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Life & Times Transcript

04/03/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

As the debate grows over controlling illegal immigration, we get two views on policing California's border.

Monica Hernandez>> There's been incidents of violence and this is just vigilantism. Vigilantism, as far as I know, is illegal.

Jim Gilchrist>> It's my duty as a patriotic American to come and help resolve the problem. Am I promoting revolution and burning down buildings? No, no, not at all.

Val Zavala>> And then, think it's just coincidence when you glimpse a product in your favorite show? Some writers are putting their foot down over products that dictate plot lines.

These stories and more 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>> We're all used to United States agents patrolling the Mexican border, but these days hundreds of regular citizens are heading south and they're taking with them video cameras. But is the video that they shoot reality or propaganda? Hena Cuevas talks to both sides of this new kind of border war.

Hena Cuevas>> Along the two thousand mile United States-Mexico border, cameras are an important tool. Night scopes help border patrols spot foreigners trying to dash across the desert. But the border patrol isn't the only one wielding cameras. Citizen groups like the American Civil Liberties Union are finding that video can say what words can't. This is an excerpt from their documentary, "Rights on the Line: Vigilantes at the Border".

>> "Whatever it takes to stop the flow of people coming across the border right now has to be done for the survival of America."

>> "We need to get them removed because they're taking over our communities as strangers from Mexico and wherever else they come from."

Hena Cuevas>> "Rights on the Line" is a joint production between the ACLU and the American Friends Service Committee. At first, the idea was to show the growing militarization of the border.

Ray Ybarra>> "So here we are, International Avenue, where I like to consider my little playground when we used to come and visit my grandfather. You just look at the gigantic steel fence. You can see a huge difference from what it was like when we were growing up here."

Hena Cuevas>> The narrator is Ray Ybarra from the ACLU who also shot most of the documentary. In April of last year, the Minuteman Project got off the ground. Ybarra found himself shooting footage of civilian volunteers lining up to stop illegal immigrants from crossing into the United States.

Ray Ybarra>> You have people who want to come down here and patrol the border. The white supremacist websites are going crazy talking about this issue and I have no doubt in my mind that there will be white supremacists here hunting for migrants in April.

Hena Cuevas>> Nearly two thousand Minuteman volunteers from around the country converged along the border to assist immigration agents. The Minuteman Project was founded by Chris Simcox seen here in the documentary and Jim Gilchrist, an Orange County retiree who ran unsuccessfully for Congress last year.

Jim Gilchrist>> I feel it's my duty as a patriotic American to come and help resolve the problem. Am I promoting revolution and burning down buildings? No, no, not at all.

Hena Cuevas>> Monica Hernandez is one of the producers of "Rights on the Line". She says it reveals the danger of civilians taking the law into their own hands.

Monica Hernandez>> There's been incidents of violence and this is just vigilantism. Vigilantism, as far as I know, is illegal, so that's what I see the problem being, the major problem.

Hena Cuevas>> The documentary paints the Minuteman Project as vigilantes, people who take the law into their own hands, but Minuteman founder Gilchrist refutes that description. He says the volunteers are there only to report illegal activity.

Jim Gilchrist>> This is not a war, not in a conventional sense. It's probably a philosophical war that I firmly believe in to preserve our national identity, our sovereignty.

Chris Simcox>> "So we're a neighborhood watch group. It's no different than a neighborhood watch group in many cities around this country."

Hena Cuevas>> The first footage was shot in Arizona, but as the Minuteman Project grew in popularity, it expanded to the San Diego area. Then the ACLU realized that the Arizona video could be useful in another way.

Monica Hernandez>> So we figured what we would do is then refocus our documentary to be more specific on what the vigilantes were doing out in Arizona and then use that as an organizing tool out in San Diego to prepare for when they would come down to San Diego.

Hena Cuevas>> Eventually, the Minutemen did make it into California and the ACLU followed with a hundred fifty observers and video cameras.

>> "Who goes there?"

>> "How you doing, gentlemen?"

>> "Good. How are you doing?"

>> "All right. Heard you got two."

>> "Who are you?"

>> Legal observers. How about you?"

>> Well, we didn't get anything. There's two gentlemen sitting down over here. They're waiting for BP."

Hena Cuevas>> This isn't the first time a group of private citizens has gone to the border. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the KKK gathered volunteers and decided to patrol the border. Back then, there were no official reports of violence and that, says founder Gilchrist, is going to be the key to keeping the Minuteman Project around. He says he needs to make sure his volunteers don't get into any trouble.

