FATE OF LOTTERY’S ‘BIG SPIN’ UP TO NEGOTIATORS

Negotiators were working in Sacramento Tuesday to decide the fate of the California Lottery’s “Big Spin” weekly television program.

Representatives of the lottery and of a statewide network of 11 TV stations were attempting to resolve a dispute that threatened to kill the program despite an eleventh-hour save of last week’s show.

The talks resulted from an effort to avoid a Superior Court hearing previously planned for today .

Problems with scheduling the show do not threaten the state’s weekly cash giveaways, but, lottery officials say, the dispute over the ratings-troubled program could harm the lottery’s long-term prospects.

In interviews, parties to the dispute said the half-hour show’s troubles involve the move of the show from Mondays to Saturdays at 7 p.m., when audiences are much smaller and advertising rates are drastically lower. Hanging in the balance is thousands of dollars worth of commercial time for the show.

Cancellation of the show “will result in loss of public confidence in the lottery,” state officials said Friday. They won a temporary restraining order forcing the 11-station Winning Image Network (WIN) to air last Saturday’s broadcast.

On Friday, the lottery agreed to cover that show’s $65,000 in production costs, despite an earlier agreement with WIN that no state money would be used to make the show. The lottery is asking the court to order WIN to reimburse the state. The lottery wants the court to force WIN to honor a one-year contract to make and distribute the program.

Behind the public squabble, lottery officials suggest, is a conflict between the show’s production company--Hollywood Center Studios--and the two most important WIN stations--KABC in Los Angeles and KGO in San Francisco.

Lottery officials say the scheduling issue was settled during a meeting Dec. 5, when all the parties reached a joint decision on the 7 p.m. time. On New Year’s Eve, however, the producer and the stations were disagreeing on the time, said George Howard, acting director of marketing for the lottery.

“All of a sudden we were notified that they (the stations and the producer) were having difficulties,” Howard said.

Upon hearing the arguments in court last week, Sacramento Judge James Ford called the dispute the result of a “holdup” by the show’s producer “who, at the eleventh hour, changes the terms of the deal.”

Marty Perrelis, general manager of the studio, declined to discuss the situation and referred inquiries to his attorney. (At Calendar press time, the attorney had not returned phone calls.)

Lottery officials speculated that Hollywood Center may have sold commercial time to advertisers at rates that cannot be sustained in the current 7 p.m. time slot.

According to lottery officials, Hollywood Center wants the show to air at 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, the potentially more lucrative time period immediately before network prime time. KABC and KGO want to reserve that time for their own programs, such as the “Eye on L.A.” magazine show.

The stations have refused to give up the time period. Instead, they scheduled the show for 7 p.m., a time that, according to one local advertising sales executive, “has the lowest rating” in evening TV.

“Seven-thirty was not a viable time period for us,” said John Severino, general manager of KABC. “We offered 7 p.m. and other times. . . . That’s when the controversy came about.”

The earlier a show is scheduled, the smaller the audience. One local TV advertising salesman said the 7 p.m. Saturday time period is “the toughest half-hour to sell” during the week.

In any case, Saturday evenings are not as attractive to most advertisers as Monday nights, when the show was airing after 10 p.m. in Los Angeles and San Francisco and 9 p.m. elsewhere. The show was moved to Saturdays due to the season end of “Monday Night Football” and the return of regularly scheduled entertainment programming.

The number of viewers is considerably lower on Saturday than on Monday, and the difference can make or break a show, Severino said. He estimated, for example, that the Monday-night broadcasts may have produced as much as $30,000 per night profit for Hollywood Center.

On Saturdays, however, Severino guessed that advertising sales may not be covering the cost of producing the show, much less returning a profit.

“It no longer becomes a viable situation for the producer,” Severino said. “It’s important to the producer to find a way to reduce the production costs, which may mean moving out of Los Angeles.”

Severino said the show probably could be made for much less than $65,000 per week in another city.