Manson Controversy Sparks State Bill: Responding to controversy over the inclusion of a song by mass murder mastermind Charles Manson on the Guns N' Roses album "The Spaghetti Incident?," State Sen. Charles M. Calderon (D-Whittier) has introduced a bill that would prohibit convicted criminals from financially benefiting from their crimes. Although Manson's album royalties will go to the son of one of his victims under a court ruling, Calderon noted that Manson has received "thousands of dollars in royalties" from T-shirt sales. "The state should do everything possible to prevent criminals from earning money simply because they became famous from the commission of a heinous crime," Calderon said. The bill would expand the existing "Son of Sam Law," which places money from the sale of autobiographies or interviews in a trust fund for court-appointed beneficiaries, to include all proceeds collected as a direct or indirect result of notoriety from crime.

* The Final Figures -- What Recession?: As predicted, 1993 turned out to be a banner year for the music industry with sales of albums and singles in the United States jumping to an estimated 683 million units -- a 4.3% increase over last year, according to year-end figures released by the New York research firm SoundScan. Thanks to an 8% surge in sales of compact discs, industry sources estimate that record companies last year grossed in the neighborhood of $9 billion in domestic revenues. TELEVISION

Shake-Up at ABC: Emily Rooney has been replaced as executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings." Rick Kaplan, executive producer at the network's "PrimeTime Live," will take over the nightly newscast, while ABC producer Phyllis McGrady takes over "PrimeTime Live." Sources at ABC said Rooney, who joined ABC News in May, had alienated staffers with her management style. There was also said to be some concern about recent ratings gains by "NBC Nightly News." Rooney will be offered a new assignment at ABC News.

* Wilson Draws Viewers: Bucking conventional wisdom that Southern California TV viewers aren't interested in state politics, about 555,000 households tuned in to the complete live coverage of Gov. Pete Wilson's State of the State speech Wednesday on KCBS-TV Channel 2 and KNBC-TV Channel 4. The combined ratings figures easily made it the most-watched program in the 5-5:30 p.m. slot, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co. By comparison, when Wilson's speech a year ago was carried only by KCAL-TV Channel 9, it drew only 139,000 households and was the lowest-rated program in its time slot.

* The Return of Chuck: Chuck Henry, former veteran KABC-TV news anchor and "Eye on L.A." producer and host, has landed at KNBC-TV Channel 4 as an anchor-reporter. Henry, who has been reporting for the station all week, will begin co-anchoring the 4 p.m. weekday news next week with Carla Aragon, but his permanent anchoring assignment has yet to be determined.

* More Animation for Kids: More Walt Disney-style animation is in store for kids, including two new weekly "theme days" set to be added to "The Disney Afternoon." Along with the already announced "Disney's Aladdin," a 65-episode daily program based on the 1992 theatrical feature, Disney plans "Monday Mania," featuring "The Shnookums & Meat Funny Cartoon Show," and "Action Friday," with the dramatic cartoon "Gargoyles." Disney's Buena Vista Television is spending more than $50 million on the three new series. "Disney's Aladdin" is set to premiere in September, followed by "Gargoyles" in October and "Shnookums & Meat" next January. PEOPLE WATCH

Mickey Rourke Arrested: Actor Mickey Rourke was arrested outside his Miami Beach nightclub, Mickey's Place, early Thursday, after he reportedly yelled at some 75 people causing a stir outside his club and at officers who had come to quiet the ruckus. "Mr. Rourke appeared to be highly agitated, and was clenching his fist as he confronted others as well as the police officers at the scene," the police report said. Rourke, 39, spent a few hours behind bars before posting a $500 bond. If convicted on the misdemeanor charge of resisting an officer without violence, he could face up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. THE ARTS

NEA Starts Cutting: The National Endowment for the Arts is eliminating two of its programs -- the $150,000 Professional Theater Training Program and the $300,000 Dance Heritage Initiative -- and greatly scaling back grants to many other arts organizations to help cope with a $4.7-million reduction in the endowment's $174.5-million 1994-95 budget. The eliminated theater program benefited 16 of the nation's premier drama schools, while the dance program provided grants to help companies preserve dance productions on film and video tape. In an interview with the New York Times, Jane Alexander, the new NEA chairwoman, said: "It's highly regrettable, but we have to respond to the cuts that Congress handed to us. It's cutting into muscle, since it's been a long time since there was any fat to cut." A spokesman said the NEA expected to announce more cuts next week. SHAUNA SNOW

Tsui Hark's rousing "Once Upon a Time in China II" (at the Monica 4-Plex) is more a true sequel than most Hong Kong series pictures, which tend to be self-contained. You need to know going in that its hero, Wong Fei-Hong (again the boyish, personable Jet Lee), was an actual figure, a Canton physician and a proponent for Chinese independence who became a folk hero in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You also need to know that the reason his lovely relative, his contemporary, but called Aunt Yee (Rosamund Kwan), dresses Western-style is because she has been a student in Britain. In short, it's a big help to have seen the first film in the ongoing series.

This qualification aside, "China II" is a terrific example of dealing with history within a martial arts fantasy context. It's 1895, a turbulent time in the rapidly waning Manchu dynasty. China has just lost Taiwan to Japan, and in Canton the ever-expanding mystical martial arts White Lotus sect declares its intent to free the poor, but concentrates on driving all foreigners out of China. Now the Chinese had plenty of reasons for wishing to do so after so many concessions had been granted to rapacious foreign nations, but Tsui Hark and his co-writers take a progressive view, condemning xenophobia for its own sake and realizing that it would be good for the nation to come to terms with the modern world. A century later the issues the film raises are still pertinent.

Not surprisingly, Wong Kei-Hong finds himself in the midst of escalating strife. He, Aunt Yee and his manservant Leung Fu (Max Mok) are determined to save a group of schoolchildren whose foreign-language school has been burnt to the ground by the White Lotus; meanwhile, Wong meets none other than Sun Yat-Sen and lends his support for Sun's cause in overthrowing the decadent monarchy and turning China into a republic. Although he is eventually cast as the bad guy, you really do have to have some sympathy for Kung (Hung Yin-Yin), Canton's military commander, who simultaneously is charged with protecting the foreigners, curbing the White Lotus and repressing Sun's rebel movement.

Tsui Hark directs with his customary verve, and the martial arts battles are suitably spectacular. "Once Upon a Time in China II," however, is perhaps most notable for the way in which the director and his greatly gifted cinematographer, Arthur Wong, mask an overly modest budget -- various Victorian interiors are definitely dime-store -- with a dramatic play of light and shadow and a crisp sense of composition. "China II" is a blithe, often humorous action entertainment that nevertheless manages to illuminate a crucial period in China's history.

'Once Upon a Time in China II'

Jet Li: Wong Fei-Hong

Rosamund Kwan: Aunt Yee

Max Mok: Leung Fu

Hung Yin-Yin: Kung

A Rim Films release of a Golden Harvest production. Director Tsui Hark. Producer Tsui Hark, Ng See-Yuen. Executive producer Raymond Chow. Screenplay by Tsui Hark, Chan Tin-Suen, Cheung Tan. Cinematographer Arthur Wong. Editor Mak Chi-Sin. Costumes Chiu Kwok-Sun. Music Richard Yuen, Johnny Njo. Production design Eddie Ma. Action choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping. In Cantonese with English and Chinese subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

Times-rated Mature. Times guidelines: standard martial arts violence.

The story of an American college coach's attempt to recruit a taller-than-tall African basketball player, "The Air Up There" (citywide) may be the first movie to be high concept both literally and metaphorically. But that doesn't mean it's going to make anybody happy.

A feeble and simplistic attempt at an adventure comedy, "Air" is a movie that never should have been let out of development hell. In truth, it probably snuck out, because nothing about it is as well-developed as Charles Gitonga Maina, the 6-foot-10 Kenyan who stars as Saleh, the object of that coach's attention.

The coach is Jimmy Dolan (Kevin Bacon), a hard-driving assistant at mythical St. Joseph's. Once known as "the mouth that scored," Dolan is a former hot-shot college player considered too self-centered to be head coaching material. If you think all that is about to change, you're way ahead of this game.

Determined to work his way out of the doghouse, Dolan gets the cracked idea of going to Kenya to sign up a tower of power "with the hang time of a hot-air balloon" he glimpses in the background of a video about missionaries.

That turns out to be Saleh, an affable young man (pleasantly played by Maina) who would like nothing better than matriculating in the states. However, his father (veteran South African actor Winston Ntshona) has other plans for him at home, and Dolan's slick recruiter's attitude is so obnoxious even a saintly nun (Yolanda Vazquez) breaks down and calls him "a sports pimp." Will the coach have to go home empty-handed? Guess again.

The inspiration, if that is the right word, for "The Air Up There" is the careers of such transplanted-to-the-NBA stars as Nigeria's Hakeem Olajuwon and the Sudan's Manute Bol. Novelist Max Apple got the idea and is credited with the screenplay, though its high percentage of bathroom jokes leads one to suspect that a committee of 10-year-old boys really did the work.

If Apple was the screenwriter, he must have come up with the plot after holing up for the weekend with a gross of videos, for "The Air" (blandly directed by Paul M. Glaser) is jammed with as many narrative cliches as its hour and 46 minutes will allow.

And though the production went to the trouble of shooting in Africa and using Kenya's Samburu tribe as the inspiration for the film's fictional Winabi, its treatment of Africans is so cartoonish it might as well have been shot on some back lot. And of course the real purpose of having Africans in this film at all is to enable a pale face to mature and shine. Some things never do seem to change.

'The Air Up There'

Kevin Bacon: Jimmy Dolan

Charles Gitonga Maina: Saleh

Yolanda Vazquez: Sister Susan

Winston Ntshona: Urudu

Mabutho "Kid" Sithole: Nyaga

An Interscope Communications/Polygram Filmed Entertainment production in association with Nomura Babcock & Brown and Longview Entertainment, released by Hollywood Pictures. Director Paul M. Glaser. Producers Ted Field, Rosalie Swedlin, Robert W. Cort. Executive producers Lance Hool, Scott Kroopf. Screenplay Max Apple. Cinematographer Dick Pope. Editor Michael E. Polakow. Costumes Hope Hanafin. Music David Newman. Production design Roger Hall. Set decorator Karen Mary Brookes. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG. Times guidelines: bathroom humor and an attack by a wild boar that the boar does not live to regret.

