The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 66

VCos Angeles (Times IEW Two Looks Into the Future and Past Scientist Disputes Viking Findings PART IV WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1977 BT WILLIAM OVEREND Timtt Staff wrHtr Robert Jastrow, a man of enormous curiosity, is disappointed that his colleagues at NASA don't think there's life on Mars. He thinks evidence suggests just the opposite, and he's also fascinated by the possibility that the universe is populate ed with alien worlds "billions of years more advanced" than ours. But he has to keep these things in perspective in a 20 billion-year perspectiveso he starts by explaining what he regards as "the most extraordinary finding in all of FIT TO PRINT Environmentalist Ernest Callenbach holds Diane Schatz's centerfold art that illustrates his ideas of "Ecotopia" where American society's filth is forbidden. Photo by Robert Footherap LIFE ON MARS? Robert Jastrow doesn't claim this dehydrated "water bear" is a resident of Mars. But NO POLLUTION IN 'ECO'TOPIA' An Environmentalist's Utopia BY HARRIET STIX CRITIC AT LARGE A Song for Two Women BT CHARLES CHAMPLIN Tlns Am Editor The movie begins with what could be called a declarative sequence images of women, dozens of them, salon-sized enlargements covering the walls of a shabby portrait studio in Paris.

Agnes Varda's "The One Sings, the Other Doesn't" Chante, 1' Autre which opens today at the Royal Theater in West Los Angeles, is very French, feminist, personal, impassioned, sensitive, positive and finally joyous. It is quite literally a song (several songs, as a matter of fact) in praise of women, with lyrics by the film-maker herself, and their salty tang survives the translation into English subtitles. What is admirable about her celebration of the changed consciousness of women (particularized in the friendship of the singer and the nonsinger over a dozen years or so) is that it does not insist the world would be better off without men, or that all men are beasts. The suggestion is that men are as varied a lot as women strong or weak, tender or not, generous or self-centered but that they have inherited traditional roles, images and attitudes which are changing as women's change. The women in the photgraphs are old, young, pregnant, gaunt, clothed and more often unclothed (not nude for erotic effect but naked as if to expose their souls).

They are alike in their expressions of unsmiling intensity. The studio is in a poor quarter of the city; the photographer obviously doesn't have a plugged centime to his name, although the work identifies him as an artist of considerable talent. He lives for an obsessive need to catch the spirit of women in frozen moments of time. (The pictures are not credited in the film. I presume they might have been taken by Varda, who began her career as a still photographer in the theater, then for magazines.

The images draw a curious schoolgirl (round-faced, red-haired Valerie Mairesse) who is to become the singer of the story and who is further drawn into the life of the photographer (Robert Dadies). He is a kind and hopelessly unworldly man who cannot get out of a loveless marriage to wed the lovely mistress (Therese Liotard) by whom he has had two children. Liotard, slender and intense, has come to the city to escape the mindless, mean drudgery of farm life. When the photographer finds the only way to cope with the world is to leave it, she and the children return to the taunting scorn of her parents. The girl, politicized by her exposure to Liotard's unhap-piness, splits from her own insensitive family (the mother shows signs of compassion, buried until papa is buried).

She joins a singing group that tours the country in a van, doing consciousness-raising songs and skits in public squares. She keeps in touch with the older woman, who has begun a slow hard climb to independence, practicing on a borrowed typewriter in a freezing cow barn, bicycling to an assembly-line job in a factory, finally starting a birth-control free clinic. The two friends meet again at the demonstration outside a famous abortion-issue trial in Paris in 1972. Apple, as the singer has come to be called, marries a charming Iranian economist (Ali Raffi) but the male-dominated Tehran society is more than she can take. A doctor (Jean-Pierre Pellegrin) enters Liotard's life.

The voice of the film-maker herself, speaking lightly accented English, narrates the tale of two women discovering their way to the arrangements (different) that spell happiness for them. By now the nonsinger's daughter by the photographer is a fine and independent-minded young woman. Perhaps, says the narration, the choices and the course of her life in this different day will be clearer and simpler. The film thus ends as it began, with a kind of declaration all the more affecting because the young woman in the film is. played by Varda's own daughter, Rosalie, now 19.

