The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 111

9 9 9 99 i or THE SUN SECTION- SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 1995 (oj (1 ifirVi Robert Altman (shown with Kim Basin-ger) looks at fashion world in new film. 1 'Ready to Wear' PR machine is ready to crank Get ready, get set, get confused, in TV's big switch in Baltimore By Allen Barra Special to The Sun By David Zurawik Sun Television Critic i A 1 intAAi fil. J. UJ Wear fPret-a-Porter)." has so many in Jokes and visual puns that you won- It i der if the director hadn planned this t's Monday night. The holidays are over, and you sit your weary self down In front of the television set aching for the comforting rhythms and easy familiarity of your favorite prime-time shows.

"J1L. utives. But in other ways, they add, it's nothing to lose any sleep over. "Within the Industry, it is a very big deal. It's historic, the biggest realignment since the early 1950s, when many affiliate-network relationships were first established," says Douglas Gomery, media economist at the University of Maryland College Park.

"This undoes relationships of 40 or more years. "But, on the other hand, in the era of channel-surfing and grazing, especially for younger viewers, it's not such a big deal," he adds. There will be confusion and anxiety Initially, but, in a few months, it's likely that most viewers won't even remember it happened." Executives at the three Baltimore TV stations involved in the switch agree. "From what we have seen in other markets that have changed, there is an Intense but short period of confusion. And, then, viewers find the programs they are looking for with the help of TV guides and remote controls," says Marcellus Alexander, general manager of WJZ (Channel 13).

"Viewers don't watch networks per se. They watch programs." "Here's what I think will happen when we switch," says WMAR general manager Joe Lewln. "We'll all be flooded with calls. Even the cable systems will probably be flooded with calls, because viewers often call the cable company when something goes wrong. "But, In pretty quick order, viewers will find their favorite shows and settle back in with them," Mr.

Lewln adds. "It's a truism: People don't watch stations, they watch programs. The remote control changed everything." See TV, 31 Questions on the network switch? See 2L. You tune In WJZ, looking for "Coach," but Instead you find "The But isn't the The Nanny" supposed to be on WBAL? So you click to WBAL, and there's (yipes!) the "Fresh Prince of Bel Air." What's going on here? How'd the coach, the nanny and the fresh prince get mixed up? The answer: the switch the historic, three-way rearrangement of television networks and their affiliates in Baltimore. You've been hearing about it since last summer, when Fox Broadcasting's Rupert Murdoch set off a billion-dollar game of musical chairs by raiding 12 affiliates from the old-line networks of CBS, ABO and NBC.

Now it's here, and channel surfers across Maryland who aren't paying attention are headed for a wipeout. Starting at 5 a.m. tomorrow: WMAR (Channel 2), formerly with NBC, aligns with ABC. WBAL (Channel 1 1), formerly with CBS, aligns with NBC. WJZ (Channel 13), ABC's Baltimore affiliate for 46 years, joins CBS.

OK, so the local stations are switching; they're going to air shows from a different network. But viewers will still be able to see all the networks, right? And the local news and talk personalities are still going to be there, right? How big a deal is this, anyway? In some ways it's a very big deal, say industry analysts and television station exec scene as one big ironic capper: Nearly 200 of the worst-dressed people in America interviewing a score of superbly dressed film stars playing people connected to the world of high fashion. One of the worst-dressed is your correspondent. I can assure anyone who's ever wondered about it that nothing can make you more aware that your socks don't match than wandering through suites in New York's Waldorf Astoria, dodging publicists dressed like fashion models and snatching moments of conversation with Lauren Ba-call, Tim Robbins, Tracey Ullman, Forest Whitaker, Sally Kellerman, Danny Aiello. Stephen Rea and Richard E.

