The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 79

CALIFORNIA ENCOUNTERS Academic Cos Anodes SImcs Flournoy on the Stump: It's EW PART IV FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1974 I mi HMC, 1 RAID Joy i iijmim At CRITIC AT LARGE He's Banking on the Last Laugh If. 15 Flournoy speok near' Bovard Auditorium during a campaign stopover on the USC campus. Times photo by John Malmin THE CANDIDATE A crowd of students gathers to hear Republican gubernatorial hopeful Houston I. "Whot'j he really like?" people' osk about each o( the two major party condidate for governor TNts-day, Charles T. Powers wrote about the Democrats Edmund G.

Brown Jr. Today, he looks at the Republicans Houston I. Flournoy. BV CHARLES T. POWERS TimM SUH Writer There was no escaping the conclusion that Houston I.

Flournoy was about to engage in an act of at least modest bravery. It has, been a long time since an Establishment politician could get much of a hearing on the UC Berkeley campus, and an even longer time for a Republican. The last Republican candidate for governor to try it was Richard Nixon in 1962. That wasn't a very good year for Republicans either. A former professor, Houston Flournoy believes he gets along well with students.

It is a small conceit Every man should have one. But it is a treacherous path that leads from the blackboards at.Claremont College in Pomona to a spindly microphone on the steps of Sprouj Plaza. Flournoy approached it in his shirt sleeves, reaching for the microphone as if it were someone's pet snake. Consider the situation: Sproul Plaza at noon, teeming with Berkeley's assorted crazies, Maoists, Jesus freaks, anarchists, philosophers, mute con--templators, free-form shouters and transcendental junkies, all of them about three-fourths brilliant. And into this, onto the campus, comes a man of the -same party as Ronald Reagan, perhaps the single most despised political figure in Berkeley's shimmering history of student activism.

Macho or Masochism? By any objective standard, the probabilities of political gain in the appearance were remote. The best to be said about it was that it took guts. The worst! was that it entertained suspicions of No doubt Flournoy hoped for, the since he brought with him (or, rather, met on the scene) Rep. Pete McCloskey, a Republican rebel on Vietnam and a figure more politically acceptable on a college campus, although a man whose establish-mentarian objections to the war would have pro-vided thin gruel at Berkeley five years ago. But times have changed, and Berkeley grown older, though just how much is uncertain.

Flournoy walked to the campus from a hotel two blocks away in a retinue of reporters, overtaxed staff men and at least a couple of security agents in plain clothes and sunglasses. Hugh Flournoy is nothing if not calm, and as he stepped on the campusgreeted by a Young Republican who told him he, was bound to get a question about his stand on the legalization of marijuana he pulled off his jacket, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and loosened his red-and-blue tie. McCloskey was waiting, looking as tough and world-wise as a 40-year-old vet going to school on the GI Bill, wearing khaki trousers and a loose blue shirt, his untamable hair falling- forward toward the squint of his eyes, his mouth set like a BY CHARLES CHAMPLIN Times Entertainment Miter Joseph E. Levine is a short, solid, immaculately tailored man who wears owlishly large gray-tinted glasses, speaks in raspy Boston-flavored tones and has made a fortune being right about the public taste in movies. After 39 years in the business, he has become a kind of free-lance mogul, with all the daring and confidence of that vanishing species.

He first caught wide public attention and still tends to be identified as the promoter who risked a million on a blitzkrieg campaign for a pasta pageant called "Hercules" and made it pay off beyond the dreams of Croesus. i This week he has been in Hollywood espousing his latest release, a steamy melodrama of joy through pain called "The Night Porter" which audiences everywhere appear to love and which the critics almost universally hate. "It's a people's picture," Levine says, "just like 'Hercules' was, and critics should remember that. People who went to see it had a good time, 'Night Porter' is a picture people can't forget; it stays with them and they talk about it. They tell their friends.

I'm not saying I like the picture. But I think there are flashes of genius in it." Levine is in fact going to finance the next picture by Liliana Cavani, the Italian woman who made "Night OPERA REVIEV 'Manon' Opens San Diego Season Were, that is, 'until the' crucial Cours-la-Reine scene of Act Three. Then came the shock. No Cours-la-Reine scene. Small internal cuts here and there are, of course, a fact of operatic life.

A sad fact, perhaps, but an unavoidable and often defensible one. The omission of an entire scene, however, is quite another matter. This sort of outrage damages the basic structure of the work, pokes ludicrous gaps ih narrative logic, obscures character motivation and disregards important music. An offense such as this forces one to question the integrity of the performing institution. It insults the art and, ultimately, the audience presumably being served.