(Varda, who made "Cleo from 5 to 7" and "Happiness," is wed to film-maker Jacques Demy.) Varda tried for years to find studio backing for the film, finally put together her own production company and raised funds from eight different sources. Her son Mathieu, now 5, plays the child of a wandering troubadour (the film's songwriter Francois Wertheimer) who briefly joins the Orchid group with Apple. The cast in general is a mixture of professionals and amateurs. Valerie Mairesse was a cabaret performer now well launched on a movie career. Therese Liotard was trained in the theater and acted in television before making this first movie.

They infuse the whole film with a freshness and believability that is arresting and moving despite the obstacle of language and place. And while "The One Sings, the Other Doesn't" is obviously a strong personal statement about women now, it is so beautifully particularized by the storyteller and her principals that it is a demonstration and never a lecture. "The One Sings, the Other Doesn't" (Times-rated Mature for its theme) is an experience highly recommended for sharing. Jack Smith is on vacation. BERKELEY Ernest Callenbach sat down to write a magazine article a few years ago and thought he'd call it "The Scandal of Our Sewage." He felt strongly and still does that the way this country disposes of its sewage, by burning it or dumping it, is an outrage.

"I soon realized, though, that I probably couldn't sell the article because it didn't have a positive ending, I didn't have a 'better way," he says. "I had found that recycling would cost more-only a little more, but enough for people to say no to this biologically good idea." So he abandoned the idea of hard-selling the nation on alternative sewage disposal. Instead, he began "to think about what a country would have to be like to make rational decisions from a biological point of view." He looked around the world and couldn't find such a country so he invented one. He describes it in a novel called "Ecotopia," the name of his imaginary Utopia. Northwest States Secede Ecotopia is founded in 1980 when Western Oregon, Washington and Northern California secede from the United States.

Barbara is the Tijuana of Ecotopia," says Callenbach.) Its people recycle practically everything, have come up with all sorts of nonpolluting technological innovations, established more humane political and economic systems and a saner social The book takes place in 1999, 19 years after Ecotopia seceded. Its central character, Will Weston, is a New York newspaper reporter, the first official American visitor to the new country. "Weston got to be more and more like me in successive rewrites," Callenbach acknowledges. The book is written on two levels, one made up of the articles Weston writes describing Ecotopi-an life, the other his diary. 'It's Just a Quiet Little Book He finds Ecotopia a place where the economy is controlled by the workers (who put in 20-hour weeks), the automobile has been banned, people get rid of their aggressions through ritual war games and tree worship is common.

Social, political and economic systems are described in detail. (Yes, there is a chapter on recycling sewage.) "I wrote the book partly to make things concrete," Callenbach says. "Nitty-gritty details are where the real action is." Callenbach submitted his manuscript to about 25 publishers in New York. They all turned it down. That was in 1974 and Eastern publishers were suggesting the ecology fad had ended.

"Nobody could get a handle on it," Callenbach says. "It's not exactly a novel, or science fiction with a lot of freaky technology. There's not much sex or violence or bizarre behavior. It's just a quiet little book with a lot of information." So Callenbach formed Banyan Tree Books and Please Turn to Page 9, Col. 1 JUST ADD WATER It springs to life after 100 years when moistened.

He says it shows how life can adapt there. science." It has to do with the creation of the universe itself. As founder and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Jastrow is a theoretical physicist and astroribmer with high credentials. His interests go far beyond those areas, however. For Jastrow the challenge of sending men into space was only a beginning.

More recently, he has turned to the broader questions of the origin of the universe, the evolution of human life, and the prospects of life on other planets. He has written a book, "Until the Sun Dies," presenting some of his theories. Some of what he says is controversial. But it is never dull. "One thing people don't understand about science is that it does not have the full story to Please Turn to Page 8, Col.

1 STAGE REVIEW Cronyn, Tandy in 4Gin Game' BY DAN SULLIVAN Tinwi Ttmttr Critic NEW YORK Local play makes good. First Michael Cristofer's "The Shadow Box" went to Broadway (it's still playing at the Lunt-Fontanne). This year it's D.L. Co-burn's "The Gin Game." First it was done at American Theater Arts in Hollywood, then at the Actors Theater of Louisville, then at the Long Wharf in New Haven, now at the John Golden Theater on W. 45th St At the Long Wharf it became a vehicle for Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and they are the reason people are showing up at the Golden.

