As a person—I was privileged to know the man over the last 14 years of his life—he was very warm, very encouraging to young artists, witty, quick, sharply interested in everything, brilliantly intuitive, backed with a deep sense of culture in the sometimes reckless yet always disciplined way of the French at their best. But as his friend, master picturemaker Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, An Affair to Remember), put it to me one time: “I have such respect for him. He’s too good for the business.” I said, “I always felt he was a kind of saintly person,” and McCarey nodded. “Yes, that’s what I mean,” he said.

The son of the glorious French Impressionist painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean started in the movies during the silent 1920s, during which he made a number of experimental and challenging early works (some of them available in excellent prints on a new three-disc Lionsgate DVD called “Jean Renoir: Collector’s Edition”). But he hit his stride in the 1930s and made a virtually uninterrupted series of both diverse and consistently quite extraordinary masterworks, including the tragic love story, Toni (1935), precursor of the Italian neorealists, shot entirely on location in the south of France; the chilling, haunting La Chienne (1931), with the riveting Michel Simon; and the astonishing excusable-homicide comedy-drama, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), all of which, unfortunately, are currently unavailable on DVD here (there are British, German and French DVDs of Toni). But the Lionsgate collection includes the 1938 masterpiece La Marseillaise, a little known, extremely powerful and strikingly believable historical panorama of the French Revolution.

The Criterion Collection, meanwhile, has done a great job with a number of Renoir’s most important pictures, among them Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932), featuring Michel Simon’s most iconic role; the ultimate film noir, La Bête humaine (1938), with Jean Gabin and Simone Simon steaming up the screen; a very French version of a very Russian play, The Lower Depths (1936), with Gabin and the incomparable Louis Jouvet; the originally reviled, now cherished comedy-tragedy The Rules of the Game (1939); and his most famous, yet again with the irreplaceable Gabin, The Grand Illusion (1937), the World War I POW classic, and the first of the precious few foreign films ever to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Add Renoir’s first color film, The River (1951), shot entirely in India; plus Gabin one last time, as the creator of the Moulin Rouge, in French Cancan (1954), and you’ve got a list of movies that haven’t been surpassed and won’t be.

The seeming simplicity of Renoir—he never calls attention to himself, yet it is so clearly his eye through which we are seeing the world—belies an amazing complexity in his understanding of people, of the human comedy. His films seem to grow out of the moment you are watching rather than being frozen in time. Their movement is like a river—a frequent image in the cinema of Renoir—with both an inevitability and a surprise at each turn, because nothing is ever what you’d expect, any more than you can predict a river. Or life.

Of all the great filmmakers, Renoir is most the humanist poet, the one director who only made pictures about people—not stereotypes, not archetypes, not myths, but real human beings. Having grown up with his father’s vibrant, penetrating portraits, how could the son not be interested in the people being portrayed? How not want to bring them to vivid, honest life? No matter which Renoir film—a seemingly ultra-realistic piece like the railroad workers of La Bête humaine, or an aggressively stylized musical-comedy about show business like French Cancan—the people feel fresh and authentic; they have lived somewhere.

Part of Renoir’s method in creating this magically spontaneous life onscreen was to plot out complicated choreography for the camera that would enable his actors to play out a sequence in its entirety during one or maybe two continuous shots. This necessitated deep-focus photography (and more intense lighting to preserve the focus) so that figures far from, or close to, the camera would be in equal sharpness, helping to minimize the need to cut and thus interrupt the flow (another river image) of the performances. Ford, Welles, Hawks and cinematographer Gregg Toland were all going there in the late ’30s and early ’40s, but Renoir had been doing that from the early ’30s, from the start of full sound in the late ’20s and its seismic change in the art of film.

Renoir immediately realized this would lead to greater realism in pictures and at the same time a need for more fluidity to the filmmaking process, to help authenticate the reality of the action—it is happening uninterrupted, so, in fact, it happened just as you see it. Like a documentary of the instance. Renoir was doing that from his earliest talkies, and all his films were carefully examined by serious American directors. When John Ford saw The Grand Illusion, he was so impressed that he went to Darryl Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, and begged him to buy it so that Ford could direct an English-language remake. Zanuck proved why he was such a terrific studio head with his response: “Forget it, Jack. You’ll just ruin it.”

Nobody said that to Fritz Lang when he had the nerve to direct two American remakes of Renoir films, both largely inferior. The better one is Scarlet Street (1945), Lang’s version of La Chienne (The Bitch), about a painter taunted into the murder of his beloved mistress. Although Edward G. Robinson is excellent, as usual, he’s still not Michel Simon, and the rest of the film is equally down a few notches—obvious where Renoir was subtle, exaggerated where Renoir was pure. Lang’s Human Desire (1954) practically pales out to nothing next to the original, La Bête humaine, with poor Glenn Ford incapable of competing with Jean Gabin, the greatest star actor in French film history—the one who did four of the best films of all time with Renoir, now widely acknowledged as France’s greatest filmmaker. Though Lang’s remakes actually imperiled for a while the Renoir negatives, Jean never spoke a harsh word against Lang. But Dido Renoir, Jean’s second wife and the love of his life, never forgave Fritz.

When I first met Renoir sometime in 1965, he had already directed his last feature—The Elusive Corporal (1962), an energetic, youthful World War II POW drama (available on DVD in the Lionsgate collection)—and would create only one other work on film, for French television: the beautiful autumnal omnibus picture Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir (1969), not currently available. Renoir himself, at age 75, introduces each of the four very different stories: a stylized Hans Christian Anderson tale; a sardonic mock-opera about a woman’s love of her electric floor polisher; a belle epoque song of lost love performed by Jeanne Moreau; and a return to ’30s realism with a pastoral triangle comedy-drama that is vintage Renoir. Again, you’re reminded this is the same man who not only wrote but performed the most profound line ever spoken in pictures. In The Rules of the Game, the artist played by Renoir at 44 says early in the film, in long shot, the French equivalent of (my translation): “The only terrible thing in life is that everybody has their own good reasons.”

The man I knew would have written that; he had compassion for people, and he was self-effacing, modest about his work, thankful of praise. Sometime in the late 1960s the L.A. County Museum of Art did a virtually complete Jean Renoir retrospective, and I went to every film, then spoke to Jean about them. Extremely taken with Boudu Saved From Drowning—the ironic and satirical saga of a bum floating down a river whom a middle-class family “saves”—I went right over to the Renoirs’ beautiful Beverly Hills living room and raved about the film, quietly observed by the giant Renoir portrait of Jean at 15 with a rifle (now at the L.A. County Museum) and a few small Cézannes. Jean smiled and looked delighted: “Oh, thank you so much! You are very kind.” After more effusiveness, I asked what he himself thought of the picture. “Oh, well,” he said with his strong French accent, “you know, we made it in the early days of sound, and sometimes the sound is not so good. Also, because we had no money, we had to buy the film stock as we went along, and some of it does not match, and sometimes the cutting is a little too fast, and sometimes it is too slow, and the music is not so well recorded, but I think, maybe, it is my best picture!”

His living room was a joyful place in that house (gone now), which he and Dido built in the early ’40s, after he left France because of the vicious initial reception he received for The Rules of the Game (it was resurrected in the ’50s by the New Wave). He didn’t make another film in France for a decade and a half, and never resided there again. Jean and Dido became American citizens and moved into their home on Leona Drive, off Benedict Canyon. He became close friends with many Hollywood icons: Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant, Tony Curtis and Charles Laughton, and the much-neglected major American playwright, Clifford Odets. In his brief but heartfelt and unpretentious memoir, My Life and My Films (Da Capo has it in print), Renoir says the reason he didn’t go back to Paris was because he didn’t want to move so far away from his L.A. friends, most particularly Odets, whom I got to know a little bit and who told me he adored Renoir.

Everyone in Hollywood did, actually, but still, he did not enjoy much happiness in the Hollywood studio system. While in France in the 1930s, Renoir made 14 features; in the 1940s, living in America, he made only five, yet they are all quite clearly Renoir pictures. (George Cukor once told me that Jean had said to him, “Oh, years ago, all Hollywood pictures were great.” And George had said, “Oh, no, not really.”) The only one of Renoir’s American films currently available on DVD (through VCI Entertainment) is the best of the bunch, The Southerner (1945), with Zachary Scott and Betty Field as a couple of poor tenant farmers trying to survive. For the record, the others are Swamp Water (1941), partially shot on location in the Okefenokee Swamp, much against Fox Studio’s wishes; This Land Is Mine (1943), with the inimitable Charles Laughton as a cowardly schoolteacher during a World War II occupation, never specified as, but clearly meant to be, France; Renoir’s version of The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), with Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith; and, the most damaged by studio interference and cutting, The Woman on the Beach (1947), with Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan.

Also, released for the first time in 1946 was a beautiful short feature Renoir shot 10 years earlier called Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country), based on a de Maupassant story. The shoot ran into bad weather, which made it impossible to finish a couple of sequences. For years, Renoir was hopeful of getting the money to complete the picture. Eventually, it was decided that the piece worked quite effectively without the missing scenes. Renoir has a small role as a rural restaurateur. It contains one of the most haunting close-ups in screen history: the look on the face of a young woman who is about to lose her innocence. (It’s only available on British DVD, through the BFI.)

In the ’50s, Renoir went from being an expatriate French director living in Hollywood to an international filmmaker—beginning with The River, one of the great color films and among the most moving of Renoir’s pictures, about an English family living in India, specifically three Westernized young women. It’s available in a gorgeous print from the Criterion Collection, as is the boxed set of French Cancan; The Golden Coach (1953), with Anna Magnani; and Elena et les hommes (1956), with Ingrid Bergman. French Cancan is one of my favorite films, a kind of an homage, Renoir called it, to show business. The extended climactic cancan, by itself, is among the most amazing and moving dance sequences ever shot.

Truffaut was so in love with The Golden Coach (La Carrosse d’or) that he named his production company after the movie, Les Films du Carrosse. Others in the New Wave particularly liked the English-language version—Renoir’s own preference over the Italian—but the picture never connected with contemporary audiences; neither did Elena. Perhaps they are both too artificial, though the stylization is the driving force of both pieces. Renoir once said, “Reality may be very interesting, but a work of art must be a creation. If you copy nature without adding the influence of your own personality, it is not a work of art.” French Cancan, though also somewhat stylized, comes across more believably and was a huge success with the French public. This enabled him to make his last, fascinating three films, none of them popular: the aforementioned The Elusive Corporal; the science vs. nature parable Picnic on the Grass (1959); and Renoir’s modern Jekyll and Hyde variation, The Testament of Dr. Cordelier (1959), starring a terrifying Jean-Louis Barrault, shot TV-style with multiple cameras—a daring, youthful experiment for a man of 65—again, a way of maintaining continuity for the actor for as long as possible, like live theater or live television.

I met Renoir about six years later. He had yet to make Le Petit théâtre, walked still with the limp from his World War I injury, heavyset, tall, open if reserved, articulate and outgoing. One time, when he and Dido came over to my L.A. home, where we had a screening room to run 35mm prints, my occasional valet Rudolfo brought him some orange juice, which Renoir had requested. Rudolfo didn’t have any idea who this 80-year-old man in a wheelchair was, or what he did. But from the way everyone was acting, the man was clearly an important one in the world, so Rudolfo served the orange juice on a silver tray with a bright panache, sweeping the tray in front of him. Jean looked at Rudolfo and said, enthusiastically, “Thank you! I like how you presented it.” Well, there wasn’t a happier person in L.A. than Rudolfo. He beamed and grew in height by several inches.

That’s what Renoir had, this ability to make others feel elevated by his presence and attention. One time, I brought my mother over to meet Jean and Dido. She was a great admirer of his work—as my artist father also had been. It was a lovely afternoon, sitting in the living room, sipping some white wine from antique sterling silver cups. At one point, while we were discussing dubbing of voices in movies, Jean said, “In a really civilized time, like the 12th century, a man who dubbed voices would be burned at the stake as a heretic for presuming that two souls can exist in one body!” Later, we got onto world politics and Nixon, who was still president then, and my mother remarked that Nixon’s gestures never seemed to fit with what he was saying. Everyone agreed. Suddenly, Jean called out to her: “Madame! I have it! Nixon is dubbed!” Renoir was as delighted with his conclusion as my mother was.

On some of the Criterion DVDs, there are illuminating vintage interviews with Renoir (mostly by New Waver Jacques Rivette), together with a filmed introduction by Jean, originally shot for French TV. You can see for yourself the lucidity, the charm, the humor and humanity of this wonderful artist. I was reminded of Renoir when reading a poem (by the second Lord Falkland) about the great Elizabethan poet, Ben Jonson, and described by Robert Graves (in The White Goddess) as “a summary of the ideal poetic temperament.” It could as accurately have been written about the Jean Renoir I knew:

He had an infant’s innocence and truth,

The judgment of grey hairs, the wit of youth,

Not a young rashness, not an ag’d despair,

The courage of the one, the other’s care;

And both of them might wonder to discern

His ableness to teach, his skill to learn.