One left the theater Wednesday wondering why San Diego bothered to do the opera in English in the first place, if it cared so little about making it comprehensible. As if to compensate for the omission, someone decided to at least retrieve Manon's celebrated Gavotte from the missing scene, and interpolate it in Please Turn to Page 15, Col. 1 BY MARTIN BERNHEIMER Times Music Critic SAN DIEGO One of these days, the San Diego Opera is going to decide if it wants to be taken seriously as a company of national perhaps even international stature, or if it is content to bumble along with pretentious provincialism. The nasty question was raised last season when San Diego first took a bold step forward by inaugurating a complete "Ring" cycle in English, and then took a barbaric step backward by chopping "Rhine Gold" in half a A inserting an nerian intermission in the middle. The question had to be repeated Wednesday night at the Civic Theater when San Diego opened its "gala" 10th anniversary season with Massenet's "Manon." The evening began auspiciously enough.

The production looked attractive, seemed resourcefully cast and intelligently directed. Furthermore, the intricacies of the plot were projected clearly and effectively in English, the banalities of the old Mead translation notwithstanding. Massenet and his librettists were being appreciatively served. Nonradical, Cheek' at Cabaret man pumng tne neaas on nans w.m no fanfare, McCloskey stepped to the microphone to introduce Flournoy. "This man will say the same things to you here today." McCloskey said, "as he would say in the board room at Standard Oil." It was not perhaps, the most fortunate keynote he might have struck.

"Flournoy sucks," came the first shout from the Flournoy came forward and in his even- voiced professorial style promised an open cam-- paign followed by an open government. What followed could not have been pleasant for Flournoy. nor, perhaps, for very many really thoughtful students. Dialogue by Epithet Basically, as anyone could predict, the students disagreed; with just about all of Flournoy's posir tions. And Flournoy doubtless had little hope of leading a massive conversion to Young epubli-' canism, What he was trying to do was show the students that it might be possible for a Republican governor to appear on campus without a helicopter and a uniformed phalanx of armed guards (which for a long time is how Ronald Reagan managed to get to meetings of the Board of Regents).

What Flournoy got were loaded questions you repudiate as immoral the genocidal war car-1 ried out in the name -of America in Southeast and when the candidate responded with tVio rrnwH didn't like, he eot a By now Levine" calculates that he has bought, distributed, imported, produced or co-produced some 491 movies. "A lot of them were stinkers," he "but a lot of them weren't" He finds it exasperating, to say the least, to be identified with "Hercules" rather than with "The Bicycle Thief," "Open City" and "Paisan" which he imported and which had a revolutionary impact on American ideas about film-making or with "The Graduate" or "A Lion in Winter," among the many movies he has produced. (Both, like Mel Brooks' "The Producers," were first films for their directors.) Over the years his stinkers have left Levine pretty well bloodied up by the critics; but only on "Night Porter," he says, did he finally decide to do battle. "Nora Sayre reviewed it in the New, York Times," says Levine, "and she really tore it apart. Then, just in case it was still alive and twitching there on the floor, Vince Canby did a Sunday piece and shot it through head." Levine got hold of an early copy and discovered that useful quotes could be taken from Canbs review.

"We didn't even have to lift them out of context," Levine says with satisfaction. So it is that the critic's complaint that the movie is "romantic pornography" has now become a celebration of the movie in ads and on billboards wherever it is playing. "As Canby says, it's like the Tom and Jerry cartoons where the shotgun barrels are bent back on the guy who is firing them," Levine adds, grinning with pleasure. ') Levine sold his Embassy Films to the Avco conglomerate six years ago and was an increasingly restless subsidiary until last June, when he became his own man again. Now he has bought Claude Lei ouch's new film, "A Whole Life" for distribution early next year, has another lor distribution abroad and will produce other films, including Ms.

Cavani's. He and actor-director Richard Attenborougn have been trying for years to put into production a film on Gandhi, and Levine still has it on his agen-; da. He is also spending a lot of time lecturing at -film schools, where he is outspoken, outrageous, charming and "I tell them to study like hell," says Levine, because in 10 years my estimate, who knows for sure? cable television, CATV, is going to create such an insatiable demand for product that it will take all the writers, directors, producers and technicians there are to keep up with it. "Some of the theaters will survive, if they're smart. But American producers have got to start making films that have worldwide appeal, because that's where survival, is.

not just in this special never-never land of the American marketplace. "I don't know how I've stood it for 39 years, but I love it. Now I'm 69 and I'm rich and I shouldn't care about anything, but I'm going to make some pictures and have a few laughs doing it Even the critics might like one or two of them." 0 vmmmsm 4mmmso 5 1 (4 69 Clagii I VUV shot of the standard Berkeley political dialogue (short, form) a chorus of an epithet echoing from every corner of the plaza, Three times McCloskey came forward, took microphone and calmed the crowd enough so that amplified speech could be. heard. Flournoy took it unruffled, and when it seemed as though everyone had had enough, he walked over to the student union, his coat slung over his shoulder, talking to a student about his position on strikes by pubhc employes.

