Girl fight club

The call came on a Friday afternoon: Underground girl fight. Tomorrow morning. Eleven a.m. A hangar downtown on Santa Fe Avenue.

The call was from a PR firm. That was all the information there was.

It seemed like a Hollywood fantasy of "edgy."

But it was real. Sort of.

The address was a shuttered brick storefront. Razor wire coiled atop chain-link fences. Nearby was a strip joint and a seafood plant.

Parking was not a problem.

Around back, the circus began. Vans crammed into a tiny alley. Women, hands taped, posed like cheap pinups on three strips of dingy Astroturf. Men with cameras roamed the premises, devouring the spectacle. You could see it on their faces: This was too good to be true!

In the media race to find ever more edgy, ever more urban, ever more underground scenes, this one felt intoxicatingly authentic. That was the high. That was the buzz.

"We live in a society where everything is inauthentic," says Neal Gabler, author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality." "Or everyone believes everything is inauthentic. To paraphrase [Italian writer] Umberto Eco, we want the real so badly that we have to fabricate it."

Releases required

Spectators could enter only after signing a release to Demolition Pictures, stating that their likeness could appear on film. Fighters -- some naive, some savvy -- signed away their right to sue anyone for anything, whether they got cut, broken, maimed or killed.

Fighters would be paid commensurate with the risk of serious injury: For boxing with headgear, $100 for the winner. For boxing with no headgear, $150. For three rounds of street fighting, $225. For four rounds of street fighting, $275.

This "Extreme Chick Fight" was the 10th to take place this year in Los Angeles. Previous fights were held in a backyard in Crenshaw, a loft in Venice, a photo studio on Melrose Avenue.

The underground "scene" is the creation of a 29-year-old woman who will identify herself only as "Marie," but who made herself available for multiple media interviews, from Penthouse to the Los Angeles Times. Marie, a partner in Demolition Pictures, organized these fights, she said, so she could shoot them for a DVD, which she planned to market for $19.95 over the Internet, "Bumfights"-style. She hopes to next spread her "scene" to Detroit, Atlanta and Chicago.