Entertainment Today: show biz news

SHARON STONE

Actress Sharon Stone was admitted to a San Francisco hospital with a tiny brain aneurysm. Her publicist confirms that she has had bleeding in that area.

Stone, 43, was taken by her husband, a San Francisco newspaper executive, to an emergency room, complaining of a severe headache. Spokeswoman Cindi Berger says Stone has been responding to treatments and is resting comfortably. USA Today is reporting that she will likely remain hospitalized until early next week.

Meanwhile, husband Phil Bronstein, is still recovering from a bitten toe suffered at the teeth of a seven-foot-long Komodo dragon at the Los Angeles Zoo last summer.

(Thanks to UPI Feature Reporter Dennis Daily)

'I LOVE NY'

Robert DeNiro, Regis Philbin and Jerry Orbach are among the entertainers who'll team up with New York Gov. George Pataki for a $40 million advertising campaign to boost tourism in New York.

"The campaign not only sends a message to America and the world that New York is open for business, but makes a strong statement that we will never surrender our freedoms or back down form a challenge," Pataki said. "After watching the best of America right here in New York in the aftermath of the evil attack on the World Trade Center, I know that people from around the world join us when we say, 'I Love New York.'"

The campaign to encourage business travelers and tourists to come back to New York in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks will feature a television ad with Derek Jeter, Regis Philbin, Kelly Ripa, Ben Stiller, Pataki and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. They'll begin to air nationally next week.

(Thanks to UPI's William M. Reilly in New York)

COEN BROTHERS

Joel Coen, one-half of the filmmaking Coen Brothers, says while they want their movies to be seen, they're "resigned to the fact that we're not making commercial movies and the appeal will be limited."

Joel and Ethan Coen are interviewed in the November issue of Playboy, on newsstands now.

Joel Coen says the studios generally don't interfere with them: "We're mercifully free of the Hollywood committee development process and the process of making the movie. They understand that if they are going to do a movie with us, they'll let us do it our way."

Ethan Coen adds: "The movie people let us play in the corner of the sandbox and leave us alone. We're happy here."

JAMES ARNESS

World War II veteran and actor James Arness says the depiction of battlefield conditions in such contemporary movies as "Saving Private Ryan" does and doesn't approximate the actual violence he experienced.

"The accuracy of the event is pretty much the same," he told UPI. "If they're gonna make a movie they can pick up the story of the event and the records. But it's almost impossible to achieve the degree of reality. As bad as it looks, it doesn't look as real as it does when you're there."

He said "Saving Private Ryan" is "about as close an anyone will ever get" to a faithful movie reproduction of real combat.

Violence, of course, was a central issue in TV westerns, a genre perhaps best exemplified by "Gunsmoke," which starred Arness and aired on CBS from 1955-75 and came back for several successful TV movies into the early 1990s.

Arness said the earlier episodes "depicted the violence to a much greater degree than they did later," but the show was forced by the FCC to tone things down after a few seasons.

But "Gunsmoke" did not simply glorify violence. Frequently, it emphasized the avoidance of violence in the solution of dramatic problems in stories about law abiding, peaceful people.

"That's one of the things that distinguished 'Gunsmoke' from some of the other Westerns when there were so many Westerns on," said Arness. "Producers from the beginning wanted to do not just action shows, but character studies of people, the human condition. Some action, of course, but they really were character studies."

He said he still gets mail (jamesarness.com) from people who say they learned valuable life lessons from the show.

At 78, Arness wouldn't exactly say he's anxious to go before the cameras again, but he's not entirely against the idea either. "I'm always open to suggestion," he said, "but I don't know whether I could get through the action. But I'm still out there checking."

The actor has written "James Arness: An Autobiography," with James E. Wise Jr.

(Thanks to UPI Hollywood Reporter Pat Nason)