ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT REPORTS FROM THE TIMES, NEWS SERVICES AND THE NATION’S PRESS.

TELEVISION

Geraldo (Again) Ruffles Journalistic Feathers

It didn’t take long after arriving in Afghanistan as a Fox News war correspondent for Geraldo Rivera to generate controversy.

First, he was the target of criticism in journalistic circles for carrying a gun, despite long-standing taboos against correspondents packing heat in war zones. Now the Baltimore Sun is challenging Rivera and Fox News on a dispatch he filed about a deadly “friendly fire” bombing.

The incident took place Dec. 5 near the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, where three U.S. soldiers and several anti-Taliban Afghan fighters were killed in a U.S. airstrike. The following day, Rivera reported that he became choked up after reciting the Lord’s Prayer over the “hallowed ground” where “friendly fire took so many of our men and the moujahedeen.”

The Sun reports that Rivera later acknowledged he actually had been several hundred miles from the Kandahar bombing site--saying he confused that mishap with another “friendly fire” incident that claimed several Afghan lives in Tora Bora. Though Rivera blamed his mistake on the “fog of war,” the newspaper said, the Tora Bora incident did not occur until at least three days after Rivera’s Dec. 6 report.

Officials for Fox News Channel did not return telephone calls seeking comment about the blooper--about which others were quite vocal.

“I believe that Geraldo Rivera and Fox News owe their viewers a substantive explanation of what this means, journalistically and ethically,” said Bob Steele, director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

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MOVIES

Cruise, Crowe Discuss Technology’s Downside

People who download movies off the Internet are “thieves” who threaten the potential of the film industry, Tom Cruise said Tuesday.

“We want to make movies, and in order to do that [the films] have to be able to pay for themselves,” Cruise told reporters at a news conference in Singapore where he was promoting his new movie, “Vanilla Sky.”

When it comes to technology, said Cameron Crowe, director of “Vanilla Sky,” it’s a good news-bad news scenario. While modern technology has led to a proliferation of pirated movies and music in Asia, it has also opened doors. Many new directors get started by making amateur films and e-mailing them to their friends.

“In the future, everybody is going to be a director,” Crowe said. “Somebody’s got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about.”

Officials in Singapore have been cracking down on intellectual-property theft. In April, the high-tech city-state was removed from a U.S. government blacklist of nations where intellectual property piracy is most severe.

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Film Registry Adds 25

to Preservation List

“All the King’s Men,” “Hoosiers” and “All That Jazz” are among the latest batch of 25 films selected by the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry as worthy of preservation.

According to the group, established in 1988, fewer than half of the American feature films produced before 1950--and less than 20% of those produced before the 1920s--survive. To be considered for the list, a movie must be at least 10 years old and be “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant.”

The titles chosen include “The Thin Blue Line” (1988), “The Sound of Music” (1965), “Stormy Weather” (1943), “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1978), “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” (1944) and the original “The Planet of the Apes” (1968).

More esoteric fare that made the cut: the cult sci-fi film “The Thing From Another World” (1951), Ernie Gehr’s avant-garde “Serene Velocity” (1970) and the civil-defense film “House in the Middle,” which tells people that one needs a clean house to survive nuclear war.

“With films such as Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’ and ‘Jaws’ ... there’s more of a ‘cultural icon’ thrust this year--things that are touchstones in American culture,” Steve Leggett, staff coordinator for the National Film Preservation Board, told The Times. (The list can be found at lcweb.loc.gov/film/nfr2001.html)

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THE ARTS

Houston Opera Gives Back to Enron Workers

The Houston Grand Opera is offering free tickets to next year’s concerts for current subscribers who have been laid off by the Enron Corp.--the once-mighty Houston-based energy giant that filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition last week

The opera’s general director, David Gockley, told The Times that Enron has been a major force on the local arts scene--donating money and matching gifts from employees. The initiative was a “nice gesture,” he said--a way of “giving back.”

“Enron is very central to the economy and psyche of this city--and we empathize with those who lost their jobs,” Gockley says. “Despite the fact that we’ll be ending the year with a slight deficit, we feel we have the capacity to do this without hurting ourselves. We figure there are about 75 to 100 people involved at an average subscription cost of $750, which means we shouldn’t be more than $75,000 in the hole.”

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QUICK TAKES

Columbia TriStar will release all 13 episodes of the first season of “The Larry Sanders Show” on DVD on Feb. 26.... Cheval, an equestrian ballet troupe from Montreal, will appear for three weeks at the Orange County Fair and Exposition Center in Costa Mesa beginning March 20. The company had originally announced dates in Los Angeles, but negotiations for the L.A. run could not be completed in time.... Drew Barrymore and Tom Green are getting divorced after six months of marriage. The comedian filed papers in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday, citing “irreconcilable differences”.... Complaining about “one too many years of bumping heads with corporate structure,” David Bowie is quitting Virgin Records. He plans to create his own label to release his next album.

Elaine Dutka