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fd5b32407e6ee496bc7be9b2396629c6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jul-28-mn-7890-story.html | Clinton Open-Minded on Social Security Privatization | Clinton Open-Minded on Social Security Privatization
President Clinton said Monday he is open-minded about proposals to invest Social Security funds in the stock market and other private investments, although he warned that “we also have to ask the hard questions” about the risks involved in such a move.
As political momentum builds for some form of privatization of Social Security and he seeks to build a national consensus about how to fix its long-term problems, Clinton signaled his willingness to consider what once would have been an unthinkable and radical remake of the government’s main program for the elderly.
Though not committing to anything, Clinton said private investment of at least some retirement funds could be a more palatable alternative to what he sees as the only other options for bolstering the finances of Social Security--reducing benefits, raising taxes or shutting down other portions of government. But he added that he wanted to be sure that it would not be so risky that it could throw many retirees into poverty.
“I don’t know what I would do, but I am open to the idea that, if we can get a higher rate of return than we have gotten in the past and be fair to people and lift the same number of people out of poverty . . . then we have to be open to those options,” Clinton said at a forum on Social Security at the University of New Mexico. “Because I think that’s better than raising the payroll tax.”
Clinton sounded more receptive to the idea than his Treasury secretary, Robert E. Rubin, who has made a fortune on Wall Street but has been highly skeptical of proposals to invest Social Security funds in private markets, which are far more volatile than the government bonds in which they are currently invested.
The think-out-loud forum was the third of its kind on the subject during a year of dialogue leading up to a White House summit addressing Social Security in December, to be followed by legislation in 1999.
Clinton has set his sights on restructuring the 60-year-old New Deal program that currently benefits 44 million elderly and disabled Americans, seeing it as one of the last big tasks--and most important legacies--of his presidency.
Once this fall’s elections are over, the White House believes it will have a short window of opportunity to forge a bipartisan consensus before the 2000 election.
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24c42523009e7f3c38e0253b5e373de0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jul-29-ca-7980-story.html | Happily Trapped | Happily Trapped
The premise couldn’t be less plausible, but who has ever cared? Since it came out in 1961, “The Parent Trap” has been an embraceable fantasy, a sugarplum vision of a world where parents are perfect though apart and children are the only ones with the sense and savvy to bring them together again.
Beloved though it is, the original Hayley Mills-starring “The Parent Trap” shows its age more than fond memory admits. The filmmaking team of Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer took on the task of doing it again, and an irresistible family entertainment it turns out to be.
Hewing so closely to the original structure that 1961 writer David Swift shares a screenplay credit, this new “Parent Trap” is right at home in an age when the line “It’s scary the way no one stays together anymore” seems even more to the point than it did nearly four decades ago.
It’s not only the offspring of broken homes who will be attracted to this film about children planning to trick their split folks into reuniting. Everyone’s on-screen life is so completely perfect, each parent such an amalgam of shining beauty and caring virtue, that it’s hard not to wish you were a long-lost family member, too.
Adding contemporary comedy to the tale (based on German writer Erich Kastner’s “Das Doppelte Lottchen” or “The Double Lottie”) is the Meyers & Shyer team, whose past credits include “Private Benjamin,” “Irreconcilable Differences” and the remade “Father of the Bride.”
Shyer has been the directing half of the team in the past, but Meyers gets her chance this time, and she makes full use of the opportunity. “The Parent Trap” is a glossy, high-energy entertainment, always smooth and clever. Though the film could use a little shortening, it’s been directed with an easy touch and has the considerable virtue of not pushing the sentiment harder than it needs to.
In this, in fact in all things, “The Parent Trap” can’t be imagined without its 11-year-old redheaded star, Lindsay Lohan. Her bright spirit and impish smile make for an immensely likable young person we take to our hearts almost at once. Lohan’s the soul of this film as much as Hayley Mills was of the original, and, aided by a gift for accent and considerably improved technology, she is more adept than her predecessor at creating two distinct personalities for the unknowing twin sisters who meet at Camp Walden in Moose Lake, Maine.
Hallie Parker is a completely California girl down to her painted nails and her love for horses. She lives on an idyllic vineyard in the Napa Valley with handsome and loving father Nick (Dennis Quaid) and has developed quite an affinity for poker and fencing.
Well-behaved Annie James knows a few things about poker and fencing, too, but otherwise she is Hallie’s opposite, more Posh Spice than Brat Pack. Annie lives in London with beautiful and loving mother Elizabeth (Natasha Richardson), a designer of exclusive wedding gowns (Vera Wang’s are the ones we see).
When Hallie and Annie discover each other at camp, they can’t stand what they see, the shared sentiment being “That girl is without a doubt the lowest, most awful creature that ever walked the planet.”
That shared enmity leads to a series of ghastly pranks that land both girls in the dread Isolation Cabin, where they discover: A) that they share a taste for Oreos with peanut butter and B) that they are identical twins separated at birth by photogenic and loving parents who somehow decided this was the sane thing to do.
Barely daunted, the twins come up with “a brilliant beyond brilliant idea.” They will switch places, so each can meet the parent they’ve never known. When the time is right they’ll reveal themselves, forcing mother and father to meet again to unswitch them.
Everything goes fine when Hallie arrives in London, but back at Napa, Annie discovers that handsome and loving Nick is being stalked by a calculating blond vamp named Meredith Blake (Elaine Hendrix), nicknamed “Miss I’ll Just Have Half a Grapefruit,” who is intent on marrying him for his money. A series of panicky transatlantic phone calls follows, and soon enough Nick and Elizabeth are headed for that fateful reunion.
Casting Quaid and Richardson as the parents is one of “The Parent Trap’s” shrewder moves. Though they’ve never played roles this dreamy before (who has?), these two are up to the task and display excellent chemistry. Because this is a ‘90s movie, they’ve both got household help, and her butler Martin and his housekeeper-nanny Chessy are strongly played by Simon Kunz and Lisa Ann Walter. (In a nice touch, Joanna Barnes, who played the gold digger in 1961, is cast as Meredith’s mother.)
“The Parent Trap” manages to have it both ways. It utilizes lines of dialogue from the original while putting Leonardo DiCaprio’s photo where Ricky Nelson’s used to be, and it also has its own set of unexpected comic moments, like a camper with the chubbiest cheeks working away at the bugle. And having a star like Lohan, a girl whose happiness you can’t help but share in, doesn’t hurt a bit.
* MPAA rating: PG for mild mischief. Times guidelines: a scene of ear-piercing and one of a lizard being swallowed.
‘The Parent Trap’
Lindsay Lohan: Hallie Parker/Annie James
Dennis Quaid: Nick Parker
Natasha Richardson: Elizabeth James
Elaine Hendrix: Meredith Blake
Lisa Ann Walter: Chessy
Simon Kunz: Martin
Released by Walt Disney Pictures. Director Nancy Meyers. Producer Charles Shyer. Screenplay David Swift and Nancy Meyers & Charles Shyer. Cinematographer Dean Cundey. Editor Stephen A. Rotter. Costumes Penny Rose. Music Alan Silvestri. Production design Dean Tavoularis. Art director Alex Tavoularis. Set decorator Gary Fettis. Running time: 2 hours, 4 minutes.
* Playing in general release throughout Southern California.
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74203d3c7f9d99d15b9c934b7b3745e2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-03-me-56173-story.html | Carona Edges Past Walters in Sheriff’s Race | Carona Edges Past Walters in Sheriff’s Race
In a bitter contest between two former friends, county Marshal Mike Carona led Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters by several points in the race to succeed longtime county fixture Brad Gates and become the first new Orange County sheriff in 24 years.
With about half the precincts reporting, the contest for the county’s other vacant top law-enforcement post, district attorney, was more decisive.
Superior Court Judge Anthony J. Rackauckas appeared to be easily defeating Assistant Dist. Atty. Wallace J. Wade. Rackauckas, 54, would succeed Mike Capizzi, the county’s top prosecutor since 1990.
The tight sheriff’s race and Rackauckas’ apparent victory indicated that, for the first time in decades, two of the county’s most powerful posts would be taken over by department outsiders rather than hand-picked successors.
Both Gates and Capizzi were chosen by their predecessors to succeed them; Gates prevailed in 1974 among a field of eight candidates while Capizzi was appointed to the job in 1990 and won election later that year.
As they watched returns trickle in, Walters, Carona and Rackauckas spoke of new agendas for Orange County’s largest law-enforcement agencies.
“The returns so far make it appear that I’m going to win the election,” Rackauckas said. “I’m very gratified. A lot of people have put a lot of hard work in this and they felt their careers were at stake.”
He continued, “I’m relieved and I can’t wait to get started on the changes that we need to make.”
Wade, obviously disappointed by the early results, said, “I hope as the other results come up that we move up. We’re still very hopeful.”
Carona, who watched returns intently as his lead expanded slightly shortly before midnight, said the race was too close to declare a victory.
“I’m absolutely ecstatic,” Carona said. “This campaign was run picture-perfect.”
“We had a very broad-based coalition from all kinds of groups and ethnic groups and that’s what’s winning this election,” he continued.
Walters, meanwhile, was joined by more than 500 supporters who jammed into the Revere House in Tustin.
“We think we’ll win,” Walters said after noting his surprisingly good showing among absentee voters. “It’s going to be close, but we feel confident.”
But Walters was already thinking ahead, just in case. “If for some reason their Republican machine pulls it off, we’ll be back in four years. We’ll get this done one way or the other.”
With the campaign now over, Walters reflected: “It’s been extremely positive. We’ve met a lot of great people, they believe in us, they want the same things we want for the department and the community.
The Walters-Carona race to lead the 2,500-member Orange County Sheriff’s Department remained tight. Before the election, it was a dead heat in voter polls.
Walters, 52, received strong support from rank-and-file officers who worked diligently to get him elected.
The Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs spent about $150,000 on the campaign in the final stretch and conducted a grass-roots, door-to-door campaign.
The deputies’ union had charged that Carona was not a “real cop” because the marshal’s office does not patrol the streets and is only responsible for courthouse security and serving warrants.
Walters said his biggest priority would be to make Santa Ana’s nationally recognized community policing effort a countywide program.
Walters joined the Santa Ana Police Department in 1971 as a patrol officer and steadily rose through the ranks to become chief in 1988.
Carona, 43, who was backed by Republican Party leaders, would be stepping into a job where a strong majority of deputy sheriffs did not support his candidacy.
He has said that if he won, he would work to earn their support and that he has the best credentials for the job since he runs the only other countywide law enforcement agency and has experience working with the Board of Supervisors.
During the campaign, Carona compared the sheriff’s job to that of a CEO while Walters likened it to being more of a “top cop.”
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d116a315467b382b4e91ce111d235b5c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-04-sp-56506-story.html | This Isn’t Only Passionate Time for Shanahan | This Isn’t Only Passionate Time for Shanahan
It’s a warm and humid Saturday afternoon in early August 1997 in Toronto. The sky is cloudy. Weathermen are talking about the possibility of thunderstorms. But for Brendan Shanahan, it is the most peaceful time he has spent in months.
The fun-loving Red Wings left winger has relived the team’s first Stanley Cup since 1955 every day in some way since Detroit swept Philadelphia on June 7 of last year. Each player gets to spend time with the Cup -- and the loquacious Shanahan celebrates the championship with friends and acquaintances, raising it above his head in front of hundreds of people.
But that’s just window dressing. Shanahan saves a special time for himself, the Cup and his father, Donal, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1990. After arriving at his father’s grave Aug. 9, Shanahan chokes on his words, he’s so overcome with emotion:.
“Dad, look what I’ve got.”
“For a Saturday afternoon, the place was totally empty,” Shanahan says. “I stayed for about an hour. It was just me, my dad and Stanley.”
For anyone who never thought of this 6-foot-3, 218-pound power forward as anything but a raw-boned macho player who makes his living dishing out checks and scoring goals, the passion that comes through is the side of Shanahan we don’t often see. The free spirit that we have come to know in his days with the Devils, Blues, Whalers and Red Wings is speaking from the heart. And it’s this passion to the game, to life, that is one of the biggest reasons the Red Wings are trying to win their second Stanley Cup in the two years Shanahan has been with the team. He is more than just a 50-goal scorer; he’s the reason the team’s chemistry changed from playoff flop to playoff winner.
Overcoming adversity at home helps build character -- and that’s part of what makes Shanahan a special player.
“It’s tough going away to play hockey at 18,” Shanahan says, misty-eyed, “knowing that when you come home your father might not remember anything you just said to him.”
Brendan and Donal Shanahan surely never will forget that Saturday afternoon in Toronto last August.
The sensitive side of the players often gets shoved aside like a poorly executed hip check. But it’s clear that every drop of blood leading up to the Stanley Cup finals is real. And acquiring players with passionate leadership is more than just lip service.
Trading a popular player such as center Keith Primeau, an icon such as defenseman Paul Coffey and a first-round draft choice in 1997 for Shanahan wasn’t met with overwhelming support from Red Wings fans in October 1996. But the players knew they had just added their best chance to change their losing playoff image.
“The moment Brendan walked into our locker room, Marty Lapointe and I approached him with about a million questions about how we could be power forwards like him,” right winger Darren McCarty says, laughing. “Up to that point it was just pick a fight once in a while to protect a teammate or go to the net and try to cause havoc, hoping that a shot might go in.”
The questions were as simple as what kind of stick he uses, or how he knows when to jump into a hole for a scoring chance, or what is the key thing you look for in one-timing a shot like he and Brett Hull do so well.
“Brendan could have told us to take a flying leap, but he didn’t,” Lapointe says. “He calmly put up with every question. And he did it in a way that made us all feel more at ease.”
In 1996, when the Red Wings were rolling to an NHL-record 62 wins, I said the team would not win the Stanley Cup because the environment in the locker room was nothing like the other championship teams I’ve covered. It was true, although no one wanted to admit it. Players were cocky and didn’t really know the price they had to pay to win in the playoffs.
All of that changed when Shanahan came on board. “You can see the Shanahan influence, the confidence, in the way McCarty, Lapointe, Kirk Maltby and some of the others are playing,” Avalanche left winger Claude Lemieux said, after Detroit ousted Colorado in the conference finals last year. “It’s a complete turnaround for that team from the last couple of years.”
You don’t have to be a power forward to be passionate about the game. It’s just that banging wingers who play on the edge, creating havoc in front of the net, catch our eye.
Go back to gritty power forwards Clark Gillies and Bob Nystrom of the Islanders during their Cup run (1980-83) and Mark Messier, Glenn Anderson and Esa Tikkanen, who put the fire into Edmonton’s attack and helped the Oilers win five Cups in seven years from 1984 to ’90.
The Penguins won in 1991 and ’92 with power forwards Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, Kevin Stevens and Rick Tocchet. John LeClair’s amazing run of overtime goals in the finals was key to the Canadiens’ title in ’93; Messier, Anderson and Tikkanen were still doing their magic -- this time for the Rangers -- when they ended a 53-year Cup drought in ’94; and Claude Lemieux helped the Devils win it all in ’95, then injected the same passion into the Avalanche in ’96.
“Just look at the teams that are still alive,” Lightning Coach Jacques Demers says. “You’ve got Mathew Barnaby running around like a star in Buffalo, you’ve got Brian Bellows and Esa Tikkanen coming over near the trade deadline to add that power forward mentality to Washington, you’ve got Dallas counting on Pat Verbeek to produce and you have a whole group of forwards who like to get into the scoring zones in Detroit.
“When we won it all in Montreal in ’93, we found out you have to have players who are willing to pay the price in front of the net, to show that it’s true that if you can make the opponent blink -- by any means -- you’ve got ‘em. And, believe me, these forwards make things happen.”
Shanahan says hunger is as much a key to developing that passion as anything -- and he credits being stranded in Hartford, without a chance to make the playoffs, as his driving force.
“I remember (Red Wings coach) Scotty Bowman asking me what I thought Brendan could add to this team after I came back from playing with him in the World Cup,” captain Steve Yzerman recalls. “I told Scotty that the one thing I learned about him aside from the way he plays is that he is a great guy in the locker room.”
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5a0acfe43dbfa41e413e30982a53d232 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-09-mn-58211-story.html | Wells Fargo and Norwest to Merge in $32-Billion Deal | Wells Fargo and Norwest to Merge in $32-Billion Deal
Wells Fargo & Co., a California banking powerhouse for nearly 150 years, unveiled plans Monday to merge with Minneapolis-based Norwest Corp. in a $32-billion stock deal that will create the nation’s seventh-largest bank, with branches across 21 states in the West and Midwest.
While consumer activists immediately warned of higher fees and less personal service, which often come with such bank mega-mergers, they agreed this deal could be positive for California as the combined institution will be headquartered in San Francisco.
The merger could also make Wells Fargo a tougher competitor against rival BankAmerica Corp., the parent of Bank of America, which in April announced it would move its headquarters to Charlotte, N.C., from San Francisco as part of a $60-billion merger deal with NationsBank Corp.
Monday’s merger agreement will create the largest financial institution based west of the Mississippi, one that will be prominent in mortgage lending, online banking and small-business loans. The merged bank, with $191 billion in assets, will keep the Wells Fargo name, one of the oldest and best-known in banking.
Wells Fargo has about 1,100 employees at 75 locations in Orange County, at least a third of them in supermarket lobbies at Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons markets. The bank boosted its presence in the county early in 1996 when it acquired First Interstate Bank and its 34 Orange County offices.
“There couldn’t be a better brand. The stagecoach, the Wells name, it’s going to fit in well with our culture,” said Norwest Chief Executive Richard Kovacevich, who will be CEO and president of the combined company. Wells’ current CEO, Paul Hazen, who will become chairman, appeared at a New York news conference on Monday along with Kovacevich, both sporting ties with pictures of Wells Fargo’s founders.
Some industry analysts were cautious about the merger’s chance of success, as the deal joins Norwest, America’s largest mortgage lender and one of the top-performing banks this decade, with beleaguered Wells Fargo, which has seen its performance fade since its poorly executed $11.3-billion acquisition of First Interstate two years ago.
“People are kind of taking a show-me attitude with this deal,” said Thomas Theurkauf, an analyst with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in New York. “It will take some time.”
The merger deal also brings together two banks with very different cultures, as Wells Fargo is known for its aggressive high-tech approach to banking and Norwest is known for its personalized, branch-oriented focus. As a result, some consumer activists said they hoped Wells would adopt what they called Norwest’s more “customer-friendly” strategy.
But Kovacevich said Norwest customers would benefit from Wells’ strengths in online banking and “alternative delivery systems, like supermarket branches,” while Wells Fargo customers would get a broader array of services, especially in mortgage lending and consumer finance, areas in which Norwest excels and Wells has little expertise.
Thus, although Norwest already makes or services a substantial number of mortgages in California, it expects to see dramatic growth once it begins to sell the products through Wells’ extensive branch system.
A possible acquisition of Wells has been rumored for months as a wave of consolidation has swept the financial services industry, creating such pending combinations as BankAmerica-NationsBank, Citicorp’s $72-billion merger with Travelers Corp. and First Chicago Corp.'s $30-billion deal with Banc One Corp. All hope to boost profits by capitalizing on cost savings achieved through size and an expanded customer base.
Cost savings in this deal are expected to be minimal initially, said analysts, as the only overlap between the two is in such Western states as Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. While details of branch closures and layoffs were not revealed, thousands of employees are expected to be affected either through relocation or eliminated positions, and some branches may be closed where the two overlap, analysts said.
“It’s a cobbling together of two financial powerhouses, but there’s not a lot of cost savings. It’s a strategic move,” said Charlotte Chamberlain, a bank analyst with Jefferies & Co. in Los Angeles. “The market is really taking this as a big ho-hum.”
Wells Fargo stock rose a slight $2.50 a share Monday to close at $365.75 in New York Stock Exchange trading, while Norwest fell $2.88 to close at $36.81, the first time this year that shares fell on word of a bank merger.
Wells shareholders are getting a slight 1% premium over Monday’s stock price close. Once the merger is completed, Wells investors will own 52.5% of the combined company, a financial giant with more than 90,000 employees, about 20 million customers and nearly 2,900 branches.
Analysts Knew Wells Was Ripe
The deal has been approved by the boards of both companies, but must also get approval from regulators and stockholders. While there is some overlap between the banks, there seemed to be few antitrust issues, analysts said. The deal is expected to close in four months.
Industry analysts had speculated that the recent wave of mergers in the financial industry would force Wells to find a merger partner or significantly improve earnings, which suffered dramatically because of computer problems and an exodus of customers after its takeover of First Interstate.
On Monday, even Wells chief Hazen admitted that his bank “tried to integrate the company [First Interstate] too fast,” and would not make the same mistake with this deal.
“We are very focused on making sure it happens smoothly without interruption to customer service,” said Norwest’s Kovacevich.
But consumer activists specifically warned customers Monday that this merger might bring many of the same computer glitches Wells had in absorbing First Interstate, when thousands of dollars of deposits were posted to the wrong accounts.
“We are urging Wells customers to watch their bank statements very carefully. People should be on guard for those same problems that occurred in the past,” said Jon Golinger, consumer program director for CalPIRG, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group in Sacramento.
Some consumers, such as Echo Park furniture store owner Neil Stone, whose local Wells Fargo branch closed in May, said they are worried about future service and community commitment.
The merger “means a lack of corporate concern for lower-income districts and inconveniences customers who have been loyal all these years,” Stone said.
However, some customers said Wells was improving.
“They’ve really made an effort to be more personable and give good service,” Elysian Heights businessman Philip Heath said outside the Atwater Village branch.
The mega-deal with Norwest took some by surprise, as Wells Fargo was rumored to be negotiating a combination with U.S. Bancorp of Minneapolis, a banking giant run by former Wells executive John F. Grundhofer, a longtime rival of Hazen.
There was speculation Monday that U.S. Bancorp had reportedly made a bid for Wells sometime in the past year, but neither company would confirm that. Reportedly, strategic issues scuttled that deal and made a combination with Norwest more attractive. When Wells’ board approved the Norwest merger Sunday, there was no other offer on the table, sources said.
The two CEOs, both seen as no-nonsense, straightforward leaders who have known each other for years, had discussed a possible merger several times in the past 12 months, sources said.
But this deal came together in just 10 days. It was hammered out quickly at the Doubletree Inn in Kansas City, where the two CEOs met one day last week, sources said. “White” was the code name for Wells and “Noble” the code name for Norwest, to correspond with each company’s initials, sources said.
In a rare move, both banks were advised by the same investment banking firm, Goldman, Sachs & Co. The firm, along with lawyers, will reportedly make $120 million in fees from the deal. CS First Boston Corp. later came in to advise Wells on the fairness of the deal at the end of negotiations. Although it’s rare for one bank to advise both companies, earlier this year Merrill Lynch & Co. advised two Italian banks on a deal.
While some speculated that U.S. Bancorp and Grundhofer may try to mount a hostile offer for Wells, most said it would be foolhardy because hostile bank mergers have not been very successful in the past.
“We’re joined at the hip and we’re going forward,” Kovacevich said Monday. Indeed, as part of the deal, each company was given an option to buy up to 19.9% of the other company on favorable terms, an arrangement made in some merger pacts to keep hostile suitors from breaking up the deal.
“That’s the $64,000 question--what will Grundhofer do now?” said bank analyst Chamberlain. “Will he go after something smaller like a City National or a Washington Mutual to get into California? We’ll just have to wait and see.”
A caretaker of a bit of the Old West’s identity, Wells was founded in 1852 by Henry Wells and William G. Fargo, co-founders of American Express Co., and provided a wide variety of services to pioneers.
*
Times correspondent Stephen Gregory contributed to this report.
Bank Rankings
The $32-billion merger between Wells Fargo & Co. and Norwest Corp. would create the nation’s seventh-largest bank:
*--*
Base Assets (in billions) 1. Citigroup New York $738.9 2. BankAmerica Corp. Charlotte, N.C. 579.9 3. Chase Manhattan Corp. New York 365.7 4. J.P. Morgan & Co. New York 271.5 5. Banc One Corp. Chicago 240.6 6. First Union Corp. Charlotte, N.C. 220.4 7. Wells Fargo & Co./Norwest Corp. San Francisco 190.9 8. Bankers Trust Corp. New York 157.5 9. Fleet Financial Group Boston 97.7 10. National City Corp. Cleveland 80.9
*--*
*as of March 31
Source: SNL Securities; Compiled by JENNIFER OLDHAM/Los Angeles Times
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* ARE THEY A GOOD FIT?
A look at the challenges Wells Fargo, Norwest will face. D1
* BANKING’S FUTURE
With most of the big players merged, what’s next? D16
* MORE COVERAGE: D4
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1bd9c324f796bfd3581e8990d81bf196 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-10-ca-58273-story.html | On the Upswing | On the Upswing
If a twister could talk it probably would sound very much like Ally Sheedy. It’s only 9 in the morning, and she hasn’t even had a cup of coffee, but Sheedy is already whirling around her L.A. hotel room, smoking up a storm (constantly dispelling the smoke with sharp flicks of the wrist). In a stream-of-consciousness ramble, she broadstrokes the good, bad and ugly of her life, starting with her recent experiences at the Cannes Film Festival, where her well-received new film, “High Art,” was recently screened.
“Cannes? Oh, God. You know what? I didn’t like it there. It was too much of a circus for me. Everything went wrong. I was working in Australia, and I flew 30 hours to get there and I couldn’t find the connecting flight to Nice. I didn’t realize it was in another terminal and that it was far away and I had to get on a bus with my bags and go through customs.
“I just couldn’t find it. I missed the flight and there I was crying in the airport just wanting to get on the first plane to New York.”
She pauses just long enough for a drag on her cigarette. “I was just there three days. And I’d never been there before, and there was so much international press, one after the other. Masses of people everywhere. As I’m walking down the street I just kept feeling people staring and wondering, ‘Are you important?’ ”
She shudders, trying to shake off the memory, then shifts gears. “But then they had the screening. The crowd was very silent and when it was over everybody just stood up and gave it a standing ovation: one of those magical moments you dream about happening. And it happened.”
“High Art” looks to a new turn in the road for Sheedy, 36, whose career has been in turmoil over the past decade. In the public mind she remains frozen in time, closely associated with her early films such as “War Games,” “The Breakfast Club” and “St. Elmo’s Fire.”
That Ally Sheedy was all energy and youth and promise. When “High Art” debuted earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, there were audible gasps from the audience when Sheedy first appeared. In the film she portrays Lucy Berliner, a fiercely talented but hellbent on self-destruction photographer who, though only in her mid-30s, has been up and down and over and out--a woman on the outskirts of youth, looking back less with regret than with resignation.
“Her performance is intense and detached, present and absent at the same time,” says the film’s director, Lisa Cholodenko. “And that gives her a kind of power on screen. You’re attracted. You want to get up close to her.”
What better way for the actress to cast off what she labels her goody-two-shoes image? But “High Art” is more than a calculated career move. When she first read the script, there was an immediate identification. Though the character is said to be somewhat loosely based on noted photographer Nan Goldin, thematically the film subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) echoes Sheedy’s life, not only where she’s been but where she might have ended up.
Sheedy doesn’t shrink from the comparisons. She chews them over with gusto.
Like Lucy Berliner, Sheedy caught the spotlight early and has been a public figure almost continuously since the age of 12, when she published the best-selling children’s book “She Was Nice to Mice.” The notoriety she attracted then, and later as part of the putative Brat Pack, wasn’t what threw her into a tailspin, however. It was the reaction her celebrity provoked in everyone else.
“See, I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Both my parents came from nothing, poverty, and succeeded against tremendous odds.” (Her mother, Charlotte Sheedy, is a noted literary agent; her father, John, is a successful marketing executive.) “The credo in my house was, anything you want to do, you just go out and do it.”
One afternoon she read her story to a family friend, a book editor who then took it to MacGraw-Hill. “She told me they were interested and could I turn it into a book. And I said, of course. So I wrote it. It was only afterward when I had to get up and talk at the American Booksellers’ Convention and people were asking if I really wrote the book because I was only 12. . . . It hadn’t occurred to me until then that it was this phenomenal thing.”
Sheedy survived her first brush with celebrity. The second time around was not so easy. In “High Art,” her character’s life choices displease her mother (played with sang-froid by Tammy Grimes). When Sheedy ventured into acting she also experienced parental disapproval.
“My mom’s nothing like Tammy,” she quickly explains. “At the same time, there was a similar tone of voice that happens when I talk to my mother. And I could hear myself going there [when acting].”
Charlotte Sheedy would have preferred her daughter hone her writing talents.
“She said to me, ‘You have this mind that you have to use,’ ” Ally says. “Her image of acting is someone who sits around all day and paints her fingernails--superficial. It went against her politics, her ideology.”
*
But the strong-willed daughter was already laying the groundwork for her acting career. After being accepted to USC (which she used largely as a pretext to get her to Los Angeles), Sheedy almost immediately landed an agent. A year later she was cast opposite Sean Penn in “Bad Boys” and immediately thereafter with Matthew Broderick in “War Games.”
“I never expected it to happen as quickly as it did. But I paid a price for it,” she admits.
By the time she was 21, she was famous and part of a new generation of promising young talents including Penn, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald, who were haphazardly thrown together in various combinations in a number of youth-oriented films, most notably “The Breakfast Club.”
“It was actually enjoyable there for a while,” she recalls. “I felt like I had this network of friends, all doing the same thing, all very young, all of whom had managed to realize their dream. It was the first time in my life I really felt I belonged somewhere.”
But after New York magazine defined them as the Brat Pack, this loose circle began to feel constricting and its members chafed. “It all suddenly became a negative. The entire group splintered. And I experienced it as a loss.”
Cast in a succession of “cheerleader girl-next-door roles” (“Short Circuit,” “Maid to Order”), Sheedy says she felt pressured to build herself into a movie star, which “boiled down to making myself into some kind of sex object: Pile on the makeup, wear tight, short dresses, go to parties, do provocative photo spreads in magazines, have my teeth straightened, my breasts enlarged, change my weight--either up or down, depending on who I was talking to.”
Not good advice for someone who was already battling bulimia. Even if she had been able to conform, it would not have taken her in the direction she wanted--which was to follow in the footsteps of her idols, such as Helen Mirren, Alfre Woodard, Frances McDormand and Judy Davis. She tried. She took on several quirky character roles in little-seen films like “Heart of Dixie.”
“And suddenly I wasn’t commercially viable anymore. When you’ve fallen, that really brings out the animus in people. That’s when you really find out what everybody’s made of. I remember telling a really highly powered female agent that I was having a problem because I didn’t want to take off my clothes in a movie. And she said, ‘If a high-powered director in a big studio movie decides for whatever reason you have to take your clothes off, just shut up and take off your shirt.’ ”
Sheedy howls with laughter now. Ten years ago however, “it completely freaked me out.”
The depiction of drugs in “High Art” is harrowing. Lucy Berliner’s female lover is a heroin addict and Lucy finds herself sucked into a vortex. And this bears comparison to another defining moment in Sheedy’s young life.
Though it lasted less than a year, her affair with Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora ended with Sheedy in drug rehabilitation for a dependency on Halcion, Xanax and antidepressants.
“Things change when you fall in love with someone. For all his problems. And I was in love with that guy. It was a key relationship in my life--not his. It destroyed me. I ended up in a lot of trouble.”
Sheedy was woefully unprepared for the subculture of the rock world. “As smart as you can be, there are a lot of things you can only learn through painful experience. I started taking drugs to be with him [Sambora] on his level and in his world. It not only relieved the anxiety of being with him but also helped me to deal with someone who’s behaving horribly toward me.”
The irony that she was the one who wound up in rehab is not lost on her. As she sat in the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota, “I thought to myself, how did it end up that I’m the one who’s here and he’s running around . . . treating people badly--and functioning?”
Sambora recently denied all of Sheedy’s assertions in an interview with Us magazine. “These allegations are ludicrous and false. I think, over time, Ally has embellished her memories of the brief time we spent together.”
Sheedy has been glimpsed over the past decade in a TV movie here, a play there, sometimes working just to work, sometimes to pay the bills. Slowly, with the support of her manager Neil Koenigsberg and husband actor David Lansbury, she has begun Act 3. In 1991 she even returned to seriously writing, publishing a volume of poetry, “Yesterday I Saw the Sun.”
Despite the glowing notices for “High Art” (she has three other independent features in the can) she says the scripts are not exactly jamming the mailbox yet. But she’s not 18 anymore and no longer in such a rush.
“There were times over the past 10 years when I thought maybe it shouldn’t have happened this way,” she says. “But I got to see what it’s like to be that successful that young. And I realized I didn’t want to be a big movie star. Fortunately, it all happened early enough for me to change my life.”
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09641dcd697f5163392f5e99dc11a160 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-17-mn-60786-story.html | Garlic Pills Called Useless for Cholesterol | Garlic Pills Called Useless for Cholesterol
Contrary to the widespread belief that garlic pills are nature’s very own cholesterol buster, an unusually rigorous clinical study made public today found that the supplements did not lower blood cholesterol levels at all.
The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., undercuts the prime reason that garlic appears to be the nation’s most popular herbal or botanical supplement. Americans spent $71 million on medicinal garlic preparations in 1997, up 11% from the year before.
That growing appetite is largely based on several previous clinical studies suggesting that whole garlic or garlic pills can lower moderately elevated blood cholesterol levels 10% to 15% or more.
Seizing on those results, everyone from supplement makers to cookbook authors have promoted the herb as a sure-fire alternative to pharmaceutical drugs. “Garlic is a powerful cholesterol-lowering substance,” declares the 1998 book Prescription Alternatives.
Many medical researchers have also taken garlic’s prowess for granted. Indeed, the new study, involving 25 people in Germany who alternately took a commercial garlic supplement and a dummy pill for three months, was intended to study how it lowered cholesterol levels, not whether it did so.
“We were surprised that the overall effect of the garlic drug on cholesterol was zero,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Heiner Berthold, a clinical pharmacologist at the University of Bonn. The garlic pills tested had active ingredients equivalent to four to five grams of fresh garlic, or a few medium-sized cloves.
“It looks like an extremely good study,” said Dr. Frank Sacks, a medical nutritionist and cholesterol expert at the Harvard School of Public Health. Most significant, he said, the study was so rigorously designed that it would have detected even a slight effect of the garlic pills on blood cholesterol.
A Lesson for the Public
This garlicky turnaround highlights the difficulty that physicians and lay people alike have in translating modest clinical findings into sound advice to live by. “It’s an object lesson for consumers to use caution when dealing with unsubstantiated treatments,” Sacks said.
Representatives of supplement makers interviewed by The Times disputed the study’s broad significance, saying that it pertained only to the garlic oil formulation tested. Other, dried garlic preparations, not to mention whole fresh garlic, may contain ingredients that are crucial to the herb’s reported benefits, they said.
But Berthold said that the product tested, a pill containing oils purified by a steam distillation process, was loaded with the same basic active ingredients found in powdered garlic preparations, including allicin, which serves as the standard of nearly all garlic supplements.
Moreover, another new study of 28 people who took a commercial brand of dried garlic pills for three months at the recommended dosage also found that the supplement did not lower blood cholesterol, a type of lipid.
“This study does not support the use of garlic tablets for lowering plasma lipid levels,” concluded the researchers, who were led by Dr. Jonathan Isaacsohn, now at the Metabolic and Atherosclerosis Research Center in Cincinnati.
That study, published last week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, an AMA journal, involved a popular dried garlic supplement, Kwai, and was paid for by the supplement’s maker, Lichtwer Pharma of Germany.
The technical manager of the company’s United Kingdom unit said in an interview that he was not aware of the negative findings. Neither was the research director of Nature’s Way, a Springville, Utah, company that makes the powdered garlic supplement Garlicin.
To be sure, the new studies do not address other properties of garlic associated with cardiovascular health. There is some evidence that it can lower blood pressure slightly and thin the blood in a way that might reduce the risk of clogged arteries. It is also said to kill germs, and may slow the growth of cancer cells.
Still, consumers embraced garlic primarily for its effects on blood cholesterol, which is associated with increased risk of heart disease when extremely elevated.
“I can’t help but think that garlic has some positive effects when mixed into a healthy diet,” said Dr. David Heber, head of UCLA’s Center for Human Nutrition. Although he recommends garlic supplements to improve blood cholesterol levels in his 1998 book, “Natural Remedies for a Healthy Heart,” he said in an interview that he never thought garlic pills alone should be used to treat cholesterol problems.
What makes the new German study significant, experts said, was its scrupulous design. The 25 subjects had moderate to high cholesterol levels, ranging from 240 to 348 milligrams per deciliter. They received a placebo for three months and a garlic supplement for three months, with a one month “wash out” period in between when they again took just the placebo. Blood samples were repeatedly taken for cholesterol measurements.
During the main treatment periods, the subjects and the researchers were “blinded” to whether a placebo or supplement was being administered.
After six months, there was no difference in cholesterol levels between the two groups.
Supplements may have had an undeserved positive reputation, Berthold said, because industry-supported researchers may have been disinclined to publish negative results. As a result, summaries of the evidence may appear more positive than the totality of evidence would indicate.
“Taking garlic preparations can give people a false sense of security that they are doing something beneficial for themselves when perhaps they should be taking an effective pharmaceutical drug,” Berthold said.
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b242e63a4bead61a0282ba84796f5e0c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-23-ca-62561-story.html | A Novice Auteur Makes His Stand | A Novice Auteur Makes His Stand
The mystery began with the June 11 issue of Daily Variety, which carried a full-page ad quoting the John Lennon lyric: “Everybody’s hustlin’ for a buck and a dime, I’ll scratch your back and you knife mine.” The same day, an ad ran in the Hollywood Reporter with a quote from Edmund Burke, saying: “All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.”
Both ads were signed at the bottom of the page: Tony Kaye.
The enigmatic ads, which have been followed by others, one quoting Abraham Lincoln, another Albert Einstein, yet another admonishing Leonardo DiCaprio to “immediately” read a Tennessee Williams film script, prompted a buzz of curiosity in always gossip-hungry Hollywood. Were they a political tract? A cheeky movie promotion? The work of another shameless self-promoter?
In the mind of Tony Kaye, a 45-year-old British conceptual artist and award-winning TV commercial director, the ads were what he calls “hype art.” But the first ads, about backstabbing and the forces of evil, also served a more immediate practical purpose. Kaye was sending a very public message to New Line Cinema, which has been engaged in a behind-the-scenes skirmish with the director over the fate of his feature film debut. Titled “American History X,” the turbulent drama stars Edward Norton as the leader of a gang of violent, neo-Nazi skinheads. After his release from prison for murderering two black men, Norton’s character struggles to put his past behind him and prevent his younger brother (played by Edward Furlong) from following in his footsteps.
The ads were Kaye’s response to an acrimonious meeting he’d had several days earlier with New Line top executives Bob Shaye and Mike DeLuca and two of the film’s producers. Witnesses say Kaye and Shaye engaged in a shouting match and Kaye threatened to take his name off the film, which could force New Line into releasing it with an Alan Smithee director’s credit, the signature sign of a film project gone bad. The argument largely focused on the length of several sequences, as well as the placement of a key flashback scene. Tempers ran so high that a frustrated DeLuca announced, “This meeting is over,” and stormed out of the New Line conference room.
“It was a healthy debate, because we’re all passionate about the film, but feelings did get intense,” acknowledged DeLuca, who brought Kaye to the project. “Bob and Tony got into a heated conversation, and there was some sniping and I think Tony misinterpreted what had happened. But it was a mistake for me to walk out, and I apologized to Tony for it.”
At issue, according to several participants at the meeting, was a test screening of the film that New Line had held the previous night. Kaye had previously screened his version of the film, which both DeLuca and Kaye say went well. The second screening was of a composite version of the film reflecting the input of New Line executives, the producers and Norton, who have all made frequent visits to the editing room since Kaye finished shooting the film last May.
The second screening went so well, DeLuca says, that he and Shaye attempted to persuade Kaye to allow New Line to release the film in its present form. Kaye balked. “They were talking about putting the film out in a state I was unhappy with,” he says. “Since I gave them my director’s cut, I’ve been editing the film according to their guidelines. Some of the things I was asked to do were ridiculous. But I felt I’d given them my best ear and I said, ‘Now it’s time for me to go back to work again.’ I’m fully aware that I’m a first-time director, but I need the same autonomy and respect that Stanley Kubrick gets. I’d rather take my name off the film than let it come out as it is now.”
After the meeting, Kaye took out the initial ads that ran in the trades. DeLuca then met again with Kaye, where he agreed to let the director have an additional eight weeks to work on the film. Kaye says the meeting occurred the day before the ads ran. DeLuca says it was the day the ads appeared. Either way, DeLuca insists “the ads didn’t influence our decision at all. We knew Tony was frustrated and was going to take them out. We all got a laugh out of it--it’s just Tony’s way of expressing himself.”
On June 15, after reaching agreement with New Line, Kaye ran a new ad. Addressed to the studio’s top brass, he quoted Patanjali, the Indian founder of yoga: “When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project . . . you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” It added: “Thank you, thank you. Tony Kaye.”
Kaye’s seemingly madcap ads served a shrewd purpose, making it clear he was willing to back up his threat to walk off the film. It’s difficult to market any movie with an Alan Smithee credit--few, if any films with that credit have ever turned a profit. It would be even more difficult to promote “American History X” without the director on board to defend its volatile subject matter. As it is, the film has a tarnished image, since its release date has been pushed back several times, a move that is often interpreted as a sign of trouble. (The film is now slated for a Nov. 6 release.)
New Line has been considerably more patient with Kaye than most studios, which would have long ago taken control of the film. New Line also gave Kaye unusual latitude during the making of the film, allowing him to serve as his own director of photography and camera operator.
New Line also gave Norton extraordinary input into the project. The young star, who took a reduced fee and rewrote much of his dialogue in the film, spent many weeks in the editing room, working with an assistant editor on a cut of the film that reflected his thematic and political concerns. He has also told New Line, DeLuca says, that “if he can’t stand behind the movie, he won’t do publicity” for the film.
Norton defenders say he was asked by New Line to be involved in the editing process, and did so with Kaye’s full knowledge. “It’s not normal to have actors in the editing room, but Edward’s been like a co-producer on this movie,” DeLuca says. “Sometimes it’s just easier for the actor to try different edits, to demonstrate what he wants.”
However, Kaye says that Norton, who did not respond to interview requests, was often an “uninvited” visitor. “I very much respect Edward’s talent as an actor and I’m not opposed to actors’ being involved in the editing process. But his abilities as a filmmaker are less than nil. He abused the process by politicking with New Line and telling them I didn’t know what I was doing. Edward is not calling the shots. Tony Kaye is calling the shots, and if I don’t end up calling the shots, I’ll be gone from the movie.”
If New Line were dealing with a more pragmatic director, it might have called Kaye’s bluff. But Kaye, who with his shaved head looks like Michael Stipe’s older brother, is known for his unpredictable behavior. In 1983 he took out an ad in the London Evening Standard announcing: “Tony Kaye is the most important British film director since Alfred Hitchcock,” surely an example of hype art, since, as Kaye admits, “that was before I’d directed anything at all.”
Kaye went on to become a top director of TV commercials, but remained a prickly free spirit. When British Airways complained he was using too many ethnic actors in one of his ads for it, he staged a public protest outside a London British Airways office, dressing up 50 film extras as Hasidic Jews.
In 1995, Kaye, who is an observant Jew, ran an ad in the Hollywood trades that announced: “Jewish car for sale. Four telephones, one fax machine, $3 million.” It was half hype art, half truth. Kaye is chauffeured around town in a Lincoln Town Car with four phones, a fax and a California license plate that reads “JEWISH,” although he admits he only leases the car.
In addition to “American History X,” Kaye has been making “G-D,” a documentary on abortion, and staged several conceptual art pieces. He has “installed” Roger, a homeless man he met in London, to walk around the Tate Gallery there. Not long after the Getty Museum opened here, he hired Lorraine, a woman he met on Venice beach, to appear daily at the Getty.
“She just walks round, looking at the art,” he explains. “She was recently arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and I had to bail her out. When the judge admonished her for being a troublemaker, she told him she wasn’t a troublemaker, she was a work of art at the Getty.”
But is Kaye being a troublemaker? Or is he a director defending his work? And what will happen if he and New Line are still at odds when Kaye submits his cut in eight weeks? “We have an excellent movie,” DeLuca says. “The issues we’re debating are about subtle changes. Hopefully we can compromise, because I can’t see this coming out as an Alan Smithee film.”
But Kaye says New Line is going to see “an entirely different movie” in eight weeks. “If a baker makes a cake, it doesn’t matter who manufactured the flour or mixed the cream, it’s the baker who takes the ingredients and bakes the cake. And that’s the way it is with this movie. Unless I’ve made the cake, I won’t have my name on it.”
Either way, the hype-art ads will continue. As Kaye puts it, “I’m on to something big here.” Just how big he doesn’t know. Asked to explain the ad that quoted Lincoln, he says: “It was very expressionist, in the sense that I’m not entirely sure what it meant either.”
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e807bcedef0a0507a7cdf7e2cdb5f5fc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-24-mn-63160-story.html | China’s Eternal Parade Ground | China’s Eternal Parade Ground
As public spaces go, it’s not a pretty sight: a vast plain of concrete bounded by a mishmash of architecture, including a mammoth Stalinist government building and a three-story Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet.
But as symbols go, Tiananmen Square is one of the most recognizable on Earth, 100 acres spread out under the heavy-lidded gaze of Mao Tse-tung and featured in countless cutaway shots by filmmakers needing a quick and easy emblem of China.
For many in the West, Tiananmen Square has become synonymous with a single event: the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. So dominant is the square as a symbol of repression that critics are blasting President Clinton for agreeing to meet Chinese leaders there this week during the first visit by a U.S. president since the massacre.
But in China itself, that bloody event represents just one layer of meaning out of many covering the square--the world’s largest public plaza. Along with the ancient Gate of Heavenly Peace that overlooks it and gives the plaza its name, Tiananmen Square has been part of the political landscape here for centuries. Ming Dynasty emperors ruled over it as part of the southern approach to the Forbidden City, and Mao basked in the adoration of Red Guards who packed the square by the millions.
Since Mao established the People’s Republic in 1949, the square has hosted scores of foreign dignitaries, including former U.S. presidents Richard Nixon and George Bush. For Clinton to avoid Tiananmen during this week’s summit would constitute an insult to national dignity in the eyes of some Chinese and a departure from standard procedure for the government.
“This has been the protocol of China for many years,” Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan said Tuesday. “Not to hold a welcoming ceremony at [Tiananmen Square] in honor of President Clinton, such an important guest of state, would be abnormal and discourteous.”
To many Chinese citizens, Tiananmen Square is this country’s paramount symbol of state, enshrined in the official national emblem and pictured on every note of currency. The square has been witness to several defining moments in China’s tumultuous history, including--but not limited to--the demonstrations nine years ago.
“Tiananmen Square is definitely the central symbol of China,” said Yan Yufen, 46, a factory worker in the city of Taiyuan, about 250 miles southwest of Beijing. “The last time I was there watching the national flag being raised, I was so excited that I couldn’t help bursting into tears.”
Author David Bonavia, a former China correspondent for the Times of London, once wrote of Tiananmen Square: “The patriotic emotions stirred by that name are extraordinary. No city except Mecca or Moscow has a monument to match its magnetic hold on hundreds of millions of people.”
Clinton will be officially received Saturday at the Great Hall of the People, the massive legislative and banqueting structure whose Stalinist bulk stretches along the square’s western edge for a full quarter of a mile. (Nixon and Bush ate there.) Clinton’s meetings with President Jiang Zemin will take place in the central government compound of Zhongnanhai, just a stone’s throw away.
Birth During a Golden Age
But Tiananmen Square’s association with political power in China extends back more than a millennium, to long before either the Great Hall or Zhongnanhai ever appeared on a draftsman’s drawing board.
The first open space where the square now sprawls was cleared during the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), the golden age of ancient China. Although Beijing was not the capital then, the royal family kept a home here, and part of what is now Tiananmen Square served as a courtyard outside the home’s main entrance.
After Kublai Khan founded the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th century, China’s new Mongol emperors moved the capital to Beijing, where construction began in earnest, including on the first incarnation of Changan Avenue (Avenue of Eternal Peace), the broad east-west thoroughfare at the northern end of the square that until recently still bore the tread marks of tanks from the 1989 crackdown. During the Yuan Dynasty, the square began to assume its present shape, although that was but a fraction of the 160-football-field expanse it is now.
By the middle of the Ming Dynasty, more than a century later, the Tiananmen area had been built up--and had become closely identified with the seat of imperial power.
A 17th century map shows that the square, paved with stone slabs, was walled off as part of the Forbidden City, accessible only to the emperor and his court.
Imperial guards marched off to battle through the Gate of Heavenly Peace, whose antecedent, the Gate of Heavenly Succession, was erected in 1417 by the Ming emperor Zhu Di. Royal edicts were written on scrolls, wedged in the beak of a phoenix-shaped gilded box and lowered from the top of the gate to kneeling officials below, who then promulgated the laws throughout the Middle Kingdom.
From that spot atop the gate centuries later, Mao Tse-tung announced the founding of the Communist People’s Republic to the cheers of thousands massed in Tiananmen Square. “The Chinese people have stood up,” he proclaimed.
For most modern Chinese, Tiananmen Square’s strongest associations are with key events in 20th century Chinese history.
“Perhaps no other place in China better symbolizes the turbulent course of modern Chinese history, both for better and for worse, than does this one spot,” Harry Harding, a China expert at George Washington University, said recently.
In fact, one of the events lending Tiananmen Square its significance was a series of student protests that began there 70 years before the demonstrations of 1989.
Famous Student Protest--of 1919
On May 4, 1919, about 3,000 young scholars from 13 colleges and universities rallied in the square to protest the loss of Shandong province to Japan at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. The students drew sympathetic crowds, some of them weeping, with their impassioned defense of Chinese territorial integrity and their denunciation of the government for its quiescence. “Protect our sovereignty!” they declared. “Oppose power politics! Down with traitors!”
Foreshadowing what would happen seven decades later, the students’ march through Beijing from the Tiananmen plaza ended in violence that night. Demonstrators were beaten and arrested; one person died.
But the “May 4th Movement,” which spawned further patriotic--and sometimes bloody--protests in Tiananmen Square throughout the 1920s, became a beacon and is still celebrated today as an early turning of the tide against imperialism. In 1989, the students who flocked to the square calling for greater democracy and freedom considered themselves the inheritors of the tradition of May 4, 1919.
“The square had been used by the people to criticize a corrupt and insufficiently nationalistic government even before the founding of the [Chinese Communist] Party” in 1921, said Stanley Rosen, a Sinologist at USC. “This is one important reason why the [1989] students feel that their revolutionary credentials predate the Communist Party’s credentials.”
But the Communist regime co-opted the May 4th Movement for its own ends as well, commemorating it as part of the Communist revolution and depicting the struggle on the base of the 120-foot Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of Tiananmen Square. The government unveiled the monument in 1958, about the time that workers quadrupled the square to its present size, tearing down the surrounding alleyways, homes and trees.
The expansion allowed millions of Mao’s fanatical Red Guards to parade through the square during the 1966-76 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, waving their little red books, chanting slogans and sobbing at the sight of the Great Helmsman, in some of the most enduring images to come out of China during that period. (Mao’s embalmed body now lies in a large mausoleum at the southern end of the square.)
But the square’s expansion also created the space for hundreds of thousands of citizens who converged on it in April 1976, ostensibly to mourn the death of Premier Chou En-lai but implicitly to criticize the radical policies of the previous decade, in which thousands of Chinese were persecuted and killed.
Ten years later, in the winter of 1986-87, students once again staged a massive rally in Tiananmen Square, selecting the potent symbolic site to demand democratic reforms, which the government rejected.
Then came the 1989 demonstrations, which captured the world’s imagination unlike any event the square had seen.
Over six heady weeks, what began as a youthful stand against authoritarianism swelled into an outpouring of support from hundreds of thousands of Beijingers, whose marches on Tiananmen Square both protested and reaffirmed the square’s historic role as the embodiment of state power.
When tanks rolled in June 4 and gunned down civilians, television viewers worldwide were stunned.
Some witnesses say no one was killed in the square itself, only in the streets leading to Tiananmen. But such hair-splitting makes no difference to human rights advocates, including prominent Chinese dissidents, who accuse Clinton of dishonoring the memory of those who died by acceding to the greeting on the square.
“If the Clinton administration accepts a welcome from the murderers at that location, then that itself takes on greater political significance,” exiled democracy activist Wei Jingsheng said in the U.S. last week. “The acceptance of this welcoming ceremony represents that there has been a dramatic retreat on the question of human rights by the Western governments.”
Police Keep Close Watch on Square
The legacy of the 1989 assault lingers like a sour taste. Plainclothes police officers continue to patrol Tiananmen for “suspicious” activity, hustling away locals handing out leaflets or reporters trying to conduct interviews. Some say you can still find a bullet hole gouged into the Monument to the People’s Heroes, left over from the firing by army troops.
But the daily bustle in the plaza--which attracts hordes of tourists and residents flying their kites, riding their bikes and having their pictures snapped at one of 15 photo kiosks--has returned to normal.
For many Chinese, the massacre has simply been added to the long catalog of defining events that have occurred in a place once called “the spiritual hub of all China.” Last year, hundreds of thousands streamed into the square in June--not to commemorate the 1989 protests but to celebrate Hong Kong’s imminent return to Chinese rule.
In the opinion of Zhang Yong, 22, Clinton should definitely make a stop at the square, despite the bloodshed nine years ago.
“The two things should be separated,” he said. “Going to participate in the Tiananmen ceremony is something every state leader does. . . . As the leader of one of the world’s great nations, it is a great honor for him to go there.”
Jason Dean in The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this story.
* ON THE BEATEN PATH: President Clinton’s China trip will begin in a town well-versed in the tourist trade. A10
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Tiananmen Square: Evolution of a World Landmark
A look at the evolution of the square and the ancient Gate of Heavenly Peace that overlooks it and gives Tiananmen Square its name:
Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907): First open space is cleared on the eventual site of Tiananmen Square for a courtyard leading to the imperial family’s home.
13th Century: Mongol rulers move capital to Beijing and start building up square.
1417: The Ming emperor Zhu Di constructs the first Gate of Heavenly Peace from which Ming rulers would promulgate new laws. The square is walled off, and only the emperor and his entourage are allowed access until the early 20th century.
1651: The gate is rebuilt and renamed Tiananmen (Gate of Heavenly Peace).
1919: Students protesting loss of territory to Japan after World War I gather on May 4, prompting the famous “May 4th Movement” and sparking scattered nationalist demonstrations at the square throughout the next decade.
1949: Mao Tse-tung announ-ces the People’s Republic of China to thousands of cheering supporters.
1958: The square quadruples in size to its present dimensions, with the massive Great Hall of the People on the west side.
1966-76: Millions of Red Guards troop through the square to glimpse Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution.
1972: President Nixon dines with Mao in the Great Hall of the People.
1976: Hundreds of thousands pack Tiananmen to honor the memory of Premier Chou En-lai and implicitly criticize the Cultural Revolution.
1984: The Gate of Heavenly Peace is renovated; “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping watches parades in the square below marking the 35th anniversary of the People’s Republic.
1986-87: Students stage massive protests to demand democratic reforms.
1989: On June 4, the government orders tanks to roll into Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of protesters.
1997: Celebrations in the square on the night of June 30 mark Hong Kong’s return to Chinese control.
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bf423fe617d1fee921353093a389150b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-27-mn-64148-story.html | Serial Killer Eludes Texas’ Death Chamber | Serial Killer Eludes Texas’ Death Chamber
Gov. George W. Bush on Friday spared the life of a death row inmate who once claimed to have killed 600 people, commuting Henry Lee Lucas’ sentence to life in prison after doubts about his guilt in the so-called “orange socks” slaying were raised.
Bush issued the reprieve on the recommendation of the state parole board, the first time the Republican governor has commuted a death sentence since he took office more than three years ago.
Lucas, 62, was scheduled to die Tuesday by injection.
“I can only thank them for believing the truth and having guts enough for standing up for what’s right,” Lucas said.
The governor’s decision allows no chance of freedom for the infamous one-eyed drifter once considered among the nation’s most prolific serial killers.
Lucas, who recanted confessions to about 600 killings nationwide, still faces six other life sentences and 210 years in prison for nine other murders.
Lucas is guilty of other crimes for which he has been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, said Bush, in Brownsville for a conference of U.S.-Mexico border state governors.
“However, I believe there is enough doubt about this particular crime that the state of Texas should not impose its ultimate penalty by executing him,” the governor added.
Lucas’ lone death sentence came from a San Angelo jury in 1984 for the rape and strangulation of an unidentified woman whose body, clad only in orange socks, was found on Halloween 1979 in a ditch north of Austin.
No witnesses or physical evidence linked Lucas to the crime, but he confessed four times. He now says he was lying, and various investigations have raised questions about his guilt. Work records and a cashed paycheck indicated Lucas was in Florida when the woman was killed.
“At the time it made its decision, the jury did not know and could not have known that Henry Lee Lucas had a pattern of lying and confessing to crimes that evidence later proved he did not commit,” Bush said.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles this week voted 10-8, the minimum needed, to ask Bush to give Lucas a 270-day reprieve and voted, 17-1, to recommend the death sentence be commuted.
Hours after Bush reduced Lucas’ sentence, a man whose frenzied knife attack left four people dead was executed by injection.
Leopoldo Narvaiz Jr. was executed for hacking to death his ex-girlfriend, Shannon Mann, 17, along with her sisters, Jennifer, 19; Martha, 15; and a brother, Ernest Jr., 11, in San Antonio.
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98216476be1b52d57765157309f69891 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-29-he-64603-story.html | Exercise in Awareness | Exercise in Awareness
Staying fit into the millennium may mean working out less for your money. That’s because after doing an ATM class, your body will move as smoothly as the slide of a debit card.
But ATM in this case stands for Awareness Through Movement, and the classes are part of the Feldenkrais Method, which many say makes exercise as easy and efficient as automatic banking.
Brought to this country in the 1970s by its originator, Moshe Feldenkrais, a Ukrainian-born physicist and engineer plagued by a knee injury, the method has long been a professional secret among dancers, actors and musicians.
But recently the fitness community has gotten hep to the benefits, and a few on the front lines are serving up Feldenkrais as the latest physical elixir. “We like to stay on the cutting edge,” says Karen Joy, general manager of Fitness for Her! in San Diego, one of the health clubs around the country now offering ATM classes alongside step and sculpt.
Basically, Feldenkrais is an educational approach that teaches students to become aware of their bodies and move as seamlessly as possible. For an actor, that can mean getting into character more convincingly; for an Olympian, shaving the winning second off a sprint; for a stroke patient, learning to walk again.
As for the rest of us, it could be just what the trainer ordered. Rather than a replacement for those calorie-blasting workouts that rev the engines, Feldenkrais is the oil that can perfect your performance and stop you from getting rusty over time. “Many people quit exercising because they hurt themselves,” says Andrea Wiener, president of the Feldenkrais Guild, an organization that regulates its member practitioners. “This method helps you both prevent and recover from injuries, and enjoy what you love to do more.”
Frances Fisher doesn’t need convincing. “Feldenkrais has taken the struggle out of exercise,” says the actress, who used ATM exercises to keep her energy flowing on the set of “Titanic” during long days of filming in a corset.
“Before I did this, I found myself walking around like these guys at the gym who have a lot of muscle but can’t lift their arms. With the Feldenkrais, I’m not thinking about making my muscles stronger. I’m aware of how my skeleton is moving in space and how my muscles and nerves are responding, so my body is much more relaxed, responsive and flexible. As I get older, I’m more interested in flexibility because flexibility is youth.”
