Just Think of Them as Long Trailers

Worried your history classes didn’t do justice to topics featured in the holiday movies “Amistad,” “Titanic” or “Anastasia”? Never fear, a wave of television specials are here--many supplied by the very studios releasing those films. This Thursday, the History Channel will run “Ships of Slaves: The Middle Passage,” which DreamWorks produced as a companion to “Amistad” and which features an introduction by director Steven Spielberg. DreamWorks also had a hand in “Cinque: Freedom Fighter,” which airs next week on the A & E series “Biography,” just as Fox provided that network with a special tied to its animated feature “Anastasia.” Beyond such exercises in self-promotion are instances in which cable channels simply ride piggyback on the enormous publicity campaigns surrounding certain films. In that vein, Discovery Channel will run “Titanic: Untold Stories” and a documentary titled “Slave Ship” on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively, with another “Titanic”-related entry scheduled for TBS’ “National Geographic Explorer” on Sunday. An A & E spokesman says that the network tries to capitalize on interest fostered by certain movies but that it doesn’t allow the production auspices to affect the editorial content of its programs.

It’s True: The Getty Doesn’t Own Everything

As press and public begin gliding on the automated tram up to the new hilltop Getty Center for the first official previews this week, they should prepare to check labels closely in the museum’s glamorous galleries for European paintings. The Getty’s spotty collection has been tweaked with a dozen loans, borrowed from public museums and private parties in L.A., Brazil, Germany, London--even Wichita, Kan. (a portrait of a man by 16th century Italian painter Dosso Dossi, author of two other knockout pictures owned by the Getty). Locally, Lynda and Stewart Resnick have lent three small 18th century pictures, including Francois Boucher’s lusciously lascivious “Leda and the Swan”; Hannah Carter lent an elegant fruit and floral still life by Henri Fantin-Latour; and two Edgar Degas pastels have come from an unidentified source. From Sa~o Paolo there’s a portrait of the Earl of Surrey by Hans Holbein the Younger, from Berlin a Tintoretto Madonna and Child and from Frankfurt a Pontormo portrait of a woman in red (some scholars think the picture might actually be by Bronzino, Pontormo’s most gifted pupil). Orazio Gentileschi’s monumental Baroque epic “The Finding of Moses” (a record breaker for the artist when it sold at auction two years ago) and an oil sketch by Edouard Manet of his great “Bar at the Folies-Bergere,” both from an anonymous collection in London, round out the enviable list of borrowed baubles.

Steamrolling Its Way Up the Pop Charts

It has become almost as much a part of the holiday season as eggnog, mistletoe and eight tiny reindeer: a Christmas album by Mannheim Steamroller climbing the pop charts. Look for the latest effort from the orchestral rock ensemble led by Chip Davis, “Christmas Live,” to move into the Top 20 this week when SoundScan figures are reported Wednesday. The Omaha-based Mannheim Steamroller reigns as the undisputed champion of this lucrative corner of the recording business. Its first three seasonal albums--1984’s “Christmas,” 1988’s “A Fresh Aire Christmas” and 1995’s “Christmas in the Aire”--have sold a combined 14 million copies, according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America. The new collection, culled from a 1995 concert that was broadcast on PBS, has moved steadily up the Top 200 pop chart since it was released in October, selling about 165,000 copies so far. It’s No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Christmas Albums chart this week (behind Hanson’s “Snowed In”), and the first three Mannheim Christmas albums are also among the Top 12. “It doesn’t surprise me. These are perennial big sellers,” says Pete Howard, editor and publisher of the ICE CD newsletter. “A well-done instrumental Christmas album can be even more timeless than one with vocals. A vocalist may go out of style and start to sound dated, but the right songs done instrumentally can be ageless.”

Sheesh, Seems Like Everyone’s a Critic

It isn’t the Oscars. It isn’t even the Golden Globes. But Hollywood studios will be anxiously awaiting Tuesday’s vote when the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures in New York chooses its best films and performances of 1997. Never heard of the National Board of Review? Well, it was created as an anti-censorship group in 1909 to protest then-New York Mayor George McClennan’s revocation of moving picture exhibition licenses on Christmas Eve, 1908. It seems the mayor believed that the new medium of motion pictures degraded the morals of the community. By the 1920s and 1930s, the group had become an unofficial clearinghouse for new films, with movies carrying the legend “Passed by the National Board of Review.” But today, it is the group’s annual list of awards that interests Hollywood’s studios. That’s because the awards are among the earliest handed out, so studio marketing departments eagerly tout them in their movie ads. The board’s awards signal the beginning of a three-month orgy of nominations and awards ceremonies. On Thursday, for example, New York film critics are scheduled to announce their awards, followed by Los Angeles film critics on Saturday. The Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., meanwhile, plans to announce its annual Golden Globe nominations on Dec. 18 and hand out the statuettes on Jan. 18, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will announce its Oscar nominations Feb. 10 with the annual Oscar telecast airing on March 23.

Compiled by Times staff writers and contributors