KOCE-TV HOPING TO AIR PROGRAMS AT ARTS CENTER

For months public station KOCE-TV has tried to drum up major fiscal backing should the station’s owner, Coast Community College District, go through with a plan to withdraw all support and turn the station’s operations over to the KOCE-TV Foundation in early 1987.

So far, station officials haven’t had much luck recruiting major underwriters. But they hope a proposal to broadcast performances nationally from the Orange County Performing Arts Center will give the station its long-sought fiscal breakthrough.

That is, if KOCE can come up with $2.3 million to finance the project, which proposes three 1987 national specials, modeled after broadcasts from the Kennedy Center in Washington, as well as a local series on Orange County arts developments.

“It’s a high-prestige project for us. It’s the kind, we hope, that will provide support not only for this project, but also generate support for our other programs as well,” said Don Gerdts, the station’s executive vice president. He added that a KOCE survey last year reported that major donors were more interested in backing individual “high-prestige” projects than general operations.

Under a preliminary agreement expected to be finalized next month by the KOCE-TV Foundation and the Performing Arts Center, KOCE would:

- Tape the first of three specials this fall for airing by Public Broadcasting Service-affiliated stations next March. Performing groups are yet to be selected for this series, to be called “Tonight, From the Pacific.”

PBS has already allocated $15,000 in seed money to help develop KOCE’s national series plan, but final approval of the plan itself is still pending. “It is still in the preliminary stage. But we’re very much interested in what they come up with,” said Mary Jane McKinven, a spokeswoman for PBS, which has affiliations with more than 300 public television stations.

- Produce a monthly series focused on Orange County Center facilities and on other Orange County arts organizations, including interviews with star performers. This series, to begin with live coverage of the Sept. 29 opening-night ceremonies at the Orange County Center, would be offered to other public stations in California.

Dale Bell, the project’s executive producer, said he won’t discuss specifics about the productions until the entire project is assured of being financed. “Right now, we’re still looking for backers. But we hope to have a single corporation, or a partnership of companies, lined up by this summer,” he said.

Bell, a former vice president with public station WQED in Pittsburgh, was executive producer of “Kennedy Center Tonight,” the widely acclaimed series that was broadcast nationally from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts from 1981 to 1983 at a cost of $2.6 million a season. The chief underwriter was Shell Oil.

Bell last summer drafted a proposal for the Orange County Center at the request of Center executive director Thomas Kendrick, who is the Kennedy Center’s former director of operations. The plan was presented to both KOCE and KCET (Channel 28), Southern California’s biggest public station. (This year’s KOCE budget is $6.1 million, compared with KCET’s $23.7 million.)

Barbara Goen, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles-based KCET, said Channel 28’s president, William Kobin, held one “exploratory discussion” in Costa Mesa with Center officials, but a week later KCET was told that the Center had decided on KOCE.

“Their (Center officials’) decision, they informed us, was because KOCE was willing to make the venture its sole primary project,” Goen said.

As KOCE executives put it, the Orange County Center collaboration could not have come at a better time for the station, which has seen its fiscal support and number of employees dwindle markedly in the past three years and is still faced with uncertainty over whether the Coast Community College District will retain operational control.

“With this (Center) project, we have an ideal combination--both national exposure and the meeting of (local) community responsibilities,” said KOCE’s Gerdts. “It can be a real winner for us.”