Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation’s press.

POP/ROCK

Treatment Set: Stone Temple Pilots lead singer Scott Weiland will have to spend four to six months in a drug treatment program, Pasadena Municipal Court Judge Elvira R. Mitchell ruled Monday. Weiland, 28, of Topanga, has been in and out of voluntary drug rehab centers since his arrest last May, when sheriff’s deputies said they found cocaine in his car and heroin in his wallet. “I think it was a general consensus [among all parties] that something needed to be done to get Scott’s attention,” Steve Cron, the singer’s attorney, said after the hearing. “We’re all hoping that that’s what will do it.” The best-selling rock group last week canceled all concerts until Weiland overcomes his addiction problems. Various industry observers, concerned about drug use among musicians, lauded the band’s action. Weiland will spend the next week at Century Regional Detention Center, a county jail facility in Lynwood, before starting a rehabilitation program at Impact House in Pasadena. Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Grosbard said Weiland’s wife and family observed his continued drug use and “decided they needed to get him into a program. . . . I really hope this will do it. He is suffering.”

MOVIES

Hot Property: A previously unnoticed first novel by Louisa May Alcott has been discovered in the stacks of Harvard University’s Houghton Library, and Hollywood studio executives are reportedly eager to see the work by the author of “Little Women.” Joel Myerson, a professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C., said that he and the University of North Carolina’s Daniel Shealy came across the hand-written manuscript while researching at Harvard several years ago but didn’t reveal it until they were able to transcribe the manuscript and assess it. “It really is good quality,” he said. A notation on the text indicates that it was Alcott’s first novel, written in 1849 when she was about 17. The book, which had been separated from other Alcott works in the library but was cataloged, “was hidden in plain sight,” Myerson said. Literary agent Lane Zachary of Boston, who is representing the professors, said she plans to send their version of the manuscript to publishers and filmmakers next week. Word about the book has already spread among studios, she said. “They’ve all called.”

TELEVISION

Early Returns: It may still be April, but the May sweeps are already blooming for NBC. Or they did Sunday, when the peacock network scored its highest overnight ratings in five years for a telecast of a May sweeps miniseries with Part 1 of Peter Benchley’s “The Beast.” An estimated 50 million viewers saw the show, the second part of which was shown Monday night. The overnight Nielsen rating for Sunday in 33 metered markets was 19.2 with a share of 29. “The Beast” out-rated “Grumpy Old Men” on CBS by 66% and “She Woke Up Pregnant” on ABC by 38%, NBC reported. That’s the best May sweeps miniseries telecast since Part 1 of “Switched at Birth” (20.1/30) on April 28, 1991, and the top Sunday movie since Part 1 of “Gulliver’s Travels” (23.3/33) on Feb. 4. National ratings will be out today. And, yes, May sweeps started last Thursday.

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Candidates Sought: The Directors Guild of America and Walt Disney Television are looking for candidates for an eight-week training program aimed at increasing the number of female and minority directors. Applicants must have prior directing experience and should apply by Aug. 1. The program, in its second year, offers supervision and hands-on experience in half-hour comedies for one or two participants. “Last year, we were overwhelmed with the number of qualified applicants,” said Dean Valentine, president of Walt Disney Television and Walt Disney Television Animation. “There’s an incredible resource of talent out there, just waiting to be tapped.” For details, call (818) 560-4000.

DANCE

‘Black Choreographers’ Adrift: The “Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century” festival takes place this week, but it appears to face an uncertain future now that its local artistic director, Neil Barclay, has moved to the University of Texas at Austin as associate director of marketing, development and programming for its performing arts series. The dance festival has been mounted in Los Angeles roughly every 18 months since 1989--and sometimes also in San Diego and San Francisco--with Barclay choosing the participating dance companies and raising money for the festival’s local presentations. Barclay, who says he’s interested in curating the event in the future, notes that “the question [now] is who would fund-raise and produce it on the local level. There’s interest in it continuing, and if a presenting organization in L.A. wants to take it over, it would be easy.” “Black Choreographers” runs Thursday to Sunday in the Luckman Theater at Cal State L.A.

QUICK TAKES

New York’s Metropolitan Opera has commissioned Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison (“The Flight Into Egypt”) to write an opera based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel “The Great Gatsby.” The work is slated to premiere during the 1999-2000 season. . . .Comedian Oliver Hardy’s oldest surviving film--a 10-minute slapstick short made in 1915 before Hardy teamed up with Stan Laurel--has been saved from a London bonfire and may soon be shown for the first time in almost 80 years. A London film projectionist had decided to burn the film from his collection when it started decomposing. But he was stopped by Laurel and Hardy fan David Oyston, who has since had the film authenticated by U.S. experts and Britain’s National Film Archive. . . . Actor Chuck Norris sponsored a tennis tournament in Houston a week ago that raised $260,000 for his nonprofit Kick Drugs Out of America Foundation.