COLUMN ONE : World Sees Lotus Land as Badlands : L.A.'s image remains soiled on anniversary of riots, but King verdicts have allayed some fears. Many cling to view of city as visionary hub of entertainment industry.

By DAVID FERRELL

April 29, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Los Angeles always seemed the wayward child--spoiled, precocious, a strapping youth running wild on the world stage. It was tolerated, despite its smog and traffic, and envied for its exuberance and sunshine. It was all one big movie set wrapped in sandy beaches and fault lines--a land of dreams and beauty, playing by its own rules.

Then, a year ago, came an epochal moment. The riots ravaged not only the face of Los Angeles, but its image as well.

A horrified world realized that the pampered child had grown into a troubled creature harboring deep fears and hatreds. Visible now, all too clearly, was a schizophrenic Los Angeles divided by race and social class. Rolls-Royces shared the streets with looters and thugs. The land that had spawned Mickey Mouse and Goofy was now a murder capital that had also given rise to the Crips and the Bloods.

Close observers had known it all along, but the global media coverage of the riots made the point clear from Toronto to Tokyo, from Miami to Hong Kong. Once the mask was off, Los Angeles continued to take a media pounding through months of drive-by shootings, political turmoil, economic recession and a second trial in the Rodney G. King case, an event touted to bring almost certain bloodshed.

That peace accompanied the verdicts has done some good--but only some--in shoring up the image of a city seen by many as being lost and directionless, a dazzling and glamorous place teetering on the precipice.

“I am thrilled there wasn’t rioting,” said Margaret Broun, a librarian from Fremont, in the Bay Area, who feared the latest verdicts because her adult son was visiting Los Angeles at the time. She imagined him on a bus being overturned by rowdy mobs--and she could picture such a nightmare in the days ahead, regardless of whether it was touched off by a trial. “L.A. is a hot pot that’s ready to explode.”

The city’s soiled image is one of the enduring legacies of the riots, a scar as deep and ugly as the vacant lots in South-Central and Pico-Union. From Denver: “It’s like a hand grenade and somebody’s messing with the pin, trying to pull it.” That is how restaurateur Noel Cunningham, 43, describes Los Angeles. He loved it here before leaving in 1986. Now, he says, “it’s not the same city.”

In London, sportswriter Christopher Davies, 44, recalls how some Britons who traveled to Los Angeles for this year’s Super Bowl were afraid to window shop on the sunlit streets of Westwood Village.

“There are some people who literally wouldn’t walk any time of the day over there,” Davies said.

Even in San Salvador, a traditional point of origin for war refugees fleeing to Los Angeles, the tide of public opinion--and human migration--is turning. Many Salvadorans are deciding to stay home, in part because the war has ended in their own country but also because they have heard too often about the violence and lack of opportunity in California.

“The situation in Los Angeles now is very screwed up,” said Vicente Guerrero, 59, a custodian at a San Salvador office building. “Today we have a little bit of peace here, and in Los Angeles it’s as though they are going through days that are like the worst of times here. It seems as bad there now as it used to be here.”

The bleak assessments tell only part of the story, of course. Like any large, multifaceted metropolis, Los Angeles has many images; its name implies an incalculable variety of experiences, subcultures, urban textures and deep-rooted problems. For every out-of-town critic who decries its violence and social strife, there is another person who downplays those concerns.

Many, especially in cosmopolitan bastions such as Paris and Berlin, cling to a more romantic notion of Los Angeles, according it respect as a trendsetter: a visionary hub of film and entertainment.

“As long as the Hollywood culture remains in L.A., the city will still be viewed as a play land of the rich, full of promise and prosperity,” said Cecilia Chuy, 26, a Hong Kong resident who has begun to attribute at least part of that prosperity to the exploitation of poor minorities. “The riots . . . just brought to light the misery, anger and hatred in these communities.”

But Hollywood’s role in shaping the city’s image has changed, incorporating much of that misery and anger into films that have only reinforced the negative perceptions. The shift in tone is best illustrated by the 1991 comedy “L.A. Story” and this year’s hit “Falling Down,” in which a trip across town becomes a trek into raging insanity, says film critic Michael Medved, author of the book “Hollywood vs. America.”

