NETWORK TV PROGRAMMING 101 SEMINAR TEACHES INSTRUCTORS THE ROPES SO THEY CAN GUIDE THEIR STUDENTS.

Byline: Valerie Kuklenski Staff Writer

The instructor paced back and forth slowly in the front of the room, gesturing slightly as he rattled off facts and figures.

His 19 students were as rapt as if he were telling war stories in vivid detail. No one was caught doodling or gazing out the window.

The subject was the making of television movies according to HBO. Jay Roewe, vice president of production for HBO Films, was taking them through the paces of making ``For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story,'' the cable network's latest project, starring Andy Garcia.

His students, though, were the ones who are accustomed to being in the front of the classroom. They were film and TV production professors who came to North Hollywood this month for the 13th annual Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' Faculty Seminar, which teaches instructors how to make network entertainment programming, so they in turn can teach their kids.

The seminar was implemented after the academy's Educational Programs and Services arm learned from a poll of TV professionals that most student interns and recent college graduates were landing in Hollywood ill-equipped to work in network production.

``What became very obvious was, at the college level, professors know all about producing documentaries and news and public affairs programming, but what they mostly did not know well was entertainment television production and how it's done in the Hollywood community,'' said Price Hicks, the academy's EPS director.

The agenda for the intensive three-day seminar, which has changed only slightly year to year, included discussions with heads of network programming divisions, panels on everything from rights negotiations to producing to pitching and field trips to working sets, production meetings and special-effects facilities.

For the movie-of-the-week session, their textbooks were the Sandoval shooting script and an even more precious resource, a portion of the film's production notebook, which Roewe handed over with some hesitation.

``What I say in this room, and what I hand you, there is a certain confidentiality that I trust you will respect,'' Roewe told them.

He talked the lingo that regular readers of the entertainment trades understand - MOW, post, location infrastructure, and pay or play. He walked them through issues of accuracy in a biopic, the pluses and minuses of telling the story of a living subject, and the impact of outside events on a production - in this case, the Elian Gonzalez drama unfolding in Miami while most of the location scenes were being shot there.

``Could you explain what you mean, the difference between spending money and spending big money?'' one of the professors asked.

After giving his fourth annual seminar, Roewe said both he and HBO gain from his participation. When he publicly represents HBO as a quality network producing award-winning projects, he may attract better-quality applicants to the network for internships and regular jobs.

``As much as I went to a very good university, Boston University, the contact with the state of the art was missing,'' Roewe said. ``I would love to tour around to universities, but short of that, the opportunity to sit down with a bunch of professors in a captive setting and tell them what's happening and have them take it back to students is great.''

For the 2000 seminar, Hicks said the EPS committee took extra steps to try to recruit delegates from historically black colleges, by using a donation from Nokia to offer every delegate $1,000 to cover travel expenses, and by bringing the professors' seminar invitations to the attention of presidents or chancellors of historically black colleges. She said the number of applicants doubled, and the final 19 participants represented the most racially diverse group ever.

Cecil Hale, a delegate from City College of San Francisco, said ethnic diversity was brought up during the meeting with the network programming heads, which was closed to outside media.

``The one thing I was really concerned with was what's happening in the executive ranks to make sure they find a way to become more diverse at that level,'' he said. Asked whether he felt he received a satisfactory answer to that, Hale said, ``I got an answer, which was good. That's a great, great start.''

The seminar has not always gone so smoothly as it did this time.

``We put them in a role-playing position where we divided them into very small groups and they had to develop and pitch an idea to a programming or production executive that we brought in, and they hated it,'' Hicks said of an exercise used the first three years. ``They didn't like being put on the spot that way. We had to remember these are professors who are accustomed to being the person with the information, and suddenly they weren't.''

She also said that in the early years, a few professors used the seminar for their own gain, attempting to push a script or make contacts in the business for personal benefit. The academy has since laid down ground rules prohibiting that.

But overall it's been a rousing success, she said, in its own right and in the academy's internships and its Visiting Professionals program, which sends Hollywood TV specialists in a variety of fields out to campuses across the country.

``I think what's especially fascinating about teachers coming to Hollywood is this is the creative community, and they feel it when they're here (at the academy) and going around town,'' Hicks said. ``It's like being thrown into the water. I don't care how much is done in New York or Canada or wherever. This is the heart of the television creative community.''

At the close of the seminar, several faculty delegates said they were impressed that executives such as ABC's Stuart Bloomberg and the WB's Susanne Daniels would take time to talk with a bunch of teachers from, say, Alcorn State University in Mississippi and the University of Montana.

They also were pleased with the frankness of all the discussions, and with the materials they could take back to their classes, such as a script and tape of a ``Third Watch'' episode, with permission from the Writers Guild to photocopy it for class use.

In light of what he learned here, said Tom Kingdon of Emerson College in Boston, he will be shifting his teachings in documentary production away from the orthodox ways to more reality programming methods, such as ``Cops'' and ``Survivor.'' Kingdon, a former BBC producer, said it won't be hard to tell his students that Hollywood doesn't have much need for conventional documentaries. ``It's exciting and stimulating and they'll really appreciate it,'' he said. ``They'll think their old professor has learned a trick or two.''

Elzar Camper Jr. of East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania said he would encourage his department to rethink the structure of its writing program and to delve more deeply into the budgeting and management roles of a producer.

``Among us, we talk a lot about our credibility as academics,'' said Debbie Owens of North Carolina's Fayetteville State University. ``Many times, our students see us as the teacher who has not been out there. And unless we get back into the environment, either as interns or seminar participants, we aren't giving the whole story and we really can't bring the perspectives that they need to know to be competitive, even in the most introductory of courses.''

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Teachers Tune In

College professors get schooled in producing for entertainment TV

(2) TV professor Gail Wiggins of North Carolina A&T University observes Michael Denney, director of CBS' ``The Young and the Restless,'' in the soap opera's control room as part of the 13th annual Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' Faculty Seminar.

(3) Film and TV production educators learn about network operations as they tour the wardrobe warehouse for ``The Young and the Restless.''

John Lazar/Staff Photographer