‘Man to Man’: End of the Line for Gay Forum : Television: Hosts Howard Smith, Dave Wright are forced to sign off due to cost of production and air time, waning support.

They’re just a couple of wild and crazy gay guys from the mid-Wilshire district who had a wild and crazy idea for a TV talk show: “Howard and Dave: Man to Man.”

And it worked for a while.

Howard Smith and Dave Wright did live remotes from the annual West Hollywood gay pride parade and from a gay cruise on the Caribbean. Their guests included Gloria Allred, Estelle Getty, Judith Light and female impressionist Jim Bailey. They pumped up the volume when Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed legislation that would have banned job discrimination against gays and during last year’s gay activist demonstration outside the Academy Awards ceremony.

When Magic Johnson announced that he had tested positive for HIV, Smith and Wright pointed out that they, too, had tested positive for the disease, long before the Laker star. (In fact, Wright has developed AIDS.) And they openly displayed their love for one another.

“We felt the view that we wanted to bring to TV was to make people laugh who had AIDS and also to show there are long-term survivors of AIDS,” Smith said.

But Southern California’s first gay and lesbian cable talk show recently disappeared from the four cable systems carrying it, after 46 installments--a victim of waning sponsorship, escalating production costs and expensive airtime. Except for an 85-minute “Best of . . .” video, most of which was shot in a three-camera setup in their living room, the weekly hour of “Howard and Dave: Man to Man” is now history.

Smith, 46, and Wright, 34, who have lived together for two years, decided to take the TV plunge a year ago, after watching Penn and Teller perform at the Wiltern Theatre on the Los Angeles leg of the comic-magicians’ “Refrigerator Tour.” After the show, Smith noted, Penn Jillette went into the lobby and hawked “Penn and Teller” T-shirts, tapes and buttons to the departing audience.

“I figured, if Penn can sell his own T-shirts, why couldn’t we sell our own show?” he said.

By March, that was precisely what they were doing. Beginning on Century Cable in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and on Continental Cable in Los Angeles, “Howard and Dave: Man to Man” offered an oddball mix of vaudeville, gay politics, travelogue and extemporaneous vamping for one hour each week.

Almost immediately, they got a mix of glowing fan letters and hate mail. Some of the harshest criticism came from the gay community itself. “We got a lot of flak from gay people for having (a 976 phone) service as a sponsor,” Smith recalled.

The 976 number, promising the same kinds of fantasies and party line talk for gay callers as similar late-night adult call-in numbers offer heterosexuals on other Los Angeles-area TV stations, also put off some potential sponsors, Smith said. Merchants who might have advertised did not want their products associated with a 976 commercial.

“But I’ve got to tell you: This sponsor’s checks were always on time and they never bounced,” said Smith.

“When sponsors say they don’t want to advertise with us because of that, I think it’s a ludicrous, ludicrous answer,” said Wright.

Even with the early advertising problems, Smith and Wright added two more cable systems last summer: Simmons Cable in Long Beach and United Artists Cable in the San Fernando Valley. They leased an hour a week on each system, bringing their weekly airtime purchase to $700 and their potential total audience to about 1 million.

Smith kept his day job as circulation manager for the 35,000-circulation West Hollywood-based gay newsmagazine Frontiers, but Wright gave up his position as client services manager for the Los Angeles Shanti Foundation in order to produce “Howard and Dave: Man to Man” full time.

“We’ve tried to maintain the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed throughout all of this: borderline poverty,” Smith said. Their own underwriting on the 46 shows has cost them about $25,000, he said.

“We’re happily deficit financing,” Smith said.

But the sponsors who stayed with them and those who had shown an interest in the show wanted to reach a larger audience. So the pair began looking to broadcast outlets for “Howard and Dave: Man to Man.”

“We made some calls and we found the one station we could afford and had the time available was KDOC (Channel 56 in Anaheim),” said Smith. “We could afford KSCI (Channel 18) too, but that’s mostly foreign-language programming.”

KDOC had an 11 p.m. time slot open for an $800 charge per each 30 minutes, Smith said. The next best broadcast buy was KCOP-TV Channel 13 with a 1 a.m. time slot at $3,000 per half hour, he said.

“Besides, KDOC is also carried on most cable systems in Southern California,” said Smith. “So by paying $800 a week to them instead of $700 to four cable systems, we could increase our potential audience to 10 million!”

At first, they were welcomed by a KDOC advertising salesman, they said, but when the salesman asked for approval from his boss, the show was turned down.

“We were told that they didn’t like having two men kiss on camera,” Wright said.

When there was a change in KDOC management last fall and former KCAL-TV Channel 9 manager Chuck Velona took over, they tried again. But, once more, they were turned away.

“It is true,” Velona said. “We turned the show down based on the content of the program, and I will not go into any further explanation than that.”

Velona said that “a television station can take or reject any programming they choose to, and that is most television stations’ policy.”

“But they ‘choose’ to sell Wally George programming six nights a week!” said Smith, referring to the conservative host of “Hot Seat,” a staple of KDOC for several years. George often makes gibes at the expense of homosexuals.

“There’s no offsetting programming,” said Wright. “We feel that KDOC is not at all presenting any other interests, politically speaking. There’s the far right screaming out the party line of the far right and no show at all addressing the large gay and lesbian population in Orange County.”

Smith and Wright peppered KDOC with phone calls and letters through last month, fending off creditors and hustling sponsors at the same time. They devoted the first half of their two final cable programs to a “Howard and Dave” telethon. By the last week in January, it was apparent they could not go on.

They will continue to produce specials for cable, develop a gay dating game show and peddle their “Best of . . .” videocassette in an effort to keep their grins before the public--but for the time being at least, “Man to Man” is gone. And, ultimately, Los Angeles is the lesser for it, they maintain.

“Suppose you went into a supermarket like Ralphs and every shelf contained a loaf of pumpernickel bread,” Smith said. “Or you walk into a store and it’s just prime roast beef. Or pickles. The gay community wants to be represented.

“We need to appreciate everybody’s differences. We need asparagus. We need pickles. We need the roast beef. We need pumpernickel. We need everything that’s in that store. So why do the pickles have the right to say to the roast beef you oughta be a pickle?”