Betty White red alert! The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences is hosting a tribute to the thesp affectionately known on this blog as the First Lady of television.

The Aug. 7 event, "Betty White: Celebrating 60 Years on Television," is already sold out, even though it hasn't even been formally announced with an Acad press release. I noticed it as an events listing today on the Acad's emmys.tv home page. (Pic of Betty with Emmy swiped from that site.)

Among those set to appear are Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman, Mary Tyler Moore, Craig Ferguson (White makes semi-regular visits to "The Late Late Show," in a tribute to Craig's excellent taste), Bob Stewart, Gavin MacLeod, Tom Sullivan, Susan Harris, Valerie Harper and John McCook. Pete Hammond is set as moderate, and the event also promises a perf by Michael Feinstein. I'm there.

As Betty-philes know, her first paying gig on TV came in the summer of 1949 with her appearance on a local special hosted by singer Dick Haynes, on KLAC-TV, known today as KCOP-TV. From there she appeared on a short-lived (by weeks) comedy "Tom, Dick and Harry," starring three third-rate vaudevillians, and then she segued to game show "Grab Your Phone," according to White's 1995 memoir "Here We Go Again: My Life in Television."

Betty's first steady work came in November 1949 with the debut of KLAC's "Hollywood on Television," in which she was a "girl Friday" sidekick to Al Jarvis, then a top L.A. disc jockey.

"Hollywood on Television," by Betty's description, was a prototypical morning TV show. Betty and Al would chat about the headlines, interview guests ranging from human interest to celebs, have musical and how-to segments, etc. Five hours a day, five days a week of live without-a-net television. She did "Hollywood on Television" for about four years, and then moved into her first lead role in a scripted series, the syndie "Life with Elizabeth" (she did both shows simultaneously for a little while). No wonder she's so good.

POSTED BY STUART LEVINE

"You've got spunk. I hate spunk."

Any self-respecting TV aficianado knows Ed Asner spoke those words to Mary Tyler Moore in the first seg of Moore's iconic '70s sitcom, and spunk is what Asner brought to the Hallmark Channel presentation on the opening morning of fear and loathing between beleaguered nets and disgruntled journos, aka TCA.

During a panel dedicated to the upcoming Hallmark pic "Generation Gap," the first question asked of Asner -- a former president of the Screen Actors Guild -- was whether he thought his fellow thesps would strike.

"I have no idea, but I doubt it," Asner said, just warming up. "The town has been fairly terrorized and actors don't have more guts than the average person. ... The actors would vote for it (AFTRA deal) for it, and I would vote against it, but I always do the opposite thing."

Asner also went off about how Hollywood and the TV biz has changed over the many decades in which he's been doing stellar work.

"TV has been in horrible shape for awhile," he said. "When I came to California in 1961, there were three big networks and I remember going to MGM. It was the city on the hill. I didn't go back for a long time, after Kirk Kerkorian had taken over, and the city on the hill had sunk into the ghetto. It looked like a dump. It was amazing to see the deterioration and shocking to see MGM that way, because it was the king.

"Everything now is based on the cheap, with 30-second soundbites. And who owns the network this week, that sort of thing... What everyone is looking for is stabilization out of the chaos."

Just as things were looking particularly bleak heading into the weekend, the emails arrived, one right after the other. And for a change, the AMPTP and then the WGA West were saying basically the same thing: Talks to resume Nov. 26. Whoo-hoo! ('Whoo-hoo' added for emphasis.)

This joyous news reached my BlackBerry while I was taking in the "Lou Grant" reunion at the Paley Center for Media. The reunion was a hoot, as these things go. They're all much grayer than they used to be in the Trib newsroom -- even Animal, aka thesp Daryl Anderson. But they're still feisty, particularly Ed Asner. When asked by a frothing super-fan type whether there was any hope for a reunion series, Asner quipped: "I'll work for food." When asked if he was ever sorry that his stint on "Mary Tyler Moore" and "Lou Grant" typecast him as the curmudgeonly Lou Grant-type, Asner didn't hesitate.

"I'm extremely lucky to have been chosen to do him in all his embodiments. He was a good guy," Asner said. "I could've been Ted Knight." (I think he meant "Ted Baxter" but you never know...)

I didn't froth too much, but I made a point of telling a few of the principals how much the show meant to an impressionable girl who only ever wanted to be a reporter when she grew up. (For a little while I wanted to be a novelist, and then I read "Ten Days That Shook the World" and "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" in quick succession and that pretty much sealed it.)

Linda Kelsey, aka Billie Newman, was gracious, as was exec producer Gene Reynolds. Allan Burns, who co-created "Mary Tyler Moore" with James L. Brooks and shepherded "Lou Grant" with Reynolds, was smart and funny and insightful about TV then and now. Moreover, Burns outta qualify for hero status with the younger-gen of WGA members -- he's been out pounding the picket pavement in front of 20th Century Fox every day that I've gone to the lines since the strike began Nov. 5.

Burns (pictured far left with Asner) noted that despite its Emmy and Peabody winning glory, "Lou Grant" was frequently on the verge of cancellation. Burns recalled "a famous meeting at CBS" a few weeks into the first season in 1977-78 with then CBS programming head Bud Grant, Burns and Reynolds and Grant Tinker, then head of MTM Prods.

"They told us we were doing it all wrong. We were a little 'uptown.' We want more action...What you're giving us is The New York Times and we want the Daily News." After hearing this, "Tinker had smoke coming out of his ears," Burns recalled. "You mean you don't want the New York Times on your network?"

Given the setting -- the lovely wood-paneled halls of the Paley Center for Media -- there was a funny story to tell about how the show went out after the 1981-82 season. Asner, of course, had been gaining noteriety for his outspokeness regarding the political situation in Central America, back in the days when U.S. foreign policy was greatly concerned with shooing Communists out of America's backyard, particularly in places due south of Texas like El Salvador and Nicaragua. (Asner actually made an interesting point that his "activism" was somewhat overblown in this period.)

And back in the days when even moderately successful primetime series routinely drew 20 million-25 million viewers, it was hard to hide from a "shit-storm" stirred up by the star of Big Three network show -- as Asner provoked in 1981 by taking part in the presentation of a $25,000 check to a humanitarian org that aimed to provide medical care to the needy in parts of El Salvador that were held by rebels. Humanitarian gesture to some; sedition to others. Conservative forces in Congress and elsewhere mounted a letter-writing campaign to CBS boss William Paley. And though a host of CBS execs denied it to Asner, he's always believed the story he heard after the fact about how "Lou Grant" got spiked.

"We heard that CBS (execs) had 'Lou Grant' on the scheduling board" in the spring of 1982 when they were setting the sked for the 1982-83 season. "And supposedly Mr. Paley came in and said 'What's that doing up there? Get it off, get it off," Asner recounted. "And at that point, 'Lou Grant' was off the board."