For the past two and a half years, the battle for the future of L.A.’s Fairfax Avenue corridor has been raging between economic powerhouses.
Hackman Capital Partners, which owns and operates nearly two dozen studio properties, has been seeking to expand and modernize the historic 25-acre site known as Television City, where “American Idol,” “All in the Family” and scores of other shows were filmed.
Two neighborhood giants have pushed back against the project: A.F. Gilmore Co., which owns the Original Farmers Market, and the Grove LLC, which owns the popular Grove shopping center developed by billionaire Rick Caruso. Those businesses joined with neighborhood groups who say the project is too big and, without changes, will make local traffic much worse.
The debate over the $1-billion project has played out amid a serious downturn in the region’s entertainment industry, with studios shifting film and television production to Georgia, New Mexico and other out-of-state locations.
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council sided with Hackman, voting 13-0 to approve the TVC project, including its environmental impact report, its tract map and new zoning for the site. Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who represents the area, described the development as critical to the future of the local entertainment industry.
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Yaroslavsky said out-of-state production has cost numerous Angelenos their jobs, tearing families apart and hurting restaurants, catering companies and other businesses.
“This project represents an opportunity, a real opportunity, to keep Los Angeles as the entertainment capital of the world,” she said. “We cannot let this opportunity pass us by. The stakes are simply too high.”
Zach Sokoloff, Hackman’s senior vice president, expressed gratitude for the council’s vote. That decision, he said, will be a critical part of the effort to rebuild the industry, along with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push to expand Hollywood production tax credits.
The TVC project is expected to add 980,000 square feet of offices, soundstages, production facilities and retail space on the property, located on Fairfax at Beverly Boulevard. A 15-story office tower is planned for the interior of the campus. When fully built out, the facility would occupy nearly 1.7 million square feet.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky speaks Tuesday in support of the $1-billion TVC project, which would expand and redevelop the old CBS Television City site at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue.
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(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Yaroslavsky said she worked with Hackman to steadily reduce the size of the project over the past year, removing one tower entirely. But detractors have remained unconvinced, saying the project is still out of scale with its surroundings.
Shelley Wagers, co-chair of Neighbors for a Responsible TVC Development, said the developer provided “minimal concessions” to the nine businesses and community groups that filed challenges to the planning commission’s approval of the project. She contends that the project is more about the development of office space and less about studio operations.
“Given the flawed process and spotty administrative record, litigation is both inevitable and likely to be successful,” Wagers said after the vote.
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Hackman Capital acquired the CBS Television City property in 2019, filing its application to redevelop the site two years later. In 2022, A.F. Gilmore and the Grove expressed “profound concern” about the development plan, calling it a “massively scaled, speculative development which, if approved, would overwhelm, disrupt, and forever transform the community.”
That same year, the Grove and A.F. Gilmore co-founded the Beverly Fairfax Community Alliance, using it to rally the neighborhood against Hackman’s project. Over a two-year span, the two companies poured nearly $1.2 million into the alliance’s public relations efforts, purchasing newspaper ads, billboard space and glossy mailers warning that the project would bring intolerable traffic and 20 years of construction.
Hackman fired back last spring, filing a complaint with the city Ethics Commission that called the Beverly Fairfax Community Alliance a “shell funded by private commercial interests.” In a letter to the commission, Hackman attorney Jim Sutton said the public deserved to know whether the alliance and its affiliated groups are “merely a ‘front’ for private commercial interests.”
Jason Kaune, an attorney for the Beverly Fairfax Community Alliance, said in an email that his client has complied with the city’s ethics rules, disclosing its spending on a quarterly basis. The Grove and A.F. Gilmore are the alliance’s sole funders, he said.
The alliance has been providing logistical support to Neighbors for a Responsible TVC Development, a coalition of community groups that includes the Beverly Wilshire Homes Assn. and Save Beverly Fairfax.
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Architect’s rendering of the proposed renovations of the Television City property, located in the city’s Fairfax district.
(Foster + Partners and Television City)
Wagers, who co-chairs the neighbors organization, pushed back on the criticism from Hackman, saying she and her neighbors are acting out of concern for the Beverly Fairfax community — and are “not on anyone’s payroll.” She accused the developer of using concerns about film production to push through a project that is “wildly out of scale and out of character” with the neighborhood.
Stan Savage Jr., president & CEO of A.F. Gilmore Co., lodged his own concerns, telling the planning commission last year that traffic to and from the TVC project would make the Original Farmers Market, a major tourist destination, more difficult to reach.
“What the developer is proposing will have substantial and irrevocable consequences, damaging the small businesses of the market,” he told the commission.
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Other business leaders have rallied around the TVC project. Jacqueline Canter, co-owner of Canter’s Deli, told the council on Tuesday that she has attended every City Hall hearing on the project to show her support.
“That’s how important this project is for the community,” she said. “TVC will create new jobs, which means more customers, more lunch orders and more business.”
The TVC project also drew support from construction trade unions and from the Entertainment Union Coalition, which represents 160,000 workers in Hollywood, including actors, directors and a wide array of behind-the-scenes players. In a letter to the city, the coalition warned that production work is so scarce that a significant number of workers face losing their homes — and are looking to move elsewhere.
