QUIBBLES & BITS

Introducing an Outtakes column for gaffes, ironies, outrages, etc., that might otherwise go unnoticed, from alert staffers .

. . . The credits said, “Music by Marvin Hamlisch,” but the theme through much of NBC’s “Two Mrs. Grenvilles” was Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low” from the 1943 musical “One Touch of Venus.” A Lorimar rep told us Hamlisch wrote about 90 minutes of background music but there wasn’t enough time to credit Weill and seven other composers who contributed fragments. Reminds us of “The Sting,” for which Hamlisch wrote Scott Joplin’s rags.

. . . Exhibitors received a letter from Disney advising them that for “Outrageous Fortune” “you will be receiving two sets of newspaper ads. One set will have Bette Midler’s name on the left side and Shelley Long’s name on the right side and the other set will have the names in reverse. We have been advised by our legal department that these ads are to be alternated on a daily basis.”

. . . After airing a ski-jumping tourney last weekend, ESPN rolled its warning to kids (“Only professionals should try these dangerous stunts,” or words to that effect)--too bad it flashed by in about a second.

. . . How about that Prime Ticket sportscaster during an Indiana U. basketball game touting Coach Bobby Knight as the ideal “father figure” for boys? That’s the same Knight convicted in absentia for assaulting a Puerto Rican cop, who hurled a folding chair across a basketball court, who indulges in on-camera tirades. . . .

. . . We have to wonder if Tri-Star will cut an unintentional howler from its upcoming violent-voodoo suspenser, “Angel Heart,” currently fighting an X rating. A clairvoyant apparently mixed up in Satan worship, mutilation murder, petrified (severed) hands, et al., is herself killed. Recalls her dad poignantly: “She wasn’t evil, but she was a strange kid. . . .”