Arts Organizations Finances

Nine months into a campaign to raise $200 million for two new concert halls, the Orange County Performing Arts Center has yet to land the huge "naming gift" its officials had hoped would be the cornerstone of their fund-raising drive, prompting a change in tactics.

As a theater, the Dorill B. Wright Cultural Arts Center seemed to have a lot going for it: a lovely seaside setting, first-rate acoustics and a size that lent warmth and intimacy to smaller-scale productions. But the municipally owned performance space has sat dormant for years, the victim of a budget crisis in 1993 and city leaders unwilling to fund its operation during better economic times.

Performing arts groups, museums and libraries will receive $415,500 in grants announced Tuesday by the Pacific Life Foundation of Newport Beach. The 33 arts and cultural recipients--26 of them in Orange County--range from the county's mightiest to its tiniest institutions. Overall, the cultural grants accounted for about one-fourth of the $1.5 million being distributed by the foundation, a philanthropic wing of Pacific Life Insurance Co.

A group that is trying to revive the bankrupt film festival in Newport Beach announced Friday that it is planning the event for next spring, provided part of the $100,000 budget can be raised by the new year. Organizers expressed confidence Friday that the funding would come through for a streamlined eight-day event, now scheduled to kick off March 30.

About a dozen area business leaders and a representative from Chapman University's film department took their first step toward creating a new Orange County film festival after the collapse earlier this month of the Newport Beach International Film Festival. "There is a strong desire," said Bob Bassett, dean of Chapman's film school who met with others Wednesday to discuss prospects of continuing a film festival. "The issue right now is what form [a new festival] will take."

The Fullerton-based Paul McNeff Singers have received two financial grants totaling $23,000. The Orange County Community Foundation has given the group an $18,000 grant, one of 31 the foundation donated to Orange County nonprofit agencies for the 1998-99 fiscal year. The Bank of America Foundation has given the group a $5,000 grant from its $1-million national initiative. Both grants will be used to support the group's Educational Outreach Ensemble and the Paul McNeff KidSingers programs.

Opera Pacific--Orange County's only opera company--has bounced back from an accumulated deficit of nearly $1 million and is poised to regain its financial footing after struggling the last three years, company officials said Thursday. The good news comes to the financially strapped company by way of a $1-million anonymous pledge received last May and a small budget surplus--its first since 1997--for its just-ended 1998-99 make-or-break season.

The Newport Beach International Film Festival, dogged for most of its four years by foul-ups and poor attendance, has gone out of business. Co-founder Jeffrey S. Conner filed a petition for Chapter 7 bankruptcy Sept. 1 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Ana, seeking to liquidate the festival business. Conner listed assets of $10,960 and debts of $191,900. The festival's annual budget has been estimated at as much as $150,000, which organizers tried to raise through corporate sponsorships.

The economic house is in order, and the public's embrace of what's presented by the Orange County Performing Arts Center remains gratifying, center leaders declared Thursday in reviewing the just-concluded fiscal year at the center's annual members' meeting. Then they turned to the imposing prospect of raising the roofs on two additional performance houses: a proposed 1,800-seat concert hall and a 500-seat theater next to the existing 3,000-capacity Segerstrom Hall.

Experts assessing the Orange County Performing Arts Center's ambitious expansion plans have some expensive news: It will cost twice as much as expected--$200 million or more. The first realistic price tag for the project was presented this week to center officials, who conceded Wednesday that the original estimate of $100 million, made by the center's staff, amounted to "amateurs just throwing out numbers," said Roger T. Kirwin, chairman elect of the center's board of directors.