Counting on Their ‘Celebrity’

Is this week the beginning of the end for youth pop or just another chapter in its success story? ‘N Sync will play for more than 50,000 fans at the Rose Bowl on Tuesday, the same day the group’s new album “Celebrity” arrives in stores amid expectations that it will go platinum in a week. So why is everyone asking if the genre is history?

The group’s last album, “No Strings Attached,” shocked the music industry last year by selling 2.4 million copies its first week in stores, doubling the former record. But that was the group’s first album in two years (not counting a holiday music collection), and it arrived at the peak of the youth pop wave, factors that stoked fan appetite.

Now, though, radio is cooling on youth pop, and the genre’s second-tier acts--including 98 Degrees, LFO and Mandy Moore--are watching their album sales sink.

One school of thought in the music industry is that youth pop is collapsing, just as it did a decade ago after the New Kids on the Block fad. Others, though, say it’s not a fad; it’s a new staple sound in an era when toddlers own CD players and Radio Disney seeks them out.

Either way, “Celebrity” will still be a top seller of 2001 even if it can’t match the youth pop of the good old days of 1999 and 2000. “The record ‘N Sync set with their last album is going to be one that will stand a long, long time,” says Bob Bell, music buyer for the Wherehouse chain.

“It’s a tougher market in youth pop now: You have a few superstars and then everybody else. But ‘N Sync is going to do extremely well, no doubt about that.”

The Art of ‘Citizen Kane’

In honor of its 60th anniversary, Orson Welles’ classic “Citizen Kane” will hit the big screen once more as part of a symposium on Sunday that pays tribute to the film’s art director, Perry Ferguson.

Speakers for the event, sponsored by the Art Directors Film Society, include John B. Mansbridge, a retired art director who worked on the “Citizen Kane” set, and Robert Carringer, an English and film professor at the University of Illinois and author of “The Making of Citizen Kane.”

Ferguson, who died in 1963, was an innovative art director for RKO and Samuel Goldwyn studios. “Citizen Kane” was the first of several collaborations with Welles, including “The Stranger” in 1946, and is heralded as a groundbreaking work of economic and creative set design.

Sunday’s symposium should touch on the personal aspects of filmmaking and the technical and professional history of art direction. “To talk about him is to talk about how art direction operated,” Carringer noted.

The 850-person film society, which is presenting its fifth season of screenings, was created to bring together and pay tribute to the industry’s benchmark art directors. With this screening, the group hopes to provide contemporary art directors with a firsthand account of how production has changed.

“We are so far behind in chronicling our history,” said Tom Walsh, the society’s chairman. “Especially now, seeing the first generation of art directors gone, we only have a very delicate handful of second-generation, 1930s art directors like John [Mansbridge] left to count on.”

The symposium begins at 1 p.m. at the Paramount Studio Theater on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, followed by the film screening at 4 p.m. Both are open to the public.

Fox Launches ‘Planet’ Watch

It almost wouldn’t be a big summer movie released by one of the studios that owns a major TV network if said network didn’t run a related prime-time special that really amounts to 30 minutes of free advertising for the film.

Such will be the case Wednesday, when Fox offers “Planet of the Apes: Rule the Planet,” a tie-in special that has been more suspenseful than most because of director Tim Burton’s last-minute re-shoots on the 20th Century Fox movie, which opens Friday.

It was even reported last week that the TV program would be postponed, but at press time, Fox officials said the show is still scheduled, including interviews with Charlton Heston--who starred in the 1968 original--as well as with younger celebrities to discuss the movie’s pop-cultural significance, among them creators of “South Park” as well as Los Angeles Laker (and sometime actor) Rick Fox.

Beyond the obvious promotional aspects for the movie, such specials also offer benefits to the network by providing splashes of original programming during the summer, one reason NBC was willing to rerun “Jurassic Park”--along with footage of its second sequel, which opened last week--in advance of the movie’s release, even though the network has no financial interest in the film.

Compiled by Times staff writers