In Lisa Kron's deft solo, "101 Humiliating Stories," at Highways, a sanitary pad lies stranded in a junior high school corridor, and the girl who dropped it tries valiantly to disown it. Cooties cause a wave of thousands of passers-by to part like the Red Sea, as our heroine recoils.

Flash forward, and the girl's a woman, sent on a work errand to pick up petty cash from the bank. On the way back, she's sidetracked into Macy's. And when the makeup counter won't take Visa, she plops down the office dough.

Later at another job, our lady of the faux pas strolls past co-workers, unaware that her skirt is stuck in her tights.

Whoopsie . We're in the land of the dreaded Awkward Moment. And, while it's not a friendly place for the doofs and dorks of the world, it's terrain that the slyly dissembling Kron farms with rare virtuosity.

After all, what's a Big Lesbian to do when she's got to face her 10th annual high school class reunion in Lansing? Four versions of what Kron imagines she might have said -- ranging from stridently out of the closet to sheepishly apologetic -- punctuate this autobiographical solo, but they're the tamest parts of an often raucous ride.

Weaving together themes of sexual identity, social convention and anti-nostalgia, "101 Humiliating Stories" is a hoot with a point. Journey with Kron through her 1975 gym class, three "geeky celebrity encounters" or "the Laura Ingalls Wilder debacle," for instance, and you'll hear familiar tales of self-consciousness tinged with social critique.

A paper chain of personal anecdotes that's both astutely written and skillfully performed, Kron's solo combines the belly laughs of comedy with the poignancy of better solo performance. Because she's not confined to stand-up's punch-line pace, she can draw a story out for dramatic effect, demonstrating that humor and depth needn't be mutually exclusive.

This is the woman you want to be next to at a cocktail party when you need someone else to do the chatting. She's wry but she's also a mensch. "I know the high school segments can be resonant," says Kron, temporarily interrupting her harrowing accounts of green polyester gym suits and "nerdy blue knee highs." "So, um, I'm gonna check in periodically . . . and make sure everybody's OK . . . If you have feelings that come up . . . ."

The writing is economical without being too spare, and Kron takes her time delivering it. That, combined with her relaxed stage persona, creates a casual fluency rarely matched in this genre. The sure-footed show may feel as though it's off the cuff, but you suspect that every "um" or "uh" is scripted.

Kron, who's part of the comedy group the Five Lesbian Brothers, is also a master of the on-purpose accident. Although she plays clumsy, she has a knack for physical comedy. When she nods off, drops her notes or careens into the music stand, you actually wonder for a nanosecond whether the boo-boos are bona fide or not.

Only her junior high gym teacher knows for sure.

* "101 Humiliating Stories," Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica . Friday-Saturday, 8:30 p.m. & 10:30, Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Ends Sunday. $12-$15. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

From three-minute bits on "Late Night" to half-hours of "Get a Life" to -- now -- the big screen, Chris Elliott has developed a pretty singular, if slippery, comic persona. He's always inviting you to laugh with him and then at him, taking down the high and mighty while deserving a good tackle himself, alternately a provider and object of extreme condescension in almost the same beat. This fey, unctuous dolt deserves -- and probably could carry -- a good, deliriously perverse movie farce.

"Cabin Boy" (citywide) isn't it, not by a nautical mile. It's another cross-demographic picture that seems destined to bypass all demographics. There's a lot of juvenalia already built into Elliott's character, for sure, but his grown-up ironic sense gets dumbed down a little too much in the effort to make the movie a palatable kid-flick. In this climate you might appreciate the pains the film takes to avoid the profane, but Elliott's a master of black comedy, and this film desperately needs a little soot on its soul.

Elliott and writer-director Adam Resnick do at least generate enough good will with the bemusement of their concept to set sail for a while. Their farce is designed as a cross between vintage boy-at-sea adventures like "Captains Courageous" and the stop-motion fantasy of Ray Harryhausen's "Sinbad" and "Jason" pictures.

The "boy" coming of age here is Elliott, as spoiled-rotten Nathanial Mayweather, who sets off from a continental finishing school to rejoin daddy in the States. The ship he mistakenly steps onto isn't the Queen Elizabeth, of course, but rather the Filthy Whore, a fishing vessel full of gruff character actors. At first they're ready to pull a Jonah on this pampered stowaway, but all must band together when they run into adversaries like a fearsome iceberg and an island giant with a pocket protector.

The vividly colorful, set-bound set design (by Stephen Alescgh) and art direction (Nanci B. Roberts, Daniel A. Lomino) cleverly establish "Cabin Boy" as parody, for those who care to recognize it. And at least the screenplay doesn't resort to references to other movies for its laughs. The problem is that it doesn't find a lot of laughs in much of anything, referential or otherwise. Resnick's script plays like a first draft rushed into production before most of the gags got penned in, or before anyone decided who they should be targeted at.

Elliott does have some very amusing bits of ridiculousness -- literally licking the deck clean, or doing a quadruple-take underwater. Current Conan O'Brien sidekick Andy Richter gets washed overboard before too long, but in the early going enjoys a few amiably imbecilic moments as a doofus involved in Elliott's shipside misfortune.

But it's another "Late Night"-er who steals the movie. David Letterman pops up for a couple of unbilled minutes as a denizen of the dockside village Elliott visits pre-voyage, and he cackles his way through the entire scene, patronizing the befuddled star as hilariously as he used to in the NBC days of yore. This marks the first screen work Disney has gotten out of the talk-show host since making that multimillion-dollar movie deal with him some years back; he so lights up the screen in his brief time he makes you hope they talk him into a Letterman-and-Elliott feature, though breath-holding isn't advised.

'Cabin Boy'

Chris Elliott: Nathanial Mayweather

Ritch Brinkley: Captain Greybar

James Gammon: Paps

Brian-Doyle Murray: Skunk

A Touchstone presentation of a Burton/DiNovi production. Director Adam Resnick. Producers Tim Burton, Denise DiNovi. Executive producers Steve White, Barry Bernardi. Screenplay Resnick; story Resnick, Chris Elliott. Cinematographer Steve Yaconelli. Editor Jon Poll. Costumes Colleen Atwood. Music Steve Bartek. Production design Steven Legler. Art directors Nanci B. Roberts, Daniel A. Lomino. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

MPAA-rating: PG-13 for "crude language." Times guidelines: Mildly rough language, two instances of implied sexual liaisons.

The media giveth, and the media taketh away -- especially when it covers sensational trials. In another entry in the growing genre of the media covering itself, "Trial by Television," on the A&E channel's "Investigative Reports" series at 10 tonight, offers a quick gloss on the horrendously difficult issue of how First Amendment rights can be balanced with the right to a fair jury trial.

What producers Caroline Sommers' and Paul Gallagher's report lacks in depth it nearly makes up for in coverage. There are the grieving mothers of media-trial victims: Ellen Levin, mother of murdered Jennifer Levin, and Linda Wojas, mother of Pam Smart, convicted of murder conspiracy. There are the various attorneys of all stripes, from potent First Amendment advocate Alan Dershowitz and perennial defense attorney William Kunstler to hustling counsel David Lewis. There are the judges, like John A. K. Bradley of New York, who condemn cameras in the courtroom.

And, of course, there are the media stars, from New Hampshire TV reporter Bill Spenser, who starred as himself in the TV movie of the Smart case, to Fred Graham, anchor for Court TV, which brings the courtroom into your living room (that is, if you have the right cable carrier).

*

Mostly everyone here defends their role in the trial-TV jungle, and sometimes they get bitten in their defense. Graham amusedly notes how Lewis, so quick to condemn media influence in the courtroom, has served as a Court TV commentator; Dershowitz deflates Bradley's gripes about cameras in court by remarking that the judge was a big "ham" on TV during the Leona Helmsley case.

Dershowitz provides the one useful suggestion during the hour of cross-debate: Place a camera in an enclosed booth with a two-way mirror in every American courtroom so the judge, jury, lawyers and witnesses never know when it is on.

This, however, would have no effect on the sensationalist pretrial coverage by TV news crews sniffing down good footage for the evening broadcast: It's this bloodhound mentality that Wojas insists prevented her daughter from having a fair trial. The only thing to do about it, as media critic Edwin Diamond correctly says, is to complain about coverage -- not to censor it.

But what's dramatically wrong with "Trial by Television" isn't its central theme, but its East Coast bias. Even though it was made in advance of the Menendez case and the Michael Jackson affair, the report might have used any number of media-affected trials in Los Angeles, arguably the world capital of sensational cases. Kurtis' brief closing comment on the Rodney G. King beating trial hardly sums up the enormous influence that coverage of that case had on L.A. residents -- including those who started rioting hours after the Simi Valley verdict.

Eric Reed, the 23-year-old pianist who has earned valuable exposure with the Wynton Marsalis group, was at the Brasserie of the Bel Age Hotel Tuesday and Wednesday leading his own trio.

Reed's knowledge of the roots of jazz enables him to skip decades with consummate ease, applying his technical finesse to everything from the traditional "Wade in the Water" to popular and jazz standards and an occasional original.

His own "Never Say Never" established the engagingly unified personality of the trio, with Willie Jones III on drums and the exceptional John Clayton Jr. on bass.

"You Don't Know What Love Is," a 1941 ballad, brought out dual moods, romantic and assertive, in Reed, along with an arco contribution by Clayton. Bobby Watson's "E.T.A." found the threesome in a more contemporary mode.

Reed may not yet have found his own firm identity as a stylist, but in his more inventive moments he shows strong potential. His best offering by far was "Every Time We Say Goodbye," a 1940s love song that he developed brilliantly, enriching its already opulent harmonic lines, then doubling the beat as the intensity built. Following a Clayton chorus, Reed returned to the original mood and tempo for a well-conceived finale. LEONARD FEATHER

Since introducing his enlarged Silver Brass Ensemble a year ago at Catalina Bar & Grill, pianist Horace Silver made a successful album, but a serious illness prevented him from touring to promote it. Tuesday night he brought the same group back to the Hollywood club for an engagement that continues through Sunday.