*
There are two ways to study the method. With Functional Integration, a practitioner works on you privately, gently guiding your body into improved ways of moving as you sit or lie down, fully clothed. The ATM lessons, which you take in group classes or practice at home with tapes, help you make the same kinds of discoveries on your own through thousands of movements--some so subtle that observing them is like watching paint dry.
Both Functional Integration and ATM lessons (many students do only one; others combine the two) are based on the idea that each of us inevitably develops unhealthy movement habits through years of going about life on automatic pilot, overusing the body in repetitive ways and nursing old injuries. Feldenkrais teaches you how to notice these stressful patterns and replace them with more comfortable, efficient ones, so that, as one practitioner put it, you’re not using the force of chewing a steak to eat a cream puff.
In a way, the education is like receiving a Thomas Guide to your body that shows you in detail how you normally move and then lets you find alternate routes to avoid an accident down the road.
Having that full body map, practitioners say, is important because when a knee gives you problems or a shoulder aches, your whole system is affected. Pauline Sugine, co-owner of the Center for Physical Health in Los Angeles, describes working with Martina Navratilova: “I showed her that as the result of an injury to the right ankle, when she moved her head to the right, even just her eyes, she stopped breathing,” says Sugine. “In tennis, if you look in one direction and a part of your body freezes, even subconsciously, then you lose the connection. It’s sort of like driving with a flat tire. Not only is your tire flat, but if you keep driving, more things go wrong.”
Through Functional Integration, Sugine kinesthetically reminded Navratilova how to look right and breathe at the same time, getting her whole body, including the ankle, in top form again.
The beauty of Feldenkrais is, you don’t have to understand it intellectually. “Whether you get it on a conscious level or not, your nervous system is picking it up,” says Sugine. “It’s like we’re smuggling the information in.”
Advocates of Feldenkrais say such movement education has been the missing link in fitness as we know it--which is why, after 25 years of pounding the pavement, many of us are limping toward burnout.
“The Western approach to athletic training is almost exclusively based on overload and compensation,” says Ken Largent, director of Movement Facilitation in Portland, Ore., who works with many athletes. “The Feldenkrais approach looks at movement from a neurological standpoint. So, for example, it looks at how effective you are in using the least amount of effort to accomplish your ends. This is almost the opposite of the concept we’ve all been working under--not that it’s superior, but it is necessary. There is a yin and yang. What we need is the fullness of both.”
Frank Wildman, past president of the Feldenkrais Guild and director of the Movement Studies Institute in Berkeley, goes even further. “The routine, boring exercises people do don’t take into account the human ability for self-reflection and awareness,” he says. “This is what Feldenkrais offers. We’re after physical intelligence.”
Wildman explains that we’ve come to view the body as a machine, measuring our workouts in numbers, clocks and weights. However, when you watch someone like Michael Jordan, what’s really beautiful is not how high he jumps, but the way he slips in so many points without seeming to try, his amazing coordination, his elegance and grace. “Feldenkrais teaches you to pay attention to the quality versus the quantity of motion,” he says. “It expands your physical imagination.”
*
This, of course, is why performers love the method. When, after years of weightlifting, Fisher needed to play a stripper in a film, she went to choreographer Kim Blank, who uses Feldenkrais in her coaching. “Frances was very strong and muscular,” says Blank, “so I’d start her on the floor with an ATM exercise showing how the pelvis connects to the spine and the spine connects all the way to the head to give her that sense of fluid, undulating movement appropriate to a stripper doing a routine. And then we went on to the choreography.”
Fisher says this work helped her access an inner, organic sensuality while giving her body a more elongated look. “It’s a great tool for getting into any character,” she adds.
And that’s true whether you’re an actress, athlete--or nowhere close to being either.
Ultimately, Feldenkrais is a way to explore yourself and build the kind of inner fitness that lets you jump into any situation--whether it’s playing a film role, learning a sport or going for a job interview. “Feldenkrais helps you act connected and there’s something so inherently satisfying about that,” says Blank. “When you move with grace and ease, you can’t help but feel joy. There’s a sense of calm, a sense of being more grounded.”
Who wouldn’t want to cash in on that?
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To find a certified Feldenkrais practitioner near you (a title that reflects 800 to 1,000 hours of training over a three- to four-year period) contact: the Feldenkrais Guild, (800) 775-2118, or on the Web, https://www.feldenkrais.com. For audio and videotapes (including “The Better Driving Tape” and “Dealing With Back Pain”), call the Movement Studies Institute at (800) 342-3424.
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38d6b9d01720b1b9b3c8db3158e9428f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-08-ls-26691-story.html | Murder From Beyond the Grave | Murder From Beyond the Grave
More than 40 years after her death, Dorothy L. Sayers has a new Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novel out this month. “Thrones, Dominations” (St. Martin’s Press) becomes the 12th Wimsey book, thanks to the imagination and humility of British novelist Jill Paton Walsh, who turned a rough bag of notes and first-draft chapters into what one early review called “a splendid and high-spirited return from the grave.”
“My secret qualification for the job was a passion for Lord Peter Wimsey, which began when I read ‘Gaudy Nights’ as a teenager,” Walsh says.
The 60-year-old writer of children’s books, two academic mysteries and the 1994 Booker Prize-nominated novel “Knowledge of Angels” wasn’t the first author invited by the Sayers estate to finish “Thrones.” P.D. James thought about it and decided to stick with her own man, Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh.
“My first emotion was fascination, then a mixture of honor and fright,” says Walsh of being offered the chance to complete a book that Sayers began in 1936, then put aside as she turned her attention to translating Dante and writing about religion.
After Sayers’ death in 1957, the 172-page manuscript of “Thrones, Dominations” (the title, from Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” had particularly pleased Sayers, according to a letter she wrote to a friend) wound up at Wheaton College in Illinois. Another similar typescript was found in an agent’s safe in London.
“There were six chapters, numbered within each chapter, but not consecutively, so you had no idea of the order,” Walsh says. There were also “a plot diagram with different colored lines for each story thread and a page and a half of very cryptic notes saying things like ‘started January before the king’s death because of the clothes.’
“Although neither script got as far as the crime, the notes did make it very plain who the murderer was supposed to be--which rather tied my hands,” she says. “I think if I were going to write a modern story, I’d prefer another murderer, but I was faithful to DLS and kept hers.”
Walsh says that four-fifths of the new 312-page “Thrones” is her invention, including a lively exchange between Lord Peter and his new wife, mystery writer Harriet Vane, about the value of mysteries.
“It’s only detective stories. You only read them and write them for fun,” Vane says.
Wimsey replies: “You seem not to appreciate the importance of your special form. Detective stories contain a dream of justice. They project a vision of a world in which wrongs are righted . . . murderers are caught and hanged, and innocent victims are avenged and future murder is deterred.”
Sayers couldn’t have said it better herself.
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fa605f586a9f2e2f0cc593b6a6018a59 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-10-mn-27361-story.html | A Growing Faith--and Outrage | A Growing Faith--and Outrage
In the predawn darkness, the floodlit cathedral looms like a snow-covered mountain over this poor neighborhood. Inside, 15,000 faithful have been waiting for two hours, but they show no sign of fatigue.
They are expecting their Moses.
Suddenly, a pudgy preacher in a brown suit strides up the marble stairs to the altar, a golden tree trunk. Thousands of worshipers break into chest-heaving sobs. Others furiously wave white handkerchiefs and cry “Glory to Christ!”
Samuel Joaquin has arrived.
“There are no words to explain what he is. It’s something divine,” said awed worshiper Vicenta Equihwa.
The 61-year-old Joaquin is perhaps Mexico’s most controversial religious leader. His fundamentalist Christian church, La Luz del Mundo (The Light of the World), is one of the country’s fastest-growing faiths. Offering a warm community atmosphere, a strict moral code and a promise of eternal salvation, the church is expanding in Latino areas of the United States, including Southern California.
But critics say Joaquin is an egomaniac who has sexually abused youngsters and created a cult that preys on the poor--charges he denies. Several of his critics claim they’ve been harassed and even beaten; one former member was stabbed 57 times last month in an attack he blames on the church.
Now the controversy is spilling across the border. La Luz del Mundo is trying to open a church in Ontario, its 39th in Southern California. But some residents, expressing fear about Joaquin and the church’s practices, are fighting its petition for a city permit.
“On the one hand, we want to maintain freedom of religion. On the other hand, we want to zero in on those destructive sects that abuse communities and individuals,” said Lourdes Arguelles, an Ontario professor leading the fight.
The Luz del Mundo controversy actually had its genesis in a Southern California event: When 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult killed themselves in Rancho Santa Fe last spring, Mexican media set their sights on religious groups at home.
Could there be a Mexican Marshall Applewhite? Yes, responded an obscure anti-cult group that pointed to Joaquin. In fact, no evidence has emerged to support such claims, and Joaquin denies any intention to order a mass suicide. But the incident focused attention on the church.
In the past year, Mexican newspapers have delved into the practices of La Luz del Mundo, producing extensive reports about alleged sexual abuse and orgies, as well as the church’s close ties to Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Television and radio programs have featured debates on the church, questioning whether this is an issue of religious freedom or exploitation.
La Luz del Mundo, founded in 1926 by Joaquin’s father, a peasant turned military officer called Aaron, claims to have 1.5 million members--which would make it the second-largest church in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country. It claims an additional 3.5 million members worldwide. (Experts dispute the church’s estimates of its size.)
But while proselytizing energetically, the church has kept a low profile, operating mainly in poor neighborhoods. In Guadalajara, members are known mainly by their dress. Women wear ankle-length skirts and long hair; they are forbidden to wear slacks, makeup or jewelry. Many members live in three neighborhoods dominated by the church and are active supporters of the PRI.
In the past year, the veil has been pulled back on the once-obscure church. Taking advantage of the new media interest, several former members from Guadalajara have gone public.
They have described a church that requires members to seek permission for even the most mundane activities--to go downtown, or on vacation. Joaquin is so powerful he chooses the spouses for a corps of elite church members known as “Unconditionals,” they say. And members are urged to contribute heavily to the church, whose leader lives in luxury, they say. The church replies that Joaquin has a chauffeur and cars but lives more modestly than local politicians.
But the most shocking charges allege sexual abuse of young church members.
Amparo Aguilar is a 31-year-old shopkeeper with long, brown hair and a round, gentle face. She calmly recalls the day nearly 20 years ago, when, she claims, she was invited to Joaquin’s home in Hermosa Provincia (Beautiful Province), the neighborhood where the church is based.
A female assistant of Joaquin’s took the girl to the church leader, who was in bed, Aguilar claimed.
“He asked me if I could get rid of his headache. I said, ‘How? I have no pills, no aspirin,’ ” Aguilar said.
With that, she said, Joaquin and his assistant grabbed her and stripped her. She resisted the church leader, she said. But the two pinned her to the bed, and Joaquin raped her, Aguilar said.
“They made me promise not to say anything, because if I did, God would punish me,” she said.
Aguilar recently reported the alleged rape to the Religious Affairs Department of Mexico’s Interior Ministry, which has passed it along to a state prosecutor, said her lawyer, Jose Raymundo Meza. Three other former church members complaining of sexual abuse or rape have done the same, he said.
The prosecutor’s office in Guadalajara confirmed it had received the four accusations of sexual abuse. But because the alleged crimes occurred so long ago, it’s unlikely any trial will take place, officials say.
La Luz del Mundo denies the charges, and Joaquin has declined to discuss the accusations with the media.
“Not one of the alleged abuses disseminated by the media has been proven true by the authorities,” said a church spokesman, Joel Silva. He added that it was strange that none of the victims had complained about the alleged abuses until recently.
Word of La Luz Reaches Ontario
Word of the controversy eventually reached Ontario, where La Luz del Mundo wants to open a church on Mountain Avenue. Arguelles, a professor at Claremont College who is active in immigrant issues, says she began to investigate the church after hearing disturbing reports from Mexican colleagues and students.
What she discovered in the Mexican press frightened her. Her objections, she insists, do not stem from religious intolerance.
“We’re not talking here about theology . . . or [whether you] believe in Jesus Christ,” she said. “What we’re talking about is purported criminal activity.”
In addition to the sex abuse charges, Arguelles said she fears the church’s “totalitarian control of powerless people.” She said she is especially concerned about vulnerable recent immigrants.
Ontario officials have been meeting with residents and researching La Luz del Mundo while considering the permit necessary to operate a church in a commercial zone. Local police have checked with other cities that have La Luz del Mundo churches, city spokesman George Urch said.
“We couldn’t find any problems at all,” he said.
He said the city will make its decision based on zoning questions such as traffic and noise, not the nature of La Luz del Mundo. Residents, he noted, have the right to practice any faith. “This could be a Lutheran church, a Baptist church--from the city standpoint it could be anything,” he said.
Some of the Ontario residents’ fears may be unfounded. Renee de la Torre, a Mexican academic, noted that the sexual abuse allegations focus on Joaquin and the Guadalajara church--not congregations in other areas.
“One thing is the church . . . another thing is the Hermosa Provincia, the center of power,” said De la Torre, who has written a book about La Luz del Mundo.
She noted that even church dissidents in Los Angeles, who have accused Joaquin of creating a cult of personality, do not allege sexual abuse.
As for church control of members, De la Torre said that La Luz del Mundo closely supervises the community in Hermosa Provincia, requiring individuals to seek permission from church members known as “guardians” to travel or study outside the area. The guardians monitor attendance at daily religious services and contributions by members, who are required to donate at least 10% of their salaries.
But La Luz del Mundo churches outside Guadalajara are not as strict, De la Torre said.
A Counterattack Against Church’s Foes
Stung by the attacks, La Luz del Mundo is fighting back. In a rare appearance recently at the church’s modernistic temple in Guadalajara--a building as tall as the planned Catholic cathedral in Los Angeles--Joaquin lashed out at his enemies.
“What do they want? To turn this temple we built into a dance hall, a home of prostitution!” he thundered. When he asked if the church would be destabilized by the accusations, the congregation cried, “No!”
Church members have published a book and made up posters attacking Joaquin’s accusers. La Luz del Mundo representatives say critics are intolerant of their faith, which is based on a strict interpretation of the Bible and frequent attendance at religious services marked by singing, weeping and, sometimes, speaking in tongues.
“We think there’s an effort to stop the growth of religious groups like ours,” said Silva, the church spokesman.
It’s hardly surprising that La Luz del Mundo would suspect it’s being persecuted. Mexico’s Catholic Church, which counts about 85% of the population as members, has reacted with hostility to the rapid growth in recent years of evangelical churches, which it calls “sects.” Membership in the small churches grew more than 50%, to 3.5 million, from 1980 to 1990, according to the latest available official figures.
“Sects, like flies, need to be gotten rid of,” was the analysis of Girolamo Prigione, the Vatican’s former envoy to Mexico.
The Catholic Church has engaged in a battle of words with La Luz del Mundo, accusing it of seeking political power, especially through its close relationship with the PRI. That relationship has resulted in La Luz del Mundo neighborhoods getting preferential treatment in receiving such services as running water and electricity, De la Torre said. Luz members in Guadalajara have solidly voted for the PRI, at the urging of church leaders, members say.
However, the critic most despised by La Luz del Mundo is an evangelical Protestant. He is Jorge Erdely, the former pastor of a small church and head of an anti-cult group that has single-mindedly attacked La Luz del Mundo. Luz officials accuse Erdely, who wrote a popular book about abusive ministers, of trying to make money by attacking small churches. He denies the charge.
Erdely and another little-known group are asking the government to strip La Luz del Mundo of its legal recognition, which would bar it from owning land or operating schools or hospitals. They cite Mexican laws barring religious groups from harming members or supporting political parties.
The Interior Ministry, which is studying the case, did not respond to several requests for information.
The controversy appears to be causing a quiet exodus of La Luz del Mundo members, according to Catholic Church officials, academics and former members.
But in Hermosa Provincia, it’s difficult to detect any flagging of the deep reverence for Joaquin. In the central plaza, hawkers do a brisk business in posters of the beaming, dark-haired leader.
Members’ homes are decorated with photos of Joaquin wearing a flowing white overcoat or sitting in a gilt-trimmed chair. The hymnal in the cathedral features 19 songs about Joaquin.
For the leader’s 61st birthday last month, thousands flocked to a party in a hangar in Guadalajara. Singers and folk dancers performed for Joaquin and his family. Church members were clearly thrilled at seeing the leader, who reportedly spends much of his time visiting his far-flung congregations.
“There’s a need [of church members] to be seen by Samuel. It’s like his gaze gives them ecstasy,” De la Torre said.
Alba Lopez, 50, a cleaning woman who lives in Hermosa Provincia, agreed. “It’s something supernatural. You feel great happiness seeing him,” she said.
But some say the reverence has produced intolerance. Former members say that after criticizing the church, they have been taunted, followed by Luz members and even beaten.
The most serious attacks have been against Moises Padilla, 33, a former member who has accused Joaquin of forcing him to have sex when he was a teenager.
Last month, gunmen kidnapped Padilla from outside his home in a working-class neighborhood of Guadalajara--an abduction corroborated by a neighbor who said he saw the attack.
The gunmen handcuffed Padilla and drove him to the deserted outskirts of the city, Padilla said. There, they tore off his clothes and attacked him with a dagger, he said.
“Now you’re not going to talk, idiot!” one yelled, according to Padilla. After the gunmen left, Padilla recalled, he stumbled to a nearby road for help. He filed a criminal complaint to the state prosecutor’s office a few days later.
57 Slashes From a Dagger
In his hospital bed, Padilla showed a reporter 57 matchstick-size slashes covering his neck and back. The doctor who treated Padilla said he could have died from loss of blood.
Padilla blames Joaquin for the stabbing and for a previous attack in which he says he was beaten by men warning him against criticizing the “servant of God.”
“He [Joaquin] wants to shut us up,” Padilla declared. Because of the accusations of abuse, “he’s having trouble with his business, the sect, which has given him millions of dollars.”
Silva, the Luz spokesman, denied that Joaquin or the church had anything to do with the attack. He accused Padilla of orchestrating the assault to give credence to his previous charges.
Authorities are investigating the attack and several others that have been reported. But judicial authorities say the victims haven’t been fully cooperative.
For their part, the former members are suspicious of the legal system, complaining that it favors the politically influential church.
Political authorities appear reluctant to become involved. Guadalajara’s mayor, Francisco Ramirez of the pro-Catholic National Action Party, or PAN, says La Luz del Mundo hasn’t caused problems for the city.
“We need the legal truth to be established,” he said, referring to the controversy surrounding the church. “Until then, everyone is innocent until proven guilty.”
But former church members say they’re determined to seek an investigation. They recently banded together in an association that claims about 40 members. While Padilla says he might go into hiding, others say they will continue to speak out about Joaquin.
“This is our objective: that people know who he really is,” Aguilar said.
Times staff writer Tom Gorman in Riverside contributed to this report. Sheridan was recently on assignment in Guadalajara.
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d8b7516988f4e568dff978fa0d5763f1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-16-me-29454-story.html | ‘Titanic’ Refuses to Sink, Passes ‘Star Wars’ as Top Moneymaker | ‘Titanic’ Refuses to Sink, Passes ‘Star Wars’ as Top Moneymaker
It’s loyalists like Selena Phanara who helped the blockbuster maritime disaster epic “Titanic” steam its way past George Lucas’ “Star Wars” this weekend to become the highest-grossing film of all time.
Six times, the Burbank artist and teacher has seen the story of two star-crossed young lovers aboard the doomed ocean liner--which on Saturday reached $471.5 million in box office sales across North America, compared with $461 million earned by “Star Wars.”
These are heady days for director James Cameron’s “Titanic,” which, with its $200-million price tag, is the most expensive movie ever made. Last week, the three-hour film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet became the first movie to pass $1 billion in worldwide theatrical box office sales. The film has also been nominated for 14 Academy Awards.
Heading the list of top-grossing films for 12 straight weeks since its release Dec. 19, “Titanic” officially surpassed “Star Wars” on Saturday. If the trend continues this week, the film would tie “Tootsie” and several others for the most weeks atop the list.
So what would it take to break the movie’s string of first-place weekly finishes?
Another Leonardo DiCaprio movie, of course.
On this most recent weekend, according to preliminary figures from Exhibitor Relations Co., “Titanic” shared first place with the debut of “The Man in the Iron Mask,” another film starring DiCaprio.
Both films took in an estimated $17.5 million. Final figures were to be released today.
“We knew this could possibly happen, to have a weekend where it’s DiCaprio versus DiCaprio,” said John Krier, who heads the box office tracking firm. “But we’ll see what happens. ‘Titanic’ has been routinely strong on Sundays, when people aren’t as pressed for time and can make time for a three-hour movie.”
So far, “Titanic” shows little sign of easing its record-setting pace begun in December, when it had moviegoing crowds lining up for hours. The film is being played on 3,116 movie screens nationwide--the most since its release--compared to 3,101 for “Iron Mask.”
“I’ve been watching for the big ‘Titanic’ decline, and so far I don’t really see much of one,” Krier said. “It’s been doing $20 million a weekend at a steady clip, so--even if it declined to $17 million--that’s not much of a drop.”
Unlike countless teenagers nationwide, many of whom have flocked to see “Titanic” time and again to swoon over the youthful-looking DiCaprio, Phanara has another reason for worshiping the film.
“It’s not the riveting plot, OK?” she said as she waited for a Sunday morning showing at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. “It’s the whole spectacle of the thing. On repeated viewings, you can enjoy the little flourishes, like watching the extras.
“And there’s still enough to the movie to keep me coming back. But I think 10 times will probably be my limit.”
Paul Person, an assistant manager at Mann’s Chinese, said the demand to see “Titanic” has eased a bit after the film sold out every performance for its first 10 weeks.
“It’s been pure madness,” he said. “They’re not all sold out. But they’re full.”
But Hollywood moves on. On Friday, Mann’s Chinese moved “Titanic” from its 1,500-seat main theater into a smaller 750-seat one to make way for “U.S. Marshals.”
And on Sunday, the theater suddenly canceled “Titanic’s” scheduled first showing of the day due to a premiere party for the 20th-anniversary re-release of the film “Grease.”
A handful of “Titanic” believers, and a few who had not seen the film, stood in disbelief outside the theater box office at the news of the cancellation.
“They can’t do this,” said a disappointed Phanara, who promised to return for a later showing. “This is ‘Titanic.’ This isn’t some film you can push around like this.”
* DOUBLE TROUBLE: Leonardo DiCaprio’s appeal is apparent as “Titanic” and newly released “The Man in the Iron Mask” tie for the No. 1 spot at the box office. F2
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871735d5d3fd4cb5192b37436d49c55d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-18-mn-30074-story.html | Netanyahu Turns to Evangelicals in U.S. for Support | Netanyahu Turns to Evangelicals in U.S. for Support
Beset by growing friction with the Clinton administration and splits in the U.S. Jewish community, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has turned for grass-roots U.S. support to what might seem an unlikely source: Christian fundamentalists.
Israeli officials say Netanyahu has decided to court Protestant evangelicals to demonstrate that he has a solid base of support in a powerful U.S. constituency even though some of its members are such outspoken critics of President Clinton that they are unwelcome in the White House.
The Clinton administration wants to lean on Netanyahu to freeze Jewish settlement activity and take other steps to resuscitate the stalemated Middle East peace process. Although the American Jewish community continues to offer public support to the Israeli prime minister, some key leaders are beginning to share the president’s impatience with the pace of negotiations. Netanyahu’s courtship of evangelicals is intended to fill that gap.
Before keeping an appointment at the White House during his visit in January, for instance, Netanyahu had a high-profile meeting with evangelical leaders with well-known anti-Clinton views.
Although Clinton owes no political debts to the Christian right, the number of evangelicals is just too large for him to ignore. Moreover, conservative Christians have considerable influence with Republicans, potentially giving Netanyahu a counterbalance to the White House in the Republican-led Congress.
For Netanyahu, keeping U.S. backing is critical. Washington is Israel’s only reliable ally, something the Israeli public knows full well. Although Israelis sometimes grumble about their reliance on Washington, public opinion polls show clearly that they want their prime ministers to maintain cordial relations with the White House.
“An Israeli prime minister usually needs the support of both the U.S. president and the U.S. Jewish community--Netanyahu has neither,” said an analyst with strong pro-Israel views.
Netanyahu’s embrace of the Christian right is not original. His Likud Party mentor, the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin, also counted on Protestant evangelicals to shore up his American flank during the divisive Israeli war in Lebanon in 1982.
“Likud prime ministers who get criticized by some American Jews tend to turn to the Christian right as an alternative source of support,” said Steven L. Spiegel, a UCLA political science professor and expert on the impact of U.S., Israeli and Palestinian public opinion on the peace process.
‘Natural Attraction’
In many ways, evangelicals are the ideal U.S. support group for an Israeli government. Although there are differences of opinion among Christian fundamentalists, the evangelicals tend to support Israel for theological reasons that are unaffected by current political issues.
By large majorities, they see the Middle East as a stark contest between Israeli good and Arab evil.
“Anyone who believes the Bible to be the inspired word of God has a natural attraction to Israel,” said Pastor John Hagee, founder of the 16,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio and a widely syndicated television preacher. “Israel is the only nation ever created by a sovereign act of God.”
Hagee said his interpretation of the Bible means that support of Israel is mandated by God and is not subject to change based on the policies of Netanyahu or of any other Israeli government. This unquestioning support is what distinguishes the attitude of many evangelicals from that of other Christians, secular Americans and many American Jews.
“There is a blind belief by many Christians in support of the state of Israel,” said Martin Mawyer, president of the Christian Action Network. “There is a blind trust in the nation of Israel which is not rooted in any knowledge of what is happening in that country.”
That sort of support is attractive to Netanyahu right now because U.S. Jews clearly are split about the wisdom of his policies.
Spiegel said Netanyahu is seen by U.S. Jews as “insufficiently enthusiastic about the peace process. Support for the peace process is much stronger and deeper among American Jews than it is among Israelis.”
Moreover, he said, the debate in Israel over legislation giving Orthodox rabbis almost total control over religious conversions “has really hurt, deeply hurt in more ways than the Israeli government fully appreciates,” its relations with adherents of the Conservative and Reform strains of Judaism, which are by far the most popular among American Jews.
The Second Coming
Many evangelicals have a political affinity with Israel, which they describe as the only true democracy in the Middle East and the only true friend of the United States in the region. But it is the theological ties that bind tightest--and cause growing unease among some American Jews and some liberal Christian denominations.
“Some of the very same people who are most supportive of the state of Israel and its security and well-being don’t see Judaism as a full and valid religion,” said Rabbi James Rudin, inter-religious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee. “It’s like ‘Israel si, Jews no.’ ”
What bothers Rudin is the belief among many evangelicals that establishing and nurturing a Jewish government in Jerusalem is a necessary condition to the Second Coming. Drawing on a variety of biblical texts, some evangelical leaders argue that the end of the world is drawing near.
“Many American Jews will say: ‘Any port in a storm. If they support Israel, that’s fine. Don’t worry too much about the apocalypse,’ ” Rudin said, referring to the account in the Book of Revelation of a final battle between good and evil fought at Armageddon, a location that evangelicals believe is the northern Israeli region now known as Megiddo.
But he expressed concern that some evangelicals believe “there is a divine plan out there in which my people will play [only] a supporting role. What disturbs me is that my fellow Jews have not examined fully the theological engine that is pulling [evangelical support]. I welcome the support, but at least I know what is involved here, the theological basis. Not a lot of Jews do.”
Although evangelicals have supported Israel since the modern state was established 50 years ago, Likud-led governments seem more comfortable with the relationship. When Netanyahu stopped first at a rally of evangelicals before his White House visit in January, the slightest suggestion of a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians drew loud jeers. His speech was met with chants of “Not one inch.”
Some fundamentalist Christians support Israel for religious reasons that have nothing to do with apocalyptic prophesy. Television evangelist Jerry Falwell said the theological basis for his unflinching support for the Israeli government is his interpretation of the story in Genesis of God’s covenant with Abraham.
As for linking modern Israel to the Second Coming, Falwell said: “Some evangelicals do hold to that. I’m not one of them.”
Hagee, however, clearly is. And so are many others.
“My father was a great Bible scholar,” Hagee said. “Before Israel was a state, he would teach his congregation that two things have to happen before the Messiah returns to Earth. One of those is that the state of Israel must be reborn. The second thing is the city of Jerusalem would need to be in control of the Jewish people.”
Officials of the National Council of Churches, an umbrella group representing 34 Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations, say that more liberal Christians also support Israel’s right to exist but reserve the right to oppose specific government policies.
Arab Christians Overlooked
Paradoxically, the evangelical view of Israel overlooks an Arab Christian community that has lived in the Holy Land for centuries.
Dale Bishop, chairman of the Middle East committee of the National Council of Churches, complained that pro-Israel evangelicals “either ignore or downplay the presence of Arab Christians--it is as if they don’t matter. Everything is subsumed into what many of us consider fanciful readings of prophecies.”
For Netanyahu, however, this support could be crucial.
“What Netanyahu wants is an American political coalition that will support Israel to the bitter end,” said William H. Lewis, a professor of strategy at the National Defense University and an expert on the Middle East.
Lewis said Netanyahu seemed to taunt Clinton by meeting with Falwell and other anti-administration fundamentalists before conferring with the president. He said Clinton “should have said this is not acceptable, but he accepted it.”
Falwell said: “Netanyahu understands America better than other [Israeli] prime ministers have. His meeting with me the night before his meeting with the president was not accidental. I knew what he was up to. This prime minister had enough American in him to know how to rub it in.”
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ef496ccf8e10f4060c3bdb9e3e5ac07e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-21-sp-31288-story.html | Martin Signs Jet Offer Sheet | Martin Signs Jet Offer Sheet
Curtis Martin of the New England Patriots, one of only seven players in NFL history to begin a career with three 1,000-yard rushing seasons, signed an offer sheet with the New York Jets on Friday.
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but ESPN reported that Martin had an option of $4 million for one year or $36 million for six years. The Patriots have a week to match the offer.
Martin, a restricted free agent, was taken in the third round of the 1995 draft by then Patriot coach Bill Parcells, who now coaches the Jets.
“I want nothing less than the best for the New York Jets organization,” Parcells said. “This was an opportunity that we felt was difficult to pass up.”
Martin sat out three games because of injuries last season, but still gained 1,160 yards in 274 carries and scored four touchdowns. He also caught 41 passes for 296 yards.
Tennis
Boris Becker withdrew from the Lipton Championships at Key Biscayne, Fla., an hour before his first-round match against Jonathan Stark. Becker, who withdrew from 10 tournaments last year, blamed flu this time.
On the court, U.S. Open champion Patrick Rafter was upset by Vince Spadea, 6-3, 7-5; sixth-seeded Yevgeny Kafelnikov of Russia overcame four match points in the second set and outlasted Slava Dosedel of the Czech Republic, 6-7 (7-5), 7-6 (7-5), 7-6 (7-5), and Paul Haarhuis of the Netherlands upset No. 12 Felix Mantilla of Spain, 6-7 (7-3), 6-4, 7-6 (7-3).
In women’s play, top-seeded Martina Hingis of Switzerland needed only 47 minutes to beat Chanda Rubin, 6-1, 6-0; Serena Williams upset 10th-seeded Irina Spirlea of Romania, 7-6 (7-4), 6-0; Venus Williams beat Tatiana Panova, 6-3, 6-3., and sixth-seeded Amanda Coetzer of South Africa defeated Alexia Dechaume-Balleret of France, 5-7, 6-3, 6-3.
Winter Sports
Olympic silver medalist Chris Witty won a 1,000-meter World Cup speedskating race at West Allis, Wis., on a day in which the winners of all four races set track records. Witty, of West Allis, who is the world-record holder at 1 minute 15.43 seconds, was timed in 1:17.41, breaking the record of 1:18.74 she set in January.
Canadians Catriona Le May Doan and Sylvian Bouchard won the 500-meter races. In the men’s 1,000, Adne Sondral of Norway skated 1:11.74, bettering the record of 1:12.76 set by Japan’s Manubo Horii last year.
Ed Podivinsky of Canada, who finished fifth in the Olympic downhill at Nagano, beat Daron Rahlves of Truckee, Calif., in a NorAm downhill at Jackson Hole, Wyo. . . . Hometown favorite Todd Lodwick, who won his third World Cup Nordic combined event a week ago, captured his third U.S. title at Steamboat Springs, Colo. . . . Elvis Stojko of Canada will not defend his title at the world figure skating championships in Minneapolis next month because of a groin injury suffered at the Winter Olympics.
Miscellany
Dominican Republic officials could not verify a broadcast report that four Cuban baseball players and a coach who fled their country in a rickety boat were alive or that they had made it to the neighboring country.
Mark Martin knocked teammate Jeff Burton off the pole in the opening round of qualifying for the NASCAR Winston Cup TranSouth Financial 400 at Darlington, N.C., Raceway. Burton had a lap of 168.284 mph, but Martin beat him with a speed of 168.665.
Dariusz Michalczewski of Germany successfully defended his World Boxing Organization light-heavyweight title for the 13th time by knocking out Andrea Magi of Italy in the fourth round at Frankfurt, Germany.
Defending champion Iowa and top-ranked Oklahoma State suffered costly upsets, but each still advanced three individuals into the finals and the teams stood 1-2 in the NCAA wrestling championships at Cleveland.
Stanford swimmers broke records in the 100-yard backstroke, 200 medley relay and 100 butterfly to keep their team in the lead at the Division I women’s swimming and diving championships at Minneapolis.
Second-seeded Brown beat Northeastern, 3-2, and top-seeded New Hampshire defeated Minnesota, 4-1, setting up the first NCAA women’s hockey final today at Boston.
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73d9465a19e4ea0ecb0cc3e6abe733f7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-22-bk-31341-story.html | SLAVE COUNTERPOINT: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. <i> By Philip D. Morgan</i> .<i> University of North Carolina Press: 674 pp., $49.95</i> : SLAVES IN THE FAMILY.<i> By Edward Ball</i> .<i> Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 504 pp., $30</i> | SLAVE COUNTERPOINT: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. <i> By Philip D. Morgan</i> .<i> University of North Carolina Press: 674 pp., $49.95</i> : SLAVES IN THE FAMILY.<i> By Edward Ball</i> .<i> Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 504 pp., $30</i>
American history offers no more complex, peculiar and terrible subject than the colonial and antebellum slave society of South Carolina’s Lowcountry. Only this region of British North America rivaled Latin America in killing off slaves as fast or faster than they reproduced. Nowhere in America were slaves so systematically repressed, and nowhere did they rise up in such numbers and with such organization. Slaves helped transform coastal South Carolina’s dark malarial swamps into the most expensive American agricultural lands, making their owners perhaps the richest entrepreneurs on the continent and enabling them to build the closest thing to a truly aristocratic society in America. Yet from this most uncharacteristically American aristocracy emerged the most ferocious defense of political liberty (for white men) in all of colonial America.
Perhaps because it was so atypical and extreme, the Lowcountry’s slave society has traditionally failed to attract the same attention from scholars and the general reader as colonial Virginia’s or even that of Georgia’s antebellum Cotton Belt or the Mississippi Delta. This situation began slowly to change in 1975 with Peter Wood’s “Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion,” the first comprehensive treatment of its subject. More recently, aspects of the Lowcountry’s slave society have been explored in a host of specialized monographs and in two remarkable books, Peter Colcanis’ “The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670-1920" and the first volume of William Dusinberre’s monumental “Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Country.” But all these books, with the partial exception of Dusinberre’s, focus primarily on either black life or white life and don’t fully recognize the Lowcountry’s slave society as the product of the interactions, antagonisms and accommodations between slaves and slaveholders.
This is precisely where Philip D. Morgan’s “Slave Counterpoint” succeeds and where Edward Ball’s “Slaves in the Family” fails. These are two very different books--Morgan’s is an academic yet accessible study, Ball’s a personal memoir and family history--that explore the same broad subject: the Lowcountry’s slave society. Morgan, the editor of William and Mary Quarterly, the most prestigious journal of colonial American history, and a professor at the College of William and Mary, has written a study comparing 18th century black culture in Tidewater Virginia and Maryland with that of Lowcountry South Carolina. Ball, the New York-based descendant of a wealthy Lowcountry slaveholding family, has written a history of that family and of the slaves they owned and an account of his search for and encounters with their descendants.
Although Morgan’s is the more authoritative and detailed account, “Slave Counterpoint” and “Slaves in the Family” paint similar pictures of the economy of the Lowcountry rice plantations and their social and political ramifications. Whereas colonial Virginia first developed its export staple--tobacco--and then developed a labor system--slavery--to exploit it (indentured servants were the primary laborers on tobacco plantations throughout the 17th century, and Virginia became a society based primarily on slavery only at the turn of the 18th century), colonial South Carolina was initially a slave society in search of a plantation economy. Most of South Carolina’s early white settlers came from Barbados, where they had already developed a slave economy based on sugar plantations. Arriving with their slaves in what was probably the most inhospitable region of British North America, whites began frantic efforts to develop a profitable export crop that their labor force could produce. Since South Carolina’s coastal swamps were too far north to yield sugar and other tropical commodities, for decades plantation owners had to settle on cattle and timber as their primary exports. At the turn of the 18th century, however, South Carolina’s whites finally discovered the lucrative staple that had eluded them: rice, a crop that soon defined nearly every aspect of Lowcountry economy and society.
The Lowcountry’s rice swamps were enormously profitable; they required enormous investments, and they were murderous. At least until the heyday of Louisiana’s sugar fields in the 1850s, no place in America offered such fabulous fortunes, and no place was so lethal. Early visitors to the region remarked that the white population appeared homogenous, since all its members had the same feverish, yellow faces, a result of the malaria that gave the Lowcountry the highest death rate of any region in British North America (perhaps a third of the Lowcountry’s slaves died within a year of their arrival). Though tobacco plantations could be profitable with a small number of slaves working them, rice cultivation, which required clearing and draining malarial swamps, constructing huge irrigation works and constant hoeing of the rice fields, was incredibly labor-intensive.
Contemporaries compared the work to the rechanneling of the Euphrates and the building of the pyramids. Although plantation owners could realize enormous profits, they had to make extraordinarily high investments in massive armies of expensive slaves who could produce the large quantities of rice necessary to recoup the heavy investment. As Morgan quotes an 18th century observer, "[R]ice is raised so as to buy more Negroes, and Negroes are bought so as to get more rice.”
Because of the peculiar nature and demands of the rice economy, then, no population in colonial or antebellum America was nearly so black as the Lowcountry’s. Blacks comprised about 40% of the population of Jefferson’s Virginia but 85% of that of the Lowcountry (98% during the malarial season, when planters went to Charleston). With whites so greatly outnumbered and hence in constant fear of slave insurrection, the Lowcountry’s slave regime was particularly harsh and in certain features resembled a police state. But paradoxically, the very repressiveness of their society engendered among Lowcountry whites a fierce jealousy of their own freedom. As Timothy Ford, a South Carolina lawyer, explained in 1775, "[L]iberty is a principle which naturally and spontaneously contrasts with slavery. In no country on Earth can the line of distinction ever be marked so boldly. . . . Here there is a standing subject of comparison, which must be ever perfect and ever obvious. . . . The constant example of slavery stimulates a free man to avoid being confounded with the blacks. . . . [S]lavery, so far from being inconsistent, has, in fact, a tendency to stimulate the spirit of liberty.” Knowing full well what they had done to Africans by enslaving them, the Lowcountry’s slave owners would not permit the same to be done to them in any form.
Because slaves comprised the overwhelming majority of the population in the Lowcountry, slavery took a different form there than in most other areas of the South. From the early 18th century to the Civil War, American slavery was called “the domestic institution,” because although it was dependent upon unlimited violence, it nevertheless required daily and intimate contact between slaves and slaveholders. The average slaveholder in most areas of the South owned fewer than 10 slaves and, guided by a patriarchal and later a paternalistic ethos, even most larger plantation owners referred without a trace of hypocrisy (however misguidedly) to their slaves as members of “my family.” In the Lowcountry, with its absentee slaveholders, this paternalism was greatly attenuated. More important, because they had so few interactions with whites, the Lowcountry’s blacks retained African customs and linguistic traits that made them seem even less part of an American “family” than slaves in more racially mixed areas.
But although whites and blacks were more radically separated in the Lowcountry than in any other area of the American South, they profoundly influenced each others’ lives. Morgan’s appreciation of their complex relationship differentiates his nuanced portrait from Ball’s rather simplistic story. Ball, limiting his sources primarily to his family’s plantation records and other papers, essentially tells two stories--that of his family and that of their slaves. Rarely does he intersect the two except to speculate sensationally (albeit almost certainly correctly) on the topic of miscegenation.
On the other hand, Morgan’s synthesis draws upon a wealth of social, political, legal, economic, literary, religious and anthropological sources to illuminate through a variety of prisms what he calls “the core contradiction of slavery--treating persons as things,” which guaranteed that master and slave would be thrust apart, even as they were bound inextricably together. Slave society was thus defined by its inherent contradictions: “However much masters treated their slaves as chattels, the humanity of their property could not be ignored or evaded. However total the masters’ exercise of power, negotiation and compromise were necessary to make slavery function. However sincerely planter patriarchs stressed mutuality and reciprocity, their authority ultimately rested on force. . . . However deep a chasm opened between blacks and whites, channels of communication arose to bridge it.”
In such a society, in which, to quote the most brilliant historian of the subject, Eugene Genovese, “slavery bound two peoples together in bitter antagonism, while creating an organic relationship so complex and ambivalent that neither could express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other,” affection and warmth flowed naturally into hatred and violence and vice versa. Morgan’s study ultimately shows how blacks and whites penetrated and altered nearly every aspect of each others’ world yet remained distinctive, and how “their encounters could not fail to produce unlimited permutations of human emotions, infinitely subtle moral entanglements.”
Thus, while Ball understandably feels compelled throughout his book to expose and condemn his ancestors’ enormities, Morgan uses the testimony of a former Ball slave as evidence that, in the former slave’s words, “there can never be any affinity of feeling between master and slave” and cites the same slave’s recollections of “the greatest tenderness of feeling” on the part of masters toward their slaves and of one master’s wife who was “a true friend to me.”
Ball becomes particularly heavy-handed with such ambivalent issues. He has an interesting story to tell, but he is probably not the right one to tell it because his need to apologize for his family’s misdeeds keeps him from examining their history in a clear-eyed way. He can’t help but editorialize self-righteously and declares often that while he is not “responsible” for his family’s past, he is “accountable to it,” a formula which he never manages to explain. Whenever he relates an encounter with the slaves’ descendants, his otherwise facile writing turns wooden. He stops using contractions--a sure sign that a writer is treating his subject too reverently and self-consciously--and his descriptions of these people are often strained, one-dimensional, saccharine and unintentionally patronizing. One “had a fine baritone voice, and his gaze was direct.” With another, “lines were deeply etched on her cheeks, like grooves . . . her eyes were moist the way age wets the vision.” Another was “poised and tall with a lovely smile.” Clearly, what happened to the Balls’ slaves is part of one of history’s greatest crimes, but Ball too frequently strikes a sanctimonious pose that hinders his ability to explore the intricacies of black-white relations that sprang from that crime.
It is impossible not to compare “Slaves in the Family” to an illustrious group of books extraordinarily well-written by wealthy Southern whites in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s that marry family history and memoir in a tormented effort to come to terms with the complexities of Southern race relations and the crippling heritage of slavery. Some--Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin’s “The Making of a Southerner,” Lillian Smith’s “Killers of the Dream,” James McBride Dabb’s “The Southern Heritage"--courageously held to egalitarian views on race. Others--David Cohen’s “God Shakes Creation,” Ben Robertson’s “Red Hills and Cotton,” William Alexander Percy’s “Lantern on the Levee"--while moderate for their time, held to what could be called a “genteel racism” that is, thankfully, now beyond the pale.
But all are painfully penetrating and honest attempts to grapple with a shameful past and with the ambivalence at the heart of history and in the heart of man. All these authors found that in their families’ histories, the admirable and the loathsome were rooted in the same soil and that the region they loved was tragically riddled with contradictions and paradoxes. “Slaves in the Family” cannot measure up to such company.
More than 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville defined what remains the fundamental and most obdurate problem in American life: “The two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable to separate entirely or combine.” The contours of this contradictory relationship were formed, as Morgan’s extraordinary book demonstrates, before the founding of the nation in the colonial slave societies of the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry. Ball’s view of the past, in which slaves and slaveholders pursued largely autonomous histories, neglects the complexities and messiness that Morgan, unflinchingly, refuses to ignore and that we must face squarely if we as a nation are ever to transcend the conundrum that Tocqueville defined.
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f3fd623dcdce2c078550028c5db8dcf9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-22-me-31613-story.html | Ski Slopes for the Southland | Ski Slopes for the Southland
From palm trees to Ferraris, Los Angeles has always had more than its share of exotic imports.
But for sheer novelty, few have rivaled Joseph “Sepp” Benedikter, the daredevil Austrian ski racing champion who established a ski school in a town where snowflakes are as rare as waiters without acting aspirations.
Ski fever was just beginning to afflict the American West in June 1939, when Benedikter, encouraged by a group of film celebrities, opened his Pine Needle Ski Slope on the North Hollywood hill where the Universal Sheraton Hotel of the Stars sits today.
On the 800-foot hill between Lankershim and Cahuenga boulevards, Benedikter dumped 6,000 burlap sacks of pine needles, installed two rope tows and built a ski rental shop, where he introduced and promoted the new sport of dry-land skiing.
Under the gaze of grazing cows, Hollywood jet-setters and downtown professionals dressed in fashionable bathing suits and shorts donned long wooden skis and clung to a rope for dear life. Students, including Lori Saunders, Ginger Rogers, Jane Wyman and Joan Bennett, never had to wonder which ski wax to use because the pine needles were slippery enough.
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Benedikter began skiing in his native Austria in 1914 at the age of 3, and the next year entered a race for children under 6, winning the first of more than 200 trophies.
He was one of five dashing ski enthusiasts imported from Austria, the country where modern downhill skiing techniques developed, by W. Averill Harriman to make his Union Pacific railroad’s Sun Valley terminus a ski resort.
With an engineering background, Benedikter designed the runs, decided how the slopes were to be groomed and organized the construction of the lodge.
In 1936, when Sun Valley opened, Benedikter was the first person to ride the world’s first chairlift.
The idea was conceived from banana boat conveyors that brought giant stalks ashore on hooks. At Sun Valley, they simply attached chairs instead of hooks to the cables. Before chairlifts, skiers sometimes had to climb six to eight hours with sealskins strapped to the bottom of their skis to keep from sliding back downhill.
As Hollywood stars flocked to the country’s first true ski resort, Benedikter immediately found himself typecast as a ski instructor in “I Met Him in Paris,” starring Claudette Colbert, Robert Young and Melvyn Douglas.
In 1939, for one summer only, he was lured to Los Angeles by the star-studded Wooden Wings Ski Club, which included Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, Henry Fonda, David Niven, Richard Greene, Tyrone Power, David O. Selznick and Lili Damita, and opened Pine Needle Ski Slope.
A passionate athlete whose constant travels were governed by changing seasons and an irrepressible craving for thrills, he left Los Angeles and returned to Sun Valley, winning the first Diamond Sun medal for downhill racing in 1941.
The same year, Glenn Miller captured the nation’s imagination with a new song, “It Happened in Sun Valley,” as skiers arrived daily through the winter on a train called the City of Los Angeles. Again, Benedikter was pulled away from his lucrative private ski instruction to double for Milton Berle in “Sun Valley Serenade,” starring Sonja Henie and John Payne.
The other immigrants who arrived with Benedikter at Sun Valley also prospered after their own fashion. Hans Hauser married gangland heartthrob Virginia Hill, the former lover and savvy partner-in-crime of natty Bugsy Siegel. Friedl Pfeifer moved to Colorado to create a resort of his own, in a place called Aspen.
During the summers, Benedikter kept in shape by working at an Idaho logging camp, until a loaded truck rolled over on him and ruptured several discs.
Germany’s annexation of Austria made him a citizen of the Third Reich, and even his show business connections couldn’t keep Benedikter out of a World War II internment camp.
After the war, he returned to the Los Angeles area for good, settling in Tarzana and taking charge of ski schools at some of Southern California’s newly opened mountain resorts. He supplied them with certified instructors from his latest business brainchild, the Far West Ski Instructors Assn., while still devoting part of his time to daredevil stunts.
In July 1948, when snow was sparse, he jumped 110 feet across a highway lined with cars at Mt. Lassen in the Sierra Nevada. Later, lawmakers outlawed such antics after a less skilled leaper was killed.
After developing Holiday Hill ski area (now called Mountain High East) near Wrightwood in 1949, where he built Southern California’s longest double chairlift--more than a mile long--he again pushed the limits of sport with stunts.
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Defying mother nature, Benedikter built what was called the world’s highest artificial ski jump at the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona in 1951. Thrilling hundreds of thousands of spectators, he brought in the U.S. Olympic team for exhibition jumping off a 225-foot tower that sloped 500 feet. In the 100-degree weather, as much as 8 million pounds of crushed ice was blown onto the slope. But the biggest surprise came when no one on the team wanted to be the first to take the breathtaking leap. Benedikter stepped in and made the opening jump and, reluctantly, the team followed. Each evening he led the team weaving figure eights down the hill, illuminating their descent with torches. Later, he reconstructed the jump at Dodger Stadium.
In 1956, after rain flooded the Los Angeles Basin, Benedikter put on a pair of water skis and was towed by a car through the neighborhood at 23rd and Main streets. He even starred in a short-lived weekly TV show, “Ski Meisters,” teaching viewers the art of skiing.
A professional slalom and downhill racer and in between an “accidental engineer,” he also designed and built incline chairlifts and funiculars for apartment houses and homes on hillsides from Hawaii to Laguna.
In 1964, he purchased a rundown ski area, Rebel Ridge near Big Bear, and converted it into a successful operation, drawing stars like Eddie Albert and Ann-Margret. He remained king of the mountain for five years, then sold it.
The skier’s journey ended with his death in 1981, four years after he was inducted into the National Ski Hall of Fame.
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8e2d96082f025e11123069404ae51e4b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-23-mn-31918-story.html | Clinton Allegations Dividing Feminists | Clinton Allegations Dividing Feminists
Women’s rights advocates broke ranks Sunday over allegations that President Clinton groped a female volunteer in the White House, reflecting a fundamental struggle to determine what constitutes sexual harassment and whether a popular Democratic president engaged in it.
At issue is a 1993 encounter between Clinton and former volunteer Kathleen E. Willey, who said in a nationally televised interview that the president embraced her in a hallway adjoining the Oval Office, fondled her breast and placed her hand on his genitals. Clinton has vigorously denied Willey’s characterization of the incident.
Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, said Willey’s account, if true, may constitute a case of “sexual assault.”
“She’s arguing he physically touched her and forced her hand on him. That’s pretty serious stuff,” Ireland said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Offering a far different assessment, Gloria Steinem, a founder of the feminist movement, discounted the seriousness of the charge because “President Clinton took ‘no’ for an answer.”
In an opinion piece published in Sunday’s New York Times, Steinem said the president may have “made a gross, dumb and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life,” but he is “not guilty of sexual harassment” because it happened only once and he backed away when rebuffed.
“This is very different from the cases of Clarence Thomas and Bob Packwood,” Steinem said, because the controversial Supreme Court justice and former U.S. senator were accused of making repeated unwanted advances to women.
During his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Thomas weathered an allegation that he sexually harassed a subordinate, Anita Faye Hill. Packwood, a longtime Republican senator from Oregon, resigned from office in 1995 after the Senate Ethics Committee recommended his expulsion for sexual and official misconduct.
Taking something of a middle ground, Eleanor Smeal, who heads the Fund for the Feminist Majority, said Willey’s story is serious for two reasons. It is “in an employment setting. She is asking for a job. And if what she says is true, there is touching and that is a form of misconduct,” Smeal said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
But Smeal also noted that liberal feminists see “a political overtone” to the accusations about Clinton and the sexual harassment case brought against him by Paula Corbin Jones.
The array of sexual misconduct charges involving the president has put feminists and many Democratic women in a difficult spot. Most have strongly supported Clinton, in part because of his stands on issues such as abortion, child care, education and women’s rights.
But until now, they have tended to take a zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment by powerful men. In 1991, Democratic women in the House of Representatives marched to the Senate chamber demanding a hearing over Hill’s charges against Thomas.
Anger over Thomas’ confirmation by the nearly all-male Senate inspired the so-called “Year of the Woman” in 1992 and was cited as a contributing factor in the election of Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer in California and Carol Moseley Braun in Illinois.
The three have said little in response to the complaints of unwanted groping voiced by Willey or Clinton’s other alleged sexual improprieties. Last week, both Feinstein and Boxer said Willey’s charges should be investigated, but they added that the facts remain unclear.
“At this stage we’re still at ‘he said, she said,’ ” Moseley Braun said on ABC-TV’s “This Week.”
“We have a presumption of innocence that attaches to any accusation that’s denied,” she said.
Moseley Braun said women will look at the bigger picture and support the president because of his political stands.
Republican women said they see hypocrisy in the stance taken by their Democratic counterparts.
“There’s sort of a selective outrage here,” Rep. Anne M. Northup (R-Ky.) said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Northup said women are treated far more professionally in the workplace today than they were 30 years ago. And, she added, “I think it would be a terrible shame if, in order to protect somebody political, we retracted those standards.”
Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) said Steinem’s column dismissing the president’s alleged groping of Willey is “shocking.”
“It’s a horrible message,” Snowe said on “Face the Nation.” “The fact is, Gloria Steinem should have been writing a column asking the president of the United States for an explanation, a candid explanation to the American people.”
Appearing on the same program, Sen. Susan M. Collins, also a Maine Republican, said she is “incredulous” at Steinem’s response.
“We have a case of unwanted touching,” Collins said. “And this is a case of the White House bringing the full weight of its propaganda machine down on this unfortunate woman.”
In a related development, Newsweek magazine reported that Willey said the White House is trying to “make me look like a wacko” by distributing copies of friendly letters she sent to Clinton, including nine after the alleged 1993 encounter. The White House made the correspondence public last week after Willey’s March 15 interview on “60 Minutes.”
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said the White House has erred by invoking “executive privilege” to shield two presidential aides from testifying fully in Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation of the Monica S. Lewinsky matter.
“I think it will damage the credibility. It looks like they have something to hide,” Lott said on “Meet the Press.”
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a27d099d70dee26e6ad85b95e71259ff | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-24-sp-32091-story.html | Cloud of Uncertainty Over Karros | Cloud of Uncertainty Over Karros
On the eve of the regular season, Dodger first baseman Eric Karros could be sidelined indefinitely after an examination Monday revealed that he must undergo arthroscopic surgery on his injured left knee.
Team physician Ralph Gambardella will perform the surgery today at 1 p.m. at Centinela Medical Center in an attempt to determine the cause of pain and swelling Karros has experienced throughout spring training here.
One source indicated that Karros might not have any cartilage remaining in the knee. Depending on the damage, Karros could return to the lineup in a month--or possibly sit out the entire season.
“The pain Eric has experienced was a concern, so we wanted to have it looked at to find the best course possible,” said Fred Claire, Dodger executive vice president. “The doctors have told us that this can possibly be something short term. Hopefully, the shortest scenario will play out.”
Regardless, Karros, who has played in 267 consecutive games, will miss the beginning of the season.
The Dodgers open on the road March 31 against the St. Louis Cardinals, and the six-year veteran will not be in the opening-day lineup for the first time since his rookie season in 1992. Karros, 30, has hit at least 30 home runs with 100 runs batted in the past three seasons.
“Eric Karros is a big part of our team and we’re obviously going to miss him,” Manager Bill Russell said. “You never want a player like him to be out of your lineup, but we just don’t know enough right now.
“We need to find out what the problem is and get it fixed. That’s the important thing.”
Players were surprised to learn that Karros, a team leader and fixture at first base, could be severely injured.
“Karros is one of the leaders in the middle of our lineup,” second baseman Eric Young said. “He keeps the infield together and he’s definitely an asset. Everybody is going to have to do more now.”
The Dodgers said they don’t know how or when the injury occurred. Karros, who was unavailable for comment Monday, is typically guarded with such information.
He returned to Los Angeles on Friday to be examined by Gambardella after his knee failed to respond to therapy. He had played infrequently in recent weeks as the swelling and discomfort lingered, but maintained he was fine. Two MRI tests suggested that something was wrong, but they were inconclusive, team officials said.
Gambardella, who examined Karros for the first time Monday, said he believes the problem is related to cartilage and not ligament damage, but he won’t be certain until he probes Karros’ knee.
“With the persistent swelling, for someone who has not had knee problems, we thought it was best to take a look inside,” Gambardella said. “But we are not inclined to say we know enough yet.”
The length of the procedure will be determined by what is found. The fear is that significant damage might require reconstructive surgery, jeopardizing Karros’ chances of playing this season.
“But we’re not thinking in those terms, so I wouldn’t feel comfortable speculating on anything like that,” Gambardella said. “We’re just basically going to take a look inside Eric’s knee to try to define the issue.”
Karros played in 14 of 24 games in spring training. He was productive despite the injury, hitting .389 with three homers and eight RBIs.
“A lot of things are not normal about this,” Gambardella said. “The fact that he has been able to play with it is not normal. That’s why we need to find out.”
Karros is calmly awaiting the procedure, his attorney said.
“It’s a tough time for him, as it would be for any player who is about to start the season and then experiences an injury issue like this,” said Jeff Moorad, who spoke with Karros late Monday night. “But Eric is extremely mature in his view of issues such as these. He’s approaching this with his typical professionalism.”
The Dodgers have already decided they will replace Karros from within, naming rookie Paul Konerko as the opening-day first baseman. The 1997 minor league player of the year at triple-A Albuquerque, Konerko has been working in the outfield in spring training. But first base is his best position.
“We’re comfortable with Konerko there until Eric gets back,” Russell said. “If it were up to Eric, we know he would be back tomorrow. But it’s not up to him.”
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83c9ad9f6ebfa8c688200c32996355a1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-26-sp-33052-story.html | David Greenwood’s Past Is Good Model for Present, Future | David Greenwood’s Past Is Good Model for Present, Future
David Greenwood’s plan for returning Verbum Dei to glory appears to be ahead of schedule.
Greenwood, a Southern Section player of the year at Verbum Dei in 1975 who starred at UCLA and played in the NBA, guided the Eagles to the state Division IV basketball championship last weekend at Arco Arena in Sacramento.
Not bad for a first-year coach.
“The discipline Coach Greenwood brought us really helped,” junior point guard Marlon Parmer said. “Last year, a lot of people weren’t very disciplined. They missed practices and it affected the way we played. This year, every time we were lagging in practice, he’d talk about the past. He’d say, ‘When we were playing. . . .’ That helps. We know the tradition and we want to be the best.”
Felicia Simon also won a state title in her first year as coach--and did it in the final trimester of her pregnancy--guiding St. Bernard to the Division IV girls’ championship.
In all, Southern region teams won eight of 10 championship games, including all five boys’ titles.
Westchester (Division I), Santa Margarita (II), San Diego University (III), Verbum Dei (IV) and Pacific Hills (V) won boys’ championships and Narbonne (I), Brea Olinda (II) and St. Bernard (IV) won girls’ titles.
Westchester’s victory gave Southern region teams 15 victories in 18 Division I boys’ championship games. Narbonne’s victory gave the Southern region 13 victories in 18 Division I girls’ championship games. Like the Narbonne girls, who will have all but one player back next season, Verbum Dei’s boys are a favorite to return to the state finals. Parmer and 6-9 center Dalron Johnson are two of the main reasons, Greenwood another.