The last time I saw Renoir was only a week or so before he died, in February 1979. I went over to Leona Drive, and Jean grew very excited when he saw me—but he was quite frail; lying in bed and having forgotten most of his English, he now spoke only French. He started to talk to me with great intensity, but my French wasn’t good enough, so I told Jean I wasn’t understanding him. He said, “Get Dido!” So I went to find her, brought her back, explaining that Jean seemed to want to tell me something. By the time we got back, though, he had forgotten what he was trying to say. One final gift he couldn’t give me, yet he had given me so many.

Just knowing him was an amazing present, and he had shown me so much through his work, his actions, his personal vision. When I told him I was going to film a story in Singapore (Saint Jack), and felt it might be a black-and-white picture—I then asked, what did he think? He said, “I think if people know the film was shot in Singapore, they would like to see the colors of Singapore.” I shot in color. Another time, I asked if he thought I should act in my own pictures. He said, “I think you should act in your own pictures—once in a while.” As he had done, most memorably in The Rules of the Game. The single most instructive and liberating thing Renoir ever said to me was in response to the question (I was about to make my second film, The Last Picture Show), did he know before he started a picture what it would look like? He answered, “Of course not. If I know what the picture will look like, I have no reason to make the picture.” He also made the strangely comforting remark, “Death is a part of life.” His funeral was well attended at a church in Beverly Hills, and the body was flown back to Essoyes, Burgundy, to be buried in the family plot by his father, mother and brother.

Dido, a very strong, witty, forthright person, lived another decade but deeply missed Jean the whole time, though she remained very active and outgoing. I visited her, as it turned out, the night before she died of cancer. She was lying in bed, and at one point I said something to the effect that I was certain Jean would be with her again. She nodded, and said plaintively, “It takes so long. …” If anyone had imperishable spirits, it was the Renoirs, and they are happy somewhere, having left behind a legacy of love for human beings, greatly imperfect though they may be.

I get very irritated when I hear someone sounding off about how some of Renoir’s films are not as good as others, and how there are certain ones that don’t fully work. Who gives a damn!? Look at how much does work. Anybody who could in one lifetime make The Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game, La Chienne, The Crime of Monsieur Lange, French Cancan, Boudu Saved From Drowning, Toni, La Marseillaise, La Bête humaine, The Lower Depths, The River, Partie de campagne, The Southerner and Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir does not have to make another movie to be the best there has ever been. Who else comes close? (From the East, Kenji Mizoguchi gives him a run for his money.) But I remember Orson Welles (who named The Grand Illusion as his single desert-island movie) rhapsodizing to me on Greta Garbo, and—still being a bit of a pedant at the time (I was all of 32)—my saying that yes, she was terrific, but wasn’t it too bad she had been in only two really good movies? Welles looked at me for a long moment, raised his eyebrows, and said, quietly, “Well, you only need one. …”

Finally, then, Jean emanated love of life and people. It’s all in his films, down to the extras—nobody handles crowd scenes as well as Renoir—with his lifelong penchant for keeping the camera on extras (whom we’ll never see again) after the main characters have left the frame. Jean gives them their moment—they are people, too; they live, they die. At the heart of Renoir is the heart. No other director in the Western world has shown so much of the human condition in such a timeless way.

When Lubitsch arrived, however, things started to change. He brought European sophistication, candor in sexuality and an oblique style that made audiences complicit with the characters and situations. This light, insouciant, teasing manner became known far and wide as “the Lubitsch Touch.” By the end of the 20’s and throughout his short life—he died in 1947 at age 55—Lubitsch was probably the most famous film director internationally, except perhaps for C. B. DeMille. Today hardly anyone remembers either one of them. Yet while most of DeMille is pretty forgettable, if sometimes fun, Lubitsch is always fun and often as good as it gets.

Recently, a number of now fairly obscure Lubitsch films have been released on DVD, so maybe there’s hope. If you want to see just exactly how dumbed-down our society and culture have become, take a look at Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), out on the Criterion Collection. This airy, witty, blatantly amoral sex comedy about a couple of amorous jewel thieves was in its time a successful mainstream picture, hard as that may be to believe these days. But then in the 1930’s, films were being made by adults for adults, even after the Production Code kicked in around 1934.

Trouble begins in Venice, and its brilliant screenwriter Samson Raphaelson (who did numerous films with Lubitsch) told me once that he and the director spent over a week trying to come up with a good opening to establish the location as Venice: “Ernst wasn’t satisfied with just a shot of the canals or something,” and he wouldn’t go forward until they had solved the beginning. Finally, Lubitsch came up with it: Fade in on a shot of a back door to a building at night, a dog sniffing around a garbage can. A heavyset man enters the frame, picks up the can and carries it off as we PAN to see him dump the contents into a gondola filled with garbage on a darkened canal; he gets in his craft and, as he oars away, starts to sing, “O Solo Mio.” That was the Lubitsch touch.

This was the same picturemaker for whom Garbo laughed in the irresistible Ninotchka (1939), and Jimmy Stewart lifted his trousers to show that he wasn’t bowlegged at the conclusion of The Shop Around the Corner (1940), probably the warmest, most human romantic comedy ever made. Lubitsch was the fellow with the moxie to laugh at the Nazis right in the midst of World War II, typified by Jack Benny’s infamous line from To Be or Not to Be (1942): “So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt!” And he was the one to elicit Don Ameche’s single great performance in that beautiful period comedy about an unremarkable man’s love life, Heaven Can Wait (1943). All these acknowledged classics are currently available on DVD. (Also available is a rare Lubitsch flop, his last silent, Eternal Love (1929), a tragic love story with a brilliant performance by John Barrymore, and directed with all the economical precision and emotional depth of Lubitsch at his best.)

Although in the talking era he made virtually all comedies, Lubitsch had pioneered intimate costume dramas in the teens and 1920’s: His first international successes were Madame DuBarry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920; originally titled Deception in the U.S.), both of which dealt with historical figures in a candid, mostly-warts fashion that American audiences were not accustomed to. Kino has just released DVD’s of Anna Boleyn, with a devastating performance by Emil Jannings as the sexually rapacious Henry VIII, as well as another popular epic, Sumurun (1920; first U.S. title was One Arabian Night), in which Lubitsch himself has a sizable role opposite his star Pola Negri. (Orson Welles told me that when he first came to Hollywood, one trade term for a close-up was “big head of Pola,” a phrase of Lubitsch’s when he was directing Negri in America.) Of course, Lubitsch himself started out as an actor in silent comedy two-reelers, playing Jewish merchants with gusto and perfect timing.

Indeed, Lubitsch was well known in the business for giving his actors extremely precise instructions on how to play their roles. I once asked Jack Benny if it was true that Lubitsch acted out all the parts for his cast, and Jack confirmed it. Was he any good? I asked, and Jack answered, “Well, he was a little broad—but you got the idea!” This addresses the question of why all the actors in Lubitsch movies have such a very particular style, unlike the way they are in any other picture, be they as disparate as Gary Cooper, Don Ameche, Maurice Chevalier or Herbert Marshall. Signe Hasso, who played the French maid in Heaven Can Wait, told me that Lubitsch—who was short, heavyset, with a thick German accent and always sporting a cigar—had shown her exactly how to play the maid, and that he was just terrific at it, too.

The silent German comedies Kino has released—The Wildcat (1921), The Doll (1919), The Oyster Princess (1919), I Don’t Want to Be a Man (1920)—are all fast-paced in a farce mode, often extremely funny, but not really typical of the understated Lubitsch comic touch that sprang full-grown with his second American film and first drawing-room/bedroom romantic comedy, The Marriage Circle (1924; released on DVD by Image Entertainment). With this film, an unqualified and undated masterpiece of infidelity and misunderstanding, Lubitsch became, as his biographer Scott Eyman put it (in Laughter in Paradise), “the composer of the cinema’s finest, most elegant chamber music.”

Speaking of music, bear in mind that Lubitsch also made the first great screen musicals, including the very first all-talking, all-dancing, all-singing, fully plotted musical-comedy in American picture history, The Love Parade (1929), starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, both brand-new to movies. Parade is one of four musicals just recently released on DVD by the Eclipse (budget) division of the Criterion Collection—under the comprehensive title, Lubitsch Musicals—and each of them is pure gold. I have to admit that these are—along with Lubitsch’s last and best musical, The Merry Widow (1934; currently not available on DVD except in a Japanese edition, which can be played here only on all-region machines)—among my favorite movies of all time. There is an innocence and a sophistication combined that is enchanting, a sense both of mockery and celebration that is at once very funny and strangely touching.

In four short years, Lubitsch and his talented collaborators put together four complete book musicals, all with original songs, all sung live during shooting, with the orchestra right off camera. This was before sound mixing was possible, or playback, so everything had to happen at once. (I remember Hitchcock telling me about shoot
ing an insert of a radio in the same period, and having to have a full orchestra off-camera to play the music supposedly just coming from the radio.) However, singing live that way gives these early musicals a remarkable immediacy, a spontaneous freshness that doesn’t date. Chevalier and Macdonald (and in Parade the legendary second bananas Lillian Roth and Lupino Lane) are really singing right there and then.

After The Love Parade, there was Monte Carlo (1930), with MacDonald and the English music-hall star, Jack Buchanan; followed by the bittersweet The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), with Chevalier, Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins; and finally One Hour With You (1932), again with Chevalier and MacDonald, a musical version of The Marriage Circle and in its own special way just as delectable. Lubitsch’s superb way of shooting those films gave nobility to the new art of talking pictures, and influenced everyone who followed. The Smiling Lieutenant is especially unorthodox in creating a triangle situation that does not have the happy ending the audience would prefer.

In both The Love Parade and One Hour With You, Chevalier actually speaks directly to the camera a few times, daringly breaking the fourth wall in a way that no one was ever quite able to do as well again. For the Best Picture-winning Gigi (1958), Vincente Minnelli and Alan Jay Lerner brought Chevalier back to America, and in an homage to Lubitsch, had him address the audience (“Thank Heaven for Little Girls”) just as he had done 30 years before (though this time he was lip-synching to playback, and often not very precisely). Minnelli had remembered Lubitsch before: When making his terrific The Band Wagon (1953), he brought Jack Buchanan to Hollywood for the first time since Lubitsch’s Monte Carlo, in which Buchanan is inordinately charming, and which features one of the most famous of early musical numbers—MacDonald on a train singing “Beyond the Blue Horizon” while passing farmers wave and join in with the syncopated sounds of the engine.

Both The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant (and later, The Merry Widow) are Ruritanian romances, Chevalier being an officer from some mythical middle-European country. Monte Carlo begins in one and then shifts to the French Riviera. One Hour With You is set entirely in Paris, a favorite city of Lubitsch’s: One of his best silent comedies is So This Is Paris (1926), and The Merry Widow mostly plays there, too, as does Ninotchka and nearly all of Trouble in Paradise—though it is really a fantasy Paris. As Lubitsch famously said, “I have been to Paris, France, and I have been to Paris, Paramount. I think I prefer Paris, Paramount.” In other words, the places of his imagination—and indeed, it’s his very personal slant on everything that makes his pictures so intoxicating.

Naturally, all older films suffer from not being seen, as they were meant to be, on the big screen, which is probably one of the main reasons why younger people are so impatient with anything made earlier than about 1990. I was fortunate to have first seen these Lubitsch musicals in a large screening room at Paramount in the mid-1960’s when Jerry Lewis generously set me up to screen whatever studio prints I cared to run. I ran 82 movies, some in their original, gloriously shimmering nitrate prints. There is simply no substitute for that. We cinéastes of the 60’s used to scoff when someone said they had only seen a classic on TV: “Then you haven’t seen it,” we’d say. Now it’s all on TV, and there’s very little chance of viewing classics the way they were meant to be seen (Film Forum and MoMA are two New York oases).

Many films, therefore, are irreparably damaged and diminished. John Ford’s famous long shots, for example, lose all their majesty and impact. Howard Hawks’ comedy pacing becomes exhausting when you have to strain to see. Mythology, which is what pictures are at their best, by its very nature must be bigger than life, not smaller than life. Being overwhelmed by images in the dark is part of the basic magic of the medium. Take that away and you take away a good deal of the glory. At least if you’ve seen a picture the right way once, repeat viewings retain in memory a residual glow. But kids don’t have that, so to them it becomes perhaps just a charade they must strain to view, certainly not something that takes over.

In 1929, when Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade sang to the audience—“Paris, Please Stay the Same” was his first number—he was bigger than he could be on any stage, and therefore proportionally all-powerful. Today, on DVD, unless you have a gigantic screen, he becomes maybe only a charming curiosity. I’ll take it, though, in place of most of what’s out there. It speaks of a simpler, more civilized era. The America that took Chevalier to its heart is definitively gone, too, of course, and only retrievable by an act of imagination. To see these Lubitsch musicals takes us back to a remarkably more innocent time, evoking a period when charm, wit and grace could rule, when an ineffably light touch could become famous and cherished the world over.

