‘The Industry’ in Their Backyards

Way out on the west end of the San Fernando Valley last Wednesday afternoon, presidential candidate Bob Dole bashed the entertainment industry for its godless, drug-loving, family-thrashing ways.

It’s a good thing the senior senator from corn country didn’t stick around for the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. meeting that night.

The crowd overflowing the lobby of a Ventura Boulevard bank building would’ve made sure that he knew he wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

Certainly, many in the three dozen rows of folding chairs had probably shown up to hear the heroic saga of how their association president had saved Sherman Oaks’ old-fashioned street lamps from downtown bureaucrats’ light-modernization program.

And others were there for the free dinner, courtesy of the restaurant of the month, Marie Callender’s.

But many had shown up to hear from the night’s two keynote speakers, the president of CBS Studio Center and the head of Fred Sands Realtors. The subject: how those dope-smoking, church-hating, child-ruining hustlers of screens silver and small had brought the East Valley its biggest boom since the Cold War and revitalized the market for home sales.

The night was a love-in. Elsewhere across the country, or even across the city, such homeowner meetings typically turn into festivals of no-growth naysaying that have added the acronym NIMBY--”Not in my back yard”--to the American vocabulary. In the East Valley, which has now thoroughly supplanted Hollywood as the capital of the entertainment biz, don’t be surprised to hear them say PLIMBY--”Please, in my back yard.”

The speakers almost put listeners in the mood to forgive Mikhail Gorbachev for wrecking the local real-estate market in 1989 by throwing in the towel on the arms race and sending the local defense industry the way of the riverboat and the buffalo.

“The entertainment industry is our savior--thank God for television,” said Elijah Rosenberg, a manager of 11 Melrose-area apartment buildings, who had driven over the hill to hear the spiel. “More than 60% of the people I rent to are in the business. Actually, more like 80%.

“May the business grow by leaps and bounds.”

Indeed, entertainment money has swept across the East Valley like a hurricane. The signs are everywhere.

CBS Studio Center President Michael L. Klausman said the industry is creating 11,000 new jobs a year in Los Angeles, or more than 900 a month. He said the industry annually buys $8.9 billion worth of goods--everything from lumber and books to sandwiches and flowers--from its suppliers. And he made a point of noting that his staffers try to buy everything in the Valley first, with Studio City and Sherman Oaks at the top of their list.

Sound stages at his complex, tucked away north of Ventura Boulevard near Laurel Canyon, produce hits such as “Seinfeld,” “Cybill,” ’Grace Under Fire,” “Roseanne” and “The Larry Sanders Show.” Demand is so hot for what he called his “intimate, mom-and-pop” operation that it has launched a $50-million expansion. The Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. and NBC in Burbank’s nearby Media District are likewise laying plans to significantly boost production on their lots over the next half-decade.

Klausman, a Cal State Northridge grad, spoke in the clipped, rhetorical tone of an evangelist, somehow making every statement a question that contained its own answer.

First he copped to the downside of growth. Already, he said, three huge, new sound stages have been erected on a former empty lot next to the Los Angeles River channel, near Moorpark Street. Next will come a big parking structure and later an office tower.

“It’s traffic, all right? Noise, all right? And I suppose you don’t want to see us put up big structures in front of your home, OK?”

He was warming up. Then came the pitch.

“But what’s the upside? Financial stability, all right? Even in the worst of times, people go see movies, OK? We grow no matter what. . . .

“And so all we’re asking for is a pat on the back when it comes time for our hearings at the city planning department. Don’t beat up on us too bad, all right? Give us some credit, OK?”

CBS has in fact managed to grow in peace in Studio City because it has reached out to the community and built mainly production facilities.

The experience of MCA Inc., farther east on county land in the Cahuenga Pass, has been much different, as neighboring homeowners have loudly protested the company’s plans to build out its property with a vast, new theme park, replete with resort hotels.

“MCA’s master plan will turn the East Valley into Coney Island,” said Joan Luchs, a Hollywood Hills resident, to anyone who would listen at the Sherman Oaks meeting. “It will be a nightmare of tourist-related gridlock.”

Luchs’ beliefs were clearly in the minority among this crowd, which really wanted to hear from Fred C. Sands.

The dapper prince of Los Angeles real estate selling didn’t disappoint them. He told them that just as he was right when he predicted the 1989 crash in prices, he would be proved equally correct in claiming now that the exploding entertainment business had ended the local real-estate recession. The figures: Transactions are up 24% in 1996, nearly to the level of 1989, and prices are edging up too, he said.

Sands added, with characteristic Realtor optimism: “But hold on. We think 1997 will be a banner year.”

In Studio City, he said, 50% of his home buyers are in the entertainment industry; in Sherman Oaks, about 33%.

Indeed, in my own Studio City neighborhood, more than half of the folks on my block are in The Industry, as they say. A top-gun record company lawyer. A popular drummer-songwriter. A pair of screenwriters. A pair of television directors. A record producer. An animator. A retired set designer.

The nexus is even tighter at my kids’ preschool. Every day of the week there is a television show on the air that was written, produced, directed by or stars the parents of chums in their two classes.

Sands sees only sunshine in this trend, and who can blame him?

“What’s nice about the entertainment industry is that they’re young, and they really spend money,” he said. “And they’re working so hard, they’re always in a hurry. Some will buy a property with no more thought than if they were buying a sweater. It’s nice to have people like that in your community.”

The only problem is that they’re ruining the housekeeper market, Sands said.

He complained that he had lost a maid to actor Tom Cruise, who right off the bat paid the woman enough to buy a new house and a car phone.