He proved he was more than a just a big name in the championship game against Pacific Grove. The Eagles were leading, 53-50, with 23 seconds left when Greenwood switched his team from man-to-man to zone defense for one possession. The subtle move surprised Pacific Grove and point guard Eddie Banaszek shot an airball as a result.
“In the last few years, a lot of kids that would have come to Verbum Dei in the past have gone to other schools out of the area. It’s kind of pleasing that since I’ve been back, we’ve been getting calls from parents. “I say, ‘Your son is 6-foot-what? Yes, he can come here.’ ”
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aa63c0b67c4e23f85b97a14e837b47da | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-28-mn-33486-story.html | Japan Sowed Seeds of Its Pollen Problem | Japan Sowed Seeds of Its Pollen Problem
What on earth is ailing the weeping, sniffling, miserable Japanese seen on every street corner these days?
Not the nation’s worsening recession, its political dithering, the Asian economic crisis or even the Hong Kong avian flu. No, chances are the culprit is Cryptomeria japonica, a.k.a. the Japanese cedar tree, once one of the nation’s most beloved species and now the reviled producer of the pollen that has unleashed a dreadful allergy on one in five urbanites here.
Japan’s ill-fated love affair with the cedar is a classic tale of the unintended consequences of a seemingly benign environmental policy.
For centuries, shoguns and peasants have had a special affection for the cedar, known here as sugi. Besides its tall, noble good looks, the sugi is also extremely fast-growing, hardy and perfect for home-building.
After World War II, in an attempt to replenish forests that had been felled for firewood or scorched by bombs, the government offered generous subsidies for tree planting. Between 1955 and 1972, in national forests and on private land alike, Japanese eager for greenery and timber opted, en masse, to plant about 600 million acres of sugi and its almost equally allergenic cousin, the hinoki Japanese cypress. Now experts say at least 10% of Japan’s landmass is covered with the two species.
Although sugi trees have been growing in Japan for thousands of years, the related allergy was not identified until 1964, according to Dr. Sakae Inouye, one of Japan’s leading experts on the cedar problem. Because it takes 30 years for a sugi tree to mature and begin throwing off its pollen, it was not until the 1980s that Japan began to realize the magnitude of this arboreal gaffe.
Since then, things have only gotten worse. A recent survey by the Tokyo metropolitan government found that 19.4% of residents suffer some degree of cedar allergy, up from just 7% in 1983.
*
This spring, Koji Murayama, the chief pollen forecaster at the Japan Weather Assn., announced that global warming will almost certainly increase the pollen count because warmer weather in July prompts sugi to release more pollen the following spring.
Murayama based his calculations on two assumptions. First, he estimated that the average temperature will increase by 1 to 2 degrees centigrade by 2050. Second, he calculated that 40% more cedar trees will reach maturity over the next 50 years because sugi trees are still being planted, albeit in smaller numbers.
Based on those assumptions, Murayama forecasts an 80% increase in the number of allergy patients by 2050. If he is correct, that would mean one in every three Japanese citizens would be affected for up to four months of the year.
Already, the afflicted, who sometimes develop insomnia and rashes as well as the usual hay- fever symptoms, spend at least $40 million a year on remedies and medical treatment, according to the Japan Allergy Assn.
Murayama, himself an allergy sufferer, said it is possible to fight sugi allergies. He suggests taking note of pollen forecasts to prevent unnecessary exposure; using air cleaners indoors; and wearing an allergy mask, smooth clothing that pollen won’t stick to and a wide-brimmed hat to keep one’s hair from being contaminated while outdoors.
“Problem is, when you wear the goggles and the mask and a vinyl raincoat, you look like a bank robber, so I really can’t recommend this to people,” he said. Tokyo has a hotline that provides up-to-date information about which way the dreaded pollen--which can travel up to 60 miles--is blowing.
Cedar-bashers, calling themselves the Assn. of People Who Detest Cedar, have started their own Internet home page; they advocate cutting down some of the forests. And sufferers have their own parliamentary lobby, the Assn. of Sneezing Lawmakers, a group of 60 allergic politicians from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, that is pushing for more research into cedar pollenosis.
Alas, the sugi trees are likely to outlast even the perennial LDP. Cedars planted by the Tokugawa shoguns nearly 400 years ago at their burial place in Nikko are still going strong, and sugi trees in a forest on the island of Yakushima in Kagoshima prefecture are believed to be 2,500 years old.
Prospects for cutting down the newcomers are dim. Although the first postwar crop should be ready for harvest in about a decade, importing timber is so much cheaper than logging in Japan, primarily due to labor costs, that anyone who tried to fell and sell the sugi forests would probably go broke.
The Nature Conservation Society of Japan advocates gradually harvesting the cedars and replacing them with a diverse selection of native broadleaf trees--particularly in national forests, which the group believes should never have been logged and planted with sugi in the first place. But even environmentalists recognize that the current economics of timber mean that little can be done any time soon.
“It’s not realistic to cut the sugi down now, when you can’t make any money on them, because then there would be no money to invest in reforesting with broadleafs,” said Masahito Yoshida, director of the society’s conservation science division.
“The current situation, in which it’s cheaper to log in Southeast Asia and import trees than to cut the ones in our own backyard, is weird, no matter how much you believe in free trade,” Yoshida said. He believes that environmental concerns and shrinking world forests will eventually change the economics of the Japanese timber industry--but not for at least another decade.
*
Meanwhile, the allergy problem is growing so severe that the government has allocated $2.4 million for a three-year, multidisciplinary study. Research topics include developing better treatment methods, researching a vaccine, developing sugi breeds that give off little or no pollen and studying the still-unproven link between air pollution and allergies, said Hiroshi Nitta, an epidemiologist at the National Environmental Institute.
“It’s an extraordinary project given that this is not a fatal disease,” Nitta said.
Doctors say the increase in allergies among children has been particularly striking.
“We weren’t taught about allergies in medical school. We were told we didn’t have them in Japan,” said Inouye, 58, the author of a book on the sugi problem called “Allergies and Civilization.” Now 30% to 40% of Japanese children are believed to have some type of allergy, Inouye said.
The sharp increase in allergies among adults and children, which is common to most industrial countries, is believed to be the result of a combination of factors. They include particulate air pollution from diesel exhaust and other sources; an increase in the amount of pollen as more and more trees reach maturity; the advent of Western-style housing that traps pollen, dust and mold; and the changing Japanese diet and lifestyle.
Traditionally, Japanese babies were never fed red meat or eggs because such foods were rare and expensive. But there is growing evidence that the kind of protein an infant is first exposed to produces a kind of immunological “imprinting,” Inouye said, and that ingesting meat and eggs before the age of 1 may make children more vulnerable to allergies later. The Japanese diet featured more meat and eggs after the 1960s, according to the Tokyo survey, which also found that most Japanese allergy sufferers are under age 44.
Inouye’s group is also testing whether certain foods may help allergy sufferers. Tests of traditional Chinese herbal remedies for allergies have revealed that some are interferon inducers, which suppress the production of antibodies involved in allergic reactions, Inouye said. Now he is experimenting with feeding herbs to mice and studying their antibodies to see if there is an anti-allergy effect.
“It would be very cheap if you could use food as a medicine. . . ,” Inouye said.
For those who can’t wait for relief or can’t take anti-allergy medications, there are immunotherapy allergy shots that are effective for 70% to 80% of those who have cedar allergy, said Dr. Kimihiro Okubo, an allergist and assistant professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo. About 30% of patients become symptom-free after taking the shots, and 40% to 50% more report a decrease in symptoms.
But because the series of injections takes an entire year, only 10% of Japanese allergy sufferers opt for the treatment, Okubo said.
“The treatments are progressing, but the government must think seriously about what to do about this problem or there will be trouble,” said Okubo, who believes that it is possible that up to 50% of the Japanese population may develop allergies in the coming decades. “If it gets worse, no one will work in March, April or May. It will be a Japanese vacation.”
Chiaki Kitada in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Pollen Prediction
Pollen forecaster Koji Murayama has bad news for Japan’s allergy suffers: He says global warming will increase the amount of pollen that is released. Warmer weather in July will trigger greater releases of pollen from the sugi, the Japanese cedar tree, the following spring.
Percentage of increase in number of patients from 1990
* Source: Koji Murayama/Japan Weather Assn.
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e55204f5dc59e53f85ae8fce08d3a6ac | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-31-sp-34674-story.html | Tennessee Women Have a Dynasty in the Making | Tennessee Women Have a Dynasty in the Making
When Vice President Al Gore called to congratulate the Lady Vols for winning their third straight NCAA title Sunday night, Tennessee star Chamique Holdsclaw took the receiver from Coach Pat Summitt and, according to Summitt, asked Gore:
“Are you going to get tired of seeing me at the White House?”
Holdsclaw’s question was as relevant as it was bold. Not only will she be making her third trip to the White House in as many collegiate seasons, but there is no reason to believe she won’t be making a fourth White House visit. On Sunday, Holdsclaw promised to return for her senior season instead of going pro.
The Lady Vols, who topped off a perfect 39-0 season with Sunday’s 18-point victory over Louisiana Tech, will lose only one senior to graduation this spring. And even after Holdsclaw graduates in 1999, this year’s freshman starters--guard Semeka Randall and forward Tamika Catchings--will be entering their junior seasons.
In other words, there could be many, many more White House visits for Summitt’s teams. All that talk about Tennessee being the greatest team ever? The subject now has turned to the Lady Vols’ dynasty-in-the-making, one that could rival the most awesome dynasties of all time. This year’s title makes it six in 12 years.
“Certainly with this freshman class and Chamique coming back, and Kellie [Jolly] will be a senior, we should have a terrific team,” Summitt said. “If we stay healthy . . . I think we’re capable of doing it [again]. I think you are going to see an exciting team next year.”
Louisiana Tech Coach Leon Barmore worries that Tennessee’s success could prove to be too much of a good thing.
“This year I thought they really added a lot to women’s basketball,” Barmore said. " . . . I think for a couple of years that’s great. But if they run off five, six, seven in a row, now I don’t think that’s good for women’s basketball.”
This season, Tennessee received credit for drawing more people than ever to the women’s game, culling attention because of its remarkable winning streak and unprecedented playing style. The Lady Vols’ aggressive, running, take-it-to-the-hole philosophy had not been employed by a women’s college team to this extent. Though Holdsclaw was the team’s anchor, Summitt said, it was Randall and Catchings who brought a more fast-paced approach--to which even Holdsclaw had to adapt.
Holdsclaw actually increased her championship streak to seven with Sunday’s victory. She won four straight titles with New York’s Christ the King High before arriving at Tennessee.
“I guess I’m used to winning right now, and everyone is [saying]: ‘Meek, you’re not really excited,’ ” she said, shrugging. “I’ve been there, so I’m not going to be crying or anything like that.”
Added Holdsclaw: "[I want] to come back as a better player, win another championship and leave here in style.”
If Holdsclaw does indeed bypass the WNBA and ABL, the two professional women’s leagues, the Lady Vols bring back their entire starting lineup: Holdsclaw, Jolly, Randall, Catchings and center LaShonda Stephens. Catchings, along with Holdsclaw, was named a first-team all-American last week. Jolly, the point guard, scored a career-high 20 points in the final game, including four of five three-point attempts. Randall, who provided the most dazzling moves in Sunday’s game, is regarded as just a notch below her all-American teammates.
Summitt should have no trouble attracting even more of the nation’s best high school players to her program. An HBO movie about the Lady Vols’ 1997 title season recently aired. Summitt just released an autobiography and will spend the next couple of months on a book tour. In the past few weeks, Summitt appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and Holdsclaw made the cover of Ebony. There’s no telling what’s ahead.
But, according to Summitt, the best reason to expect future success from the Lady Vols is not the team’s level of talent, or the upcoming recruiting classes. It’s the attitude of this season’s young players. Summitt called this her most enjoyable season coaching in 24 years, saying this team mirrored her drive and motivation like no other has.
Last year’s title-winning team, by contrast, drove Summitt to the brink of retirement with its laid-back approach. After losing 10 games during the regular season, the team rebounded during the tournament. This team never once fell off the track.
“I am so happy for this team because of their love for the game, their competitiveness and their chemistry and love for each other,” Summitt said. “I cannot imagine this team not getting what they deserve. They deserve a national championship.”
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8811ad09ebe69d4db90507046794009f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-03-ca-45751-story.html | A True Renegade Cavorts on Amos’ ‘Choirgirl Hotel’ | A True Renegade Cavorts on Amos’ ‘Choirgirl Hotel’
Is she a high-boil Kate Bush rip-off or a true renegade--a singer-pianist unafraid to cavort with fairies and howl with wolves? Sometimes Amos is simply both, someone capable of terrific, swooping highs and ungodly, muck-wallowing lows, a woman whose fever either mesmerizes or embarrasses. Before Fiona, there was Tori Amos: strong, passionate, womanly and weird.
On her fifth album, Amos sticks with her recipe of undulating piano and strangely phrased lyrics, only this time she pumps it up with a little electronic trickery here and there, resulting in a complete mix of good and bad.
The highs would be the heart-wrenching “Black-Dove (January)” and “Spark"--despite its unfortunate “she’s addicted to nicotine patches” opening line. At the bottom of the barrel are the sappy and nostalgic “Jackie’s Strength” and the cartoonish “Playboy Mommy.”
The rest of “Choirgirl” sways to Middle Eastern rhythms and throbs to snail’s-pace dance beats. In the end, the electronic cha-cha of Amos’ “Raspberry Swirl” outdoes most of the songs on Madonna’s new album because, rather than doling out nice-sounding self-obsession, Amos actually takes on the serious and the disturbing. The result is a complete and baffling portrait of the artist as a flawed human being.
*
Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).
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cd22e4d330630d95e5b161752ffc821c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-03-sp-46047-story.html | Angels Put On a Show Come Hell or High Water | Angels Put On a Show Come Hell or High Water
His name: Joshua Hutchings.
His title: Geyser control.
His job description: “I throw a whole bunch of water in the air.”
He’s the Geyser Guy, the man who runs the “Outfield Extravaganza” at Edison Field.
Actually there are three people who have this job. That’s one of life’s little disappointments, like finding out Sea World uses more than one killer whale to play Shamu.
Hutchings is the man on duty for this game, the opener of a four-game series against the Chicago White Sox. He sits in a booth he shares with the pyrotechnician on the west side of the press box.
“Why does everyone want to talk to the Geyser Guy?” wonders Scott Lake, the Pyro Boy.
Because plenty of ballparks have fireworks. This is the only one with a geyser. Yes, the Kansas City Royals do have what they call a “water spectacular” at Kauffman Stadium. But the Angels did them one better. Their extravaganza has a geyser.
“It’s pretty original,” the Geyser Guy says. “Leave it to Disney to be on the cutting edge.”
As you can see, Hutchings, 19, is Disney through and through. He has worked on shows such as the “Fantasmic” production at Disneyland and does pregame special lighting for Mighty Duck games, although this is his first real experience with water. “Personally, I’m more of a lighting guy,” Hutchings says. “It’s where my background is. I’ve been doing it longer. I have more control.”
There isn’t much creativity involved in running the geysers. It’s a pretty set routine.
The Geyser Guy shows up 2 1/2 hours before game time, sits down in his booth and starts the water flowing down the rock formation beyond the outfield fence. He inserts a key into the control panel and turns it to “Show Enable.”
On the panel before him are seven buttons that activate different preprogrammed water and light routines for the five small geysers that shoot 20-25 feet in the air and the main geyser that can shoot up to 90 feet in the air. The biggest decision-making process involves choosing which button to push.
There isn’t much room for individual expression. Although Hutchings is considered an independent contractor when running the geysers, he’s working for a company that fired Jungle Cruise guides at Disneyland because they added their own jokes to the script.
“They wanted it very consistent through the season,” Hutchings says.
“You can kind of see little differences” between the three operators, he says. “It’s very subtle. I play with the main geyser more, I think, than the other guys do. But we’re all pretty consistent.”
The main geyser offers the operators the best chance to express themselves. They can push a button marked 25%, which activates only one of the four pumps, or push the 100% button and use all four pumps to send it to its full height. Or they can bump it up and down for effect.
Hutchings got to do a little freelance work when George Strait had a concert at Edison Field last month. For three songs, the stage lights were dimmed and Strait sang while the geysers danced behind him.
“Too bad they didn’t want pyro with it,” Lake says. “That would have been real nice.”
You’ll have to forgive Pyro Boy for being a little antsy. The Geyser Guy can play with his toy between every inning. Pyro Boy has a state-of-the-art computerized firing system, but the only time he is assured of using it is for the national anthem and player introductions. He spends the rest of the night hoping for an Angel home run, which gives him a reason to set off the celebration sequence.
“It bangs, it flames, it sparks, then it flames,” he says.
He’s holding what looks like a fighter pilot’s joystick in his right hand. His thumb hovers over a red button, and his index finger is ready to pull the big red trigger. Pushing the button and pulling the trigger simultaneously will set off the fireworks.
He doesn’t fire away when a ball goes over the fence. He doesn’t look for the umpire to twirl his finger over his head to signal home run. His cue comes when he gets the word though his headset from the people who run the game operations.
“Nothing in this park happens unless someone tells it to happen,” Pyro Boy says.
Tonight he’s in luck. Darin Erstad steps up with the bases loaded in the bottom of the sixth inning and hits a blast to right field.
“Here we go!” Pyro Boy says.
The ball lands in the seat, the word comes through the headsets, flames shoot out of the rock formations and the Geyser Guy hits a green button marked “home run.” As the small geysers dance, Geyser Guy holds the main geyser at its full height.
“Especially for a grand slam,” he says.
He’ll let the geyser stay up for about 15 minutes while the fans leave the ballpark after a victory.
“If they lose, I just kind of turn it off and walk away,” he says.
Guess you could say losses dampen the Geyser Guy’s spirits.
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f13609931e9c5f0bfcbf4031cf9b77d8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-06-ls-46952-story.html | Sparks in the Darkness | Sparks in the Darkness
Carrying doughnuts, a bowl of fresh vegetables and a stack of homework assignments, a tall woman in a silky skirt made her way down the long concrete path of L.A.'s Central Juvenile Hall. Even balancing this awkward load, Karen Mezek Leimert moved with ease and confidence, as if she were in a country garden, not jail.
Suddenly, her eyes found those of an 18-year-old inmate named Silvia Sanchez. At once, they embraced. Then, from her pocket, the girl produced a small slip of paper, her latest report card. Sanchez waved it like a victory medal, and in a way it was. Sunlight made the teenager’s eyes crinkle, but so did the glee of earning straight A’s. Awesome, Leimert said: perfect marks, even in math and government.
And then, from Sanchez, the most amazing words of all: “I’m going to graduate!” Against all expectations, Sanchez, who dropped out of school in the seventh grade, had earned her high school diploma. Beaming, Leimert high-fived the girl in orange prison garb.
So from the outset, this is a story about unlikely intersections. At its center are two women: a pair of lives that by rights should never have come together. But it is also a tale of transformation, for because their lives meshed, neither Karen Leimert nor Silvia Sanchez will ever be the same.
At 41, Leimert is an accomplished author and illustrator of nearly two dozen books for young people, among them the popular “Rumpoles and Barleys” series. Acclaimed in this country and abroad, her books convey quiet spiritual themes. Leimert lives in Calabasas with her husband and three children in an affluent, gated community. She was raised in privilege, and her life today remains rich in so many senses. As a child, Leimert lived in Europe and fondly remembers a sojourn in a castle in Switzerland.
The daughter of a laborer and a homemaker, Silvia Sanchez, who speaks only Spanish with her parents, was raised in a bright pink bungalow on Orchard Street in South-Central Los Angeles. She and her older sister, Belia, shared the sole bedroom, leaving the living room to her parents and the younger three children. Sanchez left school at 13; soon afterward she was raped. In the spring of 1995, she was one of six people arrested in the murder of a neighborhood acquaintance. She was 16.
Had Leimert not felt a twinge of social conscience, their paths would not have crossed. But the fates had been generous, she said. She wanted to “do something.” She wanted to give back. One day in 1996, she read about an enrichment program for incarcerated youth, and the next day, her altruistic impulses sent her to Central Juvenile Hall. She was a writer, she explained. Maybe she could set up a workshop: essays, poetry, journals. The prison authorities rolled their eyes and told her to go work with the girls. Silvia Sanchez was in her first class.
They connected in spite of themselves. Sanchez was withdrawn and not at all convinced she had anything to say, on paper or otherwise. Leimert was, above all, earnest. The writing curriculum she had earlier developed, “Word Power for Kids!,” began to bore her the day one girl wrote that her biggest crisis was when her mother couldn’t find the right shoes on sale at Nordstrom’s. At Central Juvenile Hall, Leimert asked the half a dozen or so girls in her seminar to write about “Me.” Sanchez scribbled and scribbled. Out came a story about persistent abuse at the hands of men. Leimert was chilled. She seldom discussed why she left her first husband. But domestic violence was something she knew intimately. So was the net of a man who tells you you’re nothing, a man around whom, nevertheless, you wrap your hopes and dreams.
Keep writing, Leimert told Sanchez. Through writing you will find your heart. Through writing, you will reclaim your soul.
For more than a year before her trial, Sanchez was a regular at Leimert’s weekly writing classes. The instructor was anything but a courtroom junkie: She had never attended a criminal trial and knew little about the rules of procedure. Even the victim’s own family did not attend every day of the trial. But Leimert felt the need to be present.
She marveled that throughout the proceedings, the 25-year-old murder victim remained faceless.
“The only thing they ever said about him was in relation to stab wounds,” Leimert said. On trial together, the six defendants merged into one indistinguishable and not very attractive lump, Leimert thought: gangster wannabes, poster kids for a harsh sermon on What’s Wrong With America Today. Everyone--the court-appointed attorneys, the prosecutors and the judge--all seemed to be going through preordained motions, like a charade, Leimert reflected.
She concluded that the trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court was a study in mass-market justice: one-size-fits-all or, more accurately, none. Though a county-authorized psychologist described Sanchez as “immature . . . an adolescent with low self-esteem, a negative self-concept and an oppositional nature” and recommended that she be tried as a juvenile, the girl was tried as an adult. The psychologist, Adrienne C. Davis, determined that “a young man lost his life, but not at the hands of this minor.” She added, “There is no evidence that this minor in any way knowingly participated in . . . the murder. She was along for a good time.”
But Sanchez’s own court-appointed lawyer was less persuaded. At the very minimum, said Arlene Binder, her client “may well have known about the plan to steal a car radio” from the victim. That in itself is a felony, said Binder. She had little face-to-face time with Sanchez. Even so, Binder said she felt the case against Sanchez was “really bad,” and the outcome was largely predetermined.
During the sentencing phase of the trial, Leimert rose to speak on her student’s behalf.
“I am the writing teacher, no more no less,” Leimert told Judge James D. Smith. “But I know a spark of light when I see it, and Silvia has the ability to shine.”
She looks back now on her small speech and on the sentiments behind it.
“Silly me, with my idealism, I kept thinking that if I could just say something, everybody would understand, it would all become clear,” Leimert said. “But, of course, it doesn’t work like that.”
Sanchez was sentenced to 25 years to life for murder in the first degree of 25-year-old Martin Quintanilla, the sometime-boyfriend of another of the defendants, Maribel Ochoa. Sanchez got the same sentence as that of her boyfriend, Gerardo Fuentes, who wielded the knife. The judge said the decision was merciful. Given the circumstances of the crime, life without possibility of parole would have been just as likely. In a further act of benevolence, Smith permitted Sanchez to remain in juvenile detention until the tattoos Fuentes etched onto her neck, arms, chest and face were removed. They were not actual gang tattoos, the judge observed, but they were identifying marks that could get her in trouble. Over a meal of processed meat and white bread at Central Juvenile Hall, Sanchez described the laser treatments that may one day erase Fuentes’ name and crude drawings from her body. They are thick and clumsily drawn, connoting ownership, like cattle brands.
“I hate the tattoos now,” she said. “I want them taken off. I want to change. I want to be a different person. I want no memories of the past.”
Love Fraught With the Threat of Violence
The crime took place at Dockweiler Beach, right under the flight path of Los Angeles International Airport. In a region renowned for its coastal majesty, no one would rank this strip of sand as a splendid piece of seashore. Young people are drawn to Dockweiler because, compared with where they live, it is exotic.
Around 11 p.m. on April 25, 1995, a beach guard told seven of these young people to leave. The beach was closed at dark, he informed them. They stayed. Quintanilla had agreed to drive the group to the beach if everyone gave him money for gas. His girlfriend, Ochoa, told him there would be a party. She told him to “dress down,” meaning dress like a gangbanger. Quintanilla drove his El Camino to the beach with the stereo blaring. Everyone was drinking, including Quintanilla and Fuentes, who made no secret of just how much he coveted the stereo, along with Quintanilla’s car and beeper.
The coroner’s report concluded that Quintanilla was stabbed numerous times “through his torso area and the back of his neck,” then left to die on the beach. Fuentes and his companions left in the victim’s car, taking with them Quintanilla’s beeper and stereo.
From detention, Sanchez said she hates Fuentes, and she loves him. She was barely 15 when they met. Fuentes, known in the neighborhood as Jerry, or sometimes by his street names, Midget and Lonely, was 21. He was handsome beyond her wildest dreams, she thought. Fuentes often beat her. But Sanchez shrugs: Isn’t that what love is? Just before the killing, he stood her against a wall and played darts with a switchblade. The outline of her body was the target.
“Even though he never knew how to show it, even though he would hit me, I still thought, ‘Oh, he loves me,’ ” Sanchez said. In their neighborhood, “he was known, everybody knew him. They would say, ‘Oh, you’re his lady. Oh.’ It felt good.”
With Fuentes, Sanchez loved to party. She drank and did drugs, mostly marijuana and cocaine. A party, not murder, is what she thought awaited the group that night at Dockweiler Beach. Fuentes told her that if she didn’t go with him, he’d take her best friend.
“To me that was worse than if he was going to kill me,” Sanchez said.
She said she hardly knew Quintanilla. But as they walked down the steep path to the beach, Quintanilla grabbed her. Sanchez feared the advance would enrage Fuentes. Besides, Quintanilla repulsed her. She said she hung back from the rest of the crowd. While they went down to the ocean, she lingered near the walkway. She said she didn’t hear or see anything that resembled murder.
From jail, Sanchez said: “I hate that night. I wish I could go back. I don’t know if I could have stopped it. I would have tried. It’s not fair that seven lives were lost that night. More, really. The victim, the six of us who were involved and all of our families.”
But she said this after the fact. In court, Sanchez said not one word, other than “yes, your honor,” when asked whether she understood the proceedings. Even that statement was subject to question. Sanchez says she was confused when, midway through the proceedings, her attorney took her aside and outlined a plea bargain. She did not comprehend the details, Sanchez said: “I didn’t know what it meant.” Besides, she said, the lawyer told her about the deal within earshot of Fuentes. She feared retribution if she accepted.
Sanchez is shy on an ordinary day, and in court, she said, she was overwhelmed. She also said she was scared to death, less for herself than for her family. No correspondence exists to support this claim, but Sanchez said Fuentes had threatened to harm her brother if she spoke out.
“He knows that is what I love the most--that my little brother, Cesar, that’s what counts the most for me,” Sanchez said.
Powerful Voices No Longer Silenced
When she showed up for Karen Leimert’s first writing class, it was hard to tell what counted for Silvia Sanchez.
“She was angry and withdrawn. She thought she was nothing,” Leimert remembered. After she dropped out of school, Sanchez spent most of her time running around with men. “She’d been battered and abused. Anything that in your wildest imagination could happen to someone had happened to her. She didn’t think she had anything to say. But when she started writing, there was a flicker of something that came out.”
That is not so unusual. Leimert came into the jail through Sister Janet Harris, a nun and filmmaker who several years ago launched a program for juvenile offenders called Inside Out. Harris’ idea was to reach these tough, troubled kids by introducing them to the arts.
“I felt that to be involved in the arts was to open them up,” she explained. “But it also provides a voice for them that has been muted. People are always talking about these kids, but they never talk to them. The writing is really an attempt to get their voice out there. It’s just amazing the impact it has.”
Harris, a former high school teacher, faults the juvenile justice system for focusing on “punishment for its own sake, without the counterweight of restorative justice.” She believes the writing program is more than an exercise because it offers a path to rehabilitation.
“These young people, the people in our juvenile prisons, are really no different than the high school students I taught,” Harris said. “Sometimes they make mistakes, big time. But if you are patient enough with them, if you create an environment where they can learn about themselves, the vast majority will change.”
Leimert was the first to tailor Harris’ program to young females. Every week, half a dozen or so of the most hard-core girls at Central Juvenile Hall would meet with her at a picnic table. Right from the start, she remembered, “what amazed me was that they were immediately on such a deep level. I thought they would stare at me and say, ‘Who the hell are you?’ ”
One week, she instructed the 14- to 18-year-old girls to write about heroes. She was stunned when most chose their mothers: “I thought, ‘I have a 15-year-old. She wouldn’t write about me.’ ”
At another session, given the topic “Cuts Like a Knife,” 18-year-old Letisha--convicted of armed robbery--calmly wrote about being sexually abused by her stepfather, beginning when she was 6. In an essay called “Me,” 14-year-old Julie--doing time for theft--described how her uncle was shot in front of her when she was 12. The following year, when her brother came out of jail, he was killed--also before her eyes.
But from the start, Sanchez, “in particular, had a powerful voice,” Leimert said. Much of her writing centered on her relationship with Fuentes.
“You said to me many times, ‘You ain’t nobody without me.’ And I believed you,” she wrote in “Love and Regret,” an essay. “But now I look back and say, why did I allow you to do that to my life? All those times I said, ‘I love you,’ and you said, ‘I love you too’ was just a waste of time. Now I know love is not supposed to hurt, love is caring.”
In “Me and a Man,” Sanchez noted: “I did enough by giving my life away, but I’m working on getting it back. So from today on, it’s all about me, not about me and a man.”
For a young woman involved in what social psychologist Angela Browne calls a “companionate” crime, this is a dramatic realization. Browne, author of “When Battered Women Kill” (Free Press, 1987), said companionate crime occurs when someone is in a relationship with a very dominant person--and that person commits a crime, often a killing. Men can be involved in companionate crimes, when a female partner breaks the law.
But 85% of killings in this country are committed by men, Browne said, and when the companionate crime is murder, “the burden falls particularly hard on women.”
Sanchez’s understanding of just how seriously her involvement with Fuentes has affected her life has not come as an epiphany. She has been in jail almost three years now, and for much of that time she has worked with Leimert. Trust is hard for Sanchez: “I never trust no one,” she said. But Leimert has become the exception.
“I trust her, and she understands me, too,” Sanchez said. “She understands what I am going through without judging me.”
Adolescence is rarely an easy crossing, and study after study shows that teenage girls, in particular, respond well to steady and consistent mentoring. Incarcerated teen girls are no different. A one-on-one, direct relationship with a dependable adult seems to provide a rudder.
But when Leimert first arrived at Juvenile Hall, her sense was, “these girls are pushed over here on the side. What do we do with them?” At the same time, she felt oddly at home. “I don’t know what it was,” she said. “I just felt I belonged.”
The Outsider Feels at Home
There she was, surrounded by young women who held the franchise on alienation, and Leimert felt preternaturally at ease. It was a powerful realization, because for all her sophistication and worldliness, Leimert grew up feeling like an outsider herself. Just when he should have been making a ton of money in business, her father had a revelation from God. Leimert was only a grade-schooler in Southern California when he chucked the business and packed his wife and four children off to Europe so he could preach the Gospel.
Yes, they lived in a 17th century castle in Switzerland, but only on account of the castle owner’s Christian generosity. Leimert’s family traipsed from country to country in a rickety VW bus. They smuggled Bibles, and they sang hymns for border guards. The revival business was an itinerant trade, so they never stayed long in any one place. Each time they plopped down in a new village, Leimert said, “I might as well have been on another planet.”
A dreamy child, Leimert coped by dwelling in her own private fantasy world. She created fairy tales out of daily events. She drew, she wrote, she dreamed. In her mind, Prince Charming was no idle reverie. She was 14 when she met Sasha Mezek, a handsome Slovenian rock star. He barely spoke English and thought the braces on her teeth were a beautiful form of adornment. Leimert molded a story around him. She was determined that her fantasy would come true. They married eight years later.
Overnight, Leimert said, “my dream just turned to a nightmare.” Her romantic prince turned out to be an abusive husband. He told her that she was stupid and had nothing to say, and so she was not allowed to speak at parties. She could not walk faster than he did on the street. If she couldn’t find his socks, she got hit. If the water dripped from a potted plant onto the floor, she got hit. When she drew pictures, he threw them out.
“He really controlled me,” Leimert said. She knew the description might apply equally to Sanchez and her relationship with Fuentes. “There but for the grace of God,” said Leimert. “Exactly.”
Only after her daughter Katya, now 15, was born, did Leimert think about getting out. She and Katya returned to America, where Leimert established a successful career as a writer and illustrator. She met her second husband, a land developer, at a park in Santa Monica. Their two young sons attend a Christian school.
But Leimert’s work at the jail and her role in Sanchez’s case consume increasing amounts of her attention. Leimert and Casey Cohen, a private investigator she met through Sister Harris, have spearheaded an appeals effort for Sanchez. They have filed a petition for appeal and found a lawyer to represent Sanchez.
Both acknowledge that Sanchez was present when a murder was committed, a crime that should not go unpunished. Neither paints Sanchez as an innocent gone astray. But both feel her sentencewas excessive, her defense inadequate. Richard Lasting, a Santa Monica criminal defense lawyer 2003332896Lasting called the case “a real microcosm of how the justice system has fouled up, how the name’juvenile justice’ is a misnomer.” (Calls to the prosecutor on the case were not returned.)
Sanchez’s growing cheering section--Leimert and Cohen, Harris and even some people within Juvenile Hall--also recognizes the irony of hauling the teenager off for 25 years to life in an adult prison, just as she has opened up to change.
“Her writing is turning out to be interesting. There is a Silvia inside there,” Cohen said. “Now that Silvia knows what she could have been, now that she has seen her value, she’s going off to prison.” Leimert’s writing program, he said, “kind of brought her up to the level where she could suffer.”
Leimert struggles mightily with precisely this quandary. Sanchez may not be the next Emily Dickinson, Leimert concedes. She probably is not some vast undiscovered talent that the world is waiting to read. But under her tutelage, Sanchez evolved from a girl who “couldn’t put two sentences together, who didn’t think she had anything to say, who figured she was dumb.” In Leimert’s class, Sanchez began to believe in herself.
“She discovered she can actually think,” Leimert said. “She learned she could make choices. She found something inside her that could shine.”
But there was a price.
“Because she was given some hope,” Leimert said, “it makes it that much more tragic.”
In the End, Hope Remains
Not even her own family thinks Sanchez should walk free. Her older sister, 19-year-old Belia, said, “She was there, and something happened. But it’s not like she planned it or anything. I don’t think the charges should be completely dropped. I think Silvia, she should do her time. But I don’t know, maybe five years?”
But at Central Juvenile Hall, Sanchez herself has stopped thinking about what might happen. She waits for the moment when, in the middle of the night, she will hear her name shouted out--when she will know it is time to go off to an adult women’s prison. She tells the younger girls who come to Juvenile Hall: “Just don’t have no hope.”
Still, she continues to write.
“I’ll never stop,” she said. Recently, she sent a letter to Leimert.
“Dear Karen,” she wrote. “You became my friend. I even thought that although we live in different worlds and had different lifestyles, I felt as if we were somehow both almost the same.”
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3547c5c34d483a76920c14a0fa290a9d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-06-sp-46977-story.html | Belle Cleared of Betting on Baseball | Belle Cleared of Betting on Baseball
An investigation into the gambling habits of Chicago White Sox slugger Albert Belle found no evidence he bet on baseball.
Kevin Hallinan, baseball’s executive director of security and management, spent about 14 months investigating Belle, who has admitted betting on other sports.
Players’ Association lawyer Gene Orza said he had not seen a copy of the report but had been told of its findings, which were reported Tuesday in the Chicago Tribune.
“It is consistent with what we always believed, that Albert Belle had no involvement in gambling on baseball,” Orza said.
The investigation began after Belle admitted in a deposition for a lawsuit that he lost $40,000 gambling on pro and college football and basketball games. He denied betting on baseball, which would have led to a lifetime ban.
*
Seeking to to expedite a trial on former sales manager Thomas Sneed’s claim of racial harassment, the Boston Red Sox asked the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination to find that discrimination probably did occur to gain “a trial on the merits, where the positions of all parties can be fully explored.”
Sneed, who is black, said the team asked him to keep quiet when he reported that a photograph of himself and his white fiancee, which he had on his desk in his office at Fenway Park, was defaced with a racial epithet in June 1996.
He said the team also did nothing about a year later after he reported that a photograph of his fiancee--who then worked as a nanny for several ballplayers--was covered with a picture of a woman who had recently been murdered.
The Red Sox denied any wrongdoing.
*
The Cleveland Indians put outfielder Geronimo Berroa and left-handed reliever Alvin Morman on the 15-day disabled list. Pitcher Jason Rakers was recalled from the minors, but the other spot was left unfilled. . . . The Texas Rangers activated right-handed reliever Xavier Hernandez, who has spent the season on the disabled list after shoulder surgery last summer. Pitcher Al Levine was optioned to triple-A Oklahoma.
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7a06ce35a9fd7b23c360b3348dc85f52 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-09-mn-47941-story.html | 3 Men Sought in Death of Former Beauty Queen | 3 Men Sought in Death of Former Beauty Queen
Investigators were searching Friday for three men seen leaving a motel with a former beauty queen the night before police found her body in a muddy field six weeks ago.
Jill Ann Weatherwax, 27, a onetime Miss Hollywood, was found stabbed to death behind an animal shelter March 25.
“It’s one of those tragic endings that we often see when someone becomes involved in a spiral of drug use that turns into prostitution, that ultimately ends in murder,” Police Lt. Jerry Davis said.
After winning beauty pageants in Michigan, Weatherwax moved to Southern California several years ago with hopes of becoming a star. She was crowned Miss Hollywood and signed a recording contract.
But police say that she took a wrong turn. In the 11 months before her death, Weatherwax was arrested three times in Ventura County for drug possession and being drunk in public, court records show.
She was arrested in Fresno March 21 for investigation of being drunk in public.
Three days later, she was seen in an abandoned house, Davis said. She was last seen alive that night with the three men, who Davis said were seen driving a green or gray four-door Ford Tempo.
“It is a known fact to our investigators that the activity that she was engaged in . . . that night was prostitution,” Davis said.
But family members say they find it hard to believe that Weatherwax was involved with drugs or prostitution.
She made her last phone call to her family in Michigan the evening before her death, her father, James Weatherwax said. “They think just because people dropped her in a vacant lot near a street where there’s prostitution, she was involved in it,” he said. “She was not a prostitute. It’s ridiculous.”
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e090f237345d0499c2673ee96be734b9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-10-bk-48197-story.html | Ralph Ellison in Tivoli | Ralph Ellison in Tivoli
Some 40 years ago I came into a small legacy and with it I bought a house in Tivoli, N.Y. “House” is not the word for it; it was, or once had been, a Hudson River mansion. It had a Dutch cellar kitchen of flagstones and a kitchen fireplace. There was a dumbwaiter to the vanished dining room above. The first floor had a ballroom but according to my informants, Tivoli’s townspeople, no one had danced in it for 80 years. Tivoli had been the birthplace of Eleanor Roosevelt. The villagers were the descendants of the servants and groundskeepers of the Duchess County aristocrats.
I shan’t be going into the social history of the township or the county. There were great names in the vicinity--the Livingstones, the Chapmans and the Roosevelts--but I didn’t know much about them. I had sunk my $16,000 legacy into a decaying mansion. To repair the roof and to put in new plumbing, I drew an advance of $10,000 from the Viking Press to write a novel called “Henderson the Rain King.”
There was a furnace of sorts and a warm-air system that took the moisture out of your nostrils. I was too busy with “Henderson” and with my then-wife to take full notice of my surroundings. The times were revolutionary--I refer to the sexual revolution. Marriages were lamentably unstable and un-serious. My wife, tired of life with me in the gloomy house, packed her bags and moved to Brooklyn.
I was naturally wretched about this. I now found the solitude (and the decay of the house) insupportable. Determined to save my $16,000, I threw myself into the work of salvage. I painted the kitchen walls and the bedrooms, as much for therapeutic reasons as to improve the property.
Then Ralph Ellison, who was teaching at Bard College, accepted my invitation to move in. I have always believed that this was an act of charity on his part.
We had known each other in Manhattan. I had reviewed “Invisible Man” for Commentary. I was aware that it was an extremely important novel and that, in what he did, Ralph had no rivals. What he did no one else could do--a glorious piece of good fortune for a writer.
Both of us at one time had lived on Riverside Drive. We met often and walked together in the park, along the Hudson. There we discussed all kinds of questions and exchanged personal histories. I was greatly taken with Ellison, struck by the strength and independence of his mind. We discussed Richard Wright, Faulkner and Hemingway. Ralph, it was clear, had thought things through for himself, and his ideas had little in common with the views of the critics in the literary quarterlies. Neither he nor I could accept the categories prepared for us by literary journalists. He was an American writer who was black. I was a Jew and an American and a writer, and I believed that by being described as a “Jewish writer,” I was being shunted to a siding. This taxonomy business I saw as an exclusionary device. Ellison had similar objections to classification. From his side, he saw the Negro as one of the creators of America’s history and culture.
That was OK with me. We found each other sympathetic. We got along splendidly and went fishing together for striped bass in Long Island Sound.
Ralph drove into Tivoli in his huge old Chrysler. He himself serviced it, coddled it, tuned it, and it ran as smoothly as it had when it came off the assembly line. The trunk, when it was opened, gave me my first hint of Ralph’s powers of organization. For hunting there were guns, there were decoy ducks; for fishing, rods, lures and a wicker-work creel; there were tools of every description. Ralph was able to repair radios and hi-fi equipment. I envied him his esoteric technical skills. Where I saw a frightening jumble of tubes, dials, condensers (I can’t even name the parts), he saw order. In my trunk I carried the spare wheel, the jack, a few rusty tire irons, rags and brown paper bags from the market. His trunk with its tools and weapons announced that he was prepared for any emergency, could meet every challenge to his autonomy.
He did not come alone. He was accompanied by a young black Labrador retriever who jumped from the Chrysler, eager to play, pawing my chest. Ralph had bought the dog from John Cheever, who was then, briefly, a breeder of black Labs.
The ballroom now became Ralph’s studio. It ran the entire length of the house. He set up his typewriter and his desk and we found a bookcase for his manuscripts. You couldn’t see the Hudson from the ground floor. Instead you had the Catskills to look at.
In the ballroom Ralph kept African violets which he watered with a turkey baster. It was from him that I learned all that I know about houseplants.
But the important thing was that the gloomy house was no longer empty--no longer gloomy. All day long I heard the humming of his electric typewriter. Its long rhythms made me feel that we were on a cruise ship moving through the woods--the pines and the locust trees, the huge hay fields plowed, planted and harvested by Chanler Chapman. Chanler, before I could be aware of it, became “Henderson the Rain King.” He drove his tractor like a real king, knocking over fences, breaking stone walls and pulling up boundary-markers.
Ralph and I brought the house under civilized control.
He came down to get his breakfast in a striped heavy Moroccan garment. He wore slippers with a large Oriental curve at the toe. He was a very handsome man. A noteworthy person, solid, symmetrical and dignified but with a taste for finery, Ralph was never anything but well-dressed, and he liked clothes of an Ivy League cut. In the days before everybody had elected to go bareheaded, he wore what used to be called a porkpie hat of very fine felt. By comparison, I was a stumble bum. He put on his carefully chosen clothes with aesthetic intent. I often amused him by my (comparative) slovenliness. He studied me, silently amused--deeply amused by my lack of consideration for my appearance. Day in day out I wore the same blue jeans and chambray shirt.
Our meals were simple. We ate in the kitchen. I learned from Ralph how to brew drip coffee properly. He had been taught by a chemist to do it with ordinary laboratory paper filters and water at room temperature. The coffee then was heated in a bain-marie--a pot within a pot. Never allowed to boil.
We saw little of each other during the day. I kept a vegetable garden, and at the kitchen door I planted herbs.
At cocktail time we met again in the kitchen. Ralph mixed very strong martinis, but nobody got drunk. We talked a great deal, before dinner, before the martinis took hold. Over dinner, Ralph told me the story of his life--told me about his mother, about Oklahoma City; about their years in Gary, Ind., and later in Cleveland, where he and his brother hunted birds for the table during the Great Depression. He described to me his trip, in freight trains, to Tuskegee; and how he learned to play the trumpet; and how he had come upon certain essays by Andre Malraux that changed his life. Often we rambled together about Malraux, about Marxism, or painting or novel writing.
There were long discussions of American history and of 19th century politics, of slavery and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Ralph was much better at history than I could ever be, but it gradually became apparent that he was not merely talking about history but telling the story of his life, and tying it into American history. His motive was in part literary--he was trying to find the perspective for an autobiography. In this respect he much resembled Robert Frost, who had made a routine, an entertainment of the principal events of his life and polished or revised them again and again when he had the right listeners. But Frost was his own hagiographer. He would tell you how Ezra Pound had received him in his London flat sitting in a hip-bath and treated him--Frost--like a ploughboy-poet. “I was no Bobby Burns,” Frost often said. He was trying to establish his version or picture of a significant chapter of literary history and to spray it with a fixative of his own.
Ralph’s purpose was very different from Frost’s. He took pleasure in returning again and again to the story of his development not in order to revise or to gild it but to recover old feelings and also to consider and reconsider how he might find a way to write his story.
He and I had our differences. I am not inclined to be sentimental about those Arcadian or Utopian days. He didn’t approve of my way of running the place. I had complained also that his dog relieved himself in my herb garden. I asked, “Can’t you arrange to have him do his shitting elsewhere?”
This offended Ralph greatly, and he was outraged when in a fit of nastiness I took a swipe at the dog with a broom for fouling the terrace. He complained to John Cheever that, with my upbringing, I was incapable of understanding, I had no feeling for pedigrees and breeds and that I knew only mongrels and had treated his chien de race like a mongrel.
Cheever was broken up by this. Well, it was very funny. Cheever never spoke of it to me. I learned of Ralph’s complaint when Cheever’s diary was posthumously published.
When I told Ralph that perhaps it would be a good idea to thin out the locust trees along the driveway, he said, “Well, they’re your trees.”
Immediately I telephoned a woodsman with a power saw. I don’t recall that there was such a saw in the trunk of the Chrysler. But in my place Ralph would have cut the trees himself. Nor would he have consulted anyone about it.
But the main cause of trouble between us was the dog. Ralph believed that I had taken against the dog.
I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom--which is bordered on all sides by isolation--is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life’s banquet.
But our boiling paranoias do simmer down, and later on Ralph and I resolved our differences. His dog was after all handsome, intelligent, lively. I didn’t hold it against him that he was a thoroughbred, a chien de race. We made peace and parted on the best of terms.
Ralph and I later agreed that our Tivoli life had been extraordinarily pleasant. It’s no longer a shored-up ruin. Its new proprietor has turned it into a showplace. But Ralph and I, two literary squatters, comically spiky, apart though living together, had been very lucky in the two years we spent together in what I called the House of Usher. We did not form a great friendship. What we had was a warm attachment. He respected me. I admired him. He had a great deal to teach me; I did my best to learn.
Since that time I have brewed my morning coffee precisely as he had taught me to brew it.
I often summon him up. He is wearing his Moorish dressing gown and the leather slippers with turned-up toes. Sometimes while pouring water from the measuring cup with one hand, he rubs his nose with the other, rubs it so hard that you can hear the cartilage crack.
*
UCLA’s Department of English will stage a marathon reading of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” Thursday at noon. The event, which is expected to last 20 hours, will take place in the Rolfe Sculpture Courtyard. The public is invited. For information, call (310) 825-4026.
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e413345ee673dbed97d8288a9e8c73d9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-10-sp-48358-story.html | Thanks to Spike Lee, Ray Allen Has Got Game and Movie Fame | Thanks to Spike Lee, Ray Allen Has Got Game and Movie Fame
Ray Allen doesn’t look like a movie star. Comfortable in baggy black jeans, a rumpled white V-neck T-shirt and white athletic socks on shoeless feet, he barely resembles an NBA millionaire, either.
But director Spike Lee didn’t want a star to play Jesus Shuttlesworth, America’s No. 1 high school recruit, in the new movie “He Got Game.” He sought a talented basketball player who looked young enough to portray an 18-year-old, and Allen, the Milwaukee Bucks’ second-year guard, fit the bill.
Lee approached Allen about auditioning for the part when the Bucks were in New York to play the Knicks. Unlike a lot of athletes eager for show business careers, Allen hadn’t considered any other stage than a basketball court.
“I can’t do any movies,” Allen recalled of his initial reaction. “It was great for him to just ask me. That was my first year in the league and I was still trying to get used to meeting all these celebrities, so I was amused by it.”
His only previous experience was as narrator of a third-grade school play, so he worked with an acting coach for eight weeks before shooting began in Brooklyn last summer.
“He did not want to be just a jock on screen,” Lee said. “He was focused and determined, and not many players would be willing to make that kind of commitment and dedicated effort in their offseason.”
In the movie, opening this weekend, Oscar winner Denzel Washington portrays Jake Shuttlesworth, a prisoner paroled for one week to persuade his estranged son, Jesus, to sign with the governor’s alma mater. If Jake is successful, the governor promises to commute the sentence he’s serving for the murder of Jesus’ mother.
With Jake in jail, Jesus had to raise himself and his younger sister in a Coney Island housing project. He’s facing the biggest decision of his life, whether to accept one of hundreds of college scholarship offers or jump from Lincoln High School to the NBA.
In some ways, the movie is not unlike Allen’s recruiting experience. As a talented prep guard from South Carolina, he was wooed by Kentucky, Alabama, Wake Forest, North Carolina State, Clemson and Florida. (The story also has similarities to Stephon Marbury’s career. The Minnesota Timberwolves guard grew up in Coney Island and went to Lincoln High).
“The phone rang all the time,” Allen said. “My sister stopped answering the phone, then my mom started telling people she wasn’t home. I wanted everybody to leave me alone. I just wanted them to stop bothering me.”
Eventually, they did after he chose Connecticut, where he starred for the Huskies.
“I wasn’t offered anything coming out of high school. A lot of guys get things, but I wasn’t high on the totem pole for most colleges,” he said. “Nobody came to me and said, ‘Here’s a car,’ and I’m thankful for that.”
Not so for Jesus.
His coach flashes $10,000 cash in exchange for early word on his decision. An agent invites Jesus over to ogle expensive cars and a platinum and diamond Rolex for signing with the agent.
It’s a lot like today’s real-life recruiting, much to the chagrin of the NCAA, which has rules prohibiting contacts with agents in order to retain eligibility.
“You get recruited by agents, you get recruited by coaches, you get recruited by girls, too,” Allen said. “These are people you probably never had relationships with in the past. The agents want money and coaches want to win, and they’re trying to get the best available talent.”
Allen has already told some of his young fans they’ll have to wait until they’re older to watch the R-rated movie, which has some nudity and sex scenes.
“I know a lot of kids will get their hands on it,” he said. “It’s just important, in case they do see it, that they look at it for the story it’s telling, and not just for the sneakers that are in the movie and the pretty girls in the movie. It’s about something.”
The movie also features a real one-on-one game between Allen and Washington. Washington played as a freshman at Fordham University, and although his skills were rusty, he scored some points on Allen, which wasn’t in the script.
“Most of the scenes that Ray and I did together took place on or around the basketball court, which was a great environment for him because it’s where he can be instinctively more relaxed and confident,” Washington said.
Milwaukee wasn’t good enough to make the playoffs, leaving Allen free to talk up “He Got Game.” He’s already thinking of future roles he’d like to play.
“I would say secret agent-type films, something that people would really like to see with fun gadgets and things blowing up, espionage and all that good stuff,” said Allen, a James Bond fan.
But he’d rather accept the NBA championship trophy than an Academy Award.
“The Oscar, they call your name and you win an award,” Allen said. “It just doesn’t have the elation to me that after zero seconds on the clock, you just won a championship and everybody is hooting and hollering for you. The whole world is drawn in on those [NBA] finals.”
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d6834abed4859111f6f2423caf2ccbf2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-12-me-48840-story.html | Police Commission President Defends Panel’s Oversight of Chief | Police Commission President Defends Panel’s Oversight of Chief
In response to growing criticism of its job performance, Los Angeles Police Commission President Edith Perez said Monday that the panel has not shirked its oversight responsibilities.
“The absence of public dissent between the board and Chief of Police Bernard C. Parks does not, as some might believe, indicate an unwillingness to tackle tough issues or critically review department programs or policies,” Perez said at a news conference.
Commissioners, she said, take their oversight duties “seriously” and “will continue to do so.”
Perez’s comments came in response to an article in Monday’s Times in which a number of department observers, including former commissioners, civil rights activists and union officials, said the five-member panel is struggling to supervise Parks, who is aggressively reshaping the LAPD and enjoys wide-spread political support.
Critics, who accused the commission of being a “rubber stamp” for the chief, mentioned several concerns, including the panel’s seemingly poor relationship with its inspector general, meeting agendas with few important policy matters, turnover in commission staff, a prolonged search for an executive director, and little public discussion of LAPD reforms.
Moreover, some community and city leaders privately have criticized Perez’s leadership of the panel, accusing her of acting more as a booster for Parks than as a civilian watchdog.
“I think that in our private meetings, the chief will tell you that he gets anything but a rubber stamp from me,” Perez said.
Parks declined to discuss the issue. His spokesman did say that the chief and the commission have a professional relationship characterized by mutual respect.
Perez and other commissioners reject the idea that they are not monitoring the chief’s actions. They said they are unfairly being compared to previous commissions, which clashed with chiefs to get things done.
“A different chief requires different oversight,” Perez said. “When a chief accomplishes much, there is no reason to have public dissension.”
Commissioners said their critics have a faulty impression of their performance and argue that they have made significant progress on many issues.
In a press statement, Perez listed seven accomplishments, including the establishment of a new language policy aimed at improving contacts with people who speak little or no English, the creation of committees exploring hate crimes and tracking problem officers, and holding occasional night meetings in the community.
“The board of police commissioners has exercised responsible and proactive leadership and oversight of the chief . . . and the Police Department,” Perez said.
Perez also praised the LAPD for allegedly satisfying 98 of 103 recommendations that were proposed by the 1991 Christopher Commission after the beating of Rodney G. King. She said the five that were not obtained were the result of funding constraints. She did not elaborate.
Such pronouncements by Perez have been the source of concern to many of her critics. Several were surprised that the commission president could make such a declaration when the panel is still developing a meaningful tracking system and appears to be defining a role for the inspector general.
Furthermore, Perez’s comments appear to depart from the views of previous commissions, which were reluctant to treat the Christopher Commission’s recommendations as a checklist.
Commissioners said most of their accomplishments occur out of the spotlight and thus may not be viewed as proactive.
Commissioner T. Warren Jackson, who joined Perez at the news conference, agreed that the commission is being vigilant in its oversight responsibilities.
“Frankly, I think we’ve done a great job of oversight.”
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e81c0579ea1c2de046fa522fbd17a6f2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-16-ca-50143-story.html | ‘Seinfeld’s’ Finale Ends Up in Sixth Place of All Time | ‘Seinfeld’s’ Finale Ends Up in Sixth Place of All Time
After all the hype, the last “Seinfeld” may have proved a letdown for many viewers, but the show didn’t disappoint NBC in the ratings department, as the raw numbers rivaled other historic television events.
The national audience was on the low end of projections the network issued in April but still massive, with 76.3 million people watching, Nielsen Media Research reported Friday.
Thursday’s “Seinfeld” thus ranks as the sixth most-watched entertainment event (excluding Super Bowl games) of all time, behind the 1983 “MASH” finale (which drew 106 million people), the “Who Shot J.R.?” episode of “Dallas” in 1980 (at 83.6 million), the last “Cheers” (80.5 million) five years ago, the 1983 movie “The Day After” (77.4 million) and the concluding chapter of “Roots” (76.7 million) in 1977.
NBC issued its own inflated estimate, putting the total audience at 108 million people--predicating that figure on the millions who watched at viewing parties across the United States. The network has repeatedly noted that Nielsen’s methodology doesn’t regularly record such out-of-home viewing.
Perhaps understandably reluctant to let such a juggernaut pass quietly, NBC also announced that it would repeat the finale at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, the concluding night of the current rating sweeps. The network will eliminate on-air promotion from the encore presentation, so Wednesday’s telecast will run only a few minutes past 9 p.m., leading into the season finales of “3rd Rock From the Sun” and “Law & Order.”
NBC cited the millions of fans who missed the episode as its rationale for repeating it, but there may be a more practical consideration: Networks are granted two airings when they license programs, so NBC doubtless wanted to use that second airing when it would do the most good, padding the top-rated network’s sweeps results while the “Seinfeld” iron still might possess some heat.
As it was, NBC bludgeoned the competition Thursday, as the network’s nightly average of 61 million viewers more than doubled the combined audience for CBS, ABC and Fox.
“Seinfeld” came into Thursday as television’s top-rated program, averaging roughly 30 million viewers each week. The first episode of the series, “The Seinfeld Chronicles,” drew fewer than 16 million people for its premiere in July 1989.
Advertisers paid record-setting rates for commercials within the program, eclipsing the previous high of $1.3 million for a 30-second spot established by this year’s Super Bowl.
Following “Seinfeld,” the season-ending “ER” also set a ratings record, surpassing the mark established by the live broadcast that began the season in September. With Jerry Seinfeld as a guest, viewing of “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” also soared.
Locally, KNBC-TV Channel 4 surpassed the national average, with almost 48% of all homes in the area--about 2.4 million households--tuned to “Seinfeld.”
KCAL-TV Channel 9’s attempt to counter-program with a prime-time showing of “The Jerry Springer Show” provided scant competition; in fact, the second-highest rated station during the 75-minute finale was Spanish-language outlet KMEX-TV Channel 34.
The rating in Los Angeles placed seventh among the 39 major cities individually monitored by Nielsen, behind Sacramento, Philadelphia, Seattle, New York, Boston and St. Louis. Ratings were substantially lower in most Southern markets, especially Memphis and Houston.
Those overwhelmed by the saturation coverage of the final episode will doubtless be reassured to discover that life will go on, even for “Seinfeld” fans. In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center released Sunday, only about 1 in 5 people who watch the show said they would miss it a great deal, compared to 51% who said they won’t miss it much.
As for those put off by the ending, Jonathan Swiller, a writer who watched at his home in New York, said he thought Larry David--who created the series with Seinfeld and wrote the final installment--made a deliberate choice in trotting out all the characters the “Seinfeld” foursome had alienated.
“I think he was saying, ‘These characters are repellent, and any of you out there who didn’t know that, wake up,’ ” Swiller said.
Details of the episode remained secret until the day before it aired, when the Boston Herald reported the central premise--that Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer would be put on trial for failing to intervene while witnessing a carjacking.
*
Times staff writer Jane Hall in New York contributed to this story.
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61106dfa85644b19acd3fa3fd0e28fad | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-17-mn-50593-story.html | Cooling Trend Predicted for Mount Vernon | Cooling Trend Predicted for Mount Vernon
Mount Vernon, one of the hottest attractions--literally--in the Washington, D.C., area, is about to get a cooling off. Air-conditioning is finally coming to George and Martha Washington’s 18th century mansion.
This is bound to be glad tidings to the million or so tourists who flock to the 500-acre historical site in Fairfax County, Va., each year, specifically the 400,000 who, by choice or need, visit in the sweltering summer months, when the temperature on the mansion’s second floor has been known to hover around 100 degrees.
