Generators roared, projectors rolled, popcorn crackled and Malibu was ready for her close up. The city’s first film festival opened on Friday night with an appearance by director John Frankenheimer and a screening of his 1969 production “The Gypsy Moths.”

Wearing everything from sweatsuits to satin, movie fans wandered past the red carpet and into the confines of a plastic tent pitched on the grounds of the Malibu Lagoon State Beach.

The event had come a long way since David Katz set up shop in a small corner of Bernie Safire’s hair salon. Together with friends like Mike McCormick and filmmakers like Candace Bowen, the aspiring actor/director turned his festival dream into a reality.

Still, this was not Venice or Toronto or Cannes — no cast of thousands, no swarming paparazzi, no bumper-to-bumper limo lines. You were more likely to find Katz dangling from a ladder hanging a sheet of tarp and Bowen giving directions to the closest bathroom.

The festival’s beginnings may be ever so humble, but the vision is grand. “If there was ever a place to hold a film festival, this is it,” said Katz on opening night, “We would like to see this become an international event for years to come.”

Much has been made of the commercialization of other film festivals such as Sundance, where studio giants run the show. Katz and his co-founders, however, pledge to remain true to the independent spirit of filmmaking. They hope to help showcase the works of new writers, directors and actors who don’t have blockbuster promotional budgets.

“The bottom line is money,” huffed filmmaker Spencer Thorton. “They [the studios] pour millions into producing films and millions more into promoting them.” Thorton, who financed his $75,000 production himself, said the exposure that a film festival provides is of paramount importance. “It is essential to give people the opportunity to put their vision on screen. If you show you can do it, you won’t be as much of a liability.”

The struggles of young filmmakers were not lost even on an old celluloid veteran like Frankenheimer. “The hardest part is getting the company to say yes. What you have to do is just mindboggling,” he mused. “Once you get over that hurdle, you can’t think about the totality of it because it would paralyze you with fear.”

Thirty films will be screened during the six-day event, including entries from Canada, France, Italy, Germany and France. Four Malibu filmmakers will also be featured — David L. Corley (“Angel’s Dance”), Isabella Fox (“When I Was a Boy”), Lisa Satriano ( “The Setting Son”) and Miles Hood Swarthout (“Mulligans!”). In addition to Frankenheimer, the festival will honor director James Cameron, cult darling Roger Corman and actor Seymour Cassel.

In coming years, festival organizers hope to continue to draw on big name support and build on their success. Still, this is show business and there are no guarantees. “It remains to be seen whether it legitimizes itself,” noted David Foster on Friday night. “But this is a noble effort. Their heart is in the right place.”

Nearby cities such as Palm Springs, Santa Barbara and San Diego have also created their own local film festivals, and getting established is a process that can take years. Even so, David Katz is busy blocking his sequel.

For now, the script of the Malibu Film Festival reads like the life of a struggling young actor, unknown and unproven, but brimming with potential and full of hope.

Faced again with the issue of how far to permit a beachfront property to extend towards the ocean, the Planning Commission Monday granted a variance to a property owner on Malibu Road permitting his proposed home to project farther seaward than the zoning code’s development standards allow.

The property owner, Marshall McDaniel, requested three variances for his planned home, including a modification of the so-called stringline rule, which regulates how far seaward a beachfront home may project.

The stringline rule requires that proposed homes extend only as far as adjacent properties, thereby preventing a property owner from encroaching on the ocean views of neighbors. To determine the stringline for a proposed development, the planning staff draws an imaginary line from the nearest adjacent corners of neighboring properties.

In the case heard Monday, the nearest adjacent corner of the home directly east of the McDaniel property is not the most seaward corner of the home. In fact, it cuts back significantly away from the oceanfront to a staircase on the side of the home.

McDaniel sought a variance to protect his future views, and with very little discussion, the commission granted his request, finding that he would otherwise suffer a hardship.

“Being a rebel, I vote against the law,” said Commissioner Ken Kearsley. “I know what the law is . . . and this commission has consistently voted for rationality, not stupidity, and to allow the stringline to be the line closest to the ocean.”

Last month, the City Council reversed an earlier commission ruling involving a deck stringline. In that case, the commission found that a hardship would occur if a deck stringline was drawn from only the nearest adjacent deck corner, rather than the seaward corner, because the deck cut away from the ocean front.

The City Council, reversing the commission, ruled that a hardship does not occur if a deck does not extend out as far seaward as neighboring decks.

Monday’s decision was the second time the commission has challenged the council on its approach to the stringline rule, and additional cases will soon come before the commission.

Councilman Tom Hasse said last month that if the commission wants to change the stringline rule, it should propose an amendment to the zoning code. On Monday, Chair Jo Ruggles repeated her interest in seeing a change.