Grant, among others. Not among the others are Julia Roberts, Lyle Lovett, Kim Basinger, Marcello Mas-troiannl and Sophia Loren, all of whom are in "Ready To Wear" (which opened Christmas Day) but are not available for this deluxe press junket designed to seduce hick journalists from Hartford, Chicago, Kansas City, De-; troit, Louisville, Minneapolis, San Diego, San' Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Miami, West Palm Beach, Houston, Philadelphia you' know, any place that's not New York. 1 have too much integrity to be seduced, which is fortunate, since I live in New Jersey and am thus ineligible to be flown in to spend three days at one of New York's great luxury hotels and stuffed with gourmet food and champagne all in exchange for writing stories about "Ready to Wear." It's a dirty and no one really has to do it. While waiting to interview Tracey Ullman and Forest Whitaker, I do some arithmetic and figure the minimum cost of bringing such a huge chunk of the entertainment press to New York for three days, and the; figure hovers between $300,000 and' $400,000 (depending upon what kind of. breaks you get for buying tickets en masse).

The budget for "Vincent and Theo," Mr. Alt-; man's brilliant but little-seen masterpiece on; the life of Vincent Van Gogh, may well have been less than the cost of Just the press junket for "Ready to Wear." It's a strange feeling, to see this kind of publicity machine crank-' ing up for the work of a man who, for nearly the last quarter-century, has been the ultimate film industry maverick. By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, I accepted free parking and a T-shirt and if you think these freebies compromised See MOVIE, 4L ik'I i I -j WsM 'Alone' comes to BMA from private collection I 1 hi 3 4 -V i 1 i (Lkbk By John Dorsey Sun Art Critic Dn John Wilson's "Street Car Scene," a strapping young man sits quietly on the streetcar, hands folded on top of his lunch pall, and looks straight out at you. All around him, people fill the seats, but there's one difference between them and him. They are all white.

He's black. He's "Alone in a Crowd," the title of the show from which this Image comes. Opening at the Baltimore Museum of Art on Wednesday, the show features more than 100 prints by 42 African-American artists of the 1930s and 1940s. That's a lot of prints, but this African-American selection is only one tiny fraction of one of the world's most phenomenal collections of American prints of all kinds. It's housed In a sleek midtown Manhattan skyscraper, on the several floors occupied by Alliance Capital Management, a pension and mutual-fund management firm.

There, everywhere you go, gray walls provide a neutral background for prints by American artists of the 19th and 20th centuries not dozens or hundreds of prints, but thousands of prints. At any one time, there are about 2,000 prints on the walls of this corporate headquarters, and that represents less than half of the more than 4,000 prints by 1 ,000 artists in the collection. It's not the corporate collection, but the personal collection of its chairman, Dave Williams, and his wife, Reba, the firm's director of special projects. It spans the history of American printmaklng, taking ir such aspects as the 19th-century etching revival, the WPA artists of the 1930s, impression-: ism and expressionism, regionalism, abstract art and up-to-the-minute contemporary work. It concentrates largely on black and white work, but there are also segments of color screen-prints and color woodcuts.

It encompasses the well-known names, of course, from Wlnslow Homer and George Bellows to Ralston Crawford, Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol I and Ellsworth Kelly. But the Williamses partlcu- larly like the thrill of discovering artists who are not well-known, so there are a lot of names few other people have heard of: Kyra Markham, W. S. Rice, George Lawrence Nelson, E. Sophonisba mer, Fred Becker, Luigl Rist.

"I think it's probably the most Important private collection of American prints," says David Kiehl, adjunct curator of prints at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. Mary Ryan, a New York dealer specializing in prints, agrees. Their collection is more substantial and wide-ranging than almost any museum collection," she says. "It's unimaginable that any other private collection has that depth," says BMA curator of prints, drawings and photographs Jay M. Fisher, who took the museum's print and drawing society to New York two years ago to see the collection.

The Williamses she's 58. he's 62 have put It together over the past two decades, and they are not your usual collectors. Your usual collector will tell you she Just bought a picture here and a picture there and a picture somewhere else until See ART, 7L Reba and Dave Williams of New York own more, than 4,000 prints by 1,000 American artists. Three Children" by William Henry Johnson is part of the Mone in a Crowd" rhow that opens at the BMA on Wednesday..