When conditions become that oppressive, Mount Vernon’s helpful guides, who are issued cold compresses for their wrists and necks, haul out the electric floor fans and stand vigilant for swooning guests. Pass out in George and Martha’s upstairs master bedroom and you’ll probably awaken outside in a rocking chair on the high-columned piazza that overlooks the Potomac River, with a glass of ice water in your hand and a breeze caressing your face.
Although other historic properties, such as Jefferson’s Monticello, have long been blessed with air-conditioned comfort, Mount Vernon waited, fearing damage to its priceless property.
“We’re very cautious here,” said Dennis J. Pogue, director of restoration at the site 16 miles south of Washington. “This building is our main artifact. It’s the most important thing we have.”
The 15-room, 11,000-square-foot mansion, which Washington called home for 45 years and where he died in 1799, is made of wood and has no insulation.
The private nonprofit association that operates Mount Vernon sought out the New York-based Carrier Corp. for the job after learning of the company’s work on the Sistine Chapel a few years ago.
The firm designed a computerized heating and cooling system that will keep the indoor temperature within about 10 degrees of the temperature outside. “Anything cooler, and the furniture could go into shock,” said Mount Vernon spokeswoman Sally McDonough.
The renovation, which is expected to cost about half a million dollars, will tear up the house as little as possible, curators say. The mansion’s old boiler-operated heating system, installed in 1899 on just the first floor, has been removed, and the open channels are being used for the new ductwork.
Mount Vernon was built by Washington’s father in 1735 and was renovated three times by Washington from 1754 to 1787, said historian John Riley.
During one of those alterations, Washington added the striking riverfront piazza, which extends the length of the house. Thought by some to be the mansion’s most distinctive architectural feature, it provided a spot for guests--then and now--to sit a spell and enjoy the cooling breezes off the river.
The mansion’s large central hall and aligned windows allow a cross-current to pass through the house, and the octagonal cupola on the third floor draws hot air up and out.
Weather conditions were of major interest to 18th-century farmers and plantation owners. “Very warm and sultry with appearances of rain--but none felt,” Washington noted in his diary entry for July 12, 1768, one of his many comments on the subject.
The Washingtons and their guests coped with the heat much as present-day visitors to Mount Vernon do: by indulging in ice cream and drinking plenty of cold beverages (Martha had a spiked cold punch that was particularly popular, according to Riley). The ladies carried fans with them, and the gentlemen traded their wool clothes for linen.
Carrier Corp. is donating its services, including engineering and design, materials and installation, a gift estimated at $300,000.
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34fc9c0aa2b85d2e25b51e9043702579 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-17-mn-50846-story.html | Woman Finds Partially Buried Newborn Baby | Woman Finds Partially Buried Newborn Baby
A woman jogging with her dog in Altadena on Saturday night found a partially buried newborn boy with his umbilical cord still attached, according to Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies, who responded to the call for help she made from a cellular phone.
The woman, who runs every day in the foothills with her dog, discovered the newborn when her dog stopped to smell and scratch at the dirt near Alpine Villa Drive and North Lake Avenue about 8:20 p.m., said sheriff’s Deputy Bob Killeen.
The baby was taken to Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, where he was listed in critical condition, a sheriff’s spokesman said about 10:30 p.m.
After discovering the baby, the woman, identified as Azita Milanian, called 911 on a cellular phone and alerted a passing motorist, who drove to the sheriff’s Altadena station and told deputies.
Milanian, an engineer, said she was running in the hills behind her house when her dog left her and ran into the bushes.
“He went after something and I thought it was a dead animal or creature,” she said in a phone interview. “Then as I looked deeper in the dirt I could see it was a child.
“I was kind of scared,” she said, still shaken almost two hours later. “I wrapped the baby in a towel and wiped the dirt from his face. I thanked God he was alive. . . . The [umbilical] cord was hanging from his stomach.
“I reached for my cellular phone and called 911.”
As she waited for the ambulance to arrive, she said she spoke with the baby.
“I was telling him it would be ok,” she said. “It took more than 30 minutes for help to arrive. I was pretty emotional.
“I didn’t want this child dying in front of me,” she said.
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2c2c741224d283e1a436897d994f322b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-18-ca-50939-story.html | For Women in Sitcoms, It’s the Next Generation | For Women in Sitcoms, It’s the Next Generation
I am woman. Hear me roar--right off the air.
Murphy Brown couldn’t keep a secretary, sang Aretha Franklin songs badly but with abandon and told off Dan Quayle (in a vintage moment of art imitating life when life believed the art was real). Cybill, the fortysomething Hollywood actress, was constantly shoring up two ex-husbands and fighting to maintain some shred of dignity through a changing parade of goofball acting jobs. Ellen--well, Ellen announced to the world that she was gay--over a loudspeaker (inadvertently). Grace was the sharp-witted, struggling, working-class heroine.
They were assertive, outspoken, funny, strong, and now they’re gone.
Being ushered out this television season, a year after the departure of “Roseanne,” are the sitcoms “Ellen,” “Grace Under Fire” and “Murphy Brown,” which airs its finale tonight. “Cybill,” which has been off the air since April 1, is scheduled to air seven new episodes starting May 25 and has not been officially canceled, according to a CBS spokesman. But most observers--including its star--don’t expect the show to return next season.
In their place is a sea of comedy babes--younger, ditsier and cheerier. Dharma of “Dharma & Greg” is the ultimate flower child grown-up; Ally of “Ally McBeal” is now famous for her quirky fantasies and moments of tongue-tied awkwardness; Brooke Shields’ Susan, of “Suddenly Susan,” is struggling to find her voice and backbone. It’s not stupidity they embrace--Dharma is sage; Ally is a Harvard-trained lawyer. But they do seem to represent a turn of the tide in comedy heroines.
“I kind of characterize the new ones as lovers and the old ones going out as fighters,” muses producer and writer Diane English, who created “Murphy Brown” and ran the show for the first four of its 10 years on the air. “They’re young and they don’t feel the need--as women in their 40s do, and did--to push their way into things. . . . Ally and Dharma are not necessarily weak women, they just have different agendas and different goals, and they do kind of get what they want. But [at least] they’re not playing the girlfriend or weak women who have nothing to say.”
“Cybill,” “Murphy” and “Ellen” all suffered from lackluster ratings this season. So did “Grace Under Fire,” although when production ended last January, the producers said it was so that star Brett Butler could “resolve personal issues.”
“I’ve specialized in representing strong women and it’s been very frustrating,” says Karen Taussig, a talent manager whose clients include female comedians. “We’ve lost Roseanne, Ellen, Brett Butler, Murphy Brown--any intelligent woman with a voice is gone. Elaine [of “Seinfeld”], not a particularly good role model, is gone. And they’re being replaced with what? Calista Flockhart and Jenna Elfman? What kind of a message is this?”
Chuck Lorre, who is in the unique position of having created the outgoing “Cybill"--before he was fired by its star, Cybill Shepherd--and (with producer Dottie Dartland) the reigning “Dharma & Greg,” defends Dharma as strong.
“But in a much healthier way,” says Lorre. “It’s not a neurotic strength. It’s not generated by pain. We were creating a character who was very much alive in the moment and in touch with her feelings but totally capable of being angry and filled with grief. . . . She’s not a constantly happy zombie.”
And he rejects the notion that she’s a ditz. “If being ditsy means having a joyful life, then that’s a sad commentary,” Lorre says. “I just feel it’s kind of unfortunate that in order to be acceptable by the media you have to be dark and brooding and troubled and angry. If you’re angry, that’s de facto hip. That’s nonsense. That’s tired. That’s played out. . . . If you can bitch and moan, you’re a modern. Maybe Dharma is postmodern.”
You can call it postmodern, post-feminist or post-loud sitcom women. Or you can just call it a natural change of television events.
“These things are generally cyclical,” says Michael Marsden, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northern Michigan University and editor of the Journal of Popular Film and Television. “In the ‘70s, we had ‘Mary Tyler Moore,’ ‘Rhoda,’ ‘Maude.’ Those were the first shows that dealt with women in the workplace. Now, when we look back, that was pretty lame stuff by contemporary standards, but back then those were significant statements. . . . Television programming is really a continuing conversation the culture is having with itself. Those conversations will shift according to the cultural and social needs of the society.”
Looking at the whole of television, there are a lot of conversations going on. You could hardly say that hourlong drama lacks strong women when “ER” has actress Laura Innes playing the steely Dr. Kerry Weaver (despite her momentary meltdown on the season finale) and “The Practice” has Camryn Manheim playing such a confident and poised attorney you wish you could call her up and hire her.
In the area of literal strength, you can’t get much stronger than warrior Xena or Buffy, the vampire slayer--although both of them operate in fantasy scenarios.
And the very nature of a long-running show, which at its best has weeks to lavishly unpeel the layers of personality of its characters, means that even the goofy comedy heroines have their moments of fortitude and the pillars of strength have their moments of softness. Even the cantankerous, booming Murphy Brown sang softly to her newborn baby moments after he was born.
But one thing does seem unimpeachable: The departing strong women are in their 40s (or older--Candice Bergen is 52). Most of the female stars of sitcoms at the moment are in their 20s and 30s. As beautiful as Bergen and Shepherd are, the premium seems to be on sheer youth.
Consider the symbolism of replacing “Ellen” with “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place"--where the “girl” (and the “two guys,” for that matter) is young, cute and pleasantly vacuous.
Says English, who wrote tonight’s final episode and who turns 50 today, “Women my age don’t exist on television. I’m going out of the [advertiser-preferred 18-to-49] demographic. The theory is you don’t buy as much or you’re too loyal to one brand you bought in your 20s. They should look at my MasterCard bill. I am not spending less as I get older. At some point, advertisers will figure out what bull---- that is, and then you will see women in their 40s and 50s playing leads.”
The youth imperative goes for men too, some producers report. “When I’m doing a cop show, someone will ask, ‘Can you make the detective 24?’ ” says writer Bob Ward, who was a producer on “Miami Vice” and “New York Undercover” and is co-creating a series about the Mafia for Showtime. “I say, ‘No, the guy can’t make detective when he’s 24, OK?’ . . . Any time I do a series, the network says, ‘Can you make them younger?'--because they buy the products.”
Shepherd echoes Diane English on the subject of advertising. “First of all, people in their 40s and 50s are the people with money. The boomer babes are where it’s at,” the actress says.
She is circumspect about the demise of her show and what it represents and whether there’s any chance of it returning. “If you talked to [the network], you know more than I do,” she says with a chuckle. “I would think it’s highly unlikely.
“I don’t want to blame the younger women,” Shepherd adds. “There really should be room for all women--we have so many different stories to tell.”
* The final episode of “Murphy Brown” airs at 9 tonight on CBS (Channel 2).
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de718d78bf104ca1942a8c696cdf3c22 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-18-me-51136-story.html | Boy Found in Grave Is Expected to Survive | Boy Found in Grave Is Expected to Survive
A newborn baby found buried alive in a shallow grave in Altadena remained hospitalized in serious condition Sunday but was expected to survive, authorities said.
“The baby has shown remarkable recovery,” said Dr. Ricardo Liberman, the neonatal medical director at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, where the baby boy, born Saturday, is being treated. “It is really almost a miracle.”
A woman jogging Saturday night with three dogs on a hiking trail near the intersection of Alpine Villa Drive and North Lake Avenue found the baby. The child was covered in dirt and barely breathing.
The jogger, Azita Milanian, runs regularly on the trail and said one of her dogs found the baby.
“He went after something and I thought it was a dead animal or creature,” said Milanian, an engineer. “Then, as I looked deeper in the dirt, I could see it was a child.”
Authorities estimate that the baby was in the ground for nearly an hour before he was found about 8:30 p.m. He was only partly buried, his feet sticking up through the dirt.
“When the two legs came sticking out of the ground, I thought it was some creature,” Milanian said Sunday.
She started digging with her hands. Then, she said, “I screamed.
“There was a blue towel, and there was a baby in there.”
Milanian dialed 911 on her cellular phone but was disconnected several times, she said. She finally flagged down a motorist, who drove to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department station in Altadena and told deputies about the baby. Meanwhile, she stayed with the infant.
While waiting, Milanian said, she wrapped the baby in a clean towel and did her best to comfort him.
“He grabbed my wrist and stopped crying,” Milanian said. “It was very emotional. What kind of sick human would do something like that? He still had his umbilical cord hanging from his stomach.”
Liberman, who said the baby was not more than a few hours old when he was buried, said the boy probably would not have survived much longer.
“He suffered severe hypothermia,” Liberman said. “His body temperature [when he was brought to the hospital] was 80 degrees.”
The baby, named “Baby Christian” by a Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services worker, was breathing Sunday with the help of a respirator and given drugs to control his blood pressure, Liberman said.
The full-term baby is African American and weighs 7 pounds, 12 ounces. He will be kept in the hospital for seven to 10 days and then turned over to Children’s Services, a spokeswoman for Huntington Memorial said.
The hospital has received more than 20 calls from people interested in adopting the baby, spokeswoman Toni Miller said.
Liberman said he expects the child to recover. But the doctor said it will take a year or two to learn whether the child suffered any lingering effects.
“I feel pretty optimistic,” he said.
A Sheriff’s Department spokesman said this was the first time in memory that such a young infant was found abandoned and alive in an area the department patrols. In March, the body of a month-old girl was found floating in the California Aqueduct near Palmdale.
That same month, Los Angeles police officers found the bodies of two newborn babies in trash bins in two separate incidents near downtown Los Angeles.
Sheriff’s Deputy Cruz Solis said detectives are searching for the boy’s parents, and area hospitals have been asked to report any women seeking treatment for childbirth complications.
Milanian said it was fate that brought her to the baby.
“I was going to go dance with my friends but went running instead,” Milanian said. “I was so happy that I was chosen by God to find this child. I hope he survives.”
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cc3f7c00574d132882a3bf92d26262f9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-19-fi-51197-story.html | French Tycoon to Buy Christie’s for $1.2 Billion | French Tycoon to Buy Christie’s for $1.2 Billion
French tycoon Francois Pinault agreed to buy Christie’s International in a deal that values the auction house at $1.2 billion, both sides said Monday.
Pinault, a top retailer and avid art collector, has been a regular customer of Christie’s and, by purchasing the auction house, hopes to capitalize on a recent trend of increasingly higher prices for top artworks.
London-based Christie’s is the world’s largest auction house, based on its sales of art, fine wine, automobiles and other valuable objects over the last two years, although traditional rival Sotheby’s has been more profitable.
British traders had suggested Pinault might seek control of the 200-year-old auction business ever since his investment company, Artemis Group, bought 29% of Christie’s earlier this month.
Artemis has agreed to pay $6.41 per share for the company--40% more than its stock was worth-- before Pinault stepped into the market to buy Christie’s shares.
Pinault holds a 42% stake in French retail group Pinault-Printemps-Redoute. In addition to his collection of fine art, Pinault has stakes in Chateau Latour wines, one of the top brands in Bordeaux, and Vail Resorts in Colorado.
Pinault said he had no plans to replace Christie’s managers, but his precise strategy for Christie’s remained unclear. Executives at Artemis in Paris said Pinault would not comment on such specifics.
Christie’s American depositary receipts jumped $11.75 to close at $62.50 in over-the-counter trading.
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da594fdf94fcc219d6cf244b4615ceeb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-20-ca-51551-story.html | A Bidding War Over an Orphan | A Bidding War Over an Orphan
The battle to buy the first commercial discovery of the 1998 Cannes International Film Festival began quietly enough.
No one had seen “Waking Ned,” a comedy made with no movie stars by a British first-time writer-director, before its first screening on Monday afternoon. The 33-year-old filmmaker, Kirk Jones, had just driven the print down from London--a 15-hour trip--because plane tickets were too expensive. He didn’t even have any promotional posters.
“Cannes is so much about hype, but we just snuck in the back door,” Jones said of his film. Snuck in, that is, and took the place by storm.
On Tuesday, just 20 hours after distributors got their first look, Fox Searchlight bought the comedy, which chronicles what happens to a tiny Irish village when one of its residents wins the lottery. Sources said Fox paid more than $4 million for the rights to distribute the film in North and South America.
“I’m wearing a big smile,” said Lindsay Law, the president of Fox Searchlight. “I couldn’t be more happy.”
But the victory--won after a grueling, late-night competition during which several distributors made entreaties via cellular phones--did not come easy.
Sources said Fox beat out four other major distributors, one which offered to pay $1 million over and above the price of the film just to secure exclusive negotiating rights. Artisan Entertainment, the newly renamed company that was Live Entertainment, was among those who lost out, having at one point put in a bid of $3.5 million, sources said. Trimark and October Films also were in the running.
That the deal was done in less than a day shows how swiftly business gets done in Cannes, where fierce rivalries force almost instantaneous decisions. That the battle was so pitched says something, moreover, about this year’s festival, which features few “audience pleasers” that have not already been bought by distributors.
Before the festival began, Miramax bought two popular films in competition here--Todd Haynes’ “Velvet Goldmine” and Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful.” Similarly, Todd Solondz’s much talked about “Happiness” arrived in Cannes already represented by October.
So “Waking Ned,” which is not officially connected to the festival but is screening at the film market, was a welcome surprise. Especially after word got around that it could be another “Full Monty"--the British blockbuster, made for less than $4 million, that has grossed $247 million to date for Fox Searchlight.
Jones, a commercial director who lives in London, said he based his film on a tiny newspaper clipping about a postmistress in South Wales whose neighbors suspected she had won the lottery.
“She put a sign in her window: ‘No, I have not won.’ I thought the idea of a small community dealing with a winner in their midst was compelling,” Jones said.
So did Law, who first read the script two years ago, liked it very much but ultimately didn’t buy it because, he said, “it had an underlying sweetness that I thought resembled too much another film we were making--which turned out to be ‘The Full Monty.’ ”
The film was financed, in part, by pre-selling the distribution rights in France and Britain. The film commission from the Isle of Man, where the film was shot, also kicked in some money.
By happenstance, Law said, he found out that the film was screening for the first time here and made a point of showing up. He wasn’t alone. Acquisitions folks from Trimark, Gramercy, Miramax, Fine Line and Polygram were also there.
The minute that first screening ended, the hustle began.
“You hope you’ll see a movie like this,” Law explained. “Then, you say, ‘If I see this is wonderful, I won’t be the only one.’ Then, you panic.”
Distributors beat a hasty path for the Noga Hilton, the headquarters of the Overseas Film Group, which was selling the film. But the company’s chairman, Robert Little, was out.
Little’s cellular phone soon started ringing incessantly. Amir Malin, the co-president of Artisan, had had three scouts at the screening and on the basis of their enthusiasm, he tracked Little down.
“They told me it was like ‘Local Hero,’ ” he said, referring to the Bill Forsyth film about an American oil company hoping to locate a big operation in a small Scottish town. Malin made his offer that night. But Little had promised other distributors not to commit to any company before Tuesday’s screening.
Law and his colleagues at Fox Searchlight were also calling. They finally reached Little while he was eating dinner at a pricey hillside restaurant called the Colombe D’Or.
“We called him every 10 minutes, though when his main course arrived, he wisely turned [his phone] off,” Law said. “We said, ‘We’ll pick up your entire dinner bill if you’ll make a deal right now.’ But he honored his agreement and made us wait.”
The calls, Little recalled, “continued until 2:30 in the morning.”
By sunrise Tuesday, when people began gathering for breakfast in the cafes along the Croissette, there was a healthy buzz about “Waking Ned.” The top brass from October Films, who had not been represented on Monday, occupied the entire back row at Tuesday’s screening.
Fox Searchlight had some advantages going into the negotiations. Its track record with “Full Monty,” Law said, is so well known to British filmmakers that he didn’t even have to bring it up. Moreover, the company has just released “Shooting Fish,” a Stefan Schwartz film whose producer, Richard Holmes, is also a producer of “Waking Ned.”
Nevertheless, Law said, anxiety about the possibility of losing the film kept him awake all night. “I went to bed at 3 a.m. and lay there until 6, when I got up and ordered breakfast.”
Tuesday’s screening began at 11:30 a.m. Half an hour after it ended, the deal was done.
“It’s satisfying,” Little said later at a party, held on a British yacht called the Zaffiro, celebrating the film. “It doesn’t happen with every film.”
Jones, the filmmaker, said he was thrilled, particularly because his movie is an upbeat tale--a cinematic style that has not been in vogue of late.
“I’d hate for you to think I’m some goody-goody director. I loved ‘Trainspotting,’ but it wasn’t my bag,” he said.
“Part of me wants to go crazy,” he said with controlled enthusiasm. “But I’m very down to earth. As soon as I let it go to my head, I’ll be lost.”
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72ac40f6118d0e26e508398341aee8f7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-24-ca-52984-story.html | Assessing the Demise of Drama-Logue | Assessing the Demise of Drama-Logue
Drama-Logue is about to die. The weekly trade newspaper will be swallowed by its young competitor, Back Stage West, next month. The L.A. theater community is talking about what that will mean.
For years, Drama-Logue was the unofficial newsletter of the L.A. theater scene--"an icon for the theater community,” in the words of one producer. The publication was never exclusively about theater--it carried casting information for films and other media as well as theater, career advice and ads related to actors in general, and reviews of movies as well as plays. But its presence was far more significant in the theater community than in the movie community.
As publisher Bill Bordy said last week, the more well-known Hollywood-based trade publications--Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter--concentrated on movies and TV, not theater, and Drama-Logue “filled that void.”
The annual Drama-Logue Awards ceremony--given only for theater achievement, not for movies or TV shows--were, in his words, “wonderful love-ins” for the theater community. There was no cap on the number of awards a Drama-Logue critic could give, and no second opinion was required. As a result, 914 awards were presented this year alone. The annual ceremony was a congenial pat on the back for many theater workers who were otherwise, in most cases, poorly compensated.
Back Stage West began its own theater awards program this year, the Garland Awards, but its awards required a concurring opinion from at least two of the Back Stage critics, so a mere 110 Garlands were presented.
The new Back Stage West/Drama-Logue will resemble Back Stage West more than Drama-Logue, for it will be run by the current Back Stage West staff. However, editor Rob Kendt said it would expand and use some of the Drama-Logue personnel. Because Drama-Logue carried more theater reviews from L.A. (in contrast to other West Coast cities, which Back Stage West sought to cover more thoroughly), Kendt said the newly expanded publication will increase its L.A. coverage.
Nonetheless, many productions formerly received reviews in both publications, and many were reviewed only in Drama-Logue. Theater producers “are concerned about losing any media outlet that offers publicity,” said Theatre LA executive director Alisa Fishbach.
The death of Drama-Logue isn’t the only such loss. The relatively recent alternative weekly New Times reviews only one or two theatrical productions each week, in contrast to the five to 10 shows that were reviewed each week by the newspapers it swallowed, the Reader and Village View. Another source of theater listings and capsule reviews died recently with Buzz Weekly.
However, the trade paper merger offers advantages too, said several observers. As Back Stage West’s Kendt said, both publications had “hitched their wagons to a poor market"--struggling actors are not the wealthiest of individuals. The market couldn’t support two similar newspapers, he said.
“It’s great that information will be consolidated into one source,” Fishbach said.
Drama-Logue had its detractors. One producer, who declined to be quoted, said Back Stage West has been more supportive of theater than Drama-Logue in recent years, putting theater subjects on its cover more often. “I don’t think Drama-Logue understood their readership. Because they were the only game in town for so many years, they didn’t feel they had to.”
Drama-Logue was created in 1969 as a daily telephone recording with casting information. Founder Lee Ross lost interest after a month, and struggling actor Bordy took over the telephone equipment and the service.
Bordy began publication of the Drama-Logue Casting Sheet in 1972. As it grew, the “Casting Sheet” in the title became “Casting News,” and then just “Drama-Logue.” Editorial copy and ads gradually were added.
“It came along at the same time as the Equity Waiver movement,” Bordy said, referring to Actors’ Equity policies that allowed members of the union to work for nothing in approved 99-seat theaters. This movement, which was transformed in 1988 into the current and more restrictive 99-Seat Theater Plan, led to the burgeoning of L.A.'s many sub-100-seat theaters, and “as those theaters started flourishing, we started reviewing them.”
Bordy was partially inspired by the success of the original Back Stage in New York, and Back Stage’s owners came courting as Drama-Logue grew, Bordy said: “We were romancing for 25 years, and finally it was time to get married.” He refused to discuss financial terms of the dowry; two sources said that several years ago Bordy was offered $3 million for Drama-Logue.
Bordy denied that the market is too big to support both publications. Competition from the 4-year-old Back Stage West “didn’t hurt that much,” he said. “But I’m tired,” he said. At age 68, “I don’t need the hassle.”
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7b2048e9dc88180f52b4930f4f9ddb3a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-24-me-53072-story.html | Wedded Bliss? Channing Says Otherwise | Wedded Bliss? Channing Says Otherwise
News of the blond, the beautiful and the O.J.-adjacent
Gentlemen may prefer blonds, but Carol Channing says her husband of 41 years preferred the company of his friends, especially Beverly Hills glamour photographer Wallace Seawell.
The frothy-haired stage and screen actress claims in freshly filed divorce papers that during their four decades of marriage her husband, Charles F. Lowe, 86, spent more than $1 million on Seawell--because of their “personal relationship.”
Seawell, Channing contends, lives in a $3-million mansion furnished with an additional $2 million worth of antiques collected during jaunts around the globe. She suspects that she has paid for some of those trips.
Channing has hired divorce-lawyer-to-the-stars Neal Raymond Hersh, who filed papers in Los Angeles Superior Court to end what Channing describes as a passionless marriage. She is asking the court to give her control of her finances and claims that Lowe is spending “like a drunken sailor.” She also asked the court to force Lowe, who is her business manager, to account for every penny spent during their union.
Channing, 77, says her husband’s true loyalties became painfully clear to her last year, when Seawell allegedly hit her over the head with an antique porcelain vase. Her husband told her to apologize to Seawell, Channing says.
Meanwhile, she says, Lowe has been abusive toward her, often snapping, “Oh, shut up” and “What do you want?” When he holds on to her arm in public, she says, he pinches her--hard enough to leave bruises.
They had sex only “once or twice” during the first months of their marriage, Channing says.
Calls to Lowe’s attorney were not returned. But Lowe has denied to the Associated Press that he abused his wife or mismanaged her money. As for his relationship with Seawell, Lowe told AP: “Wally Seawell, he’s out every night with a different woman. I can’t believe that she would say that.”
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SAY CHEESE: Some pictures may be worth a thousand words, but a picture of Mick Jagger kissing Uma Thurman is worth $600,000, a jury in Beverly Hills has found.
The jury deliberated two days before returning the verdict in favor of photographer Russell Einhorn. He had claimed in a lawsuit against the Viper Room that Jagger’s bodyguards interfered with his property rights by wrestling him to the ground and taking away his film.
Einhorn, 37, was at the West Hollywood club Oct. 1, 1996, shooting pictures of a friend who played in the band the Wallflowers, attorney Ronald W. Macarem said. “He didn’t know Mick Jagger was going to be there kissing Uma Thurman,” the lawyer added. “Someone tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey, get this!’ ”
The weeklong trial featured expert testimony from Kevin Smith of Splash News and Pictures, a service specializing in celebrity scoops. He told jurors the shot could have been worth up to $1 million on the international market.
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GONE IN 60 SECONDS: Nearly nine years have passed since filmmaker Toby Halicki was killed in a freak accident while making the sequel to his 1974 cult classic, “Gone in 60 Seconds.” And still the battle over his estate continues, despite this handwritten notation in the margin of his will:
“Split the money, guys, and have a good time. No probate.”
This week, Halicki’s widow, Denice, will go before a Superior Court judge, seeking an accounting of where her husband’s millions went.
A former model and actress, she says the legal battles over her late husband’s estate have taken a huge financial and emotional toll. She says the legal war has generated more than $1 million in administrative costs and lawyers fees.
And she is charging that the administrator, J. Patrick McCarroll, mismanaged the estate.
“The court-appointed administrator took a $14.7-million estate and ran it into insolvency in a matter of 19 months,” Halicki said in a telephone interview, echoing allegations contained in her legal filings. This was accomplished, she said, “through a disastrous combination of incompetence, indifference, mismanagement and personal vendettas.”
But one of McCarroll’s lawyers defended him, saying he did the best job he could with a difficult estate plagued by 65 claims from creditors, a general economic downturn and squabbling between the co-executors, Denice and her husband’s brother, Felix.
“Denice and Felix disagreed from the beginning about everything,” said Valerie J. Merritt, an attorney for the administrator. “They were very suspicious of each other. That has made each of them terribly suspicious of any action Mr. McCarroll took that would appear to benefit the other.”
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“I AM NOT A CROOK”: Jill Shively, whose 15 minutes of fame as a potential witness in the O.J. Simpson case began and ended with a $5,000 check from the television tabloid show “Hard Copy,” is suing author Joe Bosco for libel.
In her Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit, Shively seeks unspecified damages from Bosco, who allegedly quoted a prosecutor calling her a “felony probationer” in his book “A Problem of Evidence.”
She says in legal papers that she has never been arrested. She blames the misinformation on a spiteful former boyfriend, who she says passed it on to Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Bozanich, who was overheard by Bosco.
Shively, you might recall, claimed to have seen a scowling man resembling Simpson driving erratically in Brentwood on the night Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were slashed to death. But her “Hard Copy” moment damaged her credibility as a witness.
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53ebfb2c403533606667b566e212efdf | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-28-me-54090-story.html | Thomas J. D’Andrea; Actor, Fixture in Comedy | Thomas J. D’Andrea; Actor, Fixture in Comedy
Longtime Thousand Oaks resident Thomas J. D’Andrea, a fixture in the Hollywood movie, radio and stand-up comedy scene for three decades, died May 14 at his home in South Port Square, Fla. He was 88.
D’Andrea was laid to rest Tuesday in a ceremony at sea, his family said.
D’Andrea had moved to Florida in April 1997 to be closer to his son, Tom M. D’Andrea, a retired marine colonel. Before relocating, D’Andrea lived in Thousand Oaks for more than 30 years, his family said.
D’Andrea, who had heart problems, died a few days after falling at a restaurant. The day before his 89th birthday, D’Andrea went to sleep and never woke up, said his son.
“He had been very active,” Tom D’Andrea said. “He would show up at our door any time of day. He would come in and watch some television and then we would take him home.”
D’Andrea loved restaurants, dining out for brunch and dinner daily, his son said.
D’Andrea was born May 15, 1909, in Chicago. His first job was at the Chicago Public Library. He also worked at the famous Sherman Hotel in the Loop, a frequent Windy City lodging choice of big bands of the day.
The connections paid off and in 1934, D’Andrea moved to Hollywood to become a publicist for Betty Grable, Gene Autry, Jackie Coogan and Mae Clark. His debut as a performer came when he replaced his friend, Wilkie Mahoney, on a radio show. The pair later teamed up for a comedy stage act that lasted two years.
In 1937, D’Andrea began writing radio scripts for Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor and the comedy team of Olsen and Johnson.
D’Andrea was drafted during World War II and served in the Army Air Corps. He went to Camp Roberts, Calif., where he was assigned to write a radio program for British singer-comedienne Gracie Fields and to read lines. A host of military radio shows followed.
D’Andrea’s big break came at Ciro’s Restaurant on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, where he caught the attention of a Warner Bros. executive, who cast him in “This Is the Army,” starring Ronald Reagan. D’Andrea also wrote much of the film’s dialogue.
D’Andrea went on to act in 35 films, including “Pride of the Marines” with John Garfield; “Never Say Goodbye” and “Silver River,” both starring Errol Flynn; “Dark Passage” with Humphrey Bogart, and “Night and Day” with Cary Grant. His last movie was “A House Is Not a Home” with Shelly Winters in 1964.
Tom D’Andrea said his father’s favorite role was the taxi driver in 1947’s “Dark Passage,” who takes Bogart, portraying an escaped convict, to get plastic surgery.
D’Andrea was under contract with Warner Bros. from 1945 to 1952, when he joined Hal March to do a television show about the Army titled “The Soldiers.” He later paired with William Bendix to play the part of Gillis in the television series “The Life of Riley.”
“The character he played in the ‘Life of Riley’ was most in tune with his personality,” Tom D’Andrea said. “He was a character actor and a comedian.”
D’Andrea also performed at the Sands in Las Vegas with the late Frank Sinatra. He was a Catholic and member of the Friar’s Club and Screen Actors Guild.
In addition to his son, D’Andrea is survived by his wife, Helen, who is living in a nursing home in Fort Myers, Fla.; another son, Bobby, also of Fort Myers; a brother, Bobby of Oklahoma City, Okla.; two sisters, Lois Atherton of Chicago and Maddy Olson of Hendersonville, N.C., and four grandchildren.
D’Andrea was preceded in death by a son, Michael.
Memorial contributions can be made to any local hospice.
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e322ea3a281adb63945953f70541f4e2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-30-me-54748-story.html | Possible Suspect in Tupac Shakur Death Killed in Shootout | Possible Suspect in Tupac Shakur Death Killed in Shootout
Orlando Anderson--once named by police as a suspect in the Las Vegas slaying of rap star Tupac Shakur--was killed Friday in a gang shootout in Compton that also claimed the life of another man, sources close to the case said.
Police withheld formal identification of the victims, saying that the next of kin had yet to be notified. Officers said only that two men were dead, a third man was in critical condition and a fourth, who was treated for gunshot wounds, had been booked on suspicion of murder.
Anderson, whose grandmother had died of natural causes earlier in the day, told friends about 2 p.m. that he was “going to the store.” A few minutes later, he left his home in Compton and drove off with friends, the sources said.
About 3:10 p.m., Anderson and another man--both believed to be members of the Southside Crips--drove up to a carwash at Alondra Boulevard and Oleander Avenue where several members of a rival gang had gathered, police said.
“There was an altercation,” Compton Police Lt. Robert Baker said. “Both sides began shooting.”
The brief but intense gun battle scattered bystanders and left four men sprawled on the pavement, all of them gang members, according to police.
The four were taken to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in nearby Willowbrook, where Anderson, 23, and another man were pronounced dead a short time later.
A third man was in critical condition and “just clinging to life,” according to a nurse at the hospital.
The fourth--Michael Reed Dorrough, 24--was treated for lesser wounds before being booked by Compton police on suspicion of murder.
Investigators said the confrontation that preceded the shooting apparently stemmed from a dispute over money. The shootout occurred next to Compton High School, but police said that although classes were in session, no students or staff members were involved.
Although Las Vegas police say there was never any direct evidence linking Anderson to Shakur’s death, Los Angeles police said as recently as last September that they still considered Anderson a suspect in the unsolved murder.
Last September, Shakur’s mother filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Anderson, saying he was the one who gunned down the rap star on the Las Vegas Strip in September 1996.
According to the lawsuit, the rapper’s shooting followed a fight in a hotel lobby between Shakur’s entourage and Anderson. An affidavit filed with the lawsuit contends that Anderson was seen carrying a Glock .40-caliber handgun--the same type of weapon used to kill Shakur--several days after the rapper’s death.
Times staff writer Nieson Himmel contributed to this report.
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533cfe61f5da5f1216a16947670118b8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-31-ca-54954-story.html | Outsize and Outrageous | Outsize and Outrageous
Trying to fit Niki de Saint Phalle’s work into one of the art world’s standard categories is a bit like stuffing your cat into a cage for a trip to the vet. Just as you think you have the cute little fellow under control, he bites your finger, pokes out a paw and stops you from closing the door, then gathers all his strength and blasts off to a secret hiding place.
Sweet-tempered and lovable as Saint Phalle’s art may appear, it’s the product of deep conflicts and convictions. Her fantastic animals, Tarot characters and trademark “Nanas"--you know, those gigantic bathing beauties who shamelessly flaunt their bulbous breasts and thunder thighs--are the work of a disarmingly unpretentious artist who confesses to being motivated by guilt and a need to prove herself.
Her resume is equally paradoxical. An internationally renowned artist--and one of a very few women known primarily for monumental sculpture--she has created major public projects in Europe and executed large private commissions in the United States. Yet she’s sometimes seen as a rather marginal artist whose work is too playful to be taken seriously.
Although she’s a self-taught outsider with little regard for the art world’s hierarchies and conventions, she collaborates with the top echelon of artists, architects and curators, many of whom are longtime friends. Apparently unconcerned about honing a “high-art” image, she shows her work in offbeat venues--including the Mingei International Museum of Folk Art in Balboa Park, which opened a large Saint Phalle exhibition last week--but she also has been honored with retrospective exhibitions in mainstream art museums in Europe.
Sixty-seven and plagued by asthma and emphysema--caused by inhaling fumes from petrochemicals and plastics used in her work--Saint Phalle is a high-spirited survivor of ill health and hidebound traditions. She’s also an enormously productive workaholic, as her current exhibition attests. “Niki de Saint Phalle--Insider/Outsider--World Inspired Art” features about 100 sculptures, paintings, reliefs, graphic works and maquettes made during the last 15 years, and it only skims the surface of her output.
Outside the museum are enormous, wildly imaginative animal sculptures destined for Noah’s Ark Sculpture Park in Jerusalem, a work-in-progress that she has designed with Swiss architect Mario Botta. Among the beasts are a gorilla, a bear, a spider, an elephant/giraffe, a stacked pair of camels and a prehistoric monster--all covered with brightly glazed ceramic tiles, mirrors and stones, and made for climbing.
Inside the museum is a bonanza of vividly colored artwork. There’s a chair in the shape of a coiled snake; a fountain filled with four voluptuous women; a mountainous, gray-haired woman in a pink dress preparing to do her hair at a messy dressing table; a group of phallic obelisks; a devil with a gold fig leaf; and mechanized wall panels with components that light up or move when visitors walk past them.
Suspended from the ceiling of the rotunda, and presiding over the entire show, is a 20-foot angel, which has gold wings and bright blue skin, wears a red bathing suit and holds a gilded vase in each hand. Called “Temperance” and conceived as “guardian of the elixir of life,” the angel appears to pour the elixir--symbolized by a band of neon--from one vase to the other.
What’s not to like about this art? Very little, it would seem, unless one is offended by images of sexuality and unconventional representations of angels. Indeed, Saint Phalle’s work is so approachable that it tends to be viewed as entertainment.
“Most people don’t see the edginess in my work. They think it’s all fantasy and whimsy,” she said in an interview at her home and studio in La Jolla, where she has transformed a rambling Spanish-style house into a light-filled live/work space. Furnished with her own creations--brightly tiled tables and snake-backed chairs--and those of her artist friends, it’s a cheerful environment that reflects Saint Phalle’s artistic sensibility and the intensity of her engagement with her work.
But beyond the exuberant forms, splashy colors, glittering mirrors, shiny surfaces and functional designs is a fairly complicated artistic sensibility.
Some of Saint Phalle’s works send hopeful messages about reducing racial tension. She frequently depicts black people, and occasionally mixed-race couples. In the San Diego show, each of the four women in “Nana Fountain” has a different color skin: black, yellow, orange or chartreuse.
“Eventually, we will all turn into one gorgeous color and stop this fighting,” the artist said confidently. But then she asked, “How long do you think that will take?”
The inevitability of death is also on her mind, so she invites her audience to grapple with that, too. A 10-foot-tall, walk-in sculpture in the shape of a grinning human skull presents death as a meditation chamber or playhouse. A small skull on the old woman’s dressing table makes her vanity seem pathetic, if not ludicrous, but Saint Phalle said she herself will probably be fixing her face and hair when the Grim Reaper comes calling. Saint Phalle’s best-known works, the monumental female figures, or “Nanas,” are generally interpreted as jubilant celebrations of women’s freedom and power. But they evolved from a series of sculptures based on roles women play, including brides weighed down by tradition, mothers in labor and prostitutes.
One sculpture in the show, “Devouring Mother,” depicts a benign, lumpy woman holding dainty silverware, but the title of the work implies that she is about to eat her children.
Even Saint Phalle’s enchanting animals are vaguely ominous. “I wouldn’t want to see that spider walking around and coming after me,” she said of the sprawling sculpture with a bright red head and multicolored appendages. “Or the gorilla, even though he is smiling. So there is that edge, but kids love to be scared.”
Sometimes adults have to be persuaded of that fact, however, as was the case with “Golem,” designed in 1972 for a neighborhood park in Jerusalem. The towering creature has three long red tongues that descend from a cavernous mouth and function as slippery slides for children who climb to the top of the animal and zoom back to the ground.
“When I first presented the ‘Golem’ project, I had to go in front of a commission,” Saint Phalle said. “They turned it down because they thought it was too scary for children. Teddy Kollek, who was the mayor--really the king--of Jerusalem, told the commission to vote again. Then he told me to defend my idea.” Drawing upon psychologist Bruno Bettelheim’s writings about fairy tales, she argued that--presented in an appropriate context--"scary things are good because they help children conquer their fears.”
Saint Phalle appears to have been born with an enormous amount of energy and the courage to follow her own muse. She admits to having “a basic confidence” and “a certain kind of independence,” but also speaks of having a tremendous need to distinguish herself.
“I had to prove that a woman could do something important,” she said. “I wanted to make some of the really important things of my generation and some of the biggest. I wanted to show that we were capable of doing more than needlework.”
The artist was born Mary Agnes de Saint Phalle in 1930 in a suburb of Paris, the daughter of a French banker and his French-American wife. The bank had failed the year before Niki’s birth; the family moved to New York when she was 3 and got a fresh start. Their fortunes fluctuated, but she was raised in a privileged milieu and was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and the elite Brearley School.
Her teachers at Brearley introduced her to art and poetry and inspired her to “get out there and do something as a woman,” she said. “I was very rebellious and always doing things to get attention, but I was brought up to find a husband. That was the defining thing; you had to get married. And I did get married like everybody else because, first of all, you couldn’t make love unless you were married. Your parents weren’t going to let you do it in the next room, like now. Everything was different.
“I married a very good American writer, Harry Mathews.” The couple’s daughter, Laura, was born in 1951 while they were living in Cambridge, Mass. and Niki was trying to find her style as a painter. Their son, Philip, was born four years later in Majorca. “We were pre-hippies, so we went to Europe to escape our WASPish family influences and to explore the world,” Saint Phalle said. “Harry had a little bit of money, and we lived very inexpensively in Majorca. There was no toilet or anything, but it was fun.”
While bumming around Europe, they became acquainted with the international intelligentsia. In Barcelona, at 25, Saint Phalle discovered the work of Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi, whose organic buildings and sculptures have had a strong influence on her art. “That was the big thing in my life; I knew that one day I would make things like that,” she said.
About five years later, she left her husband and children to become a full-time artist. “I wanted a total commitment to my art, but separating myself from them was the most difficult thing in my life. Harry looked after the children while I wandered around the world,” she said.
Among her new circle of friends was Jean Tinguely, an innovative Swiss sculptor known for kinetic works made of found objects. They began living together as friends, but the relationship turned into a love affair and an artistic collaboration.
“Harry was pretty sore because he thought I was going to be alone, and then suddenly I wasn’t alone,” Saint Phalle said. “But we managed to get a nice friendly divorce. At least the kids say they never heard us say anything bad about each other. Recently, after my daughter helped me set up a show, she said, ‘Mother, you did right.’ But it was a real trauma.
“Still, I think one of the things that made me work so hard was the fact that I felt so guilty. The trauma gave me wings as an artist. I couldn’t sit around and do nothing. So guilt was a great motivator.”
Saint Phalle lived with Tinguely for 11 years before marrying him in 1971. They separated two years later but maintained a close relationship. After his death, in 1991, she established a museum of his work in Basel, to which she donated 55 important pieces from her collection. Museum Tinguely, designed by Botta, opened in 1996.
Saint Phalle rose to prominence in the 1960s with “shooting paintings,” or “tirs,” created by using rifles to shoot bags of pigment attached to papier-mache constructions or plaster panels. But after a few years she began making the sculpture for which she is best known.
Her most ambitious project to date is The Tarot Garden, a sculpture park in Garavicchio, Italy, near the Tuscan town of Orbetello. Consisting of 22 monumental structures based on characters in the card game, some of which are living spaces, the garden has been in process for the past 20 years. She now spends about one month each year at the park, which is open from May 15 to Oct. 15.
Saint Phalle moved to La Jolla from Paris four years ago “for health reasons,” but she claims to be perfectly at home here and to have benefited from living in Southern California. She has incorporated local stones and images from the landscape in her work. She is also making use of computer technology to design her sculpture.
“I have entered the 20th century in California,” she said. “I’m taking great advantage of being near L.A., working with people who can help me make my things bigger more easily. For me, it’s mind-blowing to try out all these new techniques.”
“Sun God,” Saint Phalle’s first large outdoor work in the United States, was installed on the campus of the UC San Diego campus in 1983. The 14-foot-tall bird perched on a 15-foot-tall concrete arch was the first work commissioned by the Stuart Collection.
But now she has a plan for an entire sculpture park of her work in Southern California. With an eye on some agricultural property near Julian, she has conceived of a garden based on California mythology and cultural history. Inspired in part by John McPhee’s book “Assembling California,” she hopes to build a large sculpture of Queen Calafia.
“She’s a legendary queen of California, a black Amazon queen who rode griffins,” the artist said. “I want to make a big place where people can go and bring her offerings, so she won’t be angry anymore and she will stop making the earth quake.”
If the plan comes to fruition, the artist will finance the project herself, as she did The Tarot Garden. “That gives me freedom to do it,” she said. “But if you want to help me, great.”
Meanwhile, locals and tourists alike can get an overview of her work at the Mingei. As to why her exhibition is at a folk art museum, Saint Phalle said it all began when she rented a house from Martha Longenecker, founder and director of the museum. They became friends, the artist went to see exhibitions at the museum, and “it just seemed natural,” she said. “ ‘Folk’ is the wrong word; Martha shows the world’s soul.”
Longenecker also sees the show as a good fit for her institution. It’s the museum’s first exhibition of a French artist and thus fills out the international roster. Saint Phalle’s work draws from a global array of sources and her functional pieces complement the museum’s program of contemporary crafts and design, she said. The exhibition--sponsored by Audrey Geisel, a Mingei patron and widow of Theodor Geisel, author of Dr. Seuss children’s books--also is expected to build the museum’s audience by bringing in the traditional art crowd as well as children and folk-art aficionados.
“Niki is self-taught and highly intuitive,” Longenecker said. “She works from the inside out, but she is so well-known that she has become an insider.”
*
“Niki de Saint Phalle--Insider/Outsider--World Inspired Art,” Mingei International Museum of Folk Art, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Ends Jan. 2, 1999. Adults, $5; children 6-17 and students, $2. (619) 239-0003.
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834e82ce28d43bdf0287ca1ebb30402c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-01-mn-38174-story.html | ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ Disaster Haunts Pollsters | ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ Disaster Haunts Pollsters
Political pollsters quite accurately boast of the reliability of their science, but polling’s biggest ever goof remains alive 50 years later in a headline seared into America’s collective memory: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
Fifty years ago this month, all major polls predicted victory for New York Gov. Thomas Dewey over Harry Truman, the incumbent president. Reasons for that mistake are still a cause of debate.
“I don’t think the polls were wrong in terms of measuring national sentiment,” said Burns W. “Bud” Roper, retired chairman of Roper Starch Worldwide and son of pioneering pollster Elmo Roper. “Clearly they were wrong in determining the election. I think the 1948 polls were more accurate than the 1948 election.”
Far from killing the fledgling industry, which had become popular in the 1930s, the pollsters’ embarrassing mistake laid the foundation for modern polling techniques. It also offered a valuable reminder that “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
“We stopped polling a few weeks too soon,” said George Gallup Jr., co-chairman of the Gallup organization and son and namesake of another of polling’s giants. “We had been lulled into thinking that nothing much changes in the last few weeks of the campaign.”
The problem was that major pollsters of the day, Elmo Roper, George Gallup and Archibald M. Crossley, cut their teeth on elections involving Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“Roosevelt was the issue. People were either for him or against him. The whole thing was built around Roosevelt,” said Burns Roper, explaining the approach to polling in presidential elections of 1936, 1940 and 1944.
In the 1948 presidential election, there was no Roosevelt, but a field of the two major candidates, as well as Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond and Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace.
The polls predicted a Dewey victory of between 5 to 15 percentage points, but Truman won by 4.4 percentage points. The labor vote was energized as Democrats worried about Dewey’s strength in preelection polls, and Republicans felt their candidate would win “so they played golf that day,” Roper said.
The offspring of the famous pollsters from 1948 remember the days around the election as stressful.
Helen Crossley recalls “a very tense household” as her father worried aloud that Truman, who drew increasingly enthusiastic crowds at his preelection speeches, was gaining momentum. George Gallup Jr. says his father had to visit many newspaper clients after the election to lure them back after 30 canceled their poll service. Burns Roper said the election came just weeks after the suicide of his brother, and he recalled that he and his father voted for Truman.
“It sort of looked like the end of the world,” Roper said. “It was the definition of mixed emotions. We saw our man winning, but our company going down the tubes.”
Roper company officials huddled and came up with an approach for Elmo Roper’s next newspaper column: “We were wrong. We couldn’t have been more wrong. We’re going to find out why.”
The polling pioneers admitted their mistakes, reexamined their methods and plunged back to work. They moved gradually away from quota sampling, which questioned a set number of people from different ethnic and age groups, and moved toward random sampling. They extended polling deadlines up until election day and developed their ability to predict those likely to come out and vote.
“Political polling was non-probability, and for a number of years they got away with it,” says New York pollster Warren Mitofsky, a pioneer of random-digit dialing and the use of extensive telephone sampling 20 years ago. “In 1948, they got burned.”
There’s never been a comparable election disaster since 1948, when all the major players picked the wrong winner, said Tom W. Smith, director of the general social survey at the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago. The scale of the disaster was such that a panel of scientists analyzed the industry for the Social Science Research Council.
Since then, preelection polls have become far more accurate, although some years are more precise than others. The margin of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory was underestimated by some pollsters, for example.
While the polling industry has made progress in methods of sampling and poll timing, it still has plenty to learn about probability methods and the wording and order of questions, Mitofsky said.
“Identifying likely voters is still a mystery to most polling organizations,” he said.
And a big lesson for pollsters from 1948 still holds true today.
“There’s a lot of room for humility in polling,” Mitofsky said. “Every time you get cocky, you lose.”
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a63c322644a2e6910b957f368303f6f9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-02-fi-38584-story.html | More Struggling Companies Slipping Off Nasdaq’s List | More Struggling Companies Slipping Off Nasdaq’s List
For a troubled small company, it can nail the coffin shut. It’s called a delisting--meaning the company’s stock is removed from the market it trades on--and it’s a growing risk for an increasing number of small companies.
Tougher listing rules adopted this year by the Nasdaq Stock Market, the home of most smaller publicly traded companies, and the broad market’s plunge since spring have led to a record number of Nasdaq delistings.
Pushed off the major Nasdaq market, a small stock can quickly become almost invisible to most investors. That is why resentment among delisted firms--many of them young California companies--runs high, particularly over Nasdaq’s strict new listing standards.
Nasdaq officials, however, say the new requirements are making the market safer for investors by removing the highest-risk shares from the field.
This year’s Nasdaq delisting tally has already passed the previous record of 719 set in 1988, according to preliminary data from the National Assn. of Securities Dealers, which operates the electronic Nasdaq market. Last year’s tally was the second-highest since 1988, with 717 delistings.
Through September, 638 companies were delisted from Nasdaq, according to NASD data. And during October, 97 more companies were delisted, according to Times research and data from the NASD’s Web site (https://www.nasdaqnews.com), bringing the estimated year-to-date total to 735.
“The listing standards in place today go right at the heart of investor protection,” said Patrick Campbell, Nasdaq’s chief operating officer. “It was very important to us to increase the standards to maximize the integrity of the Nasdaq market, given its place in the world’s financial system. Nasdaq continues to attract and retain very high-quality companies.”
Under the new requirements, a small company can be delisted if its stock drops below $1 for more than 30 days, it has a market capitalization of less than $5 million or it has capital reserves of less than $4 million. Many firms that are delisted fall into at least two of these categories.
California firms delisted in recent months include Vyrex Corp., a La Jolla-based biopharmaceutical firm; Showscan Entertainment Inc., a Culver City entertainment media firm; Hypermedia Communications Inc., a San Mateo-based publisher of a news magazine dedicated to multimedia technology; Thinking Tools Inc. of San Jose, a year-2000 software specialist; and Marina del Rey-based software firm Quarterdeck Corp.
Last week, troubled Grand Havana Enterprises Inc., a Los Angeles-based operator of private cigar clubs in Beverly Hills, New York and Washington, was delisted.
Like most stocks pushed off the Nasdaq National Market or Nasdaq Small-Cap Market, Grand Havana now trades on the OTC Bulletin Board. Although the Bulletin Board is an electronic marketplace, it is essentially unregulated. Most companies that trade there have little analyst coverage.
That has given the Bulletin Board a shaky reputation as the home of tiny stocks many brokers and investors won’t touch.
“Obviously we are very disappointed that Nasdaq did not react favorably to our request for additional time to implement a plan to achieve compliance,” said Harry Shuster, Grand Havana president.
Grand Havana failed to meet the minimum bid and market value requirements set by the NASD. The company’s stock, which trades under the symbol PUFF, has stayed below $1 a share all year and was quoted at 6.25 cents on Friday.
The company was known as United Restaurants until 1997, when it changed its name and focus to jump on the cigar craze just as it was peaking, analysts said.
And it didn’t help that in May, securities regulators charged Biltmore Securities and two top executives of the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., brokerage with fraudulently selling United Restaurants stock warrants that netted them $2.1 million in profit. The NASD charged that the executives failed to disclose they were selling their own warrants even as they were recommending that their customers buy them. A lawyer for the men said they denied the allegations and intend to fight them. Biltmore took United Restaurants public in 1994.
At Vyrex, which specializes in drugs to treat diseases associated with aging, executives called the firm’s Nasdaq delisting on Oct. 22 “tragic.” Vyrex, which went public at $6.50 a share in 1996, plunged below $1 this year. The company also didn’t meet market cap minimums, executives said.
“I feel it was unfair,” said Sheldon Hendler, company founder and chairman. He believes his company should be given a break. “We’re trying to do some wonderful science here,” he said.
Shares of Showscan, which specializes in movie-like attractions shown in high-tech theaters, dropped below $1 in March and have stayed there all year, with the company’s market cap now under the $5-million threshold.
W. Tucker Lemon, a general counsel for the firm until recently, said it was no surprise when Showscan got the NASD notification letter saying its stock price and market cap were too low.
Executives originally planned to fight the move at a Sept. 10 hearing but decided it was hopeless, and the stock was delisted Sept. 16.
“Ultimately, we didn’t even appear at the hearing, given that we were missing on several counts,” said Lemon, who still serves as a consultant to Showscan. “I hope we will be able to get back on Nasdaq one day. [Otherwise] It’s harder for your shareholders and investors to find out information about you.”
Under previous rules, it might have taken longer for Nasdaq to consider delisting a firm like Showscan, and a company could have pushed its case longer. But now the numbers game can be too tough.
While some companies complain, peers serving on review boards say the tighter rules protect investors.
Two Southern Californians recently agreed to serve as business representatives for the NASD, which puts together panels to review each delisting case and make delisting decisions. Former Ernst & Young partner Samuel P. Bell, head of Los Angeles Business Advisors, a group of chief executives from local companies, began attending delisting hearings six months ago.
“By raising the bar a bit, the NASD has increased the number of companies they are looking at,” Bell said. “It’s very, very positive. There are some hard-luck stories, people caught in the process of getting financings or something. But the paramount concern is protecting the marketplace.”
William Simon, national managing partner with accounting giant KPMG Peat Marwick, also participates in the review hearings.
Fred Roberts, head of Los Angeles investment bank F.M. Roberts & Co. and a former chairman of the NASD, also serves on panels that determine whether a company will be delisted. “In general, this is good for investors--anything that raises the standards is good for them,” Roberts said.
The NASD adopted the minimum-share-price rule because “penny stocks,” or those under $5, can be particularly vulnerable to manipulation by unscrupulous traders and stock promoters.
When a company is not in compliance with Nasdaq’s standards, it is notified in a letter from the NASD, which many executives liken to getting an audit notice from the Internal Revenue Service.
If a company wants to challenge such an action, executives can request a hearing before regulators to explain how they plan to boost capital levels or share price.
One survival tactic is a “reverse split,” by which a company exchanges one new share for, say, each 10 shares outstanding. Although that can boost the stock price, it does not change the company’s fundamental financial picture. Hence, reverse splits are often seen as a red flag for investors.
Even after being hit with the body blow of a delisting, some executives are still hopeful they can make it back to Nasdaq eventually.
“We’re going to make it no matter what,” said Hendler of Vyrex, who believes his company will be traded on a major exchange one day. “This company started with three people and we’ll keep going with three people.”
Debora Vrana covers investment banking and the securities industry for The Times. She can be reached by e-mail at debora.vrana@latimes.com.
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f16adc819a3805eb42c6c33e2d0bdd77 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-02-sp-38660-story.html | Kagwe Wins Close Finish in New York Marathon | Kagwe Wins Close Finish in New York Marathon
With only yards remaining in the New York Marathon on Sunday, one thing was certain--a Kenyan would win.
John Kagwe ran away from countryman Joseph Chebet to win the marathon by three seconds, the second-closest finish in the race’s 29-year history.
“Last year, I felt it was my race to win,” said Kagwe, who repeated his 1997 NYC Marathon victory over Chebet. “This year I was not that sure.”
Kagwe, Chebet and Tanzania’s Zebedayo Bayo turned into Central Park almost even, but Bayo couldn’t keep pace and fell behind. “I decided to push the pace, especially in the last 400 meters,” said Kagwe, who won in 2 hours 8 minutes 45 seconds. “I decided to go and see if Chebet would stay with me.”
Chebet finished three seconds back, nearly as close as German Rivera’s two-second margin of victory over Mexican countryman Benjamin Paredes in 1994.
Bayo was third at 2:08:51 in the race that drew two million spectators. The leading American man was Alfredo Vigueras of Woodland, Calif., who was 18th at 2:16:14.
Franca Fiacconi became the first Italian to win the women’s division of the race. She outdueled world record-holder and two-time New York champion Tegla Loroupe of Kenya over the closing miles.
Fiacconi, third last year and second in 1996, was timed in 2:25:17. Adriana Fernandez of Mexico also passed the ailing Loroupe and finished second, at 2:26:33. Loroupe, bothered by stomach cramps, wound up third at 2:30:26.
Kagwe and Fiacconi each collected $50,000.
Baseball
The New York Yankees and Darryl Strawberry agreed that the team would have until Nov. 11 to decide whether to exercise a $2.5-million option on his contract for 1999.
The Yankees’ original deadline to exercise the option on Strawberry, who is recovering from colon cancer surgery, had been Sunday at midnight. If the Yankees decline the option, they must pay Strawberry a $100,000 buyout.
Meanwhile, General Manager Brian Cashman met Saturday with David Cone and his agent, Steve Fehr, in Tampa. Fla., about signing a new deal with the pitcher. Cone, who went 20-7 with a 3.55 earned-run average this season, has until Wednesday to decide whether he will exercise his $5.5-million option or become a free agent.
Congressman Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) said he has filed a bill allowing Cuban baseball players to play in the United States without defecting.
Serrano said his measure would allow the Immigration and Naturalization Service to grant work visas similar to those given to players from other countries. The visas would expire annually after the World Series.
Serrano said he believes current U.S. law, which permits only defectors to work in the United States, is unfair.
On Friday, Cuba’s government news agency quoted Cuban sports minister Humberto Rodriguez as saying the government would consider allowing players to play in the major leagues “as long as it respects the principles of Cuban socialist sports.”
College Basketball
Louisville Coach Denny Crum, 61, remained hospitalized a day after he collapsed while preparing to board a flight.
