Banner Graphic, Volume 12, Number 39, Greencastle, Putnam County, 22 October 1981 — Page 16

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The Putnam County Banner-Graphic, October 21,1981

People in the news Letterman to host new NBC show NEW YORK (AP) Comedian David Letterman,'a native of Indianapolis, will have his own late-night television program on NBC. which will follow Johnny Carson's ■Tonight’' show and push back Tom Snyder’s “Tomorrow" show further into the post-midnight hours. According to NBC insiders, the powerful Carson has given his approval to the changes, which are expected to go into effect early next year. Letterman will have either 30 minutes or an hour after "Tonight," beginning at 12:30 a.m. EST. Depending on the length of Letterman’s program, Tomorrow Coast-To-Coast.” will be either 30 minutes or an hour The ratings of Snyder's show have been slipping in recent months. NBC has been searching for a vehicle for Letterman, who reportedly is being paid $20,000 a week while not working. He was given a long-term contract by the network and an hour-long morning comedy show in June 1980. But “The David Letterman Show" never caught on and was canceled five months later. # LOS ANGELES (AP) Betty Ford at first thought the idea of her doing a soft-shoe routine on TV was a joke hardly surprising, since the suggestion came from comedian Bob Hope But he was serious, and the former first lady rose to the occasion: After a few rehearsals, she and Hope did the dance perfectly the first time the cameras were roiling. The NBC special, taped a few weeks ago at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum at Grand Rapids, Mich., will be shown Thursday night. "Bob Hope said, ‘Since this is honoring your husband, why don't we surprise him and do a little soft shoe?”’ Mrs. Ford recalled. “I went along with the joke, I thought, not taking it too seriously. And the next thing I knew it was written into the script as an actual fact. I was surprised that he was really serious about it.” • When Robert Wayne Leath escaped from the Maine State Prison at Lewiston last August, he apparently saw no need to flee too far. nor to make any great effort at going into hiding. He was arrested Sunday night in a nightclub at Fort Kent. 160 miles from the prison. The 31-year-old convict was easy to spot since he was on stage playing lead guitar with a country music band. The Fort Kent Chief of police, Kenneth Michaud, said he had acted on a tip that Leath was performing with Dale Bennett and his Freightliners band. "There he was, playing lead guitar,” Michaud said. “He came along quietly and was very nice about the whole thing.” The only people who seemed dismayed by Leath’s arrest, Michaud said, were the nightclub’s patrons. They started grumbling when the band stopped performing after the guitarist was led off to jail. “I think they wanted us to iet them finish the set first.”

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HELEN HAYES: Honored again Although she has reluctantly accepted the economic reasons for the destruction of the small Times Square theater that bears her name, Helen Hayes said Tuesday that she was not at all certain that she would allow her name to be placed on its successor at the site, a 1,500-seat theater in the planned Portman Hotel At a ceremony in Washington’s National Theater, where a painting of her was unveiled, Miss Hayes said, “I don’t know if I want my name on a theater where it will be torture to act.” Miss Hayes, who was born in Washington and made her first stage appearance in a comedy 75 years ago, was honored Tuesday by the National Theater, where she saw her first play and fell in love with the theater at the age of 5. She likes small theaters as an actress, Miss Hayes said, and she feels sure that audiences prefer them, too. The painting of the 81-year-old actress by Furman Finck, which was unveiled by Barbara Bush, wife of the vice president, will go on display in the National Theater. Miss Hayes helped save the National, when like the Helen Hayes Theater in New York, was faced with demolition. $ GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) Jody Powell was back on the firing line again, trying to answer questions put to him by interviewers and defending Jimmy Carter’s record. But this time the former presidential news secretary’s interviewers were high school students. Powell, who is writing a book on the relationship between the press and the White House, came to Greensboro Tuesday as a guest of the public schools and spoke to students about former President Carter, who is writing his memoirs, and Rosalyn Carter, who is writing hers. Powell said history will be kind to Carter because he made decisions he believed to be right, even when he knew :hey would hurt him politically.