Silver's return to good health and to the club scene is welcome news to the jazz community.

A prolific composer, Silver, who made his debut as a leader four decades ago, basically writes melodic statements arranged for his six-piece brass section (three trumpets, French horn and two trombones). The blend he achieves with this instrumentation is one of three reasons for the group's attractive personality. The others are Silver at the piano, jaggedly sharp in his rhythmically propulsive statements, and Red Holloway, whose tenor sax solos are invariably delivered with fire.

Silver hasn't rejected his earlier values. One tune, "Blues for Brother Blue," was named for Blue Mitchell, a sideman in one of his quintets. Another was a revamped arrangement of his 1958 hit "Senor Blues."

Except for a couple of solos by George Bohanon on trombone and one by Ron Stout on trumpet, the brass members worked mainly as a unit, backed by a rhythm team to which drummer Carl Burnett and bassist Bob Maize were steady and sturdy contributors. LEONARD FEATHER

The No. 1 position on the pop album chart has been nicknamed the Dogg House--in honor of Snoop Doggy Dogg's frequent residence. He's back "home" again, with his "Doggystyle" reclaiming the top spot.Many Jodeci fans are now finding out that the vocal group has a new album. Some didn't notice when "Diary of a Mad Band" came out the week before Christmas. But the album is now picking up steam, zooming from No. 27 to No. 8 in its second week on the chart. Two Top 10 albums, Tom Petty's "Greatest Hits" (No. 9) and Aerosmith's "Get a Grip" (No. 10), probably will drop out of the elite circle next week. Both climbed in recent weeks because they were popular Christmas gift items. Mariah Carey's "Hero" is still the top pop single.

* Smashing Pumpkins' acclaimed summer release "Siamese Dream," which got as high as No. 10, is on the rise again, as the album continues to pick up new fans. It jumped from No. 22 to No. 17. 04,28,06,08,08 Rank Rank 2 Weeks Last Weeks on the Week Ago Chart 1."Doggystyle," 3 3 6 Snoop Doggy Dogg 2."Music Box," 1 1 18 Mariah Carey 3."Vs.," Pearl Jam 2 2 11 4."janet.," 7 7 33 Janet Jackson 5."The One Thing," 4 6 7 Michael Bolton 6."Bat Out of Hell II," 6 5 16 Meat Loaf 7."So Far So Good," 11 11 8 Bryan Adams 8."Diary of a Mad Band," 27 ... 2 Jodeci 9."Greatest Hits," 13 16 7 Tom Petty 10."Get a Grip," 17 19 37 Aerosmith * "Siamese Dream," 22 28 23 Smashing Pumpkins Source: Billboard/Soundscan DENNIS HUNT

The most satisfying and usually most economical way to survey an artist's career is a box set, but what happens when an artist whose music you want doesn't have one out?

In the case of Al Green, the most compelling of all post-'60s soul singers, you can turn to some greatest-hits packages or -- better yet -- his original albums, the first four of which have been released on CD by Capitol Records as part of its "The Right Stuff" mid-line budget series.

The albums, which carry an $11.98 list price, include the artwork and music from Green's original Hi Records albums, plus new liner notes.

Don't worry when you look at the backs of the albums and see a lot of song titles that are either unfamiliar or that are associated with other artists.

Whether the song is the Bee Gees' "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" or a tune that's new to you, Green's interpretation generally offers the sensual tension and dramatic intimacy that characterizes his most celebrated hits.

Born in Forrest City, Ark., in 1946, Green (his real name is Greene) began singing in a gospel quartet when he was still in his early teens.

By the time Memphis record producer Willie Mitchell spotted him singing in a Texas club in 1968, Green had switched to secular music and had registered a Top 50 hit, "Back Up Train," on tiny Hot Line Records.

Mitchell took Green to Memphis where he signed with Hi Records and began working with the Hi house band, which ranks with the great Stax/Volt session groups.

"Green Is Blues," his first Hi album, didn't generate any hits, but it offers a rewarding chronicle of a young singer trying to find a comfortable style. The eclectic material on the 1970 package ranges from Jerry Butler's "I Stand Accused" and Lennon-McCartney's "Get Back" to Heyward-Gershwin's "Summertime."

"Al Green Gets Next to You," which followed in 1971, is a more confident and commanding work in which Green goes the Temptations one step further in his rendition of "I Can't Get Next to You" and then marches to stardom with one of the great soul singles ever: "Tired of Being Alone." The weak moment: an unconvincing version of the Doors' "Light My Fire."

By the time Green's "Let's Stay Together" was released in 1972, the young singer was widely heralded as the successor to Sam Cooke and Otis Redding's soul crown. The album's title song went to No. 1 on the pop and R&B charts.

The title track from Green's other 1972 album, "I'm Still in Love With You," was also a Top 10 hit, and it was backed by another group of well-chosen and marvelously performed songs, including Kris Kristofferson's "For the Good Times."

Green, an ordained minister who has spent most of his time since the late '70s in gospel music, remains one of the great voices in modern pop. He returned to the pop charts in 1988 with his duet with Annie Lennox on "Put a Little Love in Your Heart," and teams with Lyle Lovett on Willie Nelson's "Funny How Time Slips Away" on a soul-meets-country collection of duets that will be released this spring by MCA Records.

The Broadway Bar & Grill on the 3rd Street Promenade is the type of place that we Americans, raised on Archie Bunker and weaned on "Cheers," number among our basic human rights. Housed in one of Santa Monica's oldest brick buildings, this classic San Francisco-style eating and drinking establishment has been around five years -- it survived the block's conversion to a walking mall and continues to do a steady, respectable trade.

Like any serious bar and grill, the place is filled with dark wood, dark booths for privacy, dark partitions between bar and restaurant. Especially charming are the tiny tables in the bar: They're just big enough for drinks and elbows, the perfect setting for an intense conversation on the virtues of hockey. The bar itself is a substantial vintage relic uprooted from another, older, authentic bar back East. Televisions are tuned to sporting events. One learns, after a while, not to faint each time the bar crowd roars at a particularly galling interception or tackle.

*

For all its classic touches, one could say the place has been kissed by contemporary ideas of bar and grilldom. In addition to chops and fish and chips, there's pasta and salads made with baby lettuce on the menu, as well as a number of post-modern architectonics such as faux-marbled pillars, a false ceiling and kleig lights. There's also a small, fenced-in patio outside on the Promenade, where you can sit under awnings and watch the topiary triceratops spit water into a pool.

On weekend nights, the bar burgeons with a lively, young singles scene but the dining room stays persistently democratic in terms of age, gender, personal style. The couple next to us are cheery octogenarians -- the tortilla soup's a little spicy for them, they say. The young couple on the other side of us are home for the holidays from their colleges back East. New Year's Day, a large family of red-shirted Badgers arrive, triumphant, for dinner; they're subjected to only the lightest good-natured ribbing. Besides, the bar crowd is already engrossed in another bowl -- the Orange, the Sugar, it matters not.

When ordering, it seems wise to stick with simpler, standard bar and grill fare. The simpler the salad, for example, the better: nothing wrong with the mixed baby greens, or the mixed baby greens with blue cheese and toasted hazelnuts. The grilled chicken salad with sunflower sprouts and crispy thread-like potatoes has its pleasures. But order the endive salad with pear and Stilton cheese and the kitchen is over its head: It's the standard mixed baby greens with a few slices of rock-hard pear and four meager spears of Belgian endive.

On a chilly day, acorn soup sounds perfect -- and would be if only it were, well, soupy; instead, we have a bowlful of tasty, fluffy squash puree that, like egg whites, forms stiff peaks.

*

Steamed whole Louisiana shrimp are the most expensive appetizer and the most hard work. I had to clean the shrimp myself -- pull off heads and skins, devein them -- a process that endeared neither me nor the perfectly fine finished shrimp to my squeamish dinner companion (not a dish to order on a first date). Golden calamari fritti , the bar and grill food of the '90s, while curiously uncrisp, comes with a delicious ancho chile mayonnaise. Grilled vegetable skewers are wonderful, and too small.

Singapore chicken breasts, with a rich nut crust and a sweet honey mustard sauce, are pretty terrible, but a basic, unadorned corned beef and bright-green cabbage is a perfectly workable meal. The Broadway burger tastes like a burger you'd make at home: It's juicy, on a crusty French roll with a slice of dead-ripe tomato, and comes with very ordinary fries.

Crab cakes are fresher and crabbier than many around. Fish and chips suffer from the same dullish fries as the burger and a vinegar absolutely lacking in any bite.

BB&G servers are cheerful but harried; the place seems perpetually short-staffed. Service itself tends to be minimal, sometimes bordering on neglectful. You get seated, you get your food, eventually you get your check. That's about it. As we wait for our dinner plates to be cleared, our urge for dessert gradually is replaced by the urge to pay the check and go.

* Broadway Bar & Grill, 1460 3rd Street Promenade, Santa Monica, (310) 393-4211. Open 7 days for lunch and dinner. (Brunch on Sundays.) Full bar. Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $22-$61.

"Cliffhanger" continues to hang tough at the top of the rental chart, fending off the hot holiday releases. But it may finally lose its grip on the top spot next week, with "Sleepless in Seattle" (No. 4) and "The Firm," which premiered at No. 6, the most likely new chart leaders.Both are doing bang-up business, particularly "The Firm," the thriller starring Tom Cruise that grossed a whopping $157 million in theaters. But in listing the candidates for No. 1, don't rule out "Rising Sun," which quietly rose another rung to No. 2. It's not quite as high profile as "Sleepless" or "The Firm"--and didn't make nearly as much money--but it's the kind of big-star (Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes), lurid thriller that usually does well in the rental market. "Guilty as Sin," the drama starring Don Johnson, moved up a notch to No. 10 and may climb a bit higher.

