Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 35

THE O'HARE LAD OUTDANCES THEM ALL JJelroil iYcc $)rccs If If fcntertainnienc Not Rockin TJ ae SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 1977 BY DAVE ZURAWIK Free Press Staff Writer Twenty years ago in any working 77ic Mnsh Pav UC A v. Wha t's This? Scrambled TV Thai You Pay For? smiling proudly on Tim He was a little nervous and embarrassed by the whole business But he picked up at the mention of parties. "I've been dancing for nine years, ever since my mother took me for lessons over at the Gaelic League. And the best part is the parties. See, all summer there are competitions every weekend all over the country We've been thrown out of the Biltmore and the Roosevelt for our parties." "The whole family tours the circuit in the station wagon," Mrs.

O'Hare said. "They're not that wild. We keep an eye on the boys." "It's a wild summer," Tim insisted. "One family drove from Dayton on Saturday to Rockland, New York, on Sunday to compete. It's one contest after another followed by these grand parties.

"IF YOU WIN and you compete against at least a thousand other kids in the U.S. you go to Dublin for the world finals. This is my fifth trip I'll be taking to Dublin when I leave Tuesday to compete. I have a big cheering section because all our relatives are over there. My mom's from the south of Ireland; my father from the Belfast area.

"I guess all the touring has been educational. I feel like I know more about my ancestors than the other kids do On St Pat's day everybody says they're Irish, but I really am, if you know what I mean. "In Ireland, it's tough to win. You have to dance your best because the judges get a little upset about Americans beating their boys. But, for some reason, the fellow who runs the championships likes me, so I get along I'm anxious to get back to Dublin.

I love the trips." The "O'Hare lad" will be competing in the senior division for the first time this year. His long-range goal is to take that divison three years in a row. "You see," he said, "the Irish got a system. You have to bring the trophy back each year, unless you win it three years in a row Since you can only compete for two years in each of the divisions leading up to senior, they always got the trophy back from me. I guess it's set up that way so they don't have to keep buying new trophies.

"But since senior is the top division, you can keep competing in it year after year And people always keep coming back, and eventually they get beat But after my third win, I'll just retire and be the first guy to make off with their trophy A fine lad. But the dances that win him all these trophies are not the hustle, bus stop and bump. They are called the reel, hornpipe and set dance. And because he dances these so well, he's, the world Junior Irish Dancing Champion and the pride of the Detroit area Gaelic League. Do you know how good an American kid has to be to win the world Irish championships, which are held in Dublin? First, there's the training.

A two-year-old in Dublin shows a special talent for twirling his right foot in front of his left, and he's sent to a dance school that makes the Russians' Olympic training camp look like Palm Beach. Then there's the panel of nine judges. Last year, it was rumored that the Irish decided to get a more international flavor. Only eight of the judges were from Ireland. Timmy's mother said, "Sometimes I think the only reason he keeps on dancing in the competitions are because of the parties afterward." Mrs.

O'Hare and Tim were surrounded in the living room of the O'Hare's Southf ield home by all but one of the other O'Hare dancers Mike, 13, Kevin, 12, Pat, 11, and Shawn, 9. The 17-year-old, Colleen, was not home at the moment. All those Irish eyes were class neighborhood in these United States, you could find 15 Polish kids taking accordion lessons, a dozen Jewish kids learning to play the violin and a bunch of Croatian youths banging away at tamburitzas. On those hot summer nights right after supper when everybody had their front doors open to cool off the kitchen, you were amazed at how many versions of "Lady of Spain" and "Hava Nagila" there were. Then came electric guitars and big amplifiers.

Every hopeful musician got one and became so "American" that he started trying to sound like his favorite English rock star. This is called'assimi-lation. NOW THIS "O'Hare lad," as Timmy often is referred to, is American enough He's got long hair that he wears like John Travolta and his favorite kind of music is rock He's as frisky as most other 15-year-olds and is probably in love with Farrah Fawcett-Ma-jors. And he likes dancing. Boy, does he like dancing.

He's got 63 trophies (including the three that are broken and prove he's some kind of dancer. Free Press PhotoBOB SCOTT TIMMY O'HARE of South-field is the junior world champion of Irish dancing. Rises Pay-TV may arrive in the Detroit area a lot sooner than expected In Los Angeles, a company called National Subscription Television (NST) has begun transmitting "scrambled" programs to a small group of subscribers with receiving devices attached to their TV sets. Sports events and such films as "Funny Lady" and "Prisoner of Second Avenue" are the fare for the early NST schedule Original programming will be developed if the venture catches on, the firm told the Chicago Sun-Times. If the NST venture is successful in Los Angeles, the company says it intends to come to Detroit and several other major eities.