The key word there is “professional,” because Cooper was playing a sheriff in a small town, to which a killer is about to return to murder him. Yet protecting the community was the sheriff’s job, for which he is being paid, and Hawks (who had himself done three movies with Cooper) deeply believed that his character’s behavior was, simply and thoroughly, unprofessional. So in Rio Bravo, when Sheriff John Wayne, in a similar situation, is offered help, he refuses it, saying in effect, “If they’re really good, I’ll take them. If not, I’ll just have to take care of them.” Hawks went on: “We did everything that way—the exact opposite of what annoyed me in High Noon—and it worked: people liked it.”

People loved it. Rio Bravo didn’t get any Academy Award nominations (High Noon got seven), but it was a far more popular movie with audiences than High Noon, for which Cooper won his second Best Actor Oscar (his first had been in 1941 for Hawks’ Sergeant York). Critically, Rio Bravo was received as a likable new John Wayne western, nothing much else. Some reviewers complained that it was crass of Hawks to have Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson (whose first grown-up part this was, as a gunslinger) sing in the movie. I mentioned this once to Hawks and he said, guilelessly, “Well, they were both known as singers, I thought the audience might like to hear them sing.” He didn’t mention that he’d had similar singing sequences in a number of his films, similarly used as a way of bonding the characters. That Rio Bravo was actually the brilliant culmination of a 40-year career by one of America’s finest film artists was something only the French New Wave and a couple of similarly minded Englishmen and Americans (like Andrew Sarris) pointed out.

As Jean-Luc Godard wrote: “The great filmmakers always tie themselves down by complying with the rules of the game.… Take, for example, the films of Howard Hawks, and in particular Rio Bravo. That is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all others. Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all he holds most dear into a well-worn subject.”

What Hawks held most dear was professionalism; all his adventure films deal with this subject—professionals in dangerous situations: The Dawn Patrol (war), Only Angels Have Wings (primitive flying), To Have and Have Not (foreign intrigue), The Big Sleep (private detective), Red River (cattle drive), etc. On the other hand, Hawks’ comedies put the pros into ridiculous situations: Bringing up Baby (paleontologist), His Girl Friday (newspaper reporters), Ball of Fire (encyclopedists), I Was a Male War Bride (Army), Monkey Business (chemists).

Amazingly, although he worked in virtually every genre (even musicals, with professional gold diggers in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Hawks has every bit as consistently personal a body of work as Hitchcock, who basically worked in only one genre. It’s no coincidence that when the French revolutionized cinema with their 1950’s politique des auteurs (mistranslated here as “the auteur theory”), they became known as “the Hitchcocko-Hawksians,” because their primary examples of serious artists working deep within the Hollywood system were these two essentially antipodean picturemakers: the voyeur and the adventurer.

Hawks himself was very much like the men in his movies—as a youngster, he built racing cars and drove them, and was a flier when flying was new. He had a dark sense of humor, and was a loner. “The Gray Fox of Hollywood,” he was called, and he talked and moved with the casual, laconic air of a Hemingway character, as unpretentious as he was sophisticated. He was a lethal ladies’ man, and his female characters are by now proverbial as “Hawksian women,” the no-nonsense lady, who can take it and dish it out with any guy—lean, sexy, aggressive, funny (with infinite variations): Louise Brooks (A Girl in Every Port), Carole Lombard (Twentieth Century), Frances Farmer (Come and Get It), Rita Hayworth (Only Angels Have Wings), Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday), Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep), Angie Dickinson (Rio Bravo). Several of these women he introduced to the screen.

Talking about the most archetypal example—Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not—Hawks once told me that when he had shown this picture to Marlene Dietrich, her response to him afterward was, “You son of a bitch—that’s me, isn’t it?” And he answered, Yes, and that in a few years he would do the same thing with another woman. As he did a decade and a half later, with Angie Dickinson. But his goal of creating an American Dietrich—which took root right after Josef von Sternberg and Dietrich first collaborated on The Blue Angel and Morocco (both 1930)—didn’t reach perfection until his first movie with Bacall. He succeeded just as well, in a softer tone, with Angie.

She even has a couple of the same gambits with Wayne in Rio Bravo as Bacall did with Bogart in To Have and Have Not. The second kiss with Bogie, and Bacall says, “It’s even better when you help”; the second kiss with Wayne, and Angie says, “It’s better when two people do it.” Exasperation at the man’s reluctance to commit: Bacall says, “I’m hard to get, Steve. All you have to do is ask”; Angie says, “I’m hard to get, John T. You’re gonna have to say you want me.” Hawks had no compunction about stealing from himself. He gives to Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo a nose-rubbing habit that was used by both Wayne and Montgomery Clift (as his surrogate son) in Red River. If it worked once, he would say blithely, why not do it again? He didn’t mind stealing from others either, if it would fit into his view of the world.

Equally Hawksian is the theme of friendship among men in hazardous occupations. There is usually the strong guy-weaker pal relationship, on which Hawks plays complicated variations: in Only Angels Have Wings, it’s Cary Grant and Thomas Mitchell (older, losing his sight); in To Have and Have Not, it’s Bogart and Walter Brennan (older, a drunk); in Rio Bravo, it’s Wayne and both Dean Martin (younger, but a drunk) and Brennan (older, a cripple).

In fact, Rio Bravo contains some of Hawks’ most sensitive and complex work in this interplay between the male characters. Hawks told me: “At one point Wayne said to me, ‘Hey, Martin gets all the fireworks, doesn’t he’? I said, ‘That’s right.’ ‘What do I do?’ I said, ‘What would happen to you if your best friend had been a drunk and he was trying to come back—wouldn’t you watch him?’ He said, ‘O.K., I know what to do.’” Hawks went on to explain: “The crux of Rio Bravo is not Wayne; it is Dean Martin’s story—everything happens because of the drunk. It happened at the beginning of the story, and it happened all the way through it. Of course, it becomes a great part for Wayne because he’s going through all these things because of friendship. He’s wondering how good this man is, whether he’s ruined or is going to come out all right. You watch a man develop and end up well, and the friend is glad for it.”

Wayne used to say that he was noted for action, but that his work was “more about reaction,” and Rio Bravo contains some of his most telling and subtle reactions, and not only visual ones, though he was superb in silent close-ups. But besides being sheriff, his character is the moral conscience of the picture. And he tells both Brennan and Martin quite forthrightly when he doesn’t approve of their behavior, or anyone else. Typically for Hawks, Wayne’s character is only wrong when it comes to understanding the woman. Which leads to some of Wayne’s most human, and funniest, reactions.

After an unparalleled streak of 11 straight successes—from 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings to 1951’s The Thing—Hawks made three films that didn’t work, and he decided to take some time off. For three years, he reflected on “the way we used to make pictures,” and caught up with a new medium he’d been too busy to examine: television. He noticed that on TV series what brought audiences back week after week was not the plots but the characters, not the stories so much as the people. So he decided to make a picture in which the plot was simply a token and the characters were essential. Thereby echoing Thomas Hardy’s dictum: “Character is plot.”

The result was Rio Bravo—the shortest two-hour-and-21-minute movie ever made—with the shortest plot line: sheriff must keep a rich man’s brother in jail for murder until the U.S. Marshal can arrive. Yet to describe the numerous characters’ layered and evolving relationships would require considerable time. Just see the movie: The people are constantly surprising, and Hawks frequently subverts our thinking about them, revealing them in shifting lights that deepen and enrich their humanity.

The way the film is directed and nuanced reminds me of Orson Welles’ answer to my request that he compare John Ford and Howard Hawks. He said, “Hawks is great prose, but Ford is poetry.” However, Hawks’ “great prose” fairs better with modern audiences, and it is astonishing how many of his films don’t date at all and remain enormously entertaining, even after repeated viewings. There are a number of Hawks pictures that, should I come upon them on TV, I find virtually impossible to switch off. Rio Bravo is certainly one of them, but it’s lengthy, so I keep telling myself I’ll just watch the next scene, right through to the end.

The opening sequence of the film is an extraordinary example of concise and evocative picturemaking, setting up the central plot of the movie as well as the conflicts in the central relationship (Wayne-Martin) without even one line of dialogue. It is a triumph of silent storytelling, harking back to Hawks’ childhood, apprenticeship, training and his first 11 years in pictures, four of them as a director. I once asked if he wasn’t in this initial sequence “going back to the essence of what a movie is,” and he nodded, “Yes, getting back.” A flawless use of camera placement, size of image and expressive juxtaposition to convey story and character—relying more on behavior than words—it is classic moviemaking, with a vocabulary and grammar that has not been improved upon. Indeed, concision and visual elaboration of people in movies seem to have atrophied over the years.

It is also an excellent example of the shorthand power of the original star system. A sheriff’s badge on his vest tells us all we need to know about John Wayne’s position in the story; the actor’s established persona fills in the rest. Just as the pop myth you got with Dean Martin, his being a drunk (which he actually wasn’t)—you didn’t need further convincing after a shot of him dressed like a bum and eyeing a drink. Part of the glory of the movie are the rich variations Hawks plays on the stars’ given personas. In fact, when I first saw the movie (just before its premiere in March 1959) my first written reaction—this was before I knew anything about Hawks—was for an Ivy College magazine in which I essentially said the film was like an enthralling, comfortable evening with “old friends.”

Soon after that, I found out that Hawks had directed two of my favorite films when I was a 10-year-old (also favorites of my parents, who had first taken me to see them): Red River and I Was a Male War Bride. It turned out he had also directed another family favorite: Sergeant York, the only film for which he got a directing Oscar nomination. All this coincided with my becoming friendly with two American French-influenced “auteurists”—Andrew Sarris and Eugene Archer (then the fourth-string film critic for The New York Times)—who were full of admiration for, and erudition on, Howard Hawks.

Because I wanted so badly to see every picture Hawks had directed, I devised a plan to get Paramount to pay for a Hawks retrospective (the first in America) at the Museum of Modern Art, in conjunction with the 1962 release of Hawks’ latest film, Hatari! (also with John Wayne). “The Cinema of Howard Hawks” became a monograph I wrote—featuring my first interview with Hawks—as well as the name of the Museum’s complete, six-month retrospective. By then, Scarface, Twentieth Century, Bringing up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep had joined the others as favorites of mine. They still are.

Recently, when Warners sent me this deluxe edition of Rio Bravo (they interviewed me for the DVD featurette, which also has Hawks’ voice from our interviews together), I figured to just look at the opening and see how the print was (it’s exceptional). Naturally, I watched the whole thing. And this experience was the most completely engrossing and emotional of my life with this almost 50-year-old work. By now, of course, the film had reverberations particular to me: I had known Hawks pretty well and loved him, and Wayne a bit, had met Martin and Dickinson. But, most important, I had grown up with the movie, and it had only deepened with age—its own and mine. What I think moved me most, apart from the humanity Hawks explores with such generosity, is the simplicity of gesture, the easy invisibility of the craft behind the art of golden age picturemaking that the film so beautifully embodies.

All four of these-separately, and together even more so-help to make things funnier: Physical comedy, as opposed to verbal, is the belly-laugh kind and can be truly unrelenting since there's no waiting for the next line to be heard, and laughter is infectious, building on itself. Black and white intensifies comedy because there are no distractions-such as the color of grass and flowers, the color of eyes, hair and skin, the colors of costumes and sets-nothing takes your absolute concentration away from what's funny. Seeing things bigger makes them clearer, and clearer is funnier. Freedom of movement means the whole world. Keaton's priceless comedies-the shorts and features he supervised and starred in between 1920 and 1928, the last year of silent pictures-are my own personal favorites from this glorious era. "Keaton was beyond all praise," Orson Welles said to me years ago, "a very great artist, and one of the most beautiful men I ever saw on the screen. He was also a superb director. In the last analysis, nobody came near him … I wish I'd known him better than I did. A tremendously nice person, you know, but also a man of secrets. I can't even imagine what they were."

After a score of superb two- and three-reelers, and a clever three-part feature ( The Three Ages ), Keaton's first full-length comedy was Our Hospitality , and it happens to have been the first Keaton film I saw after starting my movie card-file when I was 12 1¼2, and I dismissed it as "pretty dated." By the time I saw it again 17 years later, I had changed my view radically, giving it my highest rating: "A magnificent comedy set in the 1830's … one of Keaton's most breathtaking; exhaustingly funny-great atmosphere, sense of period, pacing, mood. A low-key masterpiece by the greatest silent director of them all." Seen again today, this lesser-known Keaton work, shot on real locations near Lake Tahoe, Nev., is certainly among his most lovely, and very typical of him in the mordantly witty and ironic slant of its humor. Taking the infamous, generations-old Hatfield-McCoy family feud as plot and making Buster the innocent target has an amazingly layered set of reverberations, repeatedly exposing the absurdity of blind hatred and blind vengeance. He also has a field day spoofing a primitive early train, and pulls off one of his most spectacular stunts, saving the girl (first wife Natalie Talmadge) from going over the waterfall. C.B. De Mille stole the whole sequence for one of his epic dramas, Unconquered (1947), but even De Mille and Gary Cooper couldn't touch Buster's one-shot marvel.

