Even before the window crashed beside her, Lovelle Fuhrman thought something was wrong. Her daughter Ivy woke her Tuesday morning saying the windows were making funny noises and she was scared.

Fuhrman said she exchanged places with her daughter; they were all sleeping on a futon on the floor because their furniture had not yet arrived from storage. The family had moved into the Tivoli Cove apartment with just the mattress, a few pillows, sheets and blankets, and plastic bags full of clothes two days before.

“We were all sleeping again when we heard a huge boom,” Fuhrman said. “The glass came crashing down right beside us.”

The force of the blast hurled a sliding glass door through the guardrail on the deck and into the street below, tore wallboard from the ceiling, followed the fireplace flu upwards inflicting almost identical damage to the unit upstairs and finally blew the covering off the chimney on the roof of the building.

Miraculously, no one was injured.

“When I came into the living room, I smelled gas and saw smoke pouring out of the fireplace,” Fuhrman said.

Fuhrman’s older daughter Danika Merlo, 15, who had checked out the fire extinguisher when they moved in, grabbed it and put out the fire.

“When I woke up, Panda Bear, our Border Collie, was shaking and he was lying on top of us under the blankets,” she said. “He’s not very brave; he must have known something bad was happening.”

Upstairs, Joseph Guidera said he heard the boom and thought it was an earthquake. “I looked out the window and saw the broken glass, the sliding doors and smelled the smoke and saw smoke coming from the fireplace. It must have been about 7:30, because my alarm was set for 8 and it hadn’t gone off yet.”

Guidero said he then went downstairs to see where the smoke was coming from and to see if any one was hurt.

Firefighters from station 71 arrived and shut off the gas. Capt. Don Schwaiger said there was no shut-off valve for the fireplace, which uses an ignitor. Fuhrman said no one had put wood in the fireplace. She pointed to a wall heater on the adjacent wall and said, “We had been told by the other tenant the wall heater did not work.”

Sheriff’s Deputy Frank Bausmith said they had knocked on the doors of several adjacent units to tell tenants what had happened. “They had probably all left for work,” he said. “Only the two residents were asked to evacuate.”

After an extensive inspection, Schwaiger said there was no structural damage to the exterior of the building. “The windows took the brunt of it. The force of the blast blew the outside of the chimney off. There was no damage to the basement.

“When gas is leaking, it doesn’t take much of a spark — a light switch, a heater switching on or off, even static electricity,” Schwaiger said. “But everyone was asleep, no one was walking around turning things on.”

Fuhrman said she couldn’t believe they weren’t hurt, but was shocked at the mess. “We just paid for the new paint job and cleaned everything,” she said, surveying the smoke smudges and broken wall board. “And there are pistachio nuts all over the floor. I can’t figure out where they came from.”

Red Cross workers arrived to make arrangements for the family.

Craig George, the city’s senior building inspector, had not completed his investigation into possible causes of the gas leak and explosion Tuesday afternoon.

Folio, the magazine industry’s magazine, has compared Bill Curtis’ office, with its floor-to-ceiling picture windows, white carpet, black Italian leather sofas and a seemingly endless blond-wood wall hiding a bar, cigar humidor and a home theater setup, to a set from a James Bond movie.

There’s even a salt-water aquarium, the main star of which is a poisonous lionfish. Most of his 100 employees filling 32,000 square feet of the Malibu Pavilion on Heathercliff Road (everything but the post office) also look like they were hired from Central Casting for their terrific, 30-something good looks.

But make no mistake; there is nothing make-believe about the business Curtis is running. His privately held CurtCo Freedom Group magazine company is one of the most successful publishing operations in America. With its near-$80 million annual gross, it’s almost certainly Malibu’s biggest independent business, too — and growing daily by leaps and bounds.