The Cronyns inspire the same ART SEIDENBAUM Barney Danchik Has a Dream On my way to meet developer Barney Danchik, I drove by two Van Nuys Blvd. billboards in perfect sequence. The first showed a matronly woman smiling; she'd compared prices and the lowest were at Forest Lawn. Below 6 feet, I was thinking, when the second board appeared: "Wouldn't You Rather Be at Caesars Palace?" And I figured sure, the odds were longer. Perfect expressions of Van Nuys, I thought, where some streets look to be dying and urbanity has long been a gamble.

Danchik the developer pulled up outside the Valley Municipal Building in his 1962 Impala, his scuffed Regal shoes and his slightly stained white golf hat. He's only been dreaming about redoing a hunk of Van Nuys for 14 years now, back when he bought some property from octogenarian Grace Green and she promised him the neighborhood would one day be beautiful. He promised her he'd name a building in her honor if she was right And now the Grace Green condominiums, 90 units of them on both sides of nearby Erwin are drawn by architect Samuel Wacht and almost abuilding. "I still need approval from Sacramento," Danchik admitted, spreading his plans across the old Chevy trunk. "From the corporations commissioner, the real estate commissioner, the securities commissioner and I forget who else." Advisory Approval But he's optimistic these days.

By September he already had advisory governmental approval to proceed. "What seems to be a highly undesirable condition," he said at the time, "a negative declaration and a pink slip in my day a notice you'd been fired is now a much sought-after and desirable condition. Only in a democracy turned-bureaucracy. The Danchik dream is residential and commercial life for central Van Nuys, where government has been growing for the last decades among the. weeds of hock shops and surplus stores and bail bondsmen.

The bail bondsmen one advertising "confidential, sympathetic help" in fact surround the expanding Valley civic center. On the east side of Van Nuys Blvd. at Sylvan St. are the old municipal building (a WPA project of the early '30s), new County Courthouse, new police building and new branch library. Newer still, facing the boulevard, are a post office and a federal building.

Plans for a new city structure, a state building and a municipal court are in the works. Bureaucracy blooms opposite commercial blight. "This is the center of an area of about 1.5 million people," says Danchik, "and I'm the only guy doing anything about it on the private side." The onetime Iowa social worker talks about condos in the moderate range of "Moderate isn't, Please Turn to Page 7, Col. 1 THE VIEWS INSIDE THEY INSPIRE-Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy in D.L. Coburn's 'Gin BOOKS: Anita Leslie's "Clare Sheridan" by Robert Kirsch on Page 5.

MOVIES: "Down the Ancient Stairs" by Kevin Thomas on Page 16. "Filmvid" by Linda Gross on Page 10. MUSIC: Blessed Sacrament Choir by Daniel Cariaga on Page 12. Music for a While by Richard Slater on Page 15. STAGE: "Hotel Universe" by Sylvie Drake on Page 16.

TELEVISION: "Rigoletto" by Martin Bernheimer on Page 18. I. AND OTHER FEATURES kind of audience confidence that the Lunts did in the" 1940s. The play might not be much, but they'll be delight- ful. And look who's directing them here, Mike NicholsT Let's go.

We go, and the Cronyns give value. Not only do they charm us in Coburn's play, it's lovely to see them embrace the ages they are given to play, not that far from the ages they are, in fact, getting to be. Actors know how to use their wrinkles, exaggerate them, even. Did we think that drama happened only to the young? "The Gin Game" takes place on the porch of a mansion declined to a rest home, gone gray like its residents (David Mitchell's set tells us about it). Cronyn has been there a while and is only annoyed with the place.

Miss Tandy just Please Turn to Page 14, Col. 4 Bridge Page 4 On Fashion Page 6 Comics Page 21 On View Page 4 Film Clips Page 11 Cecil Smith Page 17 Jody Jacobs Page 2 Television 17-20 Things Page 3 DEVELOPER Barney Danchik and "Fernando," symbolizing the Valley's first citizen. Times photo by Mary Frampton.