In his next (very short but intense) feature, Sherlock Jr. , Buster plays a small-town movie projectionist who hopes to become a great detective, and, in one of the most amazing (and famous) sequences in silent cinema, Buster dreams himself right into the picture he's projecting. The special effects he pulled off in that scene would be a piece of cake in today's computer-generated fun-house movies, but Keaton's achievement remains a delightful triumph of audacious craft. This isn't the funniest of the 10 golden features Keaton created, but it is certainly the most dazzling in its virtuosity. Seventy-seven years after Buster made these two profoundly American movies-as American as Mark Twain-they are still like intoxicating gusts of fresh spring air.

Our Hospitality . Directors: Buster Keaton, John G. Blystone. Cast: Keaton, Natalie Talmadge. Length: 75 minutes.

Sherlock Jr. Director: Buster Keaton. Cast: Keaton, Kathryn McGuire. Length: 44 minutes. Both features included on Kino Video DVD: $29.95.

Withsoft-focusdexterity,Borzage (pronounced Bor- zay -gie) guides the piece from light-comedy romance-betweena high-class Par-isianmaîtred'andanunhappily

married American lady-into deep-dish melodrama, as the woman desperately tries to get away from her maniacally possessive husband. As usual with Borzage, it is the complete sincerity of his belief in true love as having the power to triumph overeverything,includingdeath

and probability, that helps give the picture such charm and intensity. Equally responsible is the extraordinarily personable quality of the two stars. History Is Made at Night was one of Charles Boyer's first successes, released the year before he became enshrined in every impersonator's act with the line, "Come wiz me to ze Casbah," which Boyer (as Pepe le Moko) sort of said in 1938's Algiers . (His persona also inspired Chuck Jones' amorouscartoonskunk,PepelePew.) After this, Boyer's superb performances in popular pictures like Leo McCarey's comedy-drama LoveAffair ,orJohn Stahl's weepy When Tomorrow Comes , propelled the Frenchman to the upper ranks of American stardom. In 1944, he was nominated for the best actor Oscar for his brilliant portrayal of a suave murderer in George Cukor's suspenseful Gaslight . Working almost continually until his suicide in 1978 at age 81-two days after the death of his beloved wife-Boyer appeared in at least two other masterworks: Ernst Lubitsch's final romantic comedy, Cluny Brown , and perhaps Max Ophuls' greatest achievement, the tragic love story Madame de …

John Ford was not only the first to cast Jean Arthur in a movie (1923's Cameo Kirby ), but the first to cast her in the kind ofgirl-next-door,light-comedyrole (1935's The Whole Town's Talking ) she would play throughout most of her subsequent career. By the time she did History Is Made at Night , Frank Capra had made her his archetypal heroine in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town , solidifying the image with his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington . Her raspy voice became as famous as Boyer's deep-toned French accent. She was Oscar-nominated asbestactressforGeorgeStevens' war-time comedy The More the Merrier , andconcludedherpicturecareer

in Stevens' acclaimed 1953 Western, Shane .

FrankBorzage(1893-1962)

reached the peak of his prestige at the transition from silent to sound with two Academy Awardsasbestdirector:foroneof movies' most popular love stories, Seventh Heaven (1927), and for the early talkie, Bad Girl (1931). Beginning his career as an actor at age 13, he was directing a decade later, making his first important film at age 27 with Humoresque (1920)-a romance, of course. Although Borzage continued working until the late 1950's, his most valuable sound decade was the 1930's, which included his emotional version of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms with Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, the Depression-era classic Man's Castle with Spen-cer Tracy and Loretta Young, the

Lubitsch-produced romantic comedy Desire with Cooper and Marlene

Dietrich, and his last successful romance classic, The Mortal Storm , with Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart. If any one title could represent the ardent, passionate world of Bor-zage, it's either History Is Made at Night or Seventh Heaven -that special place reserved only for lovers.

Chris Kattan was nowhere to be seen during the Oct. 23 episode of Saturday Night Live . That made sense, since the show was hosted by Norm Macdonald.

Apparently, Mr. Macdonald and Mr. Kattan hate each other.

In November 1997, Mr. Macdonald talked about his feelings toward Mr. Kattan in an interview with Rolling Stone : "I don't know, but to me he seems gay," said Mr. Macdonald. "He claims he's not, but I've never seen, like, a guy who's not gay seem so gay. I don't find him funny. What can I say? Never made me laugh."

In the same article, Mr. Kattan responded: "Norm gives me a hard time … If Norm says I'm gay, then put in that I say he's an asshole."

While the in-print bickering made for good copy, people who were around Saturday Night Live when both Mr. Macdonald and Mr. Kattan were cast members said it carried over into the show. "They had a very acrimonious relationship," said a source connected to SNL . "Norm would rip [Mr. Kattan] to his face. Norm's a weird guy. If he doesn't like someone, he'll say it to his face."

In turn, Mr. Kattan was known to badger Mr. Macdonald even just minutes before airtime. So is their mutual dislike for each other responsible for Mr. Kattan's absence during the Oct. 23 show? An SNL publicist said it just so happened that Mr. Macdonald and Mr. Kattan were set to appear in a sketch that was killed after dress rehearsal, which is not uncommon.

Sources inside SNL said that's true, but didn't count out strained relations as a reason for it. Indeed, during the SNL sketch meeting earlier that week, Mr. Kattan and Mr. Macdonald were sniping at each other across the table, according to a source close to the show. But a source who was in the room said that what was going on between the two men wasn't quite sniping.

"I would say it's good-natured ribbing," said the source. "But they have very different styles, and what happens a lot is that when someone has a different style from the host, it's hard for them to get in the show. They did start working on something together when it became clear Chris didn't have anything going." Still, another SNL source said Mr. Kattan was not surprised he didn't make the cut. "After the show he was like, 'I knew this was going to be a tough week,'" said the source. Neither Mr. Kattan nor Mr. Macdonald responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Kattan has seemed to find his groove on the show since Mr. Macdonald was exiled by former NBC West Coast boss Don Ohlmeyer a year and a half ago. He used to play the monkey man who licked people and a head-bobbing Roxbury Guy, both of which only went so far. Lately he has been getting big laughs as one-half (with Cheri Oteri) of the kinky married couple and as Mango, the exotic dancer who is infinitely attractive to both men and women. Even Garth Brooks has taken part in a Mango sketch, pledging his love to the ambisexual, leopard-print-wearing maniac. If SNL 's producers had a little more guts, they would have forced Mr. Macdonald to do penance for his remarks by doing a love scene with the man he thinks of as gay. I mean, right? Tonight on the SNL repeat, Dana Carvey and Edie Brickell. [Comedy Central, 45, 6 P.M.]

On Thursday, Oct. 14, Geraldine Laybourne went before her staff at Oxygen Media Inc. to give them a little pep talk. The gist of the meeting was that the embryonic Internet-cable women's network-which is scheduled to launch on TV Feb. 2-is in great shape and that the money is still pouring in.

But soon enough, on Thursday, Oct. 21, a key afternoon program block, called "ka-ching," was essentially canceled. Instead of accounting for 90 minutes of daytime programming, "ka-ching" segments will be folded into a two-hour prime-time program block called "Pure Oxygen." The reason given: there just isn't enough money to pay for everything the network had been planning.

The news sent a chill through the Oxygen staff. First of all, "ka-ching" has been billed as one of Oxygen's premier afternoon programming blocks with a user-friendly bent. It was to offer up features on the stock market, careers, small business and personal finance for women who are intimidated by financial matters and aren't served by shows like CNBC's Business Center .

"Everybody was pretty surprised, and it makes me wonder, 'How is Oxygen different from other companies?'" said one member of Oxygen's staff, enamored of the company's supposedly feminine-feminist way of doing business. "But I'm still a believer, I'm still buying into the whole thing. I mean, is there a good way to do something like that?" A spokesman for Oxygen said these things happen with a startup and refused to go into the internal politics of the company. [CNBC, 15 , 6:30 P.M.]

Thursday, Oct. 28

Bob Costas likes to think of himself as more than just a play-by-play man. To realize that, all you have to do is think back to his old stint on NBC's Later , where he interviewed everyone from Jimmy Breslin to Charlie Watts. So he's finishing up a deal with HBO to produce a new sports interview show à la Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel . Reached at his office just before the start of the World Series, Mr. Costas said he couldn't really talk about his HBO discussions.

NYTV had other matters to discuss with him anyway: like, how does he feel about having to interrupt the flow of the tense postseason games to do hucksterish voice-over promos for various NBC products like Third Watch and The Magical Legend of the Leprechauns ?

"I accept what the realities of television are," he said. "I think the pressure to promote or the need to promote is everywhere. It's a dogfight. There's obviously more cable outlets and other networks springing up, and the audience is divided into fractions as never before, and everyone is trying as best they can." What a pro!

Mr. Costas is scheduled to take the air for Game 5 of the World Series tonight. If the Yankees have swept the series by then, you can watch Friends (who are friends off camera as well!). [WNBC, 4, 8 P.M.]

Friday, Oct. 29

The new television season is more than a month old. The Big Four networks-CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox-have lost another 6 percent of their share of the prime-time audience compared to the same period last year. In all, they now draw about 54 million households nightly.

So the ad firms that buy network advertising time for their corporate clients are going over the Nielsen ratings for the new fall shows to see where they're getting a smaller bang for their buck than expected. J. Walter Thompson's head researcher, David Marans, completed his analysis Oct. 22 and shared his views with NYTV. "All right, here's what's not working," Mr. Marans began. "Certainly Wasteland . Kevin Williamson [creator of Dawson's Creek ] went to work at ABC in an effort to be a little WB-oriented-hated it! That's what the American public is saying. On NBC, the numbers may look good on the surface for Stark Raving Mad , but the public is indifferent and turning away during that half-hour. On Fox, what's not working is Get Real , Action , Ryan Caulfield: Year One , Harsh Realm . Fox is trying a lot of edgy stuff, and the heavy viewers who really control TV are saying, 'No, thank you.' The stuff may be too different for them."

A couple of days after that interview, Harsh Realm and Ryan Caulfield: Year One were canceled. On the plus side in television land, dramas seem to be doing O.K.: CBS is hitting big with Judging Amy (15.6 million households) and Family Law (13.6 million). NBC is holding pretty steady with West Wing (12.4 million) and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (13.7 million)-though its Cold Feet is flagging a bit (5.1 million). ABC is holding its own, though barely, with Once and Again (10.3 million).

Tonight on Cold Feet , things get weird because of one of a female cast member's past loves. [WNBC, 4, 10 P.M.]

Saturday, Oct. 30

You have to give Howard Stern credit for going on the air on Monday, Oct. 25, and explaining his separation from his wife, Alison, right after the news hit the papers. But a day later, when Mr. Stern had a young woman prancing around his studio in a bikini, things felt different.

In the past you could have said that his lecherous ways were shtick because he was faithfully married. There was a barrier between him and the women in his studio, which made the situation inherently dramatic and interesting. With each new woman who was willing to strip for him, the audience could listen (or watch, on E!) as the host tried desperately to resist temptation. Now, what's the problem? Mr. Stern could actually take these women home guilt-free. That's pretty creepy. Then again, no one has a better sense for his audience than Mr. Stern, so it will be interesting to see how he redeems himself. Catch the old Howard tonight on The Howard Stern Radio Show with guests Tom Arnold and David Wells. [WCBS, 2, 11:30 P.M.]

Sunday, Oct. 31

It's Halloween. Watch Buried Alive . A dead guy comes to back to life for revenge on the wife who killed him. [WWOR, 9, 8 P.M.]

Monday, Nov. 1

BNN, which produces documentary segments for all sorts of cable channels out of a loft on Park Avenue, held a forum on the future of television in the Internet age at Columbia University on Oct. 21, and network television was declared dead. Maybe that's why the best thing on TV tonight are Taxi reruns-four hours of them-on Nickelodeon. [Nickelodeon, 6, 9 P.M.]

Tuesday, Nov. 2

Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the executive producers of Once and Again , kept as low a profile as the smarter perps on NYPD Blue , as producer Steven Bochco took to the airwaves to complain about ABC's idea of keeping their show in the usual NYPD Blue time slot (an idea that eventually fell by the wayside). But Mr. Zwick, who co-created Thirtysomething , was privately grumbling about Mr. Bochco's charges that ABC was favoring Once and Again because its corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, has an ownership claim on the show. "Their appreciation of the show is based on its merits and on its performance," Mr. Zwick said. "I mean, indeed, they are part owners of the show. But this is by no means a wholly owned ABC show. So that conspiratorial angle, um, ah, although it may have some influence in decisions, it's by no means overriding."

But Mr. Zwick said there are no hard feelings between himself and Mr. Bochco.

"We're all grown-ups," Mr. Zwick said. "We've all been on both ends of these situations, more than once. We know how the world works, and Steven does, too."

Tonight on Once and Again , starring Sela Ward and Billy Campbell, Eli plays in a baseball tournament and is certain to head home in an S.U.V. [WABC, 7, 10 P.M.]

Home Movie With Peter Bogdanovich

Judy Garland's first nonmusical role as an adult was the second picture in a row directed by Vincente Minnelli, after their popular turn-of-the-century color musical Meet Me in St. Louis . It was released the same year he became her first husband, a year before their daughter Liza Minnelli was born. Co-starring one of the 1940's most likable, charming juvenile leads, Robert Walker, as a World War II Army corporal on 48-hour leave in New York City, the now little-known black-and-white film is a truly delightful, touching love story-1945's somewhat fable-like The Clock [Monday, Nov. 1, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 4 P.M.; also on videocassette] .

