Money Talks on TV Pilot : Television: Kitty Kelley was surprised to discover that economic realities dictate guests be paid to appear on her new talk show.

Tell-all author Kitty Kelley, an outspoken critic of “checkbook journalism,” was startled by the news: Her producers had offered several people between $5,000 and $20,000 to appear on her new television talk show.

“We pay people?” an incredulous Kelley asked the show’s development chief in a three-way phone conversation between her, her production company and a Times reporter last week.

“You have to pay people,” said John Goldhammer, senior vice president of program development for MCA-TV.

“Oh,” said the author of unauthorized biographies on Jackie Onassis, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Nancy Reagan. “I didn’t know that.”

Their exchange came after The Times learned that three former members of superstar Michael Jackson’s entourage had been offered between $5,000 and $20,000 to appear on the pilot production of “The Kitty Kelley Show.” All three turned the producers down, but others did not.

“Yes, in order to make some of these people come forward, we did have to pay,” said Ron Ziskin, executive producer of “The Kitty Kelley Show.”

“The fact is, when you’re looking for exclusivity--especially when you’re not talking to the actual person (in this case, Jackson)--you must compensate,” he added.

Staff members of several talk shows contacted by The Times, including “Donahue” and “Sally Jessy Raphael,” said that their guests are not paid. One executive who asked not to be named expressed alarm that payments made for the Kelley show might begin a bidding war for guests.

Like movie trailers and demo tapes, TV pilots are often pricey, slick sales tools that may not bear consistent resemblance to the finished product itself. The “The Kitty Kelley Show” pilot will be shown next week at the annual convention of the National Assn. of Television Program Executives in New Orleans, where station executives from around the country buy syndicated programming for their local schedules.

What they will see is a beaming, confident Kelley talking to Michael Jackson’s sister LaToya and her manager/husband, Jack Gordon; Jackson’s former sister-in-law, Enid, ex-wife of older brother Jackie Jackson; Spin magazine publisher Bob Guccione Jr.; a disguised member of one of the entourages of one of the members of the singing family; and parents Katherine and Joe Jackson, denying the charges of excess, violence, infidelity and obsession leveled against them.

Neither Ziskin nor Goldhammer would reveal which of Kelley’s guests were paid, or how much. Neither seemed daunted by Kelley’s edict that she would not practice “checkbook journalism” if the talk show becomes a series.

Kelley decried the offer of $10,000 that she said a well-known prime-time broadcast journalist allegedly offered former John F. Kennedy mistress Judith Campbell Exner. The money was to come out of the network news division’s “research” fund in order to secure Exner’s tell-all interview on TV, Kelley said.

Kelley said that she does not want her producers making a similar practice in the name of “research” on “The Kitty Kelley Show,” because it might appear that her guests were saying what they were instructed to say in exchange for money.

Goldhammer said that Kelley simply was not familiar with the economic realities of getting people to appear before the cameras.

“This show will be classified as entertainment, not news,” Goldhammer said.

“But even the network news shows fly people in, bring them to the studio in limos, pay their expenses. We certainly have money for people who come on (the show). I don’t understand what the problem is. Even the police pay for informants.”

Ziskin said that the seven guests that his Four Point Entertainment eventually did gather for the hourlong pilot, which was shot in early December on Stage One at Fox Television Center, earned nowhere near what the tabloid show “A Current Affair” paid Anne W. Mercer to tell her story last year.

Mercer, a friend of Patricia Bowman, drove the 30-year-old Florida woman home from the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach the night that Bowman claims William Kennedy Smith raped her last spring. Smith has since been acquitted, but last November, “A Current Affair’s” producers paid Mercer $40,000 to tell her version of events on camera.

“The Kitty Kelley Show” will not be another “A Current Affair,” Ziskin insisted. Once the program goes into production for an hour a day, five days a week, he expects weekly production to cost about $200,000--a budget that precludes regular payment of guests (beyond the $536 that the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists requires that its members be paid for appearances on hourlong talk shows).

“When it’s a non-airing pilot, you always compensate,” he said.

Goldhammer said that the $200,000-per-week figure, which is the same budget that Four Point spent on last summer’s short-lived CBS series “Primetime Pets,” is too low. “The Kitty Kelley Show” would probably be budgeted at closer to double that amount, he said.

The lavish set of “The Kitty Kelley Show” features fireplace, sweeping staircase and a reading desk where the hostess sits when she addresses both her in-studio and television audience. The format is not the same as the traditional talk show, either.

“It’s a hybrid type of show,” Ziskin said. “It’s not really talk and it’s not really a magazine-type program. It’s a new form not seen on TV before. There is tremendous challenge to do a show like this.”

Using a satellite uplink, for example, Kelley listens to LaToya and husband Gordon in New York reiterate claims of abuse that LaToya said she and her siblings suffered at the hands of their father when they were children--claims that she has made before in her autobiography and last year on the talk-show circuit.

In a pre-taped interview with father Joe and mother Katherine Jackson at the couple’s Encino compound, however, the Jacksons refute their daughter’s charges and maintain that Gordon has “brainwashed” her.

In the studio, meanwhile, Enid Jackson, who divorced Jackie, the oldest of the nine Jackson children, charges that Joe Jackson has another family--two other children born to a woman other than Katherine.

Goldhammer said that this is typical of the approach Kelley’s show would take.

“Her focus has always been personalities. Not necessarily celebrities, but personalities in a real, larger focus,” he said. “So this (pilot) show is on the Jacksons, but all of her shows will be on groups of personalities, families of personalities, individual personalities, people in the news, people who are in a state of conflict, if you will.”

Free-lance writer Chuck Philips contributed to this story.