Publishing magazines, of course, is a notoriously perilous venture. Curtis’ secret for avoiding the pitfalls was to concentrate tightly on interest-specific “niche” publications. Although they don’t come anywhere near the circulation of People or Sports Illustrated, such CurtCo Freedom monthlies as Home Office Computing (circulation 501,000) and Small Business Computing and Communications (circulation 151,000) give a community of readers — a community joined by interest instead of location — exactly what it wants. CurtCo Freedom’s other publications are Knowledge Management Magazine, Sales Force Automation, and Field Force Automation; Customer Relationship Management will start up later this year. For advertisers like Bill Gates’ Microsoft, Intel or IBM, they’re the silver bullets of media, aimed straight at the bull’s-eye of the target audience.

Reflecting on his success just before leaving last month with 40 employees for a company-paid ski vacation in Beaver Creek, Col., Curtis, 42, said: “We’ve been incredibly fortunate with the magazines we’ve developed. They’ve all had a significant value. We’ve seen markets coming in and made sure we were directly in their paths.” In fact, only three of 17 start-up publications have failed.

After spending several years as an advertising representative for The Financial Times of London and CBS Publishing, Curtis opened his own firm in 1982 in Marina del Rey, representing clients like Inside Sports, Stereo Review, and Popular Photography. Three years later, CurtCo Publishing was launched with Car Audio and Audio Video Interiors, both of which were aimed at markets Curtis says “simply cried out for representation.” Both were sold after they reached top positions in their fields. In 1989, Curtis entered the computer and communication market by launching such magazines as Mobile Office Magazine and Portable Computing and Cellular Buyers Guide; again, after they achieved significant circulation, they were sold. The eight-figure deal enabled Curtis to launch Home Theater and, soon after, he formed a 50/50 partnership with Freedom Communications (publishers of the Orange County Register, 27 other dailies and owner of eight TV network affiliates), with Curtis remaining as president and CEO. Last December, “Home Theater” was sold to Petersen Publishing for $60 million.

Staffing such a publishing mini-empire in Malibu has not been easy, says Curtis, who, with his wife and three children, moved to the beach after the January 1994 earthquake seriously damaged their Woodland Hills home. “California is not friendly to publishing,” he says, “so, for the more senior publishing and advertising people, we have to actively seek them in New York.” Curtis admits he never planned an 80-employee office in New York either; it’s a direct result of the Big Apple’s talent pool. (There are another 20 employees in San Francisco, and everyone is linked together with a state-of-the-art computer network.)

Even though Curtis pays New York-level salaries, convincing East Coast talent to move west has been tough. “Frankly, L.A. has a lousy reputation,” Curtis says. “We’re known for earthquakes, riots, O.J. Simpson, mudslides and fires. Because CNN positions their cameras in such a way on PCH that 50 feet of mud and water looks like miles and miles, all that New Yorkers seem to know about Malibu is that it slides into the water. So when we go to a senior executive in New York and say, ‘We’d like to move you out here,’ we have to go through quite a few backflips to convince them that Malibu is not necessarily L.A. and that it hasn’t slid into the ocean. When they come out here,” he adds with a sly smile, “they get enlightened pretty quickly.”

There is more to CurtCo Freedom than magazine publishing, too. Offering growth potential as exciting as the magazine group (and certainly more mainstream) is Malibu Post & Production, a film- and video operation specializing in trailers, music promos, commercial shows, CD-ROM authoring and much more. It is currently expanding its facilities to enable the many stars who live in the Malibu area to loop their feature and television movies essentially in their back yard.

“It’s not easy making this work in Malibu,” he muses, “but I’ve never seen the experience and camaraderie we have in this building matched in any company, anywhere. It’s not uncommon to walk through these offices at 9 o’clock at night and see that half the people are still here. We’ve been marvelously successful, and they’re proud of that, too, and have shared in some of the wealth.

“I never thought when I was slogging through a New York winter to sell ads, I’d be fortunate enough to work in what I believe is America’s most beautiful location,” Curtis says. “Despite the challenges, every day is inspiring.”

