The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 323

B8 WEDNESDAY. MAY 2a 1992 WASHINGTON EDITION LOS ANGELES TIMES CALENDAR JOB til-1 '5 pw Bond Firm Takes Over 'Thief Animation: Richard Williams of 'Roger Rabbit' fame goes over budget on his 27-year project. Warner Bros, had hoped for a year-end release date. Comment ON ENTTERTAINMENT An Unrequited Hollywood Love Affair The usual themes of money, ego and sac are woven into view of Tinseltown as a club. One of three sets of actors portraying the Jackson 5 in "An American Dream," now in production.

Young Michael Jackson is played by Alex Burrall, 9, below. In the beginning: The real Jackson 5 in their early struggling days In Gary, Ind. Jacksons' Path to 'Victory' Miniseries to Trace Family Highs, Lows By BILL STEIGERWALD SPECIAL TO THE TIMES McKEES ROCKS, a dark and dingy old elementary school auditorium, a pop star is being born. Make that reborn, because thanks to the makers of the ABC miniseries "The Jacksons: An American Dream," we've been transported back to 1965 to a PTA meeting in Gary, Ind. A tiny Michael Jackson stands alone and nearly motionless on a school stage, singing his 6-year-old soul out.

His angelic face is turned to the heavens, his arms and clenched fists rising slowly at his sides like little wings. As his high but strong voice soars toward the climax of "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," the child's body beneath the sports coat and bow tie is still stage-stiff with inexperience. But Michael's precocious musical maturity is filling the hall for all to hear. When Michael finishes the first public solo performance, the audience leaps to its feet and applauds. Michael's mother, Catherine Jackson (Angela Bassett), wipes a tear from her eye, turns to her husband, Joseph (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), and says, "I guess you'll have to make it the Jackson 5." Young Michael played by 9-year-old Alex Burrall, who was lip-syncing to a recording by 13-year-old singer-actor Anthony Harrell has proven he's ready to join the family band.

The rest, as they say, is pop history. That scene will appear about 40 minutes into "The Jacksons: An American Dream." The four-hour miniseries is a family-oriented drama about the humble ART REVIEW By CHARLES SOLOMON and ROBERT W. WELKOS TIMES STAFF WRITERS Cnph he Thief and the Cobbler," a fea ture-length film that Oscar- winning animator Richard Wil liams has been making for more than a quarter -century, has gone over budget, prompting a Los Angeles completion bond firm to take control of the project. The Times has learned. On Friday, Williams told a staff meeting in London that his company, Richard Williams Animation, would cease operations and lay off about 30 animators plus other personnel.

"He was obviously not very happy about it, but it was out of his hands," said David Brown, one of the film's animators. Brown said he had heard that the film will be finished in Los Angeles by another company. The move is a blow to Williams, the director of animation for the Academy Award-winning "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Friends said Williams sacrificed family life and much of his own money attempting to bring "Thief" to the screen. Warner Bros, had placed "Thief" a movie with an Arabian Nights setting on its release schedule, but now the studio must wait to see if it can be delivered in time for Christmas. "We're discussing with Warner Bros, the best way to finish the film," said Steven Fayne, an attorney for Completion Bond Co.

of Century City, which now controls the fate of the production. Fayne said it is possible some of the production will be moved to Los Angeles, but said that negotiations are still under way. "He (Williams) could do it himself or we could farm out pieces of it to other animation companies)," Fayne said. The bond company insures investors that a movie will be completed on time and on budget, and has legal authority to make any decisions financial and creative to bring it in as quickly as possible. Completion Bond Co.

became involved in "The Thief and the Cobbler" two years ago, but its attorney would not identify the investors. Please see ANIMATION, B9 MOVIE REVIEW 'Lovers': Tale of a Steamy Triangle By KENNETH TURAN TIMES FILM CRITIC Others may boast, but "Lovers" is the real deal. A small-scale Spanish film made with major league passion, it joins a select group of motion pictures that conduct as much heat as the law allows. Though the lure of smoldering sensuality has sold more theater tickets than anything you can think of, movies rarely deliver on that promise. No amount of unrestrained nudity or strenuous simulations can guarantee drop-dead sexual excitement.

