TELEVISION - Aug. 21, 1993

Movie Madness: The battle lines are being drawn by network executives for next month’s Sunday-night face-offs. On Sept. 19, CBS will present “The Hunt for Red October” opposite the Emmy Awards on ABC, while NBC counters with the Tom Selleck Western “Quigley Down Under.” One week later, ABC has scheduled “Whose Child Is This? The War for Baby Jessica,” with Susan Dey. Its competition will be the Julia Roberts film “Sleeping With the Enemy” on CBS and NBC’s “The Flood,” about a 1987 flash flood in Texas.

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The Powers That Be: Alexandra Powers, whose film credits include “Rising Sun” and “Dead Poets Society,” will join NBC’s “L.A. Law” as a fundamentalist Christian attorney. Powers joins Alan Rosenberg and Debi Mazar (who are reprising their characters from the canceled “Civil Wars”) as new regulars on the NBC drama, which returns Oct. 7.

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Book ‘Em, Dave: Bill Murray and Billy Joel will be the first guests on “Late Show With David Letterman.” Murray was Letterman’s first guest on the first NBC “Late Night” on Feb. 1, 1982. Letterman’s new CBS show premieres Aug. 30.

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The White Stuff: Betty White, who starred last season in “The Golden Palace,” will be back with CBS this fall. The actress will join the cast of the retooled sitcom “Bob,” playing the wife of a greeting card company owner. . . . Teri Garr will play Shelley Long’s sister on “Good Advice,” which will precede “Bob” on the CBS Friday-night lineup.

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Personnel File: Augustine Martinez has been named general manager of Spanish-language station KMEX. Martinez, the former station manager and general manager at KVEA, replaces Michael Martinez (no relation), who resigned to pursue other business opportunities in Los Angeles.

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School Bells: Public television’s perennial “Back to School Week,” which begins Sept. 5 on KCET, features several new specials. The list includes “Count on Me,” which urges parents to become involved in the education of their children, “High School Stories: One Day in America’s Schools” and “The Next Generation,” a three-part series exploring the creativity of young scientists.

LEGAL FILE

Pressing Suits: Model Claudia Schiffer’s New York agency told a German newspaper it will sue an Italian magazine for printing photos of Schiffer sunbathing topless. The 22-year-old German model said her contract with the Metropolitan Model Agency forbids naked photographs. The pictures that first appeared in the Italian magazine NOI and later in French and German magazines, were taken off Mallorca, Spain. . . . Two other proceedings of note involve actors. Loni Anderson wants Burt Reynolds to pay her $75,000 a month and give her custody of their adopted son. She also said Reynolds tricked her in hopes of keeping their divorce case in Florida. Meanwhile, Kelsey Grammer is suing his estranged wife, claiming she broke her promise to sign a prenuptial agreement, hid her mental illness and menaced him with kitchen utensils. Grammer has been ordered to pay the former exotic dancer $7,500 a month while he awaits a hearing on his request to annul the marriage.

PEOPLE WATCH

Arts Flap: The New York Times defended one of its arts critics from conflict-of-interest charges stemming from his glowing 1991 review of a Florida museum published two days after his wife, an expert in 20th-Century art, was paid $8,000 to lecture there. “The bottom line is that any critic of the caliber of John Russell is not going to compromise his integrity,” newspaper spokeswoman Nancy Nielsen said Friday. Russell wrote in 1991 that the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota was “in a class of its own.” He praised “the order, the lucidity, the imagination and the technological skill” of the museum’s $20-million renovation. Two days before the review ran, Russell’s wife, Rosamond Bernier, delivered a lecture at the museum for an $8,000 fee. Russell told The Washington Post that he had planned to write about the museum’s renovation before his wife was invited to speak. “I see absolutely no conflict whatsoever,” he said.

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Making His Day: Hospital officials have confirmed that a girl was born prematurely Aug. 7 in Redding, Calif., to Clint Eastwood and Frances Fisher. The couple named the 6-pound, 2-ounce child Francesca Ruth Fisher Eastwood. Officials had refused to confirm or deny rumors about the event until a birth certificate, a public document, was filed Thursday.

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Fellini’s Cut: Director Federico Fellini left a hospital where he had been treated for an Aug. 3 stroke and was transferred Friday to a physical therapy clinic. Fellini, 73, joked with reporters and photographers as a small crowd of well-wishers watched him being taken by stretcher out of the hospital in his hometown of Rimini, Italy. There was no word on when he might be discharged from the clinic in Ferrara, which is 100 miles to the northwest.

QUICK TAKES

Anthony Quinn, 78, told a New York Post columnist that he recently fathered a child with a former secretary. Quinn’s wife of 29 years reportedly has not taken phone calls from her husband since learning of the child, who was born on July 22. . . . Director Quentin Tarantino (“Reservoir Dogs”) switches from ultra-violence to improv Sept. 2, when he appears onstage as a guest performer with The Groundlings.