President and Barbara Bush will host an...

President and Barbara Bush will host an ABC prime-time special called “To Be Free: The National Literacy Honors From the White House.” Guests Jamie Lee Curtis, Beau Bridges, Morgan Freeman, Patrick Swayze, Barbara Mandrell, Anita Baker and Jim Henson will be on hand to honor leaders in the literacy movement. The special, which does not have an air date yet, was taped in February at the White House.

When 8-year-old Elijah Wood witnesses the murder of his father, JoBeth Williams, playing a child psychologist, is hired by the police department to help the boy remember what he saw in the CBS movie, “Child in the Night.” Tom Skerritt joins the cast as a concerned police detective. The production is being filmed in Seattle.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World,” about an expedition for living dinosaurs in the heart of the Amazon, will soon begin production as a four-hour production starring Oliver Reed as Professor George Challenger and Donald Pleasence as his arch rival, Professor Summerlee.

Kimerly Montour, Fox Broadcasting’s new vice president for network news development, is planning to start a nightly national network newscast or news service next January for the seven Fox-owned stations and the Fox network’s 128 affiliates, most of which do not have newscasts. Fox chairman Barry Diller has told affiliates the news program may be sort of a news “wheel,” a program that could run an hour but be shaped so stations could use only a half-hour or 15 minutes of it.