The title has several meanings, its most literal being the large circular clock in Manhattan's legendary Grand Central Terminal, where the two lovers first meet by chance, its fateful randomness emphasized by the huge and overcrowded setting. The Grand Central clock is also where the lovers find each other again, after losing touch in another crowd, in what is probably the picture's most moving romantic sequence. An even larger clock-reference points to the young soldier's time on furlough being strictly limited to two short days. Yet what a lifetime passes in those brief hours-bringing irony to the title-since time is nowhere more relative than in affairs of the heart.

With a tight script by novelist Robert Nathan and Joseph Schrank, luminously shot by veteran cinematographer George Folsey, the movie features terrific performances not only from the two stars but from such brilliant character actors as lovable New York-accented James Gleason doing a philosophical milkman, and Keenan Wynn as a happy drunk. Producer-lyricist Arthur Freed-whose unit became famous for making all the best M-G-M musicals-did very few dramas, this being his first, as it was Minnelli's. (In fact, while The Clock was Garland's 20th feature, it was only the director's fifth.)

But Minnelli displays immediate flair for a kind of heightened realism, with gentle, yet firm control over an episodic structure, memorable in later work like The Bad and the Beautiful and Some Came Running . As superb as Garland is in The Clock , at age 22, it's sad realizing she did no other dramatic work until nearly a decade later in A Star Is Born , then three more mature dramatic performances and her career was over.

All of which makes The Clock even more precious, one of a kind, a moment in the country's history as well as in the movies', intersecting to create a powerfully nostalgic event: Judy Garland and Robert Walker as two archetypally average, innocent American kids, caught in a time of war, brought together by a love that promises not only vibrant hope but a kind of immortality. That Minnelli and Garland were probably at their happiest as a couple here also contributes to the charged magical atmosphere the picture communicates. The husband and wife worked together again on three of Garland's next four films- Ziegfeld Follies , Till the Clouds Roll By and The Pirate -their last pairing an often-appealing Gene Kelly-Cole Porter musical, though not a success. They were divorced in 1951, but remained friendly till her lamentable death 18 years later at 47.

Tragically, also in 1951, Robert Walker died at 32; neither before nor after The Clock did he land nearly as good a role or director-until just before his death when Alfred Hitchcock cast him as the enormously personable psychopathic murderer in his suspense classic Strangers on a Train . Walker gave a striking, extraordinarily layered performance, among the best in all Hitchcock's work. The actor had just about finished another complex portrayal in Leo McCarey's deeply flawed My Son John when a sudden heart attack killed him. The Clock , then, is the romantic pinnacle in the careers of three of Hollywood's most talented and valuable artists, only one of whom lived to achieve his potential.

Oprah Winfrey has already signed up for duty. Candice Bergen is ready to go. Deborah Tannen is aboard. Meryl Streep is on her way. Welcome to Oxygen.

"You can just feel the estrogen in the air," said a female Internet entrepreneur who has been talking with executives of Oxygen Media Inc. about a deal. "It's just so many women working there–it's like being in that Star Trek episode."

Queen of this multimedia castle in Chelsea is Geraldine Laybourne, 52, the 20th most powerful woman, according to Fortune magazine. Ms. Laybourne made Nickelodeon what it is. After a stint at the man's world of ABC, where she seemed to lose her way for a while, she's back in charge, with money to play with from America Online Inc. and Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures Inc.

Ms. Laybourne has put together $400 million for programming–part of which will come from the minds of Ms. Winfrey (the 26th most powerful woman, says Fortune ) and the production team of Carsey-Werner-Mandabach ( Roseanne , Cybill )–and her network already employs 250 people.

Ms. Laybourne refers to her new undertaking as something that heralds nothing less than a new age for women. "Over the last 100 years, women completely redefined themselves," she said in a speech available via the Oxygen Web site. "And in a world where women had to operate under men's terms. Imagine what we could do if it were our natural habitat."

Caryn Mandabach, in an on-line chat, tried to explain the Oxygen ethos: "It's about not being afraid to be who you want to be. It's about being as fun-loving and courageous and rowdy and bold as you want to be."

In a public on-line chat with her Oxygen partner, Ms. Winfrey addressed Ms. Laybourne directly: "You said you wanted to create a network for women that was about intent and service. I got chills."

Some on Wall Street are getting chills thinking about the possible profits, in a time when anything with a dot-com attached to it means instant money. "The important point here is to recognize that Gerry is an extraordinary programming executive, Marcy Carsey has some of the most extraordinary talent as a producer, and Oprah Winfrey is an entity to herself," said Chris Dixon, media analyst for Paine Webber. "There is every indication that this can be a clearly viable platform."

AT&T-Media One and TCI have signed up to carry Oxygen on their cable systems, which will give it a reach of roughly 10 million households when it makes its TV debut on Feb. 2, 2000. In New York, the main cable carrier, Time Warner, has only recently shelved plans for a women's cable network of its own and has not yet made room on its dial for Oxygen.

The Oxygen Web site, already up and running, is being redesigned for an Oct. 25 relaunch. So far, its content does not differ all that much from what's in Marie Claire or Glamour . It's useful stuff, with a subtext of "You go, girl."

In an Oct. 6 New York Times Op-Ed article about being a good boss, Ms. Laybourne explained how she has created that natural habitat since her days running Nickelodeon: "Once I was made president of the network, I got a big corner office. But we all agreed we needed to be connected in this adventure, and I put my desk in the open, behind the receptionist. At one point, one of my employees pointed out that there were too many meetings going on. We were taking ourselves too seriously. So we instituted recess. Every day at 3 p.m., everyone had to be out mingling in the hallways. We had buckets of plastic goop that people could play with in meetings."

She also wrote about how she listens to everyone: "I also had the notion that ideas could come from anyone, no matter what their job description. The first show we created– Double Dare –was invented by our receptionist and two on-air promotion producers."

When the Times piece hit, executives who have worked with Ms. Laybourne started calling each other for a laugh, saying that their old boss had begun to believe her own press, of which there has been plenty, and all of it glowing. But what's not to like? With primarily a teaching background, Ms. Laybourne, a Vassar graduate, daughter of a stockbroker and radio soap star and mother of two, pitched a show to the struggling Nickelodeon network with her husband, Kit Laybourne–Oxygen's creative director–about children's dreams. It was picked up, and Ms. Laybourne eventually took the network over and made it the No. 1-rated cable channel.

Still, her comments in The Times about her own management techniques drew chuckles from old colleagues. "Everyone who has been there, I'm sure, was sitting there smiling, because you think to yourself, 'This is the fairy tale version,'" said an executive who worked with Ms. Laybourne. "I read the article and I thought to myself, you know, this is George Orwell, this is like a pen name. The recess thing was funny. It was like, do people really want it? Yeah, people were hiding in their offices. It lasted a week, and it was over. I've always believed she is well intentioned, but she's essentially an icebox."

Said one of Ms. Laybourne's former subordinates, "Gerry put her office out in the open. Great concept, you know? A few months into the reality, she moved her office into the conference room. But it's like she's a rock star, she just gets this enormous amount of attention."

Among the big Oxygen hires are Roni Selig, who helped develop The View for ABC and served as executive producer for The Rosie O'Donnell Show ; Linda Corradina, formerly executive producer of MTV's House of Style ; and Cheryl Mills, the White House's deputy counsel who defended President Clinton during last winter's impeachment hearings–she'll be covering public policy as well as the legal and political beats for the network.

In the mornings, there will be a yoga show called Inhale . In the afternoon, there will be a financial show, Ka-ching , for women who are novices in the stock market. At night, Candice Bergen will host an interview show, Exhale .

The evenings will offer a comedy block, featuring a sketch show–which will include Ms. Laybourne's daughter, Emmy, 27, as a cast member–and a collection of animated shorts called X-Chromosome . Former David Letterman producer Robert Morton is helping recruit talent and work up ideas.

A few executives have already left Oxygen, feeling that the shows now in preproduction won't live up to the hype. "The picks are predictable," said one. "First of all, is there a need for a women's channel like this? I'm not so sure there is. Would I stop everything to watch Candice Bergen or Oprah? I wouldn't."

But women working there said they can indeed produce shows that wouldn't fly elsewhere. Prudence Fenton, who ran Pee-Wee's Playhouse and did the remarkable animation for Peter Gabriel's "Steam" and "Big Time" music videos, is creating an animated show for Oxygen about a fat woman who is completely confident despite her weight.

"Oxygen really wants to make it a place for women and also give women the opportunity to express themselves in a way that's really not possible in network television," said Ms. Fenton. "For instance, Lifetime doesn't seem willing to take any kind of risk unless the man is the bad guy, and he rapes you and takes all your money."

Likewise, Theresa Duncan, who's producing shorts that use animation to illustrate women's fashion stories, said she sees it as a chance to offer up something a little bit different than she sees elsewhere. "Think about Sex and the City . It's about husband-hunting single girls loose in the city," she said. "They're supposedly liberated, but it gives me the creeps that they're considered this new type of feminist. Oxygen is giving me the opportunity to show that it is not my experience of the world and men, it's not what I'm after in life."

Wednesday, Oct. 20

For strong female characters tonight, catch The Powerpuff Girls . [Cartoon Network, 22, 8 P.M.]

Thursday, Oct. 21

Wasteland : Will Dawnie, 26, ever lose her virginity? Not till sweeps, not till sweeps. [WABC, 7, 9 P.M.]

Friday, Oct. 22

Alan Ball should be living the good life right about now.

The first movie he wrote, American Beauty , is being hailed as a certain Oscar winner and has won rave reviews. But Mr. Ball has not been able to savor his success. His other project, the new ABC sitcom Oh Grow Up –about three male roommates living in Brooklyn (one gay, two straight)–is getting slammed. Entertainment Weekly 's bottom line on the show: "Suggested alternate title: Oh Shut Up ." The Los Angeles Times ' take: "This is one show that should take its title more seriously."

Meanwhile, the sitcom's not doing so great in the ratings department, either. On Wednesday, Oct. 13, it came in third place, with about 8 million households, behind West Wing , with more than 10 million, and the CBS Wednesday movie, Lethal Vows , starring John Ritter, with more than 9 million.

All this has left Mr. Ball–who has written for Cybill and Grace Under Fire –a bit stressed when it comes to dealing with his new bosses at ABC. "It's just–you don't know!" he said. "The paranoid fantasies in my mind take over that there's some unseen person over there who really doesn't like the show, which is a paranoid rant."

Certainly, Mr. Ball said, he has gotten his share of "notes" from network programmers. "We get a lot of notes: The jokes are too harsh, the characters are too mean to each other," he said. "But they've been really on board and really helpful on the show and, hopefully, they'll stick with it."

Mr. Ball said he's confused by all this since he likes his sitcom as much as his movie.

He should find out whether his show will make it or not within the next couple of weeks, when the network has to say whether it wants to picks up nine more episodes.

Catch some of Mr. Ball's early work late night, tonight, on Grace Under Fire , when Grace becomes wary of her sister's assistance. [WNYW, 5, 2:30 A.M.]

Saturday, Oct. 23

The Philadelphia Story , with Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. What more do you need? [WNET, 13, 9 P.M.]

Sunday, Oct. 24

The CBS movie, The Soul Collector , should be a pretty good bet during commercials if you're watching the World Series on Channel 4. It's about a wayward guide to the afterlife who is stuck in actual human form for about a month, so he goes and hangs out with a rancher, played by Melissa Gilbert, and her family. [WCBS, 2, 9 P.M.]

Monday, Oct. 25

Urkel watch: Tonight on Grown-Ups , Jaleel White's character gets a promotion. [UPN, 9, 9 P.M.]

Tuesday, Oct. 26

Dean Ward is a film editor for the Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn . That's just his day job. He also produced a documentary about the Friars Club, using a bunch of bootlegged footage as well as fresh interviews with the old comics. It airs tonight on Cinemax and is called Let Me In, I Hear Laughter: A Salute to the Friars . Mr. Ward, 29, said he's always been fascinated by the Friars. "I guess I was sort of born too late," he said. [Cinemax, 33, 7 P.M.]

Home Movies With Peter Bogdanovich

Gary Cooper was the archetypal American long before either John Wayne or James Stewart moved into that spot, but he died relatively young 40 years ago, and the passionate fervor with which he was adored has been forgotten. His good looks combined with a little-boy innocence were like catnip for women: The word is that of all Hollywood players, Cooper had the highest score. His acting style was imitable but not emulative. Orson Welles told me he'd stood not more than three feet away from Coop while a close-up of the actor was being made. When he later saw the dailies, Welles was astonished by the subtle play of expression the camera had caught. "I swear I could see none of that from three feet away!" This was Cooper's mystery, and it made him a born picture star.

