The San Bernardino County Sun from San Bernardino, California • Page 68

Section Sunday, May 3, 1931 The Sun, San Bernardino, California Hi typewriter is a sitcom antholo 1 'L 1 So here he was at Art's, "a writer's hangout," swallowing a bite from a three-inch thick egg salad sandwich and saying for benefit of the recorder, "I like long titles." As he explains in Chapter 1, his mother was a Goldenberg. Her name would have been Seltzer, but another emigrant aboard the ship coming to America told his grandfather that Goldberg was the best name a man can have in the U.S. Dovid Seltzer improved on the idea and called himself Goldenberg. Later Goldenberg's Candies became famous in the Northeast and still are. "The title occured to me on the second page.

Or maybe I had it in mind before I started," Greenbaum said. On Page 2 he describes a conversation between his 4-year-old self and his Aunt Leah, the one who reminded him of Ginger Rogers. As she brushed his hair, she said he looked like a regular shiek, adding, "Dance with me." The embarrassed little Everett said he couldn't dance. "Don't be silly," Aunt Leah said. "There is no such thing as a Goldenberg who can't dance." He could dance, all right, and romance the ladies and fly a military airplane and collaborate on award-winning scripts.

He wrote of all those things in his book. Having given notice as a radio writer he was someone to be reckoned with, he was hired on a trial basis to work with Jim Fritzell on the Mr. Peepers Show, a 1950s classic starring Wally Cox. They stretched a two-week trial into three years and their profitable partnership into 27 years. (Continued on Page E-2) By CHUCK PALMER Sun Staff Writer STUDIO CITY "I always believed real writing should be read, not for actors to say." That's a surprising statement from a man who is a successful television writer and has a couple of awards to prove it.

But Everett Greenbaum was talking about his book, The Gold-enberg Who Couldn't Dance, not his scripts. With nothing but his name and the intelligence gleaned from the book's dust jacket that he and his wife live in Encino, contacting him could have been difficult. Twenty-nine Greenbaums are listed in the San Fernando Valley phone book, but fortunately there is only one Everett. Does that give anyone an idea for another book title? After slipping into a booth at Art's Delicatessen in Studio City, where he agreed to be interviewed, Greenbaum eyed the modern journalist's electronic note pad, the mini tape recorder, with suspicion. "What if I freeze up?" he asked.

Not to worry. His first job of any satisfaction to him came after World War II. He guested on a Buffalo, N.Y., radio program one week and was invited to do his own show the next week. "Greenbaum's Gallery," which he wrote and in which he starred, admittedly bore the influence of some great personalities Bob and Ray, Henry Morgan, Vic and Sade, Bob Benchley, James Thurber and S.J. Perelman.

Eventually, Greenbaum's knack for expressing his irrepressible sense of humor opened the door to television writing contracts, first in New York City and then in Hollywood. His TV success led to his writing the book with the long title, published late last year by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Everett Greenbaum gary deeb ABC's '20-20' on the hot seat All 4" --i JiA Li. 'Heaven's Gate" final verdict is in and it's not good 'The unthinkable has 'Heavens Gate heralds first of many Hollywood bombs Please take your seats, ladies and gentlemen. The fight is about to begin.

In this corner: Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News. He's mad about a news special telecast by WBBM-TV, the CBS-owned station in Chicago, which accused ABC's 20-20 of "shoddy, irresponsible journalism." He says the Chicago program is "a phony piece of work" that's shot full of "chicanery." And in this corner: Reporter Bill Kurtis and producer Scott Craig, who presented the WBBM-TV documentary, insist that ABC and the Better Government Association (BGA) overstated a weak investigation in a bid to convince viewers of an "arson-for-profit" scheme in Chicago. Among those siding with Arledge are producer Peter Lance and reporter Geraldo Rivera of 20-20, and Terry Brunner, the executive director of the BGA. Meanwhile, siding with Kurtis and Craig and WBBM-TV are U.S. attorney Thomas Sullivan (whose probe of ABC's "arson-for-profit" allegations turned up insufficient evidence to produce even one indictment) and Fred Friendly (a former CBS News president and now a journalism pro-' fessor at Columbia University, who's critical of Rivera's showboat techniques).

Although both sides already have issued tons of statements, documentation and counterattacks, the end of the WBBM-ABC battle is nowhere in sight. So far, the facts seem to favor the Chicago station. Arledge and ABC are doing a lot of yelling, yet when you examine their evidence and follow-up material, they haven't built a respectable case to prove their accusation. Here's a quick rundown of the situation: Last year ABC presented a 20-20 installment that claimed to prove that Charles Roberts, a Chicago slumlord, was part of a conspiracy to inflate the value of buildings, to burn them down, and then to collect huge profits from the fire-insurance payouts. More than a year later, WBBM televised Watching the Watchdog.