Jim Gilchrist>> I cannot guarantee that somebody isn't going to do something stupid someday, sometime. I mean, that's the law of probabilities. But, so far, we've had a hundred percent cooperation with our volunteers. We emphasize it. They're all mature enough to know that this is not a war. You're not down there to play cowboy.

Hena Cuevas>> Gilchrist and Simcox are sure the video will show that, so far, the Minuteman volunteers have been nonviolent.

Chris Simcox>> "No immigrant, illegal or legal, coming across that border has ever been harmed by an American citizen. There is not a documented account since 1976. There have been some wild allegations, but there's not one victim."

Hena Cuevas>> But the documentary producers wanted proof, so Ybarra did a public records request.

Monica Hernandez>> And we found this person who had been beaten up and had been deported. We actually went to Mexico City to do the interview with him there and he related to us what his actual experiences were when he was hit.

[Film Clip]

Hena Cuevas>> But there is no way to know if the abuse was at the hands of a Minuteman volunteer or was in any way related to the project. And according to Gilchrist, they are the ones who have been attacked.

Jim Gilchrist>> Sometimes we have bricks thrown at us and coffee cups and bottles and other times somebody will threaten to stab us with a knife. We've been shot at once down the California border.

Hena Cuevas>> One of the biggest criticisms leveled against Gilchrist is that some of his volunteers carry guns.

Jim Gilchrist>> The reason is that, having been shot at and knowing that border patrol agents are shot at routinely and assaulted and battered with rocks and other weapons, I felt it would be a disservice to ask people to go to the border and martyr yourself for me. I mean, I'm kind of laughing there. How ridiculous does that sound? "Join me at the border and just turn the other cheek and let yourself be murdered." I'm not about to let that happen.

Hena Cuevas>> But Gilchrist emphasizes they're allowed only if it's in an area where it's already legal to do so. He's aware of the repercussions if someone were to get hurt or, even worse, killed.

Jim Gilchrist>> If someone does something seriously wrong, they will pay the consequences and I've made it very clear that I will side with my adversaries for their prosecution and conviction.

Hena Cuevas>> What do you tell people who watch these documentaries that are against your project?

Jim Gilchrist>> Believe almost nothing of what you see, absolutely nothing of what you read (laughter) and come and visit me. If you want to see what the Minuteman Project is all about, then come and join us.

Hena Cuevas>> However, Hernandez says that she hopes the video will sway public opinion. In the meantime, as border patrol cameras capture illegal crossings, video cameras may help ensure Americans themselves don't step over the line. I'm Hena Cuevas 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, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> Television advertisers are frustrated. More and more viewers are getting TiVo and skipping right through those commercials. That means they have to come up with other ways to get their products in front of consumers and they're doing it with something called "product integration".

You can see it most blatantly in so-called reality shows like "The Apprentice" or "Extreme Makeover Home Edition". Products of companies don't just appear on screen visually. They're part of the script like this reference to a builder.

Eduardo Lox>> "Randy, Brett and Megan Jones are behind Open Construction, a very sort of close-knit family company much like the community that they come from."

Val Zavala>> The scripts are always positive because the company has paid to be part of the program's content. This has the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild taking to the picket line. They say actors should not have to shill for a product they may or may not endorse and, if they do endorse it, they should be paid and consumers should know that companies have paid to be written into the script. We talked with the president of the Writers Guild of America West, Patric Verrone.

Patric Verrone>> In my career, I've been fortunate to work on shows like "The Simpsons". I worked on "The Tonight Show" when Johnny Carson was there. The material that we wrote, for example, for Carson, he would deliver in front of the curtain or at the desk. Then if he turned to the camera and held up a bottle of beer or a box of cereal, somebody else wrote that or he adlibbed it. It was a different skill-set in terms of the actual advertisement of products and I think viewers are particularly savvy to the notion of being advertised to.

We're living in a quickly advancing electronic age where people have DVRs, digital video recorders like TiVo, where they speed through the thirty-second commercial. Producers are finding that they can't get the ad revenues that they want by just selling thirty-second commercials, so the advertisers are trying to insinuate the products into the body of the show.

The difficulty we have as writers and, again, actors and directors, is that that's a different job. What we're being asked to do is to put that product possibly or likely in an incongruent presentation and it's uncomfortable. We don't get any additional compensation for it. In the case of many actors, if you're an actor that has a commercial contract with one brand of cola and you're being asked in a show to advertise another brand of cola, you actually have a conflict of interest to deal with.

So we've been -- again, we found this has been the case mostly or initially in reality television where writers and contestants don't have the protections of the unions and they've been sort of the canaries in the coalmine. They've been the first place that a lot of this new product integration has been tested and we're trying to hold the line. We've asked for a code of conduct with our employers. We're looking for a sort of rules and regulations that govern how this sort of thing is done.

