WHY ‘JEDI’ CAN’T GET OFF GROUND

Thanks to the ongoing war between National Public Radio and American Public Radio, the largest audience for a radio drama in recent years may never get to hear what an Ewok sounds like.

That “Return of the Jedi” will probably never be heard on either network is not much of a surprise to those who have watched the two public radio networks snipe at each other since APR was born three years ago. Though NPR and APR serve a common audience and are both nominally nonprofit, indirectly government-subsidized corporations, each network is as self-serving and as jealous of its rival as NBC, CBS and ABC are of one another.

“On balance, I think the public is well served by having both (APR and NPR),” NPR President Douglas Bennet said recently. “Competition is different from rivalry. Pluralism is what we’re aiming for in public radio.”

APR President William Kling echoed that sentiment, pronouncing the listening public the true winners in any ongoing game of one-upmanship the two networks are playing, simply by virtue of the choice that two competitors give their audience.

But the story of how and why the final part of the radio version of the “Star Wars” trilogy never made it to radio stands as mute testimony that rivalry among public broadcasters can sometimes work against their audience.

The short version of the story is simple:

National Public Radio retains the rights to “Jedi” but hasn’t got the $250,000 it will cost to produce it.

American Public Radio officials believe they can raise the money, but can’t get NPR to give up the rights.

According to NPR estimates, as many as a million listeners heard at least a portion of the 13 radio episodes of “Star Wars” or the 10 episodes of its sequel, “The Empire Strike Back.”

“NPR set up an 800 number at one point when ‘Star Wars’ was first broadcast (in 1981) and they logged in 55,000 calls,” said Tom Voegeli, the Minnesota Public Radio producer responsible for bringing those first two George Lucas fantasies to NPR stations across the United States. “Anyone who knows anything about public radio will tell you that kind of listener response is phenomenal.”

NPR underwrote Voegeli’s first two productions with government grants and broadcast them as the drawing cards in membership subscription drives during the early 1980s for about 250 NPR affiliate stations.

But when Voegeli prepared to bring “Jedi” to radio in 1983, NPR was suddenly on the brink of financial collapse. The mismanaged network was more than $7 million in debt, thanks in large part to overstaffing, poor bookkeeping and uncontrolled employee expense accounts.

Suddenly, NPR barely had the resources to keep its two premier news programs--”All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition”--on the air. There was no money at all for a $250,000 production of a six-to-eight-episode radio rendering of that summer’s box-office smash and concluding chapter to the Luke Skywalker trilogy.

So Voegeli went to American Public Radio.

From its inception, NPR has been a centralized production and distribution headquarters for all of public radio. Its current annual $22-million operating budget covers everything from satellite leasing time to lobbying for member stations on Capitol Hill. The network’s role has been both paternalistic and democratic, with its annual spring planning conferences more closely resembling a town hall shouting match than a stockholders’ meeting.

But APR, with only a fraction of NPR’s annual budget, is run more like a private corporation, complete with a no-nonsense board of directors and a chief executive whom many station operators and independent producers characterize as a “benevolent dictator.”

“APR is brutal. They tell the stations exactly what to do: when they can run their programs and how quickly they have to pay for them,” said a veteran independent radio producer from New York. “But they do a far better job of producing cultural and performance programming than NPR ever did.”

Unlike NPR, APR doesn’t serve all public radio stations. APR offers its programs on an exclusive basis to only one primary subscriber in any radio market.

In Los Angeles, for example, only KUSC-FM can receive any APR offerings. KLON-FM in Long Beach is a secondary APR affiliate, but it receives only those programs KUSC doesn’t want to use. The other three NPR affiliates in the immediate Los Angeles area--KCRW-FM, KPCC-FM and KCSN-FM--get no APR programs at all.

NPR attempts to be a full-service network, but APR does only two things: obtains programs produced by its affiliates and beams them via satellite to any other affiliate willing to pay for them.

To be an APR affiliate, a station pays an annual membership fee ranging from $800 to $2,800, depending upon how large an audience they reach. In addition, the stations must also pay a weekly carriage fee in order to broadcast APR’s most popular programs.

The network set this pay-for-play policy with its first--and still its most popular--program, “A Prairie Home Companion.” Since APR went on the air in February, 1982, affiliates have had to pay a flat fee for every two-hour Saturday-evening “Prairie” show they’ve aired. Currently, the fee ranges from as little as $20 a week for tiny stations in Alaska or Colorado to $75 per week for powerhouses like KUSC.

“Speaking as a producer, APR is a much more receptive way for a network to be put together,” Voegeli said. “I still love NPR, but it is a democracy and ultimately that is not the way to produce excellent radio or TV or film. You can’t respond to every member.

“Good programs are made by individuals who say, ‘I have an instinct for what will work and what is good and I want the money to do it my way.’ APR is more receptive to that. In terms of producing quality programming, it does work much better. The other side of it is that APR needs to risk more program money. The strength of NPR, when it had money, was that it could find out whether a show was marketable or not. There are some of us in public radio who believe there are programs that should be made whether they’re marketable or not.”

Voegeli finally struck a deal to get APR to ask its affiliates to each risk an advance broadcast fee for his “Jedi” production. He would then pool the money and make the program. His proposal had all the ingenuity of an independent feature film production that asks theater owners to assume the risk of advancing the money necessary to make a movie.

His plan almost worked, until Kling threw in one more stipulation: “I went to (NPR president) Doug Bennet and said I thought this was something we should do to finish the trilogy,” Kling said. He wanted to combine the presold “Jedi” production with the first two parts of the trilogy and offer the entire trilogy to all of his APR affiliates on a one-time-only broadcast basis. Such a blockbuster sale would boost the amount each station would be willing to pay and also provide the foundation for each APR affiliate to bring in large membership contributions.

Following the single APR broadcast, all three “Star Wars” programs would revert back to NPR.

But Bennet declined the proposition, without offering a reason.

“What Bennet said was, ‘Give us more time to try to work it out ourselves. Maybe we can still do it,’ ” said Voegeli. But that was months ago. And today, with NPR facing a continuing austerity budget that very nearly forced it to cancel its arts and performance programming as well as the weekend edition of “All Things Considered,” Voegeli sees little hope of NPR coming up with a “Jedi” grant.

“It’s not too late now, but the odds are very low that we’d be able to pull it off,” Voegeli said. “I’m a producer, so I want to build my other programs. I produce ‘St. Paul Sunday Morning’ for APR and a new program called ‘High Performance.’ It’s not that it’s (“Jedi”) totally out of the question; it’s just that the project has lost some momentum.

“It’s awful late in the game to even hope to do it. I’d love to finish the damn thing off, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.”