04/14/05

LC050414

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

When it comes to office buildings, why are more and more
companies saying paint us green?

Dan Heinfeld>> I'm dealing with my clients about energy use,
the indoor environment that their employees and users are going
to have and just how they sort of work within this space, and I
think those are much more tangible things to be talking about in
creating great architecture on than sort of decorating the box.

Val>> And then, teenage angst, a restored western, and a family
reconciliation. How will this week's releases rate with our
FilmWeek critics?

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> If you've ever been shocked by your gas or your water
bill, imagine the tens of thousands of dollars worth of energy
that an office tower or a big store consumes. Well, that's why
forward-looking architects are beginning to design green
buildings. In fact, one of the most energy-efficient buildings
in the country is in Santa Monica. As NewsHour correspondent
Jeffrey Kaye tells us, these buildings could impact our energy
future if builders embrace them.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Think about what harms the environment and the
culprits that most likely come to mind are factories, power
plants and cars, all belching pollutants. What probably isn't
thought of as an environment menace are America's more than
eighty million commercial and residential buildings.

Rob Watson>> Well, I believe that buildings are the worst thing
that people do to the environment.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Rob Watson is a senior scientist with the
environmental group, NRDC, the National Resources Defense
Council.

Rob Watson>> Buildings use twice as much energy as cars and
trucks. Seventy percent of the electricity in the United States
is consumed by our homes and our office buildings.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Architects and builders, activists and
government agencies are increasingly championing an alternative
method of design and construction. It's an approach called
green building. The essence of green building is creating
structures that are far more efficient in their consumption of
energy and water and less wasteful in their use of materials
than conventional buildings. This place, the NRDC's west coast
office in Santa Monica, California, is considered the greenest
building in America.

Anjali Jaiswal>> There are no sacrifices with it. You know, I
think that our approach with the building which I agree with --
and I wasn't part of that -- but it kind of has, you know, like
all this high technology with it, but it doesn't feel like it.
It feels like a really welcoming kind of approach to it.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Opened in the fall of 2003, the fifteen thousand
square foot structure consumes seventy percent less energy than
a non-green building of equivalent size and function. Solar
panels on the roof generate twenty percent of the building's
electricity. Toilets use a gallon less water per flush than
conventional ones. The floors are made of easily replenished
woods like bamboo and poplar. Ample skylights direct sunshine
deep into the building and reduce reliance on electrical
lighting.

Rob Watson>> And all these combine to make a more comfortable,
more effective way to operate and yet highly cost effective
space.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Watson is especially fond of showing off the
building's state of the art water recycling plant in the
basement.

Rob Watson>> The biology is killed with ozone here.

Jeffrey Kaye>> It cleans the building's gray water. That's the
water that comes from the sinks in the bathroom and kitchen as
well as from captured rain water.

Rob Watson>> It's purified a number of times and disinfected a
number of times, reverse osmosis. It's better than bottled
water. It's better than tap water. I drink it all the time.

Jeffrey Kaye>> And despite the signs warning against drinking
the recycled water because of municipal codes, Watson backs up
his words with a swig.

Rob Watson>> It may not be legal, but it sure is good.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Environmental groups are not the only ones
embracing green design.

Dan Heinfeld>> We think it's a fabulous design tool, that green
architecture really leads itself to very interesting
architectural practices.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Dan Heinfeld is president of LPA, an
architectural firm in Irvine, California which specializes in
green building design.

[Film Clip]

Dan Heinfeld>> I'm dealing with my clients about energy use,
the indoor environment that their employees and users are going
to have and just how they sort of, you know, work within this
space. I think those are much more tangible things to be
talking about than creating great architecture on than sort of
decorating the box.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Heinfeld's firm designed a green building for a
company better known for its fuel-efficient cars. Toyota's
624,000 square foot sales office in Torrance, California is a
green giant. In fact, it's the largest green building complex
in America. Its roof carpeted in solar panels generates enough
electricity to power five hundred homes. The building uses
reclaimed water for landscaping and for cooling and the material
used to make the office complex comes largely from recycled
automobiles. That includes steel in the building itself and
lobby furniture made from old seatbelts. Heinfeld says the
Toyota building demonstrates that green building principles are
no longer experimental or avant-garde.

Dan Heinfeld>> We think those are the really powerful examples
because it shows that it really can be done mainstream and can
be done on any kind of project.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Green building can often cost more than
conventional construction. Solar panels and water purification
systems, for instance, will increase builders' budgets, but
proponents say that higher upfront costs will pay for themselves
in the long run. A recent state of California study reported
that two percent additional cost in a green building's design
translates to savings of up to twenty percent in energy costs
over the lifespan of the building. In Santa Monica, green
buildings range from the police headquarters to a low-income
housing project which generates much of its power from solar
energy. The city, in cooperation with the environmental group,
Global Green, has also opened up a green building resource
center. In it, homeowners can get information about a
smorgasbord of green building products.