The special was largely devoted to a systematic slicing of the 20-20 investigation. According to WBBM, ABC and the BGA conducted a shabby, incomplete probe into the sus-. pected arson scam. WBBM contends that slumlord Roberts didn't profit at all from the fires, and that he didn't own the buildings in question. Some salient points in dispute: THE INSURANCE PAYOUT Real estate man Roberts pocketed $60,000 in insurance proceeds following a 1979 fire in Chicago's Ellis Hotel.

ABC says this proves that Roberts was the secret owner of the hotel and therefore entitled to the insurance cash. In response, WBBM contends that Roberts didn't own the building, and that he therefore had no claim on the insurance money. WBBM says the $60,000 simply was owed to Roberts by the real owner of the Ellis Hotel, John Schmiegel. U.S. Attorney Sullivan, who conducted a 16 month investigation into alleged thoroughly with WBBM.

THE AMBUSH-INTERVIEW Reporter Rivera surprised slumlord Roberts on the street and peppered him with questions. Roberts was curt in his replies and quickly drove off in his car. On the WBBM program blasting ABC, reporter Kurtis stated: "A surprise confrontation on the sidewalk is designed for drama, not to elicit the truth it runs the risk of making an innocent man look guilty." ABC explains that the ambush-interview was decided on in order to prevent Roberts and "his associates" from concocting a phony defense in advance. (Continued on Page E-3) the staying power to become a major hit will not be apparent for at least two more weeks. However, during its third weekend, Excalibur brought in $3.1 million in 730 theaters, nearly double the estimated $1.7 million earned by-Heaven's Gate.

The other Easter hit was Star Wars. Re-issued for two weeks in 1,570 theaters, it grossed $17,247,363. Hardly Working, Jerry Lewis's first movie in 10 years, did amazingly well its first week, especially since Lewis had a hard time finding a studio willing to release the movie. It was felt by Hollywood that he no longer had an audience. The movie, released by 20th Century-Fox, got uniformly poor reviews and dropped almost 60 percent in the second week.

Except for Avco's fairly successful werewolf film, The Howling, most recent movies were doing mediocre or worse business. Going Ape, Caveman, and Beyond the Reef, three attempts to cash in on the recently displayed audience appetite for light headedness, faced empty theaters. Night Hawks, a terrorist movie starring Sylvester Stallone, was performing less than half as well as Excalibur. A few weeks earlier, The Postman Aways Rings Twice, with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange as lovers and murderers, became the first important movie of the year to be labeled a box-office disaster. Opened in a very limited number of theaters to splendid reviews, Louis Malle's Atlantic City is holding quite well in Manhattan and Los Angeles, less well in the suburbs.

No conclusions can yet be drawn about this specially marketed film. Some conclusions, however, leap up. Two movies that are still quietly prospering at box offices are Nine to Five, which opened last Christmas, and Private Benjamin, which reached theaters more than seven months ago. By ALJEAN HARMETZ New York Times News Service LOS ANGELES Public judgment of the re-edited version of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, the approximately $40 million movie, which opened in slightly more than 800 theaters across the country last week, was quick and decisive. Although United Artists, the movie's distributor, refused to give out any box-office figures Monday morning, it was clear that the movie was a disaster.

A computerized service that breaks down theatrical grosses in California showed that the movie had averaged only $2,860 per print over the weekend in Southern California. Usually, 65 percent of the money that will be earned by a movie its first week comes the first weekend. At the Regency in San Francisco, where a mediocre opening week is above $30,000, Heaven's Gate managed to gross only $6,827. At Loews Astor Plaza in New York, it grossed $10,105 less than half of that theater's operating expenses for a week. A three-and-a-half-hour version of Heaven's Gate was withdrawn last November after it was savaged by critics.

The new 2-hour, 25-minute version received equally negative reviews. And word of mouth was obviously poor, because, by Monday, the grosses were dropping rapidly. "The unthinkable has finally happened," said one major studio executive Monday. The unthinkable is the total box-office collapse of one of the dizzily high-budget movies Hollywood has been releasing over the last three years. Star Trek, The Blues Brothers, 1941, King Kong and Apocalypse Now all managed to make a little money, lose a little money, or break even.

Heaven's Gate, an attempt to make an epic about a 19th-century Wyoming range war, will probably lose most of its original $37 million cost, plus the $2 million that was used to shorten and re- ,1 'Caveman' mediocre business edit the movie, and the $6 million that United Artists is spending to market the film. So far, 1981 has been a drab year at the box office and, despite two recent hits, this Easter season did not pull the movie industry out of its doldrums. In its first 17 days, Orion's Excalibur, John Boorman's Jungian version of the Arthurian legends, has grossed $16.1 million. Whether this mystical and bloody epic will have the "legs" i i.