Footage of L.A. Mayhem, Disasters Getting Star Roles

Who needs special effects when there’s L.A.?

Real life here is better, as Paula Lumbard is proving.

The owner of a Burbank video archive is doing brisk business licensing real-life footage of L.A. catastrophes, large and small, for television and movies.

Need a fire, a riot or a shootout? L.A.’s the place, and Lumbard has the footage, supplied in part by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

“The catastrophes and the drama of L.A. . . . they’re like productions,” said Wendy Carter, a librarian for 20th Century Fox Studios who buys footage from Lumbard. “Anything that’s real is better.”

Lumbard’s company, Film Bank, is one of several “stock shot” providers that are turning the visual artifacts of L.A.’s misfortunes into the stuff of fiction--as well as reality-based TV shows, news shows, documentaries, commercials and music videos.

Because of this peculiar trafficking in real-life images, movies such as “Volcano” and, says Lumbard, “Independence Day” feature the city burning--supposedly from lava and aliens--from the very real flames of civil unrest.

In TV drama series such as “Fire Company 132,” walls of orange flames are in fact footage from the Malibu fires. And, Lumbard said, in the film “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” a close-up of a screaming mouth is a real person--screaming real screams--during the riots.

The availability of such real-life stock recently expanded because of an unusual move by the financially strapped L.A. County Sheriff’s Department to peddle its video library to the entertainment industry.

To that end, the sheriff’s media resources unit recently contracted with Film Bank to catalog, market and license its footage.

“We have thousands of hours of stock footage on the shelf,” said Sgt. Jim Seulke, head of the sheriff’s media resources unit. “We thought maybe if we could sell some footage, we could buy equipment.”

The main function of the unit is the production of training videos, which are distributed to other police agencies for fees.

Deputy Chris Miller, the unit’s cameraman and scriptwriter, stages scenes and shadows deputies on the job. “I can direct people . . . but it’s hard to get people to show that intensity” of real life, he said.

Film Bank began the long process of sorting through the archive this spring. Recognizable faces and certain police tactics are not included. In addition, the videos “can’t be used in a negative way on police officers,” Seulke said.

In exchange for the service, Film Bank gets 50% of the royalties from the video clips. The other 50% goes to the Sheriff’s Department.

The collection has “hit the ground running,” said Lumbard said.

“Usually it takes three to six months for [a new collection] to generate income. But this was generating income in the first two weeks,” Lumbard said.

Lumbard, who handles many collections, said only a portion of the requests she gets are for fictional dramas.

So far, Lumbard said, the best-selling items from the sheriff’s collection have been shots of the North Hollywood shootout in February for documentaries.

Still other shots are not related to news at all: A slamming jail door at a county jail, for example, is a much-requested image, said Barry Dagestino, Film Bank’s general manager.

“We are looking for a multiplicity of uses. A rescue, someone being pulled out of a ravine,” she said. “Big crowd shots can be people clamoring for a product or waiting for something to happen. That will have ‘legs,’ so to speak.”

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Watching a sheriff’s videotape shot from a helicopter during the 1992 riots, Barry Dagestino, Film Bank’s general manager, points out a burning mini-mall.

“This is a perfect shot,” he said, “if you want to show the world coming to an end.”

Film Bank also handles the video library of KCAL-TV Channel 9 news, from which it sells snippets of everything from dripping faucets to the O.J. Simpson chase.

KCAL is unusual in licensing its footage. Though large networks do so, most local news stations release material only to their own affiliates, with limited exceptions, according to news archivists.

Lumbard says revenues to KCAL amount to “tens of thousands” of dollars yearly. So far, only a few thousand has been generated by the sheriff’s collection, but that amount should expand as word gets out, she said.

Although the sheriff’s collection is an unusual cache, Lumbard’s is by no means the only company to capitalize on L.A.’s eye-popping reality.

Freelance news crews like that of Gary Arnote, owner of Reseda-based Newsreel Video Services, regularly license images for extra income.

Arnote said he keeps his footage on a computer under headings such as “Spectacular Fires.”

“Like, if I punch ‘I.O.’ for ‘injured officers’ . . . it pulls up 150 stories,” he said.

The Los Angeles News Service, a Santa Monica company that operates a TV news helicopter for KCBS Channel 2, licenses footage such as the Reginald Denny beating and a car chase used in “Beverly Hills 90210.”

“Instead of staging a pursuit, [the producers] bought a video. . . . They didn’t have to close the streets down,” said co-owner Marika Tur.

Melody St. John, owner of Video Tape Library Ltd. in Los Angeles, provided fire footage from the riots for “Volcano” and has provided more such footage for upcoming thrillers. She’s hoping to market the county’s other archives.

St. John, who lost her home in Tuna Canyon in the 1993 Malibu blaze, also sells images of that fire.

Lumbard, of Film Bank, says she is careful not to exploit tragedy or promote violence.

The licensing idea is catching on: The county recently licensed a large archive of old public-service films to a New York company that specializes in historic images.

Also in the works is a contract to license other departments’ video libraries, which include footage of, say, the city’s first freeways, said Virginia Bortin, a county administrator formerly of the county’s marketing unit.

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The sheriff’s archive, though, may be most likely to find wide popular use, said Film Bank manager Dagestino, who acknowledges a certain irony about L.A.’s endlessly resourceful entertainment industry, which turns even the city’s worst to an advantage.

In a strange way, he said, he’s encouraged by it: It shows a certain esprit de corps of a city where disaster “comes with the territory.”

“It works on two levels: We poke fun at ourselves, and yet there is a lot of pride,” said Dagestino, a native Angeleno, as he watched mobs disperse on the screen before him.

“We go through all this, yet we stay here.”