Point Woman for Lloyd Webber’s TV Assault

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest musical, “Aspects of Love,” opened in New York a few days ago to reviews that were decidedly mixed. But it hardly matters; the advance sale for the show was reportedly more than $9 million. Like “Cats,” “Starlight Express” and his earlier musicals, the new one is a crowd-pleaser indifferent to criticism, and the merriest tune of all is played metaphorically, on the cash register.

Now Lloyd Webber and his corporate enterprise, The Really Useful Group, has elected to see what he, or it, can do in television. To head up his television explorations, he has chosen a remarkable 34-year-old Englishwoman named Anna Hall, whose origins are distinctly upper class but who first came to the U.S. as a nanny.

She attended an elite girls school, Danes Hill, in Hampshire, where one of the younger girls in her time was Sarah Ferguson. “Quite obnoxious in those days,” Hall says of Fergie, cheerfully. “I was being trained to marry Prince Charles. We all were.” Fergie, of course, came closest, marrying Prince Andrew.

(Hall married the son of the governor-general of Bermuda but they parted after seven years. “I wanted to work; he didn’t want to be married,” she explains.)

After hurricane-free Hampshire, Hall studied French and trained as a competitive skier at a tutoring school, Chateau D’Oex, in Switzerland. She finally read English literature in, though not at, Oxford.

Her father, an ex-officer who is one of 25 ceremonial gentlemen-at-arms to Queen Elizabeth, then proposed she get a job. It was not quite the job he had in mind, but she read a “Situations Vacant” ad for a nanny for a British couple posted to New York, and took it.

Back in London briefly after a trying year in New York keeping tabs on two mischievous little girls, she found a spot as a switchboard operator at Hemdale, the film production company. In February 1978 she moved to Los Angeles when Hemdale opened its offices here, working as secretary-assistant to John Daly.

There followed brief stints at Aaron Spelling, where she had a hand in developing “Dynasty,” and at Kings Road, acting as assistant to the producer on the film, “Eye of the Needle.”

In late 1981, Hall became manager of original programming at Home Box Office, her projects including “Not Necessarily the News” and “Ray Bradbury Theatre.” Three years later, she moved to CBS Television as director of miniseries and movies, where she had charge of “Kane & Abel,” “Sins” and “Alice in Wonderland” among others.

After two years, she was made vice president of program development at TVS Entertainment/Telso Communications, developing international co-productions. The two of which she is proudest were “Mandela” for HBO and “The Simon Wiesenthal Story.”

Escorting Wiesenthal himself through a television festival at Cannes, Hall had to break a date to take him shopping one morning. “Ah, well,” said Wiesenthal philosophically, “I go and look at other pretty girls.”

First on Hall’s agenda for the Really Useful Group will be to produce for television taping a concert of his music by Lloyd Webber’s wife, Sarah Brightman, in Boston’s Wang Center on June 24.

More generally, Lloyd Webber holds the full copyright on all his works except “Starlight Express” and in time Hall will explore the television potential of them all or, as in the case of the Brightman concert, their songs.

“But,” Hall says, “I can buy the rights to anything that catches our eye.” Lloyd Webber, for example, happened to catch an offbeat play called “Daisy Pulls It Off” during its tryout in Scarborough. He brought it to the West End where it became a cult hit. Lloyd Webber has the television rights to it and, during a visit to Los Angeles at the time of the Academy Awards, Hall said, “I’m here on a recky” (that useful British term for reconnaissance): talking to local companies about the possibility of a co-production.

There is also the possibility of a miniseries on Richard Burton, based on Melvyn Bragg’s excellent book on the actor, with Anthony Hopkins a prime candidate to do the Burton role.

Co-production with Lloyd Webber should be attractive. “We can pay our way,” Hall says. Lloyd Webber is indubitably big business. He recently offered shareholders $124 million for the 17.5% of Really Useful Group stock he doesn’t own. He needs 95% to take the company private, which he wants to do to free his hands for investments in movies and television, with only one shareholder to fret about--himself.

But the Australian financier Robert Holmes a Court quietly bought up 6.61%, apparently, Hall says, because he wants access to a theater the Lloyd Webber group owns and sought bargaining power with the shares.

The financial stalemate is unlikely to affect Hall’s enterprises. “Europe, looking to its commercial unification in 1992, seems ready to burst,” she says. “It’s terrifically exciting. I think I’m in the right place at the right time.”

If Lloyd Webber’s populist appeal transfers intact from the musical comedy stage to film and television, Anna Hall might just be correct.