SELLING WOODSTOCK

A range of companies from Warner Bros. to a Woodland Hills souvenir distributor have moved into strategic positions to transform the summer of 1989 into three months of hype and hoopla commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival’s three days of peace and music.

Movies, records, compact discs, Woodstock boxer shorts and possibly even a Woodstock air freshener are all parts of this plan of attack. But the prospects for one of the summer’s most eagerly anticipated developments--a live event in a big outdoor space somewhere that could become a Woodstock reprise--remains in serious doubt.

The most significant of the plans to try to do Woodstock again--a concept some veterans of the festival note conflicts with the reality that Woodstock wasn’t planned to be what it became in the first place--has languished until the last few weeks.

The reprise festival, which would be put on by the company that produced the real thing in 1969, is caught in a test of wills between Warner Bros., which controls television and film rights to anything that calls itself Woodstock, and Woodstock Ventures, the original festival producer that controls rights to the Woodstock name, itself.

Now, however, negotiations are said to be going on in earnest between Warner Bros. and John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, the two original principals in Woodstock Ventures. All parties agree it is getting perilously late to pick a site and book the talent that might play such an event.

John Morris, the original Woodstock’s production coordinator, said Tuesday in Los Angeles that, even if Woodstock Ventures and Warner Bros. come to terms, the earliest a commemorative production could be held might be sometime in 1990. Morris has been involved in the so far fruitless attempt to organize a Woodstock event to coincide with the anniversary.

Yet Rosenman--with the bravado that characterized the summer before the real Woodstock--said the location of the 1969 festival was in doubt as late as two weeks before the crowd gathered.

“There’s so much hype about Woodstock this year because everybody has such a good feeling about it,” Rosenman said. “There’s such a strong desire on the part of all of us to re-create it in one way or another (that) it seems to be re-creating itself.”

For the moment, both Rosenman and Ed Bleier, president of pay television and network features for Warner Bros.--and the man who, since he controls film and television rights, may make the final decision on whether a commemorative festival is held--agree that negotiations are ongoing.

However, one ambitious plan that would have involved simultaneous live events in the Soviet Union, East and West Germany and the United States, appears doomed. The four concerts would have been linked together by live television hook-up.

In addition to concert plans being hatched by Woodstock Ventures, pop singer Richie Havens--Woodstock’s opening act--and Wavy Gravy, founder of the Hog Farm commune that provided much of the festival staffing in 1969, have both said they hope to stage concerts. Neither could use the Woodstock name.

Bleier said Warners has resisted some plans for a live event because the company wants the re-released Woodstock film and records to be the centerpiece of the commemoration. However, both sides agree negotiations have turned friendlier in the last few weeks.

“Woodstock was clearly a phenomenon of its time,” Bleier said. “It was not originally a rock music festival. The first day was mostly folk music.” More important, though, he said, “in those intervening years, we (became) a lot more peaceful, unified country. The naivete (of the 1960s) about drugs has turned chilling. We think this is a very important milestone.”

Michael Lang, who staged the original festival, said the concept of cashing in commercially on Woodstock’s anniversary makes many people associated with the original festival uneasy. But, Lang said, Woodstock remains “something that’s very much alive today in all of us. It sort of brought something into the world that will remain.”

But Lang said he had not been informed that the summer would bring such a plethora of Woodstock commemorative items. Lang said the intense merchandising of Woodstock, simply seems “ridiculous.”

Rosenman said as many as six potential sites are under consideration for a possible live concert. While he declined to give specifics, he said none is in Upstate New York, where many village, town and county boards--including the one that governs White Lake and Bethel, where Woodstock was held--long ago passed ordinances permanently banning such events.

But on a variety of fronts, ranging from the poignant to the absurd, planning and marketing is proceeding apace for what merchandisers clearly hope will become Woodstock II--The Marketing Campaign. Beginning within the next two weeks and continuing at least through the festival’s anniversary dates Aug. 15-17, there will be these developments:

* A possible theatrical re-release of the 1970 film “Woodstock” by Warner Bros. in the form of a special tour that would play selected theaters in larger cities across the country. Bleier calls the concept “concertizing” the film.

* Warners will televise the movie--serialized over the three days near the August anniversary--on the MTV and VH-1 cable networks, Bleier said. MTV has already begun running a series of “Woodstock minutes”--segments that combine on-air reminiscences by people who were at Woodstock with documentary footage.