>> "These layers here? A glue binds them together and, if that
glue contains a lot of formaldehyde, then you get an off-gassing
from the floor."

Jeffrey Kaye>> Despite its growth, green building still meets
resistance often from designers and contractors who are
uncomfortable with changing their ways and are unfamiliar with
green building practices and material such as those on display
here.

>> "This one right here is a sorghum-based product."

Jeffrey Kaye>> That's been a frustration for Daniel McGee and
Kathryn Lara who have been coming to the center for nearly a
year as they remodel their house.

Daniel McGee>> I was probably struck by how in general the
people we've talked to, particularly architects and contractors,
know so little about this and what's available and the things
that we can do. So part of the process has been trying to
educate our architect and contractors to open up their eyes a
little bit that a lot of the traditional materials they use,
there are alternatives to them.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Looking ahead, the highest profile green
building project in America promises to be Freedom Tower which
is to be built on the former World Trade Center site in New York
City. When finished, the more than seventeen hundred foot tall
structure will include massive solar panels and its own wind
farm on the upper floor. I'm Jeffrey Kaye for Life and Times.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
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Toni Guinyard>> After more than thirty years in front of the
camera, documentary host and producer, rancher, journalist and
author, Bill Kurtis, still has additional projects on the
drawing board. From his fight to end capital punishment to his
support of small-town businesses, he has an awful lot to say and
he shared his thoughts with Life and Times.

Bill Kurtis>> I was in Illinois when they discovered thirteen
innocent men on death row. I was a lawyer and it goes back more
than three decades. I realized, wait a minute, I thought the
guilty are punished and the innocent go free. These were
innocent men. Could our criminal justice system not be working?
Governor George Ryan at the time asked one question. He was a
pharmacist, not a lawyer. He said, how could this happen? And
so did I. So I decided to use my investigative reporting. Why
not apply it here? The more I learned, why, the more disturbed
I was.

One report out of the Columbia University School of Law said
that sixty-eight percent of the cases, six thousand capital
cases since 1976, have reversible error. California has sixty-
six percent reversible error in its capital cases. I was
stunned. It was a moment -- in my book, I call it parapatea,
which is a Greek word, when all you have believed turns out to
be wrong, so I went further.

Toni Guinyard>> So at one point, you supported -- and that's an
odd way to put it -- but you supported the death penalty, the
concept of it, punish those who have hurt others. But there are
several cases that changed your mind as you looked into this.

Bill Kurtis>> I believed in it. You're trained to support the
law and the system in law school. I covered the Charles Manson
case for ten months, Angela Davis, Juan Corona, Richard Speck.
I mean, I was a mass murderer expert. I supported it clearly,
but I believed in the system then and the institution of the
criminal justice as we apply it. Then I started looking closely
at the cases, specifically Ray Krone. He was the one hundredth
exonerated person from death row. He spent ten years in prison.
He was totally innocent.

Toni Guinyard>> The state of California and the Senate in 2004
essentially established a commission to look into what some
consider to be flawed cases, wrongful convictions, wrongful
executions. Your thought on that?

Bill Kurtis>> I wish every state would do that. Essentially,
they're responding to Illinois' experience. We're ground zero
back then. It's where I live. California is going to find, as
some lawyers have already found, all those mistakes are present
in California. No system in any state can say it can't happen
here. It's the same system. So you're going to be facing very
soon whether or not you should apply a moratorium. You don't
execute anybody in California anyway. Why do you want to spend
millions of dollars to try and get capital punishment, a death
sentence? It's money that is thrown away when life without
parole essentially accomplishes the same thing, with one
exception: satisfying our need for revenge.

Toni Guinyard>> That said, I can hear the families of victims
right now listening to you saying nothing more than a liberal
journalist speaking his mind. Why should we listen to you?

Bill Kurtis>> Because I have the information. I'm not an
advocate of this. I sound passionate. I have the information
that is available to anybody who wants to go on the internet and
really look at the issue. I don't think anything is going to
satisfy the families of victims. On the other hand, I think
that they will come to the conclusion that closure will not come
from taking another life. It just doesn't happen.

Toni Guinyard>> You have a lot of information and, over the
years, we have watched you in a number of different venues on
television. Why make that transition from newsman to
documentarian, to man about town talking about a bunch of
different issues?

