This Time KTLA Got Stuck With Dodger Gloves

The Gloved One.

No station in Los Angeles has been more relentless or more capable than KTLA-TV Channel 5 in providing live coverage of O.J. Simpson’s trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. How ironic, then, that Channel 5 blew the Big Moment by ending its live coverage Thursday just as Simpson was about to laboriously pull on the gloves that prosecutors contend he wore while allegedly murdering his former wife and her friend.

The gloves did not appear to fit. The prosecution tried to show that wear and tear had shrunk them. Whatever the case, this was easily the most dramatic moment of the trial--pure, spontaneous, incredibly suspenseful theater--and Channel 5 missed it. You could almost hear Channel 5 viewers switching en masse to KCAL-TV Channel 9, the other local station that has been airing the trial (although it will cease its live coverage next week).

Blame the Dodgers.

It happened this way. As Channel 5 edged toward the climactic moment when Simpson was to do the glove experiment that prosecutors hoped would end the day’s testimony by establishing his guilt, anchor Marta Waller abruptly announced that the station was immediately breaking away to honor a “previous contractual obligation.” The obligation was to telecast that day’s Dodgers game with Pittsburgh.

The Dodgers got clobbered, and, when it came to the trial, so did Channel 5. But a contract is a contract, apparently, even when losing some great television is the cost.

Not that great television is necessarily the most significant television. In a demonstration of news priorities, the lead and longest story on network morning news shows Friday was not the U.S. Senate’s passage Thursday of an epic communications bill that, along with a similar House bill, could colossally affect Americans, perhaps for generations. It was not Thursday’s intensified fighting in the former Yugoslavia that threatened to expand the conflict there that perplexes U.S. policy-makers.

It was The Glove.

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THE GLOVED ONE II. The original gloved one, of course, was Michael Jackson, whose interview on “PrimeTime Live” last week in tandem with his wife, Lisa Marie Presley, was about the ratings tornado that ABC expected it to be.

Having a few more days to think about that interview by Diane Sawyer, you’re struck most by Lisa Marie’s loving defense of her husband and by what a patient, understanding wife she is. You may recall, regarding those famous sleep-overs by young boys at Jackson’s Neverland Valley ranch that he plans to continue, that she corroborated Michael’s claim that he doesn’t invite these kids into bed with him. It’s just that they follow him everywhere. So what’s a guy to do? “They jump into bed with him,” said Lisa Marie.

Here, then, is the scenario: Michael and Lisa Marie are in bed at night, maybe snoozing, maybe doing you know what. Suddenly the door to their bedroom swings open with a crash and half a dozen 10-year-old boys run into the room and flop on the bed.

They don’t call it Neverland for nothing.

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FOR OUR NEXT ACT. Hyperbole is not the exclusive franchise of television, witness those glossy, big-production ads for the Calendar section of The Times that for years have preceded feature attractions in movie theaters. Pure fantasy. Even Calendar chauvinists would agree that reading us even on our best days does not approximate our cinematic, high-tech, larger-than-life depiction on the big screen.

On television, however, the more overwrought the promotion, the more overwrought the news.

A recent memo to his promo producers from KCBS-TV Channel 2 promotion director Mike Benson, for example, lists ways to “more effectively sell our news product.” And, in doing so, it affirms how promos are used to frame TV newscasts as a series of melodramas potentially more transfixing than those scripted for prime time.

For example, Benson cited a CBS promo producer’s lesson on how to create “a unique look” for a spot advertising an arson story:

Beginning with a rusty piece of nail as background, “she took a piece of paper and used press type to spell out the word arson. She burned the edges of the paper and placed it on a small block to elevate the type off the rusty metal to create a float shadow. Using a flashlight as a light source, she shot the burnt paper with the type on the metal with a hand-held camera, while passing the light from the flashlight over the word. They also smeared a little Vaseline on the lens of the camera to cause the light to bloom out a little bit. After they shot the graphic, they did some simple video enhancements and slow-mo’s to make the look even more dramatic. It’s simple ideas like this that really pay off in the end product.” And don’t forget the music.

The question is whether the “end product” is the promo or the news product. “Show me what you’re made of!” Benson urges his promo producers. “Think creatively! Think visually! Be a little funkier!”

Yes, that’s what “Action News” needs, more funk.

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AT PEACE WITH BLOODSHED. When it comes to ever-widening objections to gratuitous television violence, CBS may not have gotten the message, based on pilots for two new drama series on the network’s fall schedule.

Early sequences in both of these 10 p.m. hours feature exceptional gore.

In the legal series “Courthouse,” a convicted murderer produces a gun and blows away the judge who is sentencing him from the bench, then is immediately gunned down by a deputy inside the courtroom. Both shootings are graphic and in, yes . . .

SLO MO!

And in the dark, menacing “American Gothic,” a father uses a shovel to gruesomely bash in the head of his babbling, deranged daughter. But the teen-ager doesn’t die.

Not until the series protagonist, a loathsome sheriff, comes in and snaps her neck.