Why is Jack Lemmon's latest role bittersweet?
Did Fergie have fun during her royal welcome to America?
Will war always be a winner at the movies?
Would a world tour be the thing if it didn't have the sting?
Entertainment Tonight sneaks up on you for Wednesday, January 20th, 1988.
And every bit of it is true.
Hello everyone, John Tesh is off today sitting in. I'm Rob Weller.
And I'm Mary Hart.
The British royal family is always hot news in America,
so when the family's newest rising star, Sarah Ferguson, landed here for her first visit today,
it was no surprise the event drew a crush of reporters and admirers.
The first stop of the Duchess's visit was Waterford, Connecticut,
where she was welcomed by the town's dignitaries.
And then it was on to the O'Neill Theatre Center for a demonstration of puppetry and dance.
As a token of her visit, the Duchess was presented with a map of the Waterford area.
Fergie will make her Broadway debut tomorrow night when she attends a preview performance of The Phantom of the Opera.
And while Fergie's family ties are assured, NBC's family ties is winding down.
The show's creator, Gary David Goldberg, said today that at this point,
the hit comedy will run one more year before calling it quits.
All cast members are under contract for the 1988-89 television season,
but the show's beginning to run out of new material.
Currently in its sixth year, family ties ranks 11th for the season to date.
Well, the Cosby Show will heat up its royal television ratings
with a guest appearance by millionaire entrepreneur Armand Hammer.
Just a minute.
Yes, sir.
Have you written your congressman?
Hammer, who makes his acting debut playing a hospital benefactor and grandfather of a cancer patient,
says he made the suggestion that Bill Cosby do an episode about cancer.
He said, I'll be glad to do it on one condition. I said, what's that?
He said, you play a part in it.
Well, I said, I'll take you up on that.
Hammer said the show went pretty smoothly, except for one small problem.
I kept calling him Bill. I forgot that he was Cliff, Huxnable.
So every time I'd call him Bill, the scene would be ruined.
We'd have to start to do it all over again.
Armand Hammer's guest starring episode airs tomorrow night.
And following the Cosby Show, Lisa Bonet will welcome Mary Alice from the Broadway stage
to a regular part on A Different World.
She plays a character guaranteed to make Bonet's college world different.
Excuse me. Miss Bostic, would you sign my flare?
Certainly.
As the newest member of the cast of A Different World,
Broadway actress Mary Alice plays a former Hillman College student
who returns to complete her own studies while working as Denise Huxnable's dorm counselor.
She dropped out of school years and years ago, and she went to Paris and lived there.
And she met many famous people. At least these are the stories that she tells,
and as far as I'm concerned, they're true.
Although A Different World is the season's second highest rated program behind Cosby,
the addition of Mary Alice is the latest in a number of efforts to spice up the storylines.
These children don't want to live with me.
From Mary Alice, the weekly sitcom is a welcome change from eight shows a week on Broadway
where she won a Tony Award last year for Fences.
Coming from a Broadway show, Fences, to a TV sitcom could have been a very difficult transition,
but because of the cast and the crew and the staff of A Different World,
the transition has been very easy for me, and I'm having a lot of fun.
A Different World helped carry NBC to first place in the weekly ratings race.
In fact, the top five shows were all on NBC, with Cosby nestled in its usual number one spot.
Cheers moving into second place with A Different World finishing third.
Night Court and the Golden Girls round out the week's top five.
CBS edged out ABC for second place in the network standings, but finished way behind NBC.
Grammy nominee Sting has a hot album moving up the charts and a year-long world tour on the books.
The North American leg of his Nothing Like the Sun tour gets underway in Tampa, Florida tonight.
The first leg of this 1988 tour will cover 45 cities in just over two months.
Entertainment Tonight's John Tesh traveled to Tampa for an exclusive interview with the elusive singer.
Is it as difficult to get out on the road now as it always is, or is it easier for you?
I don't think it's ever easy. It's like planning a sort of campaign of war.
There's so many people and so much equipment and so many cities to get to that you really have to be well prepared.
The style of music for this tour is sophisticated and decidedly more jazz-oriented, with help from Branford Marcellus, among others.
But the hectic touring schedule will leave Sting the actor no time to make movies this year.
It's January now and I will tour until December this year.
We go all around the world. We go to Japan, Australia, Europe.
Also part of the tour is on behalf of Amnesty International because it's the celebration of the Declaration of Human Rights this year,
and we're committed to taking that message around the world.