Bill Kurtis>> To documentarian because it's a longer time to
tell the story. We're all storytellers and that hour format is
simply satisfying. It's kind of a mini movie. I was lucky to
start at PBS and then at A&E when basic cable was just beginning
its exploration of documentaries. In the last fifteen years,
I've narrated a thousand, produced five hundred, which is
wearisome (laughter) as I look back on it, but it was a grand
time. I had retired from CBS after thirty years and you say to
yourself, what do you want to do? Do you want to continue doing
headline treatments of stories or do you want to spend enough
time so that you can impart understanding to a story in addition
to the facts? That's what led me to the documentary.

Toni Guinyard>> As I read information about you, I was
surprised to learn a lot of things. I think one of the most
interesting things to me is that you have gone back to
essentially your roots to where your broadcasting career began
and you have interest in a radio station. Tell me about that
place.

Bill Kurtis>> I bought it (laughter).

Toni Guinyard>> (Laughter) That's putting it bluntly.

Bill Kurtis>> It was my first job not only in radio, but my
first job. It was an emotional impulse buy and it's cost me a
lot of money that I haven't made back, but I have bought a
couple others since then. I like radio. I just like radio. I
like the feeling of going home and doing something for your
hometown. It's a small town in Kansas and it becomes a larger
issue of trying to save small-town America. So you renovate a
building, you try and bring in a business. I now own twenty-
three buildings and maybe I'm more of a developer than a
broadcaster. I don't know.

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> Your viewers who have followed you from PBS to
CBS to A&E, what would you like them to know about you that we
don't know right now? We see this image on the screen, but who
is Bill Kurtis in the grand scheme of things?

Bill Kurtis>> Well, I'd like them to know I'm funny.

Toni Guinyard>> You're funny. Okay.

Bill Kurtis>> Funny. I did "Anchorman", the narration of
"Anchorman". It's this kind of demon inside me that's trying to
get out. I enjoy telling a joke, but in reality I think those
of us who live in the public eye, you know, there aren't any
secrets. It's out there and the sooner you learn to live with
that and relax, the better (laughter).

Toni Guinyard>> You go along with the change then. What's on
the horizon for you, your next project?

Bill Kurtis>> I've started a grass-fed beef company. Grass-fed
beef is meat for vegetarians. It's a remarkable --

Toni Guinyard>> -- wait a minute. Meet for vegetarians.

Bill Kurtis>> Well, hear me out.

Toni Guinyard>> Okay, I will.

Bill Kurtis>> It's a remarkable discovery. It's the way we
used to raise cattle before industrialized agriculture started
pumping them with hormones and antibiotics and corn. Corn is an
unnatural feed and creates bacteria that promotes e-coli and
reduces the nutrition in our beef cattle. Put them back on
grass, free-range, pasture-fed, and suddenly the Omega 3 goes up
to as high as 7.

Toni Guinyard>> Bill Kurtis, from newsman, serious journalist,
to rancher and global warming, we've got it all covered. Thank
you so much for spending a little time with Life and Times.

Bill Kurtis>> Pleasure to be with you.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
by mail at this address:

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Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm
Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week not only
stars, but was directed by David Duchovny, formerly of the "X-
Files". It's titled "House of D".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Henry Sheehan of
henrysheehan.com, and Scott Foundas of Variety and the L.A.
Weekly. Scott, what did you think of "House of D"?

Scott Foundas>> I hated this movie. This is an extremely
bizarre and gratuitously sentimental story of an American artist
living in Paris played by David Duchovny reminiscing about his
youth as a teenager on the streets of Greenwich Village in the
1970's with a pill-popping mother played by Tea Leoni and a
bizarre friendship with an adult retarded man played by Robin
Williams and even a woman who's imprisoned in a women's house of
detention, hence the title of the movie, played by Erykah Badu.

This is a movie that refuses to be normal at any turn. It wants
to dazzle you with its eccentric characters and its originality
and it is like nails on a chalkboard, is all I can tell you,
redeemed only by the fact that some of the actors in the film do
give good performances. The young boy who has the role of the
young David Duchovny and also Erykah Badu, I think, you know,
they kind of rise above the level of the material, but just ever
so slightly.

Larry Mantle>> Henry?

Henry Sheehan>> I pretty much agree with Scott. I can't say I
hated the movie because I don't think it rose to the level of a
hatable object (laughter). It was too minor and too trivial.
The basic problem that I have with the movie is that it wants to
have it both ways. I mean, clearly Duchovny directs. He also
plays the adult version of the protagonist. You know, he has a
lot of himself invested in this character.

