TELEVISION - Oct. 22, 1993

Playing a Different Sleuth?: Angela Lansbury, who finishes a decade as Jessica Fletcher on CBS’ “Murder, She Wrote” this season, may soon be playing Emily Pollifax, the witty, unpredictable part-time CIA operative and full-time garden-clubbing grandmother-heroine of Dorothy Gilman’s novels. Although the project is being considered in feature film, TV movie of the week and series form, David Shaw, Lansbury’s son and an executive in her Corymore Productions, said the actress would most likely do four or five “Mrs. Pollifax” TV movies each year. As for CBS’ high-rated “Murder, She Wrote,” Lansbury has an option for the 1994-95 season, which would be the show’s 11th year. “But it’s up to her if she wants to do it,” said Shaw. “While things have gone well, it would have been silly not to have something under development.” Meanwhile, Lansbury will receive the Heritage Award from the American Ireland Fund at the Beverly Hilton on Nov. 4. The fund was founded in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy to help preserve Ireland’s cultural heritage.

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New Season Notes: Despite low ratings, the first-year series “Bakersfield P.D.” has been picked up for the rest of the season by Fox Broadcasting. But the fate of another low-rated new entry, “Daddy Dearest,” is undecided. The comedy, with Richard Lewis and Don Rickles, will have to shut down production when it completes its 13th episode in a couple of weeks because Fox executives haven’t decided whether to cancel it and may not make up their minds until December.

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Newsy Comedy: Former Viacom executive Michael Gerber is developing the syndicated late-night comedy program “The Newz,” which will concentrate on soft news and political jokes and feature a host and co-host and ensemble cast of unknowns that Gerber hopes the show will make into stars. Writers for “The Newz” include 10 contributors from The Harvard Lampoon. Former NBC bigwig Brandon Tartikoff has already announced plans for a similar syndicated late-night program, “Last Call,” featuring comics giving their assessments of news events. Both shows are being prepared for next fall.

MOVIES

Film Festival: About 100 films have been smuggled through Serb siege lines into Sarajevo for an “international film festival” scheduled to begin there Saturday night. The festival, which runs through Nov. 4 and features films from 1992 and 1993, is named “After the End of the World,” a reference “to evoke how we have survived the war,” said organizer and Sarajevan film critic Milan Cvijanovic. In a trial run for one of the four small resurrected theaters being used for the festival, about 100 Sarajevo residents crammed into a screening of “Basic Instinct” Monday night--the first movie shown there since Serb forces laid siege to the Bosnian capital 18 months ago. Films will be screened regularly after the festival if power supplies last, Cvijanovic said.

ART

Campaign for Kids: Los Angeles guerrilla artist Robbie Conal, whose works are currently on view at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in “The Art of Attack,” on Saturday launches a new billboard, bus shelter and street poster campaign for Children Now, a California-based, nonprofit children’s advocacy group. The campaign, created in conjunction with graphic designer and frequent Conal collaborator Deborah Ross, features a 1950s illustration of perky kids in a classroom, juxtaposed with a photo taken two months ago of children behind locked fences at a Los Angeles elementary school. Titled “Kids Then, Children Now,” the campaign will appear at more than 150 Los Angeles sites.

TRIBUTES

Edwards Retrospective: Julie Andrews, Henry Mancini, Kim Basinger, Jack Lemmon, John Ritter, Billy Wilder and Paul Mazursky will pay tribute to writer, producer and director Blake Edwards Sunday night at the Preston Sturges Award ceremonies at the Directors Guild of America. The award will cap a weekendlong retrospective of 21 Edwards films, beginning at the DGA Theater on Friday.

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Chavez Readings: The first of four tributes to the late farm labor leader Cesar Chavez takes place tonight at Theatre Geo in Hollywood. The 8 p.m. tribute, which precedes the performance of Luis Valdez’s “Bernabe,” features readings of Chavez’s speeches by actors Scott Bakula, Rosana De Soto, Valerie Harper, Dorian Harewood, Luis Avalos, Krystyne Haje and Rose Portillo. Additional tributes take place at the theater Oct. 29, Nov. 4 and Nov. 12.

QUICK TAKES

Andrea Koppel, daughter of TV newsman Ted Koppel, will become a Tokyo-based correspondent for Cable News Network on Nov. 3. She joins CNN from WPLG-TV in Miami, where she was a reporter.

Quotable: “It’s like having a child that grows to be 7 feet tall. You don’t cut his feet or his head off. You buy him a new bed and hope that he can play basketball.”

--Director Robert Altman on tonight’s “The Dick Cavett Show,” explaining why he’s opposed to shortening his three-hour-plus film, “Short Cuts.”