* "Dave," the comedy starring Kevin Kline as a presidential look-alike, racked up a hefty $61-million theatrical gross and may soon rule the rental market. Some retailers are already reporting that it's their top rental, though it only entered the chart at No. 14. Look for it to jump into the Top 5 next week. 03,22,06,08 Rank Weeks Last on the Week Chart 1."Cliffhanger" 1 6 2."Rising Sun" 3 4 3."Sliver" 2 7 4 ."Sleepless in Seattle" 6 2 5."Made in America" 4 5 6."The Firm" ... 1 7."Free Willy" 5 7 8."Indecent Proposal" 7 11 9."Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" 8 2 10."Guilty as Sin" 11 2 * "Dave" ... 1 DENNIS HUNTSource: Billboard Publications Inc.

The Pacific Symphony concert Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center was an interesting hybrid that forces consideration under a different kind of rubric than usual.

The first half was pure music, with Christopher Seaman leading the orchestra in Berlioz's "Roman Carnival" Overture and Tchaikovsky's "Rococo" Variations, with cellist Bion Tsang as soloist.

Nothing new there, although Seaman worked some real magic, given the major handicap he was handed: About 20 regular section leaders and others are touring Japan as members of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

Additionally, Tsang -- pardon the pun -- sang with small-scaled but fervent eloquence.

The new breed came after intermission, as Seaman led Holst's "The Planets" to a visual adaptation by Marc Jacobs, a British-born stage director who has lived in Los Angeles for 16 years.

Jacobs' contribution consisted of some 450 slides sequentially projected onto two 9-by-12-foot screens (one horizontal, one vertical) that floated above each side of the orchestra. Rarely did the same pictures, taken from NASA satellites or just from Life magazine-type portfolios, appear on both screens at the same time or with the same pacing.

In concept and execution, the results proved neither simplistic nor inevitable, though occasionally predictable. The images did not often illuminate the music, but the music did enhance the pictures, which had both intrinsic and cumulative impact.

In "Mars, The Bringer of War," the images ranged from the fall of Troy to Hitler and the Nazis to Vietnam and the post-Vietnam era and led to a buildup of Swiftian nausea and disgust that was alleviated only three sections later, in the smiles of ordinary people, the newspaper headlines of Peace in Europe, the picture of Louis Armstrong playing trumpet -- all in "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity."

At times, however, because of the stage lighting, the slides could not be clearly seen nor understood. Sometimes the connections to the music appeared arbitrary, dubious or weird.

Generally, Seaman conducted the difficult score with self-effacing, no-nonsense, straightforward control, enhancing the impression that the music was an accompaniment to the visuals rather than the other way around or even in equal partnership with them.

Still, he got the orchestra to play consistently with point and musical purpose, and, even if there was a sense of strain and reaching, it was reaching in the right direction.

The excellent offstage chorus consisted of the women of the Pacific Chorale.

To open the program, Seaman, who was once a candidate for the music director position and twice before a guest conductor with this orchestra, led a tight, intelligent account of the Berlioz overture.

Playing a Giovanni Grancino cello made in Milan in 1705, Tsang, 25, proved an honest, committed soloist, forcing neither the tone, the music, nor his Tchaikovsky interpretation.

Want to see an electronics retailer's eyes light up? Just mention TV/VCR combination units.

*

Retailers love the hot-selling hybrids of a TV and a VCR. The sales figures, from the Electronic Industries Assn., tell the story. The number of TV/VCR combinations shipped to retailers has jumped, from 600,000 in 1991 to 950,000 in 1992. Last year's figures aren't in yet, but the projection was a growth of 55% over 1992.

Since the markets for other video products aren't growing nearly as fast, new companies continue to board the TV/VCR bandwagon. For instance, at the Consumer Electronics Show that opened Thursday in Las Vegas, Aiwa America is introducing 13- and 20-inch models.

Gerald Calabrese, vice president of marketing at Emerson, a major player in the market since these combinations surfaced in 1988, said, "A television with VCR already built in is attractive to consumers who don't like to set up electronics equipment. These combinations also are great space-savers."

Generally the TV/VCRs don't have many frills and are limited to mid-size and smaller screens. Emerson has three models -- 9-, 13- and 19-inch -- and none are available with stereo. "When you think of stereo you think of big screens," Calabrese pointed out. "This isn't a product that's suited to larger screen sizes. It might make some sense to have stereo in a 19- or 20-inch combination unit, but there's not that much consumer interest."

The big drawback to these units is price. For instance, Emerson's cheapest unit is the 13-inch (VT1322), which retails for $650. Its 19-inch (VT1922) is $750. In many cases it's cheaper to buy a TV and a VCR separately.

"That's one of the hurdles in this market," Calabrese explained. "Production complexities create that price. That's another problem with big-screen TV/VCR units. As the screen size gets close to 30 inches, the cost gets to be too high to interest most consumers. But none of these hurdles is hurting the market right now."

Bring on the Stooges

Attention, Three Stooges fanatics: Mark Feb. 16 on your calendar -- that's when Columbia TriStar will release eight new-to-video collections, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the zany trio. Each tape, running about 50 minutes, includes three short films and will sell for $15.

True Stooge fans are wild about the Moe-Larry-Curly movies and steer clear of any featuring Shemp instead of Curly. The best of the packages: "So Long Chumps," including "Even as I.O.U" (1941), set in a race track, highlighted by Curly's encounters with a talking horse.

The tape titled "A Plumbing We Will Go" is even better, featuring "Violent Is the Word for Curly" (1938) and "Punch Drunks" (1934), arguably Curly's funniest movie. In this one, he's a boxer who goes berserk when he hears the "Pop Goes the Weasel" melody.

What's New on Video:

"Hot Shots! Part Deux" (FoxVideo, no set price). In the loony tradition of the "Airplane" and "Naked Gun" parody series, this one, spoofing "Rambo" movies, sprays jokes scattergun-style. Many are well wide of the mark, but some are hilariously on target. Worth wading through the silliness for the few gems. Charlie Sheen stars.

"True Romance" (Warner, no set price). Often intriguing, excessively violent, fairly original movie, directed by Tony Scott, about newlyweds (Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette) on the run from mobsters searching for a fortune in cocaine. What really keeps this offbeat movie interesting is all the brilliant supporting performances -- especially those by Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken.

"Hocus Pocus" (Buena Vista, no set price). What is Bette Midler doing in this mindless kid-oriented mess of a comedy? It's beneath her talents and those of co-stars Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker, too. In the free-wheeling style of the Three Stooges, the trio play wacky witches who prey on youngsters on Halloween. Kids 10-and-under may get a kick out of the actresses' mugging and the special effects. For real Midler fans, though, it's painful to watch.

RIGHT SOUND: When director Oliver Stone made "Heaven and Earth," about the wartime experience of a young Vietnamese woman -- now playing county-wide -- he knew that a good part of its audience would be Vietnamese Americans. So he had a version dubbed into the Vietnamese language. . . . The only theater around showing that version is the Thu Do Cinema in Little Saigon. Officials say it's doing well there. Much of the audience is older Vietnamese who speak little or no English.

DON'T STOP PAYING: If you live in Garden Grove and want to add a stop sign on your street, you'll probably have to pay for it from now on. The city decided this week to pay for stop signs only where the need is severe. If you want one just for better traffic control, your neighborhood has to pay. . . . A set of four-way stop signs: $1,000. A two-way set: $500. City Councilman Robert F. Dinsen begrudgingly approved the plan, but complained it was more of "government digging deeper into the pockets of taxpayers."

HOT SPOT: The annual eight-day Sports, Vacation and RV show, which opens at the Anaheim Convention Center on Saturday, is a chance to shop for dream vacation spots. But new to this year's show: a kick-off celebration of Smokey Bear's 50th birthday. His slogan, "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires," is so famous that now he often just says "Only You." Look for him at the New Mexico booth: the state is plugging its Smokey Bear State Park.

HALEY'S COMET: National Republican chairman Haley Barbour is making the rounds in California this week to prepare for the '94 elections. Tonight's stop: Le Meridien Hotel in Newport Beach, for a dinner address to the Orange County Lincoln Club, made up of party leaders and contributors. . . . "It's a chance for him to mix and mingle with the troops and whip up some enthusiasm for the next election," says local party spokesman Bill Christiansen.

Arturo Bermudez, 52, who provided live piano music, colorful murals and political posters in his Arturo's Flower Shops.Bermudez, a native Angeleno who espoused Latino causes, opened a chain of eight floral shops. His main shop at La Brea and Fountain avenues in West Hollywood included not one but two pianos with employees alternating at the keyboards and Bermudez singing the mostly Latin tunes. Once a month, he provided mariachi music for customers. On Saturday in Los Angeles of diabetes and kidney failure.

Abner (Abby) J. Greshler, the talent agent who teamed Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and brought them to Hollywood, has died. He was 83.

Greshler died Dec. 30 of pneumonia at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, his wife, Violet, said Monday.

A native New Yorker, Greshler began his career in show business management at 15, handling Paul Tremaine and his "Band From Lonely Acres." He went on to work with the bands headed by Xavier Cugat, Henry Busse and Shep Fields while studying law at Fordham University.

When he paired Martin and Lewis, Greshler produced their nightclub tours and moved with them to Hollywood in 1945, working on their Paramount films and television show.

Over the years, Greshler represented such stars as Al Jolson, Danny Kaye, Benny Goodman, Eddie Cantor, David Janssen, Jack Klugman, Vince Edwards, Marcel Marceau, Cloris Leachman, Tony Randall, Eva Marie Saint, The Monkees, Jayne Mansfield and Milton Berle.

The president of Diamond Artists talent agency for more than 35 years, Greshler also served as program consultant to NBC and was president of York Pictures Corp. and Scarus Productions.

In addition to his wife, Greshler is survived by a son, Stephen, of Palmdale; a daughter, Francine Feldman, of Los Olivos, and a granddaughter, Josette La Barbera, of Westwood.

The family has asked that any memorial donations be made to SHARE Inc., the Los Angeles Free Clinic, or the Motion Picture and Television Fund in Woodland Hills.

Arthur Dreifuss, film, television and stage director and producer who created about 40 movies over three decades, has died. He was 85.

Dreifuss, who lived in Studio City, died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of complications of the flu, his daughter, Nancy Hess, said Thursday.

Born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Dreifuss was a child prodigy pianist and conductor. He later became a choreographer and producer of stage musicals.

Immigrating to New York in 1928, Dreifuss became a theatrical producer.