“In ‘L.A. Story,’ Los Angeles is a mad and crazy place, full of pretension and . . . shallow people,” Medved said. “But it’s not a nightmare. In ‘Falling Down,’ Los Angeles is hell on earth. And the really offensive thing to me about ‘Falling Down’ was the way the movie was advertised--’Falling Down, a Tale of Urban Reality.’ ”

A variety of movies, from “Boyz N the Hood” to “Grand Canyon,” have advanced the view that Los Angeles is harsh and forbidding, he said.

“It wasn’t so long ago that people made jokes about L.A. being mellow,” Medved said. “I think the riots changed that forever--perhaps.”

If there is a bright side, he added, it may be that tomorrow’s film directors will put an entirely new spin on Los Angeles, finding positive messages that may put the city’s image on the upswing again, a place of stardust and palm trees.

The upward or downward swings of the city’s image are important for reasons that extend far beyond mere civic narcissism. The riots and all their unwanted publicity have had a substantial impact on tourism, an $8.5-billion per year industry in Los Angeles County, where each 1% flux in visitor traffic translates to about 4,400 jobs, said Michael Collins, senior vice president of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Although the 1992 figures have yet to be calculated, the damage was significant, Collins acknowledged. And with aerospace and other major industries also suffering in Southern California, tourism represents a vital economic engine that can rev up only if the city bolsters its sagging reputation.

“Perception is reality in our business,” said Collins, who talks of what he calls the competition for wallets. Every wallet, in Collins’ scenario, makes decisions about where to go for vacations and sales meetings. “It lands at an airport, fat and full, and within three or four days it empties itself out,” he said. “And then it goes home. It doesn’t stress our . . . schools, our hospitals. It’s a cash distribution mechanism that’s as clean as a whistle.

“But the bad news is, every (other city) is after the same wallets.”

In that global sweepstakes, Los Angeles has slipped dramatically because of the media spotlight on gangs, violence and the riots. In Japan, Los Angeles went from fifth among the world’s most popular tourist destinations in 1985 to 11th in 1991, according to a survey conducted by one of Japan’s leading travel magazines. Then, after the riots, the city’s ranking plummeted to 19th.

“Riots were an important factor,” the magazine AB-Road concluded.

As if to buttress the survey’s finding, the magazine chimed in with a map of the world that was color-coded to show dangerous locales. Of all American cities, only Los Angeles was highlighted with the same potential for ethnic dispute or terrorism as the Sudan, Romania, France, Spain, Northern Ireland and Egypt.

The map ran before this year’s federal civil rights trial of four officers charged in the King beating and included an analysis of the city’s predicament: “(A) riot could recur at any time. The police are training troops for riots. But they haven’t made an effort to solve the basic problem. In Los Angeles, the situation is at a level that would be inconceivable in Japan. To be honest, it is impossible for the police to control the situation. People have taken their defense into their own hands.”

To counter such perceptions, the Los Angeles visitors bureau is drafting a $30-million-a-year worldwide promotional campaign to clear away--figuratively speaking--much of the riot damage. If the sponsors can be lined up, the campaign might begin by early next year, with slickly produced TV and magazine ads, Collins said.

“Image problems are solved by taking your message and, with great consistency and high impact, placing it in your customers’ homes over and over and over again,” Collins said, lamenting that so much of Los Angeles’ image has been created by news coverage.

Under the glare of that exposure, the job of fixing the city’s reputation figures to be a tough one.

Advertising executive Steve Hayden, who put together a hugely successful campaign in the 1980s for Apple Computers, recalls being in Phoenix, Ariz., a few months ago and seeing Los Angeles described in one newspaper as the “first Calcutta in America”--and hearing later how Calcutta officials had written pointing out that crime rates were lower in that teeming Indian metropolis.

But, like New York, which rebuilt its image in the 1970s with the “I N.Y.” campaign, Los Angeles could play off the “grim beauty” of a busy, diverse metropolis, Hayden said. Los Angeles could do it by tapping into the vast film industry, using actors such as Edward James Olmos--a noted civic booster--and entertainers such as Randy Newman, who put the song “I Love L.A.” on the record charts.

“As a place to find educated people, as a place that still has access to world markets, as a place that still has excellent quality of lifestyle . . . (Los Angeles has) all that,” Hayden said. “(But) we’re never going to get anywhere until we control the fear of crime for tourists.”

