The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 76

WEDNESDAY CALENDAR August 12, 1981 Cos Anjjelea STimcs Part VI LAS VEGAS SHOWS: GRAND AND NOT SO GRAND shulam Riklis, the hotel's chairman of the board. Bernard J. Rothkopf, president of the MGM Grand and the man who supervises its entertainment from cozy mezzanine offices, acknowledged that the corporation-backed hotel can afford to dabble in shows that others can't "Our feeling is that we can secure superstars," he said, "and still' give patrons a large production show as well. We find it a tremendous help Please see LAS VEGAS, Page 6 the sinking of the Titanic and the destruction of the Philistine temple by Samson. The MGM, Caesars Palace (which rid itself of cost-consuming dinner shows and whose performers sometimes now give only one show nightly) and the Hilton have enough financial clout to still book big stars.

The Riviera pays enormous salaries to performers a week for Dolly Parton being the most publicized), all from the seemingly endless bankroll of Me- Las Vegas hotel executives, include increased salaries (the new "Jubilee!" weekly payroll at the MGM Grand, for instance, is union demands and inflation. Through it all, the MGM seems oblivious paying thousands of dollars a week to stars like Dean Martin and Mac Davis while still offering the spectacular "Jubilee!" revue, which cost $5 million to mount It replaced "Hallelujah Holly-wood" and is an epic that features i At the Desert Inn "there were no star performers we broke even on," said Burton Cohen, president of the hotel in an interview a while back. "Filling the showroom every night, we would still lose money." Cohen tried a revue format last year with a French import called "Alcazar de Paris" but that folded quickly. At the Sahara, presentations like the recent "Madame Goes to Harlem" variety show are attempts at cutting costs that mounted over the years with stars who command huge salaries from huge long-term contracts but who fail now to fill even half the showroom. Over at the Sands, where big names like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

and others performed years ago, the showroom is closed and lounge-style entertainment is the sole offering. Reasons for all this, according to I (Mm i Ammm i 1 s- i i 1 1 ma 'j Bernard J. Rothkopf, president of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, presides over the hotels new "JvbUeef show and other entertainment. PHOTOGRAPHER AT LARGE LIGHTING UP WATTS By LEE GRANT. Times Staff Writer LAS VEGAS-On the Strip here, the MGM Grand Hotel stands as a grand monument to traditional, grandiose entertainment packaging that is losing its way elsewhere in this town because of high costs.

Across the street, the venerable Dunes has replaced its 17-year-old "Casino de Paris" revue with packages brought in by independent producers who rent the showroom attractions like hypnotist Pat Collins or singer Leslie Uggams and comic Jackie Gayle. The Desert Inn down the way has dropped its policy of big-time stars (with big-time salaries) to offer instead touring Broadway shows like the current "Annie." The Dunes was losing about a week subsidizing "Casino de Paris," according to Jerry Conte, the hotel's vice president of marketing and advertising. BOB CHAMBERLIN Los Angeles Times Photographer Willie Middlebrook: FILM CLIPS A SKELETON IN CLOSET OF 'BODIES' By PETER J. BOYER, Times Staff Writer Paramount Pictures might have sensed it had a dud in "Student Bodies" when the producer of the quickie low-budget horror spoof insisted he be listed in the credits under an alias. The producer is named in the screen credits and in Paramount publicity sheets as Allen Smithee, a pseudonym occasionally used by film makers for movies not considered to be signature work.

