From The Hollywood Reporter:
Train Wreck? A Mogul’s Battle Against The Bel-Air Subway
Fred Rosen — the 80-year-old ex-CEO who turned Ticketmaster into a much-hated powerhouse — leads a group of ultra-rich Bel Air residents in a costly battle to halt a proposed metro line: "They don’t understand who they’re dealing with. OK?"
BY GARY BAUM
JANUARY 29, 2024
Fred Rosen doesn’t mind if people consider him a villain. He made that clear during his fortune-making run at Ticketmaster, which he turned into a polarizing behemoth. “I was running ‘the evil empire’? I was running a business. You know who liked me? My clients. Did I love being called an asshole? Not particularly. Could I live with it? Sure.” He adds, “You can’t build a business without pissing somebody off.”
The same attitude prevails in his current venture: attempting to kill a proposed subway through his Bel-Air neighborhood. “You have to come to grips with the fact that not everyone’s going to like you,” he says.
Rosen, an 80-year-old grandfather, is aware of his pugnacious intensity. “Guys like me make coffee nervous,” he jokes during lunch in a booth at his “commissary,” the Hotel Bel-Air’s restaurant. (Rosen did stand-up in the Catskills as a teenager.) Now his ire is directed at L.A. County’s transit authority, known as Metro, which he derides as “moribund, brain-dead, inept.”
The agency has developed six route plans for what it has dubbed the Sepulveda Transit Corridor. It’s a north-south rail system estimated to cost in the untold billions and set to open in a decade or two. Boosters hope it will get underway in the next couple of years. The goal is to alleviate traffic by connecting the San Fernando Valley’s G Line bus route with the Westside’s now-expanding D Line subway and its completed E Line light-rail system.
Half of these proposals call for a monorail along the 405 Freeway. The rest would require tunneling beneath one of the city’s wealthiest enclaves. Residents worry the colossal project will yield noise issues and disrupt traffic during construction, then emit vibrations during operation — all of which Metro dismisses. (There wouldn’t be a transit station in Bel-Air itself.) To stop a subway, or at least significantly stall it, making it less desirable to decision-makers, Rosen is spearheading a threatened lawsuit through a community group, Keep Bel-Air Beautiful.
Many of his neighbors back him. “Fred — who I now call ‘Fearless Fred’ — is leading this battle for us,” explains studio chief turned philanthropist Sherry Lansing. “It’s an important one.” Adds financier and Hello Sunshine founder Seth Rodsky: “He’s got the support of the community, which he cares passionately about. It’s good to have Fred on our side.”
Rosen’s revolt pits a powerful coterie of Angelenos (who grant they’re unlikely to commute on the proposed transit system) against an array of politicians, bureaucrats and activists who aren’t blanching, at least for now, at the legal threat. “Large projects end up facing litigation,” says L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, the former Time’s Up Entertainment executive director and urban planner whose district includes parts of the Sepulveda Pass and surrounding areas. She supports a subway. “This corridor sees some of the highest volumes of travel in the entire country, so it has the potential to be one of the most transformative transportation projects in the history of the city. If we focus on getting this right, on the speed and the reliability of the service and the ease of the [station] connections — and not what caters to the needs of people who don’t use the project — we can bring a lot of people onto this new route.”
Metro declined to speak about Keep Bel-Air Beautiful’s possible litigation. Its deputy CEO, Sharon Gookin, tells The Hollywood Reporter: “We’re guided by relieving the needs of the community. Those are the most important considerations.”
The agency has, in fact, until now done its best to largely ignore Rosen, treating him as a nuisance to be managed. This has infuriated him since he views himself not as a gadfly but as a slayer — perhaps as a redeemer, too. “They don’t understand who they’re dealing with. OK?” While some key stakeholders see compromise as inevitable, he doesn’t. “This won’t happen. Would you walk into a wall knowingly?”
This isn’t Rosen’s first go-around as defender of Bel-Air. He garnered credibility — and emerged as a cantankerous local folk hero — a decade ago for attempting to neutralize the slew of residential developers who were building increasingly mega-sized spec houses in the enclave, most notably Mohamed Hadid, better known these days as father to supermodels Bella and Gigi. Rosen’s efforts led to much stricter rules around construction. Used to getting his way, he detests the acronym NIMBY, viewing it as a bad-faith characterization meant to undermine legitimate local advocacy. “If you stand up for your community, you’re a NIMBY,” he says. “If you let them run over you, you’re a citizen.”
Rosen has taken up neighborhood activism amid late-life business capers. In recent years, he unsuccessfully challenged his old firm Ticketmaster with a top role at upstart competitor Outbox — which was later absorbed by AEG — and launched, with his golfing buddy and longtime Warner Bros. distribution executive Dan Fellman, a failed premium first-run film rental business catering to the rich. (Rosen says the final nail in Red Carpet Home Cinema’s coffin was the pandemic: “You can’t have a project for movies when you don’t have any.”) These days, he sits on boards and occasionally makes bids on companies. “Norman Lear was a friend,” he says. “He and I would laugh because it was always about ‘next.’ You don’t sit in your rocking chair.”
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Read the whole article here:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bu...ay-1235807662/
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It really underscores the anti-urban mindset that wealthy Angelenos have compared to their peers in cities around the world. I wish these people would just move out to Montecito or Orange County or something, and let LA progress without them.
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