HUMANITAS AWARDS LIFT SPIRITS OF TV WRITERS

In spite of what television creator Gene Reynolds called the “enormous profit imperative” dictated by the hard-line business of television, a record number of teleplays was submitted to the 13th annual Humanitas Prizes this year from television writers eager for something more meaningful than ratings success.

The winners of $70,000 in Humanitas awards, announced Tuesday at a luncheon at the Century Plaza, included writers of CBS’ “Kate & Allie,” NBC’s “Family Ties,” NBC’s “Smurfs,” the CBS television movie “Promise” and a CBS “Schoolbreak Special” entitled “The Day They Came to Arrest the Book.”

Finalists were selected from 440 scripts, about 100 more than were submitted last year to the Pacific Palisades-based Human Family Educational and Cultural Institute, which gives the awards to prime-time television programs that “enrich the human person.”

In addressing the group, Reynolds, a writer, director and producer for such series as “MASH” and “Lou Grant,” said: “There must be a reason why the Humanitas event has grown from a modest meeting of a few dozen people to this impressive congregation, why recipients value this prize as much as they do other prestigious awards.” He paused, then added jokingly: “Maybe it’s the money.

“Or maybe,” Reynolds continued, “writers appreciate the encouragement Humanitas gives them in the face of the enormous profit imperatives of our business that flatten even the most committed. . . . Humanitas reminds us yearly that there are other values to express, other experiences to convey beyond the shocking and the sensational, that America’s viewers can get something more from prime time than a quickened pulse.”

Father Ellwood Kieser, a member of the institute’s executive committee who gave the invocation, said: “It (the awards) is kind of an upper. This tends to be kind of a cynical industry, and it’s nice to see something that people can be enthusiastic about and proud of.”

Writer Fay Kanin, another program speaker, said that she thought the Humanitas Prizes were particularly important in 1987, as the world watches the “moral and ethical bankruptcy which seems to have invaded our society” in the televised Iran- contra hearings.

The 1987 awards, funded by an endowment established by a group of broadcasting companies, were made in five categories: 30-, 60- and 90-minute programs, plus children’s animated and children’s live-action programs. Last year, no award was given in the category of children’s animation because the selection committee was “unable to find shows that sufficiently tapped the humanizing potential of animation.” This year, Kieser said that the committee found “a significant improvement” in the genre, although “there is still a long way to go before animated children’s programming reaches its full potential for audience enrichment.”

The $25,000 prize for programs 90 minutes or longer went to the two-hour drama “Promise,” a CBS movie that explored the issue of mental illness and starred James Garner and James Woods. The drama, cited for “its insightful probe of the arduous demands that love and fidelity can make on us” and its “revelation of the transparent beauty of the mentally disabled,” was written by Richard Friedenberg from a story by Kenneth Blackwell, Tennyson Flowers and Friedenberg.

In the 60-minute category, the winners of $15,000 were Gary David Goldberg and Alan Uger for a special, hourlong episode of NBC’s “Family Ties” entitled “ ‘A’ My Name Is Alex,” in which Alex Keaton (Michael J. Fox) goes to a psychiatrist to try to get over the death of a close friend. The program, mostly a monologue as Alex addresses the psychiatrist, had no commercial interruptions during its second half-hour. The award was given for its “formula-shattering exploration of the mysteriousness of life and its proneness to death” and its “deliciously witty celebration of the transcendent dimension of the human situation, of God, and of personal immortality.”

The winner of $10,000 in the 30-minute category was Bob Randall for an episode of the CBS comedy “Kate & Allie” entitled “Jennie and Jason.” The award was given for the show’s “wonderfully funny portrayal of the honesty and trust which mother-daughter communication requires” and its “treatment of the uniqueness of the sexual act and of the permanent and symbolic gift of self that it symbolizes.”

In the two children’s categories, the winners of $10,000 each were Melvin Van Peebles for “The Day They Came to Arrest the Book,” a CBS “Schoolbreak Special” about banning books from school libraries, and John Loy and Alan Burnett for an episode of NBC’s animated “Smurfs” entitled “Lure of the Orb,” for its “charming treatment of an uncharming subject--the dynamics of addiction.”