In other matters, the commission also began considering changes to the section of zoning code governing the issuance of temporary use permits. In response to complaints about large, catered events in residential neighborhoods, the City Council requested the commission to draft an amendment to the code. Ramirez Canyon residents have for some time sought relief from the numerous events at the Streisand Center for Conservancy Studies, but other residents have also complained about their neighbors renting their homes out for special events.

Ewing asked the commissioners to name the number of guests that would turn a private gathering into an event that would require a temporary use permit.

But mindful of the lavish parties regularly thrown by those in the entertainment industry, the commission resisted naming a figure. Ruggles also said that with her five children and 11 grandchildren, she did not want to set a figure so low she herself would need a temporary use permit to have her family over.

Kearsley suggested that 100 people should serve as the minimum, and Ruggles and Commissioner Charleen Kabrin agreed.

“Otherwise, this ordinance will offend everyone in Malibu,” Ruggles said. Vice Chair Andrew Stern did not attend Monday’s meeting. Commissioner Ed Lipnick, who is still recovering from major surgery, was also absent.

The planning staff also plans to propose limiting residents to only a few temporary use permits a year and to require that amplified music end early in the evening.

Howdy says, “Eat salmon tacos,” and when Howdy speaks, people often listen. “Hey, Brad,” he shouts from a table on the outside patio of his new taqueria, “go have two salmon tacos on me.”

He is a hand-shaking, back-slapping kind of guy who dotes on his employees and treats them like family.

His name is Howdy Kabrins, and he has been called the man “who brought healthy, authentic Mexican food to the United States.”

His love of Mexico and its cuisine goes back to the time when he was a young boy.

Growing up in West Los Angeles, he made frequent visits to his godfather’s shrimp boat on the Sea of Cortez. There, he fell in love with the flavor and tradition of Mexico. “It was spectacular to see all of the pride and the expression,” he says, “in the music, in the dance, in the food.” He also learned that authentic Mexican food was nothing like the often greasy tacos and refried beans that Americans were eating back home. “Real Mexican tacos,” he says “are served on real tortillas with real meats.”

Out of his Mexican experience came La Salsa. Kabrins opened his first restaurant at Pico and Sepulveda boulevards 20 years ago. Today, there are more than 100 La Salsa eateries throughout the country. In 1992, investors joined Kabrins and expanded the operation. But the restaurateur had problems with the corporate approach, and now Kabrins and the company have gone their separate ways.

Three weeks ago, Kabrins took over the La Salsa location at Cross Creek. He put his own authentic touches on the place — corrugated iron, rough adobe texture, Mexican artwork — and reopened as Howdy’s Taqueria. While the look is different from the old place, so is the food. In addition to the usual tacos al carbon, he is offering fresh salmon, shrimp burritos and chopped salads, as well as organic rice and beans.

Kabrins is more than happy to share the food philosophy he developed while living in Mexico. “When you live in a village, you are only eating only the freshest ingredients, great salsa, fresh tortillas and chili — the spice of life.” His dedication to authenticity is a point not lost on his employees. “I feel like I am still working in Mexico,” says Patricio “Pato” Palacios, “the food, the ingredients. I feel very proud.”

Howdy pauses to greet another friend and offers to buy some tacos. He says he hopes his new place will soon become a neighborhood favorite. With the operation just starting out, another trip to his beloved Mexico might have to wait awhile. In the meantime, Howdy’s has brought a little bit of Mexico to Malibu.

After eight months of workshops with local architects and occasionally heated debate among themselves, the Planning Commission last week moved to the final stage of drafting an ordinance to regulate future housing design in the city.

The proposed regulations were originally intended only for new and remodeled hillside homes, but commissioners were unable to agree on how steep a slope to set as the threshold for regulation. Using existing zoning ordinances, Planning Director Craig Ewing brokered a compromise last month that added flat-lot properties to the regulation’s purview, while subjecting fewer hillside properties to the design requirements than some commissioners originally envisioned.

Currently, housing projects more than 18 feet tall or situated on a hillside slope greater than 33 percent must pass the Planning Department’s site plan review process. Under Ewing’s proposal, those same projects would also be subject to the new design regulations. Those guidelines generally require that the architecture and building materials of a proposed home blend into the natural landscape and not obstruct views of canyons and knolls.

The proposal provides an exception for homes that would not be visible from adjacent properties or roadways. Under the exception, what the commissioners like to call the “no-see-um” rule, hidden and isolated homes would not be subject to the design guidelines.

At last week’s meeting, architects accustomed to working in the city generally praised Ewing’s proposal, but they also urged the commission to revise some of the design guidelines before they are finalized and the City Council considers them for adoption.

“It’s a good solution, one that does not encourage political agendas,” said Michael Vignieri, a West Los Angeles architect who often works in Malibu.

