The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 213

ffitb JffiilaIpfiTa Inquirer arts leisure section THE ARTS Antiques 12 Art 12 Books 14 Classical records 7 Concert listings 8 Poprock music 10 LEISURE Bridge 13 Chess 13 Coins 16 Gardening 16 Radio listings 16 Stamps 16 Sunday, June 14, 1981 Woody Allen reveals the secret of his failures The god of American humor has from his pedestal with two flops in a row. In this first of two-part series, he says the works were misunderstood, and he blames himself. I VV -x-- yiHji P. Louis XVI or, rather, the unreasonable facsimile thereof as played by Mel Brooks in 'History of the World Part By GeneSiskel Chicago Tribune Service 1 NEW YORK For the first time in his 28-year show-business career. Woody Allen has received back-to-back negative reviews.

The bad notices were for Stardust Memories (1980), his 10th feature film, and The Floating Light Bulb (1981), his third Broadway play. Because Allen, 45, has clearly established himself as America's foremost humorist, it seemed a good time to check in with him to see what, if anything, was wrong. Wearing khaki pants, brown leather work shoes and a white oxford-cloth shirt with collar buttons unbuttoned, Allen greeted me one Saturday morning at his magnificent Fifth Avenue penthouse. (The neighboring apartment, owned by a European industrialist, is for. sale at $1.5 million.) Allen had not been writing that morning, as was his custom.

Since our appointment was for 11 o'clock, all he had time for, he explained, was his standard way of greeting the day: coffee, the New York Times and a workout on his exercise bicycle. Like most movie stars, Allen appears smaller in person than one expects. He stands about 5 feet, 7 inches; a rough guess at his weight is 130 pounds. During the interview Allen was interrupted by phone calls. "I'll call you back when I'm finished," he told his callers, except one who had dialed the wrong number.

Fans of Allen who have never met him invariably have two questions: Is he funny in person? Is his well-publicized shyness merely an act? The answers: Occasionally and no. In a wide-ranging interview, his first since the negative reviews, Allen talked about those reviews, about recent attempts to assassinate public figures and about his personal and professional goals. Oddly, for a notoriously shy Allen seemed willing to answer any question put to him. Not once in three hours did he say, "I'd rather not go into that." On the contrary, he apparently enjoyed going into answers, freely musing on subjects as varied as urban decay and attending parties. But first, those reviews, beginning with Stardust Memories, Allen's bittersweet film about a moviemaker who suffers a nervous breakdown while attending a festival of his films at a summer resort overrun by his grasping fans.

The film received some scathing reviews, easily the worst of Allen's career. "I thought it was, by my own standards, a very good picture," he said. "My feeling is that many people took it wrong. "I felt that what I wanted to make was a movie about a completely fictitious character, a film director. And I only chose a film director because I know that area so well; I mean I couldn't choose a nuclear physicist alienation of large numbers of stockholders and customers for other product lines.

The sexually explicit fare now typically available through pay TV is advertised under a number of different terms: "soft pornography," "soft core," "sex-ploitation," "soft "hard simply "titillating." In many cases, it represents a quantum jump beyond the R-rated movies that constitute the most daring of conventional television broadcasting. Indeed, pay-TV programmers are serve late lunchers, the newest being the East Philly Cafe, Second and South Streets, which offers an elegant lunch (eggs Benedict bearnaise, $6.50) right up to 3 p.m. Other places are Caraway and Frankie Bradley's, where everything on the menu is available all the time, and they don't care when you arrive or what you order. TONIGHT: If you cannot get through Sunday night without a little rock 'n' roll music, Robert Hazard and the Heroes are playing at the East Side club, 13th and Chestnut Streets, and a group called Soft White Underbelly will be bellowing away at Emerald City in Cherry Hill. NAPKIN NOTES: A quite engaging group, Samantha, will be playing the Sign of the Sun Lounge in the Valley Forge Hilton through July 4.

Odyssey II, new gay cabaret on Delan- Mel Brooks, agonizing wag By Desmond Ryan inquirer Movie Critic LOS ANGELES Anyone harboring a notion that there is anything slapdash about the way Mel Brooks mixes up his unique blend of slapstick, sight gags, one liners and assorted jests should have been in the cavernous dubbing room at 20th Century-Fox one afternoon this spring. On the huge screen, a lavish production number dedicated to the Spanish Inquisition and starring Brooks as a cavorting Torquoma-da begins as a silent movie. Gradually and ers in the pantheon of Brooks' comic creations. At one point, Torquemada, who is in torture chamber with a chorus line of monks and nuns and Jews stretched out on various painful devices, raps on the heads of two bald prisoners like a bongo drummer. In the finished film, which opened around the country last week, it is a fragment that will last a couple of seconds, a tiny element in the broad effect of the entire eight minutes.

For the better part of an hour, between phone conversations (See MEL BROOKS on 4-L) painstakingly, sound is mixed for what will become the centerpiece of a History of the World Part I (which opened last week in the Philadelphia area) sequence that belongs with Springtime for Hitler from The Produc Pay-television is concerned with ratings, too: X-ratings Woody Allen People expect humor, he says because I'd never have any of the nuances of it. "So I chose a film director, and I wanted to show a guy who was very successful in his work and had come to a. middle-age part of his life, and despite all the adulation and success, he was on the verge of a breakdown, because he couldn't cope with the fact that he was getting older and eventually was going to die like his friend who had passed away. "The love relationships in his life weren't working. And the so-called material gains of his life and even the artistic gains of his life, even the awards and the adulation, were still not enough to make his life worthwhile.

