Banner Graphic, Volume 15, Number 429, Greencastle, Putnam County, 14 December 1985 — Page 2

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The Putnam County BannerGraphie, December 14,1985

Arsen Kuchuberiya, an automobile mechanic in Moscow, signs a contract to rent a video cassette. The Soviet Union has started mass-producing video players and made available a limited number of films the gover-

Video on the Volga Comrade, can I borrow your Rambo tape?

c. 1985 N.Y. Times News Service MOSCOW The Russian host, a nonconformist writer, flipped on his television, slipped a cassette into the Japanese video player and pressed the play button. The first frames of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” an early Clint Eastwood Western, flickered on the screen. “These opening scenes are great,” the host said with anticipatory pleasure as he settled into an armchair. Video recorders, which made their entry on the Soviet scene in the late 1970 s as novelties that only the elite could find or afford, have started to become a mass phenomenon. Although the number of owners remains far smaller and the cost is still far higher than in the West, increasing numbers of Russians are watching movies at home, according to newspaper reports and Muscovites. Most of the films they watch were made in the West and are officially banned in the Soviet Union, the Russians said. The growth in video usage has forced the government to rethink its initial response to video players a heavy-handed effort to prevent their introduction and discourage their use. Apparently persuaded that this approach only forced the business underground, the government is now trying to control the trade by embracing it. In recent months the Soviet Union has started massproducing video players, made available a limited but growing selection of ideologically safe films, and opened video stores that, like their counterparts in the United States, rent movies overnight. Despite the efforts, the Soviet authorities have had a hard time keeping home video viewing within acceptable political limits. Pornographic films, which were popular when video recorders made their debut, have been supplanted by more serious movies that pose a greater threat to political orthodoxy. One of the most popular movies in Moscow this fall, according to Russians, has been “Man of Iron,” a Polish film by the director Andrzej Wajda that sympathetically chronicles labor unrest in Gdansk, the birthplace of the Solidarity labor union movement. The films of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Milos Forman and Bernardo Bertolucci circulate widely in Moscow, often in copies that bear English subtitles but are also dubbed in Russian. “Amadeus,” Forman’s Academy Award-winning movie about Mozart and Antonio Salieri, is among the hottest video properties in the capital, according to Muscovites. Older films like Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” and Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander” are very popular, Muscovites said. Sylvester Stallone’s first “Rambo” movie has attracted a large following. Video owners said they were eager to see “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” one of Stallone’s later features. In many ways, the video business remains a primitive and costly one compared with the business in the West. The going rate for having a movie dubbed into Russian is about 30 rubles. A ruble is $1.28 at the official exchange rate, and the average Soviet worker earns about 190 rubles a month. But Russians said this was a vast improvement over the first efforts to translate films, which involved hiring someone to do a simultaneous translation while a movie was shown. Blank tapes are particularly expensive. A tape that costs $5 in the United States sells for the equivalent of between S6O and S7O on the black market in Moscow. Prices, however, have fallen in recent years as the availability of video players and movies has increased. Japanese and other foreign-made video players sell for about 2,500 rubles in Moscow at “commission stores,” second-hand goods outlets run by the government. Two years ago the cost in Moscow was 3,500 rubles.

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nment considers ideologically safe. Copies of Western movies are available only on the black market. (N.Y. Times photo).

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Copies of Western movies, available only on the black market, may sell for 200 or 250 rubles in Moscow. Western movies are brought into the country by tourists, by Russians who travel abroad, and by some diplomats, whose luggage is not checked at customs. Soviet video players and television sets are not compatible with American, Japanese or most Western European models. The Soviet equipment, however, can be converted to handle movies recorded for other video systems, and a prospering underground business has developed to do just that, according to Muscovites. They said it costs about 400 rubles to have a Soviet color television converted. The Soviet video player, the Elektronika VM, costs 1,200 rubles. In October, as part of a new' drive to increase the availability of consumer goods, the Government announced that it planned to produce 60,000 video players a year by 1990 and 120,000 a year by 2000. By Western standards, the goal was small. Millions of video players are sold every year in the United States. But for the Soviet Union, the totals were considered less important than the fact that the Government had decided to mass-produce a product that until recently it considered decadent and politically dangerous. There are no official figures available for the number of video players sold annually in past years or the number of households with video machines. The first video rental store, called a Videoteka, opened in May in Voronezh, a city about 300 miles south of Moscow. Since then other outlets have opened around the Soviet Union. There are two rental outlets in Moscow. One is in the basement of a movie theater near the central farmer’s market. The decor is drab, and, unlike American video stores, there are no cassette covers lined up along the wall to advertise the selection of movies. Andrei G. Tkachenko, a salesmen, said the store has a library of 270 films. The movies, all of which were made in the Soviet Union or the Soviet bloc, with the exception of a few made in India, range from historical epics such as Sergei Eisenstein’s "Ivan the Terrible” to current comedies and children’s films. The movies rent for two or three rubles a day.

