles in hiring young people. Everywhere in the country is having trouble hiring people. One, we have the war keeping a lot of young people in the service who might ordinarily be available. Two, we have a pretty good economy right now. Employment is very high. Unemployment is very low. We have a compounding factor in big cities in that a lot of the minority candidates that we seek to acquire, Latinos and African-American, the dropout rate is phenomenal before they ever get out of high school. We have a minimum of a high school education, but in a city like Los Angeles where fifty percent of the kids that we normally seek to go after don't even make it through high school, that compounds the issue of trying to hire minorities. So there's a lot of factors at work. We are a very aggressive agency in seeking out women, gays, ethnic diversity. The good news is, our department almost mirrors the community we police almost exactly in terms of our percentage of personnel. Val Zavala>> You mentioned that one of the things you might have to do is be more flexible or change some of the standards. Now that's led to some criticism that you have lowered the standard, especially in terms of drug use. What is the drug use standard for recruits? Chief William Bratton>> Actually, the issue was with tightening up rather than relaxing any standards. For example, we now hair test every candidate that gets through our process. Hair testing will give you drug use going back six months. The traditional urinalysis, which the department used for many years, will give you three days. So if somebody is a habitual drug user, they're not going to be able to stay off drugs for the six months we can test for. We use the polygraph. If they tell us, "Oh, I used drugs five years ago. I just experimented", we can confirm that answer through the polygraph. So we have the tightest hiring standards in the country for drug testing and we did not always have that system in place. So we've tightened our standards rather than lowered them. Additionally, we've put into a place a concept called "the whole police officer", the whole person. We look at all aspects of that person's life and, if there is an issue, we don't disqualify them necessarily just based on that issue. We take it in the context of that person's whole life. As a result, if somebody has made a mistake in the past that is not going to be repeated again, why deny ourselves access to a person that made a mistake such as somebody that might have experimented with marijuana in college? In today's day and age, it's a rare kid that probably gets through college without having some experience with some type of drug. Val Zavala>> So you're willing to consider that, consider past drug use, if it's confined, isolated, it has not become a problem? Chief William Bratton>> Experimental, not of a major consequence, and we can confirm that drug use by a polygraph and by hair testing. I would point out that the standards we use are the same as the FBI uses, the same that are used for top secret clearances in this country, so that what we are doing is not the exception. It's rather the norm. Val Zavala>> Now it's no secret that you've had some run-ins with the City Council. What do you feel the relations are between you and the City Council? Chief William Bratton>> Well, it's just the Council, by and large, is very good, but from time to time, they are strained. That's the nature of politics. From time to time, we have differences of opinion. We certainly have a difference of opinion on this issue, one that I'm happy to explain. I report to the Police Commission and will be giving a presentation to the Police Commission and we'll make a presentation to the council. Again, I'm very comfortable with what we're doing and, if the council seeks to disagree, well, if they can get a majority to overrule it, fine. That's their role and that's their responsibility. But I think you'll find the majority of the council members understand what we're doing, understand the importance of it and, more importantly, understand that we're still hiring the best candidates in America. Val Zavala>> To what extent do you think the tensions are a result of the fact that there's a former police chief on the council? Chief William Bratton>> Most of the tensions are a direct result of that and we can be very clear about that. But again, former police chief Parks, now council member Parks, basically we make cases to him and to his colleagues and, by and large, we get what we're looking for. Val Zavala>> Do you ever regret being so blunt? Chief William Bratton>> Not at all. Why should I regret that? That's my nature. Val Zavala>> (Laughter) Because it causes tension and squabbles and whatnot? Chief William Bratton>> That's life in the big city. If you can't stand it, get out of the business. We're not in this business to be polite to each other all the time. You're in this business to do the best job we can and, unfortunately, sometimes you have to be very pointed in making your remarks and that's the way it is. Val Zavala>> Chief Bratton, thank you very much for your time and your hard work. Chief William Bratton>> Good being with you. Announcer>> 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. Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is from director Oliver Stone and it's his movie that tells the story of two survivors of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The movie, "World Trade Center", stars Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena, Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal. [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Lael Loewenstein of Variety, and Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com. Lael, what did you think of "World Trade Center"? Lael Loewenstein>> Well, on the one hand, I found it very upsetting to think about even going to this film. Most of the people I talked to about it felt the same way. It's a very fresh, raw wound and who wants to go back there? On the other hand, really Oliver Stone with his interest and fondness in history is in many ways the right person to do it. This is the most apolitical film that Stone has ever made and it's really just a dramatization of the struggle to survive of these two men who were Port Authority workers who were stuck in the rubble for fourteen hours. It's very well done in terms of its historical