He moved to Hollywood in 1935 as a dance director, and in 1940 began directing low budget films. He co-wrote and produced many of the films.

His film career began with the 1936 film "Hats Off," which he choreographed and ended with "The Young Runaways" which he directed in 1968.

In between, he handled such films as "Boston Blackie Booked on Suspicion" and "Boston Blackie's Rendezvous" in 1945, "There's a Girl in My Heart" in 1950, "Life Begins at 17" in 1958, "The Quare Fellow" in 1962 and "Riot on Sunset Strip" in 1967.

For television, Dreifuss produced the nature series "Wildlife in Crisis" in Africa.

In the 1970s, he became a talent agent.

In addition to his daughter, of Burbank, Dreifuss is survived by a son, David, of Hollywood, and two grandchildren.

Charles Wesley Schott, 87, retired Air Force major general and aerospace executive who was a decorated bomber command pilot during World War II, has died. He was 87.

His family said Monday that Schott died Dec. 27 at Air Force Village West Health Center in Riverside where he had lived for four years.

Born in Providence, R.I., Schott was educated at Brown University and the University of Michigan. He entered the Air Corps as a flying cadet in 1930 and served for two years.

After eight years in civilian life with American Airways and in air traffic control, Schott was called to active duty.

He spent most of World War II flying combat planes in England and Europe, and once accomplished the surrender of a German garrison near the abandoned German airfield where he landed -- before Allied troops had crossed the Rhine.

Schott earned the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit with two Oak Leaf Clusters, and the Croix de Guerre with Palm from France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

During the 1950s, Schott served as a commander with the Strategic Air Command, stationed at Walker Air Force Base in New Mexico, and later in Guam. He retired in 1963 as deputy inspector general of the Air Force, stationed at Norton Air Force Base near Redlands, after 32 years of service.

Schott later served as a director of North American Aviation and continued as a management systems executive and consultant with its successor, Rockwell International, for 25 years.

He is survived by his wife, Barbara Crittenden Schott of Riverside; a son, Kenneth C. Schott of Annandale, Va., and three grandchildren.

The family has asked that any memorial donations be made to the AFVW Health Center, 17050 Arnold Drive, Riverside, Calif. 92518.

Ronald Muchnick, 56, Hollywood talent agent, personal manager and producer. A native of Ann Arbor, Mich., and a child actor there, Muchnick was educated at the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University.Head of his own management firm since 1980, Muchnick represented such celebrities as Richard Gere, Joseph Mascolo, Clifton Davis, Lesley Ann Warren and Marian Mercer. Muchnick worked in New York during the 1960s and 1970s, where he was house manager of New York's Helen Hayes Theatre and later co-artistic director of the URGENT Theatre Company, which produced off-Broadway plays. On Tuesday in Los Angeles of AIDS.

Dr. Michael P. Rosenberg, 55, founder and past president of the national Hemophilia/HIV Peer Assn.A pioneer in investigating the AIDS epidemic among hemophiliacs, Rosenberg had helped produce television documentaries and worked to establish communication among AIDS patients and authorities. He had petitioned President Clinton for a congressional investigation into the problem of hemophiliacs contracting AIDS from contaminated blood products. On Saturday in Nevada City, Calif., of AIDS.

For most kids, seeing one of the gory, horrific "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies means going to bed with the light on for several months. But for Josh Brezner of Granada Hills, all that big-screen murder and mayhem was an inspiration.

He got some clay and began trying to re-create some of the effects, in particular a scene where a woman turns into a cockroach. "I was 10 and I had never seen anything like that before. It was fantastic. That got me started into effects and makeup, and it hasn't been boring yet," Josh says.

Now 15 and a sophomore at Van Nuys High School's production magnet, Josh makes his friends jealous when he talks about his weekend and after-school jobs. He has credits in more than 30 productions, including student films, music videos and a Hollywood play.

"When I'm at a screening of a film I've worked on and the crowd moans when they see an effect I've created, it's a rush. It's even better on a set when I've made a wound and the people around me know it's fake, and they still turn away. I want to say, 'Thank you,' " Josh says.

He credits his early success to his parents' approval of his creative energy. "From early on he's been interested in special effects, and we've encouraged him," says Michelle Brezner, his mother. Josh's parents have become accustomed to driving him to and from early-morning shoots. "This is something he's good at and he loves, so we do what we can for him," she says.

After watching Josh try to duplicate the cockroach, Michelle Brezner called UCLA to see if there were any extension courses for children who wanted to learn about movie special effects. The effects classes were for adults only, but teacher Marilyn White was impressed by Josh's creativity and got him a job cleaning up at Cinema Secrets, a Burbank store that sells makeup and special effects equipment.

Josh took the prosthetics and creature effects classes offered at the store, then began assisting on shoots, helping to create scars and wounds. "I was 11 when I worked my first set, assisting Marilyn on a movie. It was a little scary, I didn't know what to expect. But everyone was nice, and it was cool to be so young and these adults were treating me like an adult. It blew me away."

Soon he began getting calls from student directors needing some nasty scars on their actors and earned his first solo credit for the film "Tonto Tiempo" (1991). The work for film schools doesn't pay much, often just his lunch and expenses, but Josh meticulously keeps videotapes of his work for his growing portfolio. "I'm not sure yet what I'll do right after high school, but I definitely want to be involved in this," he says.

Just the names of some of the student films Josh has worked on, such as "Rigor Mortis" and "The Tar Monster," both made in 1993, suggest these could be great showcases for his talent. Fortunately for him, there aren't many E.M. Forster adaptations made in film school.

" 'Brain Drain' was definitely the toughest movie I've worked on," he says of another 1993 project. "The director wanted nonstop effects. It was the first time I was absolutely essential to the production. If I didn't show up, they couldn't film."

His challenge was to rig up a plumbing system that dripped liquid from the heads of 20 extras -- i.e., the "Brain Drain." "I had to find a way to make this work and was able to get a plumbing prosthetic that dripped and looked realistic. They say you learn something new on every shoot, and it's true," he says.

After being called for a job, Josh reviews the script and goes over the effects with the director. "I want to find out what the director's vision is, what he sees for the effects. Sometimes he has specific ideas of how he wants a monster to look or how a wound should be, other times he'll leave it up to me."

Like other kids his age, Josh spends time in the library, but not doing book reports. While coming up with ideas for effects, you can find him in the dark shelves surrounding medical and forensic pathology books.

"I'll look for pictures of rashes, burns, gunshot wounds. You have to know what these things look like in order to make them realistic," he says.

While Josh prides himself on the realism of his effects and makeup jobs, there's one effect that eludes him. "It's virtually impossible to make realistic blood," he says. When you prick your finger and watch the blood come out, you can see how it moves, it almost seems alive. That just can't be duplicated."

Actors aren't always easy to work with, especially when a guy who doesn't have his driver's license yet is trying to get you to hold still until your scarred body dries. "In the classes I took I had a lot of effects done to myself so I know what it feels like. A lot of people don't like to have any makeup or chemicals put near their eyes and I try to work with that. I'll tell the actor what I'm doing, what I'm using, just make him feel comfortable," he says.

In a recent music video, Josh made his acting debut. "Queenie," by the group Ethyl Meatplow, features a bizarre dream sequence in which a jazz quartet plays for an unusual group of dancers. In the background, the bass player with the slicked-back hair hams it up. "It was a little strange being in front of the camera. I was there just to do makeup, and the director asked if I wanted to be in it."

The director, Joy Ray, had used Josh for "Brain Drain" and also selected him to work on another music video, Porno for Pyros' "Sadness," this time only off camera. "I had to create more scars on an actor's back that matched the scarring he already had. It took a little while before it was right, but I got the hang of it."

Josh's biggest project to date has been creating a hunchback for an actor in the West Coast Ensemble's production of "La Malasangre" in Hollywood, which closed in December. "It's the first job that wakes me up at night. In a film, you create an effect, and you rely on the camera and the editing to give you the best angle. With a play, the audience is all around, and I needed to make a hunchback that looks real from every seat. And, in a film you do an effect, and it just has to work once. With a play, it's got to work every night."

"I never had any doubts that Josh could do the job," says Robert Madrid, an actor and director who recommended Josh for "La Malasangre." "For a 15-year-old, he's very confident, and he handles himself well. Not many kids are like that."

Being around so much horror, it's hard to believe anything could scare Josh. "I can sit through the goriest movies and not even blink," he says. "But real violence, real horror, I can't take. I saw someone fall down an escalator and get cut up and I just froze and turned white. I'm more squeamish than you'd expect." Where and When

What: Josh Brezner's makeup work can be seen in the music videos "Queenie" by Ethyl Meatplow and "Sadness" by Porno for Pyros, currently aired on MTV.

Imagine being misdiagnosed with AIDS. It happened to Colin Martin.

"I started having convulsions, shaking, chills," recalled the actor, who was in the middle of a performance class at Pittsburgh's Carnegie- Mellon University in 1985 when a mysterious malady suddenly overtook him and he was rushed to a hospital. In the emergency room, Martin says, he was told that the doctors were "95% sure" he had AIDS. "At the end of the week, they said, 'We're 95% sure you don't have AIDS, but we won't know for sure for two weeks.' "

For Martin, now 30, the horrific experience proved a watershed event -- and the starting point for his new one-man show, "Virgins and Other Myths," which will have two workshop performances Sunday and Jan. 16 at the NoHo Studios.

At the time of his illness, Martin had a girlfriend, and had also had sex with men -- which he says the doctors focused on in their misdiagnosis. (The actor was later found to be suffering from exhaustion, dehydration and a viral infection.)

"From that point," he said somberly, "I became aware of AIDS, and had to come to grips with my fear of it."

He began to exercise "compulsively, obsessively -- trying to beat the disease I thought was inevitable," he said. He got into support groups and realized that he had to deal with his sexuality. He says he also started to uncover suppressed childhood memories of sexual abuse. After graduation, Martin, a native of Cambridge, Mass., returned home and joined the staff of a children's AIDS program at Boston City Hospital; later, he worked in New York for a foster care agency placing HIV-positive children.

