The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 57

I Chicano Walks a Cultural Tightrope Eos Alleles Sftmea ITS I 1- ORANGE COUNTY PART IV FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1978 CRITIC AT LARGE Disney Aims for the Stars 1 1 'I i I L--l Ms ht )i 1 f. I t-l 1 If I li I I .1 "-'17T -rr -nT "im iaimiHrVrtin-lwiwnTmiraMiirJ 111 in imr BY ANNE La RIVIERE Times Staff Writer ANAHEIM Everyone in the barrios knows the Ben Vargas family. They are the family who, in 1970, organized a community drive to build Little People's Park in the barrio called Penguin City. The site of the proposed park consisted of two dirt lotsand an abandoned house which was a haven for dope pushers and "shooters." With city assistance, the Vargases and others bulldozed the old house down, put in a sprinkler system, a barbecue, picnic tables and play equipment Vargas even mowed the lawn for a year until the city could take over park maintenance. For her involvement, Mrs.

Vargas was named Woman of the Year by the local chapter of the American Assn. of University Women. And everybody knows the Vargas boy, Richard, 25. For years, he helped lead his neighbors in active protests against alleged police brutality and harassment in his community that resulted in: A visit in 1974 from the director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to investigate the charges.

The formation of the Police Community Relations Committee to try to establish rapport between police and barrio residents. In the process, Vargas was jailed three times for such police-related crimes as resisting arrest Temper With a Short Fuse Some neighbors say his troubles may have something to do with the fact that Vargas, a stocky, young Mexican-Americn with brooding eyes, has a temper with a short fuse. But each time Vargas was arrested he was freed twice after lengthy and expensive jury trials that found him and his mother, who also was arrested once, not guilty. According to Jeffrey Friedman, an attorney who knows Vargas, juries are sympathetic to police officers in cases where they maintain they were harassed. Defendants are easily found guilty of these charges.

But Vargas was found not guilty all three times. "It's pretty obvious he has a lot of enemies in the department or he wouldnt have been arrested for this kind of stuff Friedman said. "I told him," the attorney continued, "if he wants to stop being hassled by the police, he better leave Anaheim." But the Vargas family is as much a part of Penguin City as is Little People's Park. And today the park and the family that helped build it are as deeply embroiled in conflicts with city police as ever. It was young Vargas, for instance, who called police to the park on July 30 to report that a gun had been fired from a passing car into a crowd of young people who were relaxing on benches and swings.

When the police arrived a melee broke out There were varied reports on who started it, but 11 persons were arrested, some on charges of assaulting the officers. Days later, Vargas and others trooped into a City Council meeting and bitterly complained about the way the police had conducted themselves. BY CHARLES CHAMPLIN Tlmtt Arts Editor Shooting started this week at the Walt Disney studio in Burbank on the most expensive and elaborate movie the company has ever made a live-action, deep-space thriller called "The Black Hole" and budgeted at $17 million. It could also be the most significant undertaking in Disney's modern history, because it is a calculated attempt to win back the 15- to 35-year-old age group that has, as Ron Miller, the studio's creative chief, candidly admits, "turned us off." Since the death of Walt Disney in 1966, the enterprise he founded has continued to expand and prosper, thanks in large measure to Disneyland and Disney World. The movies, live action and animated, have tended to repeat the proven Disney formulas and display the smooth Disney competence but with diminishing freshness and vitality.

The dangers of stagnation have evidently been a matter of concern within the studio as well as among critics and customers, and "The Black Hole" is intended to be an important new launching. It will star Maximilian Schell, Anthony Perkins, Robert Forster, Joseph Bottoms, Jennifer O'Neill and Ernest Borgnine none of whom, interestingly, has been identified with the Disney stock company of performers. "The Black Hole" has been on the studio agenda for five years, since the original property was bought and assigned to the late Winston Hibler. Active development began some 30 months ago under the guidance of Disney's veteran special-effects artist, Peter Ellenshaw. Ellenshaw, who is the film's production designer and will be its second unit director for the special effects, has conceived an immense space platform that looks like an Erector set rendering of Las Vegas, and is presumably poised at the lip of one of the mysterious black holes that astrophysicists theorize may be caused by the collapse of a star.

MOTHER AND SON Community activist Richard Vargas and his mother, Mrs. Ben Mace was sprayed in the eyes of innocent bystanders, they said; They alleged that ycung people were beaten with nightsticks and children were dragged into the streets. Two people were choked, they said. A district attorney's investigation resulted in a decision that there wasnt enough evidence to prosecute the police. So now Vargas and his friends are mounting a petition drive to take the cases of alleged police brutality and harassment to the Orange County grand jury.

