TELEVISION - May 29, 1993

A Date With Shandling?Executives at NBC and producers of “Dateline NBC” are mulling over whether to air a segment about Garry Shandling, the man NBC wanted to replace late-night host David Letterman. Last month, a “Dateline” crew spent several days on the set of Shandling’s HBO series, “The Larry Sanders Show,” which begins a new season Wednesday. But since then, Shandling turned down NBC’s offer and is said instead to be considering a late-night talk show on CBS, following Letterman. “Dateline” has not yet taped the main interview with Shandling and now may not, according to sources. “No decision has been made on the piece yet,” a “Dateline” spokeswoman said.

No ‘Mistake’: Jay Leno took issue Friday with a newspaper report that said he had called the live “Tonight Show” from Boston’s Bull and Finch pub the night “Cheers” went off the air a “mistake,” and that he blamed the guest stars for drinking too much. “We got the highest ratings we ever got,” Leno said. “Why would I call it a mistake?” Leno said he had joked with a reporter from the Boston Herald the same way he joked on the air that night about the “Cheers” cast being drunk, but contended that she failed to point that out in print. “I feel bad because I’m not one to put off blame when things don’t go well,” he said. “But I didn’t blame anybody.” The Boston Herald said that it stands by its story.

Summer Series: Three new series will join the CBS summer lineup, two of which have been in the works for some time. “Cutters,” which originally was announced for last summer, deals with the merger of a barbershop and a beauty salon. Robert Hays, Margaret Whitton and Dakin Matthews star in the ensemble comedy premiering June 11. “Family Dog” (June 23), the long-delayed animated comedy from Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton, explores the life of a canine from the pet’s perspective. “Johnny Bago” (June 25), an action/adventure from the producers of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “Back to the Future,” follows a street hustler on the run from the mob.

Together Again: Liza Minnelli and her sister, Lorna Luft, will perform a medley of sister songs on the June 6 CBS telecast of the Tony Awards. The network says it will be their first performance together on national TV since singing with their mother, Judy Garland, in 1963. Minnelli is host of the awards program.

Good Sports: “The Great Ones: The National Sports Awards,” a June 22 NBC special, will salute basketball’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, boxer Muhammad Ali, golfer Arnold Palmer, track and field’s Wilma Rudolph and baseball’s Ted Williams. . . . ABC will carry the second annual “Jim Thorpe Pro Sports Awards” July 12.

STAGE

Court Order: Producer Shelly Garrett’s proceeds from “Beauty Shop--Part 2,” scheduled to open at the Wilshire Theatre on Tuesday, have been temporarily frozen by an order of Superior Court Judge William Beverly. A hearing on a permanent order has been scheduled for June 29. The judge acted in response to an application by a group of investors in the first “Beauty Shop,” who sued Garrett over the proceeds of the show. A spokeswoman for “Beauty Shop--Part 2” said the show will go on as scheduled.

New Work: Lincoln Center Productions in New York has announced “a major new music-theater piece” about urban life in America from the team of composer John Adams and stage director Peter Sellars. It is among six new commissioning projects for works from American artists to be presented beyond the 1993-94 season.

MOVIES

Making a Trim: Rob Cohen, director and co-writer of “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” has edited a fight sequence that will enable the martial arts film to be shown in British theaters this fall. The biographical drama was banned by the British Board of Film Classification because it featured an outlawed Asian hand weapon called a nunchaku. Cohen, who earlier this month said he would rather keep the movie out of British release than edit it, said he trimmed about one-third of a fight scene and added three shots from previously unused footage.

ART

‘Flowers’ Blooms: Childe Hassam’s “The Room of Flowers,” a colorful still life of a room of flowers and furniture, has sold for a record $5.5 million at Sotheby’s auction house. The piece, painted in 1894, went to an American private collector for a price that broke the old record for a Hassam work of $3.1 million set for “The Fourth of July, 1916” in 1989. A Sotheby’s spokesman said the $5.5 million also represented the second highest price paid for a 19th-Century American painting at auction, falling short of Frederick Church’s “Home by the Lake,” which brought $8.3 million in 1989. Hassam, who led the American Impressionist movement, painted the work on Appledore Island off the Maine-New Hampshire coast.

Local Honorees: Los Angeles-based painters Carole Caroompas and John M. Miller are among 10 artists selected from 651 applicants to receive $20,000 grants from New York’s Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Named after the late Abstract Expressionist painter and his wife, the grants have been awarded for 18 years to mature painters, sculptors and printmakers “who have dedicated their lives to developing their art regardless of their level of commercial success.”