NST has an agreement to share time with WXON-TV, Channel 20 in Detroit, a WXON official said. The agreement, which hinges on 1'CC approval, would probably not take ct 'feet for a year or never, if the Los Angeles experiment is a failure. NST says its programming staff includes Norman Lear, Dud Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio, who in various combinations have been instrumental in the creation of such shows as "All in the Family," "Maude," "The Jeffersons," "Sanford Son" and "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman." OTHER over-the-air pay-TV systems have been tried around the country, but unsuccessfully apparently because of a lack of attractive programs. The NST operation hopes to solve that problem with Lear and his compatriots. A cable pay-TV system operating since December In Ann Arbor is the closest pay-TV has come to the metro area.

That -service, Ann Arbor JESUS OF NAZARETH NBC-TV fmmLfSBhm ttv jbsus Robert Powell Virgin Mary Olivia Hussev Mary Magdalene Anne Bancroft Centurion Ernest Borgnine Adulteress Claudia Cardinale Herodias Valentina Corfese Yuhuda Cyril Cusack Simon Peter James Farentino Zerah Ian Holm Balthazar James Earl Jones Barabbas Stacy Keach Quintiiius Tony Lo Bianco Joseph of Arimalhea James Mason Judas Ian McShane Nicodernus Laurence Olivier Melchior Donald Pleasance Herod Anilpas Christopher Plummer Caianhas Anthony Quinn Gasoar Fernando Rev Simeon Ralph Richardson Pontius Pilate Rod Steiger Herod the Great Peler Ustinov Joseph Yorgo Voyaois John the Baptist Michael York Elizabeth Marina Bertl Andrew Tony Vogel Thomas Bruce Liddington PhiUp Steve Gardner Matthew Keith Washington Detroit's WXON-TV says it's ready for ivireless pay TV. Cablevision, includes softcore X-rated movies. Oak Industries of Crystal Lake, owns 51 percent of NST, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. Everitt Carter, Oak's board chairman, told the Sun-Times that NST has firm if VV -V 4 -1 ATa.fi" 5H8- i i -'1 A fli i 1 But always, there is evidence of Jesus' inner life and purpose. Powell's long, thin face and luminous eyes (which Zeffirelli has emphasized with subtle lighting) make him look like many traditional portraits of Christ.

Zeffirelli and his cameramen often pause (almost too often for the film's slow pace) to frame a picture. The resulting impression is that of walking through a museum gallery of Renaissance paintings, rich in color but with the sepia patina of age. The huge international cast is uniformly excellent, but special mention should be made of James Farentino's troubled Simon Peter, Ian McShane's questioning, intellectual Judas and Rod Steiger's weary, wary Pontius Pilate. The cast, however, presents distractions. There is a tendency to wonder "who is that?" when a familiar face appears.

And the accents are a cacophony that ranges from cockney to the Bronxese of Anne Bancroft's Mary Magdalene. But these are minor matters In a motion picture that is an inspiring version of "Jhe greatest story ever told." ALL OF THE protests and controversy were a disservice to what may be the finest biblical film ever produced. General Motors' handling of the affair was no credit to the corporation, either. A spokesman insisted that the protests had nothing to do with the cancellation of sponsorship. GM's statement insisted it was decided that "commercial sponsorship could be regarded as inappropriate" to a film on the life of Christ.

GM, however, was involved in the project from the start in 1974 The $3 million which GM paid for the TV rights helped finance the film. The protests were chiefly from backers of two magazines, Faith for the Family, published by Bob Jones University, Greenville, S.C., and the Ohio Independent Baptist. At the time, the film had not been seen by anyone in the United States. The Jones magazine also denounced the Archbishop of Canterbury and Vatican representatives, who had served as consultants on the film, as "apostates who do not believe in the deity of Christ." The charge was called "pure bigotry" by a spokesman for the National Council of Churches in Christ, who also chastised Jones as "irresponsible" for condemning the program without seeing it and "un-American" for attempting to have the program canceled because of "disagreement with a point of view." NBC said that religious authorities in Europe had seen the film and praised it as "brilliant and awesome." American religious leaders who viewed the film in the past two weeks have had only praise for Zeffirelli's treatment of the story. contracts to operate in De- troit, Miami, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Houston, Dallas and Philadelphia.

