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Life & Times Transcript

11/16/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

These giant landmarks are part of Orange County's history. Is that reason enough to save them?

Bruce Haas>> This is an icon. People know these blimp hangars. There aren't that many left.

Doug Bradley>> They're structures that really represent the service and sacrifice of Orange County veterans.

Val Zavala>> And then, a mockumentary on awards just in time for awards season. Will it win any honors from our critics?

It's all straight ahead 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>> What do you do with two massive structures built during World War II and now long past their prime? I'm talking about the blimp hangars near Tustin. Some people say that they should be torn down. Others have interesting ideas for their future. Roger Cooper takes a look at these Orange County landmarks.

Roger Cooper>> They are as much a part of the Orange County landscape as Disneyland, the Mission in Capistrano or John Wayne Airport. The Tustin blimp hangars, two giant relics of World War II that are still standing.

Bruce Haas>> This is an icon. People know these blimp hangars. There aren't that many left.

Doug Bradley>> This has been an icon for a number of generations and, to a lot of us, this represents Orange County.

Roger Cooper>> No one disputes the role these goliaths have played in Orange County's past. What's being debated now is their future. The hangars were built in 1942 at a cost of two and a half million dollars each. These massive wooden structures housed fleets of Navy blimps that patrolled the southern California coast in search of enemy submarines.

Announcer>> "Uncle Sam revives the dirigible as a defensive weapon. Soaring along, our skyship is idled down almost to the speed of a surface vessel."

Gerry Rubin>> The hangar represents the World War II generation and I have the greatest respect for those people. Knowingly or not, whether they served abroad or on the home front, they saved the world.

Roger Cooper>> But now the military is gone. The land is being turned over to Tustin and Orange County and the time has come to make some tough decisions about these aging and deteriorating buildings. Can they be put to a new use? Where would the money come from to maintain them? Are they even worth saving, or should they be torn down?

>> "Save the blimp hangars. Honk your horn. Honk your horn and make some noise."

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> To some veterans groups that have staged demonstrations, there's no question. The hangars should not be torn down. To them, they're nothing less than a national treasure.

To grasp the scale of what was built here, you have to step inside. How big is this blimp hangar? A thousand feet long, a hundred fifty-one feet high, nearly three hundred feet wide. Someone has figured out that you could put seventy-seven basketball courts inside here. You could stand the Statue of Liberty in here. And the Eiffel Tower could be placed inside this hanger on its side.

And if the hangars look familiar, it's because movie companies have valued them as shooting locations over the years. There's a Saab car commercial that was filmed inside the hangars.

Announcer>> "Introducing the all-new Saab 97X."

Roger Cooper>> Tom Hanks turned one into a lunar landing moonscape for "From the Earth to the Moon".

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> And Tustin pinched-hit for Hawaii in the 2001 movie, "Pearl Harbor". But in the real world, when it comes to the bottom line, is it practical to preserve these behemoths? Yes, it is, according to two groups who have developed competing proposals. They have their eye on the North Hangar which is in much better condition than the South Hangar. One proposal comes from a group of veterans. They want to surround the North Hangar with a major military museum to educate future generations.

Doug Bradley>> They're structures that really represent the service and sacrifice of Orange County veterans.

Roger Cooper>> Gerry Rubin of Sightline Productions has been helping with plans for the American Museum of Military History.

Gerry Rubin>> First and foremost, we want to preserve the hangars. We're going to restore it, preserve it, make it open to the general public for special events, cultural affairs, as well as let it be used for what it's being used as right now, which is blimp repair. So we're going to keep the hangar. We're then going to build a separate military museum, an eighty-six thousand square foot military museum.

Roger Cooper>> The veterans say their proposal, for which they've already received grants, would be much more than a military museum.

Gerry Rubin>> In addition, we want to then take the entire acreage and build a riverwalk, arts communities, galleries, studios, and really create a wonderful cultural area for Orange County.

Roger Cooper>> An alternative proposal comes from a company called Industrial Realty Group, or IRG, in Downey. IRG envisions turning the hangar into a giant athletic and recreation complex to be called "Play", a Tustin legacy. IRG's Bruce Haas says it would be all things athletic including gyms, stores and sports restaurants.

Bruce Haas>> Inside the blimp hangar, we're planning on doing sports-related retail and then recreation, climbing mountains, sports zone, gym, basketball, volleyball, as well as this multi-purpose demonstration zone that you can hook up, you know, half-pike skill or do indoor skydiving and all kinds of wild ideas inside there.

Roger Cooper>> IRG would put up forty million to build this hangar athletic complex which would also be surrounded by thirty acres of parks and athletic playing fields.

