Babylon

A valentine from the Taviani Brothers--modern masters of Italian film neo-realism--to the silent American cinema--and the epic genius of D.W. Griffith (deftly played by Charles Dance, pictured). The story focuses on two Italian emigre church-builders (Vincent Spano, Joaquim de Almeida) hired to make the elephants for the Babylon set of "Intolerance." (Bravo Saturday at 2 p.m.).

One OF the most notorious crimes of Jazz Age Los Angeles began quietly enough with a lost boy. But the Walter Collins case would end up becoming the O.J. Simpson drama of its day, a horrifying crime that inspired a media frenzy and captivated the Southland. What started as the real-life tale of a missing child would eventually take on a much larger significance in the then-burgeoning city.

PARIS -- The ancient city of Babylon, situated in modern-day Iraq, gets a thorough exploration in a new show at the Louvre, with treasures borrowed from galleries around the world. All that's missing is the obvious: artifacts on loan from Baghdad's museum.

Don Crutchfield is seated in an office surrounded by boxing pictures, talking about himself. It is something he does well, for even though he has the stocky build of a street fighter, it is accompanied by the smooth, persuasive delivery of a press agent. He is telling me he is private investigator to the stars and rattles off the names of celebrities like items on a grocery list: Sinatra, Brando, Lewis, Garland, Bronson, Rickles, pickles, bread, milk, salami. . . .

THOUGH sword-and-sandal films have been a box-office staple since the silent era, the genre hit its apex in the late 1950s and early '60s in Italy with such films as "Hercules" with Steve Reeves, "The Giant of Metropolis" with Gordon Mitchell and "The Loves of Hercules" with Mickey Hargitay.

BABYLON VILLAGE, N.Y. -- The Sea Baby's stuck. The storm surge from Hurricane Sandy tossed the 25-foot fishing boat into a pile of 40 boats at the Suffolk Marine Center on Sumpwams Creek, a slender finger of water that reaches into Long Island from the Atlantic Ocean. Jimmy Luttieri, the manager of the marina, and a crew of eight volunteers and stragglers are trying to hoist the Sea Baby out of the pile. This is what the cleanup looks like on the southern shore of Long Island.

There is good news and bad news about "Babylon 5," the latest in a burgeoning cluster of sci-fi series streaking across your television screen (premiering at 8 tonight on KCOP-TV Channel 13). The show's premise is not exactly original but it's not a copycat "Star Trek" either.

Robert Stone's splendid documentary "American Babylon" opens with some stockfootage of a series of implosions that leveled Atlantic City's immense old boardwalk hotels to make room for an array of gaudy new hotel casinos. The arrival of the gambling industry to the venerable New Jersey seashore resort has done little, however, for the city's black ghetto.

French archeologists working in southern Iraq have unearthed a statue and fragments of a grave marker dating back to the Babylonian era nearly 2,500 years ago, a government newspaper said. The statue of a praying man was found at Larsa, where French researchers have been digging since the early 1930s, the English-language Baghdad Observer reported. The object could shed light on the religious life of the ancient city at the site, the paper quoted French team leader Daniel Forest as saying.

A ruler who long ago held sway over the region now controlled by Iraq's Saddam Hussein once confronted a disturbing phenomenon described in the Bible--a hand writing these words on a wall: "MENE, MENE, TEKEL and PARSIN." As interpreted by the prophet Daniel, the Aramaic words meant in part, "God has numbered the days of your kingdom . . . you have been weighed in balances and found wanting."