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News from the entertainment capital

By PAT NASON, UPI Hollywood Reporter
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SECURITY TIGHT FOR GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS

Producers of the 59th Annual Golden Globe Awards are going to extraordinary lengths to maintain top security for the event this Sunday in Beverly Hills, Calif. -- including issuing credentials that not only bear photographs of the journalists, technicians, publicists and others who will be there, but also their thumbprints.

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Applicants for those credentials might have thought they were checking into LAX for a commercial flight as they stood in line for anywhere from one hour to 90 minutes Friday afternoon, waiting to be photographed and fingerprinted. Some of them passed the time cracking jokes comparing the experience to a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles while others complained that they could remember standing in buffet lines that faster than this one.

Everyone entering the Beverly Hilton for Sunday's event -- which will be televised over NBC -- will pass through a metal detector. The maximum security is a consequence of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

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Good news for fans looking forward to seeing their favorite stars dressed up on TV -- the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is not following the lead of the TV Academy, which had participants dress down in business attire for last year's Emmy Awards. That's probably the only right choice for the Golden Globes -- given that looking good for the camera has been the main point of the exercise since long before the HFPA award itself gained any measure of prestige in the entertainment community.


STUDIO PULLS PLUG ON CARREY-KIDMAN COMEDY

According to a report in Daily Variety, Universal has abruptly called off production on a comedy starring Jim Carrey and Nicole Kidman which was to have begun production in March.

Carrey was supposed to play a widower who gets back into the dating world -- where the challenge is already daunting -- only to be haunted by his dead wife, played by Kidman. Gary Ross ("Pleasantville," "Dave") was to have directed from his own screenplay, and Variety said Universal had intended a Christmas 2002 release for the picture.

It appeared as though Kidman's busy schedule was a major factor in the studio's decision. She's already started work on "Dogville" with director Lars von Trier ("Dancer in the Dark," "Breaking the Waves") and when that project is finished, she's scheduled to go right to work on "The Human Stain" with Oscar-winning actor Anthony Hopkins.

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COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU

Benefiting from some of the most extensive free media since "Saving Private Ryan," the military drama "Black Hawk Down" finally appears in theaters everywhere this weekend -- and box-office analysts are watching to see if movie fans will continue a recent trend of making the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend an important date on the movie release schedule.

Last year, the high school hip-hop drama, "Save the Last Dance," opened on the MLK holiday, and set a new record for the weekend with $27.5 million from Friday to Monday. Some analysts expect "Black Hawk Down" -- an account of a U.S. military battle in Somalia in 1993 -- might take as much as $30 million this weekend.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Ridley Scott and various technical advisers have been making the rounds on the cable news networks, which have devoted large chunks of air time to discussion of the movie -- including the question of whether it is accurate and faithful to the facts and the spirit of the Mogadishu battle.

Also opening wide this weekend is "Snow Dogs," the new Disney comedy starring Oscar-winning actors Cuba Gooding Jr. and James Coburn. It's the story of a Miami dentist who inherits a sled dog team he doesn't want -- then changes his mind and is forced to win a sled dog race in order to keep the animals.

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LACK OF 'IMAGINE'-ATION AT NBC

There is a strong consensus in Hollywood that Hank Azaria is one of the most talented performers around, but TV viewers didn't buy his new series, "Imagine That," and NBC has canceled it after just two weeks on the air.

Azaria -- who won Emmys for the ABC TV movie, "Oprah Winfrey Presents: Tuesdays with Morrie" and for his voice work on the Fox animated comedy, "The Simpsons" -- starred in the new comedy as a TV writer whose daily life was interrupted by frequent flights of fancy.


THEY CAME ON DOWN!!

Producers of the long-running CBS game show, "The Price is Right," got a lot more than they bargained for when they presented the show's 30th anniversary celebration at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas Thursday.

An estimated 5,000 people showed up, wanting to get in to see the show -- but there were only 900 tickets to go around.

A spokesman for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department told the Los Angeles Times that police managed to deal with the crowd-control issues.

"We got a call about 8:15 a.m.," said Vincent Cannito. "They ran out of tickets and people started yelling. We held over our graveyard (shift) officers and sent our day-shift patrols out a little early, but no one did anything destructive."

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Cannito said many in the crowd were obviously irritated, but they generally behaved themselves.

"These weren't bad people, by any stretch -- just tired, agitated people who stood in line," he said. "The show obviously has quite a following."

Thirty years' worth, Vince.

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