But he took issue with some of the design guidelines, including one that requires roofs to be parallel with the hillside. Vignieri said because hillsides are rugged and not uniform, requiring roofs on hillside homes to slope in a general downward direction would have an unnatural effect.

“What you would really end up with is not something that blends into . . . the way nature works,” he said.

Ron Goldman, a locally based architect, said he disagreed with the requirement in the guidelines that aluminum and stainless steel building materials be avoided. He said he knows of homes in Marin County in Northern California that are made with aluminum siding that are regarded as beautiful and appropriate for a rural environment.

“I think any one of us would find it to be an absolute gem if it occurred down here in Malibu,” he said.

The commission will likely wrap up its work in a special meeting this week. Commission members are antsy to finish their proposal and hand it off to the City Council.

Vice Chair Andrew Stern even volunteered to hold a meeting on his wedding anniversary to finish the job. “I want to get this done,” he said. “It will never be perfect.”

In a signal that families with school-age children have emerged as a powerful new force in Malibu politics, a unanimous City Council Monday agreed to consider granting development rights to the Malibu Bay Company in return for land for recreational space largely for the city’s youth. At the same time, the council’s action, which would have been unthinkable even a short time ago, is likely to alienate another formidable local constituency: residents adamantly opposed to any further commercial development in the city.

For some time, local parents have been pleading with city officials for more park space for athletic fields. Members of a recently formed advocacy group, People Achieving Recreation and Community Services, or PARCS, regularly appear at council meetings to recount how the city’s current park space at state-owned Bluffs Park cannot accommodate a youth population that is busting at its seams. They have told of Little League coaches coming to blows when one team will not make room for another’s practice time, of errant balls flying into another team’s game and of being forced to schedule early morning practice games because no other time is available.

The council members have repeatedly promised, in return, to find additional park space. But after the November poll results revealed that the overwhelming majority of residents are not willing to finance the purchase of vacant land through a bond measure, the council found itself with little choice but to negotiate with private landowners who are willing to trade land for development rights.

The council’s Land Use Subcommittee, consisting of Mayor Walt Keller and Mayor Pro Tem Carolyn Van Horn, recommended Monday that city staff draft a development agreement with the Bay Company that would permit development on its Point Dume property, in exchange for a gift of six acres from the company’s holdings there. The subcommittee also recommended that local seniors negotiate directly with the Bay Company for a senior center on the company’s Chili Cook-off site, without involving city officials.

But the other council members, expressing an eagerness to tackle the parks problem once and for all rather than piecemeal, said the city should begin discussions with the Bay Company regarding all its vacant land rather than focusing on only one site.

Councilwoman Joan House said the city should cast the widest net for solutions to the parks problem.

“This is a watershed time in the city of Malibu,” she said. “Malibu is changing.”

Councilman Tom Hasse, also declaring that the city is at a crossroads, said, “I think we’re at point that this City Council . . . has to decide if it seriously wants to pursue a development agreement with the Malibu Bay Company.”

Councilman Harry Barovsky secured a pledge from the Bay Company’s Lyn Konheim that all the company’s properties are on the negotiating table. Barovsky assured Keller the council would not agree to those parts of a deal that were not acceptable to the community.

“We’re going to do an analysis, just like when you invest in a company . . . ,” he said. “And we’re going to decide which of the components of that company fit with what we want.”

Hasse joined with Barovsky in convincing Keller and Van Horn, albeit reluctantly, to vote with the majority in forming an ad hoc committee to negotiate with the Bay Company.

“We have come to a place where we have something they want, and they may have something we want,” he said. Hasse also assured Van Horn, who at this point regards the Civic Center as off-limits for further development, that the council would take no action without knowing the results of the wetlands delineation study.

City Manager Harry Peacock, asked for his opinion by Keller, pointed out that the council is only initiating a discussion with the Bay Company and is not agreeing to make a deal.

“You may think this is a gigantic risk,” he said. “But the risk is not very large at all. The destiny of the decision is in your hands, and that’s where it will remain.”

No members of the public spoke against the development, and the council’s decision created an excited stir among those assembled, including members of PARCS and key city staff members.

Konheim called the council’s decision a “win-win situation.” “I didn’t expect it.”

In other matters, the council agreed to pay an additional $30,000 to resod the fields at Bluffs Park for the upcoming Little League season; and the council delayed dissolving the Las Tunas Beach Geological Hazardous Abatement District, after City Attorney Christi Hogin requested additional time to review recent actions by the district’s board that she said raised legal questions.

Brady Westwater is passionately convinced that author Mike Davis based many conclusions in his two best-selling books about Los Angeles on hundreds of inaccuracies and outright lies.

