Words To The Wise

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Words To The Wise

This year’s interviews touched on fame, faith and even sexism in baseball

Spend a few minutes scanning the Business Journal’s Interview page each week and you’re bound to run across snippets of the interesting as well as the unlikely. This year’s collection of elected officials, business executives, scientists and architects is no exception. What follows is a snapshot of the past year’s give and take.

Mark Lacter

Architect Frank Gehry on whether all the accolades get wearisome: “Everybody likes to be loved, and I’m not any different. On the other hand, I approach every job with the same level of insecurity that I always have, which I think is healthy. I’m going to be 74, and all this happened from the time I was 60. If this happened to me when I was 40, I might have been impressed with it, but since my work and life were pretty well-formed by the time I was 60, my insecurity patterns were still there so I don’t pay much attention.”

Dodgers Vice President Kim Ng on sexism in baseball: “I’ve gone into a visiting ballpark and I’m trying to go into the clubhouse and the security guard won’t let me in because I’m a woman. I need to talk to the manager and the coaches about the lineup … (and) I have to pull out an ID and show it to them and they say ‘OK, come on in.’ It’s not a huge deal. But it does affect me.”

L.A. City Controller Laura Chick on what cities can learn from the private sector: “For one thing, the private sector collects its bills better. Also, it does much better planning for the future and in keeping up with technological improvements. In hard times governments have a tendency to cut everything that doesn’t have to do with direct delivery of services. Sometimes, we very foolishly cut the positions that are revenue generating, like auditors and bill collectors.”

Movie producer and Liberty Hill Foundation board member Sarah Pillsbury on how her affluent family reacts to her activism: “They are moderate Republicans, very socially liberal but they still very much believe in the market economy. They are enlightened elitists, and I think they have trouble believing other people aren’t as nice as they are. Believe me, if all Republicans were as nice as my parents, the world today would be a better place.”

Planetary Society Executive Director Louis Friedman on whether there is still a need for the space shuttle program: “There are two choices for humankind: stay hidebound on Earth and keep its sights limited or to explore outward. For tens of centuries, we have made the latter choice. We are an exploring species and we don’t want to admit limits. The space program does satisfy a more basic part of us as humans in looking outward. So the question of the need is obvious yes, indeed there is a need for the program.”

Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Executive Director Bruce Davis on acceptance speeches at the Oscars: “Every year there are people who say magical things, but unfortunately it has become more and more common for people to pull out a sheet of paper. As soon as you see a piece of paper come out, you know nothing interesting is going to happen for the next couple of minutes. We may even have a system of punishment and reward based on whether or not you have a thank you sheet.”

Lions Gate Chief Executive Jon Feltheimer on how he gets the big stars to work for much less than their going rate: “My dad used to tell a story about how Frank Sinatra in his heyday signed with a manager nobody knew. And everybody said ‘Frank you could have had anybody, why did you sign with him?’ He said nobody else asked. So, the talent might have some material that they don’t think the studios will do, or maybe you let them direct, or you just have something superior that you think they would really want to do. But you have to ask.”

L.A. Superior Court Judge Judith Chirlin, selected by the American Bar Association to help reestablish Iraq’s judicial system, on being afraid soon after a bomb destroyed U.N.’s Baghdad headquarters: “I’ve made 14 trips to various parts of Eastern Europe. This was the first time I really felt I was in real danger. That night, in the hotel, we were all very nervous. A bunch of people had come back from the Canal Hotel and some were covered with blood. It didn’t really hit me, I guess, until going back to my room, when I was alone, wondering whether we’re going to get out of there. The delegation leader had his room next to mine. I knocked on his door and he and the Norwegian judge were both watching TV. I was the only one who hadn’t been in a war zone before. I did not sleep soundly that night.”

Architect Johannes Van Tilburg on how he got to Los Angeles from Holland: “A friend went to Sweden in 1964, where he won a look-alike contest. He looked like Richard Beymer’s character in “West Side Story” and the prize was a trip to New York and a screen test in Hollywood. When he got here, he wrote me and said, ‘This place is wide open,’ so when I got out of the army, I went to California. Because it was perceived that Holland was overpopulated, the Dutch government paid for my trip.”

