The Orange County Review

Forty years ago, and ten years before the OC Weekly, there was a serious effort to bring Behind-the-Orange Curtain alternative journalism and a contrary attitude toward the dominate conservative bedroom culture. Orange County Review, over forty weekly issues starting March 1996, was the group vision of both O.C. natives and interlopers like myself and my brother Matt Hunter, whose vision it was to start a publication with TNG Media, an offshoot of his company Newport Corporate Communications Group.

Matt (1954-2020) was almost three years older, and we were raised in Encino, attending public schools. He was a Trojan; I was a Bruin. In the early 1980s, through such friends as Milt Manning, one of the prime homebuilders in Irvine, and Newport Group partner David Korobkin, Matt achieved success, moved to Costa Mesa and then Laguna Beach, and looked for more business ventures. My background was in arts, entertainment and computer industry journalism, and my minimal Orange County knowledge was based on visits to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, as well as rock concerts at the Big A.

The original idea was to deliver a hipper, younger, less glossy view of O.C. than Orange Coast Magazine, and Matt hired me to be the editor. In July 1985, we produced the first issue of Orange County This Month, dedicated to “beach living.” Matt wrote in a publisher’s intro: “Filling a void that’s long existed, Orange County This Month is a comprehensive original uptown newspaper that strictly covers entertainment and lifestyle. Nothing bores us more than free distribution papers that beg to be promptly thrown away.”

That “uptown” attitude is amply illustrated in the group promotional photo on the front of the rate card, while the publication itself was staple-bound newspaper stock and had its own half-tabloid/half-magazine size of 12 3/4” by 10 3/8”. It wasn’t Orange Coast, the Orange County Register or What’s Happening, a free-listings pulp magazine. But just what was it?

While achieving some success with a non-alternative, advertiser-friendly editorial approach—movies, theater, arts, music, dining, recreation—peaking with the December 1985 issue at 38 pages, the distribution and advertising were works in progress. Costs soared and the project seemed close to ending. In January, we showed out intentions to cover local issues with an alternative journalism angle, with a cover story on the possible increase of offshore drilling, and in a way it worked.

In the fall of 1985, Matt met and in early 1986 went into partnership with Stephen L. Downard, a Los Angeles business executive, intending to transform Orange County This Month into a weekly, with a definite younger-and-hipper-than-usual approach to the politics and culture of Orange County. The key move that made this happen was Downard’s recruiting Cass D’Arlon, an advertising salesperson at the LA Weekly, who had the experience and connections required for this “ground-floor” opportunity.

Interestingly, according to D’Arlon and a Los Angeles Times article about the launch I just rediscovered, the intention was to call it Orange County Weekly until the L.A. Weekly threatened to sue. Downard, although confident of prevailing, chose not to go through the expense of a legal defense. Also from the Times article: “Downard said the Orange County Review will be modeled after successful various alternative publications throughout the country.’” And: “For revenue, D’Arlon said, the new tabloid will rely entirely on advertisers with products they want to sell to the ‘look-right, feel-right crowd.’”

Around this time, I moved to Irvine after many long, stressful commutes from North Hollywood, and we preceded to create Orange County Review. Along for the ride were Jane Greenstein (now Jane Horowitz of the Los Angeles Times) and many of my friends going back to high school and earlier as movie reviewers and contributors. But there was quite a bit of drama at the launch and soon after.

Downard insisted on a new editorial hierarchy that included himself as editor-in-chief and the hiring of Deborah Bergman from the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service as Executive Editor. Demoted, I remained Editor and Greenstein became Associate Editor. The first cover illustrates the multiple-personality problems of the Review’s first five issues. An exercising Mary Tyler Moore seemed like a demographic home run, but that was never going to be because the movie being promoted (Just Between Friends), as my review the same issue puts it, oozes “sentimental and cinematically toxic bourgeois sludge all over the screen.” It didn’t feel right and definitely didn’t look right.

The “Inside Dope on Oscars” story is something unique, a satirical riff on the fictional flick commentator Boomer Beck in Santa Ana with his girl Sandy consulting her uncle, a Hollywood agent, on the upcoming Academy Awards show. (Beck is Gary Rosen, a screenwriter, director and, lately, producer-writer of the TNT/Electric Entertainment series The Librarians.) Greenstein’s interview-feature of Stan Ridgway was the first of many timely, popular features on musicians and musical acts, including many local talents.

