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Life & Times Transcript

11/18/05

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Orange County is about to get a Great Park on the site of El Toro Air Base, but like everything else about El Toro, it's not without controversy.

Richard Sim>> I'm just concerned, if we move too fast, we can blow it and, if you blow it, you can blow it big.

Larry Agran>> What do we want to do? Just sit on these resources for five to ten years, then think about it?

Val Zavala>> And then, history as art. A team of researchers delves into the LAPD's crime archives and comes out with a gallery exhibit.

These stories and more coming up next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> 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 Zavala>> Finally after years of political battles, Orange County's Great Park is finally taking shape. This is the park that will be built where the now closed El Toro Air Base is and three architectural firms are competing to win this prize commission and they have some pretty interesting ideas. Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, takes a look.

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> For fifty years, it was a fixture in Orange County. The El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, a giant parcel of land carved out of bean fields as the nation prepared for World War II. El Toro, where thousands upon thousands of military personnel trained, lived and went off to war. Where each year, huge crowds of Orange Countians went out to see the big El Toro Air Show.

But it all came to an end July 2, 1999 when El Toro was closed down, part of a nationwide military downsizing, and today it's a ghost base. It's been years now since any jet fighter took off from this massive runway here at El Toro, since this military installation functioned almost as a city unto itself. It's the weeds that now inhabit the runway, growing up through the cracks.

But El Toro is about to evolve into the next stage of its existence. The long bitter battle over whether to turn El Toro into a commercial airport was won by opponents to the airport who managed to take their question to the ballot box. Voters rejected the airport idea. Now El Toro is on its way to becoming what people have dubbed the Great Park. Irvine councilman, Larry Agran, is Chairman of the Orange County Great Park's Board of Directors.

Larry Agran>> This is simply an unprecedented opportunity. Imagine in a major metropolitan county with three million people at this stage in our metropolitan development to be able to create a metropolitan park that is three times the size of Central Park in New York.

Roger Cooper>> An international competition has been underway to pick a designer for the Great Park with seven architectural firms invited to submit their proposals. Recently, the seven finalists got two hours each to present their concepts to the Great Park board. Architect Juan Herreros from Madrid proposed digging out a runway to create a water-filled rowing canal over which the sun would set.

Juan Herreros>> "A memorial of the history of the taking off and landing of the planes going to those difficult missions out of the country and every day the sunset exactly on the other point of the canal, we'll remember this."

Roger Cooper>> But in the end, it was three other firms who made the final cut, including Ken Smith of New York. He envisions constructing a giant canyon running through the park.

Ken Smith>> "It's a big enough feature that, when you're in the canyon, you really feel like you're someplace else, that you're separate from the city. Hence, it would be very feasible for someone to have their lunch in the canyon and really be somewhere completely else, somewhere where it's cool and refreshing and shady."

Roger Cooper>> Smith's proposal would retain part of one runway where fifty vintage war planes would be parked in a memorial to El Toro's veterans.

Dr. Steven Choi>> "Wow, that's a dream park, I think, as far as I'm concerned. Everything that I have dreamed of, you presented."

Roger Cooper>> Also among the final three competitors, the firm of Royston Hanamoto Alley & Abey from Mill Valley, California.

Manuella King>> "So, what did we think when we first went to the site? The site is phenomenal. It's really the one place that you can see in the United States that I can think of that is a bare site to make a new metropolitan park. It's flat. It has the drama and power of those runways and how many times do you ever walk out on a runway? Never, never, and never are you in the middle of the runway. You're always moving fast in an airplane."

Roger Cooper>> And the third design firm in the running is EMBT of Barcelona, Spain.

Karl Unglaub>> "We have very specific [inaudible], but we are also able to use our knowledge which we gain in one place and go to another place, so the first element, as we were saying, is the lake. We can call it the Great Lake."

Roger Cooper>> But even as the selection of a Great Park architect goes forward, not everyone is happy with the way it's being done. Richard Sim, a retired Irvine Company executive, resigned from the Great Park Board in protest. He says the process is going too fast.

Richard Sim>> I don't think people who've never done large-scale developments fully understand the ramifications of rushing before you have a good plan and you've developed all the information that is critical to the project. This is a thousand acre project that has a thousand toxic sites to be remediated over the next one to fifty years.

Christina Shea>> Well, actually, I probably was one of the critical persons on the Board that felt that same way. I felt that the process moved a little too quickly. I do think that they've done an excellent job. I'm very pleased that we are moving forward with the design process, but I did feel myself that we could have maybe taken a little bit more time to allow them, maybe a six month period rather than three months.

