Ink

1999 July 26

Holy expensive hovel! "Batman" helmer demands his privacy! 

By Ann Louise Bardach

Rosemarie Fanucchi, the sixty-one -year-old publisher and editor of the Coastal View News, puts out her weekly paper from a one-room office in the sleepy flower-and- avocado-growing community of Carpinteria, California at the southern tip of Santa Barbara County. Mrs. Fanucchi has ocean-blue eyes and wears a large, fanciful ribbon in her hair. She describes the readers of the Coastal View, which is distributed for free, as "people who want to know how Aunt Mabel is doing after she fell and broke her ankle and then went off and visited Uncle Jack in Minnesota." So it's not hard imagine how startled Fanucchi was the other day when she received a threatening, five-page letter  from a Century City law firm. 

The lawyer was upset about a barn. Two months ago, Fanucchi noticed a little story  in another local paper concerning an eighteenth-century post-and-beam barn in central Maine that had been dismantled and was being shipped to Santa Barbara. She ran a fifteen line item in her own column "Sea Shells,"  concluding "that the barn turned house will live on property right in Carpinteria's back yard." The notice, sandwiched between blurbs on the town's trash problem and a local couple's pride in their niece who was graduating from Stanford University, mentioning neither the barn's owner nor its exact address..

So how did the barn item cause such grave offense? The legal letter Fanucchi received warned that she would be well advised "to refrain from the dissemination of any further information directly or indirectly identifying the whereabouts" of the historic barn. "My client routinely goes to great lengths to ensure that he cannot be easily located by over-zealous 'fans' and/or dangerous persons," the letter stated. "[His] mere awareness that this information may be widely disseminated  in the Carpenteria Coastal View  will create  substantial emotional distress and an irrevocable loss of tranquility, well-being, and privacy." The letter identified the client as Joel Schumacher, the director of two Batman sequels.

"I knew someone was trying to threaten me but I had never heard of Joel Schumacher," . Fanucchi said the other day. "So I asked my partner, Michael VanStry, 'Who is Joel Schumacher?' And he says, 'I don't know, but I think he's a jockey,' and he looked it up in theFarmers Almanac but it turns out he was thinking of Willie Shoemaker. 

A week later, she still hadn't figured it out. "I'm not afraid of Phil Schuman," she told a neighbor who had stopped by to console her. "He probably spent three thousand dollars having his lawyer write that letter." In any case, being a town elder concerned for the maintenance of civility in the community, Fanucchi wrote  a letter to Schumacher's lawyer, assuring  him that she had no wish to "invade [the] solitude" of his client - whoever he was. However, she did gently suggest that he try not to mispell the town's name, "spelled Carpinteria not Carpenteria" - should he write to her again.