Sting has tried some of his material on at least one audience already.
We went to visit the Chingu Indians in the tributary of the Amazon.
We flew in and these people were only contacted 15 years ago and they did this dance for us.
And they said, well, you're a singer, you have to sing for us.
I got up and my percussionist borrowed some pots and pans from one of the huts and we sang this song.
They liked it. They didn't kill us.
Fortunate.
Sting will also join forces with Peter Gabriel for a series of benefit concerts to aid Amnesty International that's later this year.
Coming up next, Jack Lemmon is all that stands between a man and the gallows in a new mini-series.
And ahead, Platoon is coming to video after being hung up in a multi-million dollar court battle.
Jack Lemmon is best known as a film actor.
He's made more than 40 movies and he's won two Oscars.
But early in his career, he starred in some of TV's finest programs.
Now, three decades later, he returns to television in the lead role of an unusual story.
The two-part mini-series, The Murder of Mary Fagan, is based on the celebrated 1913 Atlanta trial of Leo Frank,
a factory manager who was convicted of killing a 13-year-old girl.
Jack Lemmon plays Georgia Governor John Slaton, who had to decide whether or not Frank received a fair trial.
It's based on a true story, one of the most important trials that we had in this century, in this country.
And my feeling about it was that probably 90-some-odd percent of the people that will ever see this show,
which will be a lot, will not have known about the trial.
Or they might have vaguely remembered, oh yeah, the trial of Leo Frank and a little girl, Mary Fagan,
but they won't really understand what happened in 1913, 14, and 15, and how important the trial was,
and how important it is that I think people realize that a thing like this could happen in our country.
I'm not saying that it could happen again, but it could to an extent, and it would be a horrible thing.
Do you realize this puts the final decision in your lap?
Hugh really knows how to stick in the New York Hull, doesn't he?
And he learned from a couple of masters.
I love that he's riding high. He wants me to shine his shoes.
If I hang Frank, it's Dorsey's victory.
And if you don't?
They'll hang me.
This is really a story of a true governor, Governor Slayton.
And he was the governor of Georgia at that time.
And just at the end of his tenure in office, as he was getting ready to be replaced as governor
and go on to Washington as a senator, in those last two weeks he had to make a decision
that could ruin his life politically and personally in many ways.
Travel arrangements furnished by Delta Airlines.
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At Delta, we love to fly, and it shows.
When Robert Redford likes a script, he has the clout to get the movie made.
Such was the case with Promise Land.
Redford was the film's executive producer.
It underscores his ability to pick the best new talent for his projects.
Some of Hollywood's brightest young talent came to see the premiere of Promise Land,
a small budget film that features a cast of rising stars.
Kiefer Sutherland and Meg Ryan play a mismatched married couple
who become frustrated with their lives and turn to a life of crime.
Bev!
Bev!
Where'd you get that thing?
It's rattlesnakes.
You got rattlesnakes in your head.
You got any meat?
I didn't mean to scare you or nothing.
It's provocative and it's earnest and it's intelligent, and I'm really happy to be in it.
Very strong film, very strong performances, very thoughtful film, very good.
It's captivating. It's... I was expecting it, and I loved it.
I really enjoyed it. Made me laugh, made me cry, pushed all the right buttons.
Well, Promise Land opens Friday in theaters nationwide.
After a lengthy court battle over who had the rights to sell last year's Academy Award-winning movie, Platoon,
that video will now be in stores Friday.
And though TV can't match the impact of a movie shown on the big screen,
as Leonard Malton points out in our video report, there are advantages to watching a movie at home.
Leonard?
Platoon is the kind of film that's worth seeing more than once, which is the great thing about home video.
But the other thing I like is being able to see all kinds of films, old and new.
So beginning this week, I'm going to spotlight new video releases and older films that go together with them,
so you can stage your own film festival at home.
And we begin with Platoon.
I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy.
We fought ourselves, and the enemy was in us.
Oliver Stone's film, based on his own experiences in Vietnam, earned an Academy Award as Best Picture.
But it wasn't the first war film to be honored that way, and it isn't the only Oscar-winning war film available on video.
The earliest, in fact, is Wings, the first film to ever win the Oscar as Best Picture.
Made in 1927, Wings celebrated the daring exploits of America's flying aces in World War I a decade earlier.
And the flying scenes are still impressive today.
Few films of any kind are as impressive as All Quiet on the Western Front,
because this 1930 Oscar winner was a passionate anti-war film, which dared to show World War I from the German point of view.
