Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 62

EH dJ mm '1 1 1 i' 1 .1 fV -V! Undb Kerridge anxious to break from Monroe image Mi" It. If6! in" With red-ringed lips and platinum curls, Linda Kerridge does justice to the late Hollywood star she is often mistaken for Marilyn Monroe. 0 By PATRICK READY Special le SfxI With red-ringed lips and platinum curls, screen newcomer Linda Kerridge does justice to the late Hollywood star she is often mistaken for. In fact, she came so close to Marilyn Monroe in Fade to Black that many who saw the film insisted it was old footage of Monroe. Kerridge costared with Dennis (Breaking Away) Christopher in a story about a mentally imbalanced film buff (Christopher) who plays out his nostalgic film fantasies in violent manner.

Linda Kerridge plays a model who Christopher insists is Monroe. She raises his wrath by standing him up for a date. Later, she gives two astonishing performances as she and Christopher play out a scene from 'The Prince and the Showgirl, and again when she sings Happy Birthday reminiscent of the famous tribute to Monroe's supposed lover, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. KERRIDGE HOPES she will not be remembered for her resemblance to Monroe, but as an actress in her own right. She has turned down repeated offers to imitate Monroe again.

"I'd rather die than make a profession of imitating someone," she said. "I wasn't mimicking Marilyn in Fade to Black, I was just being myself. I have always been mistaken for her. Some people have even suggested I join a group of look-alikes and impersonate her as a profession. Never.

It's much too limiting, boring. Where could I go from there?" Beyond her uncanny resemblance to the classic movie star lies Linda's own Hollywood discovery story. Raised on an Australian ranch, away from the glamor and glitter of show business, Linda Kerridge never even saw a film until she was 12. After that, she was hooked. Her idol as a teen-ager was Liz Taylor.

"She was so beautiful and glamorous," said Kerridge. "I knew some day I would be a star like her." When Linda was studying art and modeling in Europe, she was approached by Fade to Black producer George came up to me at a party and told me I ought to be in pictures," Kerridge giggled. "He gave me his card and told me to look him up when I got to Hollywood." WELL, OF COURSE, Linda lost the card, and when she did arrive in Los Angeles she had long forgotten about the incident. Then, in true fairytale fashion, as she was walking along the street, Braunstein's partner, Ron Hamadan saw her, and so the story goes: she was written into the film Fade to Black. Linda says she did not get much for the picture, but appreciates the experience.

At this point, she is totally committed to motion picture acting; but she does not want to jump into it too fast. "I try and take each day as it comes," she said. "I like to sleep late, but I get depressed if I don't get something productive accomplished each day. I'm looking at new projects every day; reading new scripts." Linda is excited about the future and feels the whole world is coming into a new era. Her favorite period in history was the 1950s.

"I think the '50s were full of energy. It was after the war and things were changing. The 70s were very boring times. It's the '80s now and I think people are starting to wake up. People are looking forward with enthusiasm and pride." Linda Kerridge has much to look forward to, but her road to stardom will be a difficult one.

Typecast already, she will undoubtedly face many obstacles in her road to success. But, she has that secret ingredient that goes into being a star: she believes, she is a natural. in' (1 P. 3 Gary Leonard MEGA Viewers responsible for return of 'Palmerstown' Inside features Dick Clark is 51 years old, but he doesn't look a day over 35. If you want to know how he does it, turn to Spotlight on Page 4 i i iiimp Brian G.

Wilson (left) and Jermain H. Johnson star as two young boys growing up in a small Southern town 45 years ago, in Palmerstown. "We have not been compromised and I'm not saying that defensively but what we all agree we've done is strengthen the show by saving what we found to be re-sidually powerful and reaching into a new area and letting the stories involve adults to give us more range of what could happen." HALEY EXPLAINS that the two boys are still central to the series, but now have become "catalysts" for plots in which the drama occurs heavily among the adults. And rather sadly he adds, "One of the facts is you can do just so much with little boys carrying your action." And he didn't have to say "in prime time." Many so-called adult dramas on TV have dealt with racial conflicts recently. Will Palmerstown explore that facet again? "That will not dominate now," Haley replies.