He found himself in a position most people would dream of, but for him he could only see himself heading for the junkyard along with everybody else. "So he was at a depressed part of his life. But finally, through the course of searching his soul, at the end of the film (this is what I had hoped to show) he came to the conclusion that there are just some moments in life that all you have in life are moments, not your artistic achievements, not your material goods, not your fame or your money just some moments, maybe with another person, that are wonderful moments. Moments you can think back to and say, 'Gee, I was sitting (See WOODY ALLEN on 17-L) touting the difference. "Send the kids to bed," reads the promotional literature of Escapade, a satellite-fed "adult" movie service sold through cable-TV operators.

Most of the "adult" films now showing on pay TV stop short of showing actual sexual intercourse or other scenes typical of "hard-core" X-rated films, but they do show plenty of simulated sex. Andrew Wald, programming executive for ON TV, says one out of three subscribers watches at least one of (See X-RATED on 17-L) cey Street near 16th, now has a Sunday afternoon "tea dance" from 4 to 7 p.m. It will be "magical comedy" tomorrow night when Mark Goldstein headlines the show on Rick's Cabaret comedy night. Dorian, who has been playing regularly at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel, has joined John and Fran D'Amico at the keyboard at Lily's in NewMar-ket. Jessie Winchester plays the Bijou Cafe tomorrow and Tuesday.

TALENT: Singer Andre Williams is looking for a piano player. Williams won the first open-talent show at Rib-It on Walnut Street, and one of the prizes was a one-night paid booking there. They liked him so much, however, he was offered a full week's work if he could find an accompanist. The talent show, hosted by DJ Ken Garland, is scheduled again Wednesday night. Los Angeles Times Service HOLLYWOOD A buxom young radio preacher spreads the gospel on her regular afternoon program, her zeal mounting by the moment.

What her listeners don't know is that she is delivering her commentary in the nude from a bathtub in her studio, where she is simultaneously making love to a young man she has just met. That movie scene played here in March not on the wide screen of some X-rated movie theater, but on television screens throughout southern California. It was from Russ ByJOONCORR For movers and shakers VfS5 On the town Meyer's Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, one of four such "adult" films that a pay-TV company called ON TV broadcast that month for the late-night titillation of its 360,000 paid subscribers. The viewers are among millions of Americans who, because of a revolution in video technologies, are now offered in the privacy of their own homes movies and other video fare once seen only in "adult" theaters. The first blue movies came to television screens with the proliferation of videocassette recorders in U.S.

They will be up to their necks in bellies this week at the Middle East Restaurant, 126 Chestnut St. The Eastern Regional Belly Dancing Championships will begin there tomorrow and continue for six days. There will be more than 100 entrants, according to Kathy Schmidt, director of the championships. There will be awards in four divisions: novice, amateur, professional and teacher. Entrants will be judged on technique, costumes and finger-cymbal playing.

Anybody can enter. MUSIC: An Impressive new duo has taken up residence in the Not Quite Crickett room in the Latham Hotel. Doug Nelson and Rick Iannacone both play the guitar and sing their own songs as well as contemporary hits. Nelson also plays a mellow flue-gelhorn and a muted trumpet. They are on every night but Sunday.

THE SHORE: The big stars playing households, beginning in the mid-1970s. About two million such units are now in use in the United States, and by some estimates as many as half of the videocassette movies now sold are "adult" titles. But the area in which pornographic programming is causing the biggest stir is in pay TV. There, it has raised myriad sensitive legal and ethical questions for both government and business. Afraid that pornographic programming might otherwise get out of the hotel-casinos seldom eat in the hotel dining rooms but generally in their suites.

When they do go out to dinner, often it's to the Smithville Inn outside town. It's quieter and, for some reason, not frequented by autograph collectors. (An exception to all of this is Frank Sinatra, who likes to dine in the Capriccio Italian restaurant at Resorts International.) The new show at Resorts, The Baggy Pants Revue, is not a lounge act, even though it goes on nightly in the Carousel Lounge. You have to buy an $8 ticket ($10 on weekends) to see the vaudeville show. For the benefit of those few stalwart creatures who can sit through 75 minutes of silliness without some liquid there is no drink minimum.

RESTAURANTS: Holly Moore, who says he operates "the world's only indoor, second-floor sidewalk cafe," hand, government units at the local, state and national levels have tried to impose restrictions. In so doing, they find themselves on a tightrope between obscenity laws on one side and the issue of free speech on the other. Image-conscious corporations, meanwhile, have been buying or inventing their way into the new video technologies as the wave of the 'future. In so doing, however, they have landed in the middle of the "adult" programming controversy, where they fear a wrong move could will be operating a food stand this summer at the Phiadelphia Zoo. The zoo wanted to offer an alternative to the hot dogburger stands and asked Moore to provide it.

He will be serving unusual sandwiches and salads. There is good news for Sunday night pub crawlers. The Lickety Split restaurant at Fifth and South Streets will be serving full dinners up to 1 a.m. on Sunday. Wayne Inn in Merion now has a separate summer seafood menu in addition to the regular menu Congratulations to Deux Cheminees, beautiful little restaurant on Camac Street near Spruce, on receiving the Fine Dining Award from Lords Locator.

There are those among us who just cannot make it to lunch before 2 p.m., which gets us a lot of surly looks and "the kitchen, sir, closes at 2." But there are a few places that cheerfully.