Take One (Jul 15, 1979)

DISH NIGHT By Waldo Lydecker Barry Manilow, Dolly Parton and Peter Allen have been picked up. have her memoirs published in the States. But with a hitch—all of the names are going to be deleted. The British version, which drags Warren Beatty, Ryan O’Neal, and Anthony Newley (among many others) through the mud, was a hot item last year in Beverly Hills; every British agent flying to LA knew it would be worth his while to pack a few extra. GAS LINE FEVER: Among the dramas taking place on long gas lines during the fuel shortage in California: studio executives having story ideas for prospective screenplays pitched at them by rabid writers, starlets using the queues as The New Schwab's, waiting to be discovered by every young producer in a Mercedes. Warner planned a big “gasless premiere” for The Main Event, but FROM THE MIKE NICHOLS WON’T/MIKE NICHOLS WILL FILE: he wont be directing Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton in secretarial saga Nine to Five or the re-make of Grand Hotel. He will, however, stop auditioning twelve-year-old girls for road companies of “Annie” long enough to re-team with Elaine May in a revival of “Who's Afraid FLASH: Ryan O'Neal and Diana Ross are off. cancelled it when the crisis passed, sending roller skates back into closets all over Brentwood. IT’S A HELLUVA...: At the end of a particularly productive (and lucrative) Broadway season, New York talent got a big shot in the arm when several of its own were lured west by fat contracts. Jack Hofsiss, director of the season's biggest hit “The Elephant Man,” wound up with a three-picture deal with Universal, and its star Philip Anglim was eyed by every movie executive passing through town. Neither one will have anything to do with the movie version of “Elephant,” however, since the picture (which is being produced by Mel Brooks) is not based on the play, but another version of the story of the nineteenthcentury freak who gets befriended by a society dame. John Hurt will have the title role, co-starring with Anne Bancroft. Meanwhile, Michael Weller’s new play “Loose Ends” was also optioned for Universal by Stevie Philips, the girl who put “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” on the map, and comedy duo Monteith and Rand (touted as the new Nichols and May) landed a deal with The Producer Circle and Warners to write something called “Turtle Diary,” which is apparently (but not positively) about a flock of turtles on the loose in the Hamptons. FROM THE CLASSICAL FRONT, Richard Dreyfuss will have a chance to challenge all of those wags who claim that Al Pacino's rendition of “Richard III” is funnier than his (in Goodbye Girl) when he takes on the role of Iago in an outdoor production of “Othello” with Raul Julia. FLASH: Dean-Paul Martin wants to give up acting. NO, BUT I HEARD THE SONG: In a new, desperate attempt to find interesting material, Hollywood has let the publishing business alone long enough to option several song titles as the basis for movie plots. Tunes by Willie Nelson, 6 TAKE ONE of Virginia Woolf?” this year—Love at First Bite. QUESTIONS about Stewart's pregnancy were resolved when she showed up at hubby Rod’s Madison Square Garden concert very much so. Meryl Streep, also the subject of much Is She Or Not? gossip (she is), is being courted for the role of Evelyn Nesbitt in the movie version of Ragtime, another one you think you've seen already. Speaking of Evelyn Nesbitt, Joan Collins (who played that famous turn-of-thecentury playgirl in the 1950s) will finally A piece of the rock You may remember a few months back the wire stories about the Malibu Rock, the 116-pound boulder perched 250 feet above the Pacific Coast Highway. Numerous attempts were made, under the auspices of the California Department of Transportation and at a cost of $100,000, to remove the rock from its precarious perch. While these attempts were still being made, enterprising Australian sculptor Brett-Livingstone Strong bought the boulder for $100 because, he said, FLASH: President Jimmy’s favorite movie Alana Hamilton FLASH: Ryan O'Neal and Diana Ross are on. GOOD LORD: Warners and Orion are worried that their co-effort Monty Python's Life of Brian, is going to be quite controversial. While the movie doesn’t exactly make a laughing-stock out of Jesus Christ, it isn’t going to do a lot for his rep either. They sneaked it in Westwood to hysterical acclaim from an audience of Monty Python freaks, and those in-the-know say that this could be the big breakthrough for those loveable zanies. “John Wayne is imprisoned in the Malibu Rock.” Once the rock was dislodged, the intrepid Strong blasted off the loose conglomerate edges, loaded its marine sandstone core onto a flatbed truck and hauled it to the Century Square Shopping Center where he proceeded to release the entrapped Wayne in the form of a sculpture called “Life, Time, Light” which the artist calls “a theatrical mask expressing John Wayne not as a traditional cowboy, but as a man who represents all life.” Bart Photo/L.A.