NUCLEAR NIGHTMARES

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward are awork on anti-nuke projects--his is a film, hers is a play.

Newman isn’t saying much: “You have to be very careful,” he said in an interview. “While a flaw in, say, a family film might be glossed over, every flaw in a political film is ammunition to discredit some area, and if one area can be discredited, the entire film may be lost.”

He won’t give specifics--not even whether he’d star, direct, etc. He’d only tell us that the concept is “to dramatize Einstein’s statement that the Atomic Age has changed everything but the way we think, and also, to dramatize the lunacy that munitions are the solution to national security and preservation of the planet.”

Woodward has been directing “The Depot” by Eve Ensler, starring Shirley Knight as a nurse whose nightmares propel her to become an anti-nuclear activist. Already mounted at the Actors Studio and on university campuses, it will be staged at a NYC high school on Jan. 17 to benefit an anti-nuke group, then at Washington’s Kennedy Center, colleges and possibly as a film to star Woodward and Knight.