authenticity. The sound design is absolutely superb. The art direction is quite amazing. But it's actually slow-going as a piece of drama. Larry Mantle>> Henry, what did you think? Henry Sheehan>> Well, I think there are two things going on here as far as Stone is concerned. One of them involves his status as a veteran of a war -- Vietnam, but I think almost any war. That is, for the man on the ground, the soldier fighting, the greater issues become less of a force than your loyalty to your fellow soldiers, that you're fighting for each other. The other one is that he's solidly in the tradition of American masculine filmmaking, a kind of Howard Hawks, Raul Walsh school. So this film is really quite excellent, I think, when it focuses on two men who end up pinned under the rubble and have to be rescued, which is really what the film is about. I thought that masculine side was very well-done. The film is also very well shot with large spaces contrasting with tight, small ones and how this is dynamic, how the size men have to operate in is always shifting. The parts with women I thought were totally inferior to that, but I really think this is a film very much worth seeing. Larry Mantle>> Writer David Mamet has written the film, "Edmond", which is adapted from an earlier stage work. It stars William H. Macy in the title role, the film directed by Stuart Gordon. [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> Lael, what did you think of "Edmond"? Lael Loewenstein>> Well, I'm a fan of William H. Macy who has collaborated with David Mamet on so many projects. This is actually an adaptation of Mamet's one-act play from, I think, more than twenty years ago. Macy plays Edmond, a man who descends into violence when he realizes that his upper middle class life is sort of worthless and meaningless. He promptly tells his wife that he's leaving her for reasons we don't really know and he goes out and kind of falls apart over one night. It's sort of like "After Hours" meets "Falling Down". It's a little bit comical, but becomes quite dark and disturbing. Mamet's stagy dialogue frequently bothers me, but I thought it was very well acted, and Macy really kind of plays with great understated eloquence, this man who's just really ripping apart at the seams. So I thought that part of it was quite good. There's a lot of good performances by Julia Stiles, Denise Richards, Mena Suvari. A great cast and it's a pretty good film. Larry Mantle>> Next is the film, "Conversations with Other Women". It stars Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter. [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> "Conversations with Other Women", Henry? Henry Sheehan>> This is a movie based on a dramatic gimmick, which is a very dangerous thing to do. It can work sometimes. Other times it can fall apart. This is a movie that actually works sometimes and falls apart both, which is pretty rare. Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart play a couple of people who meet in the aftermath of a wedding. The wedding party is coming -- you know, the final dances are being danced, the bride and the groom are leaving, and these two people are kind of left amid the strewn trash of the reception. They start talking to each other and they start flirting with each other. Then we find more and more about them and it turns -- well, there are surprises. Let's put it that way. I thought, you know, sometimes as a bantering comedy-drama, it works. Other times, the gimmick just reared its ugly head and kind of destroyed everything that was going on. As an acting showcase, it's pretty good. Carter and Eckhart are both attractive performers and they really can submerge themselves in the right kind of characters and these are the right kind of characters for them. Larry Mantle>> Lael? Lael Loewenstein>> Usually I find these kind of split screen techniques, like in the film "Time Code", really annoying. They're just distracting and it's hard to get into the story. In this case, I actually thought it worked rather well because a lot of times you're seeing one character on one side and the other on the other, so the emotional distance between them corresponds with the physical distance in separation of the screen. You also sometimes have one of the screens used for a flashback or illuminating the love affair that they had twenty years earlier. So there's a lot that goes on using this split screen technique that actually works. In contract to being a form for form's sake exercise, this is actually quite effective and a pretty entertaining film. Larry Mantle>> Our next movie is a Brazilian one, "The House of Sand". [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> Not to be confused with the earlier film, "The House of Sand and Fog", we have just "The House of Sand". Henry? Henry Sheehan>> Yeah, this is a very different film. You know, sometimes when you tell people that a film has tremendous landscapes, overwhelming landscapes, and, in this case, also seascapes, they think, "Oh, this is just going to be a scenery film." This is a film about vast, barren areas that engulf characters, but doesn't engulf the film. Andrucha Waddington tells the story of a woman and her daughter, then that daughter's daughter -- there are two generations played by the same actors, by the way. Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres, a very sexy Fernanda Torres -- and how they become kind of lost in the desert and take up with a colony of the descendants of escaped slaves on this very strange part of northern Brazil where the desert runs to the ocean. It's a psychological film, oddly enough, despite the backgrounds. It's about these characters, about how they cope, who they fall in love with, how they try to leave, and it takes place over sixty years. Larry Mantle>> Thanks for joining us for another FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle for our critics, Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com, and Lael Loewenstein of Variety inviting you to join us next week at this same time for the next FilmWeek on Life and Times. Val Zavala>> KPCC broadcasts a full hour of FilmWeek Friday mornings at eleven. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> 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. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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