TV & VIDEO - March 23, 1987

The first draft of a script for a film on Samantha Smith’s life as a young diplomat is complete, her mother said Friday. Columbia Pictures and Robert Wagner’s R.J. Wagner Productions will produce the TV movie for NBC, Jane Smith said in Los Angeles, where she is attending the Entertainment Summit. A Soviet company, Sovinfilm, is interested in co-producing it, she said. Samantha toured the Soviet Union in 1983 at the invitation of then-Soviet leader Yuri Andropov after she wrote him about world peace. The Manchester, Me., schoolgirl and her father died two years later in an Auburn, Me., plane crash en route from the filming of the TV series “Lime Street” in London. Samantha, 12 played the daughter of actor Wagner.