If community leaders dont agree with this step, at least some could have anticipated it "We thought we were reaching the police as well as the community with our programs," said Amin David, the city's affirmative action specialist who has worked with both sides for years. "But how do you reach people who, at the moment of action, overreact? I feel the (police) administration is unequivocally committed to making tremendous inroads Vargas, in Little People's Park in Anaheim. Family led drive for park in Penguin City barrio. limes photo by Hal Schulz with the Mexican-American community. But whether or not, in fact, it gets to the moment of truth with the beat of ficer is questionable.

"I'm distraught" David sighed. "I'm very distraught" Capt Jimmie Kennedy of the Police Department speaking in the absence of Police Chief Harold Bastrup who is on a vacation-business trip in the East, agrees that communication between police and the community is a crazy quilt of confusion. "It's pretty evident there is a lack of communication here," he said. "We feel there needs to be some fence-mending that must take place on both sides." Whether or not area residents will get the grand jury investigation they seek remains to be seen One thing is certain; Vargas1 attempts to be a leader in his community have changed his life. Please Turn to Page 25, Col.

1 OPERA REVIEW A 'Hamlet' Up From Limbo it Wmtwiimti BY MARTIN BERNHEIMER Timti Music Critic SAN DIEGO-They laughed when the San Diego Opera announced a revival of Ambroise Thomas' "Hamlet." Exhumation would be a better word. "Hamlet," after all, was not supposed to be one of those long-lost masterpieces after which historians and aficionados pine. This, we thought, was just an outdated curio, a quaint period piece, a silly reduction of Shakespearean tragedy to operatic absurdity. None of us really knew the opera, of course. The last professional performance in America took place in 1920; the last in Paris in 1938.

But we did know that Brindisi a merry drinking song for the melancholy Dane? which had provided a rousing showpiece for star baritones from I -I I Black holes, cover-blurbed on a recent cover of Time magazine as "Science's Ultimate Mystery," are a sci-fi the scientists call them, in which no conceivable deformation of time and space is indeed inconceivable, funnels to infinity beyond which a man might emerge in an eon previous to his own. In the wider speculations of quite sedate and sober astronomers, black holes come to sound like the proof positive of most of the science fiction ever written, including Kubrick's "Space Odyssey." It is the science-fact basis of the mystical excitement about space that Miller Co. hope to catch in "The Black Hole" and that they feel has by no means been exhausted by "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters" and can only be stimulated by "Star Trek" and "Star Wars II." "The Black Hole," which is scheduled for release in the winter of 1979-80, is being directed by young Gary Nelson, who received an Emmy nomination for "Washington Behind Closed Doors" and who for Disney has previously done some of the television films and one feature, "Freaky Friday." The original story has been considerably revised, not least by the science news columns and most recently by Nelson himself. Producer Miller says the final writing credit is likely to be a matter for Writers Guild arbitration. The studio has gone to an outside firm for what Ellenshaw calls "the monsters" the computer-controlled camera which, as on "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters," makes possible the melding of live action and the spaced-out special effects.

But Ellenshaw, who first worked for Disney on "Treasure Island" and who won an Oscar for his special effects on "Mary Poppins," says that most of the mind-boggling expertise the movie demands turned out to be nowhere more richly available than on the Disney lot. (The team that invented flubber is not apt to be stymied by black holes.) The veterans Art Cruickshank on visual effects and Danny Lee on mechanical effects will be Ellenshaw's chief lieutenants. "The Black Hole" is scheduled for 115 days of principal photography and from now through March it will be the only live-action feature in production at the studio, occupying every sound stage. Disney, which practically invented the merchandising of its characters and products through everything from watches to cookies to large pieces of Florida, had let some of its movie merchandising eminence erode (just as it has let a wedge of its family wide audience get away). The studio means to correct all that.

The credits on "The Black Hole" will include Martin Rabinovitch, associate producer marketing. Rabinovitch, who joined the company two years ago in market research, hopes to make the black hole (which is invisible in fact) as inescapable and consumable as, say, the Matterhorn and the movie rolled into one. "The Black Hole" is not exactly a startling reversal of form for Disney. It would not even be the first Disney PG, if it proves to be PG-rated. But, like the studio's recent recruiting of a new, young generation of animators, it suggests that Miller (who joined Disney in 1957 as a second assistant director and is a Disney son-in-law) means for the studio to look to its future as well as to its incomparable past.

