Doolittle Plan Sets Stage for Latino Center

An ambitious plan to convert the 1,021-seat Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood into a Latino-oriented performance center will be officially unveiled today. If the plan is realized, the theater would be operated by the recently formed Ricardo Montalban-Nosotros Foundation and may be renamed the Ricardo Montalban Theatre.

“This has national implications,” said Al Pin~a, an official for the National Council of La Raza, the Washington, D.C.-based civil rights organization that helped fund the development of the plan. There is no comparably large theater emphasizing Latino programming anywhere in the country, he said.

The Montalban-Nosotros Foundation signed an exclusive negotiating agreement Wednesday with Regent Properties, a real estate and investment firm that plans to redevelop the area between Sunset Boulevard and the Doolittle, on Vine Street.

If Regent’s proposal is approved by the Los Angeles City Council, the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency will buy the Doolittle from owner UCLA for $2.1 million and convey it to Regent. The deal would be part of a public/private partnership that would also build a Hollywood Marketplace shopping center in the block south of the Doolittle, offices and stores on the same block as the Doolittle, as well as adjoining parking structures and a 5,000-square-foot building for support of theater activities, just west of the theater.

Regent then would contract with the Montalban-Nosotros Foundation to renovate and run the theater. It has not been determined whether the foundation would pay rent, reimburse Regent for the renovation costs, or a combination of both forms of payment, according to Regent managing partner Douglas Brown. But the foundation hopes to raise as much as $4.5 million for the renovation, the full costs of which have not been set. The project would bring the theater up to modern construction codes, restore the theater’s facade to its original 1927 appearance, and include “a bit of asbestos removal,” Brown said.

During the renovation, theater operations would be restricted by the construction, with only a $250,000 budget projected for the first year’s programming and operations, according to Duncan Webb, a consultant hired by the foundation and the National Council of La Raza. But four years later, the annual budget would rise to as much as $1.5 million, three-fourths of which would be recovered through earned revenues, according to the plan. Montalban-Nosotros also hopes to raise an $8.5-million endowment to support programming at the theater and eventually to launch an arts academy as a charter school in downtown Los Angeles.

The foundation is an outgrowth of Nosotros Inc., an organization that the Mexican-born movie and TV star Ricardo Montalban created nearly 30 years ago in order to promote Latinos in show business. For years, Nosotros ran a 60-seat theater on a side street in east Hollywood, staging a few modest productions each year, with a current annual budget of $390,000. It also sponsors the annual Golden Eagle Awards, recognizing Latino achievement in arts and entertainment. The official announcement of the Doolittle project is slated for a press conference preceding the presentation of this year’s Golden Eagles, tonight in Beverly Hills.

Three representatives of Nosotros will be on the proposed 15-member Montalban-Nosotros board, but the two organizations will be separate. Nosotros productions are not expected to dominate the theater’s programming, given the limited resources of Nosotros and the goal of making the building a more diverse theater. “It’s important that it’s busy all the time,” Webb said.

Nosotros President Jerry Velasco said tentative talks have already begun with East L.A. Classic Theatre, Bilingual Foundation of the Arts and “seven or eight” other potential users of the theater. However, Carmen Zapata, producing director of the BilingualFoundation, told The Times her group probably won’t participate because the theater is “too large.”

Not all the programming will be Latino, Velasco added. “I don’t want to see us discriminating” on any grounds other than quality, he said.

Occasional bookings of commercial productions like those that have intermittently occupied the hall, such as “Art” earlier this year, will probably be necessary, he said: “If we come in with 100% community productions, we’ll close.”

Webb and the foundation’s attorney Joseph Avila said there had been no discussion yet of the union requirements at the Doolittle. Some local producers have cited the costs of the theater’s stagehands and box office crew, who work on a union contract, as being prohibitively expensive. And nearly all of the productions that have played the Doolittle have operated on Actors’ Equity contracts that are relatively costly, compared to the token fees that Nosotros paid actors in the past at what Velasco called its “small matchbox” theater, which operated under the Equity Waiver Plan and then Equity’s subsequent 99-Seat Theater Plan.

“I just hope the theater maintains its professional standing, that they continue to bring in professional union shows and maintain the union house crew,” said John Holly, Equity’s Western Regional Director.

Nosotros’ Velasco said he hoped the unions would “give us a break” on the community-based productions at the theater. Equity granted concessions to Nosotros when it produced a couple of shows in a mid-sized theater years ago, he said. But union contracts can’t be negotiated until the group officially secures its residency at the theater.

Although the Montalban-Nosotros negotiating agreement is with Regent, not the city, civic officials “created the marriage,” said Rocky Delgadillo, deputy mayor for economic development. The city’s Hollywood redevelopment team knew that UCLA was interested in selling the Doolittle; the cross-town university has had little need for the theater since 1993, when UCLA bought the Westwood Playhouse (now the Geffen Playhouse) across the street from the campus as an adjunct to its theater curriculum. “We put together people we knew were interested in doing things in Hollywood,” Delgadillo said. “We acted as an agent.” He noted that “Hollywood is more and more a Latino community,” so a Latino-oriented theater seemed appropriate. The area’s City Council member Jackie Goldberg also supported the arrangement.

Some other groups indicated interest in taking over the theater, including the California Youth Theatre. Besides groups that were referred to Regent by the city, Regent partner Brown said he spoke to a few other nonprofits that were recommended by members of the arts community, but the Montalban-Nosotros proposal “satisfied the most community needs on a broad basis.”

Because there was no general request for proposals, news of the Nosotros arrangement caught much of the L.A. theater community by surprise. “This one just snuck up on all of us,” said Lars Hansen, president of L.A.’s main stage-producers’ organization, Theatre LA. Nosotros joined Theatre LA in 1995 but took a leave of absence last January, as it vacated its former theater.

Jose Luis Valenzuela, whose own Latino Theatre Company occasionally performs in mid-sized spaces that require Actors’ Equity contracts, said that most mid-sized companies would not consider running the Doolittle because of the expense, but Nosotros has “a very good fund-raising arm and a strong board. Their connections are a lot better than anyone’s. That’s what it takes.”

Montalban’s name “makes it so much easier to request funds,” Velasco said. “I told him we want to name the theater after him whether he likes it or not.”

One board member already recruited for the Montalban-Nosotros Foundation is William Wilkinson, a senior vice president of the Disney Co.

The foundation is likely to hire an executive director, not an artistic director, because the foundation is primarily “a facility management organization, not a producing organization,” Webb said.

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“This [theater plan] has national implications.”

AL PIN~A

Official for civil rights organization National Council of La Raza, noting that there is no comparably large theater emphasizing Latino programming anywhere in the country.