The character happens to be very manipulative, but the way the
picture would have you prefer to look at him is as someone who's
manipulated especially by his bizarre mother. His mother comes
into the bathroom when he's taking a shower. She's emotionally
needy to the point of being monstrous at times, although the
film then portends that you're supposed to have sympathy for
her. Yet in some of the actions, the film can't help showing
that the boy is forcing the mother to act in certain ways. So I
thought the movie was, you know, self-serving and a bit
hypocritical.

Larry Mantle>> Our second film this week is from writer-
director, Todd Solondz, who's known for controversial themes in
such movies as "Welcome to the Doll House" and "Happiness". His
latest is titled "Palindromes".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Henry Sheehan, what did you think of
"Palindromes"?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, I'm a Todd Solondz fan, but I found this
movie somewhat disappointing, although the subject seems right
up his alley. It's about a twelve year old girl who wants to
become pregnant, who wants a baby to love -- many babies to
love, as a matter of fact -- so that's why she wants to get a
start at age twelve. One of the most notable things about the
movie is Solondz uses eight actresses to play this girl. One,
when she's, you know, very young, about six or seven years old,
and then most of the remaining seven which includes Jennifer
Jason Leigh play her at twelve and like thirteen or fourteen.

I think one of the things that came out in this film that I
never really noticed in his films at the time, but now see it
retrospectively, is a certain campiness when he deals with the
characters. I mean, they enter into flamboyant modes of
behavior, disproportionate to the environment they're in which
seems to be campy. For instance, there is an extended family of
Christians which he sends up viciously. It's okay. I don't
mind that, but in a campy way, it seems blunted.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Scott?

Scott Foundas>> I really liked this film enormously and I
disagree with Henry about the camp aspect of it because I think
that Solondz's strength -- and it may be at its peak here -- is
in giving you a situation like this Christian family and
presenting it in a very un-ironic, nonjudgmental way where, if
you're laughing at it, you're sort of laughing with the
characters rather than at them or because they are being
skewered in some way.

I think there is an enormous amount of compassion in Solondz's
work despite the sort of surface cruelty of it which sort of
misleads a lot of people. I think that this film, in its way,
is as tapped into the divides in this country between red and
blue, left and right, Democrat and Republican, that sort of
thing as any movie out there right now. It's really remarkable.

Larry Mantle>> And finally this week, we have the release of an
extended version of the forty year old Sam Peckinpah film,
"Major Dundee". It stars Charlton Heston and Richard Harris.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Well, the re-release and restored "Major
Dundee". What did you think, Scott?

Scott Foundas>> Well, you know, this has always been a
problematic film like many of Sam Peckinpah's movies. It didn't
reach audiences in the way that Peckinpah intended for it to.
More than half an hour of material was cut out of the film by
the producer, Jerry Bresler, and about fifteen of those minutes
have been restored. The rest are lost to history. As a result,
a lot of the sort of narrative in the original version has been
clarified.

There are a couple of key scenes here that give you information
about the relationships between the characters that was missing
before, but basically what was always good about this film is
the sort of central relationship between the character of Major
Dundee played by Charlton Heston and the renegade confederate
captain, Ben Tyreen, played with enormous grandiloquence by
Richard Harris. It's just a sort of balladic otherworldly
performance, a guy who's sort of resigned himself to the horrors
of war. The way that they interact with each other is sort of
two sides of one coin and the insights that come out of that
relationship really make it quite an interesting film.

Larry Mantle>> Henry?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, I think if you don't come to this film as
a Peckinpah fan or even if you do really, what you have here is
an ordinarily good western that fulfills a lot of genre
conventions. For instance, even the relationship between the
strict Charlton Heston character and the more dubious, let's
say, complex character of Richard Harris, that's really the
Wyatt Earp-Doc Holliday relationship if you're going to talk in
terms of western archetypes. I think that Peckinpah handles
this all well enough, but if you're coming at it as a Peckinpah
fan, what you're seeing here, I think, is a rehearsal for "The
Wild Bunch". He's trotting out a lot of scenes that he'd use
later in seeing how they play and even a couple of scenes that
he would do again in "The Wild Bunch".

Larry Mantle>> Well, thanks so much for joining us for another
edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3
KPCC. For critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com and Scott
Foundas of Variety and the L.A. Weekly inviting you to join us
next week at this same time for the next edition of FilmWeek on
Life and Times.

Val>> And you can hear a full hour of FilmWeek every Friday
morning at 11:00 a.m. on KPCC public radio 89.3. And that's our
program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times,
thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

What's behind the shortage of specialists in Southern California
emergency rooms?

>> I remember sitting down and just kind of waiting there for
about probably an hour. Then I got put on a bed and got my arm
held up and I probably waited there for about six hours.

Val>> That's next time on a special health care edition of Life
and Times.