Val Zavala>> So you're asking for a code of conduct. What are some of the key elements of that code that you would like to see enforced?

Patric Verrone>> Well, chief among them is the notion of disclosure. There are rules on the books already. The Federal Communications Commission, even before there was television, had rules on the books that govern the notion of payola and placing products in exchange for money. You'll see on many shows and in movies at the end where credits will say, "Promotional consideration paid for by. . ." It's very important to us that those disclosures be in place because we believe, as viewers ourselves, that people want to be told when they're being sold to.

Val Zavala>> Money spent on product integration in television and film hit the one billion dollar mark in 2004. In television alone, there was an eighty-four percent increase in product integration. "The Apprentice" is famous for it. The show is full of quick references like this one.

Martha Stewart>> "Each team was given an empty suite at the Westin Hotel."

Val Zavala>> But it also contains longer scripts. You can bet that Wishbone paid a pretty penny for this.

Martha Stewart>> "When I was a child, my mom took me to the grocery store and bought her first jar of salad dressing. It was called Wishbone and Wishbone has been making salad dressing for about fifty years and their annual revenues are three hundred million dollars."

Patric Verrone>> If advertisers want to have their products in these programs, they need to have the buy-in and the approval and the consent of the talent community, of the writers and the actors.

Val Zavala>> Now regarding children's programming, some people would say there should not be any product placement, much less product integration, in children's programs precisely because of what you said. They're very impressionable.

Patric Verrone>> That's right. It's certainly been the case that most of the companies are playing fair about that. There hasn't been, in our mind, a place where the children programming crosses those boundaries. But, you know, adults are being forced to watch stuff that -- I'm afraid what's going to happen is that people are going to end up speeding through the programming itself because it's got a commercial built in to it and you end up missing story points, you end up missing something that's not -- the firewall is going to be gone between advertisements and entertainment.

Val Zavala>> But our culture has become inundated with advertising. You can hardly go anywhere, grocery stores, airports, anywhere, without seeing televisions on and advertising. Isn't this just simply the next frontier and is not anything that we should worry about as consumers?

Patric Verrone>> Sure. Advertisers build television. I mean, this is a medium, particularly network-free broadcast television. Not what we're on right now, of course (laughter), but most of that was built on the notion of thirty-second spots and somebody paying to underwrite the program. Not the case, say, with direct video downloads. Not the case with, say, HBO or with feature films. Those are different business models.

It's likely that this kind of integration will continue. You know, we're in this business too. I mean, writers that I represent, the actors in the Screen Actors Guild, are very much interested in making sure that the industry continues to develop and grow. If it's an advertisement-based industry, great. So be it.

The problem is, we want to be part of the discussion where we're not being forced to shoe-horn products or promote products that we're not comfortable with having our names and faces associated with. By all means, this is how, you know, our paycheck comes through this source as well. We have no problem with the business model. We just want to be at the table where these decisions are made.

Val Zavala>> Patric Verrone, president of the Writers Guild of America West, thank you very much for your time.

Patric Verrone>> You're welcome, Val.

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>> If you were an artist or a musician or a writer back at the turn of the century, one of the coolest places to hang out was the Charles Lummis House. Well, now this unique home is more than a hundred years old, but it survived. It's a little hard to find, but as Vicki Curry tells us, well worth the effort.

Vicki Curry>> Take a drive up the 110 Freeway just north of downtown Los Angeles and you'll come to a chain link fence. Take a look behind that fence. It's like something out of a storybook, a home unlike any you'll ever see, with two distinct personalities. Half Spanish adobe, half stone castle.

Denise Spooner>> It's one of the really unusual features. You see a lot of stone houses, but none of them are quite like this one.

Vicki Curry>> That's because this one was built by Charles Fletcher Lummis, a man who was every bit as unique and ruggedly individualistic as the home he built. He was a journalist, adventurer, early booster of Los Angeles and advocate of the arts and crafts movement. Denise Spooner is the Executive Director of the Historical Society of Southern California. She oversees the house Lummis called El Alisal, Spanish for "Place of the Sycamores".

Denise Spooner>> He built the house in the late 1890s, but it continued to be a project of his into the 1920s. As we say, the house kind of grew organically. The arts and crafts movement was sort of a reaction to industrialization. So much of the house was built by hand, whether we're talking about the doors that Lummis actually planed and used in ads to fashion the doors by hand, hanging them by hand, pouring the concrete floors by himself. The beams in the house came from the Santa Fe railroad. So a lot of found materials that he re-crafted himself and then put into the house.