in favor of collective bargaining for public employes," Flournoy said, "but against compulsory arbitration and public employe strikes." student nodded, seemingly im7 pressed.) Salems and Supporters Flournoy went to a small room upstairs for a. brief press conference. He seemed relieved to be there: He sat down at the end of a table, his tie draped around his neck, smoking one Salem, after another. Flournoy is relaxed with reporters and seems generally to be well-liked by them. "Gov.

Reagan doesn't seem to be winning many points with you on these campuses, Hugh." one of them Flournoy shrugged as if to say that there was little he ould do about it except keep trying. Then, after a moment to tie his tie and get back into his coat, he met with a few student supporters perhaps 30 or 40 of them. Most of the young men wore coats and ties, the women predominantly wore dresses. They were a quiet, almost subdued group, but they pressed closely around their candidate, in- troducing each other and asking questions. Karla Kirkegaard, a 19-year-old Berkeley junior.

triad in find an nnpninf. She had a notebook and L-A EDITION Off-Broadway revue, "What's a Nice Count Uke You Oobg a Stat'e stars loco from left, Trudy Desmond Michael Scott; Bill La Vatlee, Suzanne Astor end Lorry kodman. THE VIEWS INSIDE MOVIE REVIEW THamoirf With a Rock Twist BOOKS: John "Writing Novel" by Robert Kirsch on Page 2. DANCE: Phyllis lamhunt Dance Company at UC Irvine by Daniel Cariago on Page 14. MOVIES: "The Candy Snalchers" by Kevin Thomo's on Poge 16.

"la Palomo" ot Cannes Film Festival Critic's Week by Kevin Thomas on Page 17. MUSIC: Ian Whifcomb ot Pitschel Players' Cabaret by Richard Cromelin on Page 20. Rahscan Roland Kirk by Leonard Feather Page 2 1 STAGE: "What's a Nice Country liks You Doing in a State like This?" by Dan Sullivan on Page 13. lJk Aliaw ana vv nen readv to take down Flournoy's position. "I'm interested in his stand on nuclear power she said.

Someone asked her about the crowd oa the plaza. Ms." Kirkegaard was impressed with riournoys periormance. ne tame m-ioss ucuci than I thought he would," she said, woebegone composer (William. Finley) and has him thrown out Terrible travail ensues for the un- daunted Finley, who eventually winds up with half his face ruined when his head gets caught in a record pressing machine. That's, of course, when he decides to become the Phantom Of the Paradise.

Up to this point in its parodying way the "film sticks fairly closely to "The Phantom of the Opera," which itself has been filmed three times. But no sooner has Finley, further enraged by discovering what a travesty Williams is making of his work, begun his terrorizing of the theater than he's coolly confronted by Williams, who offers him a deal: revise the cantata and Williams in turn will star lovely Jessica Harper, for whom Finley has had unrequited love since hearing her audition! As apt and stinging as De Palma's satire is of that most sinister of targets, the rock music indus- try, his own sense of humor is often as sophombric Please Turn to Page 18, Col. 1 BY KEVIN THOMAS Times StaH Writer A rock "Phantom of the Opera" with a touch of Faust thrown in for good measure? Why not, when the man who thought of it is writer-director Brian De Palma, the zany dark satirist most recently responsible for the amusingly macabre "Sisters" and now the delightfully outrageous "Phantom of the Paradise" (at the National. Westwood), which stars Paul Williams, who also composed the film's ambitious score. Looking like an evil pixie with dark glasses and long blond hair framing a pale, weary face, Williams is the sybaritic, all-powerful head of Death Records.

He's just about to launch his latest venture, a rock palace called the Paradise, when he hears a rock cantata version of the Faust legend that would be perfect as the opening attraction. He promptly has it confiscated from its dithcry, AND OTHER FEATURES Although the small crowa ot stuaents seemea already committed to him, Flournoy spent nearly an hour at the reception, meeting each one and answering each question, clearly enjoying himself. If Flournoy has a single strong tendency as a politician, it is to explain, like a teacher, usually in great detail. In most of his answers, he seemed to be telling the students that life would offer them no easy answers, that even the simplest issue is Please Turn to Fge 4, Col. 1 Page 26 Comics Poge25 Art Walk Page 8 On View Page 2 IkHrtiqw Beat Page- 3 Stage Beat Page 12 BrWg Page 10 Television Pages 22-24 A.