But in fact, the Unknown Producer is Michael Ritchie, a director of some note (he made "Downhill Racer" with Robert Redford, which earned cheers for its action technique, "Smile" and "The Bad News Not only did Ritchie produce. "Student Bodies," according to sources, but he was active in the day-to-day shooting of the film, although Mickey Rose is credited as the writer-director. Ritchie was not available for comment Paramount may be beginning to understand why Ritchie wanted an assumed name. According to a source, Paramount bought "Student Bodies" for $1.5 million, a price that seemed a bargain for a Ritchie film. The studio was so excited about its deal that the purchase was made while the film was still in production, which was rather unusuaL Ordinarily, pickups of independently made films by major studios come after the movie is completed.

mm iiiiiiiiiil BIG WILLIE: By SUZANNE MUCHNIC, Times Staff Writer Willie Middlebrook's photo essay, "Watts Revisited: Beyond the First Look," sounds like a sequel to another exhibition, but it isn't. It is a black artist's response to the pervasive conviction that Watts is dangerous and loveless. "Most people think of riots and violence when they think of MOVIE REVIEW 'OBLOMOV: SUMPTUOUS OFFERING By SHEILA BENSON, Times FUm Critic The first and recurring image of the warm and sensuous Soviet film "Oblomov" (Royal Theater) is of a very little boy with blond curls and perfect, rice-grain teeth, walking from luxurious sleep to search for his mother who has been away. In his high-collared peach smock he runs laughing through the beautiful wooden summer estate, already full of heat and purple-brown shadows, seeking her out his source of perfect love who has left him for one day. In his earlier film, "A Slave of Love," director Nikita Mikhalkov caught a film troupe shooting between Red and White skirmishes during the Russian revolution.

Now he dips further back in time, to the late 1850s, for an adaptation of Ivan Goncharov's classic semi-comic novel. The wonder is that no one has made a film of it before. V. S. Pritchett called the novel "the gentlest and most sympathetic in its feelings in all the great mad literature of 19th-century Russia." One of the fascinations of "Oblo Watts," said Middlebrook in an interview at Watts Towers Arts Center where his photographs are in the gallery through Aug.

22. "My attitude in taking these pictures was not to say Watts does not have crime, but it wasn't to go looking for violence, either. I thought it was time someone took a full view of the community." Middlebrook's "full view," as posted at the art center, began eight months ago. The show is the first mov" is how appealing the old patriarchal life under the Czars can be made to seem in a film made by a contemporary Soviet director. A theoretically unlamented past never has looked so sumptuous, and although the film is ironic in part its overriding tone is the most tender affection.

As surely as Goncharov could not despise his absentee landlord-hero, chained by indolence and almost terminal ennui, Mikhalkov, and the brilliant actor Oleg Tabakov who plays Oblomov, make him a universal, deeply moving character. We meet Ilya Ilyich Oblomov in a scene that could be from Moliere. Lying on his settee like a moonfaced Madame Recamier, Oblomov is being tyrannized by his gray-haired servant Zakhar. Zakhar, who throws a newspaper over the dirty dishes in the dust-clogged, flea-sprinkled apartment and dusts with his breath, nevertheless whines bitterly about his master's shortcomings. His shortcomings are impressive.

Oblomov, who in his mid-30s looks 50, drifts through his days in a gentle, sleepy stupor. (In Russian, "ob-lomovism" has come to mean lan-gor, passivity.) He now lives in the white, blue and gold city of St Petersburg as a retired civil servant while every year the news from his estate gets worse. Oblomov has a master plan for the estate. He's been working on it for years. In the meantime, the serfs are decamping in droves and the crops are failing Please see 'OBLOMOV, Page 4 away, leaving only family unity.

Middlebrook's method of photographing a troubled community consists of throwing away preconceptions, walking the streets, talking to people, making friends and taking pictures. It's almost as simple as that, to hear him tell it. Well, maybe not quite as simple as that. The artist, affectionately called Big Willie for obvious reasons, looks large enough, strong enough, bright enough and good-natured enough to deal with any problem, but he confessed having to overcome a few of his own preconceptions. "Although I have taught classes Please see WATTS, Page 2 MARSHA TRAEGER hot Angelt Times George Hearn ning performance.

"If you're 20 you don't have the weight If you're too much over 40 you don't have the strength. I don't know what Harold Prince thought, but I'll tell you this: You don't get offered Sweeney for being a nice guy. There has to be a powerful element of the irrational in you." At 47 an old liver and Hearn is an agreeable-looking man with a pleasant smile and watchful blue eyes. They are attentive, almost to the point of eagerness, but the way he holds himself suggests a bit of the loner in his heartiest laugh at table, his mouth was hidden behind his hand. He's conscious of his Celtic ancestry, and its tradition of melancholy and fondness for drink.