* Warners is considering a two-hour documentary that would include outtakes from the movie and other footage never seen publicly. However, Bleier said the plan has not attracted necessary advertiser and broadcast outlets. He rated the prospects of the documentary ever appearing as “about 50-50.”

* Atlantic Records, a Warner Bros. subsidiary, will re-release the original Woodstock record album, which has been available as a catalogue item since it first appeared with the movie in 1970, and the follow-up album, “Woodstock Two.” Both will also be available in cassette and, for the first time, compact disc versions.

* Yet to be seen is the extent to which a spontaneous gathering to note Woodstock’s memory will materialize at the original festival site, a hay field near White Lake, N.Y. Though local ordinances preclude an organized event, comments by visitors to the field in recent weeks have made it clear some number of people will simply appear there during the 20th anniversary period. A campground on the pond where in 1969 the inhabitants of Woodstock Nation skinny-dipped reports a surge in reservations.

* At least two new Woodstock books will be published, and at least one will be rereleased. Of special note is “Woodstock: The Oral History,” by Joel Makower, to be simultaneously put out in hard cover and paperback by Doubleday in July. Makower tracked down and interviewed 70 people--ranging from Woodstock’s original promoters and some of the musicians who played the festival to faces in its crowd. The second new book is “Woodstock: The Summer of Our Lives,” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by Jack Curry, a writer for USA Today. In addition, Bantam Books will release a paperback version of “Young Men With Unlimited Capital,” a Woodstock autobiography by Roberts and Rosenman, first published in 1974.

* Rolling Stone magazine, which has chronicled rock music since long before Woodstock, has scheduled a commemorative issue to go on sale Aug. 8. With a cover date of Aug. 24, the publication will include reminiscences from people in the Woodstock crowd. Rolling Stone contacted Woodstock veterans through such diverse means as publication of a plea for cooperation in USA Today--presumably in the belief that USA Today has become the Woodstock generation’s preferred reading.

* Life magazine is taking a more elitist tack. In an advertisement in Wednesday’s New York Times, Life asked readers familiar with Woodstock--especially people who were pictured in the special Life Woodstock issue in 1969 and others who have retained photographs of themselves at the festival, to write to the magazine. Life said its August issue would be a Woodstock recollection.

* Various entrepreneurs will begin marketing Woodstock promotional items, ranging from pins and refrigerator magnets to boxer shorts and T-shirts. The list may even grow to include air fresheners, whose package would be decorated with the Woodstock symbol of a dove perched on the neck of a guitar.

This merchandising blitz has struck some Woodstock veterans as ironic, however, since not a single promotional item was marketed in conjunction with the original festival--though there were numerous open-air vending booths where such drugs as LSD and marijuana were freely sold.

This summer, things will be much different. Pushed by an aggressive strategy by Licensing Corp. of America, another Warner Bros. subsidiary, at least eight companies have signed on to produce Woodstock clothing items. In addition, there will be Woodstock watches, coffee mugs, cloisonne pins, key chains, buttons, magnets, bumper stickers and fabric wall hangings.

The company that originally proposed to market the Woodstock air freshener says it is having serious misgivings. “I’m not sure it’s really our target audience,” said Mark Simon, of Marlenn Inc., of Trevose, Pa., which sells a variety of promotional air freshener products. The humor of the appropriate scent of a Woodstock air freshener has not been lost on Simon, however. Even if Marlenn reverses itself and decides to go ahead with it, he said, “obviously, we would not be simulating (the odor) of marijuana smoke.”

Warner Bros.’ Bleier acknowledged that the contemporary merchandising of Woodstock has raised the eyebrows of more than a few observers: “We’re taking a little heat for it, but that comes with the territory.”

This all strikes James McGrath, a Dallas-based marketing official for J.C. Penney department stores, as not just a little ironic. On the one hand, McGrath said he attended Woodstock as an 18-year-old from New Jersey and experienced the utter lack of commercialism on the festival grounds.

On the other hand, McGrath said that, as the Penney executive in charge of setting up Woodstock merchandising booths--to concentrate on Woodstock T-shirts--in an initial 350 to 400 of the 1,400 J.C. Penney stores, he is forced to conclude that times have changed:

“Quite frankly, when you think about it, the Woodstock generation was not into commemorative types of products at all. They were more anti-Establishment. I’m not surprised that they didn’t have (such items) at the festival.

“It truly is the irony that, when you think about the Woodstock generation, like it or not, they are capitalists today. Commemoration is a way to make money and (for) those of us who are capitalizing (on Woodstock’s anniversary), the reality of earning a living is very much with us.”