Bruce Haas>> Anywhere from, you know, baseball to lacrosse to football to soccer and an off-roads test track for cars, kayaks for the water course in it, canoes and a mountain bike course. Our vision here was to create a parks setting on the outside with your traditional park, have the parking in between, and then have the support retail and other recreation inside the blimp hangar.

Roger Cooper>> The North Hangar is under the jurisdiction of Orange County Supervisors and there is no guarantee that they will approve either proposal. In the meantime, fans of blimps and the big hangars are holding out hope that they can convince public officials this is something worth saving.

Doug Bradley>> They're the largest free-standing wooden structures in the world and they're something we should preserve. The reason they were made of wood is because all of the steel during World War II was going for ships and tanks and military equipment. What we did have available was Ponderosa Pine, so they made them out of a wooden structure. Just wonderful architectural detail that went into building them. They're like cathedrals. Wooden buttresses. It's a spectacular sight.

Roger Cooper>> While public officials are weighing the options, the North Hangar is still being put to use. Twice a year, the Goodyear blimp is flown here from its base in Carson for maintenance. Blimp pilot, Matthew St. John, says there aren't too many places big enough to accommodate the Goodyear blimp. What's it like to have a hangar like this for your blimp?

Matthew St. John>> Well, it makes maintenance a lot more convenient. When the ship is outside, the Goodyear blimp will vane into the wind. So when the winds shift, which they do all the time, that makes it very difficult for the mechanics to do their job.

Roger Cooper>> Blimp pilot, Martina Wegscheider, still gets a thrill when she brings an airship down at the old Tustin base.

Martina Wegscheider>> It's amazing. It's a step back in time. I mean, you've got the Goodyear history of eighty-one years now, so coming back here is actually bringing the ship back to its original place it came from actually. I mean, this was a Navy hangar. Goodyear built airships for the Navy, so it's completing a circle, I guess.

Roger Cooper>> The fate of these colossal twins will eventually be decided by Orange County and Tustin city officials. And whether the property becomes a museum, a sports complex or just a vast plot of vacant land is a decision every bit as big as the hangars that Tustin is famous for. At the blimp hangars in Tustin, 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>> If you think trying to buy a home in southern California is tough, just try finding an affordable apartment to rent where rents can average more than twelve hundred dollars a month. But what if you had landlords who weren't interested in turning a profit? Is there such a thing? Yes, there is, and Vicki Curry met them.

Vicki Curry>> Robin Hughes, you're head of a nonprofit organization that's also a real estate developer. I think some people aren't aware that that exists out there, this idea of nonprofit real estate development. Tell me how it works.

Robin Hughes>> Sure. My organization is the Los Angeles Community Design Center. We're a community development organization. The unique thing is that we have architecture development and property management all in one organization. Primarily what we do is build affordable housing for very low and low income families.

Vicki Curry>> So how does that work? You're a nonprofit organization building affordable housing, but how do you raise the money to make that happen?

Robin Hughes>> Yes. The reason we're nonprofit is because we have a public benefit. Our benefit is to serve low income communities and the way we make our housing happen is doing finance from a multiple array of sources. We go to banks and get loans because they have community reinvestment requirements that require that they invest in the communities where they have deposits.

In addition, local government plays an incredible role in the work that we do. We often get soft mortgages from local government. But one of the financing tools we use is called low income housing tax credits and it's a way that private corporations can actually make an investment into affordable housing and get a financial return. So we clump all of those resources together to build an affordable housing development.

Vicki Curry>> It sounds like a pretty complicated process then in terms of putting all the funders together and then I'm sure there's a lot of steps in the development process.

Robin Hughes>> Yes. So we start, in most cases, from a vacant lot, but sometimes we've also taken old abandoned historic buildings and rehabbed them as well. So it's usually something that is not a good asset in the community or there's blight and we take that property from its beginning through an acquisition. We work with our in-house architect's design for development. We hire contractors to actually do the construction work and we work with local government to secure any type of zoning approvals or things like that.

Vicki Curry>> We're here in Pasadena at one of your newest projects. Tell me about this complex.

Robin Hughes>> True. This is Orange Grove Gardens. We just completed construction on this development this summer and families moved in about June or July. It's thirty-eight units of affordable housing for low income families and most of the residents that live here now actually came from the community. The city of Pasadena has this commitment to gardens and courtyards, so it really is built around this central courtyard where we're standing and then there's a courtyard up on the deck as well.

Then the quality of the units is really great too. We have a mixture of unit types. They range from two bedrooms to three bedrooms, flats to townhomes, so they provide great opportunities for our residents. We select our families through a process. We start by receiving applications from families who live in the community or throughout Los Angeles County. Then they actually have to income qualify to live in our affordable housing.

