Hard to Handle

REEL DEALS After winning acclaim this year for two harrowing dramas, ''Everything Put Together'' and ''Monster's Ball,'' director Marc Forster will turn to a presumably sunnier topic. Miramax has signed the Swiss filmmaker to do a biopic of James Barrie, the author of ''Peter Pan.'' Production will begin as soon as a lead is cast.

LEGAL BRIEFS A Michigan judge formally sentenced Yasmine Bleeth to two years probation on a felony cocaine possession charge, a sentence Bleeth agreed to in a plea deal last month. Bleeth, whom police caught with the drug in her car when she ran the vehicle onto a highway median on her way to the Detroit airport in September, avoided jail time with the sentencing deal, which also requires her to submit to regular drug tests and to do 100 hours of community service. ''I have been sober four months. I am sorry. I think that's all I want to say right now. Thank you,'' the 33-year-old former ''Baywatch'' star told the court.

After more than six years of investigating gangsta rap mogul Suge Knight over allegations of murder, drug trafficking, money laundering, and gun running, a federal racketeering probe has produced only a pair of misdemeanor tax charges. The impresario behind record label Tha Row (formerly Death Row), Knight will have to pay an unspecified amount of back taxes and a $100,000 fine. Knight, who was released from prison last year after spending five years behind bars for violating his probation by assaulting a man in Las Vegas, told the Los Angeles Times, ''I appreciate the fact that, after looking into these lies and finding nothing, they had the integrity to say, 'OK, this guy broke no law,' and called it off.'' However, the U.S. Attorney's office informed Knight's lawyers in a letter that it hasn't ruled out pressing charges against Knight in the future.

COVER TO COVER Three more of historian Stephen Ambrose's books are under investigation for plagiarism. Last week, Ambrose acknowledged that, in his current bestseller ''The Wild Blue,'' he had lifted or paraphrased passages from Thomas Childers's World War II aviation history ''The Wings of Morning,'' failing to credit Childers, though he had cited Childers' work in footnotes elsewhere in the book. Now, Forbes.com reports, Ambrose may have done the same thing in his ''Nixon: Ruin and Recovery 1973-1990,'' ''Crazy Horse and Custer,'' and ''Citizen Soldiers,'' another World War II history, in which Ambrose writes in an author's note that he ''stole material profitably if shamelessly'' from Joseph Balkoski's ''Beyond the Beachhead.'' Asked if any more of his 20 tomes had similarly questionable passages, Ambrose told the Associated Press, ''I don't know. It's a lot of books.'' A spokeswoman for Simon & Schuster, Ambrose's publisher, said, ''If there are indeed additional passages or sentences that are footnoted, but not in quotations marks when they should have been, we will work with our author to make the necessary corrections.''