NEWS & NOTES

Color Wars
When director Robert Wise (West Side Story) joined a congressional delegation on a tour of Color Systems Technology, the Marina Del Ray, Calif., lab that colorizes movies for Ted Turner, he expected a routine fact-finding trip. Once inside, Wise was shocked to see a TV monitor with a scene from his stark 1963 movie The Haunting (with Julie Harris) awash in ''this awful purple color,'' he says.

Wise had already seen his 1956 drama Somebody Up There Likes Mecolorized, and he was determined not to let it happen again. Searching for a legal wrench to throw into Turner's plans for The Haunting, Wise checked his original contract and found it specified the picture was to be made in black and white. Arnold Lutzker, an attorney for the Directors Guild of America, believes the old contract restricts Turner from adding color. He sent Turner Entertainment president Roger Mayer a letter warning him against broadcasting or releasing the movie in color.

Frustrated directors are continually looking for legal means to stop the colorization of their movies. The Directors Guild is encouraging its members to follow Wise's example and study their original contracts to find clauses that might restrain the colorizers. ''If there were a systematic study of cootracts from Haunting's era,'' says attorney Lutzker, ''many directors could have comparable provisions.''

The tactic has worked before. To avoid a fight with Orson Welles' estate, Turner dropped plans to colorize Citizen Kane last year. It turned out that Welles' original contract gave the director total creative control over the picture. Although most directors back then didn't have Wise's or Welles' clout to demand such control, Lutzker says they might be able to fight colorizing with contracts that give them approval over remakes and sequels.

Meanwhile, Turner president Mayer says release of the colorized The Haunting is on hold, not because of the dispute but because of unrelated copyright problems. Oddly enough, the parties on both sides of the controversy remain civil. ''Robert Wise and I are good friends,'' says Mayer, who just added Wise's The Curse of the Cat People to the colorizing hit list. ''People sue each other,'' he says. ''That's business.''

Art Attack
To help fight proposed restrictions on artworks funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Campaign for Freedom of Expression is distributing National Arts Emergency ($10; call 202-393-2787). The 29-minute video, which features such artists as beat poet Allen Ginsberg, shows anti-censorship protests and rallies across the country. But the cassette package carries two words that most mainstream, for-profit video producers would find deeply shocking: the box instructs viewers to ''Copy Me.''