The Busy Air

The networks are becoming the new money-heavy angels of the Broadway stage. CBS, sole backer of the smash-hit musical My Fair Lady, expects to net an additional $5,000,000 from the recorded music of the show, now on the market under the Columbia label. NBC, which has done well from its investment in Call Me Madam, Me and Juliet, Fanny and the current Alfred Lunt-Lynn Fontanne hit, The Great Sebastians, will put up the money for a new musical, Jack and the Beanstalk, written by Helen Deutsch and Jerry Livingston. NBC also promised one novelty: before the new musical reaches Broadway this fall, it will have a preview on television.

Screen Gems, the TV subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, hopes to raise a contented crop of future television playwrights. The fertilization: scholarship grants for budding authors have already been assigned to Fordham University and the universities of North Carolina, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Iowa.

The Mutual radio network has a scheme for attracting longhairs: a chain of classical-music stations to extend from Virginia to Maine. The good music will be carried exclusively on the FM band of the network stations, while the AM channels continue to grind out Mutual's regular shows.

NBC's Medic, started a year and a half ago in an attempt to knock CBS's I Love Lucy from the No. 1 position in the ratings, will fold up its scalpels and silently steal away in August. The last Nielsen ratings found Lucy still No. 1, Medic No. 81. Both sponsors (Procter & Gamble and General Electric) failed to renew their options, and NBC plans to return to the attack on Lucy with a new series of filmed thrillers called Impact.

The television section of Germany's Bayerische Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio) prepared to accept commercial advertising--but with a Teutonic difference. All commercial messages will be concentrated into one 25-minute period, and the remainder of each telecast day will then be sponsor-free.

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