"Reason is we have moved more toward stories of human conflicts. One show, for example, will have blacks in conflict with each other: the blacksmith with some other black, with the white people peripheral. The next show is quite vice versa. So stories rarely deal with racial conflicts as such now." But doesn't that seemingly watered-down premise bother Haley, whose ancestral Roots were steeped in racial conflict that still exists today? "No, it doesn he answers, "simply because that was the way it was where I grew up. The South, you know, is not a place where there were racial problems every day.

That wasn't it at all. The problems were mostly with the people of each race; in the background was the situation we lived with, which once in a while took its form as a conflict. But not on any weekly basis, for sure." WHAT IS FOR sure in Palmerstown is that the entire cast, which critics applauded, has returned intact In addition to the two boys, Jonelle Allen and Bill Duke are the black Freemans, parents of young Jermain (as Booker T); Beeson Carroll and Janice St John are the white Halls, parents of young Brian (as David). And the "human conflict" of the first episode involves the Hall's older son (Michael J. Fox) declaring he is the father of his new girlfriend's (Star-Shemah Bobatton) unborn child, which sets the elder Hall off on reviving an old feud.

By PAUL HENNIGER Spal Ta SPREE! HOLLYWOOD Those who constantly assail the networks for catering to the masses with comic strip entertainment will have to lay down their brickbats the night of March 17. Palmerstown is returning! Alex Haley, whose Roots gave TV one of its memorable high water marks, created Palmerstown, with Norman Lear's T.A.T. production company developing the series. It made its debut almost a year ago on CBS and ran for seven weeks, but ran downhill in ratings and was written off as another TV casualty, almost a certainty from the beginning because the critics unanimously acclaimed it as heart-warming drama. And that's always the kiss of death.

Who would care about watching a couple of kids in 1936 in a small town in the South? Palmerstown is much like Haley's hometown of Henning, and once more he is recalling his boyhood, the Depression and the segregated way of life in a town rather evenly divided between white and blacks. BUT ENCOURAGING mail, lots of it, convinced Haley, Lear and CBS to make 10 more episodes and try again. "We got heavy mail from small communities outside of cities," says Haley, citing how the reaction was, ex-pectedly, weak in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. "We got letters from a lot churchgoers who said thank you for the only series that says a church exists! "You can't tell a story about a little town without making a church integral to it." In the original format young Jermain H. Johnson and Brian Godfrey Wilson, a pair of 9-year-olds were the central figures, the sons of families who try to avoid the racial conflict and simply get along in those rough, pre-World War II times.

And through the eyes of these lads, one white, one black, intimate pals, the story of the town and the times unfolds. BUT IN TALKING to Alex Haley about his Palmerstown returning, the feeling is that he had to alter his original format to get his series directed toward what Madison Avenue calls the "demographic mainstream" in order to survive this time. Haley says in "re-evaluating" his series he was convinced or should that be persuaded by CBS, Lear and market researchers that series that had the higher por- CBS tion of action were the ones that got the biggest ratings. No need to cite the figures of The Dukes and CHtPs. So what Haley is hopeful of doing this time is relying on that "good solid basis" of letter-writing, small town churchgoers, and added to that "something that would make the series more attractive in the cities where there seem to be more of those Neilsen boxes." It's a revolting thought, having to add to this series the three ingredients that "sell" in TV: car chases, and noise.

"In the case of Palmerstown," Haley had to laugh at the thought, "you wipe out noise, we have a minimum amount of; and car chases? Well, we do have a car chase in one episode. But what it is is chasing a bootlegger, you know, in the context of that time, it happened. TjTrry til prc, if Cccpoo titer! wi3 honored V. rcviS cl I.