Jerusalem Mayor Does the Hollywood Shuffle : Campaign: Teddy Kollek visits L.A. to drum up support for the Israeli capital’s Cinematheque, the film and TV school and his 7th mayoral bid.

“There’s the Mayor ,” someone whispered with a tone of respect.

Across the lawn at Norman Lear’s house, holding court with some of Hollywood’s power elite, stood Teddy Kollek, the 82-year-old six-term mayor of Jerusalem, his city’s master-builder, symbol of coexistence between Jews and Arabs, and someone who knows about power and infighting.

With slicked-back steel-gray hair and a physique like a tank, Kollek from a distance might have been mistaken for Los Angeles’ Mayor-elect Richard Riordan, someone nearly 20 years younger. When he returns to Israel today after a three-day trip to Hollywood, Kollek intends to run for a seventh term, despite hospitalization for exhaustion last month and cancer surgery 18 months ago, in an effort to thwart hard-liners who “would very much like to conquer City Hall.”

Indirectly Kollek’s campaign in Los Angeles was part of that effort: promoting and raising money for the 12-year-old Jerusalem Cinematheque--which includes an archive of 18,000 films, an annual film festival in which Palestinian films compete and occasionally win, the Lew Wasserman Research Library, the Norman Lear Video and Television Center, and a forum where Jews and Arabs alike, adults as well as students, meet to see movies and discuss them. Kollek was also campaigning for the Jerusalem National Film and Television School, established in 1989, a three-year program for training the next generation of film and television directors, editors and technicians--open to Arabs as well.

“We thought this community could be easily attracted by projects, close to their hearts, their minds and close to their activity, so it was a natural,” Kollek noted in a brief interview afterward. And if along his way, Kollek or a member of his entourage can persuade Hollywood to come to Israel to make movies and television programs, so much the better.

Both the Cinematheque and the institute are part of the monumental Jerusalem Foundation that Kollek helped establish in 1966 in his first year as mayor. In 1967 came the Six-Day War, and his city nearly tripled in size and doubled in population. Today the city of nearly 600,000 is 73% Jewish, 25% Moslem Arab.

While Kollek spoke about his city with unabashed pride to several dozen in Lear’s living room on Tuesday night and again on Wednesday night to about 60 of Hollywood’s “younger generation” in the back yard of producer Andy Licht, it was politics both audiences really wanted to hear about. Many in the second-night crowd were in nursery or grade school when Kollek was first elected mayor of West Jerusalem in 1965; one or two hadn’t even been born yet.

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“I was asked by someone to explain why at my ripe age” he would run again. “I’m afraid if we have a Likud mayor some aggressiveness toward the rest of the population could follow,” Kollek explained. “We have to guard this city and behave toward all the minorities . . . in the same way we would like Jews to be treated anywhere in the world.

“I’m fairly popular, but people say, ‘What, 82? It’s a five-year term. You’ll be 87 by the end,’ ” he said. But Kollek said he’d “rather lose” than “feel remorse” for not having tried.

A key stop in his visit was with MCA Chairman Lew Wasserman. “Lew promised long ago that he would give us his (personal) library,” Kollek noted after the Lear party. “May he live to be 120,” the mayor said of Wasserman, who is 80. “And we have patience, and let him enjoy his library of film books and memorabilia.” He planned to meet with Wasserman “to anchor the decision and make sure it happens.”

Yet afterward, Kollek said with a wave of his hand that they didn’t discuss that at all. Instead Wasserman wanted to show him how much the Universal lot has changed since Kollek’s last visit, and Wasserman promised to visit Jerusalem in October, an aide to Kollek said.

On this trip Kollek also met with oil baron Marvin Davis who used to own 20th Century Fox, Sony President Jonathan Dolgen, Kirk Douglas, super-agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar, producer Howard Rosenman and producer Arnon Milchan, who along with producer Edward Pressman, will be honored at the 10th Jerusalem film festival in July. Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel will also attend the festival.

According to Neal Levy, West Coast director of the Jerusalem Foundation, several hundred thousand dollars has been pledged in the Hollywood community. Already, he said, Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of Fox, has pledged scholarships for the film and TV school. And Bob Burkett, vice president of the David Geffen Co., said Geffen would contribute to Cinematheque’s film preservation efforts. Geffen had been scheduled to meet with Kollek this week but had to go to New York.

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Micha Shagrir, producer of “Avanti Popoli,” an Israeli film nominated for an Oscar in 1988 and chairman of the film and television school, made a plea at the Lear event for American production companies to come to Israel “to make movies and TV dramas and documentaries because it’s a good place as a subject and a good place as a location.”

Founder Lia van Leer spoke of the efforts to “preserve Israeli films. We have a very important collection of newsreel from 1928 to 1952 . . . of Jewish films, of films that were made in Russia and Poland and in the States in the ‘30s. We now have started a rescue fund because for the first time in many years we have access to the archives in Poland and in Russia--a wealth of materials which they didn’t want to give us before.”

Several years ago, she added, “a Palestinian film (“Shelter”) had the first prize in the festival and it was the day (July 6, 1989) when Palestinian terrorists hijacked a bus, and made it fall into the valley on the road to Jerusalem and (14) people were killed. And the jury said, ‘Can we offer a prize to Palestinians. What will people say?’ But they said you have to judge a film on its merits and there was applause in the hall when it was announced.”

Afterward, Lear suggested that perhaps he could help the foundation’s efforts by setting up “a group in each studio and connect with each (TV) network” just like “the way we started the Environmental Media Assn.” several years ago.

At the Licht event, Kollek, the politician, showed he also knows how to play director. When Fox executive Vice President Rafael Pastor introduced Kollek, he said he couldn’t mention Jerusalem without mentioning Kollek. The self-deprecating and occasionally brusque mayor called out: “You can. “