“He’s still very stable and resting well,” said Kathy Keadle, a spokeswoman at Jewish Hospital at Louisville, Ky.
Doctors said the collapse, which mimics the symptoms of a stroke, could have been caused by Crum’s allergy or asthma medications.
Behind 18 points by guard Greg Minor, Cal State Northridge defeated the California Midwest All-Stars, 84-78, in an exhibition at Northridge. Center Brian Heinle had 14 points and forward Andre Larry 10 for the Matadors.
Obituaries
Elmer “Moose” Vasko, a member of the Chicago Blackhawks’ last Stanley Cup championship team, died of cancer Friday at Loyola University Medical Center at Chicago. He was 62.
At 6 feet 3 and 220 pounds, the defenseman was one of the largest players of his time. He played for Chicago from 1956-66, including the ’62 Stanley Cup champion.
Stanislav Zhuk, a renowned and controversial Russian figure-skating coach whose students included many of his country’s best-known skaters, died of undisclosed causes. He was 63.
A highly successful skater, Zhuk was best known for teaching pairs. Although his success was evident, his methods were not universally admired, and he left a legacy of bitterness among some of his skaters. ITAR-Tass news agency did not report where he died.
Volleyball
The U.S. and Brazilian men’s teams play tonight at 7 at Pepperdine University in a warmup for the world championships at Japan later this month. They also play Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at Cal State San Bernardino.
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e38fc1564198ad0f07438eadc1390254 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-04-mn-39324-story.html | GOP’s Kuykendall in Lead for South Bay Representative | GOP’s Kuykendall in Lead for South Bay Representative
Rep. Loretta Sanchez’s apparent victory over challenger Robert K. Dornan set the tone for what looked to be a strong night for congressional incumbents in California.
Despite a roller-coaster election season, most California congressional incumbents were safe from challenge with no major shifts in control of the delegation, which is currently divided at 29 Democrats and 23 Republicans. It appeared Tuesday that California’s electorate would give the GOP a net gain of one seat when the few open seats were taken into account.
In one closely watched match, Republican Assemblyman Steve Kuykendall held a narrow lead against Democrat Janice Hahn in the contest for the South Bay seat left open by Democratic Rep. Jane Harman’s unsuccessful run for governor.
While Democrats nationwide were having unexpected good fortune, the tide did not appear strong enough to lift the prospects of water-rights attorney Sandie Dunn in her race with Republican millionaire Doug Ose for West Sacramento’s open seat.
Neither did the Democratic trend appear strong enough to harm freshman Republican Rep. James E. Rogan (R-Glendale), who took a sizable early lead and held it against former Screen Actors Guild President Barry Gordon in the only race that might have been swayed by the Clinton scandal because of the incumbent’s role in the impeachment process as a high-profile member of the House Judiciary Committee.
The results ended a year of chaotic twists and turns. With a popular president and a strong economy, Democrats started out hoping to defy off-year history and win the 11 seats they needed to take back the House majority.
Then came the White House sex scandal, and in a sudden shift of the tables Republicans seemed poised to leave their rivals in the dust.
In the end, though, not much would change in California’s 52-member delegation, the nation’s largest. Most incumbents were shoo-ins for reelection and the handful who found themselves in tough races appeared positioned to survive.
Also positioned to survive a tougher-than-expected challenge, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Pleasanton) was poised to defeat longshot Republican Charles Ball, a defense analyst and political newcomer who mounted a much stronger campaign than either party initially expected.
And incumbent Brian P. Bilbray (R-San Diego) was expected to fend off a challenge from Democratic San Diego Councilwoman Christine Kehoe, one of the few openly gay candidates in the nation.
With most incumbents safe, the real election night drama was in three of California’s open seats.
The Republican-leaning South Bay seat vacated by Harman had been a hard one for the Democrat to hold in past elections. She initially won in a 1992 upset fueled by her abortion-rights message and personal wealth. When she bowed out this year, Republican Kuykendall was given the edge over Hahn in a district many thought would revert to form.
Another wobbler ripe for Republican picking was the West Sacramento seat held for 20 years by politically powerful Democratic Rep. Vic Fazio, who is retiring. The increasingly Republican district forced Fazio to spend more than $1 million in recent campaigns.
Republican Ose, the owner of a storage supply business, had the early lead against Dunn.
One sure pickup for the Democrats was the Northern California seat held by Republican Rep. Frank Riggs, who left Congress to make an aborted run for the Senate. Democratic state Sen. Mike Thompson looked to be the likely victor over Republican Napa County Supervisor Mark Luce. The seat was likely to be the Democratic party’s only California gain.
There was no suspense in two other open districts that were sure to stick with the parties already representing them.
Republican Assemblyman Gary Miller was headed to succeed Republican Rep. Jay Kim in the rock-solid GOP Diamond Bar district. Kim was ousted in the primary after his conviction on campaign finance violations.
And in Los Angeles, the seat of retiring Rep. Esteban Torres, a Democrat, was expected to be a clear win for state Assemblywoman Grace Napolitano.
In other noteworthy races:
* Rep. Lois Capps was expected to win a rematch against Republican Tom Bordonaro. Capps won a special election last spring to fill the unexpired term of her late husband, who died last year.
* Rep. Brad Sherman was expected to fend off a challenge from Republican Randy Hoffman, head of a satellite navigation systems firm.
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f4a7a9215b614b6db941a816988f4979 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-06-fi-39986-story.html | Massachusetts’ ‘Burma Law’ Struck Down | Massachusetts’ ‘Burma Law’ Struck Down
A federal judge has struck down a Massachusetts statute banning state purchases from companies doing business in troubled Myanmar, saying the law interferes with the federal government’s power to regulate foreign affairs.
The ruling by Chief U.S. District Judge Joseph L. Tauro, while binding only in Massachusetts, casts doubt over the legality of similar so-called selective-purchasing statutes elsewhere. Since 1996, about 30 state and local governments have passed similar laws targeting Myanmar, China, Nigeria, Indonesia and Switzerland because of alleged human rights violations.
The Los Angeles City Council is also considering a law that would ban contacts with companies doing business in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
The 1996 Massachusetts law was challenged by the National Foreign Trade Council, a powerful Washington-based trade group. The group said Thursday that it was “seriously considering” challenging the other statutes, a prime target being a New York City law.
That law, passed last year, prevents city agencies from purchasing goods or services, signing construction contracts or making bank deposits with companies involved in Myanmar.
Such laws, the trade group contends, hurt its 580 members--including Unocal, Citibank and several other major U.S. multinationals--by banning them from bidding on contracts worth billions of dollars.
The Massachusetts law had also triggered strong protests from the European Union, which argued in a complaint with the World Trade Organization that it violated international regulations on government procurement.
In his ruling Wednesday, Tauro said the so-called Burma Law in Massachusetts is simply unconstitutional.
“Massachusetts’ concern for the welfare of the people of Myanmar . . . may well be regarded as admirable,” he said. But because the federal government has exclusive power to make foreign policy, “the proper forum to raise such concerns is the U.S. Congress.”
Frank Kittredge, president of the trade group, applauded Tauro’s ruling.
“We share concerns over reported human rights abuses in Burma. However, our system of government was not designed to allow the 50 states and hundreds of municipalities their own individual foreign policies,” he said.
Advocates for selective-purchasing laws have argued that local governments have the right not to use taxpayer funds to support companies that indirectly support repressive regimes.
They contend that economic activism is appropriate against Myanmar, whose military government has been condemned for using forced labor, imprisoning and torturing political opponents, and for harshly repressing ethnic minorities.
Advocates point out that U.S. cities enacted dozens of similar laws that were effective in helping to dismantle the apartheid regime in South Africa. Other courts have rejected legal challenges to such laws.
“If selective purchasing had been banned 10 years ago, [South African President] Nelson Mandela might be still in prison today,” said Byron Rushing, the Democratic state representative who wrote Massachusetts’ Burma Law.
Thomas A. Barnaco, a Massachusetts assistant attorney general who defended the law before Tauro, said his office is considering an appeal of the ruling.
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5a99b21da4bc0da34601694658081cac | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-16-ca-43273-story.html | Fox’s ‘World’s Funniest’ Hits Below the Belt | Fox’s ‘World’s Funniest’ Hits Below the Belt
An advertisement in some editions of TV Guide made it look as though an entire hour of the Fox series “World’s Funniest” was going to be devoted to home videos of men getting hit in the groin. Yes, really. In the ad for the “World’s Funniest” that aired Nov. 8, a cartoon of a man was shown with his hands over his genitals as if about to be assaulted.
“Hurts So Funny!” the ad said. “Tonight--an hourlong tribute to getting hit where it hurts the most!”
Ha ha ha. Talk about fun.
Would even Fox stoop this, um, low? We had to watch the show to find out, because Fox rarely sends such trash out to critics in advance. As it happens, the Nov. 8 program was not entirely devoted to men getting “hit where it hurts the most.” But the program was peppered with several home videos of just such occurrences. Every time it happened, there was a loud “boing” on the soundtrack.
Host James Brown told viewers that if they counted up the number of “groin hits” on the show and sent in their estimates to Fox, they could be eligible for a $5,000 prize. He also referred to the “groin hits” as “those shots to the privates.” And indeed, there were plenty of them--though we didn’t bother to count--with hapless males getting conked, thonked, thwacked and whacked in the sensitive area.
So this is Fox’s idea of Sunday night family entertainment--men grabbing their crotches in pain and falling to the ground in agony. It really makes you long for the arrival of digital television, doesn’t it, so that we can see this junk in high definition and on a wide screen?
*
Obviously “World’s Funniest” is Fox’s rip-off of the long-running ABC series “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” And in many installments of the ABC show, there were indeed shots of dads or brothers or boyfriends groping with camping or sports equipment and, in the process, taking an accidental blow to the area in question. But ABC at least had the taste never to advertise the show as a festival of crotch-yocks.
You’d think Fox might at least have been clever enough to call the special edition “Against the Groin.” Instead, it was supposed to be the “Bad Boys” installment of “World’s Funniest.” However, whenever the commercial breaks came along, a Fox announcer said this was actually the “Private Parts Edition” of “World’s Funniest.” Good grief, whatever they called it, it was appalling beyond belief.
Or almost beyond belief--this is Fox, after all.
In “Satyricon,” Federico Fellini’s great epic about life in ancient Rome, Fellini included scenes of audiences at crude stage shows being entertained by performers demonstrating extreme flatulence. Have we progressed much since then? Here is television, the greatest instrument of mass communication ever conceived, and what do we use it for? For shots of men moaning in agony because of pain to their testicles.
A flatulence festival on Fox is just around the corner, surely.
In addition to borrowing generously from ABC’s “Videos” show, Fox’s version also rips off NBC’s “Bloopers and Practical Jokes,” a series of occasional specials dominated by outtakes from TV shows. “World’s Funniest” had a classic blooper from 20 years ago on its Nov. 8 show: Gene Rayburn, host of “The Match Game,” introduces a new contestant named Karen to a continuing contestant named John by saying, “Doesn’t she have pretty nipples--uh, pretty dimples--John?”
It’s funny, because it really was an accident and it was clear that Rayburn was mortified. But Fox couldn’t just let the blooper speak for itself; it had to add comments on the soundtrack from Brown: “I guess maybe Gene has X-ray vision!” And then, “Or maybe, X-rated vision!”
Yes, the writers and producers of “World’s Funniest” manage to ruin even the jokes that weren’t already offensive. “World’s Funniest” is really “World’s Lousiest,” and it figures that it airs on Fox, the world’s crummiest.
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9db2b0674be7cf47881d16f2ebc4de58 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-24-me-47095-story.html | Northridge Temblor Set Off Surge in Family’s Glass-Repair Business | Northridge Temblor Set Off Surge in Family’s Glass-Repair Business
When Joseph Rattay reopened his crystal repair shop one month after the Northridge earthquake, customers began lining up two hours before he even got to work.
And they continued to come, even after he warned them that it might be up to two years before he could fix their precious items.
Today, nearly five years after the quake, “We’ve whittled down the wait to six months,” Rattay said with a laugh.
As a businessman, Rattay has certainly found his niche. He owns and operates Rattay’s Crystal, China and Collectibles Restoration, which began as a sideline of his father’s business, Tarzana Glass. Rattay’s is one of just a handful of crystal and china restoration shops in the area.
The Northridge temblor was good for business. Way too good.
“Right after the quake I pretty much locked the door of the repair shop because we were so busy trying to get people’s houses back in shape,” Rattay said.
“When I finally opened the shop again, people waited two to three hours to get in the door.” Customers reported that some people almost came to blows over their space in the line. Rattay had nightmares of customers crashing through his own glass window.
Rattay took in so many items that he had to rent extra space above his shop just to store the stuff. “There was such an onslaught of work that I had to stop taking items because I had no room to store them. People were begging me to take things, and even when I said I wouldn’t get to it for two years, they still wanted me to take it. It was a little overwhelming.”
Rattay cut his customer service hours to only three days a week, allowing him more time for repair work. He ground down his load so that repairs now take anywhere from a few weeks to six months, depending on the complexity of the job.
Some customers grouse about the delay, but they still come, bringing a hundred or so items a week to the small shop.
“Nothing makes me happier than getting the [items] fixed and out,” he said. “After all, that’s how I pay the rent.”
Rattay’s father bought Tarzana Glass in the mid-1960s, and the younger Rattay, now 40, began working there when he was 16.
“People began bringing in chipped stemware and I’d help grind and polish the glass,” he said. Like cracks in glass, word spread and soon people were bringing in not only crystal and glass items, but also fine china, wood, even metal pieces.
The repair work became a business in itself and the Rattays moved the glass shop to its current Encino location, opening a separate Tarzana storefront for repairs.
Since his father’s death nearly eight years ago, Rattay has managed both stores, with the restoration portion accounting for more than half his business. A manager and one employee help run Tarzana Glass, but he uses mostly just family at the restoration shop. Wife Lisa and children Adam, 18, and Sonia, 13, help with the simpler repair work, such as grinding nicks out of crystal.
He does the more exacting work himself.
Repairs cost anywhere from $5 for a simple grinding to $5,000 for extensive restoration that requires not only putting pieces back together, but also filling cracks, holes and painting.
The most common repairs are chips in the rims of stemware, bowls and platters. Fixing the rim of a crystal goblet, for example, costs about $12.50 a glass, and since good crystal sells for $30 to $40 apiece, repairing makes sense.
He has cut away broken shards from the tops of pricey Waterford goblets, which cost anywhere from $50 to $100 each, making the crystal smaller but still usable.
Shattered collectibles, such as porcelain Hummel or Lladro figurines, may be fixed up sufficiently to retain some value, even if only sentimental.
For example, about 100 pieces of a beautiful amber-colored Lalique vase sit on his workbench waiting to be pieced together. It will cost $250 to repair, but since the piece is signed and dated by Rene Lalique, is a rare amber color, and is probably 50 to 75 years old, the owner apparently thought it worthwhile.
Often, Rattay explained, people want collectibles, such as a bowl that was handed down for generations or a memento, restored for sentimental reasons. One woman, for example, spent $92.50 to repair five 1950s-era pottery pieces and two martini glasses from her California pottery collection. A man barely blinked at the $75 repair bill to bond, fill and repaint the golden leg on a hand-painted bowl inherited from his mother-in-law.
Rattay has often thought of giving up the glass business, which fluctuates with the construction and remodeling industry, to concentrate on the restoration but so far has always opted to remain diversified.
“It’s been beneficial to do both,” he said. “When the glass business is slow, we always have crystal to grind.”
And, he noted, “People break things faster than I can fix ‘em.”
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ad34ac6daaad44ee2025c7cbec0cd38d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-25-mn-47702-story.html | FDA Issues New Warnings on Hazards of Viagra Use | FDA Issues New Warnings on Hazards of Viagra Use
The Food and Drug Administration is adding serious new health warnings to the label on bottles of Viagra, the wildly popular anti-impotence drug that has been prescribed for 3 million men since it was approved for general use in April.
In expanded labels, the government warns doctors and patients that men with heart problems and very high or very low blood pressure should be carefully examined before getting a prescription for Viagra.
Patients with retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease, also are at risk. And the new description warns about the rare occurrence of priapism, a dangerous condition involving painful, prolonged erections that can last more than four hours.
The government still considers Viagra safe and effective, the FDA said Tuesday. But it is sending a letter to doctors as well as expanding the information printed on the labels by Pfizer, the drug manufacturer.
Of the 130 deaths reported to the FDA among men taking the drug, none has been directly blamed on the drug. Instead, the FDA believes that many of those who died--whose average age was 64--had serious health problems that were aggravated by sexual activity, resulting in heart attacks or strokes.
“The people who died had underlying cardiovascular problems.” said Dr. Lisa Rarick, director of the FDA division of reproductive and urologic drug products.
She added that the FDA is advising patients with serious heart problems to discuss with their doctors, “Is sex a good idea for me?”
Many men with heart disease may be impotent because of their medical condition. And the FDA is now emphasizing that sex for these patients “carries a potential cardiac risk.”
If sex itself might be risky because of a patient’s health problems, then impotence treatments such as Viagra should be avoided, the FDA said in its three-page announcement of the expanded warnings.
Viagra is prescribed for men who are unable to have erections. More than 6 million prescriptions have been written for 3 million men in the United States.
Currently, the Viagra label warns that the drug should not be used by people taking heart medicine containing nitrates. The combination of nitrates and Viagra can cause a dangerous, sometimes life-threatening drop in blood pressure.
The new label will advise that Viagra be prescribed with caution in patients who:
* Had a heart attack, stroke, or a “life-threatening arrhythmia (irregular heart beat) in the last six months.”
* Have a “history of cardiac failure or coronary artery disease causing unstable angina.”
* Had “significant” low blood pressure or hypertension (high blood pressure above 170/110).
Warning labels and notifications are added as a drug increases in popularity and more is learned about reactions. The changes are coming much faster because of Viagra’s explosive popularity. Usually, it would take a new drug three to five years to reach Viagra’s sales level, according to the FDA.
Kaiser, the largest health provider in California, said the new warnings won’t change its already conservative policy in considering the use of Viagra.
“There are a number of people who may harbor coronary disease and not know it,” said Dr. Philip Madvig, associate director of the Permanente Medical Group in Northern California, which represents 4,000 doctors who treat Kaiser members. “We’re informing physicians they should be cautious about prescribing Viagra to patients with known risk factors.”
People who smoke, who have shown a significant increase in cholesterol or who have a family history of heart disease might be bad candidates for Viagra, according to Madvig.
Because of their heart problems, they may need to be treated some time later with nitrates, which improve the blood flow to the heart. But if they have taken Viagra, they can’t take the nitrate drugs, and it becomes much harder to treat them, Madvig said.
One of Viagra’s rare side effects, occurring in 3% of the men tested, is visual disturbances. Its use is now suspected as a possible cause of a plane crash last Saturday that killed actor William Gardner Knight.
He died when his light plane crashed in Edgewater, Md. The Federal Aviation Administration said the state medical examiner was asked to determine if Knight had been using Viagra.
The drug “affects pilots’ color vision, possibly impairing their ability to distinguish between blue and green,” said Kathryn Creedy, an FAA spokeswoman. “These colors are used extensively in airport lighting and cockpit instrumentation.”
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79cbc873f7fc70030d06e57b1e60ce3f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-29-mn-48724-story.html | Historic Tunic Goes Home to Lakota Sioux | Historic Tunic Goes Home to Lakota Sioux
After a century of exile, Glasgow’s famous “ghost shirt” is going home to Wounded Knee.
A mixed band of spectators, some in kilts and some in cowboy boots, burst into applause earlier this month as the City Council of this industrial center agreed that a bloodstained Indian tunic worn by a victim of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre should be handed over to the Lakota Sioux reservation in Pine Ridge, S.D. The shirt has been in Glasgow’s municipal museum since a member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show donated it in 1892.
“This is a day of great thanksgiving for the Lakota,” said Marcella Le Beau of Eagle Butte, S.D., secretary of the Wounded Knee Survivors’ Assn. “I want to cry for joy.”
The decision may not be viewed as joyful, however, by directors of museums all over Europe, where Native American artifacts are common and extremely popular.
“A significant number of people in the museum world will feel threatened by this,” noted Mark O’Neill, chief curator of Glasgow’s municipal museums. “They are afraid this undermines our right to keep . . . objects from other cultures.”
O’Neill insisted that the return of the tunic--one of the best-known surviving relics of Wounded Knee--does not set a precedent for other objects and other museums. “We have a right to own and show this shirt in perpetuity, but the people of Glasgow are not required to exercise that right,” he said.
In the last two decades of the 19th century, Europeans were enthralled by the American West, and museums scrambled for cowboy-and-Indian artifacts.
Glasgow was persuaded to give up its relic--which boasts a gallery of its own amid an eclectic collection of Egyptian mummies, stuffed local wildlife and ' antique furniture in the city’s Kelvingrove Museum--after Indians argued that the shirt is a singularly important piece of history. There are several Sioux ghost shirts in museums today, including the Smithsonian. But the Glasgow shirt is the only one that has been connected to the massacre at Wounded Knee.
The sandy brown tunic, decorated with eagle feathers and maroon fringe, was worn by followers of the Ghost Dance religion. The Ghost Dancers had been told by their priests that the white man’s weapons could not harm anyone wearing the ghost shirts.
This proved horribly wrong on the last two days of 1890, when soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry attacked a band of Sioux near the creek at Wounded Knee. About 250 Sioux were killed, including women and children. Soldiers plundered the clothes and weapons of the dead and threw the naked corpses into mass graves.
A year later, William “Wild Bill” Cody brought his Wild West Show to Glasgow during a triumphant tour of Europe. A cowboy member of the troupe, George Crager, brought along a trunk containing memorabilia of Wounded Knee. He donated several of the items, including the ghost shirt, to the city.
Six years ago, an American tourist--a Cherokee named John Earl--walked into the Ghost Shirt Gallery in the municipal museum and was stunned by what he saw.
“I have no objection to museums showing artifacts that have been legitimately obtained,” Earl said. “But I felt very, very strongly that this item should go home. It had been stolen from a dead body at Wounded Knee.”
The City Council began to rethink its right of ownership after Le Beau led a Lakota delegation to Glasgow in 1995. The Sioux performed a ceremony of blessing over the shirt and argued that its historical significance means it belongs in South Dakota.
This month, Le Beau led another delegation of Native Americans to Glasgow. This time, she and her companions won the day.
“They had such a quiet dignity about them,” said Liz Cameron, chairman of the City Council’s Arts and Culture Committee. “They demonstrated a deep respect for the history and religion of the Scottish people. We decided that we should emulate them and display our own respect for American Indian culture.”
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3f0b12a368df512467ad2357597b065d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-02-fi-28500-story.html | Boeing to Pay $10-Million Sea Launch Fine | Boeing to Pay $10-Million Sea Launch Fine
Boeing Co. has agreed to pay a $10-million civil penalty to get its commercial space venture in Long Beach, known as Sea Launch, back on track after allegedly disclosing sensitive information to its Russian and Ukrainian partners.
The settlement will allow Boeing to reinstate an agreement with its foreign business partners to proceed with the 3-year-old, $500-million project to launch satellites from a sea platform. The State Department had suspended the agreement on July 27.
“We continue to work diligently with the State Department to have the license reinstated and resume normal activities as soon as possible,” Boeing spokesman Dick Dalton said.
Congressional sources said Boeing had broken the terms of its export license by sharing technical information with RSC-Energia of Moscow and the Ukrainian company KB Yuzhnoye/PO without a State Department representative present.
The $10-million fine is the largest ever assessed for violations of the Arms Export Control Act. Boeing will pay the government $7.5 million, with the first $3.5 million to be paid within 10 days, according to State Department documents.
The remainder--$2.5 million--will be used to set up a computerized document control system at Boeing’s Long Beach facility. The system will allow the State and Defense departments to monitor the whereabouts of sensitive technical information and its dissemination to the international business partners, the settlement said.
A State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said this week that Boeing had violated the license 207 times, adding that none of the violations damaged national security or harmed U.S. foreign policy.
Boeing still faces a criminal investigation by the Justice Department, which Crain’s Washington Outlook newsletter says includes a grand jury in Seattle.
Boeing has agreed not to challenge criminal prosecution on the constitutional grounds of double jeopardy as part of its civil penalty agreement.
The penalty could have been worse. The company could have been banned from continuing the Sea Launch partnership and from receiving any future export licenses.
That didn’t happen because Boeing cooperated fully in the investigation, which failed to show any damage to national security, the State Department official said.
Boeing has a 40% stake in the Sea Launch program and is overall project manager. The technology, however, primarily is that of other nations.
The program, which has contracts for 18 launches, will use a modified version of the Soviet SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile to boost satellites into space from a platform, which is a converted oil rig, positioned at the equator.
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7212fd332a2122050a41c6cef9a3cb71 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-02-mn-28649-story.html | U.S., N. Korea Open Talks on Missile Issue | U.S., N. Korea Open Talks on Missile Issue
After a 16-month interval, U.S. and North Korean negotiators in New York on Thursday resumed high-stakes talks that a jittery West hopes will rein in the hermit nation’s growing missile development and export programs.
The two-day session comes a month after the Communist regime surprised and angered its neighbors, as well as Washington, by launching a satellite that the United States initially believed to be a ballistic missile.
Although the solid-fueled third stage of the rocket failed and the small satellite payload was destroyed, the rocket flew in an arc over Japan, raising fears in Tokyo of unexpected military vulnerability.
“The three-stage [rocket] means they are much further along than we had thought, much further along” in efforts to build long-range missiles, a senior U.S. official warned.
He called the Pyongyang regime “the only government in the world that’s truly dangerous” to world peace because of its known nuclear potential and immediate military threat to South Korea, where the U.S. maintains about 37,000 troops.
Meanwhile, the United States warned North Korea on Thursday of “very negative consequences” if Pyongyang further tests or exports long-range missiles.
State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said the Aug. 31 launch was another step forward in North Korea’s missile development program and called it a matter of “deep concern” to the United States.
“We intend to make quite clear to the North Koreans that, if they were to proceed with additional launches or were to export such missiles, there will be very negative consequences for our policy,” he said.
The CIA has told Congress that it did not foresee Pyongyang’s ability to build a three-stage rocket and that it considers North Korea’s missile development program the most advanced of any hostile state, ahead of both Iran and Iraq.
In addition, the CIA warned that later this year North Korea may test a Taepo Dong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile with a potential range of up to 3,600 miles, enabling it to reach Alaska or Hawaii.
Intelligence officials also say North Korea earns desperately needed hard currency by selling an estimated $1 billion a year in ballistic-missile technology and equipment to such countries as Iran and Syria. Another past customer is Pakistan, which detonated several underground nuclear devices in May in response to similar tests by India.
The rocket launch by North Korea weakened already lukewarm congressional support for a landmark 1994 pact that essentially pays Pyongyang to stop producing plutonium, which can be used for nuclear weapons.
Under the so-called framework agreement, the U.S. promised to provide North Korea with 500,000 tons of fuel oil a year. South Korea and Japan agreed to pay the bulk of the estimated $4.5 billion for construction of two light-water nuclear power plants to replace North Korea’s plutonium-producing reactors.
But, angered by the rocket launch as well as the recent discovery of a vast underground site in North Korea that U.S. intelligence officials believe is being used for nuclear weapons development, Congress has refused to appropriate any money for the program next year.
The White House insists that the 1994 pact is the only effective mechanism to restrain Pyongyang’s nuclear program and warns that a failure to meet U.S. commitments could incite Kim Jong Il’s regime to resume production of plutonium.
As a result, President Clinton used his executive authority Wednesday to shift up to $15 million from anti-terrorism, nonproliferation and other purposes to a program to buy 150,000 tons of heavy fuel oil for North Korea. So far this year, North Korea has received 216,000 tons; a State Department spokesman said the shortfall from the agreed-upon 500,000 tons was being met by shipments from other countries.
A U.S. team is heading to North Korea in coming weeks in an effort to gain access to the underground site where nuclear weapons development is suspected, a senior Clinton administration official said Thursday. Administration officials have told Congress that such access is considered essential by the U.S.
Meanwhile, even supporters say the 1994 pact may need to be revised.
Said a Capitol Hill staffer who follows the issue: “There’s general agreement that either the agreed framework was a lousy agreement from the beginning and never should have been agreed to--or, alternatively, whether it was reasonable or not in 1994, the North Koreans, with their actions since then, have made it irrelevant and it’s time to replace it.
“The problem is [that] none of the critics address the issue of what will we do if you walk out of the agreement and the North Koreans start increasing their plutonium stockpiles. So, instead of having enough fissile materials for at best one or two bombs, you get enough for 10 or 20 a year.”
He said the 1994 accord was based in part on an overly optimistic assessment that the Pyongyang regime would soon collapse. In addition, the Asian financial crisis has put unexpected burdens on the ability of Japan and South Korea to pay their share.
The missile talks in a mid-Manhattan office building are the first since June 1997; the U.S. delegation was led by Assistant Secretary of State Robert Einhorn. The North Korean group was led by Han Chang On, a U.S. expert in Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry.
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6d20738912fd31b4e1912093d5456e09 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-04-ca-29046-story.html | ‘The Wind’ and the (Young) Lions | ‘The Wind’ and the (Young) Lions
If things had gone according to plan, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s season opener would have featured a collaboration between director Renny Harlin and composer Graeme Revell, as the second installment of the orchestra-commissioned Filmharmonic movies-and-music series. But Harlin had to exchange a Hollywood deadline for his Music Center debut, and instead of that work, audiences this week will experience something completely different--a screening of the 70-minute 1928 silent film “The Wind,” with a “new” musical score stitched together from works by Sibelius.
Early this summer, when music director Esa-Pekka Salonen learned that the Harlin-Revell project would have to be postponed, he made a phone call to his friend, theater director and musical conceptualist Peter Sellars. They had already batted around the idea of combining “The Wind,” by seminal Swedish director Victor Sjostrom (a.k.a. Seastrom, in America), with another Scandinavian, Jean Sibelius. Why not now?
“This is something we have talked about for years,” said Salonen, “because we both feel that this is a very important film.”
Sjostrom made “The Wind” during a brief period in Hollywood. He had previously directed Lillian Gish in “The Scarlet Letter,” in 1926, and returned to direct her in one of her most memorable performances, as a young woman trapped on a frontier prairie in a loveless marriage. It was filmed in Bakersfield, with a wind machine to create the requisite turbulence.
Punctuated with Sjostrom’s signature visual metaphors--in this case, Gish’s melancholy face, the unrelenting wind rushing against windows, the sprawling landscapes--the film may be set in another time and place, and envisioned with 70-year-old production values, but, says Salonen, its exploration of dread and desperation has a modern feel.
Speaking from London, between a recording project and a guest-conducting gig with the Philharmonia orchestra, Salonen commented that “especially from a Scandinavian point of view, this film is seminal in many ways. Although it was made in Hollywood, it contains all the elements that, later on, became the language of [Ingmar] Bergman, for instance. You can very clearly see how the particular kind of angst in this film becomes almost a trademark for European film from a certain period.” (Bergman nodded toward Sjostrom’s influence when he cast the director in the lead role, Prof. Isak Borg, in “Wild Strawberries.”)
There have been a number of recent projects in which modern scores have been written for silent films, but the Salonen-Sellars project offers a different sort of spin on a silent classic, matching sound and visuals of the same era.
“It’s quite interesting to combine period music with period film,” said Salonen, “in order to see if there was something generally in the air in that period. When you see the Sjostrom film together with this music, you suddenly understand [what] these two artists had in common.”
Sjostrom’s emphasis on the sprawling, desolate landscape and the dissonant tensions of his characters find their sonic corollaries in the Sibelius scores. His music suggests a mixture of arid, impressionistic spaces, with moments of discord amid an essentially tonal and heroic landscape. “Expressions,” in Salonen’s word, that we can all relate to.
“ ‘The Wind’ is American in the sense that it’s about vast space and life in a young country,” he says. “But this could also be said of Scandinavia or Siberia, or wherever. If you listen to Sibelius’ music from the middle onward, yes, it is Scandinavian, but it is also universal.”
Sibelius is a musical subject dear to the heart and the podium of Salonen, who has frequently conducted and recorded the Finnish composer’s work. Still, Salonen said, “Many of the works that Peter is using are pieces I’ve never conducted. A couple of them I’ve never even heard. For a Finn, this is a very intriguing thing. Here is an American person who hears and sees certain parallels between Sjostrom and the language of Sibelius, and comes up with a bunch of scores I’ve never seen before.
“I’ve been studying these works over the last couple of weeks, and some are real discoveries.
“Peter had a very clear concept about how it should be done, with lesser-known Sibelius music, which would have the same spirit as the film. I was actually stunned by how it worked. Although it was obviously not meant to, the music somehow illuminates certain gestures in the film and sometimes reinterprets them, as well. The musical experience deepens, as does the cinematic experience.
“I find this almost uncanny, because obviously it is coincidental. What happens on the detail level is very interesting, because certain things are highlighted which otherwise would go by without us noticing.”
For example, Salonen noted that the music gives a different resonance to the film’s happy ending, tacked on by Hollywood powers-that-be after seeing the original darker conclusion. “The happy ending, when played together with ‘Nightly Ride at Sunrise’ of Sibelius, it becomes totally convincing and quite beautiful.”
Inaugurated last year, the Filmharmonic series, aimed at creating a bridge between the symphonic and film cultures in Los Angeles--not to mention tapping into a new audience base--has a few built-in dangers. One of those, encountered in this case, is the unpredictability of film-world schedules. “In order to make this Filmharmonic thing work at all,” Salonen admitted, “we have to be quite flexible, because the directors can only work on these projects when they have a window [of time].”
As it turns out, the maestro--a confirmed film aficionado--has a personal stake in making it all work. “Film and music have a lot in common, even apart from the fact that film is used together with music,” Salonen said. “A filmmaker and a composer are basically dealing with the same problems, i.e. timing and sculpting with time, creating a continuity and sometimes working against continuity, using montage, using transition. When I watch films by, say, Kurosawa or Kubrick or Antonioni or Bergman, I can learn from the way they carry the form.”
Salonen paused. “But this is only the official explanation why I like film,” he said. “The truth is that I love film just because I happen to love film. It’s not that I limit myself to European art films, by any means. I enjoy a good action film sometimes.”
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36040f9e6423fb4034f99ed61add03c5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-07-fi-30014-story.html | Universal Studios Shows Beijing the Business | Universal Studios Shows Beijing the Business
With the opening of Universal Studios Experience Beijing last month, residents of the Chinese capital got their first taste of a Hollywood entertainment complex.
But visitors relishing the prospect of theme parks and thrill rides may find themselves hungry for more satisfying fare. Universal’s toehold in China is essentially just a multimedia exhibit, a store and a restaurant in a shopping mall.
However modest, the facility marks Hollywood’s first foray into “location-based” entertainment in China.
“We felt now was the time for a statement and an investment in the future,” or at least a “physical presence” in China’s growing entertainment market, Universal Studios Recreation Group Chief Executive Cathy Nichols said at Experience Beijing’s opening.
Universal executives would not disclose the amount of their investment but said it was a “multimillion-dollar” project equivalent to a low-budget Hollywood movie.
At China’s current level of economic development, a full-scale theme park would be unfeasible. But Hollywood companies are gradually finding ways to probe the market and introduce their products without big, financially risky investments.
Warner Bros., for example, has recently begun licensing its movie titles on the video CD format popular in China, while Disney has opened stores selling its merchandise in several cities.
And despite depressed economies in the region, Asian markets are a key target of Hollywood companies’ international development plans.
Included in Universal’s planned $2.5-billion expansion in the region is a 140-acre theme park, complete with “E.T. Adventure,” “Jaws” and “Back to the Future’ rides, due to open in Osaka, Japan, in 2001. Disney has sent a mobile “Disney Fest” with games and shows to Singapore and plans an aquatic-oriented DisneySea park on Tokyo Bay.
The Beijing facility is a joint venture between Universal Studios Recreation Group and the mainland China arm of Hong Kong real estate developers Henderson Land Development Co., whose diversified holdings, the company says, account for around 4% of the Hong Kong stock market’s capitalization.
The 20,000-square-foot entertainment center is in the atrium of the Henderson Center, a sprawling complex of upscale offices, apartments and shops covering a large block of downtown Beijing. Until recently, the area was a bustling warren of cheap restaurants and stores frequented by peasants and travelers emerging from the Stalinist architecture of the old Beijing railway station.
Now, for the equivalent of less than $4--roughly what it costs to see a Hollywood movie in Beijing--visitors can buy tickets to Universal’s main attraction, the “Hollywood Adventure.”
This walk-through “ride” is composed of three main rooms showing videos that explain the pre- and post-production and filming of Universal pictures that have shown in China in recent years, including “Jurassic Park,” “Waterworld” and “Dante’s Peak.”
The rooms are packed full of movie props, including the pickup truck driven by Pierce Brosnan in “Dante’s Peak.” Guests hear through heavily amplified roars from a Tyrannosaurus rex, a few loud, metallic clanks, and pass through dry ice fog simulating volcanic dust. (“Can’t you turn that stuff off?” one Chinese journalist attending the opening pleaded.)
Visitors emerge into a chamber with decor suggesting a movie premiere and then wander through a Universal merchandise store with stuffed Babe the Pig and Woody Woodpecker toys--all made in China, of course.
The entertainment center also includes a photo shop where customers have their pictures taken against movie backdrops, and a Southern California-style refreshment area where guests sit among replicas of surfboards and navel oranges under a towering bank of video monitors trumpeting Universal’s latest creations.
The venue’s low price puts it within financial reach of Beijing’s upper-middle class, who are replete with the high-tech trappings of affluence but lack family diversions of the “edu-tainment” variety.
While many Chinese tourist sites include theme park-like attractions, they tend to be so shoddily constructed and tacky that even the official Chinese press pans them.
In the long run, building Orlando-style theme parks in China may take more than just economic development.
In China, American movies and television programming are still strictly limited by quotas, reflecting the long-standing determination of Chinese officials to limit foreign cultural influences.
As a result, many Chinese do not recognize the cinematic icons displayed at Universal’s attraction, from John Wayne to the Bride of Frankenstein.
“We are acutely aware that we must work within the context of the Chinese cultural environment,” noted Brian McGrath, international president of Universal Studios Recreation Group.
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a9ee2ea8e45b03c563dbc219b1631044 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-07-ls-29943-story.html | Sequel Rubs Film’s Experts Wrong Way | Sequel Rubs Film’s Experts Wrong Way
“This material has resisted sequels for almost 60 years,” says Aljean Harmetz. As far as she’s concerned, things should have stayed that way.
She’s talking about “Casablanca.” Not only is it her favorite film. The former New York Times reporter is a “Casablanca” scholar, having written “Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman and World War II” (Hyperion, 1992).
How does she react to the decision by Michael Walsh, in “As Time Goes By,” to give Rick a background as a small-time New York mobster (born Yitzik Baline) who’d fled New York after an adulterous and tragic love affair--taking with him the contents of his boss’ safe?
“I think it’s terrible, just disgusting, beyond the pale . . . [It] diminishes him,” Harmetz said in a recent interview. “Any kind of romantic heroism that Rick has left over from ‘Casablanca'--and, boy, does he have plenty--is completely dissipated by this baggage with which he is weighted” by Walsh.
Harmetz pointed out that in “Everybody Comes to Rick’s"--the play on which “Casablanca” is based--Rick Blaine was a self-pitying lawyer with marital woes. “The Epsteins (brothers Julius and Philip who, with Howard Koch, wrote the screenplay) were smart to change Rick into a mysterious, unmarried saloonkeeper. The more concrete his background, the more nails you hammer into it, the less intriguing he becomes.”
A seminal scene in the film is one in which Captain Renault asks Rick why he’d come to Casablanca. Rick says it was for his health, “for the waters.” When Renault replies, “Waters? What waters? We’re in the desert,” Rick deadpans, “I was misinformed.”
Harmetz said Julius Epstein told her “the reason they wrote that scene was that basically they couldn’t figure out a past for him,” so they decided to leave it “murky” and let the audience invent a past. “One of the reasons the movie has retained its hold on our emotions 60 years later,” said Harmetz, “is because of its ambiguity.”
She thinks it probable that Rick and Ilsa slept together the night Ilsa came to ask for letters of transit, but she is upset that Walsh has them continuing their affair “like rabbits in a London hotel room. It absolutely cancels out the ending of the movie. The whole point of the ending is that Ilsa and Rick give each other up for the good of the world.”
She doesn’t think “As Time Goes By” will become a feature film. “Who the heck could you turn into Bogart?” Rather, she surmises, “They’ll make a television movie out of this, the way they did with ‘Scarlett.’ ”
*
Jeff Siegel, author of “The Casablanca Companion” (Taylor Publishing Co., 1992), has read a synopsis of “As Time Goes By” and says he thinks the story was “devised by committee, by people who had no idea what ‘Casablanca’ was about. . . . This honestly reads to me as if somebody who watches ‘Friends’ said, ‘We know how to do a sequel. . . .’ ”
Siegel first saw the film about 25 years ago when he was in junior high, “immediately fell in love” with it and fantasized about living his life like Rick. He, too, is unhappy with where Walsh has taken his hero. “One of the things that makes the movie work is that Rick Blaine has no past. By giving him a past, you demythologize him and make him much more ordinary.”
Like Harmetz, Siegel is offended by the thought that Rick used to be a mobster. Under that cynical shell, Siegel points out, Rick was an idealist, a man who ran guns to Ethiopia in 1935 and fought with the Loyalists in Spain in 1936 even though, as Renault tells him, “the winning side would have paid you much better.”
The role assigned to Victor Laszlo in “As Time Goes By” is, in Siegel’s view, also off the mark. Laszlo, he says, “is the absolute last person the Czech underground would call back to kill this Nazi off. Victor Laszlo would have been in London giving interviews to Edward R. Murrow.”
Siegel has never been able to decide to his own satisfaction what happened to Ilsa and Rick. “What I prefer to think is they walked off into the sunset and the movie ended and that’s all there was. The whole point of ‘Casablanca’ is that it’s a myth. It’s not grounded in reality.”
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aefad86ba2ca1147ebc96e686b0471cf | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-07-mn-30093-story.html | Firefighters Hit Roof Over Speed Bumps | Firefighters Hit Roof Over Speed Bumps
They give peace of mind to traffic-weary residents and jolt the bones of rogue motorists whizzing down the street.
But as speed bumps become more popular on the American road, they have found a new enemy in firefighters and paramedics who say the devices slow their response to emergency calls.
Communities from Santa Monica to San Diego are struggling with the issue, while other cities such as Berkeley and Boulder, Colo., have placed moratoriums on new speed bumps until emergency response issues are ironed out.
In few places have the battle lines been drawn more clearly than in Coto de Caza, where the Orange County Fire Authority is demanding that the upscale, gated private community remove the nearly 30 speed bumps that dot the hilly streets.
Leaders of the homeowners association in the unincorporated area are balking at the order, even though the fire department threatened them with misdemeanor charges that could bring jail terms unless officials comply.
“People don’t realize we have 500 gallons of water inside those fire engines,” said Blake Garlin, a 23-year veteran firefighter who until recently worked at Coto de Caza’s station. “With that weight, we can’t take bumps very fast. We have to come to almost a complete stop.”
Fire officials emphasize that quick response is critical in any emergency and cite studies showing that speed bumps slow down fire engines.
“Seconds matter when you are talking about life and death,” said Capt. Jim Jacobs of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, which strongly discourages the use of speed bumps. “If you have a heart attack, the optimum [response] time is between four and six minutes. And now you are adding to it.”
Jacobs and others could not point to examples in which delays from speed bumps resulted in loss of life or property. But Capt. Scott Brown of the Orange County Fire Authority noted that it takes only about five minutes for a fire to burn beyond its flash-over point and quickly spread.
The issue is particularly relevant in Southern California, given its heavy dependence on the automobile. The region is also home to nearly 200 private communities such as Coto de Caza, many of which rely on bumps to enforce speed limits because police generally don’t patrol their streets.
“This is an issue that is going to get wider and deeper and bigger,” said Ed Blakely, dean of USC’s School of Urban Planning and Development, noting that Southern California leads the nation in the number of such communities.
The proliferation of speed bumps extends beyond private communities. The bumps are also part of a larger trend in public road management called “traffic calming,” which is fast becoming the predominant philosophy of transportation engineers.
The concept employs physical devices such as bumps, traffic circles, road medians and extended sidewalk chokers to better control--and slow down--vehicles, especially in residential areas.
A Growing Cry for ‘Traffic Calming’
In private communities, the bumps are installed and financed by homeowners associations. On public streets, municipal governments control where the devices are placed.
“It has gone from a handful of places to hundreds over the last five years,” said Reid Ewing, an urban planner and author of a Federal Highway Administration study on traffic calming due out later this year.
Speed bumps have become increasingly common on streets in Ventura County communities such as Simi Valley, despite occasional protests from some residents that the devices slow paramedics and firefighters.
Ventura County’s Transportation Department used to allow the fire department to veto any speed- bump requests. But in 1993, the county changed that policy because officials felt decisions should be made based on traffic engineering and not fire response concerns, said principal engineer Bob Brownie.
In cities with advanced programs, such as Seattle, Portland and Pasadena, traffic calming has been successful in diverting commuter traffic off residential streets and on to major thoroughfares.
But at what cost?
The city of Portland in 1995 conducted a study to determine exactly how much fire response was affected by traffic calming.
The study concluded that each bump adds as much as 9.4 seconds to emergency response times, depending on the type of fire truck and the size of the bump. Traffic circles added even more time, as much as 10.7 seconds.
Testers found that smaller emergency vehicles, such as rescue trucks, generally experienced the least delays. In some cases, the bumps caused no delays.
Larger fire trucks and engines generally experienced greater delays, and truck engineers complained the bumps damaged their equipment.
In Orange County, the Fire Authority conducted a study revealing response times in neighborhoods served by Fire Station 40 in Coto de Caza were not meeting department standards.
The department’s goal is a response time of five minutes or less for 80% of calls. By contrast, the Coto de Caza station was meeting that mark for only 22% of calls.
Firefighter Garlin recounted a particularly jarring experience two years ago in Dove Canyon, Coto’s neighboring community, which also has been ordered to remove its bumps. The developers had just installed a new bump on one of the streets, and it had not yet been painted.
“We hit that little puppy and we just flew,” Blake said.
Brown, the Fire Authority spokesman, said some local residents began raising concerns about the bumps last year, prompting the response-time study.
He said the department sympathizes with the communities’ need for traffic control, but “there must be another way.”
Seeking a Balance for Maximum Safety
Some residents agree and have suggested a compromise: removing the bumps from major streets but keeping them on smaller ones where children are most likely to play. The idea will be discussed today during a meeting between the homeowners association and Fire Authority.
Michelle Dales, waiting for a school bus with her 5-year-old son one recent morning, said speed bumps help control traffic but that having them on the main roads is probably overkill.
"[Drivers] usually speed up to 60 mph in between the bumps anyway,” she said.
Some of Dales’ neighbors, however, fear that without the bumps, speeding in their neighborhood will get worse.
“Speed bumps slow emergency vehicles, but it also slows down other people,” said John Zarian, president of Coto de Caza’s homeowners association.
Zarian and others see the bumps as their only protection against speeding cars.
“I worry because I know people speed already,” said April Orband, a five-year Coto de Caza resident and mother of three small children. “Cars come flying around the corner, and we have kids playing outside.”
Other communities are trying to head off conflict by bringing fire departments into the traffic planning process.
In Los Angeles County, the Department of Public Works began consulting with fire personnel before installing speed bumps a few years back. Now, Smith said, the county is trying other traffic-calming tools less detrimental to fire response, such as a “neighborhood speed watch program” in which residents are trained to use radar guns and write down the license plate numbers of speeding cars.
The issue of speed bumps is likely to spread to other parts of the country as traffic calming becomes more prevalent, Atkins said. Many cities resort to bumps because they are relatively cheaper: about $1,500 per device compared to $15,000 for a traffic circle, she said.
“It is a trade-off, but by making roads safer there will be less accidents and less calls for ambulances or other emergency services,” said Edward Reimborn of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Urban Transportation. But when it comes to traffic, “everyone has an opinion.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Slow Ride for Easy Street
A number of “traffic calming devices” are used to slow speeding cars using residential neighborhoods as shortcuts to major thoroughfares. Residents say the devices slow traffic. But fire officials say some of them--such as speed bumps, knuckles and traffic circles--increase emergency response times.
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522e84ebcb9caa3304514968ff1d30b3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-08-ca-30228-story.html | The Man Behind the ‘Great Experiment’ | The Man Behind the ‘Great Experiment’
That whole thing about the cherry tree? Forget that. And the wooden teeth? Nonsense. The stuffy old guy pictured on the $1 bill? That’s hardly the real George Washington.
A slightly different image of America’s first president emerges from a new exhibit at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. He was a strapping young man, an ambitious military officer, a natural but reluctant leader.
And--one small detail--he was a fabulous dancer.
Several exhibits will commemorate the 200th anniversary of Washington’s death in 1799, but the Huntington’s is regarded as the most ambitious. Titled “The Great Experiment: George Washington and the American Republic,” it is the largest collection of Washington-related documents ever assembled, and many of them have never before been on public display. In addition to the Huntington’s own manuscripts and paintings, materials have come from the Smithsonian, Mount Vernon, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and private collections.
The Washington who emerges is more flesh and blood than the almost mythological figure in history textbooks, said John Rhodehamel, who curated the exhibit and wrote the accompanying catalog. Washington is remembered as a military leader who became head of state, he said, yet his achievements as a statesman during the founding of the United States are overlooked.
“Adams, Madison, Jefferson were all there--and yet all of them looked to Washington for leadership,” said Rhodehamel, who is the Huntington’s curator of American history. “If he was a simple figurehead, I think one of these other men would have stepped forward himself.”
“The Great Experiment” begins with Washington as a young man of modest prospects. A timeline along the north wall of the gallery traces his life through five stages: the early years, the American Revolution, the framing of the Constitution, his presidency and his final years. Besides the handwritten letters, the show contains objects ranging from silver from Mount Vernon, his home in Virginia, to locks of Washington’s hair and one of his pistols. From March through May, “The Great Experiment” will be complemented by the traveling show “The Treasures of Mount Vernon.” Objects such as Washington’s cane and non-wooden dentures will be on display in the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery.
The exhibit’s title comes from Washington’s own words: “The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.”
Now, 222 years after the Declaration of Independence, it is difficult to comprehend the tremendous odds against the success of that experiment. In the war, America’s army of volunteer militiamen were routinely routed by the professional British soldiers.
Even after the war, said Gordon S. Wood, a professor of history at Brown University and a leading scholar on Washington, there was no assurance that the new republic would survive. “There were no great republics. The only ones were tiny little states in Italy or Holland. And here was this great continent attempting to become republican. Everyone predicted that, no, this can’t last, that it’s destined to fail.”
The fact that it didn’t fail is due, in great part, to Washington’s leadership. “Anybody that bothers to spend time with Washington is impressed with the immensity of his achievements,” Rhodehamel said. “But he’s not easy.” Indeed, Washington’s most important accomplishments are born not out of victory but out of heroic restraint.
Washington started out with unbridled personal ambition, as reflected in his published journal of an expedition from Virginia to Lake Erie. In his early 20s, he fought in the French and Indian War, distinguishing himself as a courageous leader. He was also incredibly lucky. Present at several bloody battles, including Gen. Braddock’s defeat at Ft. Duquesne, Washington escaped without injury.
His string of good fortune continued throughout the Revolutionary War. Bullets grazed his jacket, horses were shot out from underneath him, but Washington was never wounded.
Washington was not a great military strategist, Rhodehamel said, but what he did do was keep 13 colonies united in the fight against England. Equally difficult, he kept the Continental Army together for the eight long years of the war. In March of 1783, some officers--frustrated at being unpaid for years--threatened to overthrow Congress. Washington, with a 20-minute speech about liberty and sacrifice, single-handedly put down the brewing coup d’etat.
Still, after the Revolution was over, most expected Washington to demand some reward for his role. Instead, he simply retired to go back to private life.
“That was a monumental act. There was nothing like it in the history of the world,” Wood said. “Here was a victorious general who could have expected all sorts of political rewards for his conquests, and yet he turns in his sword.”
The move earned him such respect and such trust that he was the obvious choice to be the first head of the executive branch when the Constitution was adopted four years later. Similarly, after two terms in that office, he resigned, allaying the fear that Washington and future presidents would serve for life.
“You feel that this man couldn’t be real,” Wood said. “He doesn’t seem to have any faults of the ordinary sort. . . . He was quick to anger. He controlled immense passions. His whole life is a story of self-control.”
There are, of course, no photographs of Washington. To visualize him, there are only portrait paintings as guides--and the most famous of those is somewhat misleading. Gilbert Stuart’s 1797 painting--on which the $1 bill etching is based--was completed only a few years before Washington’s death. The painting, which is part of the exhibit, shows a Washington who was about 65--quite old for the time. He’d lost his teeth and had dentures that pushed his lower lip out awkwardly--a flaw that was glossed over on the dollar bill. He was at the end of his second trying term as president.
A slightly better physical representation is presented by Charles Willson Peale, who painted Washington during the Revolution. In full uniform, Washington leans against the barrel of a cannon, hand on hip.
Peale’s is not, unfortunately, a great painting, according to Rhodehamel, though it does give a better sense of Washington’s presence. Closer still is a bust by French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon done in 1787. Washington was 53, at the height of his fame and popularity. At the Huntington, the bust rests on a pedestal at a height of exactly 6 feet, 3 inches, Washington’s actual height.
Washington’s eight years as president made his Revolutionary War years look like a holiday. He headed off to his inauguration with a sense of dread. In a letter to American Gen. Henry Knox that is on display, he said he had “feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”
It was, in fact, nearly that bad. As the new government groaned into action, political parties began to take hold. Washington came under vicious political attack and was accused of wanting to be king. A schism between Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, and Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state, threatened to tear the administration apart and made the citizenry naturally anxious.
“People didn’t understand that you could oppose the administration without being an enemy of the country,” Rhodehamel said. “People were frightened that they would get a monarch. . . . In some ways, these fears were reasonable.”
Washington retired to Mount Vernon in 1797 and spent his remaining years trying to get his plantation in order. He also wrote a will that, in addition to providing for his wife and stepchildren, freed 125 African American slaves at Mount Vernon.
The nation, however, didn’t stabilize in his absence and he was asked in 1799 to come out of retirement yet again. In a letter to Connecticut Gov. Jonathan Trumbull Jr., which is also on display, Washington shows complete disillusionment with the viscous partisanship that had taken hold of the government.
“He may have died a bit unhappy,” Rhodehamel said. “I don’t know if he really knew whether the United States would endure.”
As for that bit about cutting down the cherry tree, that was invented after Washington’s death by Mason Locke Weems, who wrote a popular biography of Washington that was laced with moral fables. Weems’ accuracy may have been questionable, Wood said, but his choice of character was good.
Wood suggests that in seeking governmental leadership from military generals--from Andrew Jackson to Colin Powell--Americans are looking for another Washington, someone who transcends partisan bickering.
“I think that Washington, the man, still is the model of what an ideal president ought to be,” Wood said. “It’s impossible to have that person. We have political parties now. And it’s a democratic world. But Washington lingers on as a model of what we’d like our leaders to be.”
BE THERE
“The Great Experiment: George Washington and the American Republic” at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. Tuesdays-Fridays, noon-4:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Closes May 30. $8.50, $7 seniors, $5 students, free for children under 12. (626) 405-2141.
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ed296479228126b35fa9a4f1ebcb15d7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-09-me-30731-story.html | Feinstein Recommends Mayorkas for U.S. Attorney in L.A. | Feinstein Recommends Mayorkas for U.S. Attorney in L.A.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein has recommended to President Clinton that he nominate Alejandro Mayorkas, a 10-year veteran prosecutor, to become the next U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, The Times has learned.
If Clinton nominates him, which is highly likely, and the Senate approves, Mayorkas would become the top federal law enforcement official in seven Southern California counties from Riverside to San Luis Obispo.
Mayorkas, 38, is in line to succeed Nora Manella, who is awaiting Senate confirmation of her nomination to become a federal judge.
His closest rival in the selection process was his boss, Chief Assistant U.S. Atty. Richard E. Drooyan, second-in-command of the prosecutor’s office.
Sources said the Cuban-born Mayorkas has strong support for the post within the Latino political community.
In a letter to Clinton dated Oct. 1, Feinstein said Mayorkas, who serves as chief of the general crimes section in the U.S. attorney’s office, also enjoys widespread support in the legal and law enforcement communities.
She said he also had received strong endorsements from several members of Congress in the Los Angeles area.
Mayorkas, she said, “has the strength of character and the vision to be an outstanding leader as U.S. attorney. He will be a strong administrator and manager who will train new prosecutors exceptionally well while he also sees that the office aggressively seeks convictions in all cases possible.”
Mayorkas called his selection a “tremendous honor.” He said it was premature to discuss any plans for changes in the office, which employs about 240 criminal and civil lawyers and is rivaled only by New York in size and prestige.
Drooyan said he was disappointed but wished Mayorkas well. He said he is considering his options, but has no definite plans to leave.
Bidding for the job got underway earlier this year when Manella was nominated for a federal judgeship.
Under a power-sharing agreement with the state’s other Democratic senator, Barbara Boxer, Feinstein recommends the U.S. attorneys in Los Angeles and Sacramento, and Boxer recommends the ones in San Francisco and San Diego.
Although it is now up to Clinton to send Mayorkas’ nomination to the Senate, that will not happen until the Senate clears Manella’s appointment to the federal bench.
And if Mayorkas is confirmed, he could be out of a job in January 2001 when the next president takes office and has a chance to replace all U.S. attorneys in the country.
Mayorkas came to the United States with his family in 1960, a year after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba.
He earned an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, a law degree from Loyola Law School, and practiced at the firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler until he joined the U.S. attorney’s office in 1989.
As a prosecutor in the major frauds section, he earned commendations for his role in Operation Polar Cap, one of the largest money-laundering cases in history, and for his work as coordinator of the Southern California Boiler Room Task Force, which investigates consumer fraud.
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680449d73106fc6917ade78db4f5e9e6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-11-ca-31309-story.html | COLLEEN ATWOOD / COSTUME DESIGNER | COLLEEN ATWOOD / COSTUME DESIGNER
Jonathan Demme and Tim Burton are very different directors, but they both rely on Colleen Atwood to design the costumes for nearly every movie they do, from Burton’s fanciful “Edward Scissorhands” to Demme’s new austere period film, “Beloved.” Atwood, 48, won an Oscar nomination for her work in “Little Women” and is now clothing the cast of Burton’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in England.
DESIGNER BLASPHEMY: “Edith Head was a star because she was on ‘The Art Linkletter Show.’ It wasn’t because everyone knew her credit as a designer. There were other designers that were better than her. I’ll probably burn in hell for saying that.”
HEADS UP: “I saw Edith Head in New York when I first moved there, at Studio 54. It was a great moment. She had a huge entourage of gorgeous young boys. She was ancient, had a black turtleneck and long floral skirt, was really turned out for the evening. It was great.”
ONE THAT GOT AWAY: “The only movie I’ve seriously gone after in the last year, and I heard about it late because I don’t read the trades, is ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ the Spielberg movie. I’ve always loved Japanese art, and the descriptions of the kimonos and where they come from are very beautiful, and it’s a beautiful love story. But they hired someone already.”
MOBBED: “The largest crowd I’ve done I think was in ‘Wyatt Earp’ with 700. In ‘Beloved’ we had 300, but we had to do them from the skin out. They have to be fit ahead of time, which you do about 60 fittings a day. We have 3:30 a.m. calls to get people ready for 6:30 shots.”