WASHINGTON (AP) Who are the most maligned people in America? » They are the focus of jokes by comedians on television variety shows. A rock song during the ’6os said they were “sent from down below," and a television series depicted them as howling schemers. If you guessed mothers-in-law, you’re right. The House of Representatives voted Tuesday to designate the fourth Sunday in October as National Mother-In-Law Day. The vote, by the way, wasn’t unanimous. It was 305 in favor, 66 opposed and 28 “present.” The role call was requested by Rep. John Ashbrook, ROhio. Several votes changed at the last minute, most of them from “yes” to "present.” “These stereotypes, such as the meddlesome mother-in-law, the battle-ax mother-in-law, the domineering mother-in-law and the vicious mother-in-law have served to make the term mother-in-law one of rdicule and opprobium,” the resolution stated. MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) A mental health expert who treated Jerry Lee Lewis testified the entertainer was addicted to drugs, a condition worsened by the death of two sons and marital problems. Dr. David Knott of the Memphis Mental Health Institute said he treated Lewis in early 1976 at the request of Dr. George Nichopoulos, Elvis Presley’s physician who is on trial for prescribing excessive amounts of drugs to the late rock ’n’ roll idol singer and others. “Dr. Nichopoulos expressed some concern especially to Mr. Lewis’ use of stimulants,” Knott said, adding that Lewis had abused amphetamines and placidyl. The testimony came a day after Dr. Norman Weissman, a prosecution witness, testified in Criminal Court that he determined that Presley’s body contained toxic levels of the sedative methaqualone, 10 times more codeine than needed for therapy and low levels of 10 other drugs. It was the first official release of any of the evidence that went into the autopsy of Presley, who died Aug. 16,1977, at the age of 42. Jerry Francisco, the Shelby County medical examiner, said Presley died of heart disease, but published reports have said the death was drug-related. • It is that time of the year again: When the World Series starts, boosters in prominent places make public bets on the outcome, and this time Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan and Sen. S.I. Hayakawa are betting cases of wines from their respective states. Hayakawa, a California Republican, said Tuesday, at a meeting in Moynihan’s office, that he would turn over to Moynihan, if the Los Angeles Dodgers lost the Series, a case of Napa Valley wine. The New York Democrat, appearing to have not even considered the possibility of a New York Yankee loss, said, “It has not yet entered my mind that I’d have to pick among the wide variety of New York vintages.” Moynihan said the bet would be paid immediately after the Series with “a formal presentation followed by a ceremonial sipping.” “And a drunken brawl,” added Haykawa. Gov. Hugh L. Carey was not far behind the senators in proposing a bet. He said he was willing to wager Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles that the Yankees would win in not more than five games. “He can pay me in oranges,” said Carey. “I’ll pay him in apples. No fruit flies in our apples.”

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Disney film gets new ending, more encouraging review c. 1981 N. Y. Times News Service HOLLYWOOD Walt Disney’s “The Watcher in the Woods” opened in New York on April 17, 1980, and was clubbed to death by the critics. “I challenge even the most indulgent fan to give a coherent translation of what passes for an explanation at the end,” Vincent Canby, The New York Times critic, wrote of the ghost story-science fiction hybrid, which starred Bette Davis, Carrol! Baker and Lynn-Holly Johnson. It seemed that Disney’s desperate attempt to attract a new and older audience had ended in still another failure. Eighteen months and $1 million worth of revisions later, “The Watcher in the Woods” opened in 240 theaters on Oct. 8. “A rattlingly good suspense yarn,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter, an industry trade paper. “The ending is seamless, satisfying, resolving the mystery. The film is genuinely eerie and scary,” said The Richmond Times Dispatch.” Equally satisfying to Disney, the movie earned a respectable $1.2 million during its first week Why did Disney take the unprecedented gamble of withdrawing “The Watcher in the Woods” to invent and shoot a new ending? “Why did we do it? We felt we had seven-eighths of a good picture,” said Tom Leetch, the movie’s co-producer. “But the ending confused people.” “They had tried to blend science-fiction with a ghost story, and it didn’t work,” said Harrison Ellenshaw, who designed the shape and look of the new ending. “They tried to get a scary alien, but he came out looking like a large lobster with seaweed hanging off him. It was as though the audience had wandered into another picture. You can’t break the rules that late in a movie without having the audience feel someone got the last reel mixed up.” Canby had described the alien as “a creature that looks as if it had been stolen from a Chinese New Year’s parade.” Ellenshaw who had just finished supervising the three-foot-wide acrylic paintings on glass that formed Cloud City and parts of the Eog Planet for “The Empire Strikes Back” —• decided to dump the science-fiction and concentrate on the ghost story. Ron Miller, Disney’s president, showed the original “Watcher in the Woods” to a group of theater owners. Most said that if the science-fiction ending were changed, they would be willing to book the movie. Luckily for Disney, the movie’s sets had not been destroyed but were in storage at Pinewood Studios in London. Unluckily, the actors’ strike made it impossible to shoot until late fall. Because of conflicts in the schedule of Miss Davis, who plays the mother of a girl who disappeared mysteriously 30 years earlier, her revised scenes were shot separately last winter in California. The early good reviews for the revised “Watcher in the Woods" do not, by any means, solve all of Disney’s problems. The PG-rated (Parental Guidance Suggested) movie is tense and scary enough to appeal to the teen-age audience that the studio has been trying to woo for the last four or five years. But can any film with a Disney label attract teen-agers? “The only way to get to the point where the audience for a Disney film is wider is to consistently make movies that have more bite. ’ said 28-year-old Tom Wilhite, who was recently named vice president of production. “We may not get the audience we want with our first, second, or even our third picture. But we will get it.”