Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 18

6B TIMES FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1993 4 This Day In Music: 1973 No. 1 Billboard pop hit: Delta Dawn, Helen Reddy. Reddy is the fifth female vocalist to record the song. 1964 Rod Stewart records his first single, Good Morning Little bcnooigm. 1957 sioDhan t-aney ot bananarama is Dorn.

mm Tonight on MTV: 6 Jams, 6:30 Rock Videos; 7 Beav-is and Butt-head, 7:30 Big Picture; 8 Video Countdown; 1 0 Alternative Nation; 1 1 Beaw's and Butt-head, 1 1 :30 Rock Videos Tonight on TNN: 8 -NASCAR Auto Racing; 9:30 Nashville Now, 1 1 Club Dance 1950 Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry is Quo born in Boston. 1946 vocalist Danny Hutton of Three Dog Night is born in Bun-crana, Ireland. 1945 Jose Feliciano is born in Puerto Rico. He is blind at birth. BPI A ARTS A I Rash Attitudes mmair ADOS ffinni epic The Odd Couple' returns in CBS movie By CHRSTNE M.

ANDELMAN Compiled from Tmes stuff, wire reports E2SCI1EIC23 By DENISE BARRICKLOW Entertainment News Wife Minnesota Fats hospitalized NEW YORK As The Odd Couple, Tony Randall and Jack Klugman were infamously mismatched roommates whose hilari ous relationship saw their show be come one of the big hits of the 1970s. The trail and trials from book to screen hurt an otherwise fine effort. TV PREVIEW And the Band Played On Grade: Saturday at 8 on HBO By JENNIFER L. STEVENSON Times Television Cute Grief upon grief. Death after death.

A never-ending toll that numbs the senses and transforms people into statistics as tragedy exponentially increases by the month. For years, scientists didn't even know what to call the vicious illness. Finally, in 1982, fully five years after the first person died from it, the disease had a name: AIDS. It was about that time the San Francisco Chronicle assigned a reporter to cover the epidemic full-time, the first newspaper to do so. The resulting book, A nd the Band Played On, is a horrifying, haunting look at how politics and polemics hampered research to contain the illness and cost lives during the early 1980s.

The quilt-like structure, intensely personal stories tightly in Come Sept. 24, meticulous Fe Minnesota Fats, the legendary pool player portrayed in the 1961 movie The Hustler, was committed to a hospital psychiatric ward. Fats, whose real name is Rudolf Wanderone, was admitted Wednesday to Vanderbilt University Ivledical Center after becoming disoriented and walking out of his home. A court commissioner later committed him to the hospital at the request of doctors. His wife of six months, Theresa Ward, declined to comment.

Fats' age is a matter of dispute. Associates have said he is 93, but the 1966 biography Bank Shot said he was born in 1913. lix Unger and messy Oscar Madison will be reunited again on CBS in a television movie more than two decades after first being paired together on the tube. Though the characters remain as mismatched as ever, you may have a hard time identifying Jack Klugman as the boisterous sports announcer of yore. In a voice that is so scratchy it makes you wince, Klugman explains that in the upcoming movie Oscar is shown recovering from larynx cancer a disease the actor himself developed some 10 years ago.

If his voice sounds painful, -i terwoven with science, made the book a medi Home Box Office cal thriller that was sadly true. Too bad the same can be said about HBO ON THE FRONT LINE: In And the Band Played On, Matthew Modine portrays a government medical researcher in the fight against AIDS. ill 7 ill in dt ill -A rn 3 It in ilH -Id Ai IT ni ilO )i .7 substantial but ultimately flawed version of Randy Shilts' bestseller. Klugman, who is now cured, insists The film version of And the Band Played WNET says film erred A nationally broadcast documentary erred in crediting black battalions with liberating the Nazi death camps Dachau and Bu-chenwald, a public television station that helped produce the film said Tuesday. WNET said documents and interviews with veterans and Holocaust survivors showed that the film's ac On captures the idea of the senseless tragedy of politicians fighting over money and doctors Building' falls to the ratings ax over credit as the epidemic claims victims.

Yet the movie never descends into the hell that is AIDS. And the Band Played On seems to ha ve count of the April 1945 liberation of the camps "was seriously flawed." The station said the film, Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II, about captured the feeling of the nation: AIDS kills daily, but we have become numb. Based on the material, the movie should have scored an easy A but instead the treatment earns it a B. Producers, directors or writers cannot be segregated Army units, would not be shown again unless the errors were corrected. It was totally blamed for this final product.

Instead, considering broadcasting a cor the blame must shift to those who left messy fingerprints on the script before it ever got to rection, said WNET spokeswoman Karen Salerno. WNET and HBO. Originally optioned 1987 by NBC, the network dropped the project after its Rock Hudson movie was a ratings disaster. Then. other PBS stations aired the 90-minute film in November.

