THE BIZ

The Los Angeles puppet business is tangled up in a bellicose mess that only Pinocchio and the Blue Fairy can solve. After 28 years in the business, Bob Baker’s Marionette Theater, the only puppet theater in Los Angeles, is about to fall prey to bad debts and bad blood. Facing its second foreclosure notice since the first of the year, the 245-seat theater at the corner of Glendale Boulevard and First Street will go dark if someone doesn’t make the payments on the $400,000 bank note owed by Baker and his partner, Alton Wood.

“That price tag gets me weak in the knees,” says Baker. “I’ve already mortgaged my home because I know we’ll pull through. I just wish we could get some other help.”

Despite financial woes, the show goes on. Baker, Wood and their staff of 18, including six puppeteers, put on original performances (with a few fairy tales thrown in) for scores of schoolchildren on field trips, families and assorted puppet devotees. But the debts keep mounting.

“The city’s not helping,” says Baker, 68. “There’s been some talk of funding down there but they keep putting us on hold.” Baker and Wood claim their troubles started three years ago, when they sold the theater to Don Battjes. “He was a good friend and a fellow puppet maker. We’d known him for 15 years. But once we signed the contract everything changed. He wanted the building so he could sell it, and all he did was put the theater in debt,” says Baker.

Battjes, a 48-year-old former vice president of corporate real estate for Hughes Aircraft, sees things differently. “That theater never made a lot of money,” he says. “I sold it back to Baker last summer. I couldn’t afford to keep it going.”

These days Baker and Wood sort through piles of overdue bills and try to recover the nearly 2,000 handmade puppets that they claim were lost during Battjes’ reign over their fantasy kingdom. Battjes has since gone into the toy puppet manufacturing business and is negotiating with Warner Brothers and Disney Studios to to manufacture Looney Tunes and several other animated-hero puppets, a move that further incenses Baker.

“In 1965, I got a verbal approval from Walt Disney to do the Disney character marionettes,” he says. “Battjes kept all the molds for those puppets.”

“Mr. Baker bought back the theater and the contents,” Battjes replies, “not the manufacturing part of the business. A Disney tool belongs to Disney.”

Baker hopes to avoid bankruptcy. And although the riots caused a slight setback in audience numbers, Baker says, “business is picking up. And as long as there’s an audience we’ll keep the doors open.”