Barbara Hershey stars as the mistress and...

Barbara Hershey stars as the mistress and key suspect in her lover’s murder in “Defenseless,” a New Visions production to start in January. Her legal counsel: The dead man’s wife. Martin Campbell directs the James Hicks screenplay for producers Renee Missel and David Bombyk . . . . “Bird”-man Forest Whitaker takes flight as the doctor who turns scarred criminal Mickey Rourke into “Johnny Handsome,” a Walter Hill film for Carolco filming in New Orleans next month. Elizabeth McGovern and Ellen Barkin co-star respectively as the good and bad women in writer Ken Friedman’s gangster saga . . . . Anthony Michael Hall is a rookie cop whose inexperience results in his partner’s death in “The Gnome”--a Trilogy/Interscope production for Vestron to film locally next month. His dilemma: no one believes that his eyewitness is the title character. Oscar-winning makeup artist Stan Winston created the gnome and will direct the Pen Densham script.

Singer Wayne Newton emotes as a bogus TV evangelist caught up in evil doings in “Licensed Revoked,” the new James Bond opus . . . . Malcolm McDowell plays the principal and Bradley Gregg a student rebel in Vestron’s “The Class of 1999,” which rolls next Month in Seattle.