Although the peaceful reaction to the verdicts may have lifted some of the city’s onus, the impression remains that Los Angeles is plagued by intractable problems. In Germany, the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine said: “As a general rule, the social difficulties in many parts of Los Angeles have not changed since last year. The majority of residents still live off welfare or drug dealing, the jobless rate is still higher than 40%, the young still lack hope for a better future.”

Mindful of such appraisals, Germans “constantly (ask) . . . whether it’s safe at all to go to Los Angeles,” one travel agent said. But cancellations are few, and many, such as Monika Dissemond-Rick, 24, a mail carrier living in Bonn, are looking forward to vacations this year in a city they consider glamorous and fascinating, if slightly intimidating.

“We were last in L.A. in May, 1989, and we really enjoyed it,” she said. “Actually, we felt quite at ease, but . . . the troubles last year have, of course, made us more conscious of just how great the differences are in such a big city, and the problems that go along with that.”

Media scholars note that in today’s sound-bite world of satellites and multichannel communications, reputations can slide quickly. Whereas bad news travels fast, good news is lucky to travel at all amid the crush of unfolding world events--a steady stream of calamities crammed into crowded time slots.

Only a spectacular problem, such as last year’s riots, seems to stand out above the onslaught; and then the most stunning footage is shown time and again until it resonates in the global consciousness like noise in an echo chamber.

Collins of the Los Angeles visitors bureau expressed hope that the unexpected peace accompanying the latest verdicts would speak loudly. “The world media camped out in our front yard and happened to have an absolutely marvelous and beautiful weekend,” he said. “And the whole world watched. I think we looked very, very good.”

But Glenn Garelik, who teachers a course in media and society at Georgetown University in Washington, is skeptical that such an instant will burn long in the minds of those who remember the violence of a year ago.

“If we’ve still got a sense of normalcy, the absence of riots ought to be sort of ho-hum,” he said. “In terms of public image, my God, I don’t know how you can use that at all.”

If nothing else, the global community has been made to look beyond the postcard gloss of Los Angeles to a city as deep and complex as a Dickens novel. Clearly, “the trouble is now out in the open,” said Newsweek’s Jennifer Foote, who co-authored one of the first in-depth examinations of Los Angeles’ fraying fabric in a 1989 cover story, “California: American Dream, American Nightmare.”

Foote moved from Los Angeles to London three years ago and has seen the riots foster “a dramatic change in people’s perceptions about Los Angeles,” particularly among readers of the strident London tabloids. Those mass circulation newspapers seem to attribute much of the strife in Los Angeles to the high percentage of foreign-born residents, Foote said.

“You have people thinking that nobody (in Los Angeles) speaks English, or they’re all in native dress--very exaggerated ideas,” she said.

The British--who do not own guns and do not even outfit their police officers with guns--tend to be mortified by the “postmodern Wild West” that Los Angeles represents, “where everybody has a gun and they use them,” the 35-year-old journalist added. “People in Europe feel there’s a certain level of chaos in the United States in general. They see it as an uncontrolled and slightly scary place--Los Angeles, in particular.”

Even in other parts of the American West, Los Angeles is seen as an untamed place battling demons of racism and injustice. In Texas, construction worker Rick Agen, 30, remembers a time when he dreamed of traveling to Los Angeles’ golden shores. Now, he’d rather stay home.

“L.A. is like New York--who needs it?” he said. The problems laid bare by the King beating have not disappeared just because the civil rights trial ended peacefully, he added. “Everyone has seen how ugly things are there. It’s like someone saw a bad, really ugly side of you, and now it’s too late to do anything about it. . . . It’s already out there and that’s something you don’t forget.”

Whether Los Angeles’ image and world standing will ever fully be restored is, of course, anyone’s guess. But some optimists, such as film critic Medved, say that things could always be worse. Los Angeles could be Waco, Tex.

“In Waco, the image is fixed,” Medved said, alluding to the fiery deaths of the Branch Davidian cultists. “This is the only time it (will be) in the international news. We’re in no danger of that. There’s just too much going on--so many images. We’re always the center of attention.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Leslie Helm in Tokyo, Tamara Jones and Tyler Marshall in Germany, Rone Tempest in Paris and Tracy Wilkinson in El Salvador. Also contributing were Times researchers Chris Courtney in Hong Kong, Lianne Hart in Houston, Emily L. Hauser in Jerusalem, Fleur Melville in London, Reane Oppl in Germany, Ann Rovin in Denver, Edith Stanley in Atlanta and Anna M. Virtue in Miami.