Oscar Takes a Cue From the Movies

It’s a never-ending battle keeping the hoi polloi out of the annual Academy Awards ceremony. Weary of ticket scalpers, Oscar recently conducted its own version of “The Sting.”

The undercover tactics were disclosed in a lawsuit the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences filed against New York businessman Rey Olsen and his company, World Sports Group, in Los Angeles Superior Court.

According to court papers, the academy’s private investigator, Bud Meyercamp, posed as an insurance agent who had promised Oscar tickets to a client. He arranged through Olsen to buy two for $10,000. Tickets were procured from an academy member in Riverside, the documents say, and a meeting was arranged with a go-between in the parking lot of a Good Guys store in Monterey Park.

The ducat deal never was consummated. Meyercamp pretended to balk because the tickets were for seats in the balcony and he had hoped for orchestra seats.

The next day, Olsen said he received a call informing him he’d been stung. “I was absolutely stunned,” he said.

He added that he was just trying to do someone a favor. “We’re not even ticket brokers,” said Olsen, who obtains financing for sports and entertainment events.

The tickets are made available to academy members, according to the suit, which claims that scalpers have “diminished the glamour and exclusivity” of the Oscarfest. The academy is suing World Sports for, among other things, “conspiracy to induce trespass.”

Olsen, meanwhile, is suing the academy in New York, claiming fraud and breach of its oral contract to buy the tickets.

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AFTER THE MMM-BOP: Hell hath no fury, they say. Consider Jeffrey Rabhan, who says in a lawsuit that Mercury Records and his former girlfriend, a Mercury executive, owe him more than $500,000 for his having brought them the brothers Hanson in 1996.

Rabhan claims in his Los Angeles Superior Court suit that he was promised a finder’s fee of 1% of the proceeds on every Hanson album sold. A spokesman for Mercury Records responded that his case is “totally without merit.”

According to the lawsuit, a lawyer friend from Richmond, Va., asked Rabhan to shop the group around to various record companies. Rabhan obligingly turned demo tapes and photographs of the future teen idols over to his then-girlfriend, a senior VP at Mercury. The rest, as they say, is history. Hanson took off in popularity, selling more than 5 million units of its debut album worldwide.

Rabhan and the exec are a couple no more. As for the lawyer friend, he is Christopher Sabec, one of the group’s managers. Any money Rabhan was promised, the plaintiff claims, has long since been “spirited away.”

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LOST & FOUND: Los Angeles’ Family Court continues to hear from former child performers looking to claim long-forgotten bonds that were saved for them in a courthouse safe under the 1939 Coogan Law.

Jean Van, now known as Jean Breitenbach, retrieved a single $50 war bond that had been saved for her since 1946, when she appeared in the movie “Army Brat.” She said she plans to frame it and hang it on the wall of her home near San Diego.

And Michael Morgan, who played Danny on the 1970s show “Sons and Daughters,” collected U.S. savings bonds with a face value of more than $2,000, but an actual value of four times that. The bonds are still collecting interest.

“It was a great windfall,” said Morgan, who also appeared on episodes of “The Odd Couple” and “Little House on the Prairie,” as well as in a commercial for Frosted Flakes cereal.

The court continues to search for eight other former child performers who have money coming to them.

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THIS AND THAT: Rocker Bret Michaels of Poison obtained a preliminary injunction in U.S. District Court keeping a videotape of him having sex with Pamela Anderson off the Internet. . . . Spelling Entertainment is appealing a $5-million verdict awarded to an actress fired from “Melrose Place” for getting pregnant.