For example, this development, Orange Grove, we are serving families that earn anywhere between ten thousand dollars a year and about forty thousand dollars a year. They're paying rent at about four hundred dollars a month and about nine hundred dollars a month. They have to income qualify because of all the public sources we have funding our projects. Then we actually interview the families and all the adult households have to come to the interview. We go through that process of selecting our families to move into our development.

Vicki Curry>> Your developments not only have housing, but they also include a number of social services. What kinds of programs do you have available?

Robin Hughes>> Yeah, that's great. We feel that affordable housing is a stabilizing force in peoples' lives. It gives them an opportunity to not just deal with the vital things, but also begin to think about and plan for their future and their family's future. We support that through our resident services program. That's bringing services onsite where we have a number of child care centers within our developments that are publicly subsidized, so our families can go out and work in their jobs and have good quality affordable child care right in their back yard.

In this particular site, we have the Pasadena Boys and Girls Clubs who are running our after-school programs here. We do computer literacy, we do tutoring and mentoring with the kids, so we've provided an array of services for our kids as well as our adults so that they can think about really planning for their future and visualizing what their future could be.

Vicki Curry>> When you first decide to do a project in any neighborhood, do you encounter a lot of resistance from the neighborhood, from the neighbors? What's that usually like?

Robin Hughes>> Well, that's called nimbyism, not in my back yard. We see it throughout Los Angeles County. People, I think in most cases, have a misunderstanding about affordable housing, sort of physically what it looks like. They think of public housing developments that were built in the 1950s that were poorly designed. They think about poor property management and poor building maintenance.

Then they have an opportunity. We do tours for local communities so that they can come out and see the quality of our housing, see the families that live in our building. A lot of times, once we dispel the myth of what affordable housing is and who lives in affordable housing, we get a lot of support from the community. But there are always those people that are concerned about property values and crime and things like that. I would say that our housing is usually the best housing on the block. In fact, it helps to deal with public safety issues, so I think it's a community asset versus a hindrance.

Vicki Curry>> So how does Los Angeles look in terms of the housing market? I mean, we all know that prices are way up and rents are way up. I assume we have a huge shortage. What's the status of the affordable housing market in Los Angeles?

Robin Hughes>> Well, I think the good thing about our time is that we have a local government that's committed to addressing the affordable housing crisis. In the city of Los Angeles, Mayor Villaraigosa has over the last few years provided funds for the housing trust fund up to a hundred million dollars. So we are actually seeing affordable housing produced throughout the city as a result of that financial commitment to affordable housing.

It continues to be a challenge as rents increase significantly. Families are required to triple and double up into one-bedroom units. We and other nonprofit organizations like the Design Center try and address that by doing affordable housing. I'm happy to say that thousands of units are being produced by nonprofits in the city to address the affordable housing crisis and I think that continued political support and financial support to do our work in the future will help us to continue to address the affordable housing crisis.

Vicki Curry>> Robin Hughes, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Community Design Center, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Robin Hughes>> Thank you very much.

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. Well, he is the sixth actor to play James Bond. It's the twenty-first film in the series and the movie that we lead off the week with is "Casino Royale".

[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 the new Bond, "Casino Royale"?

Lael Loewenstein>> Well, Bond is back and it's a good thing. He is totally different in this take. This is a back to basics Bond and it's much, much grittier and darker than a lot of the Bond movies we've seen. Of course, this was the first book in the series by Ian Fleming, "Casino Royale", so the movie takes a kind of back to the beginning approach.

It's so intense. At the very beginning, Daniel Craig playing Bond, earning his OO status, in other words, his license to kill. It opens in black and white and then goes very soon into a color sequence in Africa where there's this very acrobatic sequence where Bond is chasing somebody who's smuggling something and is actually a terrorist.

The plot kind of opens up into Bond trying to foil international terrorism. There's some great work from Judi Dench, of course. Daniel Craig is an excellent Bond. He doesn't quite have the pretty boy look of, say, Roger Moore. He's just really, really good and really tough.

Larry Mantle>> Next up is the first of three straight ensemble films. "Bobby" tells the story of the 1968 Ambassador Hotel assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The film was directed by actor Emilio Estevez.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Henry, what did you think of "Bobby"? Accurate or interesting look at history?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, you know, there's a funny thing in which, in the beginning of the movie, they indicate that Emilio Estevez wants to make a "Grand Hotel" version of what happened at the Ambassador on that day, so we see a lot of people going through their routines in the kitchen, campaign workers, other guests, other employees, all played by stars. Demi Moore plays an alcoholic singer who's appearing at the Ambassador's nightclub. You know, just full of stars all playing these little cameos.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really have much to say about Bobby Kennedy and I don't think it really had much to say about what it must have been like in the 1960s in the Ambassador on that day. Estevez trots out all these issues that people are undergoing.

