Quibbles & Bits

. . . On their just-released video of “Tin Men,” the tacky Touchstone people makes us sit through three promos for other films--”Ruthless People,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” and “Color of Money”--before letting us see what we rented. Grrrrr.

. . . A recent casting notice for a TV sitcom gave this description for the role of an exterminator: “Actor must look and behave like a rodent.” No comments, please, about your agent.

. . . Biggest laugh at a screening of “Hiding Out”: Jon Cryer’s girlfriend asks him, “No more trading stocks?” His answer: “No, but that may not be such a terrible thing.”

. . . “Made in Heaven” gives on-screen singing credit for the song “Goodnight Irene” to Red Foley and Ernest Tubbs. Thanks, but they call him Mr. Tubb.

. . . Last year, CBS decided that Toronto was the best place to film “I’ll Take Manhattan.” Now Showtime’s “Gotham” begins filming there next month. What if the Big Apple tried to lure Canuck productions to their town?

. . . We don’t quibble with film critic (and frequent Calendar contributor) Annette Insdorf touting the glories of the recent Telluride Film Festival in the current Movieline mag. We don’t quibble with her rave assessments. (“Telluride consistently attracts an international assortment of serious film makers; where else would you find Louis Malle, Stephen Frears, Hanif Kureishi, Lindsay Anderson, Barbet Schroeder and Andrei Konchalovsky on the same panel?”) But shouldn’t she have told us that the festival’s official moderator (and chairwoman of the panel) was herself?

. . . Wednesday’s Daily News had a banner that “Dawn Steel Named President of Columbia Pictures.” But, oops, columnist Frank Swertlow was speculating back on Page 15 of the same paper that the “hot patter in movie circles is that former Universal film boss Frank Price will take over David Puttnam’s job. . . .”

. . . Creative marketing: Boxoffice mag reports that when “Ishtar” played a $2 house in Burlington, Vt., the theater’s newspaper ad copy read: “Maybe ‘Ishtar’ wasn’t worth $5--but how can you go wrong at $2?”