Larry Agran>> People tell me that he who hesitates is lost, hurry up. Then others will say to look before you leap, don't go so fast.

Richard Sim>> Well, I think we have such a unique opportunity to build something really special in Orange County for all the people in Orange County and I just hope we take enough time.

Larry Agran>> We have the land. We have the resources. We have the momentum. Now's the time to design and build the Great Park.

Richard Sim>> I'm just concerned, if we move too fast, we can blow it and, if you blow it, you can blow it big.

Larry Agran>> What do we want to do? Just sit on these resources for five to ten years thinking about it? No, we want to begin the design process.

Richard Sim>> My guess is we're going to end up with, you know, seven pretty pictures.

Roger Cooper>> For now, at least, the architects have been told to dream big without regard to difficulty or cost, and they are.

Ken Smith>> "And at the center where the two runways once met, we propose a series of orange hot air balloons. The hot air balloons, we think, would be a fantastic opportunity for people to go up high enough to see the surrounding countryside."

Manuella King>> "He had this idea about creating these beautiful mist rings that rose up into the sky that you could see from a distance and then they just disappear."

Ken Smith>> "Think about what New York was like before Central Park. I mean, instead of a growing community, it was kind of a mess. There were hogs running in the streets. Central Park was built on the edge of town in a place that nobody really thought was going to be much and now it's the heart of the place. I have no doubt that this will become the heart of Orange County, the heart of the community."

Manuella King>> "So here you have two miles of this beautiful vista that leads to the mountains and you're doing this park not just for you, not just for your kids, not just for your kids' kids, but for generations to come. What a huge monumental, exciting task you have in front of you."

Roger Cooper>> The winning architect will be named in January with groundbreaking expected next year. In the meantime, three firms are hoping they will be the one to win final clearance for takeoff at El Toro. In Orange County, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> He was living the good life in Hollywood making plenty of money as a producer, but then something happened and now he travels the world filming human suffering. Why did he make such a dramatic change? Hena Cuevas has the remarkable story of Gerry Straub.

Martin Sheen>> "In these slums, misery is the daily bread. The bloated belly of poverty knows no relief."

Hena Cuevas>> Gerard Straub's documentaries are nothing less than eye-opening. From visiting lepers in Brazil --

Martin Sheen>> "The horror of leprosy is a reality in the Amazon region of Brazil. Shockingly, this area is home to 45,000 lepers who struggle for survival."

Hena Cuevas>> -- to spending almost a year with the homeless in Los Angeles's Skid Row.

Gerard Straub>> "My name is Gerard Straub. This is my city. Yet until recently, I had no idea so many people lived in such suffocating squalor in the shadow of such astounding affluence."

Hena Cuevas>> But before he started traveling all over the world with his camera, Straub was making thousands of dollars a week as a television network producer.

Gerard Straub>> You know, actually I never had any intention of making a documentary. I mean, I'm a soap opera producer. I've done, you know, dramas on the networks. It was the furthest thing from my mind.

Hena Cuevas>> Then in 1995, Straub, a self-proclaimed atheist, went to Rome to research a novel he was writing. He went into an empty church to take a break.

Gerard Straub>> I went into the church actually just to sit down. I didn't go in to pray. I sat down and I saw this prayer book there and I picked it up and opened it randomly and there was this Psalm 63, a soul searching for God. I didn't hear any voices or anything. It just seemed like I was immersed in this sea of love. I mean, something happened.

Hena Cuevas>> It turned into what he calls a life-changing experience.

Gerard Straub>> I began to understand that I could put the power of film at the service of the poor.

Hena Cuevas>> He's made five documentaries in some of the most destitute countries of the world, this one from El Salvador.

Gerard Straub>> "This is all, you know, the waste. This shack is a fairly typical slum dwelling. Twenty-two people live in this house. There are two small rooms and a kitchen."

Gerard Straub>> I know the people. They're real to me and I spent enough time with the people that I was able to enter into a relationship and I think that's the secret of how I get, you know, really good stuff. I tell people that I don't take pictures. I try to receive pictures.

Hena Cuevas>> This approach helped him when he took on the Los Angeles Skid Row project called "Rescue Me". He spent over six months on the streets to earn the trust of his subjects, like Loretta whom he met at the beginning.

Gerard Straub>> "This is Loretta. When I first met her, she was new to living on the streets. How long have you been living here?"

Loretta>> "Oh, I guess about a month and a half, something like that."

Gerard Straub>> "What happened?"

Loretta>> "It's a long story. One day I'll be able to tell it, hopefully."

Hena Cuevas>> Some of the images he captures are haunting. Some people may find them very disturbing, like the story of little Moses from El Salvador.

