TEXAN GRABS THE ARTS VIDEO MARKET BY THE HORNS

“Just what is the world coming to?” John Houseman wants to know.

The venerable producer-actor has been flipping through the TV channels with his remote control, growing even grumpier than usual. He switches off the set, turns to the camera and gives us a piece of his mind. “Life is too short to be squandered on Rambos, Commandos, rock videos. They all dull the senses!”

Since this is a television commercial (currently being shown on the Arts & Entertainment cable channel), Houseman has more than a gripe. He has a solution, too: namely, his (latest) sponsor, Kultur Home Video, which, old sourface assures us, offers “the best of performing arts.”

“Kultur!” Houseman exults. “They keep the arts alive!”

His proclamation is followed immediately by the announcement that by calling an 800 number we can purchase (depending on which of two commercials is being shown) either “Maria Callas: The Hamburg Concerts--1959 and 1962” or “Baryshnikov: The Dancer and the Dance.”

If there are people who think the great names of the performing arts shouldn’t be huckstered like Merle Haggard, Dennis Hedlund isn’t among them. Hedlund--a small-town Texan and ex-Marine--is the unlikely founder and president of Sea Bright, N.J.-based Kultur, one of America’s most respected arts-video companies.

He was raised on a ranch near a town named Hedley in the Texas panhandle. “Larry McMurtry country,” he explains. “It was like growing up in ‘The Last Picture Show.’ The only kind of music I heard for a long time was by people like Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams.” That changed when he saw one of Leonard Bernstein’s young people’s concerts on TV. Hedlund feels he’s now serving a similar function--bringing the fine arts to the new ears and eyes.

In the ‘70s, Hedlund got his first chance to promote his new aesthetic favorites by helping start a Florida radio station that played nothing but classics (and we don’t mean “At the Hop”). By 1980, he was an accounts manager for a video company and began to have ideas about his own video venture. After obtaining the rights to two programs--”Artur Rubinstein” and “Heifetz and Piatigorsky”--and investing his savings, he took out an ad in a classical-music magazine and sold 62 tapes. That wouldn’t be encouraging if he were selling records. But these were videocassettes--at $89.95 each. Hedlund was the first to discover that there were people with both a desire for arts videos and the money to pay for them--maybe enough of these moneyed aficionados to make a purely arts-oriented video company a going thing. He launched Kultur in 1981.

“Nobody else thought the market was there back then,” Hedlund, 40, remembers. “They’d say ‘People want to attend the opera or the ballet, but they don’t want to pay to see them on a television set.’ My reply was ‘How about the people in Alabama or Nebraska or someplace else where there might not be any opera or ballet to attend?’ ”

After those first 62 copies were sold, Hedlund says, “I started to feel that my idea would work.”

It did, especially after VCR sales boomed. And Kultur’s gradual success opened the way for performing-arts videos to be released by other companies--from specialists such as Video Arts International (VAI), Corinth and Home Vision to bigger, multi-category firms such as Sony, Paramount and HBO. Kultur hasn’t become an industry giant (it has released fewer than 100 titles) but grosses have grown steadily and impressively. Last year Kultur raked in $1.6 million--pretty good for a little New Jersey firm that still has only six full-time employees, and more than triple what the company made in 1984.

Kultur’s success and influence appear to be the result of a magical blend: classy programs, sassy salesmanship and good business sense. (One recent cost-trimmer was Hedlund doing the announcing at the end of the Houseman ads himself. “I saved $600,” he says proudly.)

The classy programs include dance tapes featuring Baryshnikov, Natalia Makarova, Fernando Bujones, Peter Martins, Carla Fracci and the Bolshoi Ballet. From the opera world there’s Placido Domingo, Sherrill Milnes and others. Also in the Kultur catalogue are Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Requiem,” a 10-hour “The Life of Verdi,” a four-cassette “Video Dictionary of Classical Ballet,” a celebration of the Israel Philharmonic with Zubin Mehta (“Going On 50”), several orchestral concerts (featuring Neville Marriner, Yehudi Menuhin, and others) and some Shakespeare plays.

The sassy salesmanship includes those Houseman commercials print and mail ads and promotions that target Kultur’s most likely customers (doctors and lawyers or, for “Requiem,” Catholics), a distribution agreement with Capitol Records that puts Kultur videos into major record stores and a West Coast office (opened in June in Los Angeles).

Plus the latest twist--a deal with a Russian vodka company.

Stolichnaya is selling a special edition of the Bolshoi’s production of “Swan Lake” for $19.95 by mail--a two-hour-plus tape that, in a slightly different version, previously sold for $59.95 from the Kultur catalogue. Stolichnaya has placed a minimum order of 10,000 cassettes with Kultur. “It would take us at least two years to sell that many the normal way,” said Hedlund. The new tape includes a 70-second commercial for the vodka.

Some of Kultur’s competitors--especially HBO, Home Vision and VAI--are moving fast lately in attempts to gain big chunks of the market. Against these hares, Hedlund says, “We’re the turtle--always moving forward. I come from a background where you don’t ever quit. And if it takes alternative ways to sell the product, even when it comes to selling ballet in Boston, I’m always ready to do some Texas horse trading.”