TELEVISION - April 2, 1996

Rallying to Rooney: The Associated Press received more than 5,000 calls--overwhelmingly in favor of Andy Rooney, the AP said--by noon Monday after Rooney asked “60 Minutes” viewers to tell AP TV critic Frazier Moore whether they agreed with Moore that Rooney was too old for the job. “I was hurt. . . . It’s like somebody saying you’re homely even if you’re not,” Rooney said in an interview Monday. “That’s why I asked people to respond.” In his column last week, Moore wrote that “the only part of ’60 Minutes’ deserving to be called ‘old’ is Rooney,” adding that this was an issue “not of age but attitude.” Moore cited Rooney’s controversial piece on the suicide of Kurt Cobain as an example of Rooney’s being out of touch. But, while Moore called in his column for the 77-year-old Rooney to step aside, he said in an interview Monday, “I said it’s his attitude--curmudgeonly and worse--not his age that’s a problem. When you criticize somebody who’s 77, I guess people think you’re a kid,” Moore said, adding that he had just turned 45.

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Turner Nixes Pix: Ted Turner and his staff rejected Anjelica Huston’s movie directing debut, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” for showing on the Turner Broadcasting System because of its graphic nature, a TBS spokesperson said. The film, based on the Dorothy Allison bestseller, is about a girl with an abusive stepfather and an uncaring mother. The trade paper Daily Variety quoted an unidentified Turner executive as saying the decision to reject the movie was difficult because the film is a “stunning, powerful work” and Huston “deserves tremendous respect for her directorial debut.”