It was pulled from distribution three months later after veterans and gay men are monogamous. Also starring are Matthew Modine and Lily Tomlin. Gere plays a choreographer and early casualty. The part is largely based on the life of Michael Bennett, creator of A Chorus Line. Cameos include Phil Collins, Steve Martin, Alan Alda, B.D.

Wong and Swoosie Kurtz, who convey in brief scenes the trauma of AIDS. Despite the film's flaws, the actors are all superb. In one small scene, the emotion of the illness is captured in a line uttered by a man dying of AIDS. "Here are pictures of me when I was still a human," he said. Off-screen controversies show how difficult it was to make the film, let alone tell Shilts' story coherently.

With less dedication from HBO and producer Aaron Spelling, the $8-million movie could have been a disaster. Shilts, who is gay and has AIDS, said he approves of the final film, but "it's not the film I would have made." What we need now is a story about the movie. Certainly not as important as chronicling the AIDS epidemic, such a film would serve up a slice of life in Hollywood that most would find unpalatable. A story about a town where people wear red ribbons and attend AIDS benefits, but when they are called on to contribute their greatest asset creative talents to debunk myths and stereotypes they quietly, furtively, fearfully back away Until the next awards ceremony, when they can wear their red ribbons again and listen to the band play on. faced with widespread fear by leading actors who didn't want to play gay roles, producers spent years trying to find a cast.

Jewish groups said the all-black 761st Tank Battalion and 183rd Say good night, Bonnie. With a little humor and a lot of dignity, just step behind the curtain, the way Gracie Allen always did. Despite rave reviews and a powerhouse producer, CBS decided this week not to pick up Bonnie Hunt's retro-series The Building, which was produced by talk show host David Letterman. The six-episode summer series had been a possible January replacement, but low ratings doomed the quirky comedy set in a Chicago apartment building. Also wiped from the January line-up is The Boys, Ned Beatty's comedy about four men who gather each week for a game of monopoly and male bonding.

The only bright news Thursday was for fans of The Home Show, the popular daytime do-it-yourself hodgepodge of crafts and hints hosted by Gary Collins. Canceled by WTSP-Ch. 10 in Tampa, the show now can be seen on Lakeland-Tampa's WTMV-Ch. 32 at 1 1 each morning. Get those hot glue guns ready, Gary's not going anywhere! JENNIFER L.

STEVENSON Only when Shilts and director Roger Spot- Engineer Combat Battalion had not freed those two camps. Filmmakers Nina Rosenblum tiswoode flew to San Francisco and personally pleaded with Richard Gere to take a small part did other actors show interest. Soon, everyone in the town of lemmings wanted a cameo. and William Miles, who produced the film in association our directors and 22 rewrites later, the with WNET, rejected the station's finding and accused PBS of censorship. film was finished only a month ago, after debates over political correctness, censorship and charges of falsifying history.

I he biggest problem was the portrayal of gays. Shilts, who didn't want to promote homophobia, was disturbed at a scene that showed gay men as drag queens, in porno stores and swinging bath houses. HBO agreed and focused more on actor Sir Ian McKellan as gay rights activist Bill Kraus, who points out that most A hit everywhere Australian audiences skipped breakfast and joined early morning queues the other day to get Ib nri that it is not. What you re hearing is the air gaps, the little pieces where the vocal cords don't come together," he says. "Not only does it not hurt, it feels good to talk." Klugman says the idea to do a movie of The Odd Couple was proposed several years ago by producer Howard Koch but had to be postponed because of the actor's disease, which took a turn for the worse in 1987.

That year, the actor had an operation to remove part of his larynx and was unable to talk for the following three years. Being a devoted actor, this handicap deeply pained Klugman. "I became a recluse," he says. "I didn't want to see anyone. I didn't want any pity.

Outside of my kids, the only thing I cared about was acting, and without a voice it looked like I wasn't going to be able to act any more." Things began to turn around when Klugman met a speech coach who taught him how to use other parts of his vocal cords so that he could eventually speak. "It's not a pretty voice, but it's a voice," he says. Klugman several years ago was able to resume his acting career, working on stage with Tony Randall. When Koch found out that Klugman had returned to work, he contacted the two and pressed them to finally make The Odd Couple movie. Klugman told the producer he would, but only if the writers somehow incorporated a scene about the actor's bout with cancer.

Now that the filming is over, Klugman says he is happy with the results and provides a glimpse of the laughs in the movie. It begins with Felix's wife kicking him out of their house so that she can better prepare for their daughter's wedding. About this time, Felix learns that his old friend Oscar is in the hospital recovering from throat cancer. "Oscar doesn't want to see anyone," he says. "We have this scene in the hospital where Felix comes in, and I am lying there pretending I'm asleep because I don't want to talk to him.