Helen Hunt plays the wife of Martin Sheen. They're an upper middle class couple and they start talking about various feminist issues. You know, they're just erupting. Everybody is just a billboard for different issues. I thought it didn't work at all.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Lael?

Lael Loewenstein>> Yeah, I think I had a mixed reaction. The abundance of cameos in this film to me was kind of distracting. There's Sharon Stone, there's Lindsay Lohan, there's Shia LaBeouf, there's --

Larry Mantle>> -- pulling you out of the story?

Lael Loewenstein>> Yeah, in a way. I see what he was trying to do. There's a sort of Altman-esque thing of all these different story lines coming together and, for so long, I kept thinking, "Where's the payoff, where's the payoff?" It does pay off in the very last scene when the story lines come together and, of course, this is when Kennedy is actually assassinated. But it's not quite enough.

I think there is a point that he is making that this night when Kennedy was killed was sort of the death of innocence, the death of idealism and the death of hope, in a way, but he doesn't make that point maybe quite emphatically enough. I do think it was a pretty good piece of work, though, for Estevez.

Larry Mantle>> "For Your Consideration" is yet another mockumentary from Christopher Guest and his usual ensemble cast, the film taking a look at the movie industry.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> "For Your Consideration", Henry?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, this, of course, is the Christopher Guest crowd, a wonderful crowd of comic actors and caricaturists who've taken on dog shows as we know in small town theatricals. Here the target is Hollywood in awards season when actors and directors begin to sniff out the possibility that they're going to be nominated for Oscars and their careers are going to take off.

The principal focus is a veteran actor played by Harry Shearer and a veteran actress played very well by Catherine O'Hara, one of her best performances ever. They're in a movie called "Home for Purim" which is -- you know, there are a lot of southern Jews, but they don't generally have magnolia accents in which they pronounce Yiddishism, but that's what's going on in "Home for Purim" which is being directed by a character played by Christopher Guest.

The first half of the movie is very, very funny, you know, in the usual crazy way. Fred Willard is a reporter making crazy comments. In the second half, the comedy really tails off and it's not so funny because I think, if you follow the logic of the characters, they're very sad and I don't think that Guest and his cast found a way to get around that and keep the humor sustained.

Larry Mantle>> And finally this week, Eric Schlosser's best-selling book, "Fast Food Nation", is adapted into a fictional film directed by Richard Linklater and starring Greg Kinnear.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> "Fast Food Nation", Lael?

Lael Loewenstein>> Well, this is a mixed bag. It takes Eric Schlosser's book about the fast food industry and it fictionalizes it. Richard Linklater has essentially brought in different lines, again in a kind of Altman-esque approach.

He's got Greg Kinnear as the executive of a fast food chain called Nicky's. He's got Ashley Johnson as a young high school student working in a Nicky's in Cody, Colorado. He's got Catalina Sandino Moreno and Wilmer Valderrama as two Mexican immigrants who have come to this country in search of a better life and end up working to their sort of disgust and disappointment in the meat-packing plant.

So this is really an expose of the fast food industry, all the different aspects of it. It's sardonic and satirical. It could have been a little sharper. I think it could have been a little more incisive and it could have made its point a little more emphatically. The end of the film, which is very, very hard to watch and which can turn anyone into a vegetarian, takes place in the kill zone or the kill floor of the meat-packing plant. It's quite brutal.

Larry Mantle>> Henry?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, I think Linklater's really overloaded this film partly because he didn't know which way to go. There are two great story lines in the film. There's the Mexican couple and what happens to them in the United States, and there's the Greg Kinnear character who wants to reform his corporation at first, but then becomes wary of what's going to happen if he does that.

Otherwise, the film is full of characters who virtually sit down in front of the camera, facing the camera, and talk about how bad the current fast food industry is for you and how abattoirs are unsafe and how the way cows are raised is unsafe and bad for the environment. I mean, we don't have to find that out this way or there would be more adept ways to just put that in the background. He leaves the two most interesting stories alone, especially Greg Kinnear who ends up a dispiriting figure when he could have been a tragic one.

Larry Mantle>> Thanks so much for joining us for another FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com and Lael Loewenstein of Variety. Please join us again in a couple of weeks for the next FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> For the hour version of FilmWeek, tune in to KPCC public radio Fridays at eleven a.m. 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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