Coalition Will Try Star Power on NEA : Arts: Entertainment activists plan a ‘SWAT-team’ approach to influence upcoming legislation.

A show-business activist group has asked for six to 10 volunteers from among the entertainment industry’s biggest stars to form a “SWAT team” to drum up support for the beleaguered National Endowment for the Arts.

The proposal by the Creative Coalition, a New York-based activist organization of motion picture, theater and music business celebrities, emerged Sunday evening at a private meeting in Beverly Hills dominated by film industry figures. The meeting was a standing room-only affair that drew more than 100 people to the auditorium of Creative Artists Agency.

Attending were producer Norman Lear, political pollster Pat Caddell, choreographer Bella Lewitzky and a range of actors including Michael O’Keefe, Jean Stapleton, Sarah Jessica Parker, Hal Linden, Justine Bateman, Robert Downey Jr., and Lesley Ann Warren. The meeting was the final event in a weekend campaign fund-raising trip by Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.) chairman of a House NEA reauthorization subcommittee.

The meeting was organized by the People for the American Way organization, which Lear founded 10 years ago.

The Creative Coalition proposal was disclosed by actor Stephen Collins, who urged the Southern California show business community to avoid a mistake Collins said it made in the 1950s when motion picture stars and executives failed to act aggressively against the blacklisting movement.

Collins and other Creative Coalition officials conceded that the strategy has something of a desperation flavor since floor votes are expected in the House and Senate on key NEA legislation in the next three weeks. Final congressional action on both NEA reauthorization and reappropriation are is not expected until September or October.

“Hollywood did not do itself proud with the Hollywood 10,” said Collins. He drew parallels between the blacklisting of screenwriters, producers and directors in the 1950s and the current NEA controversy, in which grants have been cut off to controversial performance artists. Other artists have rejected grants, including Lewitzky, who turned back $72,000 in NEA funding (she also once refused to answer questions by the House Un-American Activities Committee).

“They (the Hollywood Establishment) were very slow to get into (the political threat posed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy),” Collins said. “We’re in this same situation now.”

The SWAT-team strategy, Collins said, would rely on identification of as many as 10 “huge celebrities with enormous middle-American appeal,” who would undergo crash briefings to make them aware of the minute details of the NEA crisis. The superstars would then be sent to Washington and home state offices of key politicians, and would conduct press interviews in support of renewing the endowment without restrictions on the kinds of artworks it can support.

Collins said no mega-stars have been signed up for such a team, but he said the Creative Coalition hopes that its members would be figures not normally identified as political activists--or at least not politically active within a traditionally liberal context.

He said the Creative Coalition is determined to avoid a mistake common to political campaigns that involve show business figures, only to discover that the celebrities lack sufficient factual background in the cause with which they are identified. “We tend to be passionate with the press,” Collins said, “but not well enough informed.”

The extent of the challenge was illustrated indirectly by an exchange between Williams and film and television (“Family Ties,”) actress Bateman, who last year performed in a Berkeley Repertory Theatre production of “Lulu.” Bateman said she was confused about how the NEA controversy had come to be so prominent since she grew up in a social system in which her contemporaries believed such issues as freedom of speech and abortion rights had been long ago resolved.

“I’m 24 years old,” she told the veteran Montana congressman, “and it seems so silly that we (even) have to talk about this.”

Collins said the SWAT team strategy would be combined with a parallel tactical move involving celebrities who were born or raised in 15 target states in which congressmen and senators hold crucial undecided votes on pending endowment reauthorization and appropriation bills.

The Creative Coalition said it already has nearly 300 actors and actresses who have been identified for duty in which they would either agree to go to their home states for a day, or spend a day doing telephone interviews with news outlets in the key states--including Missouri, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Caddell told the group that the NEA situation has reached such a critical mass that any Hollywood political response must necessarily be based on sophisticated understanding of political factors involved. “There has to be a political strategy,” Caddell observed. “You can’t let (Sen.) Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and these people take the issue to their (home) grounds (and seize dominant positions in the debate). When you hurt them politically, all of this will go away.”