No More Shoots of Shots

A week after the fifth anniversary of the 1992 riots, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to ban gunfire near the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, where the violence began.

Real gunfire, of course, is already outlawed; now the council also is saying no to the Hollywood kind as well.

Outraged at what they described as “insensitivity” to the troubled neighborhood’s struggle against real-life violence, lawmakers voted to prohibit today’s scheduled filming of a television movie about a black church being burned by skinheads because its producers had requested permission to fire blank rounds from automatic weapons.

“For some reason I can’t fathom, the film companies want to make these movies in the neighborhoods where they will be most disturbing . . . where people have to put up with the real thing all too often,” said Venice Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, whose recent complaints canceled a similar shoot in the crime-plagued Oakwood neighborhood.

“It is not good for people to see in the movies, ‘Here’s what they do in [Councilwoman Rita] Walters’ neighborhood: They shoot, shoot, shoot. They kill, kill, kill,” said Councilman Nate Holden, who represents an adjacent district. “Are they shooting Donald Duck [movies] down there? I don’t think so. That to me gives the impression of how they really feel about certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles.”

Although council members agreed that the gunfire threatened to trigger more trouble than it was worth, Hollywood leaders and business liaisons for Mayor Richard Riordan worried that the unprecedented council intervention could hamper the city’s high-profile attempt to expand its signature industry.

And the Pilgrim Congregational Church in Christ, where the film was to be shot, can say goodbye to $750 in permit fees, money with which the congregation had planned to purchase a piano. Also lost was nearly $1,000 that Pepin, Merhi Entertainment Group, which is producing the film, would have paid 12 members of the church for appearing as extras in the TV movie, “L.A. Heat: Burning Sanctuary.”

“It has a chilling effect,” said Kathleen Milnes, vice president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the area’s seven largest studios. “The message it sends is that a volatile council member can wreak havoc with your production if they want to. One of the things that production companies fear most is last-minute glitches. We have seen situations in other communities where people say, simply, ‘You know what? It’s not worth the risk.’ ”

Since taking office in 1993, Riordan has made the entertainment industry a centerpiece of his campaign to make Los Angeles more welcoming to business.

A key plank in that effort was the formation in 1995 of the Entertainment Industry Development Corp., a nonprofit group that helps expedite the permitting process for film locations throughout Los Angeles County and works to smooth relations among filmmakers, elected officials and neighborhoods. Since the group took over, local production has skyrocketed about 50%, for a total of nearly 44,000 days of permits last year.

Ironically, it was the group’s phone call to Walters’ office--a trademark of its outreach efforts--that triggered her emergency motion to cancel the company’s film permit.

“I don’t think it takes a whole lot to understand that shooting . . . is not appropriate for this location,” Walters told her colleagues Tuesday morning.

But EIDC chief Cody Cluff said the council action was unnecessary. After Walters complained, Cluff arranged with the film’s producer to have the gunshots canceled. They were to be recorded elsewhere and dubbed into the location footage.

“It’s potentially costly and quite devastating and not very fair,” Cluff said of the council’s abrupt cancellation of today’s scheduled filming. “The frustrating thing here is I told the councilwoman I’d take care of it, and then 10 minutes later she had the motion.

“Where there’s legitimate concern, we work very hard to make sure that community concerns are taken into account. That was the whole purpose of setting up the office,” Cluff added. “We can’t just say no to everything that comes through. It begins to look like censorship, and pretty soon you can’t do anything in town.”

The film’s producer, John Kelly, and other Pepin, Merhi executives could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Cluff said the company produces more than two dozen low-budget films a year, most of them filmed locally, making it one of the Entertainment Industry Development Corp.’s best customers because it has a work in production nearly every day of the year.

The permit application for “L.A. Heat” outlines six days of productions in nine locations, including two days of shooting inside Pilgrim church and outside on Normandie Avenue, about a mile north of Florence.

The permits do not include requests for gunfire or special effects. Producers who want to use disruptive devices must notify residents in the neighborhood and, in many cases, obtain signatures of support. Cluff said Pepin, Merhi would have needed signatures from 80% of the residents living within a three-quarter-mile radius of the church before simulating automatic weapons fire and was in the process of collecting the signatures when the council voted Tuesday.

“Everything isn’t OK in filming. There has to be a balancing of interests,” Councilman Joel Wachs said. “They can go around the neighborhood and film the neighborhood all they want, and then dub in the shooting. They dub in singers. They dub in everything. So there’s no reason to be shooting around the neighborhood. [There’s] a need to be sensitive to more than just the bottom line.”

Perhaps most annoying to the crew and Cluff is that Walters’ motion prohibited not only the bothersome gunshots, but the entire project, forcing the producers to squeeze two days of filming into one.

Milnes also expressed concern that Tuesday’s action was a first step toward turning the permit process into a kind of censorship.

“Today, gunshots,” she said; what about tomorrow?

“Nobody likes a portrayal of their neighborhood that is not positive. These things happen in real life, and we duplicate society on the screen,” Milnes said, recalling a recent controversy in which the Inglewood City Council threatened to review movie scripts before issuing film permits after negative comments about the city in the movie “Grand Canyon.”

“It’s a free country and people can make what they want to make and film what they want to film,” she said. “Once someone chooses to make a film . . . the city wants them to make it in Los Angeles.”