The year after Cooper won the Oscar and the New York Film Critics Award for best actor in Howard Hawks' memorable World War I biographic drama, Sergeant York , he appeared in as different a Hawks picture as could be: a wacky screwball comedy in which Cooper was equally good, 1942's delightful Ball of Fire [Friday, Oct. 22, American Movie Classics, 54, 1:30 p.m.; also on videocassette.] His co-star, at her brazen best, was Barbara Stanwyck (Oscar-nominated for it), with whom he had appeared the year before in Frank Capra's heavyweight Meet John Doe .

The Ball of Fire script developed from a Thomas Monroe and Billy Wilder story (also Oscar-nominated) that Wilder and Charles Brackett fashioned into an outline they sold to Samuel Goldwyn. The plot concerned a group of scholars cloistered together working on an encyclopedia, when one of them gets involved with a nightclub singer-gangster's moll. Goldwyn sent the outline to Hawks, who agreed to direct, saying he saw it as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . Indeed, Hawks treats the piece somewhat like a fable, and certainly this is the most leisurely and sentimental of Hawks' comedies. When I first saw Ball of Fire , I had just been looking at the director's other major comedies ( Twentieth Century , Bringing Up Baby , His Girl Friday ) and noted in my movie-card file: "Slightly restrained, a bit too 'tasteful,' Goldwyn-produced Hawks comedy about a scholarly encyclopedia-writer's pursuit of the meanings of slang, which leads him into romance and underworld intrigue with a boogie-woogie singer. Cooper, Stanwyck and the rest of the cast fall in easily with Hawks' style, but the picture doesn't have the darkly frenetic quality of his other comedies, and thus is not as effective or funny."

Yes, but–having realized that the number of even semi-terrific comedies with stars and directors of this caliber is finite– Ball of Fire now seems to me more precious. Also, the relatively relaxed pace of Ball of Fire is connected to Cooper's delivery, which could never have the speed of Hawks' other comedy stars, Cary Grant or John Barrymore. What's lost has been compensated for by other virtues: The high-voltage chemistry between Cooper and Stanwyck; an international group of charming, superb character-actors including S.Z. (Cuddles) Sakall, Oskar Homolka, Henry Travers, Richard Haydn and Leonid Kinsky; nice tough-gangster support from Dana Andrews and Dan Duryea an energetic appearance by drummer Gene Krupa; striking black-and-white photography, with extremely effective deep-focus groupings, done by the legendary Gregg Toland. Also, Ball of Fire is Gary Cooper's best comedy.

Andrew Paquette and James Hudnall are a couple of comic book geeks. In late 1998, it looked like they would finally hit it big. That's when Chris Carter, the TV genius behind The X-Files , began working up a new series based on their comic book, Harsh Realm , for Fox.

But now that the show has made its debut, the comic book kids are feeling ripped off.

Harsh Realm , a show about a virtual-reality world ruled by a renegade U.S. military dictator, premiered Friday, Oct. 8, to somewhat disappointing ratings. (Its 5.4 rating was the same as World's Most Shocking Moments the Friday before.) Mr. Paquette and Mr. Hudnall are receiving some royalties, but they're unhappy that they are not listed in the credits as the original creators. Only Mr. Carter was. So now they have a New York lawyer drafting a lawsuit to get them a more prominent credit and a bigger share of the money.

"He wouldn't have come up with this idea if it weren't for this comic book," said Mr. Hudnall in a phone interview from his Las Vegas home.

"Chris Carter is the biggest man in Hollywood," said Mr. Paquette, a Studio City, Calif.-based illustrator. "What does it hurt him to give us an honest, truthful credit?"

Mr. Paquette, 34, and Mr. Hudnall, 42, seem like guys Mr. Carter would want to help out. Both sci-fi and computer buffs, they're not all that different from the trio of misfit computer-whiz conspiracy theorists who often help agents Scully and Mulder in their X-Files adventures.

Mr. Hudnall conceived Harsh Realm in 1988 and sold Harris Publications on it in 1991. First published in 1992, it features a medieval fantasy world that has been created by a computer using quantum mechanics. The world is ruled by a tyrannical teenager whose worried parents send a private investigator after him. A friend of Mr. Carter's, Dan Sackheim, optioned Harsh Realm in 1996. Mr. Carter began to see Harsh Realm as a potential replacement for The X-Files and dispatched Fox lawyers to go buy it for him in the fall of 1998, Mr. Hudnall said.

Mr. Carter's Harsh Realm is significantly different from the comic. For starters, his Harsh Realm is a virtual-reality world resembling a post-apocalyptic modern city run by a renegade U.S. Army guy. The hero is a young hotshot soldier.

Mr. Carter wouldn't comment on the current situation, but he recently told Starlog magazine: "It's a big departure from the comic book idea. We've changed everything. The comic book does have a [virtual reality] component. But beyond that, we really haven't saved much."

If the suit actually materializes, it would be the second involving Mr. Carter and 20th Century Fox in three months. In August, X-Files star David Duchovny charged that the studio undersold X-Files syndication rights–costing him millions–and kept Mr. Carter quiet by offering him a sweetheart contract and a new series deal; the Duchovny suit, however, manages not to specifically name Mr. Carter, nor does it say whether the series deal in question was for Harsh Realm .

Accordingly, on Oct. 4, Mr. Hudnall and Mr. Paquette were told that, indeed, they would not get a screen credit, and Fox felt no legal obligation to give them one. It did agree to thank the publisher, Harris, in the end credits.

Ray Bragar, the lawyer employed by the comic book guys, said Harris improperly negotiated the Fox deal. Executives for Harris didn't comment. Fox studio executives had no comment.

Tonight, watch Mr. Duchovny in Ruby , with Danny Aiello as the Dallas nightclub impresario. [HBO, 32, 4:40 A.M.]

Thursday, Oct. 14

As NYTV reported earlier this month, Bob Zmuda's Andy Kaufman bio, Andy Kaufman Revealed! , has it that Kaufman was tricked by Dick Ebersol, the NBC sports chief who ran Saturday Night Live in the early 80's.

According to the book, Mr. Ebersol agreed to hold a telephone vote on whether Mr. Kaufman should be allowed to stay on the show. Kaufman understood that if he was voted down, his alter ego, Tony Clifton, would take his place. But after he was voted off the show, Mr. Ebersol would not return Kaufman's phone calls, Mr. Zmuda reports. But, Mr. Zmuda told NYTV, it's possible Mr. Kaufman kind of had it coming.

"When the time came when Lorne Michaels left and Ebersol came in to produce the show, he starts questioning Andy's material, and Andy is highly offended by this," Mr. Zmuda explained. "At the same time, I must say that Dick Ebersol is the guy that discovered Andy and put him on SNL , so it was kind of like, 'Hey, kid, I can make you, I can break you.' So maybe Andy disrespected the guy, and because of that the guy went, 'Well, fuck you, I'm the goddamned producer of this show.'"

But Mr. Ebersol tells an entirely different story. Tonight, on Headliners & Legends With Matt Lauer , Mr. Ebersol talks about the Kaufman situation and says he made it clear to the comedian that if they went ahead with the vote, it would have to stick. "This is what I kept preaching to him: There is a basic compact with the audience. When you do this, it can't be a joke," he said. "Andy lost, and I was devastated." [MSNBC, 43, 10 p.m.]

Friday, Oct. 15

First Fox was calling its new Philly cop show Ryan Caulfield . Then it changed the name to The Badlands . Now it's Ryan Caulfield: Year One , and it debuts tonight. [WNYW, 5, 8 P.M.]

Saturday, Oct. 16

On Pamela Anderson's post- Baywatch bodyguard show, V.I.P. , that zany Maxine (Angelle Brooks) invents something that is accidentally turned into a nuclear weapon. No worry, though, all the messy nuclear physics certainly will be boiled down into easily digestible terms. [WNYW, 5, 1 a.m.]

Sunday, Oct. 17

Larry David held a lunch with reporters on Oct. 7 to talk about his new one-hour HBO special and, wouldn't you know it, the caterers forgot to take his order. Typical.

"Boy, the service here isn't too good," Mr. David deadpanned as the reporters began receiving their appetizers and he sat behind an empty table setting.

Even with a reported $242 million in the bank–making him No. 2 on the 1999 Forbes list of highest-earning entertainers–the Seinfeld co-creator somehow has held onto his downtrodden exterior. And the little things still get to him, though, he admits, not as much as they might have before the bonanza.

Mr. David is not much of a schmoozer. But his HBO special, called Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm , starts airing tonight, so he has to do the rounds. The show is a mock-umentary about Mr. David's return to the standup circuit. If it's well received, Mr. David said, he will consider doing it as a regular HBO series.

It has a Larry Sanders feel to it. In it, Mr. David shows that he really is the key guy behind Seinfeld . There's a lot of George Costanza in the Larry David character of the HBO special: He lies about sending flowers to a friend's mother's funeral, and he is easily slighted. There's a scene where he gets into a bitter feud with comedian Caroline Rhea because he mispronounces her name and then gets angry when she corrects him.

Sitting awkwardly at the table with reporters, Mr. David was asked if all the money and recognition has spoiled his act a bit.

"Maybe you lose a little hostility, either through age or money, but I don't know," he said. But then he remembered that he had earlier lost it on a television reporter who asked a dumb question. "So, yeah, I don't think so. I don't think it's changed my sense of humor in the least." Right. You don't have to be bitter to be annoyed. And Mr. David still gets damn annoyed. Take the recent time he went to dinner at a friend's friend's house: "We were on vacation and this guy we knew wanted to introduce my wife and I to his friends, and we came in and my friend said to the woman about me, 'He's the co-creator of Seinfeld ,' and the woman said, 'Never watch it, not a fan.' Out of respect to my friend, I didn't do anything, but I was steaming for about 20 minutes. I just wanted to get out of there."

That line pops up in the HBO special. And Mr. David is still smarting over the lackluster reviews his Seinfeld finale received. "I don't know what people could have expected from the finale that they didn't get," he said. Still, Mr. David, shleppy in a blue blazer and gray rugby shirt, white tennis sneakers and tube socks, was being treated like a world record holder. When the group kept pressing him on why no one has been able to match the success of Seinfeld , he groused, "I'm not an expert on television. I happened to run a show." [HBO, 32, 10 P.M.]

Monday, Oct. 18

Witness the return of Gonzo Gates in Safe Harbor , where Gregory Harrison plays a small-town sheriff whose wife mysteriously died. [WPIX, 11, 9 P.M.]

Tuesday, Oct. 19

It was just a year ago when Court TV seemed on its way out–a has-been network that would go the same way as any interest in O.J. Simpson. But third-quarter cable ratings show something amazing: the tiny cable channel, owned by Time Warner, Liberty Media and NBC, has crawled out of its hole, gaining 400 percent in the prime-time ratings. This past September, 170,000 households tuned into Court TV compared with 40,000 in September 1998. What happened? Court TV bought Homicide reruns, which lured viewers, most of them women, to other shows like Crime Stories . "That loud click you heard on Oct. 5, 1995 [the end of the O.J. trial], was most of the viewing public changing channels," said Gig Barton, head of Court TV's ad sales. "Now it's a really great place to be."

Tonight on Crime Stories : the plight of two black men wrongly sent to death row on murder charges. [Court TV, 40, 10 P.M.]

Home Movies With Peter Bogdanovich

The lives of most child stars unfortunately do not have happy endings. Why so many of them have to endure hell in later life has a lot to do with our ever-more-disposable society, the nature of American movie fame and each individual family taking such risks with their children. Bobby Driscoll was a favorite kid actor with audiences from 1946 through 1950, while the boy was ages 9 to 13. Because he was the first player to sign a long-term deal with Walt Disney's animation department, most of Driscoll's work was in family movies that today are somewhat dated ( So Dear to My Heart ) or politically incorrect ( Song of the South ); ones that combine animation with live action ( Melody Time ), and include Disney's first all live-action adventure, Treasure Island (with a memorable performance by Robert Newton as Long John Silver). But Bobby's biggest claim to immortality was also his best movie, the one for which the Academy voted him a Special Oscar as "the outstanding juvenile actor of 1949": among pictures' most fortuitous happy accidents, that little-known, modest but absolutely riveting New York thriller, The Window [Tuesday, Oct. 19, American Movie Classics, 54, 4:45 a.m.; also on videocassette] .

A picture my parents took me to see more than once in its original run, The Window was one we all liked a lot, my mother pointing out that it was essentially a modernized variation on the old cautionary fable about "the boy who cried wolf." Seven years later, I saw the movie again and noted in my movie-card file: "Breathlessly tense and suspenseful, superbly written and directed, brilliantly played–by Bobby Driscoll–thriller about a young boy who is a perpetual liar, the murder he really sees and his desperate attempts to make parents, police and neighbors believe him; only the killers do."

Tightly adapted from ace crime writer Cornell Woolrich's novel, The Boy Who Cried Murder , the film is the single most notable work in director Ted Tetzlaff's otherwise fairly undistinguished career. But as director of photography, Tetzlaff had been involved in numerous memorable pictures, from early Frank Capra through such favorites as My Man Godfrey , and one of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpieces, Notorious , shot only three years before The Window and clearly an inspiration in technique. Other valuable ingredients include typically fine understated work from the superb Arthur Kennedy, right around the time he won a Tony for his performance as Biff in the original production of Death of a Salesman ; Orson Welles veteran Paul Stewart as an inexorable heavy; two excellent women, Barbara Hale and Ruth Roman; and the gritty, sweaty feel of a lower East Side tenement neighborhood at the height of summer heat.

