SHARING THE RICHES OF TV

The Museum of Broadcasting in mid-Manhattan is a thin building, part of which used to be the kitchen of the Stork Club. The elevator doors, intact from the clubby days, have buxom Art Deco ladies incised into the shining brass.

By now the museum is a true treasure trove of the television past, 25,000 pieces of it, growing by something like 3,000 new pieces a year, all of them available for public viewing at two rooms’ worth of consoles.

I wrote some time ago about the museum’s Most Wanted list, which locally includes KTLA-TV’s first broadcast on Jan. 22, 1947, of which only a small Bob Hope segment survives.

One of the wanteds has been found: the 1955 televised version of Robert Sherwood’s “The Petrified Forest.” It was Humphrey Bogart’s television debut, re-creating the role of Duke Mantee that he had done in the film version 20 years earlier. Lauren Bacall co-starred, and it was she who proved to have a kinescope of the show, which was Bogart’s only major television appearance.

“The Petrified Forest” will be one of the major events in the Museum of Broadcasting’s 4th annual Television Festival in Los Angeles. Co-sponsored by the County Museum of Art and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the festival will run Wednesday through Saturday nights, March 4 to March 21.

Delbert Mann, who directed “The Petrified Forest,” will introduce it on March 20, a Friday. The festival will conclude the next night, as Mary Martin herself introduces the 1960 color version of “Peter Pan,” with its Jerome Robbins choreography. Martin, who first played Peter Pan on Broadway in 1954, did two earlier live performances on television in 1955 and 1956.

The festival will commence resoundingly, with Lucille Ball, who does not customarily enjoy this sort of thing, leading a seminar about “I Love Lucy,” showing some of her favorite episodes and talking about the series’ origins and her work with her writers.

Among the many rarities to be shown during the festival is a compilation of “Woody Allen: The Television Work” (March 14, 5:30 p.m., the festival’s only double-feature day). It includes his only special, from 1969; a nightclub routine from a 1966 Gene Kelly special and, the earliest clip, a 1962 monologue from “The Tonight Show.” The maestro will, alas, be on hand in spirit only.

The night’s program on the 14th is “Barbra Streisand: The Television Work,” hosted by her executive producer, Marty Erlichman, and her arranger-conductor, Peter Matz. The evening will include her appearances, unshown since the original telecasts, on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Dinah Shore Show.”

The festival’s participants, and its footages, are an exhilarating reminder that if television was a wasteland as charged, it has always been, and continues to be, patterned by oases of creativity of a very high order.

Looking chronologically at the full, eventful schedule:

Steven Bochco, co-creator with Terry Louise Fisher of “L.A. Law,” will host an evening about the series with Fisher, co-executive producer Gregory Hoblit and the four principal cast members (March 5).

Norman Lear will present a never-seen pilot of “All in the Family” (one of several made before the show found a network brave enough to take it) and an episode of its British prototype, “Till Death Us Do Part,” then will discuss the series’ difficult birth (March 6).

Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray will talk about “Caesar’s Hour” and show several excerpts, including Caesar’s takeoff on Marlon Brando (March 7).

Dinah Shore will host a tribute to KTLA Channel 5 on its 40th anniversary, including the showing of a new documentary about the station, its pioneering exploits and early-day personalities (March 11).

Edie Adams and Jack Lemmon will present an evening on “Ernie Kovacs and Music Video,” demonstrating that in “Kovacs on Music” (1959) and in segments of his other shows, the comedian was ahead of his time in the wildly imaginative presentation of music (March 12).

“Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends: A Tribute to Jay Ward” will be hosted by Rocky’s voice, the vocal wizard June Foray, and Bill Hurtz, who was the show’s director of animation. Among the treasures: three never-seen “Bullwinkle” pilots and prototype-clips of “George of the Jungle” and “Super Chicken.” The name of Ward’s partner in mirth, the late Bill Scott, will, I presume, be toasted as well (March 13).

Another of television’s present hits, “Moonlighting,” will be honored, with creator Glenn Gordon Caron and co-stars Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis participating (March 18).

In another evening on the hazards of the television pilot, Carl Reiner will introduce “Head of the Family,” a 1959 pilot in which he starred. The pilot sold--and became “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” with Reiner as second banana and head writer.

Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, its co-creators, and Jamie Lee Curtis will talk about the piloting of “Callahan,” the 1982 series in which Curtis starred.

The museum’s want list goes on, and includes two missing Kate Smith hours, the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund (the first telethon) and the May 4, 1957, Alan Freed Rock ‘n’ Roll Show, another first: the sound’s television debut.

If a lot is still missing, what the festival demonstrates is what riches are already in the vaults.

Festival ticket information (no reserved seats): (213) 857-6010.