Without doubt, one of the great publishing stories of the past decade has been the success of Davis’ dark looks at Los Angeles, 1990’s “City of Quartz” and last year’s “Ecology of Fear;” Both view L.A. as a city destined for an apocalyptic future because of deliberately ignored environmental and social dangers. Since publication, Davis’ jeremiads have been taken as Biblical revelation by much of the media that tends to think of the city in the worst possible light anyway: as the urban avatar of the sleaziest, most self-aggrandizing aspects of today’s escapist, money-driven culture.

Davis was unavailable for comment, as he has apparently been when other news outlets, including The New York Times, have tried to secure his statements.

But, agree with him or not, as a writer, it’s certainly Davis’ right to espouse any point of view he chooses.

Despite media and consumer indifference, Westwater, a Malibu resident for 20 years, has long asserted his view (and his proofs) via letters to newspapers, magazines and on the Internet. Today, people, at least the people at The New York Times, finally seem to be listening. “Mr. Davis’ particular calling card has been his unearthing of obscure, even fantastic, facts about Los Angeles’ experience with natural and scientific phenomena,” the newspaper wrote Jan. 27, “from monsoon-intensity rain to little-noticed tornadoes to mountain lions that prowl the city’s suburban fringe. But Brady Westwater, a Malibu real estate agent and amateur local historian who has appointed himself Mr. Davis’ one-man truth squad, has produced reams of material . . . questioning almost every claim he makes.”

The matter of tornadoes is one example at the top of Westwater’s hit list; Davis claims that the Los Angeles Times has essentially banned the use of the word “tornado in local coverage despite the city being “one of the tornado capitals of America.” “I checked the Times article he cited as evidence,” Westwater said last week in his office, surrounded by part of his multithousand book library on urban affairs. “It uses the words ‘tornado’ or ‘twister’ 13 times. You don’t have to check other sources to prove he is lying; he does it himself.”

Another problem for Westwater is Davis’ contention that Los Angeles is in a panic because of a threat of man-eating coyotes and mountain lions. “In 200 years of history, there has only been one death from each animal [one coyote, one mountain lion] in all Southern California, and none in Los Angeles,” Westwater says. “Alligators kill more people in Florida each year.”

But probably the hot button (no pun intended) for Malibu residents is the chapter in “Ecology of Fear” titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” In it, Davis claims, because of unlimited government support for county fire fighting, threats to millionaires’ homes in Malibu tend to take preference over saving lives of inner-city immigrants caught in tenement fires in budget-limited Los Angeles. “That’s idiotic,” Westwater says. “Anyplace the L.A.F.D. or the county fights a fire, they fight it until it’s out.” Davis’ solution? Because Malibu, “the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world,” is so environmentally fire prone, it should be left to burn.

Davis has admitted that there are mistakes in the book, but has said in his own defense: “The thing you have to understand about these books is that I’m a socialist. This book (“Ecology of Fear”) has an utterly radical political agenda, no holds barred.” “It’s one thing making errors and another saying the exact opposite of what your footnote says,” Westwater counters. “The book is the ecology of Mike Davis’ mind.”

Not surprisingly, some of Davis’ advocates have dismissed Westwater’s attack on Davis as “nutty” (Jon Wiener in The Nation, Feb. 5), but about the only thing they say to discredit his credibility is that he changed his name from Ross Shockley to Brady Westwater. “When I was at UCLA in 1968 studying to become a screenwriter, I took the name Brady Westwater after market researching names people would remember,” Westwater says, “and I don’t think it’s eccentric to believe in the truth.” Westwater has also been reproached for occasional hyperbole (“The only ghetto…was the one in Mr. Davis’ mind”) in his 20-plus page essay available on the Internet (www.burnbox.com/westwater.html). “Of course I wrote it over-the-top,” Westwater says. “For 10 years no one had paid any attention to rational discourse about Davis’ books, so I wrote it that way to get a response. But every detail has been checked.”

So why does Westwater believe Davis — until now — has been treated so kindly by the academic, media and publishing establishment? “They feel they have to defend Mike Davis because he’s their hero,” he says of the opinion-making establishment, much of it located in L.A.-obsessed New York. “I’m the messenger who has to be killed. They don’t accept the possibility Davis could make so many factual errors.”

Joel Kotkin, a much-published writer on urban affairs and a fellow at the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy, says, “Disaster movies sell tickets; Mike Davis has written a ‘disaster book.’ He is being outed as more of a showman who has made his name beating up L.A. than a serious scholar. The more you know about L.A., the more you realize how incorrect he is. And, under tremendous pressure and being demeaned for years, Brady Westwater has gone on with almost single-minded zeal to expose it.”

“The book is a, you know, polemic, with a lot of irony and humor in it,” Davis told The New York Times in defense of “Ecology of Fear.” “It has sailed over the heads of some people.” Courtesy of Brady Westwater, it looks like some of the wind is going out of those sails.