GLAMOUR: “People don’t get it. They think I go shopping and buy a lot of expensive fabric and point my finger. Little do they know that it’s like being in the Army sometimes. It’s a lot of fun, but very hard work--carrying stuff, dressing and undressing people. You’re not sitting at a desk drawing pictures much.”
MILITARY ISSUE: “I’m sure ‘Private Ryan’ will get a lot of [Oscar] nominations, but because it’s a uniform movie. I don’t know if it will get a nomination for costume. If any uniform movie ever gets noticed, it will probably be that. But it’s always good to have a few babes running around in dresses.”
RESTRAINT: “With ‘Beloved’ I stuck very much to real fabrics and real accessories and real buttons of that time and place. I did not go over the top with the clothes, going, ‘Well, they could have just a little more fabric in the skirt because I like it.’ "--Steve Hochman
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abf3dfcb68b7a33b7f58711ce705e39c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-11-me-31516-story.html | Actor Fails to Shoot Down Gun Lawsuit | Actor Fails to Shoot Down Gun Lawsuit
Plus, death to “Lawyers” . . . No contest . . . John Doe’s lawsuit.
Did actor Christian Slater cause a rookie police officer severe emotional distress by reaching for the officer’s gun last year during that infamous biting brouhaha? A judge in Santa Monica has left it up to a jury to decide.
Superior Court Judge Robert A. Letteau recently turned down the actor’s request that he dismiss a lawsuit filed by LAPD Officer Julio Cesar Flores. Slater, who spent 59 days in jail after pleading no contest to battery and drug offenses, had argued that scuffles with suspects are part of a police officer’s lot.
But the judge found that Flores “may have suffered severe emotional distress during the few moments in which the parties were scuffling, and specifically at the moment when [Slater] touched [Flores’] holstered firearm.” Flores, who underwent surgery to repair a hernia after the scuffle, is seeking unspecified damages. The trial is set for Jan. 26.
The civil court documents say Flores and his partner responded to a 911 call Aug. 11, 1997, and found Slater staggering, screaming, “Germans are going to kill us!” and pounding on the walls of an upscale Westside high-rise.
The 2 to 8 seconds during which Flores tried to handcuff Slater lie at the heart of the case. With one wrist cuffed, the lawsuit alleges, the actor spun free and began “kicking, hitting, screaming and flailing his hands, arms and legs about.” The officer was “sent flying toward a stairwell.”
No one involved disputes that Slater reached for the officer’s holstered gun, but witness accounts vary about the extent of the actor’s contact with the weapon. Slater says he “momentarily” placed his hand on the gun. But it was enough to scare bystander Jose Castro into stepping on the actor to keep him from reaching the gun. “I thought he was gonna kill us all,” Castro later said.
LIFE IMITATES ART IMITATES LIFE: “Ally McBeal” could have had some competition if things had turned out different at CBS, according to a lawsuit filed by the creator of “Murphy Brown.” Shukovsky English Entertainment is seeking $25 million in damages from the eye network, claiming it broke a promise to air a pilot and six episodes of a new show called “Lawyers,” featuring a single woman working in a law firm as its central character.
Sound familiar, anyone? “Lawyers” was the creation of Diane English, who gave the world curmudgeonette news hound Murphy Brown. The Superior Court suit says English struck a production deal in 1996 with CBS for a pilot, which she wrote and revised, and six episodes of “Lawyers.”
But, the suit claims, CBS was interested only in enticing English to try to rescue the ill-fated Ted Danson stinker “Ink” and to serve as a consultant, at Candice Bergen’s insistence, during the 10th and final season of “Murphy Brown.” Even though English held up her end of the bargain, the suit alleges, CBS “had no intention” of broadcasting her lawyer show. Had English known that from the outset, the suit states, she never would have agreed to work on “Ink” and would have taken her fledgling legal drama to another network.
The suit, filed by attorney Patricia L. Glaser, alleges fraud and breach of contract. “The allegations have no merit,” said CBS spokesman Chris Ender.
NO SMALL MATTER: A case heading toward Superior Court Judge Judith Chirlin’s courtroom Nov. 2 pits the founders of the Miss Petite USA pageant against a scion of old Hollywood. There’s even an Aaron Spelling connection.
Ann Lauren and Stephen Douglas, who are also known as Ann Marie Randazzo and Stephen Edminster, are the founders of the now-defunct Miss Petite USA pageant, which was based in Orange County and meant to promote modeling careers for women under 5-foot-5. They are seeking $8 million in damages from producer Anthony M. Shepherd, whom they accuse of fraud and breach of contract.
The pageant founders claim that in 1994 Shepherd padded his resume to impress them, promised to use his connections at Spelling Entertainment to televise the pageant, then pulled out of the production at the last minute. Lauren says she suffered a nervous breakdown after being left at the mercy of dozens of angry contestants who had paid to participate in the canceled pageant.
Court papers also say Shepherd employed unqualified assistants, one of whom allegedly enjoyed a brief fling with a contestant, and crew members who referred to the contestants as “shorties.”
Shepherd is great-grandson of MGM founder Louis B. Mayer, son of Richard Shepherd, executive producer of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and godson of Spelling, who employed him for more than a decade as a casting executive. Shepherd could not be reached for comment, but in a countersuit, he accuses the pageant founders of breach of contract and says he pulled out of the production only after they failed to pay him on time.
FRASIER HAS LEFT THE BUILDING: Somebody calling himself John Doe recently filed suit in Van Nuys against the Internet Entertainment Group, the folks who enriched so many lawyers while bringing smut fans that sex tape featuring Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.
John Doe, according to the firm and our courthouse spies in Van Nuys, really is Kelsey Grammer, beloved star of “Frasier.” Although the suit initially was filed under a pseudonym, sources say Grammer is listed as the plaintiff on an amended complaint that has been sealed. Now, Internet Entertainment says, Grammer has given notice that he intends to drop the legal action.
Not so fast. The firm is represented by 1st Amendment champion Alan Isaacman, made famous by his battles on behalf of Hustler publishing king Larry Flynt. Isaacman moved the case to U.S. District Court, where, dismissed or not, he plans to ask a judge to unseal the lawsuit. And, for the record, the firm says it has no Kelsey Grammer tapes and can’t figure out what all the fuss is about.
Times staff writer Evelyn Larrubia contributed to this column.
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1dccde15e1ca8673d96336aa6a751690 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-15-me-32774-story.html | Operational Ethics | Operational Ethics
Surgeons and ethicists are pondering a host of questions in the aftermath of an unprecedented hand transplant conducted in France three weeks ago.
An international team of surgeons at Edouard Herriot Hospital in Lyon took the hand and lower arm from a man who died in an accident and grafted them onto the arm of a man who had lost his hand 10 years ago.
Such a transplant has been attempted only once before--20 years ago in Ecuador--and that graft failed in less than two weeks when the recipient’s body rejected the arm.
But drugs for suppressing such rejections have improved dramatically since then, and the recipient, a New Zealand-born Australian named Clint Hallam, was scheduled to be released from the hospital Friday.
Surgeons caution that it may be as much as 18 months before they will know how much function the transplanted hand will have. Nonetheless, the Lyon team is planning another hand transplant later this year, and a team headquartered at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Ky., has announced that it will also perform such a graft.
“If we are successful, it opens up avenues for reconstructing any part of the body,” said Dr. John H. Barker of the University of Louisville.
“It [could] bring an enormous improvement to quality of life,” added Louisville’s Dr. Gordon R. Tobin.
Critics, however, charge that even if the graft is not rejected--and that is a very big if--the arm is unlikely to regain much more function than is available with a good prosthetic arm. For what amounts to only a cosmetic benefit, they say, potential patients are exposing themselves to an increased risk of cancer and infectious disease resulting from suppression of the immune system.
“I can almost guarantee that you will have a shorter life, on average, in order to have this transplant done,” said Dr. Vincent R. Hentz of the Stanford University School of Medicine, president of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand. “That is the real ethical issue here.”
The Louisville group triggered the ethics debate two months ago when it held a news conference to announce the world’s “first successful hand transplant,” even though it had not yet attempted the procedure in anything other than pigs.
That represented a distinct reversal from the normal route of performing a new surgery, then announcing it. But Barker said, “We hope this new way of doing things--getting public and professional feedback before doing the procedure--will be as important as the transplant.”
The team also hoped that the publicity would attract potential recipients, and it has. From 10 prospective recipients before the announcement, the pool of candidates has climbed to more than 100.
But before the Louisville team could follow through on its announcement, another team beat it to the punch, setting off some international sniping. Louisville surgeons said they had never heard of the team headed by Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard of Lyon and Dr. Earl Owen of the Centre for Microsurgery in Sydney, Australia, and that members of the French team had not spoken up at meetings where potential hand transplants were discussed.
“Louisville is not the center of the universe,” Dubernard riposted.
But the French team suffered some embarrassment of its own earlier this month. It had initially announced that its patient, Clint Hallam, was a 48-year-old Australian businessman who lost his hand in a logging accident.
But Australian newspapers reported that Hallam had actually lost his arm in an accident in New Zealand’s Rolleston Prison while serving a two-year sentence for fraud. Additionally, he is wanted by police in Australia and New Zealand on seven counts of fraud stemming from allegations of a pyramid-type scheme involving credit cards.
Owen said the surgical team had been “completely duped” by Hallam and was not aware of his background. Dubernard said Hallam’s background is irrelevant and that even imprisoned criminals have a right to the same medical care as the innocent.
Hallam’s background aside, the ethics of the transplant have created a minor firestorm. The American Society for Surgery of the Hand released an official position paper arguing that the risk-to-benefit ratio for such transplants “has yet to be convincingly established.”
The society urged other surgeons to abstain from similar procedures pending an evaluation of the success of Hallam’s transplant and further results in animals.
British physicians appear to be particularly concerned about the risk. Newspapers there reported that the surgery had originally been planned for St. Mary’s Hospital in London, but that the hospital’s ethics committee had rejected the proposal.
Dubernard said the operation was performed in France because of the greater availability of donors. Under French law, everyone who dies is a potential organ donor unless he or she has specifically left instructions to the contrary.
Other critics said that Hallam was not a good candidate for the procedure, even beyond his criminal background. Dr. Guy Foucher, president of the International Federation of Hand Surgeons, argued that too much time had elapsed between Hallam’s loss and the transplant.
Foucher said the 10-year period would have allowed muscles in Hallam’s arm to wither from disuse and his brain to lose memory of the limb, impairing future recovery.
Questioning Impact on Patients
Other potential ethical issues include such factors as the psychological impact of a graft failure on the patient. The Louisville team members say they will choose only a patient who has used a mechanical prosthesis and thus will know what to expect if the graft fails.
Members might even choose a patient who has lost both hands, on the presumption that the benefits of a partially functioning hand would be higher for such an individual.
The fact that a hand is not critical to survival does not automatically mean that hand transplants should not be attempted, however, said Dr. Linda Emmanuel, the American Medical Assn. vice president for ethics. “Medicine is not just life and death,” she said. “It’s also about being whole. Transplantation of this kind is within our normal range of healing.”
Despite all the admonishments for caution, surgeons will probably continue performing the procedure. Said Dr. Nadey Hakim of St. Mary’s Hospital, a member of the French team: “You have to dare in medicine, or it does not advance. And what we have done here is to dare.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Making Connections
Surgeons at a hospital in Lyon, France, recently transplanted a hand and lower arm from a cadaver onto the arm of a man who had lost his own hand in an accident.
1. In the 13.5-hour operation, surgeons began by cutting off the end of the patient’s stump to expose fresh tissue, carefully labeling each part.
2. The next step was to join the bones together with metal plates and screws to hold the graft in the proper position.
3. Then circulation was restored to the arm by joining the two major arteries and the veins.
4. Next, surgeons joined the tendons and muscles.
5. In the most time-consuming portion of the surgery, they joined the nerves.
6. Finally, they loosely joined the skin.
*
Source: University of Louisville
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bba737b715d25d9bea90773abfad2b23 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-16-mn-33160-story.html | Chinese Martial-Art Form Sports Less Threatening Moves | Chinese Martial-Art Form Sports Less Threatening Moves
Nearly 10,000 demonstrators converged Thursday on Tiananmen Square in one of the biggest rallies since the prodemocracy protests of 1989. But there wasn’t a dissident in sight.
Instead, the masses were participating in a huge display of China’s graceful art of tai chi.
The demonstration was part of an official celebration of wushu, the generic Chinese term for the country’s more than 100 styles of indigenous martial arts, which the government has reconstituted as a sport for the masses.
But while officials congratulate themselves, other Chinese mourn the gradual decline that wushu has suffered for decades. Like Peking Opera and other traditional art forms that represented a philosophy and way of life in earlier times, martial arts have become a casualty of more comfortable modern lifestyles.
“That stuff is useless. It’s a lot of flowery postures,” Beijing middle school student Xiao Tian said of wushu. His opinion is common among many Chinese who believe that the competition sport has largely stripped wushu of its value as a method of self-defense.
With compulsory movements grouped into routines written by committees, sport wushu is more akin to gymnastics or dance than to combat.
That’s just fine with China’s government, always mindful that, for centuries, martial arts have been a rallying point for religious cults and in peasant revolts such as the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. China’s estimated 80 million wushu practitioners would be a force to reckon with if they ever got up in arms about anything.
In the meantime, more practical martial-arts training is reserved for the military and police, who hire martial-arts masters to drill their riot-shield-and-baton-wielding phalanxes.
Also demoralizing to martial artists is the corruption that has permeated a field once known for its code of chivalry. In China’s state sports machine, coaches’ pay depends on their meeting quotas for how many of their athletes win in competition.
As a result, referees say that they are commonly bribed to inflate scores and that the outcome of some competitions is decided in advance according to which athletes are to be groomed for stardom.
“There is rampant corruption, but I am encouraged that people are trying to clean it up. . . . They want it to be fair,” said Eric Chen, president of the Huntington Beach-based National Wushu Training Center.
Last week, Chen brought eight U.S. fighters to Beijing to compete against Chinese athletes in a martial-arts sparring match that was the talk of the town. Chen invited actor Charlie Sheen to lend his support to the match and Thursday’s tai chi demonstration.
“Something this unique shouldn’t be hidden from the world,” Sheen, who has trained in martial arts for movie roles, said of wushu.
Insiders at the match allege that Chinese coaches, fearful that their fighters would be overwhelmed, asked the American side to consider throwing a bout in China’s favor. The American side reportedly refused. China ended up winning seven of eight matches.
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87a1beef452fe9a60ddbe4b258577d77 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-18-tm-33581-story.html | An Alternative Universe | An Alternative Universe
The afternoon of her 51st birthday, Octavia Butler is speaking of parasites. Of leeches, grubs, maggots and botflies, specifically.
Street poets, feminist authors, college professors and civil servants on lunch hour have gathered this summer day at Sisterspace bookstore in Washington, D.C., to honor “Sister Octavia"--and to buy some of her books. They are treated to the story behind her famously stomach-churning tale “Bloodchild.”
Oblivious to the pink paper plates stacked up behind her and the frosted birthday cake waiting to be served, Butler describes in unappetizing detail how she got so embroiled in the life stages of such slimy creatures. Anticipating a research trip to the Peruvian Amazon, Butler had begun to fret about botflies and their way of laying eggs in the wounds left by the bites of other insects. “The [larvae] eat and they eat and they get bigger and bigger, and then there’s a big knot that comes up under your skin, and as they eat closer to the bone, it hurts and . . . well, I simply knew I’d have to do something about my botfly concerns or I couldn’t go. So I did what I do whenever anything upsets me: I sat down and wrote about it.” What she wrote, a horrifying novella about aliens that use the bellies of humans to incubate their young, is ripe with images of thick worms, blind and slimy with blood.
When she was quite small, Octavia Butler learned that if the world tormented a poor, shy black child--if it saddened her, humiliated her or frightened her out of her skin--she could always escape by making up a story. Her earliest tales--the first concocted at about age 4 on her Pasadena porch while she watched other children at play as punishment for ruining her only pair of shoes--were standard fantasies about the adventures of a magical horse. Octavia was the horse.
Several decades and a dozen books later, Butler is still inventing stories to keep the world at bay. She writes novels that have evolved from the biologically bizarre to the socially profound, working behind the drawn shades of her San Gabriel Valley home and venturing beyond her local bus route only for research or to accept the occasional invitation to discuss her writing. Yet legions of fans know her as one of the preeminent authors in her field, a genre the Library of Congress classifies as science fiction but which most other current practitioners call “fantastic realism.” Under any label, it serves her special purpose: “The major tragedies in life, there’s just no compensation,” says Butler. “But the minor ones you can always write about. It’s my way of dealing, and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than psychiatrists. The story, you see, will get you through.”
Light years before the MacArthur Foundation handed her a $295,000 “genius” grant,” before she won the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, before being feted by feminists and flattered by the Smithsonian, Octavia Estelle Butler was a girl everybody called “Junie.” Her father was a shoeshine man. Her mother, Octavia Margaret, was a maid who had lost four babies before delivering Octavia. When her father died, little Junie--short for Octavia Junior, according to one theory--was sent to her grandmother’s chicken farm out near Victorville to live until her mother could make a home for her.
Although there was no electricity, no telephone, no water--except for what her uncles trucked out from Los Angeles--and very few people, for Butler it was paradise. A place with plenty of space, a blank canvas to fill with her fantasies. It is the bright stars against the deep black sky, not the daydreams, that she remembers best about the farm. Even with a crescent moon, her grandmother could see well enough to bring in the laundry, long after the sun had set. In her hopeful tale of post-apocalyptic survival, “The Parable of the Sower,” Butler describes taking the wash down from the line in the cool of early night: “The basket is full. I look to see that [no one] is watching me, then let myself fall backward onto the soft mound of stiff, clean clothes. For a moment, the fall is like floating.”
Junie soon moved back to the city lights, to Pasadena, where her mother worked as a maid and also took in boarders. “Sometimes I went to work with my mother, and I was very ashamed. She went in back doors, and she cleaned up after other people.” Once, she was reported to the police just for changing a tire on a street in La Canada, where she worked, Butler says. “I felt so embarrassed, but I had a roof over my head, I had food to eat, I could go to school.”
The elder Octavia had been snatched out of grade school to work and wanted something better for her only child. “She brought home any books her employers or their children threw out,” Butler says. “I had books with yellow pages, books that had been scribbled on, spilled on, cut up, books without covers, anything that could be read.” Dyslexia merely slowed her pace.
Butler became a regular visitor to the imposing granite public library on Walnut Street in Pasadena. Between the covers of a large, pink zippered notebook with its full ream of paper, she began to create her own universe. There she could still be a magic horse. Or, as she discovered in science fiction magazines and movies such as “Devil Girl From Mars,” she could write her part as a Martian, or maybe a telepathist.
One day, she confided to her favorite aunt that this was what she would do with her life. She would write stories. Hazel Walker, then a County-USC hospital nurse, shook her head in dismay. Medicine might make room for a bright girl like Octavia, she thought, but not literature. “Honey,” Walker told her 13-year-old niece, “Negroes can’t be writers.”
Her aunt spoke the truth, Butler remembers thinking. After all, she had never read a single word that to her knowledge had been written by a black person. But the warning came too late. She already was typing out her stories on the Remington portable her mother had purchased on the installment plan for $10 a month.
*
“I’m black. I’m solitary. I’ve always been an outsider.”
That is how Octavia Butler routinely describes herself. If it sounds arrogant, and to some it does, that’s too bad. The days of apologizing for who she is are over. Butler tells the college students who study her work that she spent most of her early life staring at the ground. “It’s a wonder I didn’t become a geologist.”
In school, she towered over her classmates. “Because I was so much bigger,” she explains matter-of-factly, “people assumed I’d flunked. I hated that condescension, and there were certain smirks, intended to be smiles. And then there was the time I was mistaken for one of my friend’s mothers. Now that . . . that was difficult.” With each shove against her self-esteem, Butler retreated. “Shyness . . . isn’t cute or feminine or appealing,” she said in a 1989 Essence magazine article. “It’s torment and it’s s - - -.”
Butler had only a few friends, but they were devoted. One of them, Donna Oliver, years ago renewed the friendship she and Octavia began in third grade. “She wasn’t the outgoing type,” Oliver recalls. “She was very, very shy and always seemed to be writing instead of playing.”
At 12, Butler looked enough like an adult to get a job as a restroom attendant at the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day. For years, her mother had cleaned the portable toilets along Colorado Boulevard so her daughter could tag along and see the parade. The two Octavias’ closeness buffered but did not vanquish the agony of being different. “I believed I was ugly, helpless and socially hopeless,” the writer says of her youth. “And I wished I would disappear. Instead, I grew to be 6 feet tall. Nature has a way of doing things like that.”
Butler was 18 and taking classes at Pasadena City College when she earned a spot in the Open Door Program of the Screen Writers Guild. Harlan Ellison and other writers had conceived the program as a way to identify and mentor talented women and minorities. Butler signed up for one of Ellison’s screenwriting workshops. It was a disaster.
“She couldn’t write a screenplay for s - - -.” says Ellison, the notoriously cranky and prolific author of such stories as “A Boy and His Dog,” as well as many memorable scripts for “Twilight Zone,” “Outer Limits” and “Star Trek.” He knows Butler by her middle name. “I try to be humble about my association with Estelle. But in truth, I am enormously proud. She’s one of my best discoveries.”
Ellison recalls a student “so cataclysmically shy that she couldn’t even look me in the eye.” He took her aside and gave her the bad news first: The scripts she had submitted were awful. But, he was quick to add, they contained fabulous prose. He encouraged her to write a novel and later helped underwrite her scholarship to the Clarion Science Writing Workshop in Pennsylvania. Two of the pieces she wrote there sold. The income wasn’t enough to support her, but it was enough to support her belief that she could survive as a professional writer.
The thrill of success faded fast as Butler struggled through the next five years without selling another word. She lived alone in an apartment in a run-down L.A. neighborhood and paid the rent by inspecting potato chips in a factory, washing dishes, sweeping floors and, finally, telemarketing--which she likes to call telephone solicitation “because it sounds more salacious.” With her elegant, hypnotic baritone, Butler found she could persuade almost anyone to buy almost anything. But all that mattered was writing, and from 2 to 5 every morning, without fail, she wrote.
Two weeks before Christmas 1974, she was laid off from the telemarketing job. “I cried, and if you cry about losing a job that awful, you know things are pretty bad. I had to fish or cut bait.” She sat down with all her stories, going back to the earliest flying-horse tales. In a few months she pieced together the novel “Patternmaster.” The book chronicles a future where humanity is divided among a telepathic ruling class of “Patternists,” the mute humans who serve them and four-legged “Clayarks” contaminated by a disease brought back from outer space.
Wary of agents after one tricked her mother out of the equivalent of a month’s rent, Butler mailed the book to publishers on her own. By 1980, Doubleday had released four of the five titles in the Patternmaster series. But while cranking away, another idea nagged at her. She wanted to help African Americans of her generation feel their history and appreciate their ancestors’ sacrifices. Though in 1979 Doubleday published “Kindred” under its mainstream fiction banner, Butler calls her story of a black woman transported back to the antebellum South “a grim fantasy.” Like so much of her work, the novel explores the relationship between the empowered and powerless and, in this case, suspends the temporal imperative to revisit the pain and horror of 19th century slave society.
By the time she wrote “Kindred,” Butler already had made peace with what her ancestors had done to survive and with what her mother had done to make her daughter’s life as a writer possible. The book remains her best-selling title, stoked in part by its popularity in university black-studies classes. But Butler is not well known outside her genre; even within it, she enjoys more critical success than commercial. She acts accordingly.
“The only real luxury Octavia will allow herself--besides the thousands of books she buys--are her earrings,” says her friend Frances Louis, a retired English professor. “She doesn’t spend a fortune on them, but she does love them. Long, dangling silver pieces that look so wonderful, so artful and clean, set off by her short hair.”
Louis, schoolmate Oliver and cousin Tina Walker form the nucleus of Butler’s tiny constellation of friends. “She is a brilliant, hard-working and particular girl when it comes to relationships,” observes Aunt Hazel. “I recall there was a gentleman who came around for her, but then it turned out he smoked, and she didn’t like smoking. Her standards are high, and she’s just so particular.”
The 1995 MacArthur grant, which rewarded Butler for “intermingling elements of African and African American spiritualism, mysticism and mythology” in her work, will have paid her more than $50,000 a year through the spring. It meant she could buy a single-level (“for my mother’s knees”) home big enough for both Octavias to live in. Butler imagined they would garden, read and listen to the music they both loved. But on a sunny morning in 1996, not long before the planned merging of households, Junie dropped in on her mother. “I remember clearly how odd it was to find her sitting on this little table by the front door. This was not a table for sitting on, and my mother would never have sat on furniture that wasn’t meant for sitting. I knew then something had to be terribly wrong.” It was a stroke, and less than three weeks later, she died.
“Like always, Junie didn’t talk much about it,” says Tina Walker. “Like always, she dealt with it in her own way.”
*
When I ask Octavia Butler which of her books would tell me the most about her, she names three: “Bloodchild,” because it was her first commercially published story; “Kindred,” because it reveals her roots, and “Parable of the Sower,” “if you want to know where I am now.”
“Parable” is a story of a visionary woman who founds her own religion. To write the book, Butler, a former Baptist, had to create that new religion. For years she wrote and rewrote the first pages of the novel. Finally, she turned to poetry, and it broke the block. “Poetry forces you to say what you have to say. And for me, it freed up the rest of the story.”
*
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes You.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
--"Parable of the Sower”
*
Next month, Seven Stories will publish a sequel--"Parable of the Talents.” As Butler told friend Frances Louis in a 1994 Emerge magazine interview, “Once I invent a universe, I like it. I want to play in it.” In her new book, Butler expands the story of religious visionary Lauren Oya Olamina. Lauren has died, and it is left to her daughter to tell the story.
Except for her birthday trip to Washington, where she also spoke to the Smithsonian Associates literary forum, Butler has spent many of the months since her mother’s death alone, writing and sorting through her mother’s things. She broke her solitude to join Walter Mosley, the mystery writer who recently published his first science fiction novel, at a reading for the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. “I know how close she was to her mother and how difficult it must be for her now,” Mosley says, “but I can tell you that Octavia Butler remains a very big presence. There’s the physical presence--tall, powerful; and that voice--so measured, so mellow. Then that presence goes away, and you feel that inner person, a warm and insightful person with a strange and fantastic creativity.”
Ray Bradbury, who knows Butler more from literary gatherings than from her books, raves about her “enthusiasm for life, for writing, for doing what it is we do.
“The Egyptians,” says the octogenarian dean of science fiction, “had a myth that when we die, the gods will ask of you only one question, and that is, ‘Did you have enthusiasm?’ Octavia Butler has it.”
Butler’s eagerness for all kinds of knowledge is evident in her eclectic collection of books, from “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and “My Mother, Myself” to dictionaries of exotic diseases and encyclopedias of poisons. They’re slowly taking over her living space. When I try several times to arrange a visit to her home, Butler recommends patience. “I don’t have that much company,” she says, “so you’re going to have to give me plenty of time to clean this place up.” On the appointed day, her 1950s ranch house on a leafy suburban block appears spotless. Although I get scolded for coming in the wrong door--"Don’t you know this is the back door?"--a soothing symphony plays on the stereo and, in the kitchen, an unopened package of gourmet cookies awaits display on a fancy plate.
Butler’s day began the way almost every day has for the past few years. Rise at 5. Pull on black pants and a heavy shirt against the cool mountain air, lace up the “outdoor” pair of black Reeboks she buys once a year at Sears. (The “indoor” pair, one size larger, doesn’t leave the house.) “I take different routes on my walks,” Butler says, “but it’s always up, up, toward the mountains. The San Gabriels are beautiful at dawn, and I like to be out in their shadow. If I’ve been a good girl on my walk and not stopped off for a doughnut, I treat myself to a newspaper. If not, I get the news on public radio--and TV, if necessary.”
As she moves in big, coltish strides from room to room, giving the tour, her signature silver earrings swing like pendulums. Butler dresses simply, eschewing skirts, as her protagonists do. “These pictures on the wall kind of say it all. Here I am with some of my writer friends. As you can see, I am wearing the same floral-print blouse that I’m wearing in this picture with my aunts. I only have two, so it’s either one or the other.
“This is the study. It was going to be my mother’s bedroom, but of course now, well, it’s just the study.” Against one wall sits her computer, surrounded by stacks of reference books. Her new book is her first written on a computer.
“I need a lot of change all at once,” she says. “If not, it’s like cutting the dog’s tail off an inch at a time.
“So. So my mother had died and I decided to get the computer. How much more miserable could I be?”
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444226a4db48b05c69f8a0be07758cab | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-22-ca-34881-story.html | Their Aim Is True | Their Aim Is True
“Somehow I never imagined I’d be playing this guitar while wearing this tuxedo,” Elvis Costello joked during his Universal Amphitheatre performance with Burt Bacharach on Tuesday, indicating the electric guitar he used to accompany an orchestrated version of his 1977 ballad “Alison.” “You never know where the road is going to take you.”
Although the song’s bittersweet message to a lost love demonstrated that Costello was a Bacharach fan 20 years ago, back then it would have been hard to imagine that England’s biggest New Wave hothead would end up performing brokenhearted ballads co-written with his idol. Or that American pop icon Bacharach would play piano and conduct a 26-piece orchestra featuring Costello’s longtime keyboardist, Steve Nieve. Or, for that matter, that Costello’s hyperkinetic ways could ever mesh with Bacharach’s easygoing style.
Having employed their shared fascination with romantic pain to a sublime end on their new album, “Painted From Memory,” this unlikely pair proved to be perfect stage collaborators as well. They satisfied just about any wish fans might have had, performing all their new songs as well as individual half-hour sets of their own material.
Using subtle theatrical gestures to underscore a variety of emotional details, Costello left plenty of room for listeners to shade in their own feelings during such standouts as the poignant “This House Is Empty Now” and the plaintive “God Give Me Strength.” Since Bacharach had tailored the songs to the younger man’s voice, Costello’s singing displayed more range than ever, although high notes were occasionally a shaky proposition.
Buoyantly leading the orchestra from his piano bench, Bacharach probably enjoyed himself even more than his counterpart. His solo set amounted to a mostly lighthearted medley featuring snippets of everything from "(Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance” to “Walk On By” to “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” mostly sung by the backing vocalists. His own, more serious turn at the reflective “Alfie” quietly emphasized how profound and enduring pop music can be.
Bacharach’s program also pointed to an influence on modern music that’s so pervasive it’s virtually subliminal. Although he has recently become “hip,” his songs never went out of style, and they never will.
For an artist who has remained a beloved cult figure in spite of efforts to appease the mainstream, Costello revealed growing signs of timelessness in his own set. His and Nieve’s arrangements made such classics as “Alison” sound natural in this setting, though a funereal incarnation of the bubbly “Veronica” proved jarring. But as the shattering sentiments of “Almost Blue” demonstrated, Costello’s work may one day be every bit as ingrained as Bacharach’s.
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966931f1186e10737e3f592d55200fd8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-23-ca-35479-story.html | The Improbable Success of ‘Life Is Beautiful’ | The Improbable Success of ‘Life Is Beautiful’
When the narrator of the surprising “Life Is Beautiful” says, “This is a simple story but not an easy one to tell,” he’s speaking of the tale he’s introducing. But the thought applies as well to the challenges facing co-writer, director and star Roberto Benigni, who set himself an impossible task with “Life Is Beautiful.”
Best known in this country for brief appearances in Jim Jarmusch’s “Down by Law” and “Night on Earth” as well as “Son of the Pink Panther,” Benigni is one of Italy’s cinematic heroes, an irresistible comic force whose films regularly set national box-office records. But when he and co-writer Vincenzo Cerami came up with the idea for “Life Is Beautiful,” Benigni admitted he scared himself, and no wonder. A comic fable about the Holocaust set in part in a mythical concentration camp would give anyone pause.
A sizable hit in Italy, where it won eight David di Donatellos (the Italian Oscars), “Life Is Beautiful,” despite its mild title and Benigni’s comic genius, has not been without its vocal detractors. Even at Cannes, where it won the runner-up Grand Jury Prize and an ecstatic Benigni literally kissed jury president Martin Scorsese’s feet, the film had some furious opposition.
That mixed reaction is understandable. For while it’s futile to pretend that “Life Is Beautiful” completely triumphs--it’s simply too tough a concept to sustain--what is surprising about this unlikely film is that it succeeds as well as it does. Its sentiment is inescapable, but genuine poignancy and pathos are also present, and an overarching sincerity is visible too.
That guilessness comes directly from Benigni, one of the world’s most irresistibly funny people. A mischief-maker percolating with infectious energy and a machine-gun verbal style, he blends an Everyman aura with the ability to infuse his characters with believable innocence.
Innocence is especially hard to come by in the dark year of 1939, but Guido (Benigni) manages. As a completely assimilated Jew his feeling is “What could happen to me?” He and a pal come to the small Tuscan city of Arezzo to try their luck, but practically the first thing that happens to Guido is having the beautiful Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni’s wife and perennial co-star) fall out of a hayloft and land right on top of him.
*
That style of chaotic comedy continues, as the first half of “Life” proceeds in an old-fashioned knockabout slapstick manner with jokes that could have come out of a silent film. Typical is the episode where Guido’s out-of-control car stumbles into a motorcade for Italy’s king, and his frantic gestures warning everyone out of the way are mistaken for crisp royal salutes.
When not courting Dora, Guido alternates between tormenting his romantic rival, a local fascist leader, and trying to learn from his tolerant uncle (Giustino Durano) how to be a waiter at the fancy local hotel. There he becomes friendly with a cultivated German named Dr. Lessing (a gray-haired Horst Buchholz), who shares his love of difficult riddles.
A characteristic of “Life Is Beautiful” that runs through both its comic and serious parts is how carefully planned everything is. If eggs are grabbed for whatever reason, you can be sure they’ll eventually be squashed on someone’s head, and many of the film’s elaborate jokes take 10 or 15 minutes to completely play out.
Similarly, the hints of fascist repression that dot the film’s first hour, including the tormenting of Guido’s uncle by local hooligans, bear fruit about halfway into the film. Almost without warning, Guido, who is by now married to Dora with a wide-eyed child named Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini) for a son, finds himself and his family on a train headed for a concentration camp. What has been a genial romantic comedy suddenly takes a very different turn.
Determined to protect his boy from the knowledge of what’s going on, Guido is desperate for a way to explain the inexplicable horrors of their new life to the child. He hits on the notion of telling Giosue that everything that’s happening is part of a huge game in which everyone is competing for the chance to win that most outrageous boyhood fantasy, a genuine army tank. A classic scene where Guido pretends to speak German and translates the rules for camp safety into a speech about the game’s rules (“no asking for your mother”) is the manic centerpiece for this deception.
*
The concentration camp, like the film, is a strange hybrid, half faithful re-creation, half fabulistic dream. While the greatest suffering Guido experiences on-camera is having to carry heavy anvils, there is also a haunting, fog-shrouded shot of a huge mountain of corpses. Just dealing, even peripherally, with this kind of powerful material lends “Life Is Beautiful” its own kind of dignity. Guido’s manic good cheer in the face of the end of his world, while something of a setup job, is moving even as we’re tempted to resist it.
Given that good cheer, the film’s considerable popularity at festivals worldwide is not surprising: the notion that the determined human spirit can find ways to triumph over this kind of hell on Earth can’t help but be an appealing one. Balancing that is the question of whether this scenario trivializes the Holocaust, making it seem like a bad but not monstrous event just so audiences can feel reassured.
Clearly Benigni is an optimist and the willingness to buy into that point of view is the determining factor in reacting to his improbable experiment.
* MPAA rating: PG-13 for Holocaust-related elements. Times guidelines: a brief shot of a huge pile of corpses.
‘Life Is Beautiful’
Roberto Benigni: Guido
Nicoletta Braschi: Dora
Giorgio Cantarini: Giosue
Giustino Durano: Uncle
Sergio Bustric: Ferruccio
Horst Buchholz: Dr. Lessing
Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori present a Melampo Cinematografica production, released by Miramax. Director Roberto Benigni. Producers Elda Ferri, Gianluigi Braschi. Screenplay Vincenzo Cerami and Roberto Benigni. Cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli. Editor Simona Paggi. Costumes Danilo Donati. Music Nicola Piovani. Production design Danilo Donati. Set decorator Danilo Donati. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.
* In general release throughout Southern California.
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d8b865347c603c5b498bfeab406b590f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-23-ca-35498-story.html | ‘Soldier’ Takes No Prisoners | ‘Soldier’ Takes No Prisoners
“Soldier,” a potent comic-book-style action-adventure fantasy, envisions a not-too-distant intergalactic future when warriors will be selected at birth by the government and trained to become human fighting machines. Over the years. Kurt Russell’s Todd has become the best of these warriors, a rugged fighter with a scar on the right side of his face and his name, blood type and a chevron tattooed on his left cheek.
His folksy captain (Gary Busey) respects him and his fellow warriors, but along comes Jason Isaacs’ Colonel Mekum, one of those lethal idiots who have mysteriously been rising to positions of power from the beginning of time. The colonel announces that Todd and his ilk have been rendered obsolete by a younger breed of warrior that has been “enhanced” via DNA and who knows what else. Busey’s Church proposes a contest between Todd and one of the new “models,” Jason Scott Lee’s Caine 607, who winds up losing the sight in his right eye.
Undeterred, the colonel orders Todd and the other veterans scooped up in an intergalactic Dumpster, deposited on a garbage disposal planet. Only Todd survives being crushed to death amid a load of metal debris.
Near the dumping site is a small colony of people stranded since their plane crashed some years before. Once accepting that they weren’t going to be rescued, these individuals set about building a community based on peace and harmony, fashioning a village created from what they could scavenge from the dumps. They’ve been able to grow enough vegetables to feed themselves, although their shanty-town Garden of Eden is menaced from time to time by rather overly symbolic and highly toxic green snakes.
But can a man trained from birth to be a killing machine fit intohuman society, especially one as civilized as this one? What’s more, you know very well we haven’t seen the last of the awful colonel or Caine 607.
In its look, scope and special effects, “Soldier” is suitably imaginative and spectacular if often artificial-looking. Russell has no more than five words to say during the film’s first hour and not much after that, but he has the presence, depth of character and expressiveness, along with the physicality, to carry “Soldier.”
Directed with vigor and finesse by Paul Anderson, “Soldier” was written by “Blade Runner” and “Unforgiven’s” greatly gifted David Webb Peoples. “Soldier” isn’t remotely as complex as either of those two landmark films, but it is a decent job of work on the part of Peoples. “Soldier” is the kind of picture described as being aimed at young urban males but may have an unexpected resonance for older viewers, who know only too well that obsolescence is something that nowadays extends to human beings and not just to machines.
It’s somehow comforting to be sent home by a sleek, violent, well-oiled action-adventure with the notion that experience can still count for more than mere youth.
* MPAA rating: R, for strong violence and brief language. Times guidelines: The violence is standard for the genre.
‘Soldier’
Kurt Russell: Todd
Jason Scott Lee: Caine 607
Jason Isaacs: Colonel Mekum
Gary Busey: Captain Church
A Warner Bros. presentation in association with Morgan Creek of a Jerry Weintraub Production in association with Impact Pictures. Director Paul Anderson. Producer Weintraub. Executive producer James G. Robinson. Screenplay by David Webb Peoples. Cinematographer David Tattersall. Editor Martin Hunter. Costumes Erica Edell Phillips. Music Joel McNeely. Visual effects supervisor Ed Jones. Production designer David. L. Snyder. Art director Tom Valentine. Set decorator Kate Sullivan. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.
* In general release throughout Southern California.
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b96c81c1f3a6ef2f8920eda20c103731 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-23-fi-35357-story.html | MGM Agrees to Acquire PolyGram Movie Library | MGM Agrees to Acquire PolyGram Movie Library
Capping weeks of negotiations, Kirk Kerkorian’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. has agreed to acquire most of the movie library of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment from Seagram Co. for $235 million in cash.
With the addition to its existing catalog, MGM’s library of 5,200 movies will represent more than half of the Hollywood studio films produced since 1948. The PolyGram library, including “The Graduate,” “The Crying Game,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Fargo,” accounts for more than 1,300 of those titles.
MGM said the acquisition would give the studio the largest movie library in the world, but Warner Bros. disputed the point, saying it has more than 5,700 titles.
In a prepared statement, Seagram put the value of the deal at $250 million, but $15 million of that will come from the library’s cash flow before the deal closes in January. Since that money will not be coming from MGM but from an asset Seagram will own outright when its $10.4-billion purchase of PolyGram is expected to close in early December, the value of the deal is probably closer to $235 million.
After selling two-thirds of the PolyGram movie library to MGM and with hopes of unloading the rest on Britain-based Carlton Communications or some other buyer, Seagram still faces the problem of disposing of PolyGram’s remaining assets, which include a movie production entity and worldwide distribution operation. What it can’t sell off will either be absorbed by its Universal Studios or dissolved.
Seagram had intended to sell all of the PolyGram movie assets intact to defray the cost of its acquisition of parent PolyGram from Philips Electronics. But Seagram couldn’t get the price it sought.
This week, PolyGram reported that losses in its film unit had widened to $38 million in the quarter ended Sept. 30, from $22 million a year earlier. For the first nine months, the unit’s losses increased to $119 million from $80 million a year earlier.
Also of note in Thursday’s announcement was MGM’s explanation that it is acquiring the PolyGram library through its wholly owned subsidiary, Orion Pictures. That way, MGM hopes to circumvent a clause in its long-term home-video deal with Warner that calls for all new and existing MGM products to go through Warner video until at least 2003, when it starts reverting to MGM.
Presumably, MGM’s position is that the PolyGram library wouldn’t be covered under that deal since the movies would go under its Orion Home Video label.
Warner, which collects a distribution fee for the service it provides MGM under a 1990 agreement, is likely to contend that the 1,300 PolyGram titles fall under its existing deal with MGM. Warner declined comment Thursday.
An MGM official declined comment on the matter, saying only, “We’re delighted to have bragging rights to the largest film library in the world.”
Warner is already up in arms that MGM has been distributing titles from its Orion Pictures library, which it purchased last year.
The portion of the PolyGram library that MGM is buying, which does not include the ITC catalog of 10,000 hours of TV programming and 350 movies, is projected to generate annual cash flow of $20 million to $30 million.
MGM’s existing library, which consists of 4,000 titles, nets the studio about $150 million annually, which could rise to $230 million once MGM gets reversions to various titles after 2000.
In addition to increasing cash flow, Kerkorian also wants to bulk up MGM’s library to increase the value of the studio and raise his chances of making a return on his $1.4-billion investment in MGM, a company he purchased for the third time in 1996.
At $235 million, Kerkorian appears to have made a good deal for the PolyGram library, which includes 1,051 titles from the old Epic catalog, as well as films such as “Baghdad Cafe” from the Island/Atlantic library; “sex, lies and videotape” from the Virgin/Palace catalog; and films like “Dead Man Walking,” “The Usual Suspects,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Fargo” that were produced by PolyGram before March 31, 1996.
PolyGram, outbidding MGM, paid $225 million for the Epic library last December after having doled out $156 million for the ITC catalog in 1995.
Now that it has sold two-thirds of the library to MGM, Seagram is negotiating in earnest to sell off the TV-heavy ITC library elsewhere.
Seagram officials declined comment, but sources said the company is talking to two potential bidders, one of which is Carlton Communications. MGM wanted to conclude a deal by today, in time for a rights offering to shareholders. MGM said it will increase the offering to $700 million from $500 million to cover most of the acquisition cost.
Kerkorian, who owns 90% of MGM, is expected to underwrite the increased offering based on the fact that he previously agreed to cover the $500 million.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
What MGM Bought From Seagram
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has agreed to buy more than 1,300 films from PolyGram’s library for $235 million. The deal means MGM would own about 5,200 titles, or more than half of the studio film p1919902837
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8c7ee6b380cc4befaee579390ab7b333 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-23-me-35295-story.html | The Mystery of the Missing Film | The Mystery of the Missing Film
George Hjorth’s orders that June morning 54 years ago were mysterious: After parachuting into occupied France with his three cameras, he was to hide in front of the German lines at Normandy and film whatever happened on the beach.
It was before dawn on June 6, 1944, and Hjorth was in the dark, literally and figuratively. He had no idea what to expect on that now-fabled stretch of coastline.
Only when the invasion began did he learn that his mission was to film the D-day landing of the U.S Army’s 1st Infantry Division and 29th Infantry Division at Omaha Beach--from the German side.
But whatever he saw, Hjorth (pronounced “Yorth”) was under standing orders not to discuss it for 50 years. Even today, the Cypress retiree’s mission remains an enigma: The film he shot, called unique by historians who recently learned of it from declassified documents, is missing.
“We’re hunting it down,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history and director of the University of New Orleans’ Eisenhower Center. Hjorth’s movie footage and photographs--probably gathering dust in a government archive--are the only known invasion pictures from the German perspective shot at the Normandy beaches, he said.
And recovering the film is important because “it shows how [Gen. Dwight D.] Eisenhower and the [Office of Strategic Services] saw the important need to capture on film what they knew would be the greatest invasion ever,” Brinkley said.
‘Right in the Middle of the Invasion of Europe’
A Hollywood actor before the war, Hjorth became a combat photographer with the OSS--the forerunner of the CIA--when he enlisted after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was part of a secret unit of filmmakers headed by director John Ford that has only become public in recent years.
Hjorth had parachuted into France three nights before D-day. The night before the invasion he was led to his hiding place on the beach by members of the French Resistance. Hjorth hunkered down with his cameras, about 50 yards from shore, and waited for dawn.
“I could hear the waves, but couldn’t see anything. Then it started getting light, and I saw large dots out in the water. I told myself, ‘Those aren’t islands. Those are ships!’ I realized that I was right in the middle of the invasion of Europe,” he said.
Hjorth could hear the fire above him from the Germans defending the beach against the American assault. He could feel the concussions as U.S. naval shells exploded around the German bunkers and trench lines. He estimates that he saw as many as 400 Americans die on the beach that day--"a horrible nightmare,” he remembers.
Reluctant to Speak of Wartime Work
Hjorth, 77 and a retired McDonnell Douglas executive, never saw the film he shot on D-day. A few days after photographing the invasion, he was thrown out of a screening room by an Army lieutenant who declared the film top secret and threatened to court-martial him if he viewed it, he said.
Details of Hjorth’s exploits were revealed this year when the government began declassifying OSS files. The declassified records also revealed new information about Ford’s band of filmmakers and their work for the OSS.
Hjorth did not consider himself a spy. Instead, he compares himself to “thousands of other guys who went away to fight for our country.”
Upon volunteering for the OSS, Hjorth had to sign an agreement that prevented him from speaking of his wartime activities for 50 years. Today, he talks about his wartime work only reluctantly.
He agreed to recall his D-day exploits only after news accounts reported that amateur military historians who have worked with Brinkley were attempting to locate Hjorth’s D-day film.
Melvin Paisley, a World War II fighter pilot and former assistant secretary of the Navy, said Lars Andersen and he have been combing the National Archives for Hjorth’s footage.
“It’s important because it’s such a unique situation. Until the records were declassified, we didn’t know that OSS photographers like Hjorth were actually dropped behind enemy lines,” Paisley said. “Nobody knew about it because the men who did it weren’t allowed to talk about it. . . . But now that we know about Hjorth’s film, you can bet we’re going to find it.”
Hjorth said he is proud of the work he did for the OSS but prefers to forget about the war.
“I’ve put the war behind me. I prefer to recall happy moments. I’m the eternal optimist. I filmed too many terrible scenes that provoke sadness whenever I think about them,” he said.
Among the images Hjorth would prefer to forget are pictures of the Buchenwald death camp and film he shot of another Nazi atrocity in France, where he photographed the corpses of dozens of civilians who were trapped in an underpass and burned alive. As an OSS photographer he was called upon to document these scenes as viewed by liberating American forces.
Although it has been more than half a century since he witnessed these events, talking about them still brings him to tears.
“I still can’t take it,” he said. “It’s one thing to photograph a battle from a distance, but when you have to photograph something so terrible up close, it’s awful. . . . I still remember two of the victims burned alive in the underpass by the Nazis: a woman who was clutching her baby to her breast, both terribly burned.”
Until the war began, life had been one pleasant memory after another for Hjorth.
He grew up in Hollywood, where his father owned a restaurant at Las Palmas Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard. Sid Grauman, owner of the nearby Egyptian Theater, was a frequent diner.
According to Hjorth, Grauman encouraged his parents to “register me with Central Casting,” and he began getting small parts in movies when he was 3. He had already appeared in several films when World War II began.
One wall of his home is lined with publicity shots of movies in which he appeared with Don Ameche, Lionel Barrymore, Tom Mix, Jackie Cooper and others.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hjorth said, he decided to enlist in the Army Air Force but a friend at Paramount suggested that he volunteer for Ford’s military movie crew instead.
Hjorth’s hobby was photography, and that was enough to qualify him for membership in the unit, of which he became one of the original 17 movie makers.
Hjorth said his first combat assignment was to photograph the Allies’ 1943 invasion of North Africa, including several ground battles, followed by documenting the U.S. landings in Sicily and the Italian mainland.
After the Italian campaign, Hjorth was sent to air school to prepare him for the nine jumps he made into Nazi-occupied France and Germany before D-day, he said.
“Not all of my assignments were to film battles. My jumps into France and Germany were to take pictures of bridges, roads, rivers, railroads and even a V-1 [rocket] launch site,” he said.
According to Hjorth, Resistance fighters took him to within 100 feet of a V-1 site, and his film provided valuable intelligence to Allied planners, who were trying to find ways to defeat the rocket “buzz” bombs that the Germans aimed at London.
Hjorth, who would usually parachute into enemy territory without a weapon, was always met on the ground by Resistance fighters who would take him to the targets he was supposed to film.
After completing his missions, Hjorth said, he was usually extracted by airplane. Twice he was met by a submarine and once by a Navy destroyer, he said.
Hjorth kept few mementos of his days in the OSS. Forbidden to talk about his wartime exploits, he said that whenever he was asked what he did in World War II, he simply replied, “Oh, I took pictures.”
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f8cb10eb19598dbbe785fc4c9c75209b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-24-me-35598-story.html | Authority of LAPD Watchdog Is Cut Back | Authority of LAPD Watchdog Is Cut Back
Los Angeles Police Commission President Edith Perez has restricted information on misconduct complaints available to the panel’s inspector general, a step both the civilian watchdog and police reform experts regard as a sharp reduction of the position’s powers.
The new definition of the inspector general’s authority--detailed in a memo signed by Perez and addressed to Chief Bernard C. Parks--represents an abrupt departure from recommendations advocated by the 1991 Christopher Commission.
Several city leaders and police reformers Friday joined the inspector general, Katherine Mader, in her outrage over the memo, saying the new definition insulates the LAPD’s discipline process from any meaningful scrutiny.
According to Perez’s memo, the inspector general can examine misconduct complaints only after the department has investigated and resolved them. The Christopher Commission, which proposed a number of police reforms after the beating of Rodney G. King, urged the creation of a strong civilian inspector general responsible for “monitoring the progress of complaints through the [internal affairs] investigation process, and auditing the results of [those] investigations.”
Memos obtained by The Times show that Perez has limited Mader’s review of misconduct complaints to “adjudicated complaints,” instead of giving her the authority to monitor the entire investigative process. The commission never has held a public discussion or vote on the change in the scope of Mader’s duties.
Three of Perez’s four colleagues denied Friday that the board wants to restrict Mader’s access to information and said the Sept. 22 memo may have to be rewritten.
“I think the memo can be misconstrued and we ought to clarify it,” said Commissioner Gerald L. Chaleff. “I would never support anything that would inhibit the ability of the inspector general to do her job.”
Commissioners Dean Hansell and T. Warren Jackson agreed.
“We have to fix it,” Hansell said.
Perez did not return calls for comment.
Police Commission Executive Director Joe Gunn, however, said he drafted the memo for Perez and does not believe it needs to be changed. He said Mader has told him that she has never needed access to complaint information before cases have been adjudicated.
“What she has done for the last two years has not been changed by these protocols,” Gunn said.
But Mader, who did not return calls for comment, wrote in an Oct. 16 letter to Gunn that the redefinition of her powers “would materially impact the day-to-day operations of the office of the inspector general.”
Others strongly concurred.
“The Christopher Commission report clearly is to the contrary of what I understand this new policy to be,” said Mark Epstein, who served as deputy general counsel to the blue-ribbon panel. “I’m troubled by this.”
Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, a former Police Commission president, said he too was disturbed by the development.
“It’s clear to me that such a change, as I understand it, alters both the spirit and the letter of the Christopher report.”
Councilwoman Laura Chick, chairwoman of the council’s Public Safety Committee, said she has “had growing concerns about the independence and integrity of the inspector general position. I plan to take appropriate action as necessary.”
Several commission sources said the chief had been consulted on the memo before it was finalized with the word “adjudicated.” The chief declined through a spokesman to comment on the matter.
To some department observers, Perez’s memo reflects the ongoing strife between the commission and Mader. Some police reformers said they fear that the commission, or at least Perez, is trying to either push Mader out of the job or make a case to fire her.
Several months ago, Mader complained that some department officials had not provided her with requested information. The commissioners held a closed-door discussion on the matter and decided to define the inspector general’s role so LAPD officials understood how to respond to her requests.
But instead of improving Mader’s ability to access information, the memo--as written--appears to restrict it.
Perez’s memo narrowly defines the broad oversight powers that voters approved for the inspector general in 1992.
According to the City Charter, the inspector general shall “audit, investigate and oversee the Police Department’s handling of complaints of misconduct by police officers and civilian employees.” The charter does not restrict the inspector general’s authority to adjudicated complaints.
Moreover, the memo undermines the inspector general’s authorities as defined by a public vote of a previous police commission panel two years ago.
Chaleff said Friday that he will request holding a public discussion of the Perez memo so the commission can clarify its positions.
Hansell said Perez should have consulted the other commissioners before finalizing the memo. Two commissioners said Friday that they had not seen Perez’s memo.
“In hindsight it should have come before the entire board,” Hansell said.
Several commission sources questioned whether Perez even had the authority to unilaterally define the inspector general’s position without a vote of her colleagues.
To some department observers, Perez’s memo was further evidence that she has too closely aligned herself with the police chief and is failing to exert adequate oversight over him. Some said they also were disappointed with the other commissioners.
“I would ask where are the other four members of the Police Commission?” Greenebaum said.
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207c30c01e8f7c16b9689190a9f5a758 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-24-mn-35647-story.html | Sibling Rivalry May Ring In a Sumo Revival | Sibling Rivalry May Ring In a Sumo Revival
There’s a heavyweight battle simmering in Japan’s center ring, an anything-but-friendly rivalry between sumo’s two most popular stars, Takanohana and Wakanohana--who happen to be brothers.
But brotherly love apparently has degenerated into family feud, inciting a national sumo soap opera with allegations of brainwashing, jealousy and, perhaps most serious, destroying the wa, or harmony, that Japanese hold sacred.
For the record:
12:00 AM, Oct. 25, 1998 For the Record Los Angeles Times Sunday October 25, 1998 Home Edition Part A Page 3 Metro Desk 1 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction Sumo wrestlers--A photo caption in Saturday’s editions of The Times incorrectly identified Japanese sumo wrestling stars Takanohana and Wakanohana. Wakanohana was pictured to the left and Takanohana was in the center of the photo.
“It’s unimaginable,” sumo critic Teiji Kojima said. “It’s not good to have such trouble outside the sumo ring.”
After all, hinkaku--dignity--is a requirement to reach yokozuna, sumo’s highest rank. Takanohana, Wakanohana and Hawaiian-born Akebono are the only three active sumo wrestlers to have attained the title of grand champion. The conflict is even more unseemly because the brothers hail from a sumo dynasty: Their uncle was a yokozuna and their father an ozeki, one rank below.
Nevertheless, the sibling rivalry may help spur interest in sumo, one of Japan’s most tradition-bound obsessions. In sumo, two wrestlers square off in a circle surrounded by sand, each trying to push the other out of the ring or trip him up so a body part hits the ground.
The sport’s popularity has declined steadily since the early 1990s, when young women followed the wrestlers around as if they were rock stars. Baseball eclipsed sumo in 1995 as Japan’s most popular sport, according to a newspaper poll by Yomiuri Shimbun.
Experts cite a variety of reasons for the waning interest, including too many tournaments (six 15-day grand championships a year) and the same wrestlers repeatedly winning. In addition, wrestlers are becoming too fat, winning with sheer girth rather than skill, Kojima said.
Weighing in at 352 pounds, younger brother Takanohana--known as Taka--lately has been getting a rap as the sport’s Dennis Rodman. The 26-year-old bad boy of sumo is the sport’s undisputed king, with 20 championships; he clinched the latest title last month, ahead of his brother, who is known as Waka.
Once very popular, Taka has seen his reputation deteriorate along with his manners. The slide began a few years ago when he dumped his fiancee and later married a television anchor who was pregnant with his child. He initially denied fathering the infant but later acknowledged paternity.
In a society that still holds fast to Confucian values of respect for elders, Taka is barely speaking to his parents, reporters said. He has criticized his elder brother’s fighting style, even refusing to shake Waka’s hand at a recent match.
The wrestlers and their families declined to be interviewed.
Japanese tabloids insist that Taka has been brainwashed by his chiropractor, Tashiro Tomita, who has been using acupuncture to try to straighten the wrestler’s bones. A spokesman for the chiropractor denies the charge.
Others suggest that Taka is trying to create some independence from his “goldfish bowl” life. The brothers, whose real names are Koji Hanada (Taka) and Masaru Hanada (Waka), turned pro at ages 15 and 17, with Taka completing only junior high school and Waka dropping out of high school.
Meanwhile, Waka has been gaining popularity because he appears more relaxed and level-headed. Nearly 60 pounds lighter than his brother, Waka reached the yokozuna rank in May, more than three years after Taka. That’s when the relationship is said to have really unraveled.
The brothers no longer bathe together in the communal tub that holds as many as five massive sumo bodies.
Now, with more eyes than ever on the battle between the grand champions, sumo fans are hoping they’ll get to see the pair square off against each other. But because they come from the same stable, as training centers are called, the brothers only wrestle each other if they are tied at the end of a tournament. It happened once, in 1995; Waka won.
Shigeo Ishihara, 68, a retired printer who watched last month’s match on television at the Ozeikan noodle shop in Tokyo, cheered for Waka. “I’m angry because Taka is a very shallow human being.”
But shop owner Namiko Ozeki, 64, stands by Taka: “Nobody can be strong and attractive at the same time.”
Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.
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a2ed96a54cba05c7e32fd1380d284179 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-25-me-36102-story.html | Barred From World He Loved, Just Getting By Is a Trial | Barred From World He Loved, Just Getting By Is a Trial
The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place Irving Kanarek. Even after several calls and letters, imploring me to air his gripe with the State Bar of California, the name still didn’t register.
His grievance was too esoteric and I put him off--but his passion and persistence carried the day. I told him I’d take a closer look at the material he’d sent, and then checked our files to see why his name rang a bell.
Irving Kanarek.
Charles Manson’s former lawyer.
Conditioned these days to celebrity lawyers, it’s hard to believe that the man seated across from me in the fast-food restaurant defended one of America’s most notorious criminals. Someone forgot to punch his ticket to fame and fortune.
