MOVIES
With Richard Grieco (Booker) going a quick 0-for-2 on his
first big- screen tryouts, If Looks Could Kill and Mobsters, the TV
hunk is watching his star stock plummet. Before those movies flopped
he was going to costar with Tom Berenger in the TriStar drama Sniper.
It may be a coincidence, but that movie just started to roll in
Australia with Billy Zane (Blood and Concrete) instead.
''I hate when this is called a teenage Fatal Attraction,'' laments Sara Gilbert (smart-mouthed Darlene on Roseanne) who makes her screen debut in Ivy, due next March. She plays a shy teen whose father (Tom Skerritt) is seduced by her friend (Drew Barrymore). ''It's a frightening story of betrayal, real psychological stuff about friendship,'' says Gilbert. ''Never underestimate a teenager in love.''
They're calling it Die Hard at Sea. Steven Seagal's about to cast off on his next film, Dreadnought, which takes place on a Navy warship and involves a struggle between two Vietnam vets: a CIA covert-operations specialist and Seagal, who plays the ship's cook.
MUSIC
Along with Blondie, the Ramones, and Talking Heads, the
group called Television led the punk parade in the mid-'70s,
influencing countless rockers in the process. Now, 13 years after its
breakup, the group — guitarists Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine, bassist
Fred Smith, and drummer Billy Ficca — has reunited and is about to
record a new album (probably for Capitol Records). ''There's a lot of
unfinished stuff for us to do,'' says Lloyd. ''Everyone's surprised at
how long it's taken, but that's the way it happens in the music
business.''
TV
Rescue 911, the CBS drama that re-creates dramatic saves, will
be simulcast in the Soviet Union to a potential audience of 200
million on Nov. 19. The episode will feature a young Siberian boy who
was badly burned last summer and was flown to Houston for the
skin-graft operations that saved his life. Filming in Siberia this
summer, Rescue 911 went to places so remote, says executive producer
Arnold Shapiro, ''I doubt Western cameras had ever been before.''
Could an all-documentary cable channel be in the works? TV author Les Brown and producer Morton Silverstein have researched the idea, and so far the concept looks feasible. ''It's a journalistic art form that's disappearing on American TV,'' says Brown, who admits that the idea was prompted ''during a lunch with several good documentary producers who are unemployed.'' If all goes well, the channel could be a reality in about two years.
