Woodstock Looking to Shake Off Sales Chill

Is Woodstock 99 stuck in the mud? The latest incarnation of the storied rock festival is set to go this week in Rome, N.Y., but organizers have been wrestling in recent weeks with cancellation rumors, performer defections and a lull in ticket sales. All of that, organizer Michael Lang says, will be forgotten once R&B; legend James Brown takes the stage on Friday to kick off a three-day event that includes Metallica, Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Korn, Alanis Morissette, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, DMX, Fatboy Slim, Limp Bizkit, Elvis Costello, Al Green, Ice Cube and Willie Nelson. What kind of crowd will greet that eclectic lineup? Woodstock organizers would not release a specific sales tally, but Lang said he expected the crowd to reach the target total of 250,000 by show time. Ticket sales started strong--57,000 were sold during the first day of sales in April--and then grew sluggish. “Things didn’t go quite the way we anticipated,” Lang acknowledged, “but in the end we got where we expected anyway.” Industry sources say that fewer than 200,000 have been sold, but observers also agree that good weather and building hoopla surrounding the show should prompt a wave of late purchases and walk-up business for the $150 tickets. The sales to date were likely chilled by a feud between the concert organizers and local government officials that led to rumors of a show shutdown. “The local government doesn’t really have a clamp on all their people, and some of them make rash, silly statements,” Lang said. A few bands also dropped off the bill (most notably, headliner Aerosmith and the Foo Fighters), but Lang promises a dazzling show that will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original festival and conclude with a special tribute to Jimi Hendrix. “That’s going to take us back full circle,” says Lang, “and what could be better than that?” Woodstock 99 runs Friday through Sunday and tickets are available via phone and the Internet from Ticketmaster, and a pay-per-view special ($59.95 for the entire three-day show, $29.95 for a single day) can be purchased through local cable operators. For details on the show, check https://www.woodstock.com on the Internet.

The Hazy, Lazy, Scary Days of Summer

And you thought Halloween was creepy. Try summertime. This summer, Hollywood is bringing out four films that contain various tales of horror, witchcraft and terror--and Labor Day is still a long way off. This week, DreamWorks unveils its new supernatural thriller, “The Haunting,” director Jan de Bont’s take on Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House.” The movie stars Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Lili Taylor and the studio thinks it will be a good counterpoint to the comedies and action films that make up most of this summer’s movies. Why not release “The Haunting” in, say, late October, when ghosts and goblins work their mischief? Jim Tharp, who heads distribution at DreamWorks, said it’s simple: Kids are out of school now and the PG-13 movie should be a draw for both teens and adults. “If you look at ‘Poltergeist,’ it had a June release [in 1982],” Tharp said, noting that his studio plans to open “The Haunting” on about 2,600 screens. Already in theaters are “Lake Placid,” a film about a giant crocodile that inhabits a remote lake in Maine, and “The Blair Witch Project,” a chilling tale about three student filmmakers who set out into the woods to make a documentary and never return. Coming up next on July 30: director Renny Harlin’s “Deep Blue Sea,” a horror film about researchers aboard a floating laboratory who are terrorized by sharks. The rush to put out horror movies in the summer was spurred last summer by the box office success of “Halloween: H2O,” which opened in early August to $16.2 million and went on to make $55.1 million. “I think this is further proof that it’s becoming a 365-day-a-year business,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. “Scare films often open big and drop off big. With the competition out there now, you really need a movie that grabs audiences right off the bat.”

Telemundo Hears the Sound of Music

When Ricky Martin sells out two Southland shows in less than 10 minutes, it’s clear that Latin music is hotter than a $10 tape deck. Whether his Latino fans will gather in front of the television in equal numbers isn’t quiet as clear. So consider Telemundo’s upcoming week of Latin music specials a high-profile trial run for “MTV en Telemundo,” a two-hour weekly Latin music show that hits the Spanish-language network in the fall. Since Sony purchased Telemundo a year ago, network executives have been trying to position it as a hip, young, acculturated alternative to Univision, the nation’s dominant Spanish-language broadcaster. And recently, music has come to figure heavily in that strategy. In May, for example, the network produced the Billboard International Latin Music Awards, which turned into one of its highest-rated shows and more than doubled the normal performance for that time slot in Los Angeles. Now comes a summer music blitz, beginning Sunday with the “Festival Presidente de la Musica Latina,” featuring Puerto Rican salsero Chayanne, Colombian pop star Shakira and Enrique Iglesias in performances culled from a three-day concert in the Dominican Republic. The week ends Aug. 1 with Martin’s return to Puerto Rico, where he was taped before a crowd of more than 40,000. In between will be an intimate acoustic performance by Mana--produced in conjunction with MTV Latin America--and midweek airings of dubbed versions of the aging Hollywood films “Salsa,” featuring Martin’s ex-Menudo bandmate Robby Rosa, and “La Bamba,” starring Lou Diamond Phillips as Ritchie Valens.

--Compiled by Times staff writers