Television - Dec. 22, 2001

TELEVISION

Networks Make Changes in Prime Time

With the year winding down, the major networks are tinkering with their prime-time schedules for the second half of the season.

NBC, to no one’s surprise, announced Friday that it has canceled first-year sitcoms “Emeril” and “Inside Schwartz.” “Emeril,” in which well-known chef Emeril Lagasse was trying to become a sitcom star, already was off the schedule and will be replaced on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. by “Imagine That,” with Hank Azaria, beginning Jan. 8. “Inside Schwartz” will have its final broadcast Jan. 3, then will be replaced by reruns of “Will & Grace” on Thursdays at 8:30 p.m.

ABC, meanwhile, will revamp its Wednesday lineup on Jan. 16, bringing back the comedy “The Job,” with Denis Leary, at 9:30 p.m. and slotting the newsmagazine “Downtown” at 10 p.m. The newsmagazine “20/20,” which had been airing at 10, will move to its former position of Fridays at 10 p.m.

Fox hasn’t announced schedule changes but has cut the number of original episodes it wants this season from three series: “Undeclared” (reduced from 22 to 17), “Grounded for Life” and “Titus” (both reduced from 22 to 20). The network also is busy working on next season: It has ordered 13 episodes of a sci-fi action series, set 600 years in the future, from Joss Whedon, creator of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

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Ali in Tolerance Public Service Announcement

The committee mobilizing Hollywood’s war effort has given the go-ahead to its first international public service announcement--starring Muhammad Ali.

According to Variety, the former heavyweight champ, a follower of the Nation of Islam, will stress that the war on terrorism is not a war against Islam or Arabs. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America and de facto president of the war committee, said that the spot would be translated into a number of languages for broadcast in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

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MOVIES

Name Change for Hero in ‘Black Hawk Down’?

Ridley Scott’s upcoming war drama “Black Hawk Down” tells the story of a botched American military raid in Somalia. The operation, which led to the deaths of 18 American troops, became the longest sustained ground action by U.S. forces since the Vietnam War.

But one of the leads, played by Ewan McGregor, is not the hero portrayed, the New York Post reports. Ranger John Grimes, it says, is actually the real-life John “Stebby” Stebbins--a man who, after winning the distinguished Silver Star for bravery in the Battle of Mogadishu, was convicted of child molestation.

Stebbins, now 36, was court-martialed in June 2000 for abusing a child under the age of 12. He is serving a 30-year sentence in Leavenworth military prison in Kansas.

Mark Bowden, author of the best-selling book and the “Black Hawk” screenplay, told the Post that the Pentagon pressured him to change the name of the character in order to avoid controversy. Nora Stebbins, Stebbins’ ex-wife, has raised objections to the portrayal.

“[Producers] are going to make millions off this film in which my ex-husband is portrayed as an all-American hero, when the truth is he is not,” she said in an e-mail to the newspaper.

A spokeswoman for Revolution Studios, which is producing the film, said that “creative” concerns rather than military pressure were responsible for the name change. “There were 100 men in the battle and only 40 speaking parts, so we had to condense some of the characters,” she said. “[Grimes] is one who’s a compilation of a number of soldiers who fought in that battle, so his name was changed.”

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Incest Theme Snipped from ‘Kate & Leopold’

Miramax Films, for the second time in a month, has taken the unusual step of cutting a movie after it was screened for critics.

First, Lasse Hallstrom snipped four minutes from “The Shipping News,” a movie delayed by the film’s extensive post-production schedule and the director’s bout with heart palpitations. And now “Kate & Leopold”--a time-travel movie in which Kate (Meg Ryan) gets romantically involved with the 19th century Leopold (Hugh Jackman)--has been trimmed about the same amount.

The film’s release was pushed back from Dec. 21 to Christmas Day to get out of the way of “The Lord of the Rings,” which was generating unexpectedly strong interest among women, “Kate & Leopold’s” target audience. That gave director James Mangold more “time to tinker,” explained Dennis Higgins, Miramax’s senior vice president of publicity--and to factor in audience response.

The suggestion that Kate was genetically related to her 21st century boyfriend (Liev Schreiber) didn’t sit well, it seems. Initially, Schreiber is set up as a descendant of Leopold, who is planning to marry Kate at the end of the film. After a host of critics, including Richard Roeper and Roger Ebert, complained about the implication of incest, that portion of the story was removed.

“What we thought was an interesting plot point was misinterpreted by audiences, who focused on that more than we imagined,” Higgins told The Times. “We’re not talking mother-father incest but a fantasy about a great-grandparent from the 1800s. Still, it made many people uncomfortable.”

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THE ARTS

Turkish Picassos Revealed to Be Fakes

Art lovers from as far as Japan have come to see the paintings attributed to Pablo Picasso at a national museum in Turkey, but officials now say four of the eight works are fakes. They are awaiting verification of the authenticity of the rest.

The Paris-based Picasso Administration, run by the artist’s son, Claude Ruiz-Picasso, examined photographs of the pieces and certified them to be imitations, Turkey’s Ministry of Culture said in a statement this week.

The newly refurbished Picasso room at the State Painting and Sculpture Museum in Ankara houses five of the eight paintings. The other three are stored in the museum’s vault.

“Not only are they copies, but they are very bad copies,” declared Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. “The originals are here with us at the Hermitage where they have always been.”

The origins of the fake paintings remain a mystery.

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POP/ROCK

Carter Arrested on Drunk Driving Charge

Country music singer Deana Carter, whose 1997 hit “Strawberry Wine” was named single of the year by the Country Music Assn., was arrested and charged with drunk driving Friday morning, Nashville police said.

The arrest report said Carter was stopped for driving 48 mph in a 30-mph zone. The officer said he smelled alcohol on her breath. The 35-year-old singer failed a field sobriety test and refused to take a breath test, the report said. She was taken before a night court commissioner and released.

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QUICK TAKES

KNX will broadcast “A Christmas Carol,” starring Lionel Barrymore as Ebenezer Scrooge, on Monday at 9 p.m. The program was first broadcast on the station in 1934.... Mariah Carey will perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the Super Bowl on Feb. 3 in New Orleans.... Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are among the artists recording tracks for a Ramones tribute album, planned for a spring release.... The U.S. Senate voted unanimously on Thursday to confirm Michael Hammond as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Elaine Dutka