Movie Industry Los Angeles

A group of downtown developers is trying to achieve what many real estate professionals consider near impossible: putting downtown on the map of the entertainment industry. The developers, a group comprising Smith, Hricik and Munselle of Los Angeles, Hollywood Location Co. and Bristol Group Inc. of San Francisco, are opening six new sound stages this week on the campus of the former Unocal headquarters building at 5th and Bixel streets.

Film and television production on the streets of Los Angeles dropped 13.4% in July from a year ago, a drop stemming from earlier uncertainties over Hollywood labor outlook. Although studios settled union contracts with actors in July and writers in May, production is expected to take months to return to normal levels. That's because studios initially accelerated production as a hedge against possible strikes, then cut back after those projects were finished.

While Hollywood is fretting about a downturn in production and the flight of jobs to cheaper markets such as Canada and Australia, a certain niche of the entertainment world is quietly flourishing: porn. This summer, grips, gaffers and best boys of mainstream movie-making are marching down Hollywood Boulevard in an effort to save their jobs.

It has been 79 years since a gentle Scot named John M. Barrie wrote "Peter Pan," and 3 1/2 years since the expiration of copyrights on the children's tale of fairy dust and far away. But Walt Disney Co. has considered the story its own since it created the first cartoon version, and Disney was not amused last year when it learned that CBS was planning a Peter Pan cartoon show.

Sure, Billy Crystal is great in his new film, "City Slickers," but in the opinion of many, the character that really walks away with the movie is Norman, a Bambi-like calf that Crystal adopts while on his cattle-drive vacation in the West. Several calves starred as Norman in the film, but not all of them were real. Three, among them the newborn Norman and the calf struggling with Crystal in the flooded river, were fake animals, designed and made by Chatsworth's KNB EFX Group.

Leaders of two major Hollywood entertainment companies on Sunday pledged $125,000 to form an AIDS funding and support organization to combat the epidemic that has hit their community especially hard. The announcement came during a celebrity-studded "Commitment to Life V" benefit that raised more than $1 million for AIDS Project Los Angeles at the Universal Amphitheatre, and in the wake of stinging criticism of the film industry by actor Brad Davis, who died last week of AIDS.

Bruce Wagner is a man with a mission: "If I can evoke nausea and laughter, I will have done my job," he says, chuckling at his own queasy powers. Not surprisingly, Wagner's method is that time-tested, knotted-stomach, gut-buster form--the Hollywood novel. With his scathingly satirical and bleak new book "Force Majeure," Wagner has become the town's writer du jour , someone touted as part of the filmland literary tradition of F.

On a recent hot day, Paul Boyington took some time out from his work to pose for a photo in Hollywood. The logistics of the shot proved to be no easy task. It turned out, in fact, that Boyington was too big to fit in Hollywood, so he had to settle for a photo of himself somewhere over Hollywood. "You mind if I stand here?" the photographer asked, towering over the corner of Sunset and Vine.

Less than 24 hours after a 7-year-old boy was killed by two men firing assault weapons at a third person in an Inglewood recreation center parking lot and a 34-year-old man died after a verbal confrontation on a Compton street, the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday agreed to exempt movie makers from a new law aimed at restricting the use of such firearms.

Whether the Democrats prove to be fortune's favorites in November remains an open question, but the time they've picked to convene in Los Angeles is unusually lucky in terms of what's on the city's screens. Aside from the usual blockbusters, there are excellent things to see, and they'll be shown in some of the most interesting venues in town. One of L.A.'s newest and most exciting screening spaces is the American Cinematheque's Lloyd E.

Last month on the Newman Scoring Stage at 20th Century Fox, 90 Los Angeles musicians were performing nearly flawlessly, after a single read-through, newly written music for a big summer movie. On this day, it happened to be Michael Kamen's driving score for "X-Men."

Nearly a decade ago, relations between the motion picture and television industry and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles were incendiary. To borrow a phrase of Hollywood hype, it was a clash of titans, two institutions--perhaps second only to the family--with the power to influence values, form consciences, present role models and motivate human behavior.

Flattery is the art of strategic praise, as fundamental to human society as chimpanzees' habit of grooming one another in hierarchical order. And Hollywood is one of the three U.S. capitals of this praise-with-a-reason, according to "You're Too Kind, A Brief History of Flattery," by Richard Stengel (Simon & Shuster, 2000). The others are Washington and New York.

The chief issuer of film permits in Los Angeles said Monday that his agency will spurn an annual movie locations trade show in Los Angeles this week, chastising it as a "glorified junket for film commissioners" out to steal production work from Southern California. But officials with the Entertainment Industry Development Corp.

So you're here to visit hollywood? allow me to be your guide. The tour bus won't go to Universal Studios or cruise past movie stars' homes. In fact, it's not a bus at all. Today's transportation will be an aging Toyota, which I'm definitely going to replace when I sell my first screenplay.

A Los Angeles judge froze 2.2 million Carolco Pictures Inc. shares owned by company Chairman Mario Kassar and rebuked the executive for enriching himself at the expense of the highflying independent film studio. Kassar was also limited in his ability to draw funds other than salary from Carolco or to exercise warrants to purchase an additional 1 million shares under a preliminary injunction issued Thursday by Superior Court Judge John Zebrowski.

After 17 years working either as an actress or production coordinator, Deborah White says the industry she loved can no longer sustain her financially, so she has bought a log house in Taos, N.M., and plans to begin life anew there. Joe Straw and Anton Holden, an out-of-work production accountant and a sound editor, decided that if they can't find jobs in the movies anymore, they will just make their own movies.

Petitions bearing more than 75,000 signatures urging Gov. Gray Davis to help stop the flow of film productions to Canada were presented to him Monday. Members of the Film and Television Action Committee unveiled the petitions--mostly signed by production assistants, stunt performers and other film industry workers--at a news conference.

Petitions bearing more than 75,000 signatures urging Gov. Gray Davis to help stop the flow of film productions to Canada were forwarded to the governor on Monday by a local assemblyman and an interest group tied to the film industry. At a press conference at the Burbank Airport, members of the Film and Television Action Committee--an umbrella group representing film workers--unveiled the petitions.