Where's 'Maple Drive'

The Truman Show may have earned Jim Carrey recognition as an actor, but he's shown his drama chops before. Witness Doing Time on Maple Drive, a 1992 Fox TV movie about a seemingly perfect, secretly mega-dysfunctional family. Carrey had a supporting role as the oldest sibling, an embittered dropout with a drinking problem, and those viewers who didn't already know him from In Living Color could never have guessed he had a single talking-butt joke in him. If the performance has gone largely unrecognized, that's partly due to the film's absence from video — unless you count the 1995 pirated version retitled Faces in the Mirror. ''One of the zaniest, most outrageous laugh riots ever,'' boasts the box, which also contains Carrey stand-up and ILC bits. ''A store in West Hollywood carried it with a disclaimer,'' reports Maple Drive writer James Duff (Duffy on the packaging), whose script was nominated for an Emmy. '''Despite the way it is being marketed, [this] is a sensitive film about a young man coming out. Jim Carrey plays his brother.''' Fox has no plans for a release; Maple Drive's next legit showing comes on cable's Lifetime on Dec. 26.