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Life & Times Transcript
12/21/06 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, it's a somber week of offerings at the box office as filmmakers look at war, past, cold and future. 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". [Film Clip] Roger Cooper>> 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, indoor 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 development. Robin Hughes>> Sure. 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 survival 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 on the community. 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. Our first film this week is from director Clint Eastwood and it's a kind of companion film to the earlier "Flags of Our Fathers". "Letters from Iwo Jima" tells the similar story, but from a Japanese perspective. [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> I'm joined by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com, and Andy Klein, the film editor for City Beat. Well, what did you think of "Letters from Iwo Jima", Henry? Henry Sheehan>> Well, I think this is a superb film from America's top director right now, Clint Eastwood. It's a take-off kind of a "Flags of Our Fathers" in that it shows the battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese side, or rather, I should say from the angle of two Japanese characters. One is a lowly private, a guy who had been a baker in private life, and the other main character is the general who, you know, is in charge of the Japanese defenses. This film is very intimate compared to "Flags of Our Fathers". It really gets into the emotional reactions of the characters rather than the kind of full-scale epic size of the battle. It's really superb, I thought. Eastwood is just so great right now. An excellent film. Larry Mantle>> Andy, what did you think? Andy Klein>> I more or less agree with Henry. I'm just the tiniest bit less enthused, but I thought this is a much better film than "Flags of Our Fathers". Very different. I mean, even though you should on some level look at both of them together because they are complementary. In "Flags", you had problems. It jumped around in time so much and I found this kind of confusing. This is very direct and linear. As Henry said, this is much more intimate. You are much more tightly bound to these characters quite, I think, as held in as, say, Ryan Phillippe in the first film. I thought this was more complex, dealt with more interesting issues and way overdue. Larry Mantle>> In seeing both of them, you know, one back to back with the other, you recommend that you see both sides together? Andy Klein>> I would not see them in the same night on a double feature, but, yes. Larry Mantle>> Our second film this week is the drama, "The Good Shepherd". It's directed by Robert De Niro, who has a small part in the film, and stars Matt Damon and Angelino Jolie. [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> Henry, your thoughts on "The Good Shepherd"? Henry Sheehan>> Well, this is directed by Robert De Niro. He plays a small part in it. But basically it's a story of one character played by Matt Damon. In the movie, he played Edward Wilson, but was clearly based on a real spy, the head of CIA's counter-intelligence named James Angleton. It starts with the Bay of Pigs fiasco which Edward Wilson has nothing really to do with and goes back and follows his development as a spy from the time he was at Yale through World War II, the cold war. The problem with this movie is that De Niro obviously wants to put in a lot of real information, a lot of things that the CIA did over twenty or twenty-five years. But he can't decide on a perspective to do it. The movie is two hours and forty minutes long and he keeps just throwing more and more stuff into the movie, more and more tales, more and more anecdotes without ever really focusing on the main character. Larry Mantle>> Director Zhang Yimou's new film, "Curse of the Golden Flower", stars Gong Li and Chow Yun-Fat. [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> Andy, "Curse of the Golden Flower"? Andy Klein>> Yeah, this is actually cloak and dagger stuff. It's set in the Tang Dynasty in the tenth century in China. Chow Yun-Fat plays the emperor at the time married to empress Gong Li and he hates her and is trying to kill her and everybody. They've got three sons and everybody is plotting intrigues against each other and, at certain points, it becomes kind of tough to follow. Who owns which army as they're all attacking each other, even though the armies are color-coded? But still, it's gorgeous to look at. You know, you could make the entire thing a picture postcard. But it has less one-on-one kind of hand fighting as his earlier martial arts films and it is a little bit, what can I say, stately. I think a little too stately for its own good. Larry Mantle>> And finally this week from Mexican director, Alfonso Cuaron, "Children of Men", based on a P.D. James story. It stars Clive Owen. [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> "Children of Men", Andy? Andy Klein>> Yeah, this is the latest from the Mexican director, Alfonso Cuaron, who did the best "Harry Potter" film and other things. I think this is a pretty terrific film. It's futuristic, set twenty years from now in a world where curiously no children have been born for twenty years. There's this infertility plague and the race is going to die out which, of course, has huge cultural impacts on everything happening. Owens plays a kind of burned-out ex-activist who's now a petty bureaucrat who gets involved with smuggling a young woman out of the country for reasons that I won't give away, but they're interesting. Julianne Moore plays his ex-wife who is still an activist. It's a big chase film with great long takes and battle scenes where you're actually following him through the streets for, I think, twelve minutes at one point. It was fabulously staged and just puts you right in there. Larry Mantle>> Henry? Henry Sheehan>> Well, I thought this was a very good movie. It's based on a novel by P.D. James, the English mystery writer. He's a very religious person, a very moralistic person, and there are a lot of religious scenes in the movie that Cuaron pays attention to and he's loyal to that side of the novel in many ways. But he's also interested in the assistance of the national security states and how you oppose that state and how, in that opposition, might become like that state. So there's a real important political aspect to this movie too, although not overwhelming. Clive Owen gives an excellent performance. I think it's the best performance he's given since "Croupier", which is the film that made him famous. I agree with Andy completely about the cinematography. I will say that it's not just these long takes with hand-held cameras, but the composition and the depth of focus are remarkable. I mean, these images are so big and full of so much depth which, of course, reflects Cuaron's attitude towards the material. A little preachy, but a great movie. Larry Mantle>> That's it for another FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com and Andy Klein, film editor for City Beat. We invite you to join us in two 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 tomorrow. 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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