The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 67

ENTERTAINMENT THE ARTS TV LISTINGS I ALENDAI TUESDAY floe Atifletes Stone JULY 2, 1991 1 HIGHLIGHTS Good Morning, L. A. Channel 5's Wake-Up News Show Targets the Networks With Local Coverage By STEVE WE1NSTEIN SPECIAL TO THE TIMES Look out Bryant Gumbel, Charles Gibson and Paula Zahm Here come Barbara Beck, Carlos Amezcua and live helicopter shots of as many traffic snarls on the 405 and the four-level interchange as KTLA Channel 5 can squeeze into two morning hours. Beginning Monday, KTLA is taking direct aim at the three networks' morning news programs and their personalties with five people who have never been seen before on L.A. television.

But in debuting the area's first 7-9 a.m. local newscast, Channel 5 and its band of unfamiliar faces are armed with one weapon that their illustrious network counterparts can't match: local news, local news and more local news. While "Today's" Willard Scott is moaning about the humidity in New York on NBC, "Good Morning America's" Gibson is discussing the elections in India on ABC and "CBS This Morning's" Zahn is introducing a story about the Florida stork population, "KTLA Morning News," the station's executives vow, will cover Southern California's weather, sports and the goings-on in local city halls and police departments. As Los Angeles has grown more crowded and more complicated, said Steve Bell, KTLA's general manager, the network shows have grown less relevant to people living here. Before investing about $2.5 million a year in "KTLA Morning News," Bell said that the station commissioned a survey that indicated that "52 of those watching one of the network morning shows would abandon that program for a local newscast." "Half the people watching 'Today' or 'Good Morning Please see F8 GRAMMY'S APPLE APPEAL: An aggressive campaign has won New York' the 1992 Grammy Awards show the second year running for the Big Apple and jeopardized Los Angeles' role as the traditional Grammy host.

PI JUDGMENT TIME: Director James Cameron, known for blending technical wizardry with intimate stories about people in overwhelming situations "The takes his biggest gamble with "Terminator 2: Judgment-Day." Not only has the sequel to his successful original cost an estimated $80 million to $100 million, it is an unusual action film that takes a stand against violence. Fl TOP 0 THE MORNING: Beginning July 8, KTLA, will challenge the three networks morning news programs with a 7-9 a.m. show that promises to serve up what the competition doesn't: local news, local news and more local news. Fl PORNOGRAPHY CONTROLS: The Justice Department issued proposed regulations to control child' pornography, but librarians, publishers and arts groups condemned the proposal as an illegal attempt to limit artistic freedom of expression. F6 REVIEWS STEVE FONTANINI Los Angdlcs Times Carlos Amezcua and Barbara Beck are co-anchors of "KTLA Morning News," which begins broadcast Monday.

Grammy Move Is Music to New York's Ears Award: The Big Apple's business, political and entertainment communities outmaneuver L.A. to snag the telecast. By STEVE HOCHMAN SPECIAL TO THE TIMES The surprise Monday wasn't just that New York wrestled next year's Grammy Awards ceremony away from Los Angeles for the second straight year, but how easy the victory was. "The business and political and entertainment community in New York really came together in a way Los Angeles just hasn't been able to," said Mike Greene, president of the Grammy-sponsoring National Academy of Recording Arts Sciences, in a phone interview following a New York press conference Monday announcing that the 34th Grammy show would be telecast Feb. 25 from Radio City Music Hall.

The telecast will cap a week of Grammy-related activities in New York that will include parties, public performances and educational programs. The New York offer for the weeklong celebration, which could bring upward of $40 million of tourist and trade revenue to the city, was so far superior to the Los Angeles proposal that it will take a dramatic turnabout by Los Angeles to become competitive again, several mhbbhh MAD DICTATOR: Journalist Edward Behr's engrossing "The Rise and Pall of Ceauses-cu," on PBS, reveals so many myths and insanities about Ni-colae Ceausescu's Romanian dictatorship that it would be a black comedy had not so many lives been lost. Reviewed by Robert Koehler. FT J. ALBERT DIAZ Los Alludes Times Director James Cameron: "Why win the struggle against machines at the expense of your humanity?" 'Terminator's' Generator James Cameron Says He Uses Violence to Make a Point sources close to the negotiations said.

Until now, Los Angeles had been virtually guaranteed the Grammys, hosting the music industry's equivalent of the Oscars 28 of its 33 years. But recognizing the revenue and prestige benefits, New York launched an intensive campaign in 1987 to move the show East. New York won the Xhe Grammys will provide a much needed boost to our local economy. DAVID DINKINS mayor of New York "Rambo: First Blood Part II" and wrote and directed "The Terminator," "Aliens" and "The Abyss." Mario Kassar, chairman of Carolco Pictures, which financed "Terminator 2," declares that Cameron is a "genius" in the field of high-tech filmmaking. But the key to that genius, he says, is that "he is a writer.

Everything has to make sense to him. He's a very logical person." Cameron marries state-of-the-art stunts and technical wizardry to surprisingly intimate stories about people caught up in overwhelming situations. His gritty landscapes and strong, blue-collar characters have rejuvenated the tired genre of the sci-fi thriller. But this sequel to the 1984 hit that helped establish both Cameron and Schwarzenegger marks the director's biggest gamble. Not only is he in the uncomfortable though perhaps enviable position of having to top himself, he has made an action film that takes a strong stand against violence.