Oak Industries' partner in NST is Chartwell Communications, in which Lear is the programming man, Yorkin is in charge of production and Perenchio is chief executive officer, the Sun-Times reported. Some three years ago, Perenchio asked Carter if Oak Industries could build equipment that would scramble and unsci amble television signals, Carter told Sun-Times writer Edwin Darby. (The station scrambles its outgoing TV signals to prevent them from being picked up by non-paying viewers. Paying customers attach an unscrambler to receive programs on their sets.) "I asked him what he wanted it for," Carter recalled, "and he said his dream was to establish an over-the-air pay-TV system. We had a series of meetings and I tried to dissuade him.

Our studies convinced me that cable television was the answer for any pay system "Finally, I told him that we'd need $500,000 in research and development money and two years to do what he wanted. He said okay, just like that." Two years later, Oak had come up with a sophisticated device that seemed to solve all the problems of scrambling, monitoring and billing, the Sun-Times reported. And Carter and his people had changed their minds about the future of pay-TV, especially if Perenchio, Lear and Yorkin were going to he running things. "We said to Jerry, we'd rather forget the money and join the show," Carter told the Sun-Times. By the end of this year, Oak says it expects to have $7 million invested in the project.

Perenchio estimates that NST will need 100,000 customers to be profitable. Carter says he thinks that will be easy in 12 months. THE SERVICE is going on the air with only 2,000 subscribers. That's by design. The unscrambler (about a foot long) has to be installed on the home TV set first, and the company couldn't risk a flood of subscribers its installers could not handle.

There's an installation cost in Los Angeles of $29.95 and a $25 deposit on the box, the Sun-Times reported. The monthly subscription cost is 1 6 95 "Cheap." says Carter, "when you consider the price of movie tickets not counting popcorn." BY BETTELOU PETERSON Free Press TV Writer "Jesus of Nazareth" is a reverent and splendid telling of the life of Christ. The film, directed by Franco Zef firelli, will be shown on NBC-TV in two three-hour segments, the first on Sunday, the second one Easter Sunday, April 10, both from 8 to 11 p.m. The film became a center of controversy when fundamentalist religious groups, claiming it was blasphemy, tried to pressure the network and local stations (including Detroit's WWJ-TV) to cancel it. The original sponsor, General Motors, did withdraw and was replaced by Procter and Gamble.

The protesters based their view of the film on an interview in which director Zeffirelli said it would show Jesus the man, not the "myth." BUT WHILE the Jesus of the film is shown as human, there is no denial of his deity. The healing, the raising of the dead and the feeding of the multitudes are in the film. Time precluded showing all the miraclesand Zeffirelli said he did not use the walking on water, which the fundamentalists insisted should be in the film, because he did not feel he could film it properly. Said Anthony Burgess, who wrote the script with Zeffirelli and Suso Cecchi d'Amico: "Ours will be an attempt to show the historical reality, the politics of the time, the sun, the sea, the bread, the wine, the fish, the flow of the blood, the reality of the nail and the wood of the cross." What has been created is a film In the monumental tradition of biblical motion pictures but minus most of the embarrassing cliches of the genre the vapid characterizations, the soaring angel choirs, the disembodied voices, the halos of light and the cloying tii ivy ahiSmkh English actor Robert Powell is gentle yet compelling as Christ in "Jesus of Nazareth." dialogue is taken directly from the familiar King James translation of the Bible. AS JESUS, English actor Robert Powell moves through the drama as a gentle, compelling figure.

He is a Jesus who enjoys companionship, the heat of good debate. He wipes sweat from the brow, laughs with children and tells parables with dramatic skill. He is an angry radical protesting the defiling of the temple. The spectacle is still there, but used with great and telling skill. The barbaric glitter of the royal courts of the Herods contrasts with the rough simplicity of the lives of the people.

The customs of the time, particularly the religious ones, are superbly shown. The settings in Morocco and Tunisia recreate the starkness of deserts, mountains and cities of Palestine. The script has used parts of all the Gospels plus recent biblical scholarship. Much of the 3 AN EVENING WITH I KM JOIN THE PARTY APRIL ii nun i.unrui.n in PERSONALIS) 14 YEARS I 72 HR SERVICE EXPERIENCED INTERACTIONS, INC. 1 569-6222 or writ I 1 17WW HlliF171 RPiQ Ul 3 I HSLLCREST COUNTRY CLUB 50 S.

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