Cash-Short L.A. Festival to Announce Tentative Schedule : Arts: Pledges for September festival reach only $2.74 million to date, slightly more than half its scaled-down $4.9 million budget.

This morning at 10 a.m. the Los Angeles Festival will make its first announcement of programming for the Sept. 1-17 arts festival. But organizers say that the much-delayed announcement will be only a partial one, and that because funds are still being raised, the scope of the festival is far from being set in stone.

“We might be fund raising until opening night,” said Development Director Allison Sampson, who is in charge of finding funds for the $4.9-million festival. “It’s a pay-as-you-go plan. The festival will happen, but the thing in question right now is the size and the scope of the festival.”

As of early this week, the festival had received pledges for only $2.74 million--a little more than half of its current $4.9 million total budget (a figure that is reduced from the Dec. 1 budget of $5.2 million). Of those pledges, only a little more than $1.2 million has actually been received by the festival.

While General Manager Michael Vargas on Dec. 1 had predicted that at least $3.5 million and probably “close to $4 million” would be spent on programming for the Pacific-themed festival, Executive Director Judith Luther now says that only $2.4 million is actually alloted for programming.

“We’re (committing to) only what we’re pretty confident we can fund,” Luther said. “As we get more funding--and I’m sure we will--we will add on. We’re just very concerned about making commitments we can’t keep.”

In the meantime, however, festival Director Peter Sellars said today’s announcement will include only part of the information that the festival is confident of funding.

“We have so many projects still under discussion,” Sellars said. “Each new cut-off date will yield new information. And some things we won’t know about until the festival. But don’t worry--we will announce a sheer mass of stuff (today). . . . We’re talking about announcing 60-75 performances over a 16-day period, and the idea that later we’ll announce another 80 is staggering.”

The Los Angeles Festival stems from the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, which ran concurrently with the Summer Games, and was budgeted at just under $12 million. The ensuing 1987 Los Angeles Festival, with a budget of $5.9 million, featured 352 artists in 31 performing companies from 21 nations.

According to Luther, despite having $1 million less than its predecessor, the 1990 festival will feature a total of 1,600 artists from 25 Pacific Rim nations, such as Thailand, Chile, Korea, Japan and Indonesia. A connected Open Festival, featuring mostly local performers and groups not selected for the curated festival, will also be held.

Today’s program announcement is long-delayed. Organizers originally said participants would be listed sometime between last Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sellars said last August that he wanted to put off the announcement as long as possible so fund-raising totals would be confirmed. He then said in December that he wanted to wait until all programming decisions were set so the announcement would make “one big bang rather than a continuous dribble.”

But according to Luther, despite the delays, today’s announcement will cover only “about 70% of the (entire) program,” including 80%-85% of works by local artists.

In all, she said, the festival will involve about 70 local, national and international performing groups. More than 500 local artists composing about 50 groups will be included, she said, and about 75% of events will be free of charge and held in open places such as the Santa Monica Pier, Plaza de la Raza and Angels Gate, Griffith and Lincoln parks.

(Should the festival raise more than the currently budgeted $4.9 million, Luther said 70% of additional funds will go straight into programming. But rather than using such surplus funds to bring in additional performers, the money would be used to keep the international groups that are already coming here longer, thus allowing for additional performances.)

According to Sampson, the festival’s $4.9 million budget includes projected ticket revenues of $500,000 and projected corporate sponsorship and advertising revenues of $1 million.

Sampson said organizers are also hopeful that the Japanese and American business communities will pledge substantial additional funds. Headed by Yukiyasu Togo, the president of Toyota Motor Sales, the Asian business community has set goal of raising $2 million in donations and has challenged American businesses to do the same. So far, each group has raised just under $1 million.

Additional funds, Sampson said, will come from various cultural groups in Los Angeles, such as the African-American community, which has set a goal of raising $100,000 by March 31 through corporate support and benefit performances of the gospel opera “Job.”

Sampson said she is also hopeful that the festival will garner another $100,000 or so through governmental support. So far, a total of $400,000 has come from the city’s Cultural Affairs Department and Community Redevelopment Agency. The festival was turned down when it made a token application for a National Endowment for the Arts grant, but as the festival did not yet have its staff or structure in place at that time, both Luther and Sampson said the rejection was not surprising.

“We created a budget that has some elasticity in it--it has to,” said Sampson, who added that she currently has “more than $1 million outstanding in (corporate) proposals that could go either way” and “a couple hundred thousand pending” in grant applications with major East Coast-based foundations.

In addition, both Sampson and Luther emphasized, the festival expects pledges to increase dramatically after today’s programing announcement, when they will finally have a concrete program to show prospective donors.

Luther acknowledged that the festival--which was originally scheduled for 1989 but postponed at Sellars’ insistence--is still behind in a some areas, especially that of community relations. But Luther stressed that the festival’s curating--which she called the most important area--is right on target.

Still, it was Sellars who brought up comparisons to a similar festival scheduled for Oct. 6-28 in San Francisco, which has been steps ahead of the L.A. Festival throughout the planning stages.

According to executive producer Lenwood O. Sloan, San Francisco’s Festival 2000: A Celebration of Cultural Diversity, had its performing arts programming in place more than a year in advance, and several other elements, including its film and video programming, in place by last December. Sloan is not bringing in artists from other nations, but said his festival, which focuses on works by artists of color, will feature 1,200 artists--about two-thirds of those from the West Coast--in 212 performances.

Festival 2000, however, is not that far ahead of the Los Angeles Festival financially. Of the set $4 million budget--of which Sloan said $3 million would go into programming--only $2.6 million has been raised. Sloan blamed that factor, however, on October’s earthquake, which he said put all fund-raising institutions in the city “a full quarter (year) behind.”)

Still, Sellars admitted he was envious of Festival 2000’s completed programming decisions. “It really burns me up that they have everything settled,” Sellars said. “I look at that longingly.”