The man at the table has lived the last year in a Garden Grove motel. Before that, it was four years in a Costa Mesa motel. Now 28 years since the Manson trial, Irving Kanarek is 78 years old and his curly white hair has receded, a la Henry Kissinger. He sports wisps of white whiskers and is missing some teeth. He walks with a limp he got from being hit by a car several years ago. He’s had bouts with mental illness and cancer, but says he feels fine. He lives on Social Security and says he can’t afford a car. He carries a briefcase that’s hard to close and he can’t see much without his glasses. When I ask him how he fills up his days, living in a motel without a car, he says that getting around by bus can chew up a lot of hours.
There are people, no doubt, who think that whatever setbacks have come to Kanarek are payback for defending Manson, convicted as the mastermind behind the seven Tate-LaBianca murders that jolted Los Angeles and the nation in August 1969.
In “Helter Skelter,” the best-selling book about the Manson murders and trial, prosecutor/author Vincent Bugliosi wrote that Kanarek’s reputation preceded him. He was the lawyer legendary for dragging out even the most mundane of cases. Bugliosi feared that a Kanarek-led defense would drag the Manson case out for years.
“I don’t know if I was legendary,” Kanarek says. “I get a kick out of practicing law. In the atmosphere of a courtroom, there is an adversary process. And where you have the adversary process, blood flows.”
When Linda Kasabian, the former Manson “family” member who became the prosecution’s star witness, was sworn in, Kanarek shouted, “Object, your honor, on the grounds this witness is not competent and she is insane!”
Later, when Kasabian testified she’d taken 50 LSD trips, Kanarek asked her to describe trip number 23. Bugliosi objected on the admittedly non-legal grounds that the question was “ridiculous.”
Amid the carnival-like atmosphere of the Manson trial, Kanarek was much more than a bit player. Although Bugliosi referred to Kanarek in his summation as “the Toscanini of tedium” and chided his tactics throughout the book, he also gave him his due. “The press focused on his bombast and missed his effectiveness,” Bugliosi wrote.
In the book, Bugliosi repeated an old story in which Kanarek objected as soon as a prosecution witness was asked to state his name. The man first heard his name from his mother, Kanarek claimed, which made it hearsay.
Kanarek shrugs at the anecdote, saying context is missing. “One man’s obstructionist is another man’s hero,” he says.
“He is a lawyer devoted to the cause of his clients, and brutally honest,” says George Denny, a longtime Kanarek friend and his former attorney. “He sometimes loses the forest for the trees, and he will take a point to extremes. That’s what terrorizes judges. He’s on the cutting edge in many cases.”
All of this should be said in past tense, however, because Kanarek is not a lawyer anymore.
That is what galls him and what drives him as his life winds down in a seeming blizzard of medical assaults.
He hasn’t practiced since November of 1989 when, in his own words, “I flipped out.” Beset by personal problems, Kanarek was admitted to the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center for psychiatric treatment.
He’s uncertain how long he stayed there and says he then spent another couple years after his release in a “rest home.” But by the time he regained his mental faculties, he says, he had lost his law practice and the State Bar paid out three claims against him from former clients totaling $40,500.
Kanarek says all three claims are bogus but that he is powerless to fight the bar. He wants the state to create a new position, along the lines of an inspector general, to oversee attorneys who handle the bar’s disciplinary actions.
“I want to practice law, and they’ve done a Salman Rushdie on me,” Kanarek says, biting off the words. “They’re forcing me to pay back money I never owed. . . . They gave away $40,500, which put a yoke around my neck.”
Even Denny, who describes Kanarek as “extraordinarily courageous and scrupulously honest,” says that his old friend’s gripe with the bar association is complicated. The heart of Kanarek’s complaint is that the association punished him while he was mentally incapacitated and denied him due process by failing to notify him about the payments being made on the claims. The association has said it won’t reinstate Kanarek until he makes restitution on the $40,500 to the Client Security Fund.
Kanarek says he can’t begin to come up with that much money.
And so, his career, once decked out in such colorful regalia, now hangs limply around him. Fighting to the end, Kanarek once again is a decided underdog howling in the wind.
“I can understand why they would not want to reinstate him” because of the fight, says Denny. “He’s always been a controversial character, and I know a number of people are delighted that he is not practicing.”
Kanarek says only the press can save him. “The justice system is great, but it’s still run by people who are motivated by personal agendas,” he says, “and the motivation that has gotten me is the failure of the disciplinary system of the state bar to take on its own personnel.”
Despite his somewhat woeful physical presence, Kanarek’s mind seems back on track.
And he remains faithful to his most famous client: “Manson was a personable guy. He had nothing to do with those murders. The people who testified against him are all criminals.”
I can’t help but think that, once upon a time, Kanarek needed an agent or a ghostwriter. I ask why he never parlayed Manson into a book deal. “I liked practicing law, and I just continued to practice. A lot of people approached me, and I never had time for it. It really is one of those things I should have done.”
When we finish talking, he asks if I’ll drop him off in the Fedco parking lot. I do, we shake hands and I wish him luck and watch him shuffle off. It’s hard not to think that things could have been a lot different for him.
Later, while on the phone with George Denny, I ask him about this stage of his old friend’s life.
“I think it’s a tragedy that a guy who was renowned and did so well for his clients has been brought this low,” Denny says.
Is it his fault, I ask, or someone else’s?
“I think,” Denny says, “the fates.”
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com
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9d6f2a8ed2bcd3ffc163541068acaac6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-25-op-35915-story.html?_amp=true | A Public-Housing Policy That Says Fewer Units Is More | A Public-Housing Policy That Says Fewer Units Is More
Why, in the midst of a severe shortage of affordable housing, is Los Angeles demolishing badly needed public-housing units and replacing only two-thirds of them? According to the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), Mayor Richard Riordan and Andrew Cuomo, head of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the rebuilding of Aliso Village on the city’s Eastside will provide mixed-income housing, which will remove the stigma attached to people living in public housing. But is “mixed income” just another euphemism for getting rid of the poor while pretending to help them?
At its start 60 years ago, public housing was called un-American. Early reformers wanted to combine moderate- and low-income people in one development and to provide housing resources in economic upswings as well as downturns. Their proposals were defeated by Congress as “creeping socialism.” Since then, public housing has become the scapegoat in a two-tiered value system: homeownership, which permits tax deductions and bestows instant middle-class status; and public housing, stereotyped as the exclusive domain of welfare recipients, gangs, single mothers and immigrants.
Responding to Republican threats to eliminate the agency in the early 1990s, HUD turned the budget knife inward and targeted severely distressed public housing with the HOPE VI program. HOPE VI allocates up to $50 million a project to rebuild fewer units, rent to fewer public-housing residents and attract residents able to pay market-driven rents or buy new units. Neighborhood facilities are also thrown into the mix. Unfortunately, it won’t work in Los Angeles, because the city doesn’t have enough affordable housing to meet the demand. Accordingly, the folly of tearing down units before new units are built to replace them should be self-evident. The Southland has four low-income renters for every unit available, the highest disparity in the nation and double the national average.
Aliso Village residents are particularly hard hit. A few blocks away, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority demolished 133 private-sector units to make way for the Eastside extension of its Red Line subway, which, if Proposition A passes, won’t be built anyway. Another 577 units are being destroyed to carry out the HOPE VI program in the adjacent Pico Gardens and Aliso Extension public-housing projects, collectively known as Pico-Aliso. Only 421 units will be rebuilt. Low vacancy rates in the surrounding neighborhood offer few alter-natives, and HACLA offers little assistance to help families move to other neighborhoods.
Aliso residents have good reason to be wary. HACLA admits it doesn’t have the money to carry out plans beyond demolishing and rebuilding fewer public-housing units. Furthermore, its concept of mixed-income housing separates public housing from other units. Why should public-housing tenants believe future housing conditions will improve as they face the multiple traumas of displacement with little support to find new housing, disruption of school and after-school programs and the uncertain prospect of whether they will be considered eligible for new units at the improved Aliso Village?
The L.A. housing authority has repeatedly stonewalled residents’ questions about the HOPE VI program. The city released its application for federal funds, to renovate Aliso Village and demolish units, only after requests under the state Public Records Act and federal Freedom of Information Act on behalf of Union de Vecinos, a group of Pico-Aliso tenants. Union members claim HACLA failed to translate information for Vietnamese- and Korean-speaking residents in Pico Gardens and Aliso Extension, where two-thirds of the units are already down, and garbled the Spanish translations. Resident advisory committees at each development were asked to approve HACLA’s application, yet residents who came to public meetings to get information later discovered that sign-in sheets were used to demonstrate resident participation and tacit approval of HACLA’s plans.
Similar struggles are occurring around the country. In Knoxville, Tenn., residents have protested demolition on the ground that the buildings could be rehabilitated; in Tucson, Ariz., because demolition means gentrification; and in Chicago, on issues of displacement. Housing authorities frequently confuse residents by providing inadequate information and by playing on people’s hopes for improvements and their fears of eviction.
What can be done? In Chicago, HUD and the city housing authority recognize the Coalition to Protect Public Housing as a bargaining entity in decision-making and as an advocate for tenant rights. HUD has announced a moratorium on demolition there until better planning can ensure replacement housing. In Baltimore, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke successfully lobbied for state funding to close the housing gap created by demolishing public housing. Ten years ago, the Los Angeles City Council established an Independent Housing Review Panel for HACLA. This body must be revived to monitor the housing fate of displaced Pico-Aliso tenants, to save buildings where possible and to press for a moratorium on demolition.
Riordan says changes are needed in public housing. If we don’t have the guts to make the move, he said, we won’t get where we need to go. Public-housing residents have guts; it is they, not bureaucrats or elected officials, who have raised serious questions about the demolition of Aliso Village. If demolition cannot be stopped, then the City Council should control HACLA’s actions and evaluate its demolition strategy and its displacement effects. Precious public-housing units should not be regarded as disposable as last season’s fashions.*
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efdbc4ae3168b499e628624d1b4c3328 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-oct-30-ca-37413-story.html | ‘Inishmaan,’ on Closer Inspection | ‘Inishmaan,’ on Closer Inspection
Martin McDonagh has been riding the luck of the Irish for two years now.
Just 28, the playwright shot to nearly instant fame in 1996 when his dark comedies, set in western Ireland, first hit London. Hailed as the heir to the John Millington Synge tradition, his lucky streak continued when his “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” and “The Cripple of Inishmaan” transferred to New York last year amid much acclaim and ballyhoo.
Meanwhile, the young playwright became noted as much for his offstage bravado as for his plays. The theater world’s antihero of the moment, he is rumored to have lost out on the best play Tony thanks to his antisocial antics.
Yet now that McDonagh’s work has arrived in Los Angeles and some time has passed, the fairy dust has started to fade, and his writing can be seen for what it is--and isn’t. “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” which opened in a problematic production at the Geffen Playhouse on Wednesday, reveals itself as an uneven work. Seductive as its folksy faux-Irish veneer may be, this is a play that’s more surface than substance.
Written in a made-up vernacular derived from the speech that the London-born-and-bred McDonagh heard from his relatives and while on vacations in Galway, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” lacks the existential pathos at the heart of the great Irish tradition. With only occasional moments of insight, it’s ultimately no more than clever. And McDonagh’s meteoric rise seems to have been just another case of collective wishful thinking.
Set in a gray stone-walled Irish village in 1934, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” tells the story of what happens when documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty arrives on a nearby island to make “The Man of Aran.” Billy, an orphan with deformed limbs who lives with the two spinster shopkeepers who are his adoptive “aunties,” sees the filming as his big chance to escape a suffocating life. And so he makes a break for it, managing to wrangle himself a trip to Hollywood for a screen test.
While Billy’s away, the villagers’ eccentricities come roaring into view. The compulsive gossip-monger keeps trying to get his ancient mother to drink herself to death. One of Billy’s aunts talks to stones; the other one binges on candy. And Slippy Helen, the violent young woman for whom Billy pines, goes around breaking eggs over various men’s heads.
Eventually, Billy returns from America, defeated and in ill health. But there is some consolation: He wins a date with Slippy Helen after all.
This is a comedy that gets its yuks, such as they are, mostly from plodding repetition. McDonagh seems to think there’s endless humor in ad nauseam references to (1) Billy’s propensity for staring at cows, (2) Billy’s aunt’s tendency to talk to stones, (3) variations on a joke that begins “Ireland can’t be such a bad place if . . . " and (4) the Irish version of a common expletive. But in most cases, these things aren’t funny the first time, let alone the 10th.
On a slightly higher level, this is also a comedy that aspires to shock. McDonagh delights in subverting our humanitarian expectations. Every time you expect him to stop short of crossing some line, he doesn’t. For instance: Just as you start thinking, no, they won’t actually beat the dying cripple . . . sure enough, Billy gets beaned with a pipe.
But it takes a more sophisticated writer than McDonagh to pull off this kind of black humor. And while McDonagh may aspire to be another Joe Orton, he’s nowhere near there yet. These jokes have neither the supporting satire nor the requisite precision to make them resonate as they should.
Then again, the humor isn’t helped by a stylistically disoriented production. The greatest problem with Joe Dowling’s staging is that it’s stranded in the middle ground between old-fashioned realism and a more presentational, almost Brechtian, aesthetic.
Lacking a unified style, the performances run the gamut from TV realism (Fred Koehler’s sympathetic Billy) to hyper-theatricality (Rosaleen Linehan’s wonderfully boozy Mammy). Each of these turns may be strong, in and of themselves, but particularly in the first act, they don’t seem to belong in the same play.
There is also a great deal of mugging onstage, with many of the characters reduced to tics and mannerisms. Aunt Eileen (Dearbhla Molloy) purses her lips and widens her round eyes. Aunt Kate (Barbara Tarbuck) raises her brows and wrings her hands. And cocky Helen (Derdriu Ring) stomps and sputters and crosses her arms across her chest--gestures that, when it comes down to it, are roughly the actorly equivalent of McDonagh’s writing.
* “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. (Also Nov. 11, 2 p.m.; no Sunday evening performance on Nov. 15.) Ends Nov. 22. $30-$40. (Nov. 11 mezzanine, $25.) (310) 208-5454. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.
Dearbhla Molloy: Eileen
Barbara Tarbuck: Kate
Max Wright: Johnnypateenmike
Fred Koehler: Billy
J.D. Cullum: Bartley
Derdriu Ring: Helen
Paul O’Brien: Babbybobby
Thomas MacGreevy: Doctor McSharry
Rosaleen Linehan: Mammy
A Geffen Playhouse production. Written by Martin McDonagh. Directed by Joe Dowling. Set by Frank Hallinan Flood. Costumes by Mathew LeFebvre. Lighting by Chris Parry. Sound design by Frederick W. Boot.
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6b371068d36eb9308ae8c1dc6418cf2b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-09-mn-21007-story.html | 3 Men Held in Loansharking at Card Casinos | 3 Men Held in Loansharking at Card Casinos
Three men accused of targeting Asian American gamblers at Los Angeles-area casinos and offering loans at exorbitant rates were charged Tuesday with loan sharking and extortion.
Authorities arrested the three men Friday and Saturday because of concerns that they may have been poised to take action against some of the victims, who were charged interest rates of 10% per week, authorities said.
“We had information that one of the victims was beaten up on Friday, and at that point we went and rounded up the ones we had cases on,” Westminster Police Chief James Cook said.
Duong “Benny” Trung Lam, 26, of Los Angeles, David Quan Tran, 40, of Bell Gardens, and Chanh Trong Hoang, 31, of Huntington Beach, face up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.
The men are suspected of loaning money to Chinese and Vietnamese gamblers playing pan and other Asian card games at the Bicycle Club in Bell Gardens and the Commerce Casino in City of Commerce. The men loaned large sums to players and threatened to hurt them and their families when they couldn’t pay, authorities said.
“These loan sharks frequent the clubs and target those Asian players who are down on their luck,” Cook said.
The largest loan that authorities have been able to document was $40,000, authorities said. Although only four victims have come forward, authorities suspect that they number in the hundreds and that hundreds of thousands of dollars were loaned, Cook said.
One of the victims told investigators that he borrowed $20,000 and was told his girlfriend would be killed if he didn’t make the payments.
“They charge an extortionist rate, which preys on the victims and is very hard to pay back,” said Stephen P. Steinhauser, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Santa Ana bureau.
Tran, who allegedly goes by the nickname “the Executor,” collected the debts, Cook said. Hoang is suspected of issuing the loans and threatening borrowers. All three were arrested in restaurants in Westminster.
The arrests were jointly announced in Westminster by the FBI, Westminster police and Orange County district attorney’s office.
The three-agency crime team was formed to address Asian criminal enterprises victimizing residents and businesspeople in Little Saigon. A multi-agency cooperative was created since crime syndicates based in Westminster are believed to reach throughout Southern California.
The investigation began four months ago at the clubs and in Westminster’s Little Saigon, authorities said.
“Many, many of these victims--we believe several hundred--are in the Orange County area, in the Little Saigon area,” Cook said.
Times correspondent Jason Kandel contributed to this story.
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b91eae94a68bf46d9f4df4b8f36fd63c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-14-sp-22727-story.html | Exclusive Club Gains Two More | Exclusive Club Gains Two More
If Bronswell Patrick and Eric Plunk had it to do over, they would put their pitches just a little further out of Sammy Sosa’s reach.
Instead, the two Milwaukee Brewer relievers will go down as the guys who gave up home runs No. 61 and 62 to Sosa.
“I’m not much of a sports fan,” said Plunk, who gave up No. 62 on a 2-and-1 fastball. “That’s cool that [he topped Roger Maris], but it’s just one more than 61, that’s all.”
With the Cubs trailing, 10-8, Sosa sent the fastball over the left-field fence for No. 62. That tied him with Mark McGwire for most home runs, one ahead of Roger Maris’ former mark.
Plunk said he felt he had to challenge Sosa, but he could have placed the ball a little better.
“I didn’t have much time to react,” he said. “I knew he obviously hit it pretty good. I’ve pitched in a lot of small parks, but this one is a bandbox when the wind is blowing out.”
Sosa’s two-run homer in the fifth inning--No. 61--gave Chicago an 8-3 lead. That ball also sailed over the left-field fence, and Sosa pumped his fists when he saw it was gone.
“Normally for me to be effective, that pitch has to be down in the strike zone,” Patrick said. “This one stayed up. I should have started it at his knees and made it break into the dirt.”
Steve Trachsel, who gave up No. 62 to McGwire last Tuesday, started for the Cubs on Sunday. Trachsel was out of the game by the time Sosa hit No. 62, and said he hadn’t even thought about playing a part in both McGwire and Sosa’s 62nd home runs.
Asked if he was off the hook for giving up the record-setting homer, Trachsel shrugged.
“You tell me,” he said. “It’s hard to say. It’ll probably be the guy who gives up 66 or 67.”
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d06c179a46b4299466e6fbd2442b8911 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-16-fi-23114-story.html | Seuss Rights Sold for Up to $9 Million | Seuss Rights Sold for Up to $9 Million
In one of Hollywood’s biggest book auctions ever, Universal Pictures has agreed to pay as much as $9 million for the rights to two of Dr. Seuss’ classics: “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “Oh, the Places You’ll Go.”
The company negotiated the deal with the widow of Theodor Geisel--otherwise known as Dr. Seuss--on behalf of Imagine Films, Universal’s biggest product supplier, which plans to produce full-length, live-action movie versions of each of the books.
The immediate focus will be adapting “Grinch,” which Imagine’s Ron Howard will direct and Brian Grazer will produce. Jim Carrey will star as the reclusive creature who wreaks havoc on the holiday in the fantasy world of Whoville. Carrey also starred in Imagine’s 1997 box-office hit for Universal, “Liar Liar.”
Sources said Universal paid $5 million for all rights to “Grinch” and could wind up paying as much as $4 million for “Places,” once the rights are untangled from a previous deal at TriStar Pictures. That would make the deal one of the largest rights deals in Hollywood, alongside book-to-movie sales for authors John Grisham, Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy.
The size of the deal underscores the value that entertainment conglomerates place on characters and stories already well-established with the public.
Beyond capitalizing on the Seuss properties in movie theaters and on home video, Universal stands to benefit significantly from exploiting the potential family franchise in its theme parks and merchandising businesses. The studio’s new 110-acre Islands of Adventure theme park attraction in Orlando, Fla., opening next summer will feature “Seuss Landing” as one of its five themed islands.
“It’s a global event movie that can be a perennial and have applications all across our company,” said Universal Pictures Chairman Casey Silver, who said he hopes to have “Grinch” in movie theaters either by Christmas 2000 or the following year’s holiday season.
The “Grinch” property was sought after by some of Hollywood’s highest-profile creative types, among them Tom Shadyac (“Liar Liar,” “The Nutty Professor”); the Farrelly brothers (hot off “There’s Something About Mary”); screenwriter Gary Ross (“Dave,” “Big”), who just directed his first feature, “Pleasantville”; and John Hughes.
Sources said all prospective bidders had to agree to pay a minimum of $3 million--a floor set by International Creative Management, which handles Geisel’s estate--before they could even meet with the author’s widow, Audrey, at her home in La Jolla.
On Monday, Silver and Howard boarded a plane from New York and met Grazer, Meyer and Imagine production head Karen Kahila in La Jolla to make their pitch.
By that evening, Grazer said, Universal had clinched the deal.
“Apparently, Ron’s take was the one she wanted,” said the producer, who described Audrey Geisel as being “very sharp, somewhat reserved and tough--she had you jump through a lot of hoops.”
During his lifetime, Theodor Geisel resisted most offers to license the characters he created for his 47 children’s stories. But after his death in 1991, his widow agreed to various merchandising deals and today there are clothes and accessories galore, plus CD-ROMs and more.
Audrey Geisel had been reluctant to make movie deals. To win the movie rights to “Cat in the Hat,” Steven Spielberg had to make several visits to her home, along with “Forrest Gump” screenwriter Eric Roth, before he and production company DreamWorks SKG secured the rights.
Grazer said the Grinch movie will be “live-action augmented by special effects in order to create a very unique world,” where even the live-action characters “will look different.”
Howard said he’s been a fan of the “Grinch” book and a loyal viewer of the animated TV special that has been a holiday-season staple since 1966.
“Grinch is a great character,” Howard said Tuesday. “He’s a great sort of anti-hero who winds up growing and doing the right thing.”
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b5d26a879aada8b52089bdaa840483ab | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-16-me-38228-story.html | Doctor Who Falsified Drug Tests Sentenced | Doctor Who Falsified Drug Tests Sentenced
The president of a Whittier Research Company was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison Tuesday for falsifying results of human drug tests submitted to the Food and Drug Administration.
Dr. Robert A. Fiddes, 53, of Palos Verdes, pleaded guilty to a charge of making false statements to the FDA about drugs being considered for approval.
For the record:
12:00 AM, Sep. 24, 1998 For the Record Los Angeles Times Thursday September 24, 1998 Home Edition Metro Part B Page 3 Metro Desk 2 inches; 62 words Type of Material: Correction Drug research firm--An article on Sept. 16 reported that the owner of a Whittier drug research company, operating as the Southern California Research Institute, was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison for falsifying test data submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. The Whittier firm is not connected in any way with the Los Angeles-based Southern California Research Institute, a nonprofit scientific research organization.
Two employees at Fiddes’ Southern California Research Institute are scheduled to be sentenced on similar charges today by U.S. District Judge Robert M. Takasugi.
Federal prosecutors said they were uncertain whether any drugs tested by Fiddes were ever approved by the FDA. A letter written by an FDA official in Washington gave no indication that any improperly tested drugs had made their way into the market.
Dr. Hsien Ju, medical officer at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said the agency was forced to reevaluate scores of test results prepared by Fiddes and his staff.
Fiddes, the owner and principal researcher at Southern California Research Institute, was involved in 91 studies that were either submitted or in the process of being submitted to the FDA in support of new drug approvals.
Conducted on behalf of pharmaceutical firms, the studies tested human reactions to drugs intended for treatment of numerous conditions, including hypertension, diabetes, asthma and vaginitis.
In a study of a drug designed to combat yeast infections, Fiddes was accused of creating documents indicating that the test had been run on 25 patients. The government said only one subject was used.
Fiddes and employees Laverne Carpentier, 51, of Walnut Creek, and Delfina Hernandez, 35, of Whittier, carried out similar falsifications in studies on a birth control product and an asthma drug.
Prosecutors said it is a standard practice for pharmaceutical companies to hire several research companies to perform the same tests on a drug, minimizing the chance of false results.
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2cb21d8b48118dd59522fde153e10005 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-26-ca-26458-story.html | Problem Is on Paper | Problem Is on Paper
This letter is a response to the article about the film “Disturbing Behavior” (“When Buzz and Test Scores Aren’t Good,” by Patrick Goldstein, Sept. 18). I am a film writer and director, having co-created the “Child’s Play” series.
Having been involved in the production of four films, both as writer and director, I don’t like the National Research Group. I find screenings to be horrible, painful, scary events. But I must admit, the input I have received on screenings was dead on; it made the films play better and ultimately perform better. No one likes to receive bad news about their “baby,” but to be honest, some of them are born ugly.
The real problem with “Disturbing Behavior” lies not in the direction or editing--it’s in the script. I read it before production. It was terrible then and it’s terrible now. It wasn’t scary, moving or suspenseful on paper and it isn’t on film. No amount of “massaging” the celluloid would make any difference.
Let’s get back to the old but truthful axiom, “If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage.” The real mistake MGM made on this film was greenlighting the script in the first place. That’s where the blame lies. Executives need to accept the responsibility for their choices--just like the rest of us.
JOHN LAFIA
Los Angeles
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401550a85108276c8cbe2873ed88e716 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-27-mn-26986-story.html | U.S. Considered ’64 Bombing to Keep China Nuclear-Free | U.S. Considered ’64 Bombing to Keep China Nuclear-Free
Amid the utmost secrecy, top aides of President Lyndon B. Johnson agonized during the early months of 1964 over a single, preoccupying national security issue: Should the United States bomb China to stop it from becoming a nuclear power?
“I’m for this,” scrawled Johnson’s national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, on one memo about a possible preemptive strike that might cripple Chinese nuclear installations.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff studied options for military action, including the use of U.S. nuclear weapons. The CIA plotted covert action against China’s test facilities at Lop Nor. American officials even sounded out the Soviet Union about collaborating to stop China from getting the bomb.
The Soviets weren’t interested, and Johnson administration officials decided, after considerable debate, that the problem was not worth the risks inherent in a military attack.
In the end, the United States resigned itself to China’s possession of nuclear weapons.
The details of this remarkable hidden drama are unveiled for the first time in a recently released collection of U.S. government documents about American policy toward China during the Johnson years. The papers were made public by the State Department, which is responsible for declassifying documents about the history of U.S. foreign policy.
Since the advent of nuclear weapons during World War II, there has been only one instance when a nation used military force to stop another country from becoming a nuclear power: In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in an action that damaged and delayed, but did not stop, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons.
On several other occasions, experts say, governments have contemplated preemptive military attacks against nuclear facilities and then held back.
“People who look seriously at that option have trouble answering the inevitable question: Can you get all of it [the nuclear material]? What are the consequences if you don’t?” observes Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, a defense-oriented research organization. “What are the consequences even if you succeed?”
China’s first nuclear test, on Oct. 16, 1964, marked the last time until this year that any country had openly sought to break into the elite club of declared nuclear powers. At the time, only the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France had nuclear weapons. (India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests this past May. Israel is widely assumed to have nuclear weapons, but it has never formally acknowledged that.)
What emerges from the historical documents is a revealing tale of how the United States struggled and plotted unsuccessfully to prevent China from acquiring nuclear weapons. American officials studied in painstaking detail how China’s nuclear weapons would affect military balances in Asia and the chances that other nations would follow China’s lead.
The secret memos are dry in language but scary in their implications.
“The Chinese could eventually do significant, but not crippling, damage to U.S. forces in Asia, while the United States will have the ability to destroy Communist China,” says one memo on the military implications. “This makes Chinese first-use of nuclear weapons unlikely.”
The United States’ efforts to stop China from getting the bomb did not begin with the Johnson administration. President John F. Kennedy also flirted with the idea.
Stanford University historian Gordon H. Chang described in his book “Friends and Enemies” how Kennedy instructed W. Averill Harriman, an American specialist on the Soviet Union, to ask Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev what he thought about China getting nuclear weapons. Harriman sounded out the Soviet leader, but Khrushchev did not answer.
At the time, the United States had better relations with the Soviets than it did with China. In 1963, the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the nuclear test-ban treaty. The Chinese accused the Soviets and Americans of collusion.
Main Agenda Item After Assassination
The newly released papers show that in the months after Johnson took office following Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, one of the main subjects under discussion in Washington was what to do about the Chinese nuclear weapons program.
The State Department had asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in mid-1963 to draw up a contingency plan for an attack, with conventional weapons, on China’s nuclear facilities.
On Dec. 14, 1963, the answer came back. The Joint Chiefs said a bombing operation against China would be feasible. But, they added, if there was to be such an attack, they recommended consideration of the use of nuclear weapons.
But American policymakers realized that military action would have only limited success.
“Direct action against the Chinese Communist nuclear facilities would, at best, put them out of operation for a few years (perhaps four or five),” one policy memo said.
The CIA was brought into the planning. One possibility was a clandestine operation against China’s nuclear facilities.
“Covert action seems to offer the politically most feasible form of action,” said Johnson’s foreign policy team in April 1964.
“Study of covert action should continue,” concluded another memo a few weeks later.
The CIA’s main task, however, was simply to find out as much as it could about China’s nuclear program, and particularly where and when China might be ready to conduct a nuclear test.
Much of the CIA’s knowledge was coming from its secret aerial reconnaissance flights with high-altitude U-2 airplanes. However, finding China’s nuclear facilities in its vast territory was a mammoth task.
In late August 1964, the CIA completed a Special National Intelligence Estimate, a top-secret memo summarizing intelligence findings for policymakers.
“Overhead photography of 6-9 August shows that the previously suspect facility near Lop Nor in Xinjiang is almost certainly a nuclear testing site,” the CIA said. It said the test site could be ready within two months.
Nevertheless, the CIA predicted--wrongly, as it turned out--that China would not be ready for its nuclear test “until after the end of 1964.” In fact, the agency did not believe China would have enough nuclear material to conduct a test for at least another year.
‘Joint Action’ With Soviets Proposed
On Sept. 15, 1964, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Johnson met with his top advisors--Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, CIA Director John A. McCone and Bundy--to figure out what they should do about the Chinese nuclear program.
They tentatively decided against the idea of an unprovoked, unilateral U.S. military strike against China. However, they also agreed that Washington might explore several options for “joint action” with the Soviet Union.
“Such possibilities include a warning to the Chinese against tests, a possible undertaking to give up underground testing and to hold the Chinese accountable if they test in any way, and even a possible agreement to cooperate in preventive military action,” summarized Bundy in his memo on the discussions.
They decided to talk “very privately” to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin.
Ten days later, Bundy had a 2 1/2-hour lunch with the ambassador. The Chinese nuclear program was the main item on his agenda.
“I . . . made it plain that we would be ready for private and serious talk on what to do about this problem if there were any interest in the Soviet government,” Bundy wrote in a memo about the conversation.
However, he was brushed aside.
“The ambassador gave no direct reply,” Bundy wrote. Instead, Dobrynin said the Soviets already took it for granted that China would become a nuclear power.
The Soviets’ lack of interest in the idea was motivated by hopes of rekindling the relatively close relationship that Moscow and Beijing had enjoyed in the 1950s.
Rebuffed in their hopes for joint Soviet-American action against China, Johnson administration officials took one last look at the idea of doing something on their own.
One of the Pentagon’s leading civilian officials, Henry S. Rowen, suggested once again at a meeting in September 1964 the possibility of destroying the Chinese nuclear installations with what he called a “limited, nonnuclear air attack.”
This proposal sparked a fierce internal debate about the significance of China’s becoming a nuclear power. Rowen asserted that the implications over a 15-year period were “horrendous.”
“Even the first Soviet [nuclear] test might have affected [Josef] Stalin’s decision to launch the Korean War,” Rowen argued, according to a summary of the meeting.
“The ChiComs [Chinese Communists] might be even more adventuresome once they went nuclear than the Soviets had been.”
But another Johnson administration official, Walt W. Rostow, disputed Rowen’s reasoning.
“With nuclear weapons comes caution,” he said. “The Soviets advanced less after they had gone nuclear than before. . . . As soon as the ChiComs got nuclear weapons, they’d have to worry lest we might be more inclined to use nucs [nuclear weapons] against them in a local conflict.”
Rowen also worried that China might help other nations seeking to acquire the bomb. “The ChiComs might be freer than we or the Russians in handing around nuclear technology,” he said. “They had already hinted at this to [Egyptian President Gamal Abdel] Nasser.”
That was an early warning about the possibilities of a Chinese-assisted proliferation of nuclear weapons, a concern that would endure in Washington for decades.
In the years after it became a nuclear power, China helped Pakistan develop nuclear weapons with “a pattern of cooperation that is breathtaking,” the Stimson Center’s Krepon observes.
In the end, those, like Rowen, who suggested military action lost the argument. American policymakers decided they could live with a Chinese bomb.
“We would prefer to have a Chinese test take place than to initiate [a military strike] now,” Bundy wrote.
By mid-September 1964, the CIA began to notice that the Chinese had completed the work at the testing site at Lop Nor.
Johnson administration officials then drafted a plan outlining a series of steps that would prepare the American public, and the world, for a Chinese nuclear test. The aim was to minimize the impact of the event, making it seem less shocking.
McCone privately briefed top leaders of Washington’s West European allies to expect a Chinese nuclear test. In late September, Rusk indicated in public remarks that the U.S. expected that China might soon become a nuclear power.
On Oct. 15, 1964, the CIA formally abandoned its earlier prediction that the Chinese test would not take place until mid-1965. After restudying the nuclear reactor at Baotou, CIA officials decided that it might have been operating for a longer time than they thought and that China therefore might have enough material to detonate a weapon.
“We believe a test will occur sometime within the next six to eight months,” wrote the CIA’s assistant director for scientific intelligence.
That forecast proved overly cautious. China conducted its test the next day.
On Oct. 16, Johnson was in the midst of an urgent White House meeting with Rusk, McNamara, McCone and other members of the National Security Council. The session had been called to talk about the Soviet Union, where, earlier that day, Khrushchev had been ousted from power.
In the midst of this discussion, aides brought in word that China had just carried out the long-feared nuclear test. Early that afternoon, Johnson read to the press a brief statement, telling the nation there was no cause for alarm.
In the aftermath of China’s nuclear test, there was a surprising reverse-twist.
The Soviet hopes about the revival of their alliance were pipe dreams. Over the next five years, the feud between Moscow and Beijing escalated to the point that there were border skirmishes between the two countries. By the end of the 1960s, the Soviet Union was taking the initiative to sound out the United States about possible military action against China.
By that time, Washington was not interested: The Nixon administration was in the early stages of its own rapprochement with China.
Such a rapprochement would have been out of the question if the United States had bombed China’s nuclear facilities in the way that it planned in 1964. If Washington had carried out that military strike, “it’s almost unthinkable what would have happened to American relations with China, bad as they already were,” Chang says.
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16979ed881511d4a8a3c67391efab030 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-30-me-27910-story.html | County Pays Family Injured by Deputies in Cerritos Melee | County Pays Family Injured by Deputies in Cerritos Melee
We know who Arthur Dole hopes won’t be dropping by when he hosts a big party celebrating the $25-million payment his family shared Tuesday: Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies.
The last time deputies attended a Dole family get-together they came waving batons and handcuffs and arrested 34 party-goers, prompting a lawsuit that resulted in the largest civil rights damage award against police in California history.
The Dole family was in a celebratory mood as the county quietly settled the court judgment, with payouts ranging from $57,000 to $5.8 million.
“We’re going to put on a big luau--one with a big Samoan pig,” said Dole, a 70-year-old retired electrician. “We’re just glad this is finally over.”
Sheriff’s deputies in riot gear broke up a bridal shower at Dole’s Cerritos home in 1989. Eleven deputies and about 35 Samoan American party-goers were injured in the resulting melee.
Criminal charges were dropped against most of those arrested, and the others were acquitted after jury trials.
But the party-goers sued the Sheriff’s Department, alleging that they were brutalized or falsely arrested. A jury awarded them a record $15.9-million judgment in 1995. With accrued interest, attorneys’ fees and other costs, the award had grown to nearly $25 million Tuesday.
“It was a nightmare. Our family was brutally beaten up. There was no reason for it,” said Emily Dole, tears in her eyes. She received cuts and bruises in the bridal shower altercation and received an award of some $1.2 million.
The former professional wrestler, who weighed 350 pounds at the time of the incident and competed under the name “Mt. Fiji,” said deputies bragged during the raid about driving “the Samoans” out of the neighborhood where they had lived for 11 years.
Sheriff’s deputies had contended that they were merely responding to complaints of a noisy party when they were set upon by rock- and bottle-throwing party-goers.
After the arrests, then-Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner characterized those charged with felonies as “very large people” with a “mob” mentality.
However, neighbors denied that rock-throwing occurred, and a videotape taken by one nearby resident showed deputies repeatedly hitting some of the party-goers as they lay handcuffed on the ground.
The most seriously injured of the party-goers was David Dole, who received head injuries, a broken hand and damage to an elbow. His award was the largest at $5.8-million. “It feels weird. It’s a bittersweet victory. These deputies falsified everything and are still out on the street,” said Dole, 38, an advertising company supervisor.
The family’s lawyer, Garo Mardirossian, voiced anger that none of the deputies were disciplined for their actions.
“How many companies do you know of that would allow [$25] million in costs and not take action?” he asked. “It would be nice to see the Sheriff’s Department apologize.”
Mardirossian said he first worried that he had taken on a case of “cops versus Samoans” that would be difficult to win.
But the videotape, just as it did in the more-infamous Rodney G. King case later, was the turning point, he said.
If Sheriff Sherman Block had appropriately and quickly disciplined the deputies, Mardirossian added, “we might not have had the Rodney King incident.”
Several family members hope to buy new homes close together, said David Dole. They are now spread out from Carson to Huntington Beach.
“We’re a very close family,” Arthur Dole said.
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2679e074c90871dec6bd476ade6fdfcd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-apr-04-me-24009-story.html | Renowned and in the Red, Marin Library in Danger of Closing | Renowned and in the Red, Marin Library in Danger of Closing
An elderly Frank Lloyd Wright stood on a hillside in 1957 and envisioned government offices anchored by a cavernous domed library symbolizing a center of knowledge.
Three decades later, Marin County is considering closing its main library, the center of the famous architect’s last major work, to help offset a $1.4-million deficit in the library system.
The debate has brought an outcry from parents and architects, who consider the building a national treasure.
“It’s kind of sad that this is the legacy we’re leaving to Frank Lloyd Wright,” said PTA president Harriot Manley.
Other cities and owners of Wright buildings have grappled with the expense of maintaining his grand designs. One in five of the 500 buildings he designed was destroyed. Others were converted to bed-and-breakfasts, offices and gift shops.
“Would you throw away a Van Gogh because the painting isn’t in perfect shape? His buildings are also works of art of that caliber,” said Gheda Gayou of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in Chicago.
Library Operating on Contingency Fund
Wright died three years before the library was completed in 1962, but his design was mostly upheld--the library sits atop the four-story county government building, directly above the supervisors’ chambers.
“He told me, ‘We’ve got the seat of learning above the seat of government,’ ” said San Francisco architect Aaron Green, who oversaw the construction. “He said the children of the county would have to go through the halls of government to get to the library. That in itself is an education.”
Green, now 81, said it makes little sense that one of America’s wealthiest counties can’t afford to maintain its main library.
The library system lost $1 million in a budget cut several years ago and is operating on a contingency fund that will run out next year. Raising taxes would require a ballot measure. Instead, library commissioners suggested closing the central branch, which would save $894,000 a year. They will vote April 14 whether to recommend closure to county supervisors.
“The commission has an overall responsibility for a whole library system and keeping it working,” commission member Larry Kramer said.
There are nine other libraries in the county, but none stands out like the one at the Marin County Civic Center, about 15 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The structure, topped by a massive teal-blue roof and glistening gold spire, was featured in George Lucas’ futuristic movie “THX1138" and the 1997 science fiction film “Gattaca.”
Residents continue to embrace the library even if the inside seems dated. Getting there requires climbing stairs and an escalator, limiting access for the handicapped. The space under the 25-foot-high dome, which Wright intended as an open reading room, is cluttered with stacks of books.
The old man also would not have been pleased by other changes at the civic center, which include a leaky roof over what he envisioned as an open-air mall, and a jail that was added in 1994, Gayou said.
Wright cared deeply about how his buildings would be used--he was even known to go into the houses and rearrange the furniture, said Gayou, who is preparing to send a “letter of concern” to Marin County’s library commissioners.
“He was very eccentric and definitely had a vision for what he thought his architecture should be,” she said. “If they’re saying the library at the civic center is not important, then who knows what’s next? The whole thing can’t be a jail.”
If it is closed, a new home would be needed for the library’s California History Room, a 7,000-piece collection of early maps, extensive Wright documents and material on nearby San Quentin Prison.
Higher Taxes Could Give Building New Lease on Life
It isn’t the first time residents have rallied behind the library.
In 1961, Supervisor William Fusselman, a candy-factory owner, wanted the civic center, then partially built, to be turned into a hospital. In 1983, supervisors voted to move the library because of a similar budget deficit. Protests put an end to both plans.
At least one library commissioner predicted that elected officials wouldn’t dare close the library after so much opposition, which has included a petition and a “read-in” by about 250 parents and children on the civic center’s steps. Supervisor Frank Kress said higher taxes may be the only way to keep the library open.
Whatever the outcome, Marin County architect Marielle Rutherford said Wright would be proud, not dismayed, if he were alive today.
“Once again it shows that the public is very vocal about defending this building,” she said. “And it proves Frank Lloyd Wright’s idea, that the library is an icon of the democratic process.”
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429e1345620e949aecb107911bfea9ba | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-apr-04-me-24119-story.html | Film Pioneer Ince’s Death Was Stuff of Movies | Film Pioneer Ince’s Death Was Stuff of Movies
Over the past century, Hollywood has spun out at least three times as many legends as it has movies. But few are stranger than the myth of the murder that wasn’t, and the way in which fiction more titillating than fact ultimately subsumed the reputation of a pioneering filmmaker, who really did deserve legendary status.
Silent-film mogul Thomas Harper Ince, “Father of the Western,” has been dead for almost 75 years, but despite sworn--and incontestable--evidence that he died in bed of natural causes, he usually is remembered--if at all--as the victim of a gunshot supposedly fired by a jealous newspaper tycoon.
Born in 1882 to a Rhode Island show business family, Ince became a seasoned stage performer before he was 15. In 1910, three years after he married actress Elinor “Nell” Kershaw, Ince was acting for Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture Co. and directing the Mary Pickford films that Laemmle made in Cuba.
The following year, Ince moved to Los Angeles for a $150-a-week job directing films for the Bison Co., which was located in a former grocery store in Edendale, now Echo Park.
As the cameras--and the money--continued rolling, Ince relocated his filmmaking to Pacific Palisades. He built Inceville on 18,000 acres at Santa Ynez Canyon and Pacific Coast Highway, where Gladstone’s restaurant stands today. The studio had 520 people on the payroll and its grounds were home to sets including a Spanish mission, a Dutch village with canal and windmill, a Western town and, of course, a Sioux Indian village.
It was there that Ince--using a circus with 350 showmen--staged the Battle of the Little Big Horn in the ambitious three-reeler “Custer’s Last Fight” (1912), among other famous Westerns. For realism, Ince imported 100 Sioux Indians, many of whom had taken part in the actual 1876 battle against the 7th Cavalry.
The Future Culver City
Actor William S. Hart--the first two-gun cowboy--leaped into film and fame at Inceville and would later take it over, changing its name to “Hartville.”
In 1915, when Harry Culver began building houses near La Ballona, Ince, while shooting a Western, sent several canoes filled with actors dressed as Native Americans paddling up the creek.
Hitting on an idea, Culver offered Ince a 16-acre prime piece of property on Washington Boulevard, inviting him to move his Inceville studio there. Ince accepted the offer, and the site soon became known as Triangle Studios.
Striking out on his own three years later, Ince paid $35,000 for another parcel down the street and put up a white colonial building, a replica of George Washington’s Mt. Vernon home.
With innate show business savvy, Ince pushed on to create more films, including what would become his last two significant movies in 1923: “Human Wreckage,” a condemnation of drug abuse, and “Anna Christie.”
Then came the apparently innocent outing that would plunge Ince’s reputation into the netherworld of innuendo and salacious rumor. On Nov. 16, 1924, Ince boarded press lord William Randolph Hearst’s yacht--the Oneida--to celebrate his own birthday and the signing of a major contract to produce and distribute the films of actress Marion Davies, Hearst’s longtime mistress. Other guests included comedian Charlie Chaplin, racy Edwardian novelist Elinor Glyn, actress Senna Owen and the head of Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Magazine, Dr. Daniel Carson Goodman.
A Heart Attack at Sea
Ince had neglected his health for years and, despite the fact that he was being treated for ulcers and angina pectoris, he partook liberally of Hearst’s rich food and well-stocked bar.
While still at sea, Ince--who already was vomiting blood--suffered a heart attack. The Oneida put into San Diego and Ince was sent home by train. Two more heart attacks quickly followed and, two days later, the 42-year-old Ince died in bed at Dia Dorados, the Spanish-style hacienda he shared with his wife on 30 acres in Benedict Canyon. Nell Ince and the couple’s two sons were at the filmmaker’s bedside when he passed away.
The entire sequence of events surrounding Ince’s death has been meticulously pieced together by the tenacious film historian Marc Wanamaker, who champions the memory of the “Father of the Western.”
But all his scholarship has availed little against the rumors that swept Hollywood--and, subsequently, the pages of popular books about the industry--in the wake of Ince’s death. In the imaginary version of the film pioneer’s last voyage, Hearst discovered Chaplin and Davies in an embrace, grabbed a gun and fired, hitting the wrong man--Ince. Another version has the newspaper tycoon finding Ince and Davies together.
Public suspicion initially was aroused when Hearst’s Los Angeles Herald Express published an account of Ince’s illness under the headline “Special Car Rushes Stricken Man Home from Ranch"[San Simeon], when the Oneida actually docked in San Diego. Skepticism increased when, despite Ince’s prominence, Hearst’s paper carried no further stories beyond a perfunctory report on the funeral.
After the scandalous rumors began to circulate, Hearst and Chaplin made things worse by denying they even were on the yacht when Ince fell ill. By then, stories were circulating that everyone on board had been sworn to secrecy, including small-time film reviewer Louella Parsons, who allegedly left the yacht as a columnist for the Hearst syndicate. Parsons subsequently denied that she was aboard the Oneida and, in fact, no one ever proved she was.
Wild Rumors Disproved
Beset by almost three weeks of rumors and glaring discrepancies, the San Diego district attorney ordered an investigation “to clear up certain facts connected with the death.” But, at the close of that probe, authorities concluded that the cause of Ince’s death was “heart attack brought on by acute indigestion.”
Two years later, Chaplin was photographed clowning around on the Oneida. Why would Chaplin and Hearst have remained friends if Hearst had really tried to kill him?
Moreover, after Ince’s $4-million estate was settled in 1928, his wife built a grand, seven-story hotel called Chateau Elysee across the street from another of their mansions on Franklin Avenue. But it didn’t take long before some speculated that Hearst financed her hotel because of his great guilt over killing her husband.
Although Ince left his wife a rich woman, one publication later reported that “Hearst discreetly provided Ince’s widow, Nell, with a trust fund. The Depression wiped out the fund, and Nell finished her days as a taxi driver.” In fact, Nell Ince died a very rich woman in the 1960s.
Shortly before her death, Nell had had enough of the rumors that continued to obscure her husband’s reputation. She collected a stack of notarized documents from several witnesses who had viewed Ince’s body and who attested that there were no bullet holes. She made her own written statement concerning the whole sequence of events and combined it with copies of the autopsy report and death certificate. The entire collection of evidence was shipped to New York’s George Eastman House, a caretaker of the nation’s film heritage.
All Nell ever wanted was for her husband to be remembered as the pioneering filmmaker he was, the man who turned movies from a “toy into an art.”
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92f5f4f683a2b385e34b4c4795757d8c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-apr-12-ca-26562-story.html | Keeping Her Father’s Legacy Alive | Keeping Her Father’s Legacy Alive
Tiffany Ward sees herself as caretaker of her father’s legacy and a stickler for detail.
“It’s my responsibility to see that the ideals of the family are carried on,” said Ward, executive producer of “The Rocky & Bullwinkle Movie.”
“That the look and feel remain true to the spirit of my father’s original characters is absolutely essential,” Ward said.
For instance, the animated/live action movie features June Foray--the original voice of Rocky. Dialect and motion coaches were hired to work with actors Robert De Niro (Fearless Leader), Jason Alexander (Boris Badenov) and Rene Russo (Natasha) to re-create the main characters’ distinctive personalities.
“Back in ’92, when [co-producers] Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro first approached me about doing a Rocky and Bullwinkle movie, I had a lot of questions,” she said. “Things like: If we were going to set the movie in the ‘90s, I wanted to know what’s happened in these characters’ lives since the TV series ended in 1964. How would we introduce them to a modern-day audience?”
Ward’s fears were allayed once she read the story developed by screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan.
“It simply won me over. . . . It just felt right,” she said. “That tongue-in-cheek, satirical edge to the humor is definitely there.”
When creator Jay Ward died in 1989, he left his company solely to his wife, Ramona. But since most of her time was spent running Dudley Do-Right’s Emporium--the Ward character store that opened in 1971 on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles--she named Tiffany managing director of the family-owned business in 1990.
Tiffany Ward, who earned a bachelor’s degree in history from UCLA and a teaching credential from Chapman University, has an aggressive plan to bring her father’s creations back into the spotlight. Besides Rocket J. Squirrel and company, other Jay Ward cartoons include “George of the Jungle,” “Fractured Fairy Tales,” “Peabody’s Improbable History” and “Aesop and Son.”
In May 1991, her vision of establishing a long-term relationship with a major studio came to fruition when Jay Ward Productions Inc. entered into a licensing agreement with Universal Studios.
The partnership has led to a live-action version of “Dudley Do-Right,” starring Brendan Fraser, that is set for release around Thanksgiving. “Rocky & Bullwinkle” is slated to hit the screens in summer 2000. A feature film of Sherman, the nerdy student, and Peabody, the professorial dog, is being planned.
Also part of the agreement are merchandising, new media (for example, the Internet), international TV distribution, TV specials and a log ride (the Dudley Do-Right Ripsaw Falls Flume Ride) at Universal’s soon-to-open theme park in Florida. And negotiations are underway with Universal for the video rights, which Jay Ward Productions reacquired from Disney last year.
(In a separate deal, Ward licensed the rights to Walt Disney Co. for the 1997 live-action feature “George of the Jungle,” for which Ward served as creative consultant.)
It’s clear that Ward--with her mother’s blessing--feels compelled to “create a stronger presence in the marketplace.”
What would Jay Ward--known as an eccentric, independent and somewhat reclusive figure--think about such a big splash into today’s commercial waters?
Tiffany Ward, who spent a great deal of time with her father while he battled kidney cancer for nine months, said he told her that Jay Ward Productions could be run more like a business, rather than his personal hobby.
“He said that he was willing to loosen the dictates on his characters, that for the family, he’d allow us to create more of a business empire,” she said. “He didn’t say, ‘Go out and do this or do that.’ It was more like he was giving us permission to do some [commercial] things differently than he had done in the past.”
While she readily acknowledges she isn’t the creative force her father was, she is determined to keep the characters “pure.”
But plans are well underway to, as June Foray likes to say, “corrupt another generation of kids” with Jay Ward’s humorous take on life.
One of the show’s original writers, Chris Hayward, is on board to help develop two TV specials. And Tiffany Ward has found never-used scripts written by Ward’s partner, Bill Scott, for “Fractured Fairy Tales,” “Dudley Do-Right” and “Sherman & Peabody.”
“They’re kind of like the lost episodes,” said Tiffany Ward, who lives on Balboa Peninsula with her husband, Dennis Bress, and a 16-year-old daughter, Amber, from a previous marriage.
“We’re creating theatrical shorts that will go hand in hand with the three movies,” she said.
Still, she plans to tread cautiously.
“My dad was truly a pioneer, and believe me, I do not want to be responsible for putting a black mark on that image.”
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0a4d294829b4359fcb0081f50a77dc84 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-apr-12-sp-26728-story.html | Grimsley Uncorks Confession in Case of Belle’s Missing Bat | Grimsley Uncorks Confession in Case of Belle’s Missing Bat
The mystery of Albert Belle’s missing corked bat has been solved.
Former Cleveland pitcher Jason Grimsley, now with the New York Yankees, crawled through the bowels of Comiskey Park five years ago to replace the corked bat of then-teammate Belle. The bat was being held in the umpires’ room.
The confession by Grimsley was reported Sunday in the New York Times, clearing up one of baseball’s ongoing mysteries.
“That was one of the biggest adrenaline rushes I’ve ever experienced,” Grimsley said.
In the first inning of a Cleveland-Chicago game on July 15, 1994, White Sox Manager Gene Lamont was tipped off that Belle had a corked bat.
Lamont challenged the use of the bat and umpire Dave Phillips took the bat and put it in his locker. The Indians panicked, knowing the bat was corked.
Grimsley, 6-foot-3 and a slim 180 pounds, volunteered for the mission to get it back.
The Times reported that he took a cork-free bat belonging to Paul Sorrento--all of Belle’s bats were corked. Grimsley said he knew there was an escape hatch in the ceiling in the clubhouse and figured there was one as well in the umpires’ dressing room.
Crawling on his belly, a flashlight in his mouth, he finally found the spot, dropped down on a refrigerator and swiped the bat from Phillips’ locker.
After the game, the umpires immediately suspected foul play since the bat bore Sorrento’s name. The American League even spoke of bringing in the FBI.
Finally, the Indians were told that if they supplied Belle’s bat there would be no punishment for the switch. Belle received a 10-game suspension that was reduced to seven games on appeal.
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The Seattle Mariners’ infield got more bad news when the team found out Carlos Guillen will miss the rest of the season because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee.
Guillen, 23, suffered the injury Saturday night when he tagged out Oakland’s Tony Phillips during a rundown. Guillen began the season at second base but moved to shortstop after All-Star Alex Rodriguez had surgery to repair cartilage damage in his left knee three days ago.
The Mariners also learned that pitcher Mac Suzuki was charged with driving under the influence and hit-and-run driving after an accident with an unoccupied car shortly after midnight Friday near the Kingdome. Prosecutors said Suzuki’s blood-alcohol level was close to .14%. The legal threshold is .08% in Washington. Suzuki, 23, pleaded innocent Saturday in King County District Court and was freed on $1,500 bail.
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The Baltimore Orioles activated second baseman Delino DeShields, who broke his left thumb during spring training. DeShields had no hits in three at-bats Sunday against the Toronto Blue Jays. Baltimore also recalled pitcher Doug Linton, who started against the Blue Jays. . . . The Blue Jays put Homer Bush on the 15-day disabled list because of cut finger suffered while sliding in a game Saturday.
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1f62fe7eb1d010f5d7a089cda31f0e07 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-apr-13-mn-26991-story.html | ‘Brownie Mary’ Rathbun Dies; Advocated Medical Marijuana | ‘Brownie Mary’ Rathbun Dies; Advocated Medical Marijuana
“Brownie Mary” Rathbun, the gray-haired rebel whose arrests for giving marijuana-laced brownies to dying AIDS patients bolstered the medicinal marijuana movement, died Saturday of a heart attack in a San Francisco nursing home. She was 77.
Rathbun became a fixture of San Francisco’s Castro district in the 1970s when, carrying a napkin-lined basket, she sold her self-described “magical brownies” for $2 to $4 apiece to passersby.
She turned to charitable baking in the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis began to peak among the city’s gays and claimed the lives of many of the young men she had befriended after her only child died in a car accident.
At the height of her baking operation, from the mid-1980s to about 1990, she had so many requests from sick people for her marijuana treats that she pulled names from a cookie jar to decide who would receive them. Along the way, she became an outspoken advocate for legalizing the medical use of marijuana, which she believed eased AIDS patients’ pain and boosted their appetites.
“My kids are dying, some of them in the streets. Why marijuana is not allowed is something I will never, never understand,” a tearful Rathbun said in 1995.
The next year, California passed Proposition 215, becoming the first state in the nation to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes.
Rathbun came to San Francisco from Minnesota in the 1940s and worked as a waitress for four decades. When her daughter died in a car accident in the 1970s, she began to befriend many of the young gay men who were flocking to the city and she realized that she could still be someone’s mother if she wanted to.
In the mid-1980s, when many of her friends began falling ill, she decided to give them the marijuana-laced brownies, believing they would lighten their pain and help them eat and thus avoid the wasting syndrome that accompanied AIDS.
She passed out the brownies in clear defiance of the law, not, she once told the Chicago Tribune, because she wanted to be a hero. But she did it because “it was something I wanted to do to help my gay friends.”
Soon her baking efforts expanded and she was producing hundreds of brownies every few months. The marijuana was donated by growers. It would simply appear on the doorstep of her public housing project apartment near Haight-Ashbury. But she paid for the sugar, flour, chocolate and other baking supplies out of her $650 monthly Social Security checks.
She gained national attention with her 1992 arrest, when police caught her in the act of whipping up her brownies with 2.5 pounds of marijuana at a friend’s home in the Sonoma County town of Cazadero.
The charges were dismissed several months later, after the district attorney for Sonoma County realized the trial of “the grandmother who bakes pot brownies” would be a media circus.
Rathbun did “straight’ baking, too, whipping up peanut butter and chocolate cookies that could only give a sugar high, delivering them by the dozens to AIDS patients at city hospitals.
Every Thursday for more than 16 years, the petite figure with curly white hair showed up on Ward 86--the AIDS ward--of San Francisco General Hospital where she volunteered, visiting patients and carrying specimens to the lab. Although she had no grandchildren, she acted like everyone’s grandmother, calling every patient “honey” or “sweetheart” and regarding them all as “my kids.”
“She was a legend around here,” J.B. Molaghan, a nurse practitioner at the AIDS clinic, said Monday of the woman who was voted the hospital’s volunteer of the year for three years.
Rathbun, he recalled, maintained her visits even when she was in great pain. An arthritis sufferer, she had two artificial knees. She also suffered a bout of colon cancer, Molaghan said.
She described herself as an anarchist; she often wore a cannabis leaf pendant, even during a court appearance after her 1992 arrest. Molaghan called her “refreshingly irreverent,” a deeply compassionate woman whose often off-color language clashed with her little old lady image.
“She adopted everybody,” he said. “She helped a lot of people who otherwise were unable to receive pain relief.”
She scrimped and saved to buy the ingredients for her baked goodies, Molaghan said, sometimes freezing parts of a batch for the next week if she didn’t have enough money to bake a fresh batch.
She died at San Francisco’s Laguna Honda nursing home, a public facility for the aged poor.
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074a2d833bcd40673862e11cc0520f14 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-apr-21-mn-29537-story.html | Helen Lundeberg; Artist, Pioneer of the New Classicism Movement | Helen Lundeberg; Artist, Pioneer of the New Classicism Movement
Painter Helen Lundeberg, a seminal figure in Los Angeles art history who in 1933 co-founded the New Classicism art movement, died here Monday of complications from pneumonia. She was 91.
New Classicism, also known as Post-Surrealism, fused the fantastical style of Surrealism with the formal structure of Renaissance painting. As former Times art critic William Wilson wrote in 1995, it was work purged of Surrealism’s “weirder overtones.”
Created with a palette of muted hues, Lundeberg paintings are known for radiating a sense of calm and order, an intimate understanding of the laws of nature. A lover of nature, she painted many landscapes, but always from memory; she did not like to paint outdoors. “The time I tried it, the wind blew, and everything fell over. It was a mess,” she once said.