People that were members of the arts and crafts movement advocated a closer relationship with nature, so the reason that the house was made of arroyo stone is because it's located right here on the banks of the Arroyo Seco River.

Vicki Curry>> But the house is more than an architectural rarity. It's also a tribute to the west and the people that captured Charles Lummis's heart.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> He didn't come to this region until he was well into his twenties. Lummis was actually born in Massachusetts. Later, he was working at a newspaper in Ohio. This was in 1884 when he accepted a job at the Los Angeles Times.

Denise Spooner>> And that was a really important period in southern California's history because it was really the first boom time where a lot of people from around the country were coming to southern California.

Vicki Curry>> Lummis decided to tramp across the continent, as he called it, walking all the way from Cincinnati to Los Angeles.

Denise Spooner>> And as he was traveling across the United States, he would send sort of dispatches to the Times and they would be published. So when he actually got to southern California, he was something of a celebrity because he had all kinds of different adventures on his way here.

Vicki Curry>> Those adventures sparked a life-long love for the people and culture of the southwest. So he decided to share this love and, in 1914, he built the Southwest Museum on Mount Washington with his own personal collection of artifacts.

Denise Spooner>> So this is the room that Lummis called his museum and it housed the collections that he gathered especially from a lot of the native people. One of the most significant features of this room, the one on which so many people always remark on, are actually these glass plate positives. They're actually pictures that Lummis took and they sort of are arranged in a way that replicates some of the journeys that he took across the southwest into Mexico and then into South America.

Vicki Curry>> This is a man who loved photography and he photographed anything and everything. So he really helped to keep a record of those times then?

Denise Spooner>> Oh, absolutely. Yeah, he did. Of those times of native people, of building the house, of people in Los Angeles, all the artists and poets and politicians, anybody who came to El Alisal. People like Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, anybody that was interested in the life of the mind and in arts at that time.

Vicki Curry>> As an editor at the Los Angeles Times and later the magazines "Land of Sunshine" and "Out West", Lummis actively promoted and celebrated the southwest and its lifestyle.

Denise Spooner>> People always associate southern California with the very things that Lummis advertised: sunshine, good health, lots of opportunities for outdoor living.

Vicki Curry>> And that hasn't changed, but the bad news is that the Lummis House is changing. In fact, it's falling apart.

Denise Spooner>> The house has suffered seismic damage as a consequence of earthquakes over time. There are two guest houses that are on the property that were multi-story actually prior to the Sylmar earthquake in 1969. Now it's just one story because the top floor fell off. Water intrusion is a huge problem. There is a leak right about here that creates what we call Lake Lummis in the floor.

Vicki Curry>> Lake Lummis is the start of a lot of other problems. The water leaks are also causing mold and bacteria to grow throughout the house.

Denise Spooner>> This is one of the rooms in which the damage that the house has endured is most clearly visible and it's visible in a couple of ways. First of all, on the walls throughout the room, you can see a lot of where there's been water intrusion. After the water actually dries up and evaporates, then what you're left with is the salt from the water and then it blasts through the paint and the plaster. So a lot of people come in here and they think, wow, why don't they repaint this place? But the damage is way deeper than just repainting. We think that it's possible anyway that, in an earthquake, damage was done, but then because of the weight of the tower on the outside of the building, it's actually pulling this section of the building kind of apart.

Vicki Curry>> Kind of ironic when you consider Lummis bragged that he built the house that would last a thousand years, but that's not going to happen without major restoration.

Denise Spooner>> If we don't move forward with taking greater care of the house, then we will lose the Lummis House. All historic structures are like this, but if you don't ever do anything to them, then you shouldn't be surprised when they just fall down.

Vicki Curry>> The house is owned by the city of Los Angeles which can't afford to repair it. Historic preservation is low on the city's list of priorities, so dollars are scarce. Any restoration of the Lummis House will probably cost millions and, even before that gets started, it will cost about two hundred thousand just to assess the house's condition.

Denise Spooner>> These projects are very complicated. They're very time-consuming because what we're doing is not just shoring up the foundation of El Alisal, not just making it so that it's not unsafe, but really restoring it so that it really represents Lummis and his time. It's a physical piece of history that links people in the present to the past and helps them better understand how the past is connected to the present and the present is connected to the past.

Vicki Curry>> And that's what's most important to the Historical Society of Southern California, saving the house in order to share it. I'm Vicki Curry for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> For more information on the Lummis House and restoration efforts, you can check out their website at www.socalhistory.org. 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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