PRODUCER PLUMBS L.A THEATER

Few public television stations around the country produce local drama. Budgetary resources are too limited. But KCET Channel 28 is a major exception, and its chief resource for dramatic material is local Equity Waiver theater.

The creative relationship between live theater and those who tell stories with a camera has never been close. A running lament among Los Angeles theater people is that TV and movie production companies are happy to tap into talent on the legitimate stage but loathe to give anything in return.

A few years back, studios systematically scouted Los Angeles theaters for source material but seldom optioned anything. Some of the major studios even maintained theater divisions and developed Broadway shows, but the results were mixed.

Today, public television’s KCET stands alone here in pursuing co-production deals with theater groups, and utilizing theater talent.

The individual most involved in scouting theatrical vineyards for the station is a former studio contract attorney-turned producer, 41-year-old Jamaican-born Julian Fowles, a double-Emmy winner at last weekend’s Los Angeles area Emmy Awards ceremony.

One of those Emmys was for KCET’s highly touted, 1986 one-woman Eleanor Roosevelt special, featuring Lee Remick, “Eleanor: In Her Own Words.”

Fowles happened upon the material at the quaint Itchey Foot Ristorante, the Mark Taper Forum’s literary cabaret. He galvanized his station’s resources with those at the Mark Taper Forum’s Taper Media Enterprises, bringing aboard Taper media director Judith Rutherford James to co-produce and then-Taper literary manager Russell Vandenbroucke to adapt his own play.

KCET spent close to $200,000 on the production. PBS’ “American Playhouse,” which had originally turned down “Eleanor” because it was leery of one-character plays on TV, acquired “Eleanor” from KCET after its local broadcast and aired it nationally.

That acquisition marked the first time that “American Playhouse” had picked up a drama originally produced by one of PBS’ local stations, confirmed “American Playhouse” executive director Lindsay Law. (“American Playhouse” has subsequently broadcast one other locally produced drama, “Damien,” the story of Father Damien and lepers, first produced by Hawaii Public Television.)

The “Eleanor” travels, from the Itchey Foot on Temple Street to Channel 28, epitomizes how KCET has been working to turn selective Los Angeles theater pieces into local dramatic programming.

Fowles last year struck a deal with Los Angeles’ popular improvisational theater comedy troupe, “The Groundlings,” hired “Groundlings” theater director Tom Maxwell to co-produce, and starred the satirists in the half-hour show, “The Groundlings Love L.A.” The cost was a trim $100,000.

Fowles devotes 50% of his job to tilling theatrical projects (he attends two to three plays a week). Occasionally, he likes a production but fails to hammer out a deal. “Color Me Dorothy,” a nifty drama about Dorothy Dandridge at the Cast Theatre two years ago, was a strong project that didn’t make it.

He’s presently in advanced development on a local Waiver play about Pancho Villa.

“Villa” was recently performed at the Bilingual Foundation for the Arts (in the old Lincoln Heights jail). Playwright Donald Freed (who co-wrote the one-man Nixon play, “Secret Honor”) has adapted his one-man “Villa” for KCET. The Bilingual Foundation’s artistic head, actress Carmen Zapata, will be involved, possibly as co-producer.

Fowles and his boss, KCET programming vice president Stephen Kulczycki, favor shows with limited casts and also production budgets that, said Kulczycki, “are always less than half the cost of a half-hour sitcom” (or under $250,000). “Costs limit our resources,” said Kulczycki.

Name talent, for instance, is hard to come by when casting local drama. “The only reason stars work in our plays, given their profit-making commitments,” said Fowles, “is their total love for the material. That’s how we got Remick for ‘Eleanor’ and now Ellen Burstyn for our next production.”

The latter reference is to Jerome Kilty’s two-character play, “Look Away,” about Mary Todd Lincoln’s widowhood spent with her confidante and black maid. The production is from the 1973 Broadway play that shuttered after one performance (in a season stuffed with three plays about Lincoln’s wife).

The KCET production will be dedicated to the late Charles Bloch, who headed Bantam Books’ Los Angeles office and produced the Broadway venture. Cynthia Whitcomb did the TV adaptation. Projected budget is $240,000.

A Los Angeles director, Arthur Allan Seidelman, brought the project to Fowles, with Madge Sinclair attached as the maid and former slave. The production, with Burstyn as Mrs. Lincoln, starts shooting next month.

Fowles is simultaneously working on non-theatrical projects entitled “American Animation--A Look at 20th Century American Experience Through Cartoons” and a jumbo 20-part documentary series called “The History of Los Angeles.”

But Fowles’ self-described “prime effort is to search out local talent and realize it for TV.

“On a related but different front,” he continued, “an untried talent who had been editor of the Hollywood Reporter in the early ‘80s. Martin Kent, came to me two years back with an idea about doing a show on comedy. He managed to get Carl Reiner to host it. Then at a party I met Whoopi Goldberg and asked her if she would be on the show, and suddenly big talents--Albert Brooks, Phyllis Diller, David Brenner--started to come aboard.”

That deceptively insightful show, “The Light Stuff,” co-written and co-produced by Kent and Fowles, wound up as the highest-rated KCET production in the station’s history. It also won Fowles his first local Emmy. And Kent has gone on to produce and write for local television.

Fowles, who broke into TV six years ago as the producer on a Mickey Rooney-featured CBS TV movie, “Leave ‘Em Laughing,” has also initiated discussions with actor/producer Brock Peters to produce for KCET one of two shows staged in recent months at the Inner City Cultural Center: “The Meeting,” about an imagined meeting between the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and “Williams and Walker,” about a pair of famous, true-to-life black vaudevillians. (The latter would involve the hand of New York producer Woodie King Jr.).

Peters described his talks with Fowles as a “preliminary series of exchanges.” Peters is chairman of the Black Consortium, which is under contract with PBS to produce black-themed projects for PBS stations.

“Given L.A.’s ethnic diversity” said Fowles, “it’s important for us as a local station to seek out theater that is representative of the Latino, black and Oriental communities.”

At last weekend’s local Emmy dinner, Fowles contended only against himself in the entertainment special category for independent stations. His “Eleanor” was rivaled by his offbeat ‘40s swing/pop/jazz treat hosted by Cab Calloway, “Soundies,” a delicious collection of World War II music clips that were projected above jukeboxes in bus stations and bars.

“Soundies,” which he grabbed Calloway to host while the “Hi-De-Ho” man was performing at the Vine St. Bar and Grill, was definitely a sentimental underdog at Fowles’ table. (His second Emmy last weekend came in the instructional series category for being executive producer of “A Special Class at UCLA With . . .”.)

Meanwhile, KCET’s executive producer of local programming, who graduated from Harvard by way of Harlem and his native Jamaica, doesn’t miss his salad days as a studio lawyer (eight years divided among Universal, Columbia and 20th Century Fox). His last dogged negotiation was agreeing to a famous actress’s demand that her producer’s wife (an even bigger star) never be allowed on the set while she was working.

“I decided then and there to find a new coming-of-age.”