MOVIES - Nov. 22, 1994

Updating His Droids: Director and special effects master George Lucas will use the latest in computer graphics to update “Star Wars” for a 20th-anniversary release in 1997. Lucas also will add previously unreleased footage and a digitally remastered soundtrack, according to Lucasfilm Ltd. and 20th Century Fox, which will distribute the new version for theatrical release. Using technology that his Industrial Light & Magic company developed to create effects for “Jurassic Park” and “Forrest Gump,” Lucas is planning to add creatures within the city of Mos Eisley and in the Tatooine Dunes, as well as new vehicles and Droids. He also will complete a scene, filmed in 1976 but not used, in which Han Solo confronts Jabba the Hutt. The changes will “bring the movie closer to my original vision,” Lucas said. “Star Wars” is the third-leading box-office attraction of all time, having taken in $322 million in the United States and Canada alone.

TELEVISION

Independent Thinkers: Bravo Cable Network will feature offerings from the new Independent Film Channel on Saturday and Sunday beginning at 5 each evening. The independent channel, managed by Bravo, was launched Sept. 1 and specializes in films made outside the Hollywood studio system--commercial-free and unedited. Among the weekend highlights will be Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams” and Francois Truffaut’s “Confidentially Yours.”

POP/ROCK

Learning the Hard Way: Country singer Merle Haggard went to San Quentin prison to record a two-part TV special that’s being shown on the Nashville Network tonight and Wednesday at 5 (repeated at 9 p.m.). The setting had special meaning for Haggard, who served time there from 1957 to 1960 for burglary. “It was here that something happened in my life and I was able to see maybe further than I’d ever been able to see, even though I was behind the walls, and I realized that this was not my calling,” Haggard said. “As much as I thought I wanted to be Bonnie Parker or Clyde Barrow or one of those people, well, I was wrong, and I realized it here.”

Performing the Hard Way: Rapper Ice Cube was performing his “Natural Born Killaz” Friday in Hickory, N.C., when a beer bottle sailed out of the audience and bloodied his face. The singer “just put a towel up to his head and finished the song,” said Nate Quick, a disc jockey who was emceeing the show. The rapper then went to a hospital and got four stitches.

Traveling the Hard Way: Former teen-age heartthrob Davy Jones, the 49-year-old front man for the Monkees, took a 3-year-old filly named Love Dancing for a tune-up run on the track at Churchill Downs. “It’s a thrill,” the 5-foot-4, 128-pound Jones said. “It’s always been in my blood to do this kind of thing.” Jones, in Louisville, Ky., appearing in “Grease,” held an amateur steeplechase jockey’s license in his native England and says he’d like to train race horses someday.

STAGE

‘Miss Saigon’ Catching On: Advance sales for “Miss Saigon,” which opens Jan. 25 at the Ahmanson Theatre, passed the $8-million mark at the end of last week. But tickets for every performance through June 4, other than opening night, are still available, said a spokeswoman for the show.

Alas, Poor Lloyd Webber: Eighty-seven British playwrights, including leading dramatists Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer and Stephen Berkoff, are asking theater directors to increase the number of new plays produced. “If theater is to have a future there must be a return to new work, and this means a change in the way present budgets are spent,” the playwrights said in a letter to theater directors that was also published in Monday’s Guardian newspaper. Critics and theatergoers have also expressed concern that mainstream theaters stick too closely to a diet of Shakespeare, 19th-Century favorites and musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The playwrights asked theaters to each produce at least three new plays a year. “It is very little to ask and represents the first step back from the brink of the absurd situation that we are very close to--theaters with no plays,” the writers said.

Albee Wins in England: American playwright Edward Albee was getting along just fine in London, where his play “Three Tall Women” and its English star, Dame Maggie Smith, were named best play and best actress at the 40th Evening Standard Drama Awards. The presentation Monday came less than a week after the British opening of the acclaimed American work, a still-running Off Broadway hit that won the Pulitzer Prize for drama this year. In accepting his award, Albee said he is “astonished” whenever he wins a prize--”and equally astonished whenever I do not.”

PEOPLE WATCH

Holiday Guests: With a special nod to struggling actors and comics, the Laugh Factory will host its 16th annual free Thanksgiving Day and Christmas dinners from 2 to 9 p.m. Proprietor Jamie Masada, once a struggling comic himself, is planning food and entertainment for 1,500 people at the club at 8001 Sunset Blvd. “This is my way of saying thanks,” Masada said.