On View : With Honors : CBS AIRS THE CROWNING OF LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS AT KENNEDY CENTER

“The Kennedy Center Honors: A Celebration of the Performing Arts” celebrates its 17th year on CBS Wednesday.

The two-hour gala hosted by Walter Cronkite honors the lifetime achievement of five American artists: actor Kirk Douglas, soul singer Aretha Franklin, composer Morton Gould, director Harold Prince and folk singer Pete Seeger.

Among the participants in the festivities, taped Dec. 4 at the Kennedy Center Opera House, are Alan Alda, Jane Alexander, Lauren Bacall, Joan Baez, Michael Douglas, the Four Tops, Garrison Keillor, Andre Previn, Arthur Mitchell, Chita Rivera, Ron Silver and Tom Skerritt.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vice President Al Gore and his wife Tipper also are in attendance, along with Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg.

The Kennedy Center Honors were created in 1978 by producer George Stevens Jr. and the late Nick Vanoff. “The honorees make every show different,” Stevens says enthusiastically. “Sometimes you think, ‘Gosh. We are going to do this again?’ And then you get five lives and careers in front of you and it spawns ideas.”

Producer Don Mischer points out that the “Kennedy Center Honors” telecast (which has won multiple Emmys and the Peabody Award) isn’t a conventional awards show “in a sense that people compete. There is no way to influence these decisions. It’s just a different show entirely in its tone. It’s wonderful for us who work in commercial TV to have the opportunity to do the ‘Kennedy Center Honors’ because it’s different and we can do things at a slightly more relaxed pace. We can do opera. We can do classical music.”

The Kennedy Center board of trustees selects the five honorees from recommendations made by an artists committee made up of about 80 people--”from Isaac Stern to Steve Martin,” Stevens says. Over the years, the honorees have included Stephen Sondheim, Gene Kelly, Arthur Mitchell, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Merce Cunningham, Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Ginger Rogers and Johnny Carson.

Stevens, who also founded the American Film Institute, came up with the “Kennedy Center Honors” concept. “I always felt that England had its knighthood and France had its legion of honor,” he explains. “We even did some research on how all different countries honor their artists. But clearly, there was no recognition for artists here. This is an important occasion. The leadership of Washington is in the Kennedy Center on that Sunday night each year. It is a reminder of the vitality and the breadth of the arts.”

Mischer directed the first nine “Kennedy Center Honors” and has shared producing credit with Stevens since Vanoff’s death four years ago. Louis J. Horvitz is now the director.

“We just have such fun putting this show together,” Mischer says. “It is really wonderful to have a tradition like this. So much of television is skywriting. It is there for a second and disappears. This show is really anchored. It is something that is looked forward to by all the people who work on it.”

The producers talk with the honorees when putting the show together, but won’t discuss the tributes with them. “Many times an honoree will say, ‘Hey, I would like it if so and so would perform for me,’ ” Mischer says. “Last year, Johnny Carson had said, ‘Ted Koppel is a friend, you might consider asking him,’ and we did. But in that instance we also booked David Letterman to come and pay tribute and we did not let Johnny know about that. That is what is fun about producing it--when you can surprise people and put people on stage who mean something to them.”

The most difficult aspect of producing the show is completing the film tributes on each honoree in the “time you have to mount the show. We do five- or six-minute pieces on the lives of each of the honorees. It takes some time to collect the material. That work starts immediately after the honorees are announced and continues up until the time we tape the show.”

The film tributes, which are written and produced by Sara Lukinson, are emotionally anchored, Mischer says. “We try to put a career in an emotional context--why was the work of this artist widely respected? Why was their work meaningful to us as a country? It is more than a documentary. The film has moments to think and reflect on what is being said or a certain image. They are not wall-to-wall narrations. They are not frantically paced.”

One of the more esoteric events to be televised on network TV, “The Kennedy Center Honors” never has been a real ratings grabber. Both Stevens and Mischer are thrilled that CBS has continued to air the specials.

“There have been years when the show has kind of struggled to stay on the air because it is not a show that lends itself to extremely high ratings,” Mischer says. “It needs the support of the network to keep it on the air and CBS has been great over the years in supporting the ‘Honors.’ ”

“The Kennedy Center Honors: A Celebration of the Performing Arts” airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. on CBS.