Gerard Straub>> "This is Moses. Moses has an incurable blistering disease."

Gerard Straub>> When I was editing the little Moses section, my editor who works on a primetime CBS show and -- I mean, he was so distressed that, you know, he had to stop. As I'm watching, I thought to myself, well, how did I do this? I don't know what it is. I think there's maybe a grace.

Gerard Straub>> "Yet all the suffering in the world for me was embodied in this one small fragile boy. Moses is, without a doubt, the saddest person I've ever seen including the many lepers I encountered in Brazil."

Gerard Straub>> I think I'm able to do it because I know that I'm not like doing this to exploit little Moses or for anything. I truly believe in the bottom of my heart that these films can help, if not Moses, but someone else, some other kids.

Hena Cuevas>> And help kids is what he wants to do with his latest project, "The Patients of a Saint". The film deals with the work of American doctor, Tony Lazzara, and the sick children in Lima, Peru.

Gerard Straub>> "Severely deformed at birth, he has no arms and one of his legs is truncated. Victor was suffering from severe malnourishment when he was found by an Italian missionary sister who brought him to Dr. Tony for treatment."

Hena Cuevas>> There's also one of the documentaries where the emotion was just so strong that you decided to actually talk about it on camera.

Gerard Straub>> That was in Tijuana, Mexico.

Gerard Straub>> "There's something that hits me so deeply when I come to a garbage dump like this and see human beings picking through the garbage. I think it's what motivated me, you know, to want to do films like this, to tell the story of the poor, to bring the poor to you so that you could see it, you can experience something that you wouldn't normally experience."

Hena Cuevas>> And in the process of helping the poor, he's exhausted his own resources.

Gerard Straub>> I have to raise every penny myself. That's truly the most exhausting part. You have to get the films out. People have to see them. I mean, most people who do any kind of technical work on the films will work for far lower than their normal pay.

Hena Cuevas>> Others have helped because he simply asked.

Gerard Straub>> Martin Sheen I met in a church one day, an empty church. I'm sitting there and I just went up and started talking to him and he had a common love for helping the people in the Philippines and he volunteered to narrate the film, so that really kicked it in into overdrive.

Martin Sheen>> "Hunger has no borders nor does it discriminate."

Hena Cuevas>> You've been doing this for three years. How do you come to grips with the realities that you're filming and that you're working with?

Gerard Straub>> I don't get depressed so much because I also know there's great joy in these places and people have great faith. There's also an amazing spirit of resiliency with the people.

Martin Sheen>> "Moments before taking photographs of this elderly female leper whose life is overwhelmingly difficult and lonely, Gerry Straub asked her how she was doing. Her answer stunned him. "Very, very good, praise be to God."

Hena Cuevas>> How much longer will you continue doing this?

Gerard Straub>> As long as I'm able to stand. I just feel such passion for this. You know, I've never been so fulfilled in my entire life. Working at the networks, I could make a ton of money, have a lot of power and prestige. That meant nothing.

Hena Cuevas>> Straub says he's two mortgage payments away from losing his house. Still, he firmly believes his mission in life is to make sure the forgotten poor are always remembered. I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

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

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> It's a crime writer's dream, eighty years of crime photos, mug shots, evidence and, of course, murder victims. Everything from mobsters to modern day gangsters, and Vicki Curry got a peek when she headed down to the LAPD photo archives.

Vicki Curry>> It's a nondescript room jammed with boxes, thousands of them, stacked shelf upon shelf, row after row. Inside these boxes is the history of Los Angeles. This is the City Records Center in downtown. It holds a hundred fifty years worth of city documents, including photographs taken by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Lieutenant John Thomas>> Just by coincidence, these crime scene photographers captured something, you know, for eternity about a people and that's the people of Los Angeles and the men and women who serve on the Los Angeles Police Department.

Vicki Curry>> Lieutenant John Thomas and photographer, Merrick Morton, took on the task of sorting through the LAPD images in 2001. Since then, they've gone through nearly sixty thousand of an estimated one million negatives. So once you start going through these photos, what happens? Do you just start going through them and putting aside ones that you think are interesting?

Merrick Morton>> Yeah, yeah. It's always what we consider interesting shots.

Lieutenant John Thomas>> There are so many different ways you can go, you know, when you're actually looking through something that's what I kind of think is an accidental historic record because they weren't intending for this to be, you know, historical. It was just evidence, but you get a glimpse of so many things by looking at these photographs.

