Part Two
Re “Mandell Should Be Relaxing Now but He Can’t”
Seven days after his professional betters — the Cultural Affairs Commission — delivered one more humiliating public dressing-down of the entertainment producer Gary Mandell, he turned around and hurled bitingly harsh assessments and critiques of his own at the obscure but influential lady quintet.
Breaking with tradition, he questioned the qualifications and achievements of several commissioners who displayed their “ignorance.” He forcefully rejected their “insults” of the performers he hires for the Summer Music Festival. And he bridled at their belittling of his talents for the whole Culver City world to see.
Mr. Mandell also was icily critical of the perceived lack of cooperation and support Downtown Business Assn., which, he noted, Commissioner Marlyn Musicant twice erroneously identified as the “Downtown Business Administration.”
Throughout his public life in Culver City, Mr. Mandell has been known as the author of one of the keenest senses of understated humor on the Westside.
But last week’s latest gang-up by the lady commissioners tipped over his capacity for sighing and walking away.
Over the past decade, the favored pastime of the Cultural Affairs Commission has been bullying Mr. Mandell during the off-season. Mutely, he has swallowed the increasingly demeaning lump of coal the volunteer advisors have acerbically, almost gleefully, doled out.
And every year — so far — the elected officials of the decision-making Redevelopment Agency have mostly smoothed over the sour feelings ignited by the Cultural Affairs Commission.
Will they this year?
The commissioners have made the Agency’s task more complicated this time.
They are urging their superiors to not only reduce the already trimmed concert schedule from 8 dates to 4, but to then spank and sideline Mr. Mandell after the fourth concert before wandering off to find a younger, cooler producer who will organize a four-date schedule of hometown bands who play music that will draw a younger, spend-conscious crowd.
Dark suspicion lurks in some civic corners that one or two or three of the five ladies on the commission hungers to be chosen as Mr. Mandell’s putative successor.
Is it any wonder Mr. Mandell, who has been doing this for 35 years, is a mite worked up?
After years of breezily rapping Mr. Mandell’s 11 seasons as the producer of the weekly concerts in the Courtyard of City Hall, the commissioners’ recommendation to push him out the door after four weeks next summer was perhaps the most hurtful of all.
“I wonder if they think I am incapable of producing a rock concert?” he asked, rhetorically, this afternoon.
Can he absorb further humiliation?
Still burning because Ms. Musicant whacked one of this summer’s star attractions, a Western swing trio, the Hot Club of Cowtown, Mr. Mandell said:
“It irritates me more when they insult the performers than when they insult me. I am used to it by now. I just think (the commissioners) are ignorant.”
Ouch.
(To be continued)
