The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 75

Controversy on Therapy for Autism EW PART IV FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 1979 90 vi i if BY JOY HOROWITZ TimttSttH Wrlltr It is a controversy that will not fade away, that seems to envelop more people and grow more heated with time and that revolves around one small ranch-style home in the San Fernando Valley. At issue is the treatment of four autistic children in the Behavior Research Institute (BRI), a residential facility that claims to be the only alternative to state hospitalization for severely autistic children in California. And despite its size and numbers, nm i hi i 'Will i u. AL FRESCO Chamber music at evening in the Dalies Frantz Courtyard at 1979 Round Top Festival, where Texan pianist -impresario James Dick "has turned a meadow into a casual, unamplified, idyllic concert hall." Photos by Henry Grossman MUSIC IN THE MEADOW A Festival Deep in the Heart of Texas 1 BY MARTIN BERNHEIMER Timn Music Critic ROUND TOP, was a balmy night, one of those gentle Texas nights when time gets lazy and tempers turn languid. The stars competed with the fireflies.

Peaceful nocturnal mooing drifted in from a nearby pasture. And on the porch-like stage of the refurbished Victorian farmhouse, three remarkably talented people were playing chamber music. Magic. To be exact, the three were wending their way, with sensitive aplomb, through the rare complexities of the Schumann D-minor Trio, Opus 63. They had just dashed comfortably (Lebhaft, dock nicht zu rasch) through the second movement, and were collecting their collective thoughts for the knots and thorns of the third.

Schumann marked it Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung slowly, with inner sensitivity. Suddenly the beatific smile on the face of Ida Kavafian, the violinist, became a Still, in its ninth season, it is a remarkable and stimulating phenomenon. James Dick, the pianist-impresario, has seized a sleepy little town somewhere between Austin and Houston (the population numbers 72 or 97, depending on which street sign you believe) and transformed it into something of a musico-educational oasis. He has turned a meadow into a casual, unamplified, idyllic concert hall. He has turned a hill-top estate into a charming network of practice rooms and sleeping quarters and administrative offices and dining halls and performance parlors.

He has attracted a large number of gifted and energetic student-instrumentalists from a vast variety of locales (the bug-pocketing page-turner is a bass-playing medical student formerly from Oberlin). And he has engaged a performing faculty with impeccable credentials. Leon Fleisher, the wondrous pianist-turned-conductor, inspires really in- Please Turn to Page 24, Col. 1 squeamish stare. Yehuda Hanani, the cellist, looked quizzical and poked at something on the floor with his foot.

Patricia Zander squinted innocently at the action from the distance of the piano bench. Then, to the rescue, swooped a noble and daring young man who had been lurking in the shadows and who had been maintaining order when the breezes threatened the music stands. He grinned, dashed to the center of the stage, dropped to his knees, scooped up a monstrous bug that apparently liked Schumann, stuffed it nonchalantly into his jeans pocket, and retreated to the shadows. The performance continued. Beautifully.

The bug, it turned out, wasn't even one of those famous Texas tarantulas. That is what life is like, these days, at the Round Top Festival. It isn't a glamorous summer showcase for a major symphony orchestra like Tanglewood. It isn't a commercial extravaganza like the Hollywood Bowl. It isn't even a high-powered superschool with a stellar faculty in depth like Marlboro.

ROBERT CLINE author of BRI urgency bill. AP photos by Walt Zeboski the Northridge-based program has generated much debate and countless hours of scrutiny by state health officials, licensing inspectors, special investigators, local regional center authorities, the district attorney's office, the state Assembly and the governor's office. "The outrage of this," says Dr. William Bronston, medical director with the state Department of Developmental Services, "is the incalculable amount of time and attention poured iSSSt CRITIC AT LARGE James Bond Goes to Space BY CHARLES CHAMPLIN Timts Artt tdllor What you do if your own movie vein starts running dry, obviously, is get a transfusion from another. "Moonraker," the 10th and latest James Bond extravaganza, is for all very practical purposes a space movie (or is a space movie, too).

Our own 007 is now Flash Bond-Buck Bond would do nicely as well fighting evil out there where the laser guns grow and a man forgets what gravity and lace curtains were like. It's not all spaced-up. The title sequence, a stunning loop-the-loop sequence last time, is in "Moonraker" a no-less-stunning sky-diving caper, an ingenious blending of actuality and special effects that lets Richard Kiel as steel-gummed Jaws and Roger Moore fight to the last drop, as it were. There also is an outrageous chase through the canals of Venice, with Bond providentially riding a hovercraft gondola and leaving a wake of pigeons across the Piazza San Marco. "Moonraker" is, that is, exactly what the Bonds have grown to be since their modest and even inhibited start with "Dr.

No" in 1963. It is lavishly produced (something like $30-million worth, or the size of "Apocalypse It is spectacularly designed by Ken Adam, a stand-out contributor to the series' success and here the author of laboratories, a satellite and other installations of almost unthinkable grandeur. The movie is an armory of lethal gadgets a wrist-worn dart gun, safecracking cigarette cases, explosive watches, fatal perfumes for femmes fatales and a few others. Moore as Bond is up to his customary suave but oddly schoolboyish lecheries, at loose amid a playboy's dream of beautiful women. Chief among the latter is Lois Chiles as a NASA-CIA rival-turned-accomplice.

