Uncovering the Grit Beneath the Glitter

Welcome to the other side of Beverly Hills.

It’s not the one filled with huge mansions, fancy cars and manicured lawns or populated with the mega-rich who favor endless Rodeo Drive shopping sprees.

No, this side has very ordinary-looking apartments with green carpets in the lobby and tiny, leaf-filled pools, and it’s made up of middle- and working-class people trying to get ahead by getting their kids into the coveted Beverly Hills schools.

It’s the world that writer-director Tamara Jenkins grew up in--and it’s as far removed from such hoity-toity cinematic images of the city from such films as “Clueless,” “Pretty Woman” and “Beverly Hills Cop” as possible.

Quite frankly, Jenkins and her family were literally down and out in a city famed for its riches.

“There was definitely a self-consciousness, an inherent inferiority complex built into the fact that you lived in this absurdly wealthy community with nothing,” Jenkins says. “There were definitely other people like us, but it felt like we were the only ones.”

Jenkins, now a resident of New York City, has returned to her Beverly Hills roots for her first film, the aptly titled satire “Slums of Beverly Hills,” which opens today.

Don’t look for such trademark Beverly Hills landmarks as the Beverly Hills Hotel or Rodeo Drive in the comedy, which is set in 1976. In fact, there are no recognizable Beverly Hills sights, save for the odd palm tree.

In dozens of movies, Beverly Hills has played the stand-in for wealth, privilege and power. It is often used as a comic foil whose inhabitants--read spoiled, arrogant, obnoxious--get the comedown they so richly deserve. It’s an image filmmakers love to play with.

Paul Mazursky, who wrote and directed “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” the 1986 hit comedy about a carefree bum (Nick Nolte) who transforms a neurotic, rich household into a happy one, says that people are obsessed with the city of roughly 32,000 people “because Beverly Hills has always represented the upper-middle class and the nouveau riche.”

“It has a lot of funny sides to it,” says Mazursky, who lives in Beverly Hills but also has an apartment near the beach in Venice. “It’s loaded with pretension. I see it as a funny thing. There’s always envy. On one hand they say [Beverly Hills residents] are ridiculous, there’s Rodeo Drive, but on the other hand, they say, ‘I wish I had it.’ ”

In “Slums of Beverly Hills,” Natasha Lyonne plays 15-year-old Vivian Abramowitz, who lives with her divorced father (Alan Arkin) and two brothers in ticky-tacky, Beverly Hills furnished apartments with names such as Casa Bella and the Camelot. Sizzler, not the Polo Lounge, is their restaurant of choice.

The dysfunctional family members hate their lives in the tiny, noisy apartments, which are filled with crazy tenants who believe their pipe dreams will come true in Beverly Hills.

Arkin’s Murray, a car salesman going through bad times, wants his kids to have the chance to go to Beverly Hills schools--the primary motivation for many people moving there, then as now.

The comedy, Jenkins says, is her opportunity to “defend my history. When people say, ‘Where are you from?’ And I say I grew up in Beverly Hills as a kid, they have these automatic associations. They assume you’re very wealthy and grew up with your parents working in the entertainment business. I have to explain I lived in Beverly Hills, but we were poor.”

“Slums” was first screened in May at the Cannes Film Festival. The French resort town is the sister city of Beverly Hills.

“I think the European journalists were completely fascinated by the socioeconomic [paradox] of being poor and living in these places. Not only in America, but across the world you’ll see somebody wandering around the streets with a T-shirt saying ‘Beverly Hills.’ They have this association with it that suggests this fancy, fancy life.”

Les Bronte, the mayor of Beverly Hills, is quick to say there are no actual “slums” in his city.

“There are ‘areas of opportunity,’ ” he says, “but we don’t have any slums. We work very hard not to have slums.”

The film, though, does capture the more quotidian side of Beverly Hills. Apartment living is not uncommon; as of the 1990 census there were 8,178 rental units in the city, compared to 6,386 owner-occupied homes. The median household income was $54,348.

The mayor says he’s not disturbed by the one-sided way Beverly Hills is usually presented in the movies--and he points out it’s not bad for business either.