He says, 'Oscar, and you can feel his heart breaking. Then he sees there's a pizza box on my chest, and it's sopping. I'm a mess, and Felix realizes I'm still the same, so we become The Odd Couple for the 1 1 days before the wedding, and it's funny as hell." their first taste of Jurassic Park. The movie opened with 6:30 screenings around the country. In Poland, Jurassic Park is so popular it has brought movie- 'X-Files' goes to extremes ticket scalpers back from extinc url .1., oy iw tion.

President Lech Walesa attended last week's Polish premiere. Since then, the six Warsaw theaters showing the film have been filled to capacity. One theater has 1 1 showings daily and is adding an 8:15 a.m. show. The new series on Fox delves into the paranormal culinary and otherwise.

TV PREVIEW X-Files Grade: Tonight at 9 on Fox, WFTS-Ch. 28 By JENNIFER L. STEVENSON Times Television Critic David Duchovny has just discovered something terrifying, more disgusting than the paranormal junk he finds every week on the X-Files. "Have you ever heard of someone who eats just the top of the muffins then leaves the bottom half?" he asks during a phone interview from his set in Vancouver, Canada. "It's gross." He bursts out laughing and his assistant the evil muffin eater yells in the background.

"You do it, too!" "I think it's worse than finding two bodies hanging in the air," Duchovny Which is what he has to do right now on the set of Fox's new suspense series. He's already discovered a Bigfoot monster, a serial killer who sleeps 30 years between each mass murder and aliens who kill teenagers. As FBI Agent Fox Mulder, Duchovny is always called upon to examine the darndest stuff. "Pretty much everything is fair game," Duchovny said Thursday. "It's really anything extraordinary." As glib as Duchovny may be, his character believes in UFOs and paranormal activity His partner (played by Gillian Anderson) is a pragmatist who doesn't believe in paranormal activities.

Although it sounds absurd, the series is a clever, well-produced hour of escapist television every week which fits producer Chris Carter's motto: "The show takes place in the realm of extreme possibilities." Carter refuses to say if he believes in the supernatural, but adds coyly "We can't prove that it happened, but we can't prove it didn Mauled muffins on a set in Canada may also fall into the realm of extreme possibilities. "Gross!" Duchovny says before going off to discover the next body. 'to .1.1 IB '8 IT 7 3 oq ilt Chinese screenplay hot In a deal that will make her the highest paid writer in China, Huo Da will demand a record million yuan when her epic screenplay about a tyrannical, book-burning emperor is auctioned next month, the official Xinhua news agency said Wednesday. A million yuan is about $170,000. "The figure is the equivalent of the combined annual salaries of about 200 Chinese workers," Xinhua said.

Ten years in the writing, Huo's script centers on Qinshihuang, who lived more than 2,000 years ago and was the first emperor to rule over a united China. The tyrannical Qinshihuang was known for oppressing intellectuals and burn- ing books he did not like. Dozens of film studios including 1 one in Hollywood have expressed interest in the script. Fox Television X-FILES: David Duchovnv and Gillian Anderson 17 'IB MO Big band singer Helen O'Connell dies of cancer at 73 Associated Press 'McNeil-Lehrer switch No, you didn't miss the roundta-ble discussion on the state of American education Thursday night on PBS' MacNeilLehrer Newshour. The program, which was to feature Times staff writer Thomas French, author of the just-released book.

South of Heaven, was canceled late Thursday because of developing news of the Mideast peace accord between the PLO and Israel. No word on whether that program would be rescheduled. Gloria Burke. Her husband, composer, arranger and conductor Frank DeVol, and three of her four daughters were with her. Born in Lima, Ohio, O'Connell had her singing career take off in 1939 when she recorded Green yes with Bob Eberly as a vocalist with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra.

She also popularized such songs as Tangerine, Amapola, Jim, I Remember You, Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry and When The Sun Comes Out. In the 1950s she worked with Dave Garroway on NBC's Today Show. For nine years she was hostess of the Miss Universe Pageant and for sev eral years was a TV spokeswoman for Polaroid. This summer she toured with a big band show and performed for the last time at the Valley Forge (Pa.) Music Fair on Aug. 14.

She appeared with the orchestras of Artie Shaw, Woody Herman and Glenn Miller, the Pied Pipers and singer Don Cornell. The tour's producer, Craig Hankenson of Tampa, said she had to leave the tour because she was in pain. Burke said Miss O'Connell returned home and was hospitalized. She had surgery Aug. 27.

Miss O'Connell was one of the most popular female singers during the Swing Era. ill 'J Ti 1 1 A SAN DIEGO Helen O'Connell, a big band singer whose songs were popular with GIs during World War II, died of cancer Thursday. She was 73. Miss O'Connell died at a hospice, said her manager, HELEN O'CONNELL: last performed on Aug. 14..