SEINFELD TAPES FINALE TONIGHT

LOS ANGELES-The hottest ticket in town is today's 6:30 p.m. final taping of Seinfeld - the 180th episode of the No. 1 sitcom.

Castle Rock Entertainment, the show's producer, and NBC have kept a lid on the contents of the one-hour finale, which NBC has predicted will be a bigger draw than the Super Bowl.

Only family and friends have been invited to the taping. They have had to promise Castle Rock that they won't spill any details to the media.

''I'll be at the show,'' says NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield. ''And I have to sign a release promising not to reveal anything.''

The 300 in the audience won't see the complete episode. Producers and cast have been filming scenes since March 31, and while some will be shown to the audience, only a few new scenes will be performed live. The ending will not be shown.

Why so much secrecy?

Jerry Seinfeld's announcement that he was concluding the series at the end of the ninth season caused so much hype and hoopla that the more the media wrote about the show, the more Seinfeld and company became obsessed with keeping the finale a surprise.

Rumors have flown about the plot of the final episode, but Castle Rock says every one has been false.

Littlefield himself hasn't been given a script and says he won't see the completed episode until it airs, a highly unusual situation for such a high-profile TV event.

The Seinfeld team ''has always marched to their own beat, and I respect them for that,'' Littlefield says. ''They don't want the world to know what the episode is about, and that's exciting. There will be a great anticipation for it, and we're all thrilled.''

Unlike the last episodes of shows such as M*A*S*H, Murphy Brown and Cheers, which were turned into media events with reporters invited, the Seinfeld set has been off limits for weeks.

Producers have told Littlefield the show may run long. If it does, they'll slice the hour-long lead-in, a Seinfeld retrospective with film clips.

LOS ANGELES -- The entertainment industry thrives on a thinly disguised hierarchy of exclusivity. Even well-known producers and directors fight ferociously -- through their agents or assistants, of course -- for tickets to major events. Still, "Seinfeld," NBC's enormously successful sitcom and cultural icon, has trumped the crowd. The taping of the final segment of the final episode of the show, which is shutting down after nine years, is shrouded in dense secrecy and is proving all but impossible to get into.

"I've gotten 89 million calls about it," said Alan Horn, the chairman of Castle Rock Entertainment, the company that produces "Seinfeld." "Shameless? Yes, people are shameless about trying to get in. But it's just a family affair, you know, people who've been connected to the show and families." Horn said he was taking his wife, his two children and another relative.

About 250 people have been invited to watch the final taping on Wednesday, all of them connected in some way to the show or its stars: Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards. "It's closed," said Elizabeth Clark, the spokeswoman for Castle Rock. "Nobody outside the immediate show is going to be allowed in."

Adding to the aura of secrecy, no scripts are being circulated. Indeed, those who have received scripts have had to sign confidentiality agreements, Horn said. No one involved would even discuss the contents of the episode, which is to be broadcast on May 14. The show is expected to attract one of the largest television audiences ever. As a result, NBC has reportedly sold advertising at $2 million for a 30-second spot; that is roughly four times the show's usual rate.

Security will be extremely tight at Wednesday's taping, and already the producers are bracing for a heavy cordon of television cameras and news crews at the gates of the studio, CBS Studio Center in Studio City.

Since the last "Seinfeld" episode will be an hour long (one of the few bits of information the people involved would disclose), it is being taped over several nights, not the one night typical for most shows. The script has been written by Larry David, who created the show with Jerry Seinfeld but left two years ago to work on movies and other projects. The episode will feature the regular cast along with several guest stars who have appeared in previous episodes.

But it is not even clear exactly what the audience will see on Wednesday evening. There have been rumors that the concluding moments of the episode will be taped at another time. There is one rumor that the select audience will be shown a tape of a decoy ending, a fake intended to throw snoops off the track in case anyone at the event discloses the story line. (A whole fake script was circulated on the Internet by an unknown author.)

The television series, which, in a reflection of the times proudly proclaims that it is a show about nothing, is enormously popular and a huge source of profits for NBC and Castle Rock. Even though no new episodes will be produced after Wednesday, "Seinfeld" is already proving a great success in syndication.

The show, at 9 p.m. on Thursdays, has been a mainstay of one of the most popular nights on network television. Already there are concerns about whether NBC will be able to replace "Seinfeld" with anything that could draw as large, young and affluent an audience.

But for one night at least, that will be a distant thought. Wednesday night will be given to entertainment and the bragging rights of those who will be able to claim they saw it firsthand.

StnCldJR45 wrote in message ...

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Fake Script? Wow, they might have actually FILMED the psychic Buddy!! :-)

On 8 Apr 1998 18:27:10 GMT, [email] (StnCldJR45) regurgitated:

Surely if they want to keep as much secrecy as possible, Castle Rock should've neither denied nor confirmed the rumours to keep the possibilities endless. Now that they've said this, we KNOW that none of the rumours will be part of the final episode, which narrows the possibilities down...not by much, of course.