After a stint doing publicity for Houston's Alley Theatre, he moved to Los Angeles in 1991 and at first laid low, "waiting tables and reading books." In 1992, accompanying a friend to an audition, he wound up getting cast in Robert Chesley's "Dog Plays" at the Celebration Theatre.

"Suddenly I was doing a gay play about AIDS in a gay theater -- and I was nude," he said. "The play ran four or five months, and was a big hit. It was the first time that my sexual identity and artistic and personal life came together in the same room."

Since then, Martin has continued down that path with his involvement in Artists Confronting AIDS. Last year, in addition to his acting stint opposite performer/activist Michael Kearns in "Camille" at Highways, he directed two socially charged works, "Myron" and "Off."

"It's a difficult path I've chosen," he said. "I want to be successful, but on my own terms. If I have a hero, it would be Michael Kearns. In my family, the strongest message I got was to be of service. So I've tried to combine theater and film and service -- and the person doing that is Michael."

Another touchstone in Martin's life is Mindy Kanaskie, an old friend from the days at Carnegie-Mellon, who is producing the show.

"What he's written is so open, so sincere and gut-wrenching," she said. "I love the idea of these kind of pieces, people revealing the honesty and dishonesty of their lives. I guess I've led a boring life . . . Through Colin, I'm learning to see more." Where and When

What: "Virgins and Other Myths."

Location: NoHo Studios, 5215 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 3 p.m. Sunday and Jan. 16.

Price: $10.

Call: (213) 969-2445.

"a little Meditation," at the Richard Basehart Playhouse, is a musical that deserves its lower-case title. The last term one could associate with this ragamuffin piece of work is capital.

For a show promoting "higher consciousness," everything is pretty much in the basement. It is so low, in fact, that the entire plot is actually a kind of con: Our hero, Russell (Greg Safel), though presented as a soldier of fortune who magically travels into a future land called Essencea (get it?), is actually a pilot named Robert who has crashed and is dreaming the whole story.

Nothing, though, in the book and music by Maximum Mix, Buddy Mix and Christopher Barnhard really fulfills this ersatz "Wizard of Oz" plot device. No one in Robert's actual life -- vaguely presented as Lakota tribes people and their friends -- clearly corresponds with the Essencean world he dreams. Absolutely nothing links up; not the best way to develop anyone's higher consciousness.

Instead, "Meditation" amounts to a patchwork New Age pop opera murkily directed by Mark McQuown and filled with solemn turbaned spiritual guides; the evil and good daughters (Licia Shearer and Christine Scherpf, respectively) of the High Priest (James Blevins); and something known as The Essence (Carole Love), who stands in a cave with a shredded white wig covering her entire head and whose profound utterances are mostly drowned out by the over-amplified and tinny synthesized music.

You get the idea.

Oh, but there's more. There's evil daughter Leleah, whose numbers are invariably bump-and-grind variations (Shearer, at least, is the only singer here who invests any passion) on Leleah's bad-chick ways. There's the impossible-to-follow Essencea plot, eventually sending Russell into a chamber of mirrors looking for the good daughter, Lelissa, whom he loves. There's Michael Roth's ugly set design (mostly a background of cheesy-looking rocks) that, by the way, doesn't include a chamber of mirrors. There's the muddy and ear-piercing sound system (care of Nikkodo U.S.A.) and the needless miking of the cast.

This show loses track of its identity, which presumably revolves around Robert / Russell. No 1994 guy in jeans, not even Safel's nice-seeming soldier of fortune, could compete with a futuristic fairy-tale-style sibling rivalry. So Robert literally gets lost in his own dream and lets Leleah and Lelissa take it over. Rather than the helpful good-evil ethics of the fairy tale, though, we're offered nothing more than New Ageisms like "follow your heart."

Now, while that's a fine phrase, it's an empty message for a spiritually concerned show. And it's hard to see how any of this has anything to do with Robert: This is no dream any respectable Freudian would touch, and this is no show any respectable dramaturge would have a clue knowing how to solve. Where and When

What: "a little Meditation."

Location: Richard Basehart Playhouse, 21028-B Victory Blvd., Woodland Hills.

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays, through Jan. 30.

Price: $9-$15.

Call: (818) 704-1845.

Merry Shaman was 18 when she first read Dee Wells' novel "Jane." This was in the '70s, when the sexual revolution was at its acme and feminism was breaking down society's walls. Wells' ideas about the possibilities of women's choices, right or wrong, hit a chord with Shaman.

That chord has resonated through time and finds its expression in Shaman's stage adaptation of the novel, "Jane's Journal," opening tonight at North Hollywood's Limelight Playhouse, in which Shaman also plays the title role.

Raised in New York's South Bronx, she was attuned to what was happening in the world outside.

"I was not terribly sheltered," Shaman says. "There were shootouts on my street. I was rather precocious. I read a lot, and I knew what was going on when I was pretty young. And there was a lot going on, particularly in women's issues. Very different messages were coming out to young women."

Shaman admits that she understands Jane better now, but that at the time it was intriguing to have a view of what she thought was a very real person living in the world as it was evolving.

The character Jane is an American newspaper film critic living in London, who makes choices which, right or wrong, are what she has to do. One of those choices involves her concurrent, and carefully timed, affairs with a black American law student and a brash young British burglar.

Shaman -- whose first play, "Mother and Daughter Reunion" was produced while she was still in college -- says she was immediately and permanently drawn to the character. She remembers her first impression: "Jane was real. She was no big role model. She made a lot of sloppy choices. She wasn't really a good girl or a bad girl, just a woman of her time. With lots of choices, lots of them, she was bound to make a few poor ones."

Shaman and her director, Kevin Shaw made the decision to separate the play from the '70s, because the statements Wells had to make about Jane were timeless in an ever-changing world.

Shaw, who is remembered for his co-direction of Thomas Babe's "A Prayer for My Daughter" last year, says: "This still could happen, it still does happen. What would you do in this situation? It will still engage an audience. The mores of society haven't changed that much. Even today, some people are going to sit in the theater and look at Jane and judge her as a woman."

Shaman smiles and responds, "Maybe even more, because there's not as much free thinking as there was then."

"It's still wrong," Shaw continues, "that people are so judgmental. People haven't changed as much as we'd like to think. That's what's interesting in the play. It may be the same way even 20 years further down the road. People may still look at women and say that they're expected to behave in such a way, and that they should make certain choices in these situations, regardless. That hasn't changed, and I don't know if it will ever change."

The core of Wells' tale, without any topical reference, is timeless. Shaman feels that it asks important questions about the rules of society that would be pertinent at any time -- today, tomorrow, yesterday.

"It's real life," Shaw says. "Jane's choices are not morally correct, or the right thing to do, but they're real. Real people's choices are reality-based. Some people are going to like the characters, some are not. That's its reality. I want people to walk away from the theater arguing over which man Jane should stay with."

Does the play have a message?

Shaman says with a smile: "The message is that we each have our own little world, and a bigger world that we affect. What we put out into that bigger world makes that world. Simple." Where and When

What: "Jane's Journal."

Location: Limelight Playhouse, 10634 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Indefinitely.

Price: $12.

Call: (818) 753-3374.

Let the "folk fascists" sleep in the past, adrift in their musical dreamland, restricted to the sounds of earlier centuries. Singer-songwriter Fred Starner wants none of that, or not too much of it anyway. Too many things to sing about today .

There always have been for Starner and his ilk, whether it was about saving the ruined environment or the travels by rail of modern hobos. Starner is 54 now, and has been singing about such matters since 1969, when he first met up with that ageless folk master Pete Seeger.

"Folk music is a living tradition," insists Starner, who has come to a funky Venice coffeehouse this afternoon to chat, armed with both banjo and guitar. "Folk musicians deal with myths, the great myths. And you have to think up stories and jokes and anecdotes to convince people it's worthwhile to spend tax money on the spotted owl or whatever it is. Art has always done that."

Of course, American folk music hasn't the same high profile it had in the late 1960s and early '70s, when Starner was singing alongside Seeger, Don McLean (of the folk epic "American Pie") and a crowd of others. It's rarely heard on commercial radio. That's in spite of such popular neo-folk artists as Tracy Chapman, and the continuing influence of Bob Dylan.

It's gotten to a point where Pete Seeger now identifies himself not as a folk singer, but as a "river singer," Starner says. "That confuses them; they don't know what that means. I don't know, the word 'folk singer' has a negative connotation or something: old fashioned, out-of-date, sentimental or whatever it is."

Starner is doing what he can to spread the good news of American folk's lasting value through a series of intimate concerts he has organized for this month at Book Grinders, a coffeehouse and bookstore in Van Nuys. Beginning Saturday night with a performance by Starner and the blues-based Del Grossos, the three-weekend series celebrates "Folk Music and Dance Month," as declared by the 3,000-member national Folk Alliance.

Other sides to the folk music tradition will be explored subsequent weekends: Ross Altman performs a tribute to the folk-blues troubadour Leadbelly on Jan. 15; singer-harpist Bobbie Jo Erikson joins Starner on Jan. 22.

Also on Jan. 15 will be an afternoon folk music workshop for children, led by Erikson and by Starner, who has released two albums of folk for children.

The music of Leadbelly, Altman says, was "a forerunner of the protest movement of the '60s. His work for 30 and 40 years before the modern civil rights movement was one of the most public forums for black music."

The Book Grinders shows are one indication of how the growing L.A. coffeehouse scene is providing a popular venue for acoustic singer-songwriters of folk, folk-rock, etc.

"Coffeehouses are natural places for folk music," says Juli Michaud, manager of Book Grinders. "There is a resurgence of folk music right now, and I happen to like it."

"It's helped," Starner says of the new venues for his music, but he isn't completely satisfied. "They don't let people play for six months at a time. . . . Bob Dylan, when he started out, played every night at 10 o'clock or whatever it was. Phil Ochs did the same thing. And management realized they had somebody."

For Starner, who lives with his wife and daughter in Winnetka, folk music alone doesn't pay the bills. This singer-songwriter is also a part-time teacher of economics at community colleges in Glendale, Moorpark and Ventura.

There's only occasional evidence of that and the tenured position he left behind five years ago at the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse in his original songs. In his song "Marlboro Man," Starner argues the irrelevance of junk bonds, the gross national product and Michael Milken in the simpler world of the hobo.