Internet pioneer and UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock on why he has remained in teaching: “It’s a wonderful profession. You don’t have a boss, you do research on what you want, you pick your students. The best talent in the world comes to see you lecture, you travel, the money is good, and if you want, you can make more money in consulting or forming companies.”

The late Convention and Visitors Bureau president George Kirkland on what provided him support during his illness: “My faith. I am a very religious man, and I find comfort in my faith. I would be remiss not to mention the one who has cared the most, who is my wife. Her love has been so uplifting.”

DIC Entertainment Chief Executive Andy Heyward on working in the animation business: “I’ve only had two jobs in my life, Hanna Barbera and the job I do today. When the company began in the United States around 1982, I was working out of my mom’s kitchen. My wife was the first secretary but she quit because she said I yelled at her too much. I was writing the scripts, doing the voice direction, cutting sound effects, mixing, editing, storyboard corrections. What I enjoy best is working with new talent.”

Assemblyman Keith Richman on the lessons learned from running for mayor of what would have been the San Fernando Valley city had secession passed: “I learned that it’s hard to run in a campaign where people are scared of retribution from the current establishment in the City of Los Angeles. People didn’t want to see their names on campaign lists because of the fear of retribution in permitting or other issues dealing with the city.”

Hot Wheels Chief Designer Larry Wood on his first car memory: “My mom tells me my first word was car. I can remember being a little kid and identifying the cars. In the 1950s, that was pretty easy because they were all so unique. I was in a little town in Connecticut, and we didn’t see many new cars. So I would go out on top of a hill with a buddy in the summers and watch all the cars go by on Route 9 on their way to the beach.”

Los Angeles Opera Chairman Marc Stern (also president of TCW Group Inc.) on what got him interested in opera: “My father, who was a vegetable farmer, wasn’t an opera buff but on Saturday afternoons he liked listening to this strange music from the Metropolitan Opera. I used to sit on his lap in a tractor and listen. But the idea of being able to go to an opera was just beyond any expectation I had at the time. Later, at Columbia University, I was a research assistant and one night the professor had tickets to the Met and couldn’t use them. I was just blown away.”

Advertising agency executive Larry Postaer on the ad climate in Los Angeles: “I don’t think this market is hopping. There are no smokestacks in Los Angeles. The industrial might of America is not here, particularly. The big soft drink and beer companies aren’t here. The airlines aren’t here anymore and even the banks, there used to be a number of them, they are all gone. There are a lot of smaller, non-consumer advertising accounts but not a lot for companies like ours that are experts at building brands.”

CB Richard Ellis President Brett White on talk of a revived downtown: “It’s not going to be like Denver where they put in the ballpark and downtown was revitalized overnight, or San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. This is a much more complex city. But people are again looking at downtown as a place to be. Look at U.S. Bank (which signed a lease for 165,000 square feet at Library Tower). For years, it was run from the Westside. They made a strategic decision to be downtown.”

Investor Michael Tennenbaum on setting up his own private equity firm: “It was scary. I grew up on a little island in Georgia and I used to swim and dive a lot, and any time I went up to the high diving board I wondered why I was doing that. And that’s the way I felt.”

Democratic Assemblywoman Jenny Oropeza on the difference between working with former Gov. Gray Davis and current Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger: “Working with Gov. Davis was not easy. Not that we argued or disagreed a whole lot. It was just hard to get him to engage sometimes. Gov. Schwarzenegger seems to have a pleasant demeanor and be just a little more likeable and open.”

Nightclub impresario John Lyons on a typical workweek: “I’m here when I feel like being at work and I’m not when I don’t. Once a place is up and running and ticking like a watch, that’s when I start to get bored and don’t want to be there. When I left the House of Blues, the fun part was over as far as solving all the problems and dealing with all the lunacy. Once everything’s working smoothly, it’s not as much fun.”

Contributors to this page: Kate Berry, Amanda Bronstad, Conor Dougherty, Howard Fine, Andy Fixmer, David Greenberg, Danny King, Darrell Satzman and Michael Thuresson.

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