Vicki Curry>> The project began when Morton and his wife, Robin Blackman, wanted to create an exhibit for her Echo Park's gallery, Fototeka. Morton had been photographing street gangs for the LAPD since the early 1980's and he figured the department had a collection of crime scene photographs that would make for an interesting exhibit, but when he spoke with the city archivist --

Merrick Morton>> She said to me, well, I think that hell will freeze over before the LAPD will give you any images to look at.

Vicki Curry>> Meanwhile, Thomas was trying to get into the archives for his own research on the history of the LAPD.

Lieutenant John Thomas>> Word got back to me that there was somebody else looking to gain access to some of the negatives for, you know, historical and artistic purposes of putting them on display and that person happened to be Rick Morton.

Vicki Curry>> The two joined forces and got permission from the police chief at the time, Bernard Parks. They then started the massive job of sorting through negatives that date back to 1925, images ranging from crime scenes and forensic photographs to mug shots and staged training pictures.

Merrick Morton>> The very first step is going through the database that the city has. Here we have images from 1928 and then from 1929 and you see, on this sheet here, they said that they were supposed to be destroyed in 1948 and 1949. But for some reason, as I said, it actually slipped through the cracks and they were saved. So when we first came in here, we were actually told that there was a good chance that there wouldn't even be anything in here at all.

Vicki Curry>> Some of the oldest boxes contained highly flammable decomposing nitrate negatives. The fire department wanted to destroy all the negatives taken before 1955, but Morton and Thomas convinced officials that some of them could be saved with proper storage.

Merrick Morton>> It wasn't really the ideal area to be stored, so we were able to transfer approximately about three hundred thousand negatives over to an archival storage facility.

Vicki Curry>> Once they started going through the boxes, the team found a treasure trove of local history.

Lieutenant John Thomas>> That's probably the most fascinating part about doing this is getting a sense of, you know, how things have evolved in the city of Los Angeles. It's very addicting because you can literally do this for hours. I mean, once you get started going through, you never know when the next great shot you're going to find will be.

Merrick Morton>> 1957, so this is the first time that these have been gone through in probably almost fifty years.

Vicki Curry>> To give the project more artistic credibility, the team brought in a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The photographs were first exhibited at the Fototeka Gallery in September 2001.

Merrick Morton>> There were quite a few photographers out there who had a great sense of training or, in other words, I guess the easiest term would be they had a great eye.

Lieutenant John Thomas>> That's the interesting thing. In the earlier photographs, the crime scene photographers would allow so much more into the picture than you'd get today. Oftentimes, you have people standing in the background. You'd get kids that would be in the crime scene. It was quite common for them to take the entire crime scene from a panoramic perspective. There are some certain images that I can be convinced that are art, but by and large, I still see them as crime scene photographs.

Most of what you're looking at is pretty mundane. Some of the stuff gets very graphic, but you find these gems that make it all worth it, you know, after searching for several hours and you pull out one photograph that's as stunning as a bridge over the Los Angeles River and all of a sudden it's like, yeah, this was worth it. It's a complete packet of history, art and everything else.

Merrick Morton>> I often like the forensic images that are very simple. Some of the crime scene images, I like a lot too, that are a little more graphic, I must say. There's this one mob hit that you would think came out of "The Godfather".

Lieutenant John Thomas>> For me, some of the more humorous ones are my favorite. That gives a glimpse of what police work was like through the years and, as I mentioned before, what Los Angeles was like through the years.

Merrick Morton>> It's always nice to come across the Central Avenue. Anything on Central Avenue is always good.

Lieutenant John Thomas>> Yeah, especially from that time period.

Vicki Curry>> Since 2001, the exhibit has traveled across the United States and Europe.

Lieutenant John Thomas>> It gets people beyond the yellow tape. It takes the lay person to a place that they often don't get a chance to venture to.

Merrick Morton>> I also think that it's the film industry that creates this because, as we see films, we see a fantasy version of crime and this is the reality of it.

Vicki Curry>> And because it is reality, Morton and Thomas are always aware of the delicate subject matter.

Lieutenant John Thomas>> So you have to be sensitive to the fact that these, by and large, are crime scene images and you walk a very thin line between what is decent and what is proper and what is appropriate out of respect for the victims. That's been a concern from the very beginning, protecting the integrity of the archives and not over-commercializing them.

Vicki Curry>> But for John Thomas and Merrick Morton, their top priority is preserving the LAPD photo archives for future generations.

Lieutenant John Thomas>> That's probably the biggest concern that we have, you know, and just ensuring that, you know, they're going to be around. It's the story of Los Angeles. It's the story of the Los Angeles Police Department. It's the story of a people, the city of Los Angeles, how it evolved, and you can find all that in these images.

Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> 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.

Sponsored in part by:


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