After The Window , Driscoll appeared in only three other pictures worth noting: as Jim Hawkins in the likable Treasure Island , as a boy coming of age in the charming, forgotten little movie The Happy Time and as the voice of Disney's animated Peter Pan . By then he was 16 and all washed up: Nobody wanted him anymore in pictures or TV. At 18, he did one little feature, then another three years later and that was it. As he turned 21, drugs began to take over his life. Arrested a few times for different things, he moved to New York when he was 28 and, three years later, in 1968, his body was discovered in a broken-down, abandoned tenement building not unlike the ones in The Window , dead from a heart attack at 31, buried as a John Doe in a pauper's grave. It wasn't until a year later that fingerprints proved the body to have been Bobby Driscoll's. Certainly the climax of his short career, The Window is the best way to remember him.

Doug Herzog was a cable king. He's the man who brought South Park and The Daily Show to Comedy Central, and The Real World and Unplugged to MTV. But now, in his first season as the chief programmer for Fox Broadcasting, Mr. Herzog is having a rough start as a network guy. His two big new shows, Action and Get Real , are getting lousy ratings, and the numbers for the Fox lineup as a whole are down 9 percent from the first week of the 1998 season.

Part of Mr. Herzog's mission at Fox was to bring viewers back from cable TV. Action and Get Real , in fact, are sophisticated, risqué shows that wouldn't be out of place on cable–but they're also drawing cablelike ratings, and therein lies the rub.

"I think it was the second week of Get Real when I picked up the phone to call the ratings line, as I now do every morning, and I just got that giant sense of dread," said Mr. Herzog, 40. "I was like, 'Here we go, welcome to what the next few years of my life are going to be like.' I feel like I got out here, and I was put under the microscope right away because I was the cable boy."

When Mr. Herzog–just a few months into his new job–unveiled his new fall schedule in New York last fall, it won raves from advertisers. He was offering up more new shows than anybody else–eight altogether. And with Action as his pièce de résistance , the Fox schedule had all the elements it seemed Rupert Murdoch's network needed to regain its momentum after seeing only one new program, That 70's Show , survive last year.

"Everyone really felt there was some creative things going on there, and bravo for them," said Stacy Lynn Koerner, vice president of broadcast research for TN Media, which buys network ad time on behalf of corporations. "I wouldn't count them out."

With South Park , The Sopranos and Sex and the City , cable seems to be where it's at now, and Peter Chernin, president of Fox Broadcasting, hired Mr. Herzog last January to bring some of that "it" quality to Fox, which seemed to be airing World's Wildest Police Chases in the wake of any real new hits. Advertisers tend not to like viewers who sit, clicker in hand, saying, "Dang, look at that dang police car go." Accordingly, acquiring Action was Mr. Herzog's first big move. Produced originally for HBO, Action was indeed ready-made for cable. The producer curses right into the camera. There's loads of sexual innuendo and behavior you don't see much on TV, like male-on-male oral sex. And it's done with single camera shots and no laugh track. But now Mr. Herzog is fast learning that network and cable are two different beasts.

"It's really hard, and it's nothing like cable. I tell people I used to run a boutique and now I run Bloomingdale's," he said. "A broadcast network, it's a different business, and you have to appeal to far many more people and far many more eyeballs than you can get away with in cable. You can get away in cable with doing the 'image' shows. If you were getting lackluster ratings for Action but all the great press that Action 's been getting, there's no way you could think about canceling it because it becomes an image show and it's playing to your brand. There is not that kind of room on the networks."

In its first week, Action came in third in its time slot, with 8.4 million viewers, compared with 18 million for NBC's Frasier . On Sept. 30, it had fallen to fifth place, behind UPN's WWF Smackdown! , with 5 million viewers. Likewise, Get

Real , about a dysfunctional family with a teenage son who brings girls over for sleepovers and a pre-adolescent one who often fantasizes about breasts, has flailed as well, ranking 89th the week of Sept. 27, with 5.3 million viewers.

Mr. Herzog pointed out that Fox has yet to roll out what could be big hits, like Time of Your Life , a Party of Five spinoff starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Malcolm in the Middle , a family sitcom about a kid who's part Bart Simpson and part genius. X-Files creator Chris Carter also has a new Fox show, Harsh Realm . And the network's biggest draws, like Ally McBeal and The X-Files , have yet to premier.

"We haven't really even gotten to bat yet and it's just sort of like, 'Oh my God, we're down five to nothing in the bottom of the first," Mr. Herzog said. "We got off to a slow start and it could be a tough year, but we have yet to put up our clean-up hitters." Fox has the baseball playoffs coming up, which allows Mr. Herzog to plug his shows. (But let's just hope that the "stars" of Fox sitcoms don't "happen" to be seated in box seats alongside the first base line this year, O.K.?)

Despite his rough start, Mr. Herzog did get some good news. That 70's Show , which was expected to tank this season, won its time slot among adults 18 to 49 on Tuesday, Sept. 28, at 8:30 P.M. , with 11.3 million viewers overall.

"A week ago, it was hard to believe we'd have any momentum with anything the way people were talking, and you get caught up in that shit," he said. "And that's what I'm trying not to do, is get caught up in it and sort of toe the line and stay the course."

Tonight on Fox, baseball. [WNYW, 5, 8 P.M.]

Thursday, Oct. 7

The Fox News Channel turned three years old on Oct. 7, and it looks as if the cable-TV toddler has finally found its footing. Ratings for Rupert Murdoch's alternative cable news channel have climbed significantly: up 44 percent from the third quarter of 1999 compared to the third quarter of 1998, with about 235,000 now watching in prime-time each night.

The O'Reilly Factor , the 8 P.M. interview show with Bill O'Reilly, is now often No. 1 in its time slot among CNN, MSNBC and CNBC. Mr. O'Reilly credits his particularly hard-charging, Fox-esque style. "You better have it together if you come on, because I'm not going to patronize anybody," said Mr. Tough Guy. "If they have an argument, I'm going to try to cut that argument to shreds." Ooooh.

With that stance, Mr. O'Reilly has lost the bigger guests, like Al Gore, to shows like Larry King Live , where they'll have an easier time. "But the audience is catching on to all that nonsense," Mr. O'Reilly said. "The real interesting story about this is that many of the establishment journalists, on television in particular, have now decided that access is more important than journalism. That it's more important to their careers to be able to get these people on than it is to ask them difficult questions and follow it up and get the truth. They want to be invited to the parties. That's a tremendously corrupting thing when you see the Clintons go out to Martha's Vineyard and you see the party list: there's Katherine Graham, there's Mike Wallace, there's Diane Sawyer."

As for Mr. O'Reilly, he never gets invited anywhere, he said. "Clinton wouldn't even let me walk Buddy," he said. "Whatever happened to Buddy, anyway?" That's a hell of a question. Anyway, catch Mr. O'Reilly tonight with his guest, Patricia Arquette. Wonder what tough, penetrating questions he'll have in store for her. [Fox News Channel, 46, 8 P.M.]

Friday, Oct. 8

Chris Carter's Harsh Realm debuts. It's much better than the last show he produced, Millennium . [WNYW, 5, 9 P.M.]

Saturday, Oct. 9

An interesting thing has happened to the hourlong television drama. Scripts have become longer, way longer. But the episodes are taking up less film. Simple deduction tells you that means more stuff is happening in the same amount of screen time. "We looked at The West Wing and looked at Third Watch ," said NBC programming chief Garth Ancier. "Because the audience has been expecting more and more dialogue and action in these shows, what's happened is that the scripts have gotten longer and longer, and the page counts for the shows have gotten longer. For the first time you have drama scripts that are probably 10 to 20 percent longer to fill the same amount of program time. A couple of shows came in as much as a minute or two short, and then we had to shoot additional scenes to get them up to full time."

This would explain why the second episode of The West Wing was so hard to follow at times. The characters were talking so fast–obviously in an attempt to depict what it might be like in the working White House–that one trip to the commode and you were through until you could be filled in at a commercial.

Tonight, watch those fast-talkin' doctors on ER . [WABC, 7, 11:35 P.M.]

Sunday, Oct. 10

The Brady Bunch turned 30 years old this fall. [Nickelodeon, 6, 9 P.M.]

Monday, Oct. 11

Les Firestein has been a television writer for some time now, working on The Drew Carey Show , The P.J.'s and then NBC's ill-fated The Mike O'Malley Show , which was canceled the week of Sept. 27. Nothing, he said, prepared him for what he went through running Mike O'Malley .

"You're talking to a guy who worked on In Living Color for four years, which was its own tinderbox," said Mr. Firestein. "You had eight people with combustible personalities. This was beyond that. There was something about the show that I think brought out the worst in a lot of people. I would call it the most extreme experience I've had."

The chips seemed stacked against the show from the beginning. Mr. O'Malley, basically an untested talent best known for his role as "the Rick" on those ESPN commercials, sold his coming-of-age sitcom to the old regime at NBC, the one headed by West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer and entertainment president Warren Littlefield; they brought in Mr. Firestein to run the show. Midway through the development season, the top executives were replaced by Scott Sassa and Garth Ancier.

Mr. Ancier reportedly hated the pilot and ordered a reshoot. Mr. Ancier was said to believe Mr. O'Malley was not without talent. But Mr. O'Malley apparently did not show much appreciation and angrily resisted many of Mr. Ancier's suggestions (that Mr. O'Malley recast the part being played by his best friend, Will Arnett, for instance). As reported by NYTV, one disagreement led to Mr. O'Malley storming out of Mr. Ancier's office in the middle of a meeting. "One group of executives inheriting another group's development was bad enough," said Mr. Firestein. "But Mike's various fallings-out with various executives were, like, driving the nail into the coffin, through the coffin, spackling it over, sanding it down and then restaining it." That said, when the early ratings came in super low, the show was canned.

Mr. Firestein is now working up his own show for NBC. His requirements for a partner? "Someone who has an excellent relationship with Garth Ancier," he said. "Maybe even a romantic one."

Tonight on The Drew Carey Show , Drew reminisces about his relationship with his high school bandmaster. [WNYW, 5, 7:30 P.M.]

Tuesday, Oct. 12

UPN debuts its new Vegas private detective show, The Strip . [WWOR, 9, 9 P.M.]

Home Movies With Peter Bogdanovich

Samuel Michael Fuller directed, wrote and produced his pictures in headlines. There was always a kind of tabloid-journalistic stylization to his work, mixed with the boldness of a scandal sheet's lead story and the succinctness of boiling it all down to as few striking words as possible. Fuller became a moviemaker with rich firsthand experiences of life as a copy boy from age 12 for the old New York Journal , as a crime reporter by age 17 for the San Diego Sun and as a soldier in World War II, fighting with the First Infantry Division–the "Big Red One"–throughout North Africa and Europe, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver Star and a Purple Heart. By the time Fuller made his first film–with the typical Fuller title I Shot Jesse James (1949)–he had seen enough true horrors, tragedy and human comedy to make even the worst picture crises pale by comparison and the most outrageous picture-plots seem tame. Because of the unquestionable authorial presence behind all his work, the French New Wave critics and filmmakers of the 1950's adopted Fuller as a perfect illustration of a subversive "auteur" filmmaker functioning within the Hollywood studio system. One of the finest of his numerous crime pictures has an A-cast and a deep B-movie noir funkiness. Richard Widmark (in his lead-heavy period), Jean Peters (at her sexiest), Thelma Ritter (at her most poignant and Oscar-nominated) and Richard Kiley (smarmy as hell) starred in 1953's gripping, hard-bitten Pickup on South Street [Tuesday, Oct. 12, Cinemax, 33, 8 a.m.; also on videocassette] .

I first saw the film nearly 35 years ago in London on my maiden voyage to Europe, which may have given the work an added piquancy. For my movie card file, I wrote: "Tough, violent, exciting underworld thriller about a pickpocket who accidentally steals a valuable piece of microfilm stolen from the Government by Communists; melodramatic but well played and directed." Two years later in Beverly Hills, having seen several more Fuller pictures and having come to know and work with the man, I saw Pickup again and rated it "excellent," adding: "Among Fuller's best films, and probably the best portrait of life among thieves ever shot. Violent, terse, yet compassionate, Fuller never compromises his characters, and he shows the objectivity-subjectivity of a great crime reporter; the love scenes have an Odetsian power, and the picture as a whole is close to a masterpiece of intensity. With Underworld, U.S.A. , it is probably his most thoroughly successful movie." (The reference to playwright-screenwriter Clifford Odets, noted for a certain street poetry in his dialogue, was inspired by lines like Widmark's after first kissing Peters: "Sometimes you look for oil, you hit a gusher.")