For that, an intensity of feeling must be created, which means involving the emotions as much as exposing the flesh. So, while the exposure in "Lovers" is modest by current Hollywood standards, the fierce erotic charge this film builds up makes "Basic Instinct" look feeble by comparison. Though based on a true story, "Lovers" has the unyielding melodramatic grip of a James M. Cain novel crossbred with the romantic fatalism that is part and parcel of the Spanish cultural tradition. The time is the 1950s, the place Madrid, the prevailing mood the stultifying conformity and conservatism of the Franco regime, an ethos Paco (Jorge Sanz) and Trini (Maribel Verdu) seem to fit right in with.

He is a young about-to-be-discharged soldier, she is his commanding officer's maid, and they are engaged. A hard-working, beautiful but unsophisticated girl who looks forward to married life mainly as a chance to cook enormous meals for Paco, Trini is also unyieldingly prim, brusquely dismissing her intended's timorous sexual advances. For his part, Paco seems rootless and vaguely dissatisfied, quite handsome but emotionally malleable, liable to drift whichever way the strongest wind blows. Out of the army and looking for a place to live, Paco answers a room-for-rent ad and finds himself face to face with Luisa (Victoria Abril), a hot number in sunglasses and a kimono. A sybaritic, self-indulgent widow who has a weakness for Please see B9 By Nicholas Kent Paul Rosenfield's anatomy of Hollywood is the latest in a long line of books that have sought over the years to codify the beguiling behavior of the natives into a coherent set of rules.

It's a daunting task, made especially so because the finest example of the genre in my opinion it hasn't been surpassed to this day-was written over 40 years ago. In 1946, an anthropologist called Hortense Powdermaker decided to apply the same field techniques she had used to study Melanesian tribes in the Southwest Pacific to the exotic inhabitants of Los Angeles. The result of her studies, "Hollywood: The Dream Factory," is a seminal work. Like all conscientious academics, Powdermaker prefaced her observations with a statement of her qualification as a detached scientist. "Most important," she wrote, "was the absence of any desire on my part to find a job in the movie industry or to THE CLUB RULES Power, Money, Sex, and Fear How It Works in Hollywood By Paul Rosenfield (Warner Books: S19.95; 352pp.) become a part of it.

This was unique for anyone living in Hollywood for a year." And, one might add, it's just as rare today to find an entertainment journalist who doesn't have a screenplay or a job application sticking out of their back pocket. Besides being free of ulterior motives, Powdermaker was also immune from Hollywood's bright lights and the heady aroma of celebrity. To her, "the handsome stars with their swimming pool homes were no more glamorous than were the South Sea aborigines exotic. All, whether ex-cannibal chiefs, magicians, front-office executives, or directors, were human beings working and living in a certain way, which I was interested in analyzing." After a year of field work she conducted some 900 interviews Powdermaker observed that although Los Angeles was indisputably connected to the mainland, the natives persisted in regarding themselves as an island race. Just as members of the Melanesian tribe could not imagine living anywhere else and were fearful of going beyond their own small community, so the inhabitants of the movie colony seemed "to enjoy and receive a certain security from being only with people like themselves." Hortense Powdermaker thought of the movie community as essentially tribal; Paul Rosenfield sees Hollywood as a club.

It's a fair enough premise, and Rosenfield appears highly qualified to follow it through. He's been treading the Hollywood beat for almost 20 years, ever since he began at the Los Angeles Times as a clip-and-file boy for Joyce Haber, whom he describes as "the last heavyweight gossip columnist in modern Hollywood." "The Club Rules" is broken down into five sections ostensibly dealing with topics, such as Money, Ego, Sex and so on. Each section is divided into chapters, most of which are personality profiles and many of which I suspect Rosenfield originally wrote as character sketches for the Los Angeles Times and then adapted to fit the thesis of his book. Rosenfield has a talent for getting people to confide in him, and he wisely allows his subjects ample space to say their piece. In a nicely revealing moment, for example, Jane Fonda admits she resents people who are negative and bitter about corporate demands.

"Work within the system or be quiet," she counsels. "Corporate pressure has always been part of the game. The only people who moan are the people who can't play." It's one of the more illuminating comments in the book, and it is especially apposite because it comes from a woman who was once a leading icon of the anti-establishment. It is in these cameos that the real pleasure of "The Club Rules" is to be had. Unfortunately, when Rosenfield attempts to bind them into his overall thesis, everything starts to fall apart.