"I probably know too much about economic problems," Starner says. "I see that as the root of a lot of issues."

For him, the main message is easier to grasp: "There are still a lot of people like me doing this kind of stuff," he says. "And we have a lot of fun doing it. Art has to be entertainment in the end." Where and When

What: Fred Starner and the Del Grossos, the first of three weekly concerts celebrating "Folk Music and Dance Month."

Location: The Book Grinders, 13321 Burbank Blvd., Van Nuys.

Hours: 8 p.m. Saturday.

Price: Free.

Also: Ross Altman tribute to Leadbelly at 8 p.m. Jan. 15, and singer-harpist Bobbie Jo Erikson with Starner at 8 p.m. Jan. 22.

Call: (818) 988-4503.

"A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree -- shoot it in Griffith Park!"

-- Abe Stern, film producer and uncle of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Studios

At old Mission San Fernando, Jane Wyman marries Cesar Romero in the kind of ceremony that the mission's Franciscan fathers didn't exactly have in mind when they built the chapel back in 1797. This wedding is strictly make-believe, recorded by cameras for a 1986 episode of CBS-TV's "Falcon Crest."

"It even made the front page of the National Enquirer!" Kevin Feeney, the mission's business manager, recalls.

In the Antelope Valley, a few residents gather beneath a glitzy, Las Vegas-style marquee bearing the name of singer Vic Damone. They ask someone how they can obtain tickets to Damone's concert.

Alas, there are neither tickets nor concert. The marquee is a prop for the 1991 feature film "The Marrying Man," starring Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin.

In the San Fernando Valley community of Lake View Terrace, a medical facility turned film-and-TV set has served motion pictures such as "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" "Postcards From the Edge" and "Another 48 Hours" -- not far, incidentally, from the scene of a video watched by millions around the world: the beating of Rodney G. King by Los Angeles police officers.

And on leafy Orion Avenue in Van Nuys -- whose white picket fences, spacious lawns and shuttered Cape Cod houses have appeared in movies ("La Bamba" and "Big Trouble") and TV series ("Dallas" and "CHiPs") -- a homeowner recalls an early morning when her teen-age son burst out the door on his way to school, only to be startled by cameras on the front porch shooting actor Peter Falk.

"Whoops! I guess I ruined your shoot," the youngster said apologetically.

Year after year, Hollywood comes calling -- sometimes in a neighborhood near you. And three stars of the show are every bit as venerable and versatile as top-drawer character actors.

They are the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, which have appeared in so many productions -- from blockbuster films to TV series to videos to commercials -- that they deserve their very own stars on the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard.

Indeed, the list of on-location sites -- even predating ex-New Yorker Carl Laemmle's transformation of a 230-acre chicken ranch in 1914 to what is now Universal City -- seemingly stretches as long as Hollywood Boulevard: Griffith Park ("Batman," "Bonanza," "Rebel Without a Cause"), the Van Nuys Airport ("Casablanca"), the Iverson Ranch in Chatsworth ("Ben-Hur," "Rin Tin Tin"), Malibu Creek State Park, partly in Agoura ("M*A*S*H*," "How Green Was My Valley"), the Sepulveda Veterans Affairs Medical Center in North Hills ("Altered States," "Knots Landing"), East Palmdale Boulevard ("Radio Flyer"), and the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys ("Rising Sun," "Murder, She Wrote"), among myriad others.

Then, too, countless private residences and estates provide settings as dramatic as Mediterranean villas or Tudor mansions, which look as if they're in Connecticut or New Jersey. Or, many locations appear as perfectly mundane as the "Leave It to Beaver" set or any other house that might pass for Anywhere, U.S.A.

Each has been deployed again and again by producers and directors who often anchor their flings of fantasy in real-life, everyday places. There, production companies pay homeowners and landlords rental fees ranging from $250 to upward of $15,000 a day, noting that they'll probably have to rearrange walls, furnishings and sometimes even landscaping, but promising to restore all properties exactly to the way they were.

Actually, their work begins months earlier when scouts for the Los Angeles area's 40-odd location companies try to match real-life sites with those described in scripts. They bird-dog neighborhoods and study huge books of wide-angle color photos in quest of a perfect match. Example: One scout recently examined photos at Real to Reel Inc., a Los Angeles location agency, hoping to find what he called "a 1947 kitchen" for a work-in-progress titled "Roswell," about tales of UFOs landing near Roswell, N.M.

And whenever on-location shooting won't work, filmmakers rely on back lots and sound stages such as those at Universal Studios Hollywood, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Corp. in Burbank or Santa Clarita Studios.

Or they turn to recycled locations such as the National Park Service's Paramount Ranch, deep in the hardscrabble hills of south Agoura and the setting for 1930s films such as "Adventures of Marco Polo" and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." Amid rickety facades that hark back to the wild, wild West, CBS-TV's "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" dominates production so much nowadays that Alice Allen, who issues permits to do film or TV work at the Paramount Ranch facility, quips, "The doctor is in residence here."

It's not by accident that the three valleys -- especially the San Fernando Valley -- turn up on millions of big and small screens across America, sometimes with a presence as indelible as John Wayne swaggering to an Oscar in the 1969 motion picture "True Grit."

More movie-making and television production occurs in the Valley than in any other single area of Los Angeles, author Richard Alleman writes in "The Movie Lover's Guide to Hollywood" -- the Valley accounting for about one-third of film and TV production in all of the city, says Hollywood film historian Marc Wanamaker.

"First, you had many studios in the Valley -- then came the studio ranches and all the other locations," says Wanamaker, now at work on a history of U.S. motion-picture studios.

With their craggy hills, sprawling desert, crowded urbanscape and assorted foliage (which enables filmmakers to shun, if they need to, Southern California's patented "palm tree" look), the three valleys have offered filmmakers virtually unlimited choices.

The busiest location? Griffith Park, according to some location scouts and librarians at the Hollywood-based California Film Commission. It's the setting for portions of feature films such as "Hoffa," "Poetic Justice," "Dave" and "Jurassic Park," as well as TV's "MacGyver," "The Wonder Years" and "Doogie Howser, M.D.," among many others.

"It's unbelievable how much filming goes on there," says Czechoslovakian-born Paul Pav of North Hollywood, whose credits as a location manager include "Lethal Weapon 3," "Poltergeist" and "Ghostbusters." "In Griffith Park, you've got New York, you've got the South, you've got whatever you want."

Another site rich in motion-picture lore is the Van Nuys Airport, the setting for portions of the 1942 Warner Bros. classic "Casablanca." But stories about filming of the famous scene in which Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, as World War II lovers, say goodby at a foggy Moroccan airstrip are shrouded in a fog of their own.

While some published accounts say filming took place at the Van Nuys Airport (then known as Los Angeles Municipal Airport), others describe the location variously as the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport and Glendale's old Grand Central Air Terminal, now part of an industrial park. Actually, historian Wanamaker says, Bogart and Bergman bade farewell on a Burbank sound stage, with the takeoff created by special effects and a miniature plane.

Another film historian, Dick Mason of Warner Bros., chuckles at the confusion. "Embellishment is the name of the game among people in this business," he says. "Everyone exaggerates."

Elsewhere, a private house in Arleta served as a set in "Back to the Future," while Chatsworth's Iverson Ranch provided scenes for the spectacular chariot race in 1959's Oscar-winning "Ben-Hur," for other films such as "Julius Caesar" and "The Robe" and for TV series such as "Bat Masterson" and "Zane Grey Theater."

And the Santa Clarita Valley takes pride in its remote but high-profile Vasquez Rocks ("Battlestar Gallactica," "Star Trek," "Charge of the Light Brigade" and Steven Spielberg's upcoming "The Flintstones"), while hundreds of Antelope Valley residents recall the winter night in 1992 when they watched parts of an abandoned, half-completed residential tract on Lancaster's outskirts go up in flames after filmmakers received permission to burn 10 houses for a fiery scene in "Lethal Weapon 3."

"Out here, we think we can offer just about any kind of location," says Stephanie Abrahamson, director of the Antelope Valley Film Assn. "And if you want it, we can give you 360 degrees and not a human in sight."

But today, pitching Southern California to filmmakers is a tough sell as Los Angeles struggles to remain the world's "movie capital" in the heat of competition from Canada, New York, Florida, Illinois and other venues.

Permits issued by the city for on-location filmmaking declined 20% between 1990 (the peak year) and 1992, according to a report in Location Update, a monthly trade magazine published in Los Angeles.

The problem stems from not just a flagging economy but what some call a "user- unfriendly " climate in some neighborhoods.

"L.A. residents, by no means in awe of an industry shoot, don't like the inconveniences it brings -- parking problems, late-night noise, trespassing," Location Update reports.

For his part, location manager Pav says the prospect of Hollywood pitching camp in the neighborhood "goes both ways."

"Some people will slam the door -- or they'll send their dogs after you," he says of his own scouting forays. "On the other hand, some keep sending you pictures of their house with a note: 'Please! Use my house!' They know it can be lucrative -- especially when the economy isn't so good."

Even on that squeaky-clean block of Van Nuys' Orion Avenue, on-site filmmaking has drawn mixed reviews from residents since the camera vans first rolled into the neighborhood 21 years ago for a network TV film, "Go Ask Alice" (Andy Griffith, William Shatner and Julie Adams).

"For a while, we thought it was overdone -- people were out here shooting at 3 and 4 in the morning, for months at a time," says Jean Austin, a retired Hollywood hairdresser who adds that she has lived on Orion Avenue for 30 years. "Sometimes you have to say, 'Enough!' -- as much as we're all trying to keep filming in L.A."

A few doors away, Keith and Marilyn Mullins contend that filmmaking on Orion Avenue is far more blessing than curse.

"It's always welcomed," says Keith Mullins, adding that their house served as a set for "Go Ask Alice" and for Great Western Savings' TV spots featuring Dennis Weaver. "The film companies do everything they can so we'll want them to come back. Especially today, we don't want to lose them."

Now, with Mayor Richard Riordan and newly appointed "film czar" Cody G. Cluff of the Los Angeles Film Commission leading the charge, the city has served notice that it intends to regain its filmmaking glitter.