You still think it's beautiful and sweet to die for your country, don't you?
We used to think you knew.
James Jones' bestseller about the outbreak of World War II in Hawaii, From Here to Eternity, had to be toned down for Hollywood.
But it's still a great movie, and it won the Oscar in 1953, along with the Academy Awards that went to Donna Reed and Frank Sinatra.
If they put you in a hole, don't yell. Don't make a sound.
And while George C. Scott turned down his Oscar, his performance as Patton helped that film win its Academy Award in 1970.
Few movies have portrayed a military leader so vividly,
but few military leaders have ever been as colorful as World War II hero General George Patton.
Look at that, gentlemen.
Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificant.
The war movie has always been a Hollywood staple, and war movies have been winning Oscars for 60 years.
The great ones are still worth watching on video.
You're right, Leonard. Thank you.
When we come back, Frank and Steve take on Jim and Tammy Faye. And what do stars do when they get fired?
Celebrating a birthday today, actor Lorenzo Lamas is 30, rocker Paul Stanley, 36, actor Artie Johnson is 54, actress Patricia Neal is 62,
director Federico Fellini is 68, actor DeForest Callie is also 68, and George Burns today is 92.
Well, in today's People Post scripts, rocker Frank Zappa and entertainer Steve Allen will co-host a benefit concert in New York January 29th for Fundamentalists Anonymous.
That's a group which represents people who claim to have been victimized by Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and want their money back.
Last week, Entertainment Tonight broke the news that St. Elsewhere was canceled. So now what are the cast members going to do?
Actually, the story broke for all of us, Bruce Paltrow and myself. We heard it on Entertainment Tonight. That's the truth.
We officially heard it on Entertainment Tonight. As far as my next plans, I don't know, I may join the Foreign Legion or I may take a hot bath. I'm not sure which right now.
Okay, Ed. Somewhere between that hot bath and signing up for the Foreign Legion, there may well be a few telephone calls to his agent, I would suspect.
And for Night Court's Richard Moll, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But Bob Sarlott found that a recent talent hunt turned up a lot of bullshanons.
You may have been asking yourself exactly how do you get ahead in Hollywood. Well, here's one way.
All these guys were picked in contests around the country to be bullshanon lookalikes in an upcoming episode of Night Court. So the hair's got to go.
But big deal. This could be their big break in showbiz. What else would you do besides shave your head to get in show business?
Shave about anything. Do a dance, do whatever.
What made you want to get involved in this thing?
Uh, fame, fortune.
Who shaved your head for you?
My mother did. She did a wonderful job.
Was she happy or was she cringing as she did it?
Oh, I think she liked it. She hated my hair to begin with.
How did this bullshanon look come about?
Well, Bob, about five years ago I was doing a film called Metal Storm, the destruction of Jared's sin. Remember that one?
Yeah.
You're a liar, Bob. Nobody saw that. I think it opened on an airline. I don't know what it was. But I was playing a bald, one-eyed desert-dwelling mutant.
They said, Richard, we want you to play a bald, one-eyed desert-dwelling mutant. I said, oh, no, not again. Oh. But anyway, so I did shave my head for the part.
The would-be bulls got some quick acting tips from the real McCoy.
Nice little courtesy thing that I say to everyone so I go like this.
Okay.
You think you can do that?
One, two, three.
Okay.
One, two, three.
Okay.
Then they taped their scene on night court. See, Bull wants to get out of going to a party because he has to attend a meeting of the BU BBA.
The Benevolent Union of Bald Bailiffs of America.
You're going to the party tonight, and that's final. Do you understand?
Okay.
Benevolent Union of Bald Bailiffs. What did he think I was for yesterday?
Sorry, guys. I can't make it.
I can't make it.
And so it was that a bevy of bald stars were born. Bob Sarlat, Entertainment Tonight.
That's pretty funny.
I would hope they get to say something after having their head shaved.
What a Barbara Bonanza there.
Wow. Well, the Bull Shannon look-alike episode, by the way, will air February 11th.
And that wraps it all up for today. James Woods tomorrow playing a character in his new movie.
He says he hopes Gloria Steinem will hate. Whatever that means, we're going to tell you about it tomorrow.
That's something you don't hear every day. Also tomorrow we're going to have full coverage of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
Today we're going to leave you with one of the honorees, the Supremes, singing their number one hit, Stop in the Name of Love.
Bye.
Bye.