PANORAMA Thousands paid last respects to Pope John Paul I Sunday in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. Views such as this reflect Italian TV coverage used by U.S. networks. AP laserphoto MATTER OF JUDGMENT Networks Assess Papal News BY HOWARD ROSENBERG Timt Stiff Wrlttr Many viewers rate the live TV pictures of the Vatican they've been seeing in the United States with the beauty and splendor created on canvas by the Italian Renaissance masters.

Although it may be stretching a point to equate a TV picture with Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, we're in the right country, if not the right century. For example, live transmission of last week's funeral Mass for Pope John Paul I in St. Peter's Square-a sight many found so moving and stunning-was the work of Italy's RAI television network. And when the new pontiff is selected, RAI again will be supplying the live pictures beamed across the Atlantic by satellite to the United States as part of pool coverage of the Vatican events on NBC, CBS and ABC. The 111 cardinals voting on a new Pope to succeed John Paul, who died Sept.

28 after a 35-day reign, are scheduled to begin their secret conclave in the Apostolic Palace Saturday and cast their first ballot Sunday. Pleased With Coverage News executives at all three U.S. networks say they're generally pleased with the RAI coverage. However, although his counterparts at CBS and ABC disagree with him, Ray Lockhart, producer for special NBC News broadcasts, sees differences in the way RAI and the U.S. networks do things, and he finds the Italians a mite romantic for his taste.

"As one of our producers said when he looked up at the Sistine Chapel," recalls Lockhart, 'It's OK, but it's not the way I would have done it' "Their coverage is good by their standards," he added. "But we wouldn't do it so artistically. We probably would have placed our cameras differently so that we could show more VIPs. We're more news-oriented and they're more The networks appear to be saving a bundle by taking the RAI transatlantic feed and sharing the production and transmission costs, thereby eliminating the need for large outlays of their own equipment and personnel to be shipped to Rome. The cost of leasing an hour of satellite time from Rome to New York is inexpensive for a single network, about $9,000, according to Jeff Gralnick, director and executive producer for ABC News special events.

Split three ways, moreover, it's not even petty cash. However, insists Lockhart, "There's not a helluva lot of savings in pool coverage. You always figure you're saving so much money that you can do a lot of special things to add to the pool coverage. So you sometimes end spending more money than you normally would. Money Minor Consideration Yet, networks say money is only a minor consideration in deciding on pool coverage for such stories as Presidential trips abroad or papal transitions.

"Pools are formed when there is restricted access to a story," said Russ Bensley, executive producer and director for CBS News special programs. "There's only room for so many cameras, adds Lockhart. "If every broadcast organization wanted to cover the Pope, there would be no room for the Pope." In covering such stories live, it's the policy of networks to utilize the live feeds from TV in the nation generating the news. "The Italians have an 'in' at the Vatican and it's their country," says Lockhart. Are there communications problems with foreign TV personnel? "Yes," he said, "but no more so than with a station in Iowa." "There's also a matter of Vatican restrictions on media.

"We know that if we roll into St. Peter's Square with an NBC truck, we're gonna get locked up," Lockhart laughed. Like other net-Please Turn to Page 44, Col. 1 THE VIEWS INSIDE OPHELIA Ashley Putnam enacts Mad Scene in Thomas' seldom -heard "Hamlet" with the San Diego Opera. BOOKS: Bernard St.

James' "April Thirtieth" by Robert Kirsch on Page 6. 1 STAGE: "Momo" and "The String," and other theater, in Stage Beat by Sondra Lowell on Page 36. "Black Terror" by Judi Ann Mason on Page 39. What's Doing in Orange County on Page 29. AND OTHER FEATURES Titta Ruffo to John Charles Thomas to Robert Merrill.

We also knew Ophelia's bizarre Mad Scene, via recordings by Nellie Melba and Maria Callas and Beverly Sills. And we knew that Thomas' librettists played so fast and easy with Shakespeare that the original version of the opera bore an ending in which the titular prince kills his enemy, is saluted by his courtiers and lives happily ever after. Thomas, who cranked out such pretty tunes for "Mignon," his bonbon-coated transformation of Goethe, hardly struck us as the composer predestined to cope with the profundity and grandeur of this Shakespearean source. But San Diego proved us wrong. No one is laughing now.

"Hamlet," as staged by Tito Capobianco, conducted by Please Turn to Page 34, Col. 1 Art Walk Page 8 Beauty Page 1 5 Bridge Page 17 Comics Page 45 Family Film Guide Page 41 Jody Jacobs. Page 3 Cecil Smith Page 42 Dr. Solomon Page 1 9 Television 42-44 Peter Weaver Page 9.