TELEVISIONFox Hires Crier: In the first major...

TELEVISION

Fox Hires Crier: In the first major hiring of an anchor for the Fox News 24-hour news channel, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes has wooed Catherine Crier from ABC News. Crier will host a nightly live, one-hour interview show with newsmakers on the Fox News channel, which debuts in October. In addition to the nightly show, she will join Mike Schneider in co-anchoring the channel’s election coverage. Crier, who began as an anchor on CNN, joined ABC in 1993. She has been a correspondent on ABC’s “20/20” as well as a regular substitute anchor on ABC’s “World News Tonight.”

MOVIES

Home Again: Sean Connery, who used to be a milkman in his hometown of Edinburgh, returned for the first time in five years to help launch the city’s 50th annual arts festival. And the former James Bond star hinted he might soon come back for good. “The situation in Britain is now better for foreigners,” said the 65-year-old film actor, who has lived in Spain as a tax exile for more than 20 years. “Now [if] I can come back to Britain, the place I would like to live would be in Scotland, but I haven’t found it yet,” he told a Sunday news conference. Connery was on hand to mark the international premiere of the film “Dragonheart,” a medieval romance tale in which he provides the voice of a computer-generated dragon. The arts festival, billed as the world’s largest, this year has more than 9,000 performers in 1,238 shows from as far afield as Albania, Ukraine and Japan.

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Colbert Legacy: Claudette Colbert left most of her $3.5-million estate to a longtime friend who helped care for her after a debilitating stroke in 1993. Helen O’Hagan, a retired Saks Fifth Avenue executive, had been a longtime Manhattan neighbor of the actress, who died July 30 at 90. Colbert’s nine-page will left $400,000 to 14 recipients and the rest of her estate, including her homes in New York and Barbados, to O’Hagan. Colbert also left money to several household employees, $150,000 to a niece and $10,000 to each of three sons of former Random House President Robert Bernstein, a friend. The sons were left explicit instructions to “spend the money foolishly.” Colbert won an Oscar for the 1934 romantic movie comedy classic “It Happened One Night.” She was widowed in 1968 and had no children.

POP/ROCK

A Flawed Pearl: A software failure put a glitch in the first-day sales for dates on Pearl Jam’s upcoming tour. Tickets to the band’s shows on Sept. 16 in Seattle and Sept. 22 in Toledo, Ohio, were to have gone on sale Saturday through an 800 number. But a system failure caused fans to get repeated busy signals even though the lines were open, and some callers were routed to numbers other than the Pearl Jam ticketing center. A spokesman for AT&T; acknowledged that its system was responsible for the failure, which was apparently corrected by Sunday, when tickets sold out for shows in Washington and Augusta, Maine. The Seattle sale was rescheduled for Monday and the Toledo show for tonight. Pearl Jam’s 11-city tour includes no Southern California dates, though the band may add additional U.S. shows in the spring following a European tour.

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More Tour Problems: Two of the six planned dates for Lollapalooza co-founder Perry Farrell’s ambitious ENIT Festival tour have been canceled, including Wednesday’s opening date at the Meadow near Cleveland. Tour spokesman Perry Serpa said Monday that “mounting production costs due to local ordinances” led to the scrapping of that show as well as one in Calaveras County (about two hours from San Francisco) that was to have been held on Aug. 23. Plans for the tour, headlined by Farrell’s band Porno for Pyros and featuring such nonmusical events as a communal meal and tree-planting activities, are unchanged for Southern California--Aug. 24 at the Snow Valley ski resort in the San Bernardino Mountains. A show Saturday at the Garden State Art Center in Holmdel, N.J., is now the opener.

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Bopping Back: Members of the late Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Gene Vincent’s original 1956-58 backup group, the Blue Caps, will reassemble at the Derby in Los Feliz tonight to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Vincent’s enduring hit, “Be Bop a Lula.” Also performing will be Buddy Knox, celebrating the 40th anniversary of his own hit, “Party Doll.” Tickets for the 9 p.m. show are $7.

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Callen Legacy: When the first Gay/Lesbian Music Awards are handed out on Oct. 6 in New York, the late Michael Callen will be remembered prominently. In nominations announced last week in Los Angeles, Callen’s posthumously released album, “Legacy,” drew the most nods--nine in six categories including male artist and album of the year. Among others in the running for GLAMA awards are such widely recognizable names as Melissa Etheridge and k.d. lang.

QUICK TAKES

Paula Abdul will make her TV movie debut during the coming season on ABC. “In the Shadow of Evil” will feature the pop singer as a young woman who “tries to reclaim her shattered life after a brutal rape.” Production has begun in Vancouver, with Adrian Pasdar to co-star. . . . CBS announced that it will premiere its new Saturday morning children’s schedule on Sept. 14, while the UPN network (which airs its children’s block Sundays) will launch its two-hour lineup of kids’ shows Sept. 8. . . . Tom Pollock, former vice chairman of MCA, has been tabbed by the American Film Institute to succeed former ABC President Frederick S. Pierce as chairman of AFI’s Board of Trustees, effective in October. . . . Warner Home Video announced that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s summer blockbuster, “Eraser,” will be released for video rental on Oct. 29. . . . Retired country music singer Naomi Judd will launch a daytime talk show in the fall of 1997. The hourlong show, “Naomi,” will reflect Judd’s views on how to triumph over adversity, such as the physical abuse, poverty and chronic liver disease that she has overcome.