Promoters’ Dream of Theater Turns to Stone

Michael Pickering may still be waving a sword of heroic dreams.

But his failing Excalibur Theatre is holding fast to its stone.

A year ago, the young promoter and a partner rented the former Valley Circle Theater in Woodland Hills, which they planned to convert into a 900-seat live performance hall.

Hoping to bring a new age of culture to the Valley, they named their project after the idealistic Arthurian legend.

Since then, however, their financial backing has dwindled and their debts have mounted.

Tens of thousands of dollars in arrears on rent, they were evicted from the still-empty theater last week.

The auditorium had been gutted in preparation for remodeling. Architectural plans had been drawn and approved. Tickets had even been sold. But there was no money to begin construction, Pickering said.

Now, Pickering said, he is accepting requests by mail for refunds of about $225,000 in ticket sales his firm solicited late last year. He intends to honor them, but conceded, “Our funds right now are kind of frozen because of the situation we’re facing.”

Even so, there is still hope, he insisted Friday. Pickering said that, just last week, he opened negotiations with a new backer who wished to remain anonymous--the owner of a theater in Hollywood--and may be ready to make a major announcement next week.

To show his continued optimism, he returned to the theater Friday carrying a theatrical broadsword.

He said there is still a chance, if the new backing comes through, to renew his lease and resume construction of Excalibur.

The owners of the theater, however, said they cannot afford to sacrifice any more, even though they fervently shared Excalibur’s dream.

“It would have to be very soon and very substantial,” said Gerelda Selvin, co-owner with her husband, Harry, of the El Camino Shopping Center. “It’s such a remote possibility I say it with a heavy heart.”

The Selvins said they allowed Pickering and his partner, Hillary Cole, to stay on months after they fell behind in rent in the hope their backing would eventually materialize.

“We’re theater-loving people,” Gerelda Selvin said.

“It just broke my heart not to see them make it,” Harry Selvin said. “But it gets to a point you can’t go on dreams. Finally we had to face reality that it was not happening.”

Harry Selvin said his company is investigating other plans for the theater, part of the El Camino Shopping Center on Mulholland Drive. He declined to discuss the plans in detail.

In launching the Excalibur Theater project last year, Pickering and Cole were attempting what no one had yet been able to accomplish: to bring major live theater to the Valley.

Although the Valley supports numerous small theater houses that stage non-union, minimum-pay productions, it has never sustained a major performance hall.

The only large-scale commercial theater ever attempted in the Valley opened in 1964, but failed two years later. The 2,861-seat Valley Music Theater in Woodland Hills foundered in spite of drawing an estimated 600,000 patrons to musicals, comedies and concerts.

After attempts to sell the $1.2-million concrete dome hall to the city of Los Angeles as a cultural center failed, it eventually became a Jehovah’s Witnesses assembly hall.

Private arts patrons formed the San Fernando Valley Cultural Foundation in 1981 to raise money to build arts complexes in two Valley parks. The group proposes to build 600- and 1,200-seat theaters in 20-acre Warner Park in the middle of Warner Center and a 2,500-seat concert hall in Sepulveda Basin. However, it has yet to begin raising the $72 million considered the minimum cost of the two projects.

Lack of Support

Although skeptics have long maintained that the Valley audience will not support such projects, Pickering believes that the experience of his company, Excalibur Productions, has proved that residents are eager for the type of theater he promised.

Beginning in August, he said, a telephone-marketing project sold 5,000 passes for a season of programs that was to include drama, music and even magicians.

Originally, Pickering and Cole announced that they had recruited backers to cover almost all of the $400,000 renovation of the 16-year-old theater and $300,000 in stage equipment.

The theater was scheduled to open last December.

Pickering said this week, however, that the primary backing, which was supposed to come from Saudi Arabian and Hong Kong financial sources, never came through.

Many Delays

“We have run into delay after delay in receiving those funds,” he said.

Pickering said the company fell behind on its rent, which was $10,880 per month plus a $2,500 monthly maintenance fee, in January.

Pickering said the company owes the Selvins $60,000. A representative for the company said the figure is $90,000.

Pickering said that Excalibur’s small investors have not abandoned the company and that if he can’t recover the theater, he will look somewhere else.

“We’re working on alternate plans now,” he said. “There are other properties in the Valley.”