The applause is loudest among entrepreneurs such as Jim Thompson, president of Real to Reel Inc., and others who've staked their futures on Valley-area and other filmmaking within the "30-mile zone," a radius from La Cienega and Beverly boulevards, beyond which production in Southern California is more expensive because of added labor costs.

"Cities such as Toronto and Chicago have hurt us tremendously," says Thompson, 40, who also is publisher/editor-in-chief of Location Update. "But there's a feeling now that everything will turn around again -- and that a lot of business will come back to L.A."

For now, Hollywood keeps calling with fistfuls of cash -- and the Griffith Parks, the Orion Avenues, the Vasquez Rocks, the East Palmdale Boulevards and the Paramount Ranches endure on the silver screen and in living rooms across the land.

For that matter, so does the work of Paul Pav, Real to Reel Inc. and all those other location scouts who keep scouring the neighborhoods and poring over those thick photo books in search of that perfect "1947 kitchen" and other sites.

They work with a painstaking zeal that continues to remind the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys that, yes, they ought to be in pictures -- and in a way that keeps saying to them: "Here's looking at you, kid." Where Real Becomes Reel

A sampling of on-location and studio sites in the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys: SAN FERNANDO VALLEY

Academy Plaza Theatre, 5200 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.

Films: "Martial Law II."

TV: "Dark Justice," "Jake and the Fat Man," "Sisters."

"Back to the Future" House, 9303 Roslyndale St., Arleta.

"Brady Bunch" House, 11222 Dilling St., North Hollywood.

Brand Library and Art Center, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale.

Films: "The Other Side of Midnight."

TV: "Fall Guy," "Mission Impossible," "The Six Million Dollar Man."

Calabasas Golf and Country Club, 4514 Park Entrada, Calabasas.

Films: "Calamity Jane," "Carousel," "High Noon," "National Velvet," "Show Boat," "Stalag 17."

CBS Studio Center (formerly Republic Studios), 4204 Radford Ave., Studio City.

Films: "Lake Placid Serenade," "Murder in the Music Hall," "The Fighting Kentuckian," "The Lady and the Monster," Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and John Wayne Westerns.

TV: "Burke's Law," "Falcon Crest," "Gilligan's Island," "Gunsmoke," "Hawaii Five-O," "Hill Street Blues," "Lou Grant," "My Three Sons," "Newhart," "Rawhide," "St. Elsewhere," "The Doris Day Show," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "The Rifleman," "The Rogues."

"E.T." House, 7121 Lonzo St., Tujunga.

El Portal Theater (home of Actors Alley), 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.

Films: "Last Action Hero," "Mr. Saturday Night."

TV: "Beverly Hills 90210."

Grand Central Air Terminal, 1310 Air

Way, Glendale.

Films: "Hollywood Hotel," "Sherlock Holmes in Washington."

Grant High School, 13000 Oxnard St., Van Nuys.

TV: "Beverly Hills 90210," "Casualty of Love," "Life Goes On."

"Gone With the Wind" House, 727 Kenneth Road, Glendale.

Actually, this antebellum-style mansion did not appear in the film but inspired the set design of Tara. The house appeared regularly in the TV series "Flamingo Road."

Griffith Park, Los Angeles.

Films: "Alien's Return," "Body and Soul," "Caddyshack," "Dave," "Hoffa," "Jurassic Park," "Poetic Justice," "Rebel Without a Cause," "The Terminator," "Union Pacific."

TV: "Batman," "Battlestar Galactica," "Beverly Hillbillies," "Bonanza," "CHiPs," "The Bionic Woman," "The Colbys," "The Incredible Hulk," "Three's Company."

Iverson Ranch, 1 Iverson Lane, Chatsworth.

Films: "Ben-Hur," "Hopalong Cassidy" series, "Julius Caesar," "Jungle Drums of Africa," "Rifles of the Khyber Pass," "Son of Paleface," "Stagecoach," "Tarzan and the She-Devil" (and others in the "Tarzan" series), "The Flying Deuces" (Laurel and Hardy series), "The Grapes of Wrath," "The Road to Bali," "The Robe."

TV: "Bat Masterson," "Rin Tin Tin," "The Big Valley," "The Rifleman," "The Virginian," "Zane Grey Theater."

Lake View Medical Center, 11600 Eldridge Ave., Lake View Terrace.

Films: "Another 48 Hours," "Beverly Hills Cop III," "Dying Young," "Heart Condition," "Mr. Jones," "Postcards from the Edge," "Road House," "Ricochet," "Terminator 2: Judgment Day."

TV: "Beverly Hills 90210," "Melrose Place," "Sisters," "Unsolved Mysteries."

Malibu Creek State Park (formerly Fox Ranch), 1925 Las Virgenes Road, Calabasas.

Films: "How Green Was My Valley," "M*A*S*H*," "Planet of the Apes."

TV: "M*A*S*H*," "Roots."

Mission San Fernando, 15151 San Fernando Mission Blvd., San Fernando.

Films: "Our Silent Paths," "Rose of the Rancho," "The Battle of Elderberry Gulch," "Two Men of the Desert."

TV: "Dragnet," "Falcon Crest," "Having It All," "Knight Rider," "Loose Cannons," "Remington Steele," "The Greatest American Hero," "The Incredible Hulk," "The Love Boat."

Monteria Estates, on Winnetka Avenue, north of Devonshire Street, Chatsworth.

TV: "Jake and the Fat Man," "Murder, She Wrote."

Orion Avenue, 6200-6300 block, Van Nuys.

Films: "Big Trouble," "La Bamba."

TV: "All My Darling Daughters," "CHiPs," "Dallas," "Falcon Crest," "Go Ask Alice," "Shameful Secrets."

Paramount Ranch, 2813 Cornell Road, Agoura.

Films: "Adventures of Marco Polo," "Broken Lullaby," "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "The Santa Fe Trail," "Thunder Below," "Wells Fargo."

TV: "Bat Masterson," "B.J. and the Bear," "CHiPs," "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman," "Have Gun Will Travel," "Helter Skelter," "The Cisco Kid."

Pioneer Church, at Oakwood Memorial Park, 22601 Lassen St., Chatsworth.

TV: "Matlock," "The Last Precinct," "The Long Journey Home."

"Scarecrow & Mrs. King" House, 4247 Warner Blvd., Burbank.

Sepulveda Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 16111 Plummer St., North Hills.

Films: "Altered States," "Dave," "Switch," "The Crackerbox," "Water Dance."

TV: "Knots Landing," "National Lampoon's High School," "Rape of Dr. Willis."

Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, 6100 Woodley Ave., Van Nuys.

Films: "Red Sun Rising," "Rising Sun," "Twins."

TV: "Murder, She Wrote," "Hart to Hart" sequel.

Universal Studios Hollywood, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City.

Films: "Abbott and Costello" series, "Animal House," "Back Street," "Dracula," "Earthquake," "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial," "Frances the Talking Mule," "Frankenstein" series, "Imitation of Life," "Jaws," "Ma and Pa Kettle" series, "Magnificent Obsession," "On Golden Pond," "Psycho," "Sherlock Holmes," "The Sting," "To Kill a Mockingbird."

TV: "Cagney & Lacey," "Message From Nam," "Switch."

Van Nuys Airport, 16217 Lindbergh St., Van Nuys.

Films: "Casablanca," "In the Line of Fire," "Last Action Hero."

TV: "Message From Nam."

Van Nuys High School, 6535 Cedros Ave., Van Nuys.

Films: "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (also filmed at Sherman Oaks Galleria).

TV: "Life Goes On," "The Wonder Years."

Walt Disney Co. Studios, 500 S. Buena Vista St., Burbank.

Films: "Bambi," "Dumbo," "Mary Poppins," "Old Yeller," "Song of the South," "Swiss Family Robinson," "The Shaggy Dog" series, "Treasure Island," "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

Warner Bros. Ranch Facility (formerly Columbia Ranch), 3701 W. Oak St., Burbank.

Films: "Christmas Vacation," "High Noon," "Lethal Weapon" series, "Lost Horizon," "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "The Three Stooges" series, "The World According to Garp," "You Can't Take It With You."

TV: "Bewitched," "Leave It to Beaver," "The Partridge Family."

Warner Bros. Studios, 4000 Warner Blvd., Burbank.

Films: "All the President's Men," "Annie," "A Star Is Born" (Judy Garland), "Auntie Mame," "Casablanca," "East of Eden," "Giant," "House of Wax," "King's Row," "Mildred Pierce," "My Fair Lady," "Private Benjamin," "Rebel Without a Cause," "The Jazz Singer," "The Music Man," "The Shootist."

TV: "The Waltons." SANTA CLARITA VALLEY

Lindsey Studios, 25241 W. Avenue Stanford, Valencia.

Films: "Beverly Hills Cop III," "Mighty Ducks II."

TV: "Highway to Heaven," "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," "Murder, She Wrote," "thirtysomething."

Magic Movie Studios of Valencia (formerly Valencia Studios), 26030 Avenue Hall, Valencia.

Films: "Judgement Day," "Lethal Weapon 2," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Star Trek" sequels, "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" "Two Jakes."

Six Flags Magic Mountain, 26101 Magic Mountain Parkway, Valencia.

Films: "National Lampoon's Vacation," "Rollercoaster."

TV: "Step by Step."

Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park, 10700 W. Escondido Canyon Road, Saugus.

Films: "Battlestar Galactica," "Charge of the Light Brigade," "Flash Gordon," "For the Boys," "Gunga Din," "Star Trek," "The Flintstones."

TV: "Bonanza," "Murder, She Wrote," "The Big Valley."

Walt Disney's Golden Oak Ranch, Newhall.

Films: "Back to the Future," "Hot Shots! Part Deux," "The Coneheads."

TV: "Baywatch," "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman."

William S. Hart Park, 24151 Newhall Ave., Newhall.

Films: Only those starring silent-film star William S. Hart, notably "Tumbleweeds." ANTELOPE VALLEY

Building (formerly a bar) at 85th St. West and Avenue I, Lancaster.

Film: "The Marrying Man."

East Palmdale Boulevard, Palmdale.

Film: "Radio Flyer."