“They aren’t choosing to leave Los Angeles,” the coalition wrote. “But in order to take care of themselves and their families, they will have to.”
Under the TVC proposal, Hackman would preserve and restore the 1952 Television City studio building designed by the architectural firm Pereira & Luckman — a move endorsed by the L.A. Conservancy, a historic preservation group.
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Lawyers for the Grove and A.F. Gilmore did not immediately respond to questions about whether they will sue the city over the council’s vote. Lawyers for the companies have assailed the city’s handling of the approval process, saying it failed to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act.
Yaroslavsky described the final project as a compromise and noted that Hackman agreed to spend $6.4 million on community initiatives, including upgrades to nearby Pan Pacific Park. She also voiced hope that the various factions would avoid a drawn-out court battle.
Settlement conversations have already begun between the developer and critics of the project, Yaroslavsky said.
“I think they’re going to settle quickly. That’s my sense, that’s my hope,” she said. “I’m projecting optimism.”
A former executive at Live Nation, the world’s largest live entertainment company, is suing the company, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after he raised concerns about alleged financial misconduct and improper accounting practices.
Nicholas Rumanes alleges he was “fraudulently induced” in 2022 to leave a lucrative position as head of strategic development at a real estate investment trust to create a new role as executive vice president of development and business practice at Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised “serious and legitimate alarm” over the the company’s business practices.
As a result, he says, he was “unlawfully terminated,” according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
“Rumanes was, simply put, promised one job and forced to accept another. And then he was cut loose for insisting on doing that lesser job with integrity and honesty,” according to the lawsuit.
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He is seeking $35 million in damages.
Representatives for Live Nation were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week after a federal jury in Manhattan found that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly over major concert venues, controlling 86% of the concert market.
Rumanes’ lawsuit describes a “culture of deception” at Live Nation, saying its “basic business model was to misstate and exaggerate financial figures in efforts to solicit and secure business.”
Such practices “spanned a wide spectrum of projects in what appeared to be a company-wide pattern of financial misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,” the lawsuit states.
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Rumanes says he received materials and documents that showed that the company inflated projected revenues across multiple venue development projects.
Additionally, Rumanes contends that the company violated a federal law that requires independent financial auditing and transparency and instead ran Live Nation “through a centralized, opaque structure” that enables it to “bypass oversight and internal checks and balances.”
In 2010, as a condition of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the newly formed company agreed to a consent decree with the government that prohibited the firm from threatening venues to use Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department found that the company had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.
Rumanes contends that he brought his concerns to the attention of the company’s management, but his warnings were “repeatedly ignored.”
At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.
When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.
After more than two and a half years of research, planning and construction, Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open June 20.
Co-founded by new media artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the museum anchors the $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” created by Refik Anadol Studio, was inspired by a trip to the Amazon and uses vast data sets to immerse visitors in a machine-generated sensory experience of the natural world.
The architecture of the space, which Anadol calls “a living museum,” is used to reflect distant rainforest ecosystems, including changing temperature, light, smell and visuals. Anadol refers to these large-scale, shimmering tableaus as “digital sculptures.”
“This is such an important technology, and represents such an important transformation of humanity,” Anadol said in an interview. “And we found it so meaningful and purposeful to be sure that there is a place to talk about it, to create with it.”
The 35,000-square-foot privately funded museum devotes 25,000 square feet to public space, with the remaining 10,000 square feet holding the in-house technology that makes the space run. Dataland contains five immersive galleries and a 30-foot ceiling. An escalator by the entrance will transport guests to the experiences below. The museum declined to say how much Dataland, designed by architecture firm Gensler, cost to build.
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An isometric architectural rendering of Dataland. The 25,000-square-foot AI arts museum also contains an additional 10,000 square feet of non-public space that holds its operational technology.
(Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland)
Dataland will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art and is powered by an open-access AI model created by Anadol’s studio called the Large Nature Model. The model, which does not source without permission, culls mountains of data about the natural world from partners including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This data, including up to half a billion images of nature, will form the basis for the creation of a variety of AI artworks, including “Machine Dreams.”
“AI art is a part of digital art, meaning a lineage that uses software, data and computers to create a form of art,” Anadol explained. “I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me, AI means possibilities. And possibilities come with responsibilities. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.”
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Sustainability is another responsibility that Anadol takes seriously. For more than a decade, Anadol has devoted much thought to the massive carbon footprint associated with AI models. The Large Nature Model is hosted on Google Cloud servers in Oregon that use 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. Anadol says the energy used to support an individual visit to the museum is equivalent to what it takes to charge a single smartphone.
Anadol believes AI can form a powerful bridge to nature — serving as a means to access and preserve it — and that the swiftly evolving technology can be harnessed to illuminate essential truths about humanity’s relationship to an interconnected planet. During a time of great anxiety about the power of AI to disrupt lives and livelihoods, Anadol maintains it can be a revolutionary tool in service of a never-before-seen form of art.
“The works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data. Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge,” a news release about the museum explains. “At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.”
“It’s very exciting to say that AI art is not image only,” Anadol said. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience — meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”