She is very attractive, although as an actress she makes one wince for the unkind things that have been said about Ali MacGraw. About all that Christopher Wood has retained from the Ian Fleming novel, so far as I can recall, is Hugo Drax as the name of Bond's adversary, a superrich multinational industrialist whose simple plan is to wipe Earth clean with nerve gas and repopulate it with a master race he has bred in space with his handpicked golden lads and lasses. (There seems nothing larger left by way of villainy for Bond to contend with. Next time he may have to go the other way and thwart the robbing of a stagecoach, or the theft of ballpoint pens from a branch bank in Surbiton.) All in all, it is a reliable mixture, a movie that delivers exactly what it promises to deliver and is unlikely to disappoint anyone who has ever found James Bond his or her cup of well-chilled martini. At that, the move to space and its weightless possibilities (special visual effects by Derek Meddings) clearly does reflect the ever-increasing strain of outdoing the previous spectacular goings-on: The Bond series has long since gone beyond (e.g., lost) the excitements of the man-to-man conflict of, say, the Sean Connery-Robert Shaw fight in a train compartment in "From Russia With Love." It also has transcended the simple fright of a spider advancing across the pillow toward the sleeping form.

The logistics, often superbly engineered and breathtaking as craft, have taken over from characterization and the possibility of a battle of wits. Bond doesn't outfox the card cheat anymore; he blows up the card table and, even better, the whole casino. It's a different kind of fun, with its own rewards which are not, however, achieved cost-free in any sense. Author Ian Fleming had the same philosophical problem himself. Bond was always a myth figure, as escapist in his day and way as the lone stranger riding into Dodge City at sunset.

But he was in the early books a feeling figure who survived as much by his wits and courage as by the gadge-tries the company armorer dreamed up for him. But Fleming's fancies grew ever more improbable and the strain showed. On screen there's probably no turning back now; it's been a long run already. "For Your Eyes Only" has been announced as the 11th in this series and a rival Bond is promised from Kevin McClory. With "Moonraker" you can't help having a good and foolish time, and you can't help feeling twinges of nostalgia for the earlier "times when Bond ruled the gadgets instead of vice versa.

Michael Lonsdale (the persistent French detective of "Day of the plays Drax and there is a fleeting moment, as in an outtake, when he seems to chortle at the folly of it all. Kiel, the giant who made his debut as a deadly but lovable assassin in "The Spy Who Loved Me," has achieved from that success a kind of life of his own in the series and this time even acquires a love interest, a small, voluptuous blonde named Blanche Ravalec. It would be a relationship made in heaven if only she wore braces. Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell as and Moneypenny make their ritual appearances. Toshiro Suga is an Oriental villain, Corinne Clery and Emily Bolton are beauties who give Bond helping hands.

Moore's insouciant charm is engaging as always; the difference between his handling of the role and Sean Con-nery's is that Connery made the ladies seem a fringe benefit in a deadly serious game, while Moore makes them the game itself. Lewis Gilbert (the one who did "Alfie" years ago) was the able director. John Barry again did the propulsive music and Albert Broccoli produced. Rated PG for the mild-enough sex and violence, "Moonraker" opens citywide KsSiifeSStSSSSMK rj? i I i I CLEMENT HIRSCH It shouldn't be politics." into this one teensy program in the Valley." Licensed by the state as a community care home for no more than six children, BRI stands firm in its advocacy of aversive therapy a strict behavior-modification program that includes physical punishments such as fingernail-pinching of the soles of feet, muscle-squeezing of the shoulder area, bare-bottom spanking and spraying of cold water in the faces of Please Turn to Page 8, Col. 1 IN REHEARSAL Pianist-turned-conductor Leon Fleisher "inspires really inspires the youthful orchestra." Here he rehearses the Texas Festival Chamber Orchestra during the 1979 Round Top Festival.

Fair Hearing for Citizens' Complaints ft JUJ 1 1 1 WV BY ELLEN HOFFS For 25 years, the husband and wife, both in their 70s, lived in their home without problems from neighbors. Six months ago, the woman sitting opposite them now in the small hearing office rented a house across the street. Since then, said the man, that neighbor's dogs barked day and night and roamed the streets without a leash, and children played ball on her lawn until almost midnight. Not so, the woman, in her 20s, told Los Angeles City Attorney Hearing Officer Katherine Cuttrell. The couple's complaint was purely personal an objection to her life style rather than children or dogs.

Ms. Cuttrell listened. Her job is to listen, and to cajole and to convince people they are better off amicably reconciling their differences than going to court As one of 13 hearing officers in the Los Angeles City Attorney's Hearing Officer Program, she mediates disputes ranging from safety, fire and health-code violations to malicious mischief, trespass, public nuisance and family THE VIEWS INSIDE BOOKS: Victor Lasky's "Jimmy Carter: The Man and the Myth" by Mark leviton on Page 7. MOVIES: "Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline" by Kevin Thomas on Page 18. STAGE: "logo," and other theater in Stage Beat by Son-dra Lowell on Page 31.

AND OTHER FEATURES Before the hearing program was initiated, deputy city attorneys either filed these potential criminal misdemeanor complaints in court, adding to the overloaded criminal court system, or rejected them, leaving citizens unhappy. In 1974, City Atty. Burt Pines established the office Please Turn to Page 15, Col. 1 Bridge Page 6 Jody Jacobs Page 2 Comics Page 35 Cecil Smith Page 33 Family Film Guide Page 20 Dr. Solomon Page 14 Television 33, 34 LETS TALK (Catherine Curtrell, hearing offi- ates a complaint in effort to reconcile differ-cer in the L.A.

City Attorney's Office, medi- ences rather than sending case to court. Times photo by Judd Gunderson.