Hollywood

What can director/choreographer Roger Minami do to top the previous production shows he has presented in Atlantic City during the last 10 years? Easy. He can bring Hollywood to the Boardwalk. Well, OK, maybe that's not so easy, but Minami gives it his best shot with StarStruck, the new revue at Merv Griffin's Resorts Casino Hotel. The premise here is to salute Hollywood's past and present. Mostly, though, this show dwells on the past, because that's when Hollywood was at its glitziest, and if there's one thing Minami understands, it's glitz.

The Front Runner, the proposed film based on Patricia Nell Warren's controversial 1974 novel about a homosexual relationship between a track coach and a star athlete, has been on the back burner for longer than just about any project in Hollywood. There are many reasons for the long delay in bringing what promises to be a decent and worthwhile picture to the screen. And now there are 1.3 million more of them. That is the paltry figure - $1,320,430, to be exact - that Torch Song Trilogy grossed in its first four weeks of release.

Hollywood looks like it should - street after street of Mission-style bungalows colored tan and beige and, occasionally, pink. It's the pine trees that seem out of place. This isn't that Hollywood, with stars and suntans and smog. This Hollywood is one of the region's quirkiest communities, a small-scale re-creation of Southern California in a pocket of Abington Township. Cruise the main drag, Los Angeles Avenue, and you pass streets named Pasadena, San Gabriel and Berkeley.

Edward James Olmos said he'd been searching for the "most relevant" word to sum up the week's hoopla celebrating Bill Clinton's inauguration and had come up with "inclusion. " Inclusion? How about, "excessive"? This would be "the final entertainment event" before the swearing-in, Jack Lemmon promised at the start Tuesday night at what was billed as the "52d Presidential Inaugural Gala" on CBS, and that was one of the most hopeful sentiments of the evening. The gushiness and mushiness of the event got out of hand quickly.

Arthur A. Vallee, 93, who gave up a Hollywood career in the 1940s to return to his family in South Jersey and went on to own a successful car dealership in Woodbury, died of heart failure Jan. 17 in his Woodbury home. After reading about California in several magazines, Mr. Vallee, a Gibbstown native, decided to launch an artistic career on the West Coast, said grandson Joseph Vallee Jr. In the late 1930s, much to his father's dismay, Mr. Vallee ventured to Los Angeles and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Nothing more clearly illustrates the complete surrender of the current Hollywood establishment to political correctness than the Dec. 15, 1999, announcement by the Directors Guild of America that . . . they were dropping their prestigious D.W. Griffith Award. Established in 1953 as a means of posthumously honoring the great pioneer director who revolutionized film art, the award was the guild's highest recognition of a director's body of work.. . . But now, citing Griffith's fostering of "intolerable racial stereotypes" [in movies such as Birth of a Nation]

HOLLYWOODIANS love to give awards, get awards, sell awards . . . and they absolutely adore the end of every year, which is when a lot of awards get tossed around, hitting and sticking to some of them. Two awards lists were just announced, one earned and the other just sort of made up - but, then, so is Hollywood. Reese Witherspoon took top moneymaker honors in The Hollywood Reporter's annual list of the highest-paid actresses. The 31-year-old Academy Award winner commands $15 million to $20 million a movie.

There is a wide, perhaps unbreachable, cultural gap between Hollywood and the East Coast. This has become jarringly apparent as my New York friends badger me with one insistent question: "Why would famous movie stars, who could have any woman they want, hire a prostitute?" Unlike most questions put to me by these friends ("What really happened to Sal Mineo?"), I am able to answer this one. For those who have just emerged from their August marathon reading of "Middlemarch," the question alludes to a 27-year-old Los Angeles woman, Heidi Fleiss, who has been charged with running a call-girl operation for powerful Hollywood celebrities.

On June 9, Washington will host a Hollywood-style benefit, a premiere of the movie Jurassic Park. The beneficiaries are the Los Angeles-based Children's Action Network and Washington's Children's Defense Fund, whose founder, Marion Wright Edelman, is a close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton. (Hillary once served on the CDF board.) The top price is $10,000, the lowest for adults is $250 and it is certain both organizations will come out of the night big winners. It's less likely the Clinton administration will.

A lot of liberals say that talk radio was responsible for, or contributed to, the Oklahoma City bombing. No, say conservatives. Talk radio is not to blame. It simply mirrors widely held attitudes in the culture. Presidential candidate Sen. Bob Dole says liberals in Hollywood and the recording industry are at least partly responsible for the social horrors everyone deplores. No, say liberals. Hollywood just mirrors reality. Some say that if one theory is true, then both must be true.