Sweeney has certainly been an exorcism. "Knowing I would do the role, when I first went to see the play I was clobbered. I said, 'Self. I'll learn the lines and I'll learn the music, just to slam that door at the People pay $50 an hour for that therapy. It's like the end of Don Giovanni, where it's Hearn was born in St Louis and Please see SWEENEY, Page 6 public exposure of an ongoing project It consists of varied black and white images straightforward and imaginative, harsh and gentle.

Middlebrook alternates a raw, documentary approach with a tender, artful one. A man high on angel dust screams from the back seat of a police car in a starkly reported photo. On an adjacent wall, a woman and her grandchild form a soft V-shape of light in a gracefully composed picture. Details of the room melt A SWEENEY OUT OF THE BLUE By LAWRENCE CHRISTON 'Si weeney Todd," which is finishing up its national tour at the Dorothy Chan dler Pavilion, is a revenge play; it probably contains the most graphic depiction of a man's slide into homicidal rage ever written into a musical, and everything feeds that blistering theme. At the center, of course, is Sweeney himself.

On the album you can hear Len Cariou, who originated the role. Sweeney has escaped an Australian penal colony, after having been unjustifiably dispatched by a wicked judge who had a yen for Sweeney's wife. Sweeney remembers her as beautiful and virtuous, and himself as naive. Cariou's voice recalls that nice man, who has returned on a bitter mission. George Hearn is our current Sweeney, and his voice, which is darker and angrier, expresses a character who is already half over the edge.

His Sweeney has become so cynical and festering that it takes a single disappointment to topple him, and the spectacle is terrifying. Hearn never auditioned for the role, and he isn't quite sure what it is that Harold Prince and other influential observers saw in him; although he had done plenty of trench work at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and on Broadway in "Watch on the Rhine" (for which he was nominated for a Tony) and in the Richard Rodgers musical version of "I Remember Mama," nothing he's done of late looked as if it could prefigure a Sweeney. "Not a lot of people could do this role," said Hearn, over a lobster dinner between matinee and eve- A "different' view of Watts. But Paramount hoped it had purchased another the airport-disaster put-on that was last summer's surprise hit "Student Bodies" has been, as one studio spokesman understated, "disappointing." Heralded by a splashy advertising campaign, "Student Bodies" opened in 600 theaters last weekend. It earned a weak $1.7 million in ticket sales.

In the matter of the Ritchie dodge, Paramount has most enthusiastically supported the ruse, going so far as to assemble a glib two-page biography on the fictional Mr. Smithee. Asked point-blank who Allen Smithee was, a studio publicist didn't skip a beat in answering, "I don't know his full body of work, but we frequently give first-time producers a chance." And a phony name on request STILL RAIDING: Michael Ritchie may not be willing to claim "Student Bodies," but you'll find no pseudonyms attached to Para-mount's big winner, "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Director Steven Spielberg, producer George Lucas, screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, actors Harrison Ford and Karen Allen and Paramount Pictures all have a piece of the movie's take. And the take is still fattening. By next week, "Raiders" which cost about $20 million to make-should have passed the $100-million point in box office sales.

That will mean, if industry estimations of the "Raiders" deal are correct that Lucas alone has been enriched by $15 million to $20 million. "Raiders," still playing in 1,091 theaters, earned $4,846,228 last weekend to bring its 59-day box-office total to $95,974,374. The other giant of the summer, "Superman II," has taken in Please see FILM CUPS, Page 3 INSIDE CALENDAR POP: Woody Herman by Leonard Feather. Page 5. Demis Roussos by Paul Grein.

Page 8. RADIO: AMFM Highlights. Page 8. STAGE "Oh CowardT by Lawrence Christon. Page 4.

TELEVISION: Today's programming. Page 7..