TAPE DELAYS

I was heartened to hear of studios’ efforts to restore and release much-loved and unavailable film classics for home video (“A Trip Down Celluloid Lane,” by Susan King, Nov. 13). Two of the titles mentioned--”Porgy and Bess” and “Annie Get Your Gun”--are held up in a legal limbo that would tax King Solomon.

Last year in an interview with The Times, the lawyer for the Gershwin estate bluntly stated that all effort was being brought to bear on finding and destroying any existing copies of Sam Goldwyn’s production of “Porgy and Bess,” directed by Otto Preminger and starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge. The reason given was the late Ira Gershwin’s dislike of the film; he felt that his opera had been turned into a musical, a fair assessment that nonetheless disparages the sizable talent involved: Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey and the voice of Robert McFerrin.

In response to my fax, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Arthur Hiller was kind enough to investigate, and in his reply he assured me that a safety negative was secure in the Goldwyn vaults. While I was cheered to know this, I am still dismayed that future generations will be denied the opportunity to see this classic.

Another executive who was helpful in my quest, Dick May of Turner Entertainment, detailed the similar plight of “Annie Get Your Gun,” which starred Betty Hutton and Howard Keel. May said the late Irving Berlin was disappointed in Hutton, having had his heart set on Judy Garland, who was fired from the production because of her instability. In addition, his heirs fear that the stereotypical representations of Native Americans might be found offensive. The result? An inventory of ready-to-market restored copies of “Annie” sitting in a warehouse.

I find the efforts of the Gershwin and Berlin heirs to deny audiences the chance to view these films an abomination to cinematic history and a violation of the rights of the other artists involved in these productions.

JOHN MICHAEL CAFFEY

Marina del Rey