And Away We Go

Television networks will throw around more money this fall and winter than ever before, put on more spectaculars, more color, more old movies ($150 million worth) than have ever been seen. It will, quite obviously, be the biggest season to date. A sampling of shows to come:

ABC will put on a nighttime version of Omnibus, the best of the highbrow shows, which moved over from CBS. Programs include a re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg as directed by Delbert (Marty) Mann and a look at the history of U.S. musical comedy through the eyes, ears and expressive hands of Leonard Bernstein. Disneyland will document "The Great Cat Family" with an all-animated cartoon, make a study of the atom and recount man's efforts to fly. Disney will also launch a TV spectacular called Johnny Tremain, about "events leading up to the American Revolution." Afternoon Film Festival and Famous Film Festival will serve up 46 J. Arthur Rank films never seen on TV. including Hamlet, A Queen Is Crowned, Genevieve, Hungry Hill.

CBS's upcoming specialties will be topped by Rodgers and Hammerstein's first TV original: a 90-minute musicollaboration on Cinderella, starring Julie (My Fair Lady) Andrews. Ford Star Jubilee will hire Cole Porter. Shirley Jones, Gordon MacRae. Dorothy Dandridge, Dolores Gray. George Sanders. Louis Armstrong to salute Composer Porter's 40 years of songwriting. Ford will also adapt Sidney Kingsley's Men in White and showcase MGM's The Wizard of Oz. Ed Murrow's, See It Now will include cathode reports from the Suez. Asia. Russia and South America, and a 1 1/2hr. documentary of Buffoon Danny Kaye's 32,000-mile junket for the U.N.'s Children's Emergency Fund. Martin Manulis' Playhouse 90, the chain's most ambitious drama project, offers adaptations of Charley's Aunt, Kay Thompson's Eloise, J. P. Marquand's Sincerely, Willis Wayde, and Shirley Booth in The Perle Mesta Story. Jack Benny returns this month from a successful BBC stint loaded with film shot in Europe (including a Paris show with Benny and Maurice Chevalier). In November the U.S. Air Force joins forces with CBS Public Affairs in a 26-part series called Air Power, "the story of flight and its impact on the 20th century." U.S. Steel will bring back Grade Fields, offer a musical version of Tom Sawyer and an adaptation of James Joyce's Dubliners. CBS viewers will also see a new Jackie Gleason show, a Herb Shriner variety program, and about five hours of color every week.

NBC will loose a torrent of color spectaculars in hopes of tottering CBS's rating preeminence. Splashiest of all will probably be onetime Vaudeville Hoofer Walter Winchell as host of his own variety show early next month. Paul Douglas will join Mary Martin, biggest audience-puller on TV. in Born Yesterday on Hallmark Hall of Fame, which will also repro cruce Shaw's Man and Superman with

Maurice Evans, Ray Bolger and Elaine Stritch will star in 16 one-hour live shows called Washington Square, alternating with the Chevy Show's Dinah Shore and Bob Hope. Nanette Fabray, who left Sid Caesar for greener folding money, will star in High Button Shoes. Producer's Showcase will offer Somerset Maugham's The Letter (produced and directed by William Wyler), a musical version of Jack and the Beanstalk with Celeste Holm and Cyril Ritchard. John Huston's Lysistrata, Anatole Litvak's Mayerling with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer, Claire Bloom in the Old Vic's Romeo and Juliet, the Lunts, making their TV debuts, in The Great Sebastians, Gene Kelly and Fredric March in Front Page, a Roy Rogers rodeo. NBC will also give opera, ballet and concert-hall music their biggest boost as popular art forms with the Sadler's Wells Ballet's Cinderella, Puccini's La Boheme, Verdi's La Traviata, Beethoven's Fidelio, the world premiere of Prokofiev's War and Peace and Sol Hurok's Music Festival. Producer Max Liebman will try to develop Comic Buddy Hackett as a top comedian with a half-hour comedy series.

To pull all these stops out, NBC has sunk $12 million into color production (converting Manhattan's Ziegfeld Theater into a color studio and building the largest color studio in the world in Brooklyn). Seventeen different series of regular shows will be televised in color (compared to only three last year), and on some nights NBC will offer three consecutive hours of color shows, with at least one major show each night (or an average of 15 color hours a week).

But with all its new stars and equipment NBC must continue to stage its biggest fight with CBS's Ed Sullivan Show, again pinning its hopes on Steve Allen to bust CBS's eight-year Sunday-at-eight audience dominance.

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