In order to achieve some kind of unity, Kent is the producer of the award-winning BBC documentary series "Naked Hollywood" and author of the companion book (St. Martin's Press) Please see KENT, Bit "An American Dream" is a complicated undertaking. Using three sets of actors to portray the six Jackson boys at three periods in their lives, it opens with the postwar courtship of parents Kath-erine and Joseph Jackson and continues through the early struggling days of the Jackson 5 to the triumph of the "Victory" tour of 1984. Co-executive producers Stan Margu-lies and Suzanne de Passe came to Pittsburgh for economic reasons, but primarily because the city could stand in well for industrial Gary, as well as for other parts of the Midwest. Pittsburgh will provide the reality for the family's struggling early days, which consume most of the first two-hour segment.

L.A. locations will be used to depict the dream-come-true years, Margulies said. The miniseries will be filled with the original versions of many of the Jack-sons' Motown and post-Motown hits, with the actors lip-syncing to the songs. Pre-Motown tunes like "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" will be sung by young musicians chosen for their resemblance to voices of the Jacksons when they were young. There'll be enough music from all the Jacksons and others like the soulful a cappella group Boyz II Men to fill a soundtrack CD.

De Passe, a former Motown executive Pleue see JACKSONS, Bll NICK CARONE "Untitled (Mona Lisa)," is part of the Robert Rauschenberg Installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. sions are notable and painful, especially at the end of this intimately detailed show. Having been through selections of the notorious "white paintings" executed at Black Mountain College in 1951; assorted "black paintings," made in different ways between 1951 and 1953; and a few of the small 1953 "gold paintings," with their fragile surfaces of torn gold leaf, it's a disappointment to come to the brink of the great combines and find a sizable hole: The "red painUngs" of 1953-54 are poorly represented. The loss isn't fatal especially with Pleas see RAUSCHENBERG, mo rjL mm Enlightening Look at Early Work of Robert Rauschenberg WILLIAM MALDONADO origins, multimusical triumphs and in-tra-family squabbles of the Jackson parents and their famous children. Scheduled to air next season probably during the November sweeps the movie finishes four weeks of filming in Pittsburgh's working-class environs this week and then moves to Los Angeles for another four weeks.

Houston, the show has now been given a spacious and elegant installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it completes a tour that already has included Washington and Chicago. Of all the exhibitions that have toured in the past season, this is the one that should be lamented most for not having come to Los Angeles. It isn't just that Rauschenberg settled in L.A. for a year or so after discharge from the Navy in 1945, or that his first epiphany in art came from seeing the lush and romantic 18th-century English portraits at San Marino's Huntington Art Gallery. More important, the 11 "combine paintings" owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art (which date from 1955 to 1961) form the most significant collection of Rauschenberg's pivotal work in any American museum.

Throughout the exhibition in San Francisco, you find yourself mentally reading backward from the classic combines (and the subsequent silk-screen painUngs) to the work before you from the early 1950s. What an opportunity it would have been to see the combines in MOCA's collection with their immediate predecessors! Hopps also organized the great Rauschenberg retrospective in 1976, and his knowledge of the artist's full career has been brought to bear on this highly focused examination of a five-year period. (The catalogue is indispensable.) Certain By CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT TIMES ART CRITIC SAN FRANCISCO-Between 1954 and the mid 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg created an extraordinary body of work that became a principal pivot for postwar art. In it the painter asked: For a fading industrial world increasingly filled with the fleeting images of an evanescent mass culture, what is the utility of painting? The question had informed Rauschen-berg's work almost from the start. His famous "Erased de Kooning Drawing" of 1953 is a good example.

A drawing in ink and crayon by the most painterly of the new breed of Abstract Expressionist artistsand a European immigrant to boot the De Kooning sketch represented the kind of armature on which Western painting had been constructed since the Renaissance. When Rauschenberg erased it-then carefully matted, labeled and framed the blanked-out sheet in a gold leaf frame it was like exalting the eradication of the sturdy foundations on which building normally would stand. The "Erased de Kooning Drawing" is among the chief pleasures of "Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s," an important exhibition of nearly 100 paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages, assemblages and prints made between the spring of 1949 and the summer of 1954. Organized by Walter Hoppt for the Menil Collection in.