The Holly Shop OPEN SUNDAY 11 a.m.-5 p.m. 830 Indianapolis Road Greencastle, Ind Phone 653-8810

STALLONE: Popular with Soviets

'No excuses/ senator says after drunken driving arrest

WASHINGTON (AP) - Sen. Robert W Kasten, R-Wisc., was arrested and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol, running a red light and driving on the wrong side of the road, District of Columbia police said Friday. Kasten, 43, was arrested Thursday near his home after a police officer saw him run a red light, said to police spokesman Lt. William White. “When the officer pulled over the car, he smelled a strong odor of alcohol,” White said “The officer then gave him an alcohol test arid subsequently arrested him.” Kasten was detained for an hour and

Congress agrees on defense spending level

WASHINGTON (AP) Congressional budget negotiators agreed on a defense spending package while trying to resolve House and Senate differences on a multibiliion-dollar catchall spending bill before adjourning for the year. Conferees also agreed on new subsidies for cotton and rice late Friday, leaving energy issues as the only major obstacles preventing adoption of the budget bill. While the negotiators worked Friday in anticipation of beginning their Christmas recess sometime next week, President Reagan signed a stopgap bill granting the goverment spending authority until Monday evening. Without that measure, the government would have run out of money and ground to a halt. Administration officials, meantime, tried Friday afternoon to refloat tax revision legislation that had been sunk earlier in the House by a Republican mutiny against the White House. The main roadblock to adjournment has been inability to approve the catchall spending bill, which is necessary because Congress has been unable to agree on separate legislation appropriating money for most government agencies. The agreement Friday night on defense issues removed a major obstacle. Conferees on the Pentagon portion of the catchall spending measure agreed on a package giving $298.7 billion to the Pentagon this year. The House had voted to freeze spending at last year’s $292 billion level while the Senate passed $302.5 billion, a figure that permitted enough of an increase to cover the expected rate of inflation.

Angry reactions to Japan hint of unrestricted auto exports

WASHINGTON (AP) - Senate backers of the U.S. auto industry are angry about a report that Japan will allow unlimited exports of cars to the United States, calling it an act of “national arrogance” that would worsen relations between the two countries. A new extension of voluntary restraints on auto exports to the United States, steps the Japanese originally took in 1981 to give the American industry time to rebuild itself, was “out of the question unless there is some exceptional” justification, according to a Japanese official who spoke Friday in Tokyo on condition he not be identified. Sen Don Riegle, D-Mieh., called such a move "a form of trade piracy.” “It’s unreasonable, it’s unfair and it’s an act of national arrogance,” he said in a Senate speech. Sen. John Danforth, R-Mo., said in a

Light trucks show gain

U.S. auto sales down by 12.6%

c. 1985 N.Y. Times News Service DETROIT Sales of new Americanmade automobiles in the Dec. 1-10 period were down 12.6 percent from last year, the manufacturers reported here Friday. The decline came despite a new round of sales incentive programs offered by most of the car companies. Sales of light trucks, however, were up by 5.3 percent. Total industry sales of 245,213 light trucks and cars for the period were down 7.2 percent from the period last year. There were eight selling days in the period this year and last. The seasonally adjusted annual selling rate, set at 7.4 million units, was down from an unusually high 9 million units last year, but was up from 6.9 million units at the end of November. It was, in fact, the highest since the end of September, when deep discount programs by the manufacturers expired. Those programs brought sales to record levels in August and September. Recent sales incentive programs, also in the form of low-interest-rate financing, are

released, White said. The senator is scheduled to appear in D.C. Superior traffic court on Feb. 4, he said. “There are no excuses. I made a serious mistake and I feel terrible about this. I am sorry and I can assure you it won’t happen again,” Kasten said in a statement issued by his office in Milwaukee. White said while Congress is in session, members of Congress are immune to arrest except in cases of treason, the commission of a felony or breach of the peace. Kasten’s arrest came under the latter category because driving under the influence of alcohol “threatens the imminent safety of members of the public at large,”

Sell FHA to private bidders?

NEW YORK (AP) - President Reagan’s draft budget for fiscal 1987 includes a proposal to sell the Federal Housing Administration to private bidders, according to a report published Saturday. The FHA, which has provided mortgage insurance for more than 51 million home buyers, “will be sold in its entirety as a single package, including all existing assets and liabilities,” The New York Times quoted the budget documents as

The package still must be approved by the entire conference of budget negotiators next week and then passed by each chamber. The conferees also decided to permit the Army to end a 16-year-long moratorium and build new chemical weapons, although they said the nerve gas programs could only produce artillery shells. The Pentagon also wanted to build a Bigeye bomb. But the conferees did ban future tests of the Air Force anti-satellite weapon :ASAT). The Senate had voted to go ahead with the program, but the House wanted to halt it. The House position prevailed despite a personal plea Thursday from President Reagan. The conferees also voted $2.75 billion for “Star Wars” research, which basically split the difference between the $2.5 billion voted by the House and the $2.9 billion

statement that Japan's reported decision would “increase our trade deficit with Japan, and it’s going to make trade relations worse.” He said the result could be a renewed call for tough trade sanctions against foreign competition White House spokesman Edward Djerejian said the administration had received no official word from the Japanese government of a change in its policy. Riegle, whose home state produces more automobiles than any other in the country, called the decision “absolutely irresponsible and selfish in the extreme.” “We pay for their defense," Riegle said. “And while we bring them under our defense umbrella, they turn around and damage consciously the economy of the United States. ... That is not what friendly nations do. That is what unfriendly nations do.”

