Company Town : Will ‘Virtues’ Bring More Rewards?

Bill Bennett was breezing through the lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel on Wednesday when he bumped into an acquaintance.

Asked what he was doing in town, Bennett--whose reasons for stopping in Los Angeles usually involve things like political fund-raisers and speeches--responded, “I’m seeing my producer.”

William Bennett, one of the leading voices among American conservatives, has gone Hollywood.

Bennett is the former secretary of education, national drug czar and--until he took his name out of the running recently--one of the names most often mentioned as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 1996.

Most recently, he’s become an improbable best-selling author with “The Book of Virtues,” an 800-page tome that contains no sex, murders or CIA plots, but rather a collection of classic tales from Plato to Hercules involving themes such as courage, honesty, friendship and personal responsibility.

With some 2 million copies sold to date, Bennett now plans to turn the book into an entertainment vehicle involving an animated series, videocassette collection and interactive project. Call it Plato meets CD-ROM.

Seated Thursday at a conference table in a renovated brick building in West Los Angeles, Bennett still seems a bit uneasy about getting into show business.

His personal television viewing habits involve a healthy diet of C-SPAN and CNN. His own children, ages 10 and 5, are allowed to watch television only on weekends. As education secretary, Bennett was frequently critical of television. And plenty of friends warned that television could take his book--which he calls “my baby” and “the best thing I’ve ever done in my professional life”--and vulgarize it.

“I’m still a little nervous about it,” Bennett says. Still, “television is where kids are,” and it has the ability to teach in a way that is engaging and entertaining.

As drug czar, Bennett says, he often would hear from judges who would tell him that kids in trouble lacked any “moral compass” because they had never been taught basic standards of right and wrong.

“This book is about the basics. This series will be about the basics,” he said.

So Bennett hooked up with PorchLight Entertainment, a fledging family entertainment firm founded by former Hanna-Barbera executive Bruce Johnson. The company bought the rights--about 85% of the book is in the public domain--for an undisclosed sum. Johnson said the project is at least 14 to 18 months away and, the company hopes, can be sold to a major network.

Bennett, 51, isn’t exactly a television basher. He believes the medium has shown it can do great things--he cites the PBS documentary “The Civil War” and the 1970s miniseries “Roots” as examples--but he doesn’t believe it has lived up to its potential. His main complaint isn’t children’s programming but the “whining” of afternoon talk shows that seemingly excuse any behavior.

As it was in the days when Bennett watched such shows as “The Cisco Kid” and “The Lone Ranger” on a black-and-white set, good still triumphs over evil. But Bennett does feel there is something missing in television when it comes to encouraging active virtuous behavior.

“It’s better on procedural virtues: tolerance, understanding, pluralism, compassion,” he says. “It’s not so good on virtues that require personal exertion: self-discipline, self-restraint, temperance. And one sees very little of faith.”

Bennett’s only instruction to the producers is “Don’t mess it up,” although he has requested that a regular character who introduces stories be a buffalo, his family nickname.

So will it sell?

Bennett notes that he has already overcome skepticism from publishers, who said that an 800-page book about morality wouldn’t sell. His book advance: $5,000.

Producer Johnson says he is betting that exciting tales about such figures in literature as Hercules and the Minotaur can compete with the adventures of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

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Join the crowd: Sony Corp. isn’t the only Japanese company that has stumbled badly investing in Hollywood.

Pioneer Electronics’ efforts at propping up Carolco Pictures, the financially ailing maker of such films as “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and “Basic Instinct,” may soon hit the firm’s bottom line in a big way.

On Thursday, officials with Pioneer, which owns 41% of Carolco, told reporters in Japan that the company may soon write off $86 million in goodwill related to its investment.

As previously reported, Carolco appears headed soon for yet another financial restructuring, possibly involving a bankruptcy plan.

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In at RCA? Concert promoter John Scher has emerged as the leading candidate to take the job nobody in the music industry seems to want: head of RCA Records.

Scher, a major New York concert promoter, ran the recent 25th anniversary Woodstock concert in Upstate New York. He’s currently head of Metropolitan Entertainment, a concert and management firm.

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Chuck Philips contributed to this column.