‘Elite’ Festival Battles Censorship

The Scene: Sunday afternoon at the Santa Monica Museum of Flying, where PEN West, the nonprofit writer’s group that champions freedom of expression, held its third annual literary festival and auction. Proceeds went to aid imprisoned writers around the world and, in the words of the group, “to stem the tide of domestic censorship.”

The Honorees: “Murphy Brown” creator Diane English; Alfred and Bernice Ligon, owners of the oldest African-American bookstore in the country, the Aquarian Book Shop (which was destroyed in the riots in April); murdered Guatemalan journalist Myrna Mack; Paul Monette, author of the AIDS memoir “Borrowed Time”; Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner, and writer/director Oliver Stone.

Who Was There: Most of the honorees, as well as PEN West president Aram Saroyan; actors Mike Farrell, Ed Asner, and Richard Masur; writer and priest Malcolm Boyd; writers Frank Pierson and Wanda Coleman, and cartoonist Matt Groening, creator of “Life in Hell” and “The Simpsons” and a previous PEN award winner.

TV versus Quayle: The flashiest item on the auction block was a copy of the script of the “Murphy Brown” season opener answering Dan Quayle’s attack against the character’s single motherhood--and the script went for $300. (With English and Stone both being honored, the cultural elite quotient at the party was off the scale.)

The Cultural Elite Speaks: “I’m finally trendy,” noted Groening with satisfaction. “I’ve been doing anti-Bush and anti-Reagan cartoons for years. That’s where I got the title ‘Life in Hell.’ Face it, Quayle deserves to be laughed at.”

Irony: The usual tired potatoe jokes were hauled out, with one auctioneer claiming that Dan Quayle had spell-checked the “Murphy Brown” script. Perhaps Quayle or someone else should have spell-checked the program for the affair too, because it not only misspelled the name of director Sydney Pollack in huge type, but misidentified Oliver Stone as the director of the film “Reversal of Fortune.”

Triumphs: With all the moaning lately about well-fed Hollywood types not being able to express their creative selves, one item up for auction put the issue of freedom of expression into real perspective--an autographed copy of “The Satanic Verses,” donated by Salman Rushdie.

Glitches: The museum is an increasingly popular place for events, but the acoustics, fittingly enough, are like having a party in an airplane hangar--and the sound of arriving and departing planes doesn’t help much either.