“She has never been interested in primary colors,” Los Angeles curator Donna Stein once said of Lundeberg’s work. “Red, white and blue--forget them. She works in a very close range of tones, using two or three pigments and augmenting them with black and white. It gives her works a sort of mysterious quality.”
Lundeberg, whose career spanned 60 years, founded New Classicism with Lorser Feitelson, her art teacher who became her husband. They issued a printed manifesto that read: “In New Classicism alone do we find an aesthetic which departs from the principles of the decorative graphic arts to found a unique order, and integrity of subject matter and pictorial structure unprecedented in the history of art.”
Feitelson died in 1978 at age 80.
“She was a person who helped put California on the map in the years when people were not looking to the United States at all as an arts center, and certainly not looking to California,” said Carol Eliel, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which hosted the exhibition “A Birthday Salute to Helen Lundeberg” in 1988.
In an interview Tuesday, Eliel called Lundeberg’s work “psychologically revealing, I think, beautifully painted; her technical execution was superb.”
Lundeberg’s paintings have been exhibited in prominent museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. The National Museum houses one of Lundeberg’s best-known paintings, the autobiographical “Double Portrait of the Artist in Time,” a self-portrait as a little girl, sitting before a self-portrait as an adult. Her work often contained paintings within paintings.
Eliel noted that while Lundeberg is best known for her paintings of the 1930s, her work recently has enjoyed a resurgence of interest as the art world focuses on contributions of California artists to the American art scene.
In 1990, Lundeberg’s work was included in “Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy Art in California” at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Westwood. In 1994, her name was back in the news when a refurbishing effort at Venice High School drew attention to two panels of a forgotten Depression-era mural in the school library. The 1941 mural was created by a team of Los Angeles historians, illustrators and painters led by Lundeberg and funded by the federal government’s Works Project Administration.
Lundeberg had a long association with the WPA, whose public art projects provided many artists with the only work they could get at that time. Another WPA-funded Lundeberg mural still exists in the Police Department briefing room in Fullerton City Hall. The artist also created several huge outdoor murals, the largest of which is a 240-foot-tall mosaic in Inglewood’s Centinela Park.
The Tobey C. Moss Gallery in Los Angeles has presented several Lundeberg retrospectives in recent years.
“She was very quietly witty,” Moss said Tuesday. “She was a quiet and retiring person who really never sought the podium.”
Born in Chicago in 1908 to second-generation Swedish parents, Lundeberg moved with her family to Pasadena in 1912, where her father worked for real estate and stock brokerage companies.
In her youth, she was selected to be part of a study of gifted children conducted by Stanford University. Intending to become a writer, she did not begin to study art until her early 20s, when a bookkeeper in her father’s office offered to pay her tuition for a course at the Stickney Memorial School of Art in Pasadena.
Lundeberg was at first uninspired by the art classes, but that changed when Feitelson joined the faculty and became her teacher. She blossomed under his tutelage, and also fell in love. Only a year after she entered the school, one of her paintings was accepted for an exhibition at the Fine Arts Gallery in San Diego.
After Feitelson’s death, the devastated Lundeberg retreated from the canvas, but returned for a prolific comeback in the 1980s with two major series, the “Grey Interiors” series, followed by the “Wetlands” landscapes. Her last painting, “Two Mountains,” was done in 1990. In a 1992 Times interview, she expressed the wish to begin painting again, but failing health prevented it.
Over the years, Lundeberg experimented with abstract forms, but always returned to a base of reality. As she once said: “I have never been interested in pure, non-objective abstraction; I love, too much, the forms, perspectives, and atmosphere of our natural world.”
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3318a043eb15875acb83f76891345942 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-apr-25-tr-30776-story.html | California’s ‘Dead Sea’ Teems With Life | California’s ‘Dead Sea’ Teems With Life
It’s one of the grand landscapes of the American West--an ancient lake cradled by volcanoes, glacier-carved canyons and snowy peaks. Visitors marvel at the eight-mile-long (north to south) and 13-mile-wide lake and its unusual tufa towers, remarkable limestone creations that rise from the lake in magnificent knobs and spires.
Not everyone finds the Mono Basin magnificent. Too desolate and too weird, some folks think. In his 1872 travel narrative “Roughing It,” Mark Twain described Mono Lake as “a lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth” and its setting as “a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert.”
Ever since Twain’s time, Mono Lake has been called “California’s Dead Sea,” but it’s actually a life-support system for great numbers of birds. California gulls fly in from the coast to nest on the lake’s isles. About 90% of the state’s population of this species of gull is born on Mono Lake.
About 800,000 eared grebes, duck-like diving birds, have been tallied at the lake. Mono’s summertime winged visitors include Wilson’s and red-necked phalaropes, species that commute from wintering grounds in South America.
Primary bird food is the brine shrimp, which, like other organisms dependent on Mono’s waters, has evolved over the last million years or so to adapt to an extremely saline habitat.
While Mono is anything but a dead sea, it was, until recently, a dying lake. Beginning in 1941 and continuing for more than half a century, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power diverted most of the major creeks and rivers that had sustained Mono Lake for centuries. Such diversions caused the lake level to drop 40 feet and its waters to double in salinity.
The resultant damage to the lake’s ecological integrity and to Mono Basin’s wildlife habitat prompted the Mono Lake Committee and the National Audubon Society to take legal action to stop this drastic drain. After 16 years of conservation efforts and legal challenges by citizen activists in numerous courts and forums, the State Water Resources Control Board agreed to raise the lake level in 1994.
Theoretically and legally, at least, Mono Lake has been “saved.” However, much shoreline and wildlife habitat restoration will be necessary to return the lake to ideal environmental health.
You can learn more about the lake and conservation efforts at the Mono Basin National Forest Scenic Area Visitor Center, located on the outskirts of Lee Vining. The Mono Lake Committee maintains an information center and attractive little gift/bookstore in Lee Vining.
Travelers with limited time can get a quick look at the lake and some tufa formations with the help of two boardwalk trails located at Old Marina on the west shore and Mono Lake County Park on the northwest shore. The best place to observe Mono’s most compelling natural attraction--its tufa towers--is the South Tufa Area, explored by a short interpretive trail. The trail’s shoreline segments will no doubt need to be relocated periodically as the lake rises and reclaims its ancient bed. Tufa towers are formed when calcium-rich freshwater springs bubble up into the carbonate-saturated alkaline lake water. This calcium-carbonate commingling results in limestone formations--the tufa spires.
Trail-side interpretive signs explain more than most hikers will want to know about the lake’s food chain of algae, billions of brine flies and countless shrimp, as well as gulls, grebes and other migratory birds. Some visitors, overwhelmed by the lake’s majesty, might be disappointed to learn that Mono is the native Yokut word for “brine fly.”
South Tufa Trail leads past some landlocked tufa formations, then skirts the lake shore for a look out at those protruding from the midst of Mono. Loop back to the parking area if you wish, or extend your hike by continuing on to Navy Beach, the best swimming area.
Access: From Interstate 395, about five miles south of the hamlet of Lee Vining, turn east on California 120 and drive five miles to the signed turnoff for the South Tufa Area/Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve. Turn left and proceed a mile on a good gravel road to a parking area near the trail head. There’s an entry fee of $2 per person.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Hiking/ Mono Lake
South Tufa Trail
WHERE: Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve, Mono Basin National Forest Scenic Area.
DISTANCE: 1 to 2 miles round trip.
TERRAIN: Arid plain, ancient lake with Sierra Nevada backdrop.
HIGHLIGHTS: Tufa towers, craters, flocks of birds.
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Easy.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Mono Basin National Forest Scenic Area P.O. Box = 429, Lee Vining, CA 93451, tel. (760) 647-3044. Mono Lake Tufa State = Reserve, tel. (760) 647-6331.
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dc047348402a3af751eb065af68b70e2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-apr-27-ca-31387-story.html | Inland Pacific, State Street Troupes Put Fresh Spin on Classic Themes | Inland Pacific, State Street Troupes Put Fresh Spin on Classic Themes
Two 6-year-old dance companies--Inland Pacific Ballet, under artistic director Victoria Koenig, and State Street Ballet of Santa Barbara, led by Rodney Gustafson--are proving against all odds and naysayers that ballet is alive and kicking in Southern California.
Gustafson, formerly with American Ballet Theatre, brought his “Romeo and Juliet” on April 16 to Rolling Hills’ Norris Theatre. Using Prokofiev’s score, he successfully streamlined the work, focusing on the eponymous lovers in two acts.
As Romeo, Albanian-born Leonard Ajkun has an authoritatively chiseled presence, executing buttery landings and razor-sharp turns and effortlessly partnering Jenna McClintock’s sweet but sometimes stiff Juliet. Ajkun also wielded a convincing sword in Frank Moran’s expertly choreographed fights.
Comporting themselves with spirited technique were guest artist Fabrice Lemire, a menacing Tybalt, and company member Sergei Domrachev, a Mercutio whose bag of tricks included one-armed cartwheels and break-dancing barrel turns.
Gustafson also has a precise male/female corps; while Lindy Howe’s effective costumes and Rolf Freeman’s equally efficient lighting helped the evening resonate.
On Sunday’s bill with Inland Pacific at Cal State L.A.'s Luckman Theatre, State Street paid homage to Spain. Gustafson’s “Bolero,” set to Ravel’s ubiquitous music, showcased the company in crimson unitards and pointe shoes. Standouts: Kathryn Petak and Jeremiah Lincoln Campbell in a sultry pas de deux; Rebecca Thompson as slinky soloist.
In “Carmen,” Robert Sund effectively married the music of Miles Davis and Gil Evans’ “Sketches of Spain” with the saga of the ill-fated heroine. Guest artist Jodie Gates was breathtaking, from her snarly fights with Petak’s pert Micaela to mopping the floor with Lemire’s passion-oozing Jose. The 38-minute work left no gasp unturned, as Ajkun, a haughty Escamillo, completed the triangle.
Killer love was not the point of Inland Pacific’s two premieres, but elements of attraction held sway nonetheless. Janek Schergen’s staging of Choo San Goh’s “Beginnings” flowed with lyric hip-swiveling and sensual coupling, as Christopher Bonomo, Sarah Spradlin, Kelly Lamoureux and Eric Shah infused a pliant freshness to this 1983 suite.
George Balanchine’s 1970 classic “Who Cares?” epitomizes brilliance and brio. In Elise Borne’s staging of the shortened, concert version, Bonomo stole the show, magnificently partnering Spradlin, Lamoureux and Samantha Mason and enlivening the Gershwin tunes with joyous ardor. His solo effort, “Liza,” was a study in stamina and carefree elegance, adjectives that could readily apply to both companies.
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5b4f8a19dfc8cd2e864429dfe2abb583 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-apr-27-fi-31481-story.html | Irvine-Based Continuus Plans Public Stock Offering | Irvine-Based Continuus Plans Public Stock Offering
Continuus Software Corp., which makes programs to help companies utilize business-management software and develop Web sites, is planning an initial public offering that could raise as much as $40.5 million.
The Irvine-based company plans to sell an unspecified number of shares of common stock, raising money for general purposes and possible acquisitions, although no buyouts are in the works now, according to a report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Continuus products help client companies handle “explosive growth in the scale and complexity of software,” the IPO filing said Friday.
Programmers use the company’s tools and consulting services to manage the process of installing and customizing business-planning software. Clients also use Continuus software to help develop Internet-based applications--an increasingly important part of the company’s growth strategy, according to the filing.
Continuus said it hasn’t turned a profit in any year since its founding, including a net loss of nearly $3.9 million in 1998 on sales of $27.4 million. Last year’s revenue was an 18% increase from $23.3 million in 1997, while its net loss was bigger than the $1.6 million net loss Continuus recorded in 1997, the filing said.
The company has posted operating profits in its two most recent quarters. Meanwhile, its net loss narrowed to $198,000 in this year’s first quarter, from $649,000 in the first quarter a year ago, according to the filing., First-quarter revenue rose 21% to $8.2 million from $6.8 million a year earlier.
The company expects net losses to continue for “the foreseeable future,” the filing stated.
Continuus, headed by Chairman and Chief Executive John R. Wark, didn’t disclose the exact number of shares it plans to sell or the price it will seek in the IPO. The company estimated the top value for the offering at $40.5 million only to calculate the SEC registration fee. That amount also figures in an over-allotment of extra shares, in case the sale is oversubscribed, and an unspecified number of shares to be offered by existing shareholders, the IPO filing said.
The filing didn’t say who among current owners plans to sell stock in the IPO.
An affiliate of Norwest Venture Partners of Palo Alto is the top shareholder now, with a 29% stake before the offering. A Brentwood Venture Capital entity, based in Menlo Park, owns another 21%. The SEC filing didn’t indicate how big a percentage anyone will hold after the initial offering.
Continuus hired U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray Inc. and CIBC World Markets to underwrite the stock sale, and plans to have its shares listed for trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol CNSW, according to the registration statement.
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1769c4ee6bf1953ea3287b4b5d8f1f0c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-apr-29-mn-32268-story.html | Rory Calhoun; Handsome Actor Starred in 1950s Westerns, TV Series | Rory Calhoun; Handsome Actor Starred in 1950s Westerns, TV Series
Rory Calhoun, the handsome, lanky actor, producer, writer and rancher best remembered for his 1950s Western films and television series “The Texan,” died Wednesday. He was 76.
Calhoun had been hospitalized for the last 10 days with advanced stages of emphysema and diabetes, said his longtime friend Paul Dean.
For the record:
12:00 AM, Apr. 30, 1999 For the Record Los Angeles Times Friday April 30, 1999 Home Edition Part A Page 32 Metro Desk 2 inches; 37 words Type of Material: Correction Rory Calhoun--An obituary on actor Rory Calhoun in Thursday’s Times incorrectly said that he was no longer married to his second wife, Sue Rhodes Calhoun. They married in 1971, were divorced in 1979 and remarried in 1982. She survives along with four daughters.
He worked with screen queens Marilyn Monroe in “River of No Return,” Betty Grable in “Meet Me After the Show” and Susan Hayward in his longtime favorite film, “With a Song in My Heart.” He could sing and dance a little, and performed in some movie musicals, including his debut film, “Something for the Boys,” in 1944 with Carmen Miranda and Vivian Blaine.
But Calhoun’s breakthrough film was the 1952 Western “Way of a Gaucho,” filmed in Argentina, and it was Westerns for which Calhoun was best remembered. Among them were “The Silver Whip,” “Four Guns to the Border,” “Powder River,” “Utah Blaine” and “Black Spurs.” In 1984, long after the era of Western entertainment had waned, Calhoun was asked to play frontier scout Kit Carson in the Hollywood fantasy film “Angel.”
“By and large, I suppose my image is Western,” he told The Times in 1979. “If the two or three dozen Western features I made didn’t do it, the 79 episodes of my television series, ‘The Texan,’ certainly set it. You could say there were more B Westerns than A Westerns, but even so, I always enjoyed putting on the hat, strapping on the gun and feeling like a kid again.”
The 6-foot-3, half Irish and half Spanish onetime matinee idol was born Francis Timothy McCown (he sometimes used the surname Durgin) on Aug. 8, 1922, in Los Angeles. The unintentional actor was convinced to try a screen test by actor Alan Ladd, whom he encountered on a Hollywood Hills bridle trail. He made his first few films under the name Frank McCown.
It was legendary producer David O. Selznick who gave Calhoun the permanent screen name. The first name should be “Rory,” Selznick explained, “because you’re a Leo, Leos are lions, and lions roar.” Selznick suggested either Donahue, Calhoun or Callahan as a surname, and the actor’s choice began showing up in movie credits.
Calhoun’s nickname, “Smoky,” has been attributed either to his sexy gray eyes or to his frequent disappearing acts in his youth.
He grew up in Santa Cruz, and frequently ran away from home to escape beatings by his father, a professional gambler. He left for good at 17, hopped a freight train to Los Angeles, and began hot-wiring cars.
“I guess you could classify me as a thief with a pure joy of stealing,” the reformed car thief told Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in 1957. “I enjoyed it because I knew I was doing something that I shouldn’t be doing.”
But it landed him in the federal reformatory at El Reno, Okla., for “three years, three months and four days,” during which he learned “never to do anything like that again,” he told The Times 20 years ago.
The prison background was the subject of 1950s articles in popular scandal magazines such as Confidential. Calhoun somewhat mitigated the impact by sharing the true story with Hopper, who touted him nationally as a reformed bad boy.
Calhoun had what he described as “a yo-yo career.” Beginning in his early teens, he worked as a grease monkey, a logger in California’s redwoods, a hard-rock miner in Nevada, a cowpuncher in Arizona, a net hauler for fishing boats, a dump truck driver, a crane operator and a forest firefighter with ambitions to become a forest ranger--anything that kept him outdoors.
After he learned to like what he originally considered “the sissy’s game” of acting and the “easy money” it brought, he became an astute businessman. He owned several saloons, a hotel rug business in Beverly Hills with his screen name on the side of its vans, and a huge ranch near Ojai.
Calhoun also went far beyond acting in the entertainment business. He produced, directed and scripted the 1957 motion picture “Domino Kid,” produced and directed “The Hired Gun” the same year, and co-wrote the screenplay for a 1955 Sterling Hayden Western, “Shotgun.”
The eclectic Calhoun also wrote novels, including “The Man From Padera” and “Cerrado.”
As an actor, he occasionally performed on stage, including in a London production of “Belle Starr” in 1969 and 1970. On television, he also appeared in several 1950s and early 1960s anthology series, including “Ford Television Theater,” “Death Valley Days” and “Zane Grey Theater,” and hosted the syndicated “Western Star Theater.”
Calhoun’s personal life was no less colorful than his career. Described by Hopper in 1952 as “one of the handsomest men in the industry, all male,” Calhoun was linked romantically with such pinup girls as Lana Turner and Betty Grable--often during his 21-year marriage to singer Lita Baron or his six-year marriage to Australian journalist Susan Langley. He settled at least one paternity suit, and when Baron countersued him for divorce in the late 1960s, she accused him of “adultery with 79 women.”
His marriage to Baron produced three daughters, Cindy, Tami and Lorri, and the marriage to Langley produced a fourth daughter, Rory Patricia.
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7584c6b9d8e854d56e2e79e6dc86ffa6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-01-ca-61737-story.html | Mr. Judge Judy Gets a Show of His Own | Mr. Judge Judy Gets a Show of His Own
It was not the typical ruling that Judge Judy Sheindlin is asked to make when her husband, jurist Jerry Sheindlin, asked if she’d mind yet another TV competitor. The New York State Supreme Court judge had been approached about picking up the gavel for “The People’s Court.”
“She is the one who told me I should do it,” says Sheindlin, 65, who will be sitting on the bench most recently occupied by former New York Mayor Ed Koch, who had appointed both Sheindlins to the New York City Criminal Court years ago. “If she had any reservations at all, I wouldn’t have done it.”
And Sheindlin isn’t worried about going gavel-to-gavel with his enormously popular wife.
“I think that behind every great woman there is a man,” Sheindlin says, laughing. “So I may be behind her now, but I also heard a rumor that behind every great man there is a woman. So we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.”
Sheindlin wasn’t “quite retired” from the Supreme Court when he was contacted earlier this year about doing the third season of “The People’s Court.” Sheindlin began taping the series about six weeks ago. “I do about 10 cases a day and I work two days a week,” he says. The workload, he adds, is a far cry from the some 150 cases a week he used to preside over.
A lot of the cases so far have bordered on the bizarre, Sheindlin says. “There was a bird that died, a pink outfit that came back gray [from the cleaners].
“But these cases are all real and are very serious to the people who come in with intense emotion with their point of view. They really look to you to solve their problem.”
The native New Yorker and Korean War veteran earned his law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 1959. He spent the next 22 years as partner in Adlerberg & Sheindlin, concentrating on criminal cases as a defense attorney. He was appointed a U.S. administrative law judge in 1980 and three years later was assigned a Criminal Court judge of the city of New York. Sheindlin was elevated to the State Supreme Court in 1986.
Sheindlin met his wife of 22 years in a bar. “I just finished trying a murder case as a defense lawyer,” he recalls. “She was a prosecutor. There was a reporter from the New York Post there at the bar, and I was speaking to him about the case. Judy came walking in and put her finger in my face and said, ‘And who is this?’ I said, ‘Lady, get your finger out of my face.’ We’ve been together ever since.”
Though Sheindlin has gotten a kick out of his wife’s TV success, he adds that if “my show takes off and I beat her, I am contacting Hollywood immediately to remake the movie ‘Sleeping With the Enemy.’ ”
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1207e52004407c896af2604b8798fc46 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-01-ca-61738-story.html | Cue the Composer | Cue the Composer
At the age of 5, Jerry Goldsmith sat in the last row of the Hollywood Bowl, listening to Jascha Heifetz and the Los Angeles Philharmonic play Brahms’ violin concerto.
This week, he’s a lot closer to the action, conducting the Philharmonic in an evening of his own music--scores from such films as “L.A. Confidential” and “Chinatown,” TV themes from “The Waltons,” and “Dr. Kildare,” plus the world premiere of a classical piece commissioned to accompany fireworks and celebrate his 70th birthday.
The Bowl event, says Goldsmith, is a watershed, of sorts. Although he has conducted locally, this, in his mind, is his Los Angeles coming out.
“I’ve conducted to sellout crowds in London, Glasgow, Seville, Yokohama,” says the composer. “Now, at the age of 70, I’m getting my hometown debut. After leading the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Disney’s ‘Mulan’ premiere last year, I told my wife, ‘I want more.’ ”
An odd statement coming from a guy so prolific--someone with 180 film scores to his credit and 200 CDs on the shelves. And despite Hollywood’s current hunger for song-based soundtracks, Goldsmith’s symphonic compositions underscore four 1999 movies--"The Mummy,” “The Haunting,” and the upcoming “13th Warrior” and “Reindeer Games.” A survey quoted in a Gramophone magazine CD guide said that during any given minute, “a film or TV show accompanied by Goldsmith’s music is being shown somewhere in the world.”
The ponytailed composer chalks up his success to a mix of flexibility and pragmatism.
“I’m a chameleon,” he observes, delving into a salad at a Beverly Hills hotel. “My longevity comes from my adaptive skills. I let the picture dictate the style. And I accept the fact that there will be gunshots and dialogue over my music. Movies are a director’s medium and I’m not center stage.”
Goldsmith’s refusal to repeat himself is admirable, says writer-director Michael Crichton, who’s worked with the composer on six films, including “Coma” and “The Great Train Robbery.” But it makes it harder to identify his work. Crichton found that out when Goldsmith was unavailable for a project and he was desperately seeking alternatives.
“I watched the video of ‘Air Force One’ and said, ‘That’s terrific--maybe I hold Jerry in too high esteem,’ ” recalls Crichton, whose “13th Warrior” is due out in August. “The credits rolled: ‘Jerry Goldsmith.’ I look at Anthony Hopkins in ‘The Edge.’ ‘Pretty good [music],’ I said to myself. The credits rolled: ‘Jerry Goldsmith.’ Jerry is the most varied and inventive film composer of our time--a real pro who does what the picture calls for, which is a vanishing breed in Hollywood.”
L.A. Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen approached Goldsmith to participate in his “Filmharmonic” project, in which leading composers and filmmakers collaborate on original pieces. And, in 1998, he conducted “Music for Orchestra,” a classical work Goldsmith composed in 1972.
“I don’t know anyone, regardless of genre, with Goldsmith’s stylistic versatility,” Salonen observes. “He’s obviously influenced by the greats of this century: Schoenberg and, of course, the athletic rhythms of Stravinsky.
“People who came to last year’s concert expecting to hear Goldsmith’s nice movie stuff didn’t recognize him in that rather austere 12-tone [‘Music for Orchestra’],” he adds. “I’m fascinated by the idea of a very famous film composer who has this other, totally unknown, side.”
*
Goldsmith works out of a two-story renovated guest house in the backyard of his Beverly Hills Tudor-style home. Lining its stairwell are movie posters--graphic testament to the hours he has spent in the studio while Lois Carruth, his longtime assistant, holds the fort downstairs. A certifiable workaholic, he composes from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. seven days a week, when he’s working on a film. Typically, he turns out two minutes of music a day for four or five pictures a year.
“I no longer work nights--and I’m trying to get out and play golf,” the composer says with a visible lack of enthusiasm.
Goldsmith’s studio contains state-of-the-art equipment: a mixing console, a Macintosh computer and his flat-topped Yamaha GS-1 keyboard--flat-topped so he can jot down the notes with old-fashioned pencil and paper. Before sitting down to compose, he confers with the director.
“If you haven’t worked together before, it’s like a first date,” says Goldsmith, stylishly casual in a white T-shirt, navy blazer and jeans. “Everyone is so proper--it’s a strange dance.”
The two of them watch the movie set to a temporary score. Directors often become attached to this preexisting material, says the composer, which can be a “pain in the ass.” Working together, they decide where to insert music. Cue sheets are drawn up, describing the action and dialogue down to 1/100th of a second.
“Now I’m at the starting gate,” Goldsmith says. “It’s ‘poor me!’ time. Every artist wakes up in the middle of the night filled with fear. We want to create something everyone loves, which is why most of us are neurotic.”
Using a metronome to set the tempo, Goldsmith plays the material into the Yamaha, which transmits it to the Mac. The computer reproduces the sound in the manner of various instruments, simulating an orchestra.
Adding to the pressure, says Goldsmith, is limited post-production time. He used to have 10 weeks to come up with a score. Now, he often has five. Crises turn up the heat even more. The music for “Chinatown” was composed in 10 days after an earlier score was rejected.
And scores are getting longer, the composer points out. Horror, sci-fi and action films (what he calls “E-rides”) order up wall-to-wall music to keep people in their seats. The composer turned out 65 minutes for “The Haunting” and 98 minutes for “The Mummy"--in contrast to only 30 for “Patton” and 45 for “Papillon.”
Putting a band together is the next step, handled by freelance contractors in consultation with the composer ever since in-house studio orchestras were phased out in the 1950s. Goldsmith is a loyal sort who has worked with the same principal players for years. Shorthand comes in handy since rehearsal time is tight.
“I was very intimidated going in,” says harpist Katie Kirkpatrick, whose Goldsmith films include “Mulan” and “The Haunting.” “Jerry is very focused on his work, which is off-putting until you know him. And the density of his writing is frightening--the pages look almost black. Still, you soon realize that arrogance doesn’t compute with him. He’s just one of the guys.”
*
Every musician thinks he can write a movie score, Goldsmith says. But, contrary to public perception, film composition is a “serious art.”
“I make no apologies for working in movies,” he maintains. “But I’m tired of being referred to as a ‘Hollywood composer.’ The term is annoying, a slight. No one called Puccini or Verdi ‘opera composers.’ Andre Previn took a beating for years because he wrote out here.”
Alex North, whose photograph hangs on a wall in Goldsmith’s studio, is a mentor of the composer. North’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” film score incorporated elements of jazz into a symphonic motif--revolutionizing film composition, he says.
“Prior to Alex, Hollywood relied on 19th and early 20th century European composers such as Strauss, Wagner and Debussy,” Goldsmith explains. “His dissonant ‘Streetcar’ created American-style film music and gave those who followed him license.”
People react to melody and rhythm more than anything, says Goldsmith, and it’s important to be accessible. And the composer’s classical training often finds its way in: allusions to Wagner and Strauss can be heard in the “Boys From Brazil” and Gregorian chants in “The 13th Warrior.”
“It’s so nice working with someone whose limits of knowledge aren’t Buddy Holly or the Doors,” says Crichton. “Last year, I attended a Carnegie Hall concert at which he played a cue from [his score for] ‘Planet of the Apes’ which had this unworldly sound like [John] Cage or Edgar Varese, an early electronic pioneer.”
Goldsmith is an advocate of less is more. He and Crichton decided that no music would be introduced until 30 minutes into “Coma.” Goldsmith knows the power of silence, says Paul Verhoeven, who teamed up with him on “Total Recall” and “Basic Instinct.”
“Jerry will stop the music for 10 or 20 bars, so when it starts it will be new again,” says the director, whose “Hollow Man” Goldsmith will score next year. “Another thing I notice is his simplicity of orchestration. Jerry won’t use four oboes if two are enough.”
Goldsmith is drawn to intimate movies such as “A Patch of Blue” and “Rudy"--and to emotion and character, in any case. (“I saw ‘Poltergeist’ as a love story and ‘The Haunting’ as the story of a person coming home,” he says.)
“Jerry gives emotional context to the images without making them cheap or hollow,” says Verhoeven. “There’s nothing ‘on the nose.’ Instead of accentuating sound effects, he goes for the soul of a film.”
Fans from more than 25 countries belong to the 17-year-old Goldsmith Film Music Society and, in the spring, BMI, a performing rights organization, set up a Jerry Goldsmith film scoring scholarship at UCLA. But the composer’s public profile isn’t as high as it might be considering the scope of his credits. Blame it on the lack of a breakout hit soundtrack, such as John Williams’ “Star Wars” or James Horner’s “Titanic.” Disney’s “Mulan” is Goldsmith’s only gold record, and, despite five Emmys (for programs such as “Masada” and “Star Trek: Voyager”), 1976’s “The Omen” is his only win out of 19 Oscar nominations.
The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross maintains that at least a couple of Williams’ Oscars should have gone to Goldsmith. The composer, he says, has brought “various modernist devices into film music” (references to the ‘60s Polish avant-garde, atonal passage work, exotic percussion) “while pulling off the basic melodic seduction that a potential blockbuster requires.”
The good-natured Goldsmith takes a philosophical approach. “With that [Oscar] track record, I’m the Susan Lucci of the film composing world,” he says. “Still, it’s a blessing in disguise. The worst curse that can befall you is having a platinum CD. It’s easy to rest on your laurels.”
*
Goldsmith grew up in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw District, the son of a structural engineer and a schoolteacher. Although he wanted to be a classical pianist, he realized at the age of 12 that he didn’t have the temperament or the “fingers.” He continued studying piano with Jakob Gimpel and music theory and composition with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco in the hope of becoming a composer. At the age of 16, Goldsmith saw Hitchcock’s “Spellbound,” falling in love with Ingrid Bergman--and movies.
“To make it in the classical world, you can teach, you can live on grants and commissions, or you can marry a rich man or woman,” he says. “I chose the weak way out: writing for movies so I could continue my classical composition.”
After graduating from high school, Goldsmith took a course at USC with “Spellbound” composer Miklos Rozsa while enrolling in music classes at Los Angeles City College. (“I spent three years at a two-year institution--and still managed to fail.”)
At 21, he got a toehold in the creative world, getting a job typing scripts at CBS. After befriending a music department secretary and writing scores for a weekly employee show, Goldsmith began composing for network radio drama and live TV. When shows such as “Climax” and “Playhouse 90" were taken off the air, however, his option wasn’t picked up.
In 1961, the composer headed for Universal TV, where up-and-comers like Dave Grusin, Williams, Quincy Jones and Lalo Schifrin were in residence. Simultaneously, he tackled his first major movie: 1960’s “Lonely Are the Brave.” “Freud,” “Lilies of the Field” and “Seven Days in May” followed in quick succession. Movies provided a good income for the composer, who was supporting a wife and four children at the time. (He now has a fifth child with his second wife, Carol, to whom he’s been married for 27 years, and is a grandfather five times over.)
The work also enabled him to compose chamber music and art songs--most of which he kept to himself because he considered them “imperfect.” Still, three dance companies, including the San Francisco Ballet, choreographed pieces to his music. And in 1972, Goldsmith wrote the 13-minute “Music for Orchestra,” first performed (“to scathing reviews”) by the St. Louis Symphony and, four years later, by the Minneapolis Orchestra.
Salonen, who included the piece on a Philharmonic program, recalls a mixed response to the 1998 performance. While some loved it, not everyone has a fondness for “music in the modernist camp that’s pretty atonal and acidic,” he points out. The Los Angeles Times was upbeat: “Goldsmith knows his way around an orchestra and the players and Salonen seemed to enjoy getting around this music,” critic Mark Swed said. “The audience clearly sensed that this was music about the darker side of the city it lives in, and loved it.”
Goldsmith’s plan to support his classical habit through film composing didn’t pan out. “Music for Orchestra” was his last classical piece until his current Bowl commission. “I was writing so much film music, and I can’t shift that quickly,” Goldsmith explains. “Besides, movies are a crutch for a composer. Creating something abstract becomes a daunting task.”
Classical composition may be on the back burner, but Goldsmith is conducting more these days. He’s scheduled to appear in 11 concerts this year and is booked into 2001. “Live concerts are a shot of adrenaline--but like a Chinese meal, in a way,” Goldsmith says. “Unlike writing music, which is there forever, you eat it then you’re hungry again.”
Goldsmith is paired with Verhoeven in the Philharmonic’s “Filmharmonic” series. (Temporarily on hold until a corporate sponsor can be found--which may be in the offing, Salonen hints.) Down the road, he’d like to write an opera, a medium with fewer time constraints and greater control for the composer. (“Since movies are larger than life, I’ve been writing a form of [opera] for the last 40 years.”) The composer also wants to complete a trilogy--following “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential” with another Los Angeles-noir film.
First, however, there’s the Bowl project. Goldsmith’s piece was commissioned by former Philharmonic managing director Willem Wijnbergen as a new backdrop for the weekend fireworks finale. Titled “Fireworks (A Celebration of Los Angeles),” Goldsmith’s piece has a Latin feel.
“I’ve had my share of writing for noise--special effects,” he concedes. “But if Handel and Stravinsky can compose for fireworks, I can do it. While I’m grateful for the opportunity, I’m also a little nervous. I don’t know if the audience will be saying, ‘Show me!’ or if they’ll be in my corner.”
And facing a new orchestra will be scary as well, the veteran composer points out.
“There’s no way you can fool them,” he says. “By the time you give the upbeat and the downbeat, they know if you know what you’re doing--what you’ve had for breakfast, in fact. Getting up there is the moment of truth--especially in your hometown.”
*
“Movie Music Magic,” Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Jerry Goldsmith, Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. Friday and Saturday, 8:30 p.m. $3-$100; (323) 850-2000.
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7c6f80fa0b7f359a79a2c1e97ca179bf | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-01-mn-61590-story.html | 9 Skydivers, Pilot Die When Plane Crashes in Michigan | 9 Skydivers, Pilot Die When Plane Crashes in Michigan
A plane carrying nine members of a skydiving group that was holding its annual camp-out crashed shortly after takeoff Saturday, killing all the passengers and the pilot, authorities said.
The plane, a twin-engine Beech King Air 200, came down at 8:20 a.m. in a grassy field near Marine City Airport, about 40 miles north of Detroit, said State Police Sgt. Craig Nyeholt.
Jim Silliman, the National Transportation Safety Board investigator in charge, said the cause was not yet known but heat could have been a factor. High temperatures and humidity make it harder for planes to take off, NTSB spokesman George Black said.
Saturday was in the 80s and humid.
All the passengers were members of the Parahawks, a skydiving group that apparently had gathered at the airport for its three-day annual pig roast and camp-out. The event was to end Saturday.
A woman who answered the telephone at the Parahawks skydiving center at the airport refused to discuss the club or the crash.
“This is a very extended family,” said James Relken, the local Red Cross chapter director, who was counseling families of the victims at the crash site. “The immediate family may not be here, but they’re extended family to each other. That’s very evident.”
John Sers, who said he was the brother of one of the victims, said the Parahawks jumped weekly.
“This is where my brother loved to be. This is his passion. That’s what he loved to do,” said Sers, who declined to give his brother’s name. “If you’ve got to die doing something, it ought to be something you have a passion for.”
Raymond Wilson said his 22-year-old nephew, Roger Engle III, had made more than 100 jumps and was an expert at parachute-packing.
“He was out here all the time. He jumped a whole lot. We were hoping that he wasn’t [on the plane], but his grandpa knew he was,” Wilson said.
Each of the skydivers had made at least 200 jumps, and each had a D license, the highest level of certification from the U.S. Parachuting Assn., said Gary Cooper, regional director of the association.
The pilot, Paul Myks, also flew DC-9s for Spirit Airlines, Cooper said.
Macomb County Medical Examiner Werner Spitz said the plane, which crashed shortly after takeoff, broke into three parts, and the victims’ bodies were strewn across a 50-yard area of wreckage.
Spitz said one body found in the cockpit was not wearing a parachute and is believed to be that of the pilot. The other nine victims were wearing parachutes, but they never had a chance to jump, Spitz said.
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4c3be21c2e80a54d8f3552a981a66e49 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-03-ca-62032-story.html | Can’t Get Enough of Barrym Babe | Can’t Get Enough of Barrym Babe
The voice is instantly recognizable--a rich, raspy, rumbling bass. It’s a voice that has become almost synonymous with seduction, and when Barry White smiles and says he’s happy to meet you, it’s easy to understand the reason why.
Sitting in his Manhattan hotel suite, White looks like an authority on happiness. At 54, the singer appears a bit slimmer than he did in his 1970s heyday, when he released a series of lush, erotic pop-soul hits, including “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” and “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything.”
White, who now lives in San Diego, has been in town for several days on a whirlwind promotional tour that included radio station visits and television show appearances. After more than three decades in the music business, White is still obviously recognized by music fans of all ages as a supreme love man--a fact for which he is grateful.
“I’m honored, honey,” the Galveston, Texas, native says. “I don’t know if I’m a sex symbol, but I love life and I love people. Any time you create something where people love what you do, that’s a powerful gift, and to do it over and over and last for years . . . that is a super great thing.”
Lately, in fact, White’s popularity seems to be rising. His latest, just-released album, aptly titled “Staying Power,” follows the singer’s much-ballyhooed performance earlier this year on Fox-TV’s smash hit “Ally McBeal.”
“They called last year and invited me to come on [the show] and do, ‘First, Last, Everything,’ ” White says. “Now all over the world, wherever I travel, people say, ‘I saw you on the “Ally McBeal” show!’ ”
According to Steve Robin, a producer on “Ally McBeal,” the idea to incorporate White into the program came from creator/executive producer David E. Kelley. Having already used White’s music as a source inspiration for the romantic fascinations of the show’s John Cage, the eccentric lawyer played by actor Peter MacNicol, Kelley decided to include the singer in an episode focusing on Cage’s birthday.
“When Barry appeared on the set, every member of the crew was star-struck,” Robin says. “He signed autographs and took pictures. And he went into the studio and [recorded] a new version of the song--without the big orchestral arrangement of the original--which gave it a live feeling and worked much better for the show.”
Concert Tour Delayed
at Doctor’s Orders
White was scheduled to begin an arena tour with Earth, Wind & Fire on Thursday in Northern California and include a stop Sunday at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, but those plans were put on hold Monday after White’s doctor diagnosed the singer as suffering from exhaustion and recommended a period of rest. The tour will now start Sept. 10 in Boston and the Pond show has been rescheduled for Sept. 28.
“I’m taking my doctor’s advice and taking it easy for a few weeks,” White said in a statement Monday. “The last thing I want to do is inconvenience those who have put so much hard work into the tour or to disappoint any of my fans. I hope to be able to give 110% as soon as I can.”
White was working so hard to promote “Staying Power” because it is his first studio effort in five years; the collection is also his initial outing for Private Music, a division of the Windham Hill Group that signed White less than two months ago.
White released his last album, 1994’s triple-platinum “The Icon Is Love,” on A&M; Records, which had been his label since 1987. (The original hits were on 20th Century Records.)
But White’s longtime manager, Ned Shankman, had concerns when A&M; was sold to Seagram’s Universal Music Group late last year; he subsequently asked that White be released from his contract. When that release was secured, Shankman placed the singer with Private Music, whose roster includes such other smooth R&B; artists as James Ingram and Jeffrey Osborne.
“We have two challenges,” says Steve Vining, president of the Windham Hill Group. “One is to make sure that dyed-in-the-wool Barry White fans--let’s call them the over-30 crowd--need to become aware of the record . . . [and] we have to skew younger.”
The album’s title track is already getting a strong response at stations with an urban adult-contemporary format, and Vining is hopeful that the album, which also features a song remixed by Sean “Puffy” Combs and guest vocals by Chaka Khan and Lisa Stansfield, also will be embraced by more hip-hop-oriented urban stations (some of whom have also picked up the single), and eventually by pop radio.
But those who attend White’s concerts can expect to hear plenty of golden oldies.
“This is the close of the millennium,” White says. “I think I owe it to my fans . . . to play and sing the hits. I’m gonna try and give them the best time they ever had.”
White: ‘I’m a Very Controlled Person’
On the personal front, White--the twice-divorced father of five daughters and three sons, ranging in age from 24 to 37--has been romantically involved with the same woman for the past five years: Katherine Denton, who also works for him as a personal assistant.
“I love how she thinks,” he says, smiling. “I love the things she wants to do with her life. I love the way she takes care of me, and I take good care of her.”
The singer describes his home life as comfortably staid. “I’m a very controlled person. I don’t go to wild parties, I don’t give wild parties. I play video games. I hang out with my youngest son, Kevin. I spend a whole lot of time with my partner, Jack Perry [who co-produced “Staying Power” with White]. Sometimes I do nothing but sit around and play with my dogs and look out at the ocean.”
White says he also thinks about music constantly. “I’m already planning my next album,” he says. “I’ve gotta come up with another one for the year 2000, and for 2001.”
Where the rest of his life is concerned, however, White maintains a predictably laid-back philosophy.
“I try to stay flexible,” he says. “I don’t know what the future brings--no one knows. The weather man is the only guy I know that can be wrong and still get paid. I just stay loose, sweetheart.”
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5b30d9ca1e07a6855e4df10a5ddb30fc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-04-mn-62514-story.html | Zedillo Key to End of Prop. 187, Villaraigosa Says | Zedillo Key to End of Prop. 187, Villaraigosa Says
California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa thanked President Ernesto Zedillo here Tuesday for helping defuse Proposition 187, saying the Mexican leader played a key role in scuttling the controversial state measure that denied benefits to illegal immigrants.
“As leader of the state Assembly, I say President Zedillo had great impact in defeating Proposition 187,” Villaraigosa told a news conference after he and a state delegation met the Mexican chief executive. Zedillo’s visit to California in May “pushed the process” that eventually invalidated most of the measure, the speaker said.
Villaraigosa’s declarations were perhaps the clearest sign yet of California’s radical change in relations with Mexico and of the rise of a new phenomenon: cross-border politics. Once a distant neighbor, the Mexican president has become a prized ally for California politicians eager to court the Latino vote.
“The emergence of cross-border coalitions and issues shows the advent of a whole new era in U.S.-Mexican and Mexico-California relations,” said Denise Dresser, a visiting fellow at the Pacific Council think tank in Los Angeles.
The meeting with Zedillo was the centerpiece of a four-day visit to Mexico by Villaraigosa, a Los Angeles Democrat who is trying to promote economic and political ties between California and its southern neighbor. He is also considering a run for mayor of Los Angeles.
A senior Mexican official who attended Tuesday’s meeting said Villaraigosa told Zedillo that the latter’s trip to California was “decisive” in invalidating Proposition 187.
“He gave thanks on behalf of Mexican Americans,” said the official, Deputy Foreign Minister Juan Rebolledo.
“I was surprised he was so explicit,” Rebolledo added.
Villaraigosa told reporters that Zedillo’s statewide visit was crucial because it generated an outpouring of positive feelings and publicity. He added that the presence of the Mexican leader pushed Gov. Gray Davis to promise he would “never be a party to an effort to kick kids out of school.”
That statement was the first indication that Davis would not support the main provisions of Proposition 187, a state referendum approved in 1994 by nearly 60% of California voters. It barred illegal immigrants from attending public schools and receiving social services.
The Mexican president responded to Villaraigosa’s declarations Tuesday by breaking into applause, said Raul Hinojosa, a UCLA professor in the California delegation.
Since taking office in January, Davis has greatly strengthened ties with Mexico, which had been sorely strained by what Mexicans perceived as the anti-immigrant attitude of former Gov. Pete Wilson.
But Davis faced a dilemma with Proposition 187. The governor personally opposed the measure but said he felt bound by voters’ wishes to continue Wilson’s appeal of a federal court decision that had ruled much of the initiative unconstitutional. In April, Davis decided to submit the issue for court-sponsored mediation.
Last week, he agreed to a settlement that abandoned the appeal.
Dresser, a political scientist, said Villaraigosa’s statements reflected the growth of cross-border politics, which has been manifest in such novelties as Mexican politicians campaigning in California to capture the approval of immigrants who wield influence back home.
“NAFTA has just accelerated the process of silent integration” of the two neighbors, she said, referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Dresser said Zedillo didn’t overtly contribute to the demise of Proposition 187. But his visit, which emphasized rapidly increasing trade ties between California and Mexico, “led many to believe the benefits of doing away with 187 far outweighed the negative consequences.”
Villaraigosa said in an interview Tuesday that he is seeking alternatives to propositions like 187 to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into California.
One such idea, he said, is a new program that combines donations from Mexican Americans and funds from the western state of Jalisco, a major source of immigrants to California. The money goes into an economic development fund to start small businesses in the towns the immigrants come from.
Villaraigosa also said that Mexican Foreign Minister Rosario Green had expressed interest in launching a program to allow Mexicans to work temporarily in jobs in the United States. But, he added, the minister did not discuss specifics of such a plan, which would require U.S. federal approval.
California growers have said they face an acute labor shortage and have become increasingly dependent on undocumented immigrants.
Agricultural groups such as the Nisei Farmers League in Fresno are lobbying hard for an expanded guest worker program, but resistance from farm worker advocates--who argue that the shortage would disappear if farmers raised wages and improved housing--has been strong. Last year, the U.S. Senate approved a major expansion of the existing guest worker program, which is rarely used in the West because farmers say it is unwieldy, but the legislation failed in the House.
In his meeting with Zedillo, Villaraigosa also urged that this country’s government-controlled airlines, Mexicana and Aeromexico, award a $6.5-billion contract for new planes to Seattle-based Boeing Co., which manufactures aircraft in Long Beach.
Villaraigosa and Mexican officials said the airlines would examine competitive bids. But the California speaker said Zedillo reacted positively to his support for Boeing.
The Mexican president responded with “a big smile,” Villaraigosa said. “He said Mexico was very interested in this proposal.”
*
Times staff writer Nancy Cleeland in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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30940087e3a04e259f4fc34078531a7a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-04-mn-62521-story.html | Film of JFK Assassination Brings Family $16 Million | Film of JFK Assassination Brings Family $16 Million
The U.S. government was ordered Tuesday to pay the heirs of amateur filmmaker Abraham Zapruder $16 million for seizing one of the nation’s most macabre artifacts--the 26-second film capturing President John F. Kennedy’s final moments.
An arbitration panel charged with determining the value of the film said that the figure might be on the low side. The arbiters said that they could imagine a wealthy collector paying twice that much for “the most complete recording of President Kennedy’s assassination.”
Lawyers for the Justice Department had said that the film was worth $1 million at most. But heirs to Zapruder, who died in 1970, sought $30 million as just compensation, extolling the film as a cultural and artistic “icon” worthy of comparison to da Vinci manuscripts, Van Gogh and Warhol paintings and Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball.
The arbiters hearing the case were effectively asked to place a price tag on the most enduring and tragic reminder of the sudden end to Kennedy’s Camelot mystique.
The use of the images on the Zapruder film was never at issue. The copyright belongs to the family of the late Dallas dressmaker, which has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years from videocassette sales, excerpts in such films as Oliver Stone’s “JFK” and other uses.
But the government seized the original film from the family last year, declaring the fragile, six-foot-long strip of celluloid to be a critical record of the still-controversial Kennedy assassination that should be preserved at a National Archives complex in Maryland.
Unable to agree on a price, the Zapruders and the government let a private, three-member arbitration panel conduct hearings and make a final, binding determination. The Zapruders are expected to receive a check within 30 days for the $16 million, plus roughly $800,000 in interest.
Zapruders Are Relieved
The arbitration panel’s 2-1 opinion became final two weeks ago but its release was delayed out of respect for the Kennedy family after the death of the president’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr.
The Zapruders said that they were relieved by the decision, calling it a “fair and reasonable” award. The family also said that it wants to transfer copyright control over the film to a public institution.
Meanwhile, David W. Ogden, the acting assistant attorney general who handled the case for the government, said that the decision would ensure preservation of the record of “one of the most tragic events in American history.” He did not comment on the value assigned to the film but several others familiar with the issue said they were astounded by the $16-million figure.
“I consider that to be excessive,” said John Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board, which ordered the film’s seizure under congressional mandate.
Tunheim said his panel considered it critical to keep the film “in the hands of the American people. We didn’t want to see it cut up into individual pieces and sold off, as was threatened at one time.” But a better solution for U.S. taxpayers, he said in an interview Tuesday, would have been for the family to agree to donate the film to the government.
“To give them $16 million is obscene,” said G. Robert Blakey, a Notre Dame law professor who was chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which investigated the Kennedy slaying. “This was just the raw film. Its value was purely symbolic.”
But as Gerald Posner, author of a book about the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination, said: “What this is really about is a commentary on celebrityhood. If this were the assassination of just an ordinary president, we wouldn’t be seeing this high an award. But this film has become part of the classic American landscape surrounding Kennedy and the assassination.”
The single dissenter on the arbitration panel, former U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, said that he thought the film was worth perhaps $5 million, noting that even that figure would exceed the $2.4 million paid for an original broadsheet--one of the first copies--of the Declaration of Independence, which was sold at auction in 1991.
Yet Dellinger did not question the film’s place in history.
“The vivid images captured by the Zapruder film are eminently recognizable, perhaps more so than any film footage ever captured and so much so that anyone who reflects on President Kennedy’s assassination quite likely does so instinctively from Abraham Zapruder’s vantage point,” he wrote.
In 1964, a sobbing Zapruder told investigators that the experience of filming Kennedy as the blood poured from his head that day in Dallas had been so traumatic that “I can hardly talk about it.”
The two arbiters who delivered Tuesday’s majority opinion, retired federal judge Arlin M. Adams and Washington attorney Kenneth Feinberg, relied heavily on testimony the Zapruders’ lawyers presented from experts in the auction-house industry.
These industry experts predicted that the lore of Camelot, combined with the red-hot collectibles market, could drive the price of the film up to $40 million if the family were allowed to sell it on the open market.
Adams and Feinberg were swayed. “The record is clear about the special value that attaches to historical items deemed to be ‘Kennedy memorabilia.’ . . . In terms of its emotional and historical significance, the film would undoubtedly surpass previous ‘Kennedy memorabilia,’ ” they wrote.
Abraham Zapruder sold the film in 1963 for $150,000 to Time-Life Inc., which later gave it back to the family for $1. But the arbiters dismissed the government’s effort to use that transaction to gauge the film’s current worth.
“To mount an argument using variables like [consumer price index] and ‘1999 dollars’ is to fail to understand the historical value of the Zapruder film as it has developed over time,” the panel said.
“Simply stated, the Zapruder film is one of a kind,” the panel said. “There are no comparisons.”
The Zapruders, led by Abraham Zapruder’s son, Henry, a Washington attorney, and represented by attorney Robert S. Bennett, who also represents President Clinton, played up repeatedly the unique aspects of the film’s 494 images in the legal filings that preceded Tuesday’s announcement, calling the footage “perhaps the most important piece of criminal evidence ever to come to market.”
The family said that “many would want to own the Film in the hope of being the one who ultimately solves the mysteries associated with the assassination.”
They even argued the film’s artistic merits.
Gauging by da Vinci
“The colors are beautiful,” wrote one appraiser. “The ever-familiar hues of the tragedy--the pink of the first lady’s outfit, the red of the wounds, the green of the grass, the bluish-black of the presidential limousine--would not have been better if selected by Warhol or Matisse.”
One good measure of the film’s market value, the family said, is Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, a scientific manuscript bought at auction in 1994 by Bill Gates for $30.8 million.
But government lawyers ridiculed such arguments, saying that it was unreasonable “to force the American taxpayer to pay for the camera original Zapruder film as if it were the market equal of the greatest works of Van Gogh, Picasso or Leonardo da Vinci.”
*
Times staff writer Robert L. Jackson contributed to this story.
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26dc8f73992f678247e3710b588ce02b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-09-he-63977-story.html | Sports Bras Are a Bust for Some | Sports Bras Are a Bust for Some
Two women runners created the first one in 1977 by sewing together two jockstraps. One woman soccer player focused worldwide attention on the newest one by showing off her buff cups at the 1999 World Cup. In just over two decades, the sports bra has come a long way.
Not since 19th century feminist Amelia Jenks Bloomer designed baggy trousers to give women the freedom to participate in athletics has a piece of apparel so changed the shape of female fitness. Before the creation of the mother of all sports bras, the Jogbra, breast discomfort and embarrassment kept many women from participating in high-impact sports.
Today women run, climb, skate, play basketball and virtually every other sport, supported by the booming, $300-million-a-year sports bra industry, which has followed--or perhaps led--this explosive growth in women’s athletics. Yet despite the dazzling variety of colors and styles now available, most sports bras are still a bust for the typical American woman, who wears a size 36C.
“Almost universally, sports bras have not satisfied women who wear a C-cup or larger,” says Judy Mahle Lutter, president of the Melpomene Institute, a Minnesota-based research organization devoted to women’s health and physical activity. “Larger-breasted women, and women who are breast-feeding, often have trouble finding a sports bra that fits, feels comfortable and provides sufficient motion control.”
Inability to find a satisfactory sports bra keeps many women from exercising, says Lutter, whose organization recently ran a sports bra survey in its newsletter. “Some women report wearing two or three bras at one time” to get sufficient control, she says. Others bind their breasts with Ace bandages to minimize “jiggle” and wear T-shirts under their bras to eliminate chafing.
A woman who had breast reduction surgery said one of the biggest benefits was being able to exercise and swim without attracting stares. A study conducted last year by the American Council on Exercise reported that “a large majority of women experience breast discomfort while exercising” and either suffer in silence or avoid physical activity altogether.
When ACE commissioned a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse to evaluate five of the most popular sports bras designed for large-breasted women (size C-cup or larger) they found that some provided no more support than regular bras.
Part of the problem is that “the average bra size has increased from 34B just 20 years ago to 36C (plastic surgery and the use of birth control pills have been implicated),” notes an article about the ACE study, published in the organization’s journal, FitnessMatters.
Smaller-breasted women, who wear an A- or B-cup, typically fit well into compression bras, which press the breasts against the body. Their major dissatisfaction is the unflattering look.
*
Larger-breasted women, however, generally can’t wear compression bras and need the support found in another style of sports bra, which encapsulates each breast in a harness-like device. “Coverage is typically greater (in encapsulation bras), and straps and clasps of all sorts help to keep the breast in place,” the journal notes. But while there are “countless styles and fabrics to choose from” in compression bras, encapsulation models tend to come in fewer varieties and carry higher prices.
Indeed, the attention-grabbing sports bra worn by U.S. World Cup soccer heroine Brandi Chastain is available only in A- and B-cups, notes Nike spokeswoman Kathryn Reith, who is quick to add that the company’s new Inner Actives line also includes styles for fuller-busted women.
The highest-rated bra in the ACE survey was the Champion Action Shape Sports Top, one of more than 50 styles of sports bras made by Champion Jogbra, which is now owned by the Chicago-based Sara Lee Corp.
*
A good sports bra is much more than a fashion statement. It’s an essential piece of sports equipment. “If you ask women who work out what their most important piece of equipment is, shoes and sports bras tie for first,” says Missy Park, the self-described “chief bra guru” at Title Nine Sports, a California mail-order company specializing in women’s sports apparel. “But the surprising thing is that many women don’t know their proper bra size.”
Bra size often changes, after pregnancy for example, or as a result of weight gain or medication. “Yet many women never remeasure themselves,” notes Park, who says her company’s sales associates are trained to talk women through the measurement process. (Call [800] 342-4448.)
To select a sports bra that’s right for you, ACE experts advise:
* Choosing a bra that has good ventilation so sweat won’t be trapped, increasing friction and chafing.
* Making sure the clasps or straps don’t dig into your skin. A good sports bra should fit comfortably from the very first wearing.
* Mimicking the exercise you’ll be doing when you’re trying on a bra. You might want a different type of bra for lower-impact sports than you would for aerobics or jogging.
* Keeping in mind that sports bras lose elasticity over time and should be replaced every six months to a year.
Carol Krucoff writes a column on health and fitness issues for the Washington Post.
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8b8554d79cd95418e76c79befeab3898 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-13-fi-65449-story.html | Speculation Grows on Rift Between Key Vanguard Group Executives | Speculation Grows on Rift Between Key Vanguard Group Executives
Vanguard Group, the nation’s second-largest mutual fund company, suddenly is facing mounting speculation about a clash in its executive suite.
Published comments by Vanguard’s founder and senior chairman, John C. Bogle Sr., suggest rising tension between Bogle and his handpicked successor, Chairman John J. Brennan.
Although any rift would have no effect on the day-to-day operations of Vanguard’s many funds, it may focus attention on Vanguard’s growth strategies as it seeks to maintain its unique character.
Differences between Bogle, 70, and Brennan, 45, may be coming to a head as the company deals with whether Bogle should retire.
Vanguard said Thursday that it will impose on Bogle its mandatory retirement policy, which requires that all board members step down at the end of the year in which they turn 70. Bogle turned 70 in May.
But Bogle, a legend in the fund industry, has been increasingly vocal about not being forced to leave the now-$500-billion-asset company he started in 1975.
Vanguard spokesman John Woerth stressed that “Vanguard’s board is not asking Jack Bogle to retire.” But Woerth said the company intends to adhere to its long-standing retirement rule.
Bogle, however, on Thursday told TheStreet.com, a financial Internet site, that he has “mixed emotions” about being subject to the retirement rule. “There is certainly an argument that the creator of a company deserves a tad of extra consideration,” he said.
Dan Wiener, editor of the Independent Adviser for Vanguard Investors newsletter, said that “if the [Vanguard] board meets in September and they don’t change the policy, I think it’s like a passive-aggressive way of them forcing him out.”
Bogle handed the chief executive reins to Brennan in 1996. Brennan now also serves as chairman of Investment Company Institute, the fund industry’s chief trade group.
As such, Brennan is the designated defender of the $6-trillion mutual fund industry. Bogle, meanwhile, has been openly critical of the industry as a whole, attacking it on issues such as high fees.
In his new book, “Common Sense on Mutual Funds,” Bogle blasts fund companies for caring more about marketing and distribution issues than the actual trusteeship of investors’ money.
Analysts say Brennan continues to run Vanguard much as Bogle did. Vanguard continues to be the industry’s low-cost leader.
However, some think that one potential point of conflict between Brennan and Bogle may be the company’s decision last year to expand its discount brokerage services, a unit that was launched in 1983 when Bogle was CEO.
In 1995, facing rising competition, the unit created a fund “supermarket” that made available 400 no-load funds from a variety of fund companies, as a one-stop resource for Vanguard shareholders. However, investors had to pay a fee to buy or sell.
Last October, Vanguard added 800 additional funds that could be bought without fees.
Bogle has long been critical of no-fee fund supermarkets because he thinks they encourage investors to trade too often.
In an upcoming cover story in Institutional Investor magazine, Bogle defends Vanguard’s supermarket. “There are supermarkets,” he said, “and there are supermarkets.” Vanguard’s, for example, imposes a fee on short-term trades.
But in the same story, although Bogle doesn’t openly criticize Brennan’s management, he said that he and Brennan “don’t talk much anymore. . . . Jack isn’t in his office as much as he used to be. He’s busy with his industry things.”
Brennan, who couldn’t be reached for comment on Thursday, may find it politically difficult to bend Vanguard’s retirement rules even if he wanted to.
An ICI advisory committee recently came out with “best practices” guidelines for fund boards in which it recommends formal policies on retirement of directors.
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