In the original film, a cyborg from the future was sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor, a woman destined to give birth to a son who would one day lead a human resistance movement against the machines. Please see CAMERON, F4 By KIRK HONEYCUTT special ro mi; TIMES James Cameron likes to point out that the world's most famous videotape the footage of motorist Rodney G. King's beating by Los Angeles police officers actually contains two segments. Amateur cameraman George Holliday shot scenes on the set of the Arnold Schwarzenegger action epic, "Terminator 2," at a location two blocks from his Lake View Terrace home, before capturing the beating. "That, to me, is the most amazing irony considering that the LAPD are strongly represented in 'Terminator 2' as being a dehumanized force," says Cameron, the film's writer-director.

"What the film is about, on the symbolic level, is the dehumanization we do on a daily basis." "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," a film rumored to have cost anywhere from $80 million to $100 million, opens Wednesday. With that kind of money at stake on an action film, it's unusual to hear even a mention of symbolism. But at 36, Cameron is Hollywood's preeminent science fiction director. After launching his career with the inauspicious "Piranha II," Cameron co-wrote CRIME OF ANGER: A painful, ugly documentary, "Rape: Cries From the Heartland" tries to shock viewers into seeing that rape is an act of violence, not unbridled sexual passion, but leaves unanswered questions about victims' privacy. Reviewed by Lynne Heffley.

F7 COLUMNS CRITIC AT LARGE: Spalding Gray and Eric Bogosian both work in solo performance, but there's a world of difference between them. Sheila Benson looks at the shock and assault stand-up shows and their effect on audience's expectations. Fl MORNING REPORT: The Bob Baker Marionette Theatre is closing; after 29 years the truth (the whole truth) about Dick Clark's age a little "Dallas" in, the Soviet Union. F2 LIZ SMITH: It's a words-only deal no photos, thank you between Patti Davis and Penthouse Wanted for soaps: talented people with "normal-plus-something" looks. F2 RICK DU BROW: ABC's "MacGy-ver" series may not receive bouquets, but it is quietly entering its seventh season with a budget well over $1 million an episode.

F9 QUOTABLE "The big challenge facing the performer is seeing beyond this somewhat rotten world and getting down to the essential: the marriage of two separate forces, control and feeling." Pianist Ralf Qothonl, In the Finnish Music Quarterly Grammys in 1988 and again in 1991. Next year's show will be the sixth Grammy awards show ever in the Big Apple and the first time it has been there two years in a row. (Nashville hosted the awards once, in 1973.) New York reportedly offered a guarantee that various Grammy Week events would raise about $750,000 for NARAS' Grammy in the Schools and MusiCares charities, as well as providing an array of entertainment and social events for Academy members coming to town for the awards show. Even the man spearheading the Los Angeles drive for the Grammys said that it was hard for his city to compete with New York. "We understand the reasons they selected New York, mainly that they were going to get a guarantee of revenue for their charities," said Sheldon I.

Ausman, president of the Los Angeles Visitors Convention Bureau. From a Glowing Campfire to a Bleak Street us on a journey with a dozen rambling side trips and diversions; the feeling in the audience is that we're there to listen. Laugh, perhaps, but most of all be held in the grip of the yarn. We expect to be manipulated; actually part of the edge we may feel as he begins is wondering just how he'll do it. Gray initially lulls us; then having done that, guides the storytelling as firmly as a practiced orchestra conductor.

There are even music-like crashes of volume and tempo, followed by hushed passages of contrast. Gray's work has a great plus: It's anti-high concept. For all of us in the grip of high concept's punishing simplicity, in films, on television, an evening of such complexity that it can't be described in one sentence is as seductive as a weekend in the country. The superurban Bogosian, who becomes more than a dozen characters in turn, is as seductive as shrapnel. Lulling anyone is the last thing on his mind.

His evening of "Sex, Drugs, Rock Roll," is, as he's built around "what jerks men are," and he has no lack Of candidates, Please see STYLES, F3 Monologues: Spalding Gray and Eric Bogosian are skilled monologuists, but where one cultivates, the other detonates. By SHEILA BENSON CRITIC AT I.AKCiE Spalding Gray one night, Eric Bogosian the next: What different ways these men inhabit a bare stage, and with what different demons. Gray, with his air of the self-obsessed Yankee Woody Allen as Ethan Frame stoutly maintains that he cannot make things up, that he merely distills and describes what goes on around him. The events he leads us through may be real, but it would be disingenuous of us to overlook the skill that goes into shaping the trip. Gray is an intellectual's tale spinner from the tradition of flannel-shirted campfire storytellers.

His night's enter-, tainmcnt, which he calls "The Monster.in a Box," conducts I is a commitment and guarantee we couldn't I make," he said. "We could not make it because in the recording industry much of the support comes from outside L.A. Last month we contacted a couple of recording companies in L.A., but it was too late to secure their commitment of that level of financial support." But Los Angeles-based record executives contacted Monday said that it will take more than their involvement to turn the trend around. "The mayor's office makes an incredible effort, but can't do it when it doesn't get the support from the business sector that New York offers," said Irving Azoff, owner of Giant Records and former chairman of MCA Records. "We hope next year, given enough time, we can put together a program that will justify them returning here," said Ausman, a former partner of the Arthur Anderson accounting firm.

"But with the level of financial support Mike Greene says they're getting in New York, we can't promise that. The Grammys doesn't appeal to the general Please see GRAMMY, 3 INDEX F3 Openings Radio F9 TV TJps F10 TVf.Tonight's schedule F10 Weekend Box Office F2.