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REEL DEALS If anything, Linklater might have a stronger case than the Bond producers; both ''Slacker'' and ''Slackers'' are about college students behaving outrageously, while ''Goldmember'' is clearly a parody that no one is likely to confuse with an actual 007 movie. Why MGM didn't challenge ''Slackers'' the way it did ''Goldmember'' is unclear, but an MGM publicist told USA Today she hadn't even heard of Linklater's film. But Clint Culpepper has; he's the president of Screen Gems, the Sony arm that released ''Slackers.'' He told the paper he's a Linklater fan, and that while his target viewers are too young to have heard of the ''Waking Life'' director's 1991 film (''Our audience has probably never seen that movie,'' he said), he doesn't mind exploititng the title similarity. ''I hope there's a controversy, and I hope the people out there are talking about it, because that means they're interested,'' he said. Even Linklater is interested in seeing ''Slackers,'' due to its cameo by a septuagenarian sex symbol. ''I'm a Mamie Van Doren fan,'' he said. ''Maybe I'll go the second week....

One of Van Doren's spiritual heirs, Anna Nicole Smith, wants everyone to know that she's on the market. Backstage at Tuesday's Lane Bryant fashion show in New York, where she was modeling lingerie, Smith made a point of telling the New York Daily News, ''It's been seven years since I've had sex or fun. Except for that one guy for three weeks, but then it was all over the papers. I feel so good to be out of my house and out of my bed tonight.'' Smith, whose nonagenarian tycoon husband J. Howard Marshall died in 1995 (leaving an estate that has been tied up in court ever since in disputes between Smith and Marshall's sons), also told E!, ''I haven't had sex in seven years, hold on, what was I saying... Did I say that out loud? On television? I'm so bad. I'm so bad. No, no I'm not really bad. But I've been cooped up for a long time, and it's time for me to get out. I gotta get out.''

TUBE TALK Variety reports that Conan O'Brien is close to a deal that would double his salary to between $7.5 and $8.5 million per year, though neither NBC nor the ''Late Night'' host would comment. Such a deal would keep him from defecting to Fox (which had expressed a desire to build its own late-night show around him) and would make him the highest-paid 12:30 host ever. Not bad for a guy who, when he started at NBC nine years ago, couldn't get the network to sign a contract with him that lasted longer than 13 weeks....

Get ready for Enron: The Miniseries. Cable's FX is developing a movie about the scandal-rocked company with Lowell Bergman, the former ''60 Minutes'' producer whose attempt to tell a similar story of corporate malfeasance in the tobacco industry was the subject of the movie ''The Insider,'' where Al Pacino played Bergman. How a two- to four-hour TV movie can make sense of such a convoluted story is a good question, but Bergman hinted at his strategy in a New York Times interview yesterday, saying, ''It's about the women against the men.'' That is, it'll be about how the alleged boys'-club skullduggery of Enron execs like Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling was uncovered by women like whistle-blower Sherron Watkins, Fortune reporter Bethany McLean, and California utilities lawyer Loretta Lynch. ''From the beginning of the California energy meltdown, women were not afraid to point a finger at the seventh-largest corporation in the U.S. and say, 'You can't do this,''' Bergman said. ''And the electric cowboys at Enron, where the culture had a take-no-prisoners, get-rid-of-any-regulation, macho perspective on the marketplace, was aggressive when it came to shutting them up.''...

''Boston Public'' is flunking out with conservative groups. A coalition of 16 groups, including the Family Research Council, Morality in Media, and Focus on the Family, sent a letter Tuesday to Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell, urging him to launch an investigation of the Fox network for airing the drama, which the coalition believes violates FCC decency standards. Pointing to the show's plotlines regarding oral sex, a student supporting herself as a stripper, sex between students and teachers, and other risque topics, the letter states, ''It is our view that shows like 'Boston Public' and its ilk do not belong in prime time when any child in America can see them.'' Of course, the coalitions tactic of calling attention to ''Boston Public'' may backfire; 15 years ago, conservatives similarly targeted another Fox show, ''Married with Children,'' and succeeded only in boosting its ratings.

The larger issue for the activists is what they see as lax FCC enforcement of indecency statutes. The letter notes that Democratic appointee Michael Copps is the only FCC commissioner who has stated that FCC policy should be changed so that the responsibility for monitoring broadcast violations should fall on the government, not on citizens. Right now, the FCC only investigates broadcasters when individuals complain and provide a copy or transcript of the offending material. Copps wrote in a USA Today column on Monday that radio stations should keep tapes of their shows to make FCC investigations easier, and that broadcasters should come up with their own self-policing code of conduct, lest the government do it for them. ''The industry can fix the problem voluntarily,'' he wrote. ''If it won't, government may have to halt the race to the bottom.''