being offered only on a limited number of models at each company and are not as generous. “The sales numbers are now becoming a pretty good indicator of underlying demand,” said Scott Merlis, auto analyst for Morgan Stanley & Co. “The incentives are not widespread enough to be the most dominant factor in the report.” He added that while the 7.4 million rate is an improvement from recent rates, “it is still , depressed relative to most of this year.” Another analyst, Thomas O’Grady of Integrated Automotive Resources, said that now, with the Christmas season in full swing, consumers are “shopping for gifts and toys and not for a new car.” The weak incentives will not do much to clear out inventories, which are again beginning to build. O’Grady said, adding that he expected to see new, stronger campaigns at the start of next year. The General Motors Corp., which last year was recovering from strikes at some of its operations, said its car sales dipped 10.2 percent from 1984, to 95,073 deliveries

Whitesaid. White said a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol carries a S3OO fine andor a prison term of 90 days. The fine for running a red light is $75, and SSO for driving on the wrong side of the road. Last April, the senator forfeited $182.50 bond after being found guilty of driving the wrong way on a divided highway in the Milwaukee area Police said the incident occurred in fog at 2:30 a m. and Kasten passed a field sobriety test. In 1978, he paid a ssl penalty after pleading no contest to a charge of traveling 54 mph in a 35 mph zone near Milwaukee.

saying. The FHA, basically a mortgage insurance company, was created during the Great Depression in 1934 by the National Housing Act, and an act of Congress is needed to dismantle the agency. FHA policies continue to set standards widely followed in the homebuilding and mortgage industries. The FHA, which employs more than 5,000 workers, produced a profit of $9.4 million last year.

passed by the Senate. A main dispute in energy programs is the Senate-passed program of $750 million for so-called “clean coal” technology. Administration officials originally opposed the provision, which is strongly backed by coal-rich West Virginia’s Sen. Robert C. Byrd, the Democratic leader. But the administration is now willing to approve some money for the program in return for deep reductions in the Synthetic Fuels Corp. budget, said legislative sources who declined to be named. The House wants to rescind all but $500,000 of Synfuel’s unobligated funds, but the Senatepassed measure retains $3.6 billion. On the farm bill, conferees voted to give cotton and rice farmers traditional pricesupport loans over the next five years at slightly reduced levels, but would require them to pay back only part of the loans.

Japan limited annual car exports to the U.S. market to 1 63 million vehicles until 1983. In fiscal 1984, Japanese auto makers extended the measure twice, but raised shipments to a total of 1.85 million cars. In another extension this year, they raised that total by 24.3 percent, to 2.3 million for the fiscal year ending next March 31, 1986 Rep. Carl Levin, D-Mich., accused the Japanese of “foot-dragging” in lowering their trade barriers. He said they “cannot be so naive as to continue to believe that the United States will continue to be taken advantage of like this.” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone announced last spring a plan he said was designed to lower trade barriers and increase purchases of U.S. products. Levin recalled. “If this policy of unrestrained exports is an indication of his plan, I shudder to see the rest of it,” he added

in the early December period. Light-truck sales by the auto maker, however, rose by 7.5 percent, to 38,175. The Ford Motor Co. said its car sales fell 18.1 percent, to 40,046 units, but truck sales at Ford were strong, up 7.4 percent, to 28,256. The Chrysler Corp reported cars sales of 19,656, off 114 percent, and truck sales of 10,711, down 12.6 percent. New-car sales by the American Motors Corp. continued to decline, as they have for most of this year, with the company estimating 1,700 deliveries in the period. The company’s Jeep sales were strong, however, with estimated sales of 4,700, up 23.7 percent from last year. Volkswagen of America said its sales of 1,132 cars were up 60.3 percent from a weak period in 1984 and the Nissan Motor Corporation reported sales of 1,458 new American-made autos. The company began assembling cars here early this year Nissan’s domestically produced truck sales of 2,111 were up 11.9 percent from the period a year earlier.

Beard letter yields $4,400 NEW YORK (AP) A four-page letter in which a woman describes how she persuaded Abraham Lincoln to grow a beard was bought for $4,400 at auction. "It's a very high price for something relating to Lincoln and not signed by Lincoln." said Herman Darvick, who sponsored the auction Thursday. He said the letter was bought bx a Long Island collector of American historical autographs who asked to remain anonymous. In the letter dated 1918. Grace Bedell recalled how when she was 11 years old, she wrote and told Lincoln him he would look better in a beard.