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Show 1 STAHVIEw 1 , Not home, but could you call it vacation? By RUTH THOMPSON For many years that splendid splen-did English actor Anthony Quayle and his wife spent their vacations on the island of Malta and kept a boat there. The coast became a second home for them. But to a number of show-business show-business people the motivation motiva-tion to visit Malta is different. Theirs is a bleakly landscaped Malta that suits a range of film and television specifications. specifica-tions. It was chosen for the location loca-tion work on the mini-series, "The Martian Chronicles," starring Rock Hudson because "it looks like Mars." That's not its only "look" though. When the still-in-production "Brideshead Revisted" (starring (star-ring Laurence Olivier and gave him his first California assignment on Jan. 2, 1967. When he drove past the palm trees decorating his home-away-from-home the Beverly Bev-erly Hills Hotel down Sunset Sun-set Boulevard, he marveled that balmy breezes brushed his face while the only visible snow was atop distant mountains. moun-tains. He took up permanent residence, and fast, in sunshine land. But right now, in midwinter, mid-winter, he is back in New York City, headquartered in the handsome and semi-ghostlike structure that, until it was retired, had a proud history histo-ry as Haaren High School. It is, says Isenberg, ideal for the next incarnation of "Fame," which be loved as a theater release movie and which is Anthony Andrews) reaches the United States home screens via PBS, we'll see a strip of the island posing as a desolate strip of North Africa. Versatile Robin Williams spent his hiatus from "Mork and Mindy" starring in "Popeye" on location on Malta Mal-ta because the versatile island struck producer Robert Alt-man Alt-man as the one right place on earth that evoked the sparse background that is integral to the comic strip. Gerald Isenberg, the 36-year-old producer who bears a resemblance to actor Tony Roberts and has a strong track record for major television televi-sion specials (among them "Go Ask Alice," a landmark film used by drug rehabilitation rehabilita-tion centers), has rooted himself him-self for the icy winter weather in a spot where you might not expect to find him. Manhattan. Manhat-tan. Why is it a suprise? Isenberg, who grew up in Boston, went to college in Maine (Bowdoin) and whose first job was with the New York office of Columbia Pictures, calls it personally "fortuitous" that Columbia being adapted as a television movie for 1981, with a strong possibility that NBC will lock it in as a series. Says Isenberg: "Yes, personally, I love living in California. But to do 'Fame,' it has to be New York." This is where you find the ethnic variety in schools where (in ideal situations) energy mixes with something more. Call it goals, call it a dream, but it works, says Isenberg. If you outgrow the early dream then upgrade it, amend it. For himself, the enthused Isenberg says, "I have other things waiting for me, but right now I am committed to 'Fame' on television." It is a personal as well as professional commitment. "In this film I have eight young players, any one or two of whom could carry an entire series. This is not a 'jungle' high school." These are, he says, people who want to be somebody and get somewhere and include the red-haired, insecure, but flamboyant Doris, played this time by Valerie Landsburg also currently getting nightly applause on Broadway in Neil Simon's "I Ought to Be in Pictures." |