Fuller (1911-1997), whom most people who knew him well called Sammy, remains an outstanding example of the sort of energy and originality that comes to pictures because of a director's outside, non-show-business activities. Besides knowing about newspapers, crime and war, Fuller had ridden freight trains during the Depression, published his first novel ( Burn, Baby, Burn ) before he was 25, and collaborated on his first film script the following year, in 1936. Fuller's extensive, harrowing, shell-shock-provoking war experiences resulted in several of the best American movies about war, including the first on Korea, The Steel Helmet (1950). Both Steven Spielberg and Terrence Malick, whose World War II movies competed for the Oscar last year, cited Fuller as a major influence with pictures like Steel Helmet , Fixed Bayonets (1951), China Gate (1957), Verboten! (1959), Merrill's Marauders (1962) and The Big Red One (1980). Surprisingly, for a guy who had lived through some of the worst of human behavior, Sammy to the end retained a tough innocence, a clean inner beauty as a person, that was touching. In a world of crooks, Fuller was the last honest pal.

Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling, which has been flagging in the ratings behind Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation, is looking to hire

real TV writers to spruce up its shows.

As it stands now, the story lines are left up to the wrestlers themselves, who are bigger on brawn and bluster than they are on imagination. So you get " Raa raa raa grrr " and not much melodrama in the ring. Thus the W.C.W. shows often seem just a step above public-access wrestling shows like Motor City Big Time Wrestling .

On the other hand, the World Wrestling Federation, which does employ writers, has epic story lines–like where Triple H gets Stone Cold Steve Austin arrested for ramming him, etc.

"Just think about it," said a W.C.W. source. "They have so many hours of programming a week, and to keep a seamless story written is hard from week to week. Wrestlers doing the stories doesn't usually work as strong. I don't know how creative Hulk actually is, but I tend to think a story writer from Hollywood is a little smarter than Hulk."

The recruiting drive is being planned about a month after Ted Turner fired W.C.W. president Eric Bischoff. Mr. Turner reportedly got rid of him because he was sick of seeing his wrestling organization getting smacked around in the ratings by the W.W.F. The rival wrestling outfit consistently draws a bigger audience per night on USA than the W.C.W. has on TNT (pulling up to a 7 rating, compared with between a 3 and a 4 rating for the W.C.W.).

The W.C.W. executives plan to begin their recruiting drive at the Harvard Lampoon , which has provided the best television comedy scribes for decades now. Conan O'Brien is one. Another is Billy Kimball, Craig Kilborn's executive producer. So is former Saturday Night Live writer James Downey.

"A lot of wrestling depends on humor–they want it to be funny," said the source, adding that the organization has intelligence that there are Lampoon alumni on the W.W.F. writing staff (which a spokesman for the W.W.F. refused to confirm or deny).

The guys over at the Lampoon weren't too surprised at the W.C.W.'s interest in them. Believe it or not, they've had a relationship with the W.C.W.'s Macho Man Randy Savage for a couple of years now. In 1998, Lampoon named Mr. Savage Man of the Year. More recently, they've been in contact with him for a book they're publishing with Time Warner. But, they said, Mr. Savage–who declined to comment–has yet to pop the question. Still, they said they're open to it.

"It's the most entertaining television there is," Lampoon president Matt Warburton said of wrestling. "I think that humor writers are in an excellent position to contribute to the W.C.W. Maybe they can make a niche for themselves as the really funny wrestling show."

For the funniest wrestling right now, check out Motor City . [Manhattan Neighborhood Network, 57, 10 p.m.]

Thursday, Sept. 23

Action , the new Fox half-hour comedy about a trash-talking movie producer played by Jay Mohr, was expected to hit the air on its debut night with some big numbers. Fox spent more than $4 million to promote it, and it got a lot of ink. But Nielsen ratings show that Action did only as well as UPN's World Wrestling Federation Smackdown! Both drew nearly 5.5 million households between 9 P.M. and 10 P.M. As for reaching male viewers between the ages of 18 and 34–a demographic coveted by all the 18- to 34-year-old males who work in advertising– Smackdown! actually did a hair better than Action . UPN's tab promoting the night? Put it at $0.

As much as that says about Action , it says a whole hell of a lot more about wrestling. Adam Ware, UPN's chief financial officer, chalks it up to good writing.

"These guys have great, great stories," he said. "Everyone used to say, 'Gee, how do we make a male soap? and whoever could come up with that would be a hero. These guys have captured it."

Tonight on Action, Peter can't get money for his next film. [WNYW, 5, 9:30 P.M.]

Friday, Sept. 24

In late August, ABC announced it was pulling reruns of Sports Night from its

Tuesday-night schedule. The hope was that by yanking the ratings-challenged–but critically acclaimed–show for a while, it would seem fresher for its Oct. 5 season debut.

It was a blow to the Sports Night staff and TV powerhouse Aaron Sorkin. And it was also about the last thing they needed just then.

Sources said the announcement came at a time when Sports Night was in total disarray. The problems stemmed from fights between Mr. Sorkin–on double duty launching his NBC drama, West Wing –and one of his stars, Josh Charles. Mr. Charles, a veteran of movies such as Dead Poets Society and Coldblooded , was said to be less than thrilled with the direction of the show–and even less thrilled by on-the-set direction from Mr. Sorkin. Sources said on the show's first taping of the season, Mr. Charles publicly resisted Mr. Sorkin's acting advice. Mr. Sorkin didn't like being talked back to, and called up ABC entertainment chiefs fuming about his uppity actor.

"Josh comes from the movies, and he didn't like a lot of the stuff Aaron had done. Josh was acting up," said an ABC insider familiar with the situation. He added that programming executives put everything on hold while trying to cool the situation. "They came in and tried to make everybody make nice," he said.

Apparently, the diplomacy mission has worked. Reached at his West Wing offices, Mr. Sorkin said he didn't know what NYTV was talking about when the topic of a tiff between him and his star was brought up. "I love Josh and have since the first minute I met him!" said Mr. Sorkin.

So then, he was asked, absolutely nothing is wrong?

"Everybody who works on Sports Night is very into the show, and in the five days in which we have to do every show, there are probably 500 arguments that flare up in the right way or wrong way to do the show. It's 'Wouldn't this be better than that?' That kind of thing. It's nothing to write home about."

Neither is Coldblooded, which stars Jason Priestley as a bookie-turned-assassin. [WLNY, 55, 12:30 A.M.]

Saturday, Sept. 25

The ad people aren't giving Freaks and Geeks much of a chance and predict it won't do so well. But after viewing NBC's 80's high school show, we gotta say it feels like a winner for us, even if it brings back painful memories. [WNBC, 4, 8 p.m.]

Sunday, Sept. 26

% Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, veterans of The Simpsons , started hitting the phones on their own to promote their new show, Mission Hill , the week of Sept. 13. Mission Hill is an animated series about young downtown-type slackers living in a big loft, and it was panned by some critics as just another show about young people. But what really bothered the creators was that many who reviewed it–or "previewed" it–hadn't seen it. The pilot wasn't available for review until mid-September. Most of the reviews were based on a script and a 30-second segment produced for advertisers in May, which the creators threw together at the last minute.

"If I saw that presentation, I would think the show sucked, too," said Mr. Weinstein, 33. "But it's also like, 'C'mon! Don't write that the show is terrible if you haven't seen it!' It makes me wonder how many other things have I read that end up not being true. Like, maybe Iraq really isn't such a bad country, and people are writing that based on a 30-second presentation they saw."

Meanwhile, Mr. Weinstein said, he watched as the WB went full-throttle promoting shows like Roswell and Angel while leaving his show alone. That hurts a guy.

And so the Mission Hill creators began calling reporters on their own and sending out tapes. They even dispatched a friend to hand out stickers at the CMJ music festival here in town. "It's a grass-roots campaign where everyone on the show is saying, 'Please watch this tape,'" Mr. Weinstein said. NYTV took a look at the show. While it starts out a little slow–thanks to the necessary exposition–it picks up at the end and genuinely delivers laughs. Mr. Weinstein said he's not asking people to like it. He's just asking for a chance.

Tonight it's The Simpsons ' season premiere: Homer helps out Mel Gibson on his latest film, as Simpsons writers bravely struggle to come up with another plot. [WNYW, 5, 8 p.m.]

Monday, Sept. 27

There are some sad faces moping around the Court TV offices this week.

On Tuesday, Sept. 14, the staff of Snap Judgment , the network's comedy show created by Daily Show whiz Lizz Winstead, was told the show would be shown only at 11 P.M. from now on; this, after the show had been airing at 7:30 P.M. and 11:30 P.M. each night.

Those working on the show were told to look at it as a good thing. Nielsen numbers were showing that in the early evening, the channel is mostly watched by women between the ages of 18 and 49. But their show appeals more to males, so it would be bumped later, closer to Cops . But three days later–on Friday, Sept. 17– Snap Judgment was canceled. Lionel (the one-name former radio guy), Liz Layton, Jamie Greenberg and the rest of the staff were told they could apply for other jobs at the network and were given time in the office to get their reels together. People inside Court TV say it just represents the channel's new footing since the days of O.J.–when it was more a male channel. "They're mostly a male show, and we're skewing highly female now," said a spokeswoman. "We absolutely love them, and we want to wish them luck in the future." As of press time, the show was still scheduled to run tonight at 11 P.M. [Court TV, 40, 11 p.m.]

Tuesday, Sept. 28

It's just about a month before CBS bumps This Morning for a guy named Bryant Gumbel and something called Early Show . With Jane Clayson named as co-host, all that's left for Mr. Gumbel, producer Steve Friedman, CBS news division chief Andrew Heyward and president and chief executive Les Moonves to agree upon is the news reader. Said to be among those being considered: current news reader Julie Chen and Saturday anchor Dawn Stensland. [WCBS, 2, 7 A.M.]

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week

Among hip Western connoisseurs both here and abroad, there have been four really memorable, artistically consistent director-star series in the genre's sound era: eight John Ford-John Wayne features (from Stagecoach to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ); four Howard Hawks-Wayne pictures (including Red River and Rio Bravo ); five Anthony Mann-James Stewart sagas (from Winchester '73 to The Man From Laramie ); and seven intimate ones from Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott. The least known are the low-

budget, quickly shot Boetticher-Scott films, all intriguing, at least four of them remarkably complex, powerful and unpretentious sagebrush chess games, all written by the talented Burt Kennedy, with Scott or Mr. Boetticher as producers; starting with 1956's Seven Men From Now and concluding with 1960's color and wide-screen Comanche Station [Sunday, Sept. 26, Turner Classic Movies; 8:30 p.m.] . The other two are The Tall T (1957) and Ride Lonesome (1959).

When I first saw Comanche Station in the mid-60's, I wrote and filed a card that read: "Personal, effective Boetticher-Scott Western about a man searching the plains for his wife, captured years ago by the Comanches; he saves another man's wife, then must contend with three outlaws accompanying them, who are after the $5,000 reward put up by the woman's husband. Written with depth and character, well acted, and strikingly directed, this is an evocative, often ambiguous, fascinating work."

Probably the major distinguishing aspect of the Boetticher-Scott movies is the complicated cat-and-mouse relationships they depict between Scott and the various heavies, all of whom are given considerable dimension and charm, with such enormously effective character leads as Lee Marvin, Richard Boone, Pernell Roberts and, in Comanche Station , Claude Akins. Akins becomes quite a contender opposite Scott, with typically fine malevolent support from the brilliant former child actor Skip Homeier, already a Boetticher veteran from The Tall T . The well-conceived woman in the piece is played simply and convincingly by Nancy Gates.

Mr. Boetticher (pronounced Bet'-a-ker) was born in Chicago in 1916 under the inappropriate name of Oscar Boetticher Jr., and got into directing pictures through one of the most unusual and roundabout ways in movie history. After graduating from Ohio State, having played football and been a varsity boxer ("I had to be," he said, "with a name like Oscar"), he went down to Mexico in the mid-1930's and became a professional matador. When 20th Century Fox needed a technical adviser for the Tyrone Power bullfight picture Blood and Sand (1941), they hired Mr. Boetticher. Within three years, he was directing low-budget programmers under his birth name, but in 1951, the billing became Budd, with his first important, and clearly semi-autobiographical picture, Bullfighter and the Lady , starring Robert Stack. Over the next four years, Mr. Boetticher directed 10 action and Western quickies before making another bullfight picture, The Magnificent Matador (1955), with Anthony Quinn. The amazing series of Randolph Scott Westerns followed (the others: 1957's Decision at Sundown , 1958's Buchanan Rides Alone and 1958's Westbound ), bracketed by exceptionally well-done crime pictures, The Killer Is Loose (1956), with Joseph Cotten, and The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), with Ray Danton.

At the peak of his career, having been offered Scott's next (and last) film, Ride the High Country (directed by Sam Peckinpah, 1962), Mr. Boetticher instead went to Mexico to shoot a documentary about his friend, the world-famous matador Carlos Arruza. The decade-long struggle with this ill-fated work, Arruza (1972), could be a hell of a movie in itself and is a riveting memoir, told unflinchingly by Mr. Boetticher in his book When in Disgrace : imprisonment, bankruptcy, divorce, insane-asylum commitment, near-death–first from starvation, then a lung infection–and the accidental death of his hero, Arruza, as well as much of his film crew. Certainly a survivor, Mr. Boetticher today remains youthful, candid, courageous and one of our finest living directors.