“We love to laugh at ourselves,” Bronte says. “The ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ things did a lot for us. The greatest exposure has been the TV series ‘Beverly Hills, 90210.’

“As long as Beverly Hills gets out there in a positive way or even a humorous way, but not in a demeaning way, we’re OK.”

Jenkins got her first taste of Beverly Hills when she moved here at age 5 from Philadelphia to live with her father.

She thought because he had a Beverly Hills address he would be living in the lap of luxury. Instead, he was residing in a “bachelor apartment” in a “dingbat”--a post-World War II building with an exterior hallway and a carport underneath the residences.

“I lived in a lot of apartments on Arnaz Drive,” she recalls. “They used to nickname it ‘Divorce Drive.’ The parents were divorced and it was mostly single mothers bringing up their kids. You were just inside the ZIP Code just to maintain a Beverly Hills address so you could go to school.”

“[Those apartments] are really not that bad,” Mazursky says. “They are perfectly good apartments. I know a lot of people who lived in them. They do it for the schools.”

(Mazursky says he’s written a sequel to “Down and Out” in which the family loses its money and moves into a small apartment in West Los Angeles. “I can’t get [the studios] to do it. It’s funny as hell. [People] love to see the upper class get it from the lower class.”)

Jenkins says that occasionally her father, who was also a car salesman, did well enough for them to afford moving to a nicer building.

“Our notion of luxury was a lobby and an elevator, so it felt it was really an economic step up. We lived in one apartment building that was called the Mayan because there was some tile work. That was a fancy one.”

Most of “Slums” was filmed in and around the nearby neighborhood known (in real estate speak) as Beverly Hills Adjacent and also Mar Vista.

“I drove around to some of the apartment buildings I had lived in as a kid, and they were souped up and had really fancy cars parked in front of them,” she says.

The production elicited various reactions from residents. “There were some people who, when we were shooting near Beverly Hills, would come out and say, ‘What movie are you shooting?’ ” Jenkins recalls.

“Some people went, ‘That’s right. Yep, you found it, kid’ ” on hearing the title, she says. “There were people who hadn’t much of a sense of humor or a sense of irony about themselves. They were really insulted because they had probably paid an extra dollar to be in Beverly Hills Adjacent and you’re calling the movie you’re shooting down the block from their place the ‘Slums of Beverly Hills.’ ”

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A Familiar Backdrop

Here’s a look at some other recent Beverly Hills movies. They are all available on video.

* “The Taking of Beverly Hills” (1991): Ken Wahl and Matt Frewer star in an action thriller about crooks who try to loot Beverly Hills--the production built its own Rodeo Drive set--by staging a toxic-waste accident and forcing the entire community to evacuate.

* “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills” (1989): Paul Bartel’s risque, offensive sex romp set among the city’s manicured estates was actually filmed in Hancock Park.

* “Beverly Hills Cop” (1984): Blockbuster action-comedy--the first of three in the series--which cemented Eddie Murphy’s status as a box-office star. Murphy plays an irreverent Detroit detective on a case in Beverly Hills who teaches the local cops about life on the streets and takes on the uptight store owners and gallery operators on Rodeo Drive.

* “Pretty Woman” (1990): The hit romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere makes great use of Beverly Hills, especially in Roberts’ shopping spree along Rodeo Drive.

* “The Beverly Hillbillies” (1993): Silly-billy comedy based on the long-running CBS sitcom actually shot most of its mansion exteriors in Pasadena. Other locations include the Tower Mansion in Bel-Air.

* “Clueless” (1995): Amy Heckerling’s totally rad updating of Jane Austen’s “Emma” offers cool glimpses of Beverly Hills High (called Bronson Alcott High in the movie), hip Rodeo Drive shops and supercool mansions. Awesomely funny.

* “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” (1986): Paul Mazurksy’s delightful remake of Jean Renoir’s 1932 French classic “Boudou Saved From Drowning” finds a charming Nick Nolte as a bum living in alleys of Beverly Hills who totally changes the life of a dysfunctional nouveau riche family. This satire of the pretentiousness of Beverly Hills makes great use of Rodeo Drive and the streets of seemingly endless mansions.