Public access television production in Malibu will no longer be as easily accessible to the amateur. New rules and regulations for submissions by local producers will take effect April 15, according to Falcon Cable Director of Local Programming Jeanette Scovill.

Essentially there are three big changes the Malibu producer must conform to, Scovill said. These are: tape type, labeling and residency of the production.

“There’s been a continuing effort to try to improve the technical quality of programming on the local public access channel,” said Scovill. “Because we have a lot of industry people living in Malibu, there’s a very high expectation of what a program should look like.”

Gone are the days of using a home VHS camera to tape an airable show. “In the past they had to at least dub that to a three-quarter inch tape. That was the standard. But it’s very much become now the dinosaur of broadcast quality tape,” Scovill said. “Now the move is to go to BETA SP. BETA SP transfers much better to a digital hard drive. It also means that the user has to become a little more sophisticated about the professional presentation of a tape. Basically what we’re asking them to do is, instead of duplicating their master onto three-quarter, we’re asking them to transfer and submit on BETA SP.” Scovill acknowledges that the price of BETA SP is now cost effective for the local producer.

Additionally, local public access producers will be required to properly label their submissions, noting the start and stop time in appropriate technical terms. “When we describe for them ‘time code,’ many of them are unfamiliar with how to write the length of their show in time code. Our new instructions actually spell out how to do that. We ask them to put down the first frame of video and audio on their program and the last frame of video and audio on their program, and write the time code for that.”

One of the reasons for the new protocol, according to Scovill, is to match the quality of what’s coming in with the quality of Falcon’s new equipment, called an MPEG encoder, that’s sending the program out to the viewer. “The new system that we’re using, which calls for playing the tape on a tape player and translating it through a computer software package, turns it into a digital signal. It’s very high-end equipment. It’s very sensitive. If the original tape isn’t good quality, it’s not going to accept it. In many ways, this is a service to the viewer.” Scovill said the new refinement is intended to improve the picture seen at home.

The final area affecting how a local producer submits for broadcast on Falcon Public Access stems from a four-year-old request from the city. “There has been an increasing request through various committees that the city has had to look at having only local residents on the system. At this point we have rewritten the guidelines so that they reflect the intention of the city of Malibu and residents to have local programming on the air.” Scovill said residents must prove they actually live here by authentic identification. The only other option, she said, is to have a Malibu resident accept liability for a program submitted.

The only outside programs that will continue to air, such as “Week In Review” and “Family Focus,” are considered public service material. Scovill said more changes are underway in the swim of local access.

The city of Malibu, undecided about whether to offer to take over Malibu Pier from the state, may now be leaning toward leaving the landmark in the state’s hands.

The pier was closed in 1997, and Alice’s Restaurant, the tackle shop and the fishing boat have been out of business since then.

The city’s consultants, hired to examine the potential deal and make recommendations, recently recommended that the city “reconsider” its intentions to take over the pier.

The state Parks and Recreation Department told the consultant last September it had appropriated $900,000 for fiscal year 1998-99 to repair and renovate the pier. Construction was scheduled to begin this month and would be completed by the end of the year, the consultant was told.

Before that, according to a report by consulting firm Williams-Kuebelek & Associates, Inc., “The city had been negotiating with the state and the County of Los Angeles with a view to the city entering into a 30-year operating agreement with the state to renovate and reopen the pier and to operate and maintain the pier.”

The consultants recommended that the city “reconsider its intention of taking over the pier and assuming all responsibilities for improving, operating and maintaining it.” Instead, they suggest, the city might consider using the state and county funds ($850,000 – $1,020,000) to help the state improve the pier, rather than spending an estimated $2,900,000 to renovate it on its own.

According to the city’s new Public Works Director, Charles Bergson, the Public Works Commission will recommend to the City Council April 12 that the city continue its negotiations with the state. Bergson, a registered civil engineer, said a sinking fund for maintenance would be a critical element in the deal.