A crucial addition to the editorial breadth of the Review in the months to come were the efforts of Anaheim writers Peggy Pivirotto-Hesketh and Citric Acid’s own Grant Hier, which began with their co-cover story on the O.C. singles sense in that debut issue of March 20-26, 1986. Oh yeah, and that banner at the top? My piece about the antiwar-themed Disarming Images exhibit at UC Irvine—politics, you know. (What didn’t make the cover was my page 8 reporting on the protests and protesters of the WINCON ’86 military weapons conference in February at the Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel.) It was a start, with a lot of tension, a lot of learning on the job and much uncertainty.

In their opening “County Juice” publisher’s column, Downard and my brother wrote: “It’s clear that Orange County is no longer the sleepy county of one mind that it once was . . . Like the county, this newspaper will be hard to categorize . . . you can say we’re an alternative arts and lifestyle weekly, but like the labels we often want to pin on people for our convenience, that doesn’t quite cover it.” In the second issue, they extolled the success stories and economy of Orange County while arguing it had a price in reduced expectations and affordability for many residents.

By issue three, the publishers led with the headline “Tolerance of Things Foreign” and claimed Orange County needed to “mature as a major center of cultural diversification. Implied in that is a need for tolerance.” Reiterating the county’s image as a “bastion of bigotry” they acknowledged the “county’s vast population of ‘foreigners’ . . . Then there are those who are not at all new the county—but who still seem to be treated like outsiders . . . people like single mothers, blacks, Latinos, anti-nuclear demonstrators, and gays.”

The first five issues had busy covers and lots of ads, mainly fashion. We were launched, and on our way, even if the editorial department was not in unity. We almost floundered when Downard left, by issue five, in an unexpected rupture of the partnership between him and my brother. Bergman was gone by issue 6. There were departures from the advertising/marketing department. Matt ceased to be publisher, while still overseeing the business side. With so much already committed and determined to go forward, we plunged ahead and the paper grew more into its niche with a mixture of local lifestyle, mainstream entertainment and culture, local music, theater, and art, and select coverage of local politics.

Keep in mind that protesting conflicts in Central America, Reaganism, apartheid, and the anti-nuclear/anti-war movement comprised the most above-ground opposition in those days. While AIDS was already a widely spreading tragedy, queer culture was not as visible or accepted as today, not even close. The increased awareness of native Americans, of Asian, African, and European minority lives and viewpoints that we now have was just at its start.

If the 1980s was a crucial decade bridging the collapse of one superpower empire and the rising dominance of another—the dangerous crossroads we got past—it was also the decade globalism spread, the computer revolution changed work and just about everything else, and more women reached the heights of power and influence. In Orange County, we tried to surf that changeable current of experience, from supporting and celebrating the non-L.A. beach culture to highlighting the contrarians when we found them.

Here’s a tally of some of the “alternative” news and culture stories we produced in issues 6-20: theater feature on the production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Private Life of the Master Race at Cal State Fullerton when Tom Metzger was producing a TV show on campus (writer Jeff Rubio, issue 6); feature on O.C. burlesque dancer Toni Alessandrini (Scott Hays, 9); feature on director Donna Deitch and one of the first lesbian romance movies Desert Hearts (David Hunter, 9); music feature on local band El Groupo Sexo (David Joel Gaar, 10); primer of O.C. politics (Hunter, 11) the networking between county art museums (Connie Michaels, 12); Amnesty International concert at the Inglewood Form (Kevin Sweeney, 13); closing of Fullerton’s Common Ground Art Gallery (Jane Greenstein, 15); music feature on county group Agent Orange (C.P. Welch, 15); July 4th editorial about aid to Nicaraguan rebels (Grant Hier, Peggy Pivirotto-Hesketh, 16); Laguna Art Museum artist’s council (Greenstein, 16); music feature on O.C. band Gyromatics (Eric Eberwein, 16); feature on the Peace Education Institute for Teachers at UC Irvine (Hunter, 17); feature on Bowers Museum and muralist Emigdio Vasquez (Greenstein, 17); music feature on Huntington Beach band T.S.O.L. (Christopher Menial, 19); art feature on Newport Beach’s Underground Gallery (Hier, 20).

I’ll never forget being in the Campus Drive office the day the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded soon after takeoff. Matt couldn’t stop himself from saying, in effect: “Not a good day to launch a new product or business.” And so, 1986 was one of the linchpin years in a decade when we faced new fears and threats while the expanding media environment brought us more together, in theory at least.

David Hunter is a movie critic, fiction writer, poet, photographer and half-a-dozen retired things, including magazine editor, film festival publicist, and movie theater manager. He currently lives in Reseda and writes about movies, books, and life on Substack.