Fall Season

Filmforum concludes its fall season at 8 tonight at LACE with a potluck party and a program of highlights from the 1991 Ann Arbor Film Festival, a 30-year-old annual showcase for 16 millimeter films of every kind. There are four standouts among the eight offerings, and two--Karen Kennedy's seven-minute "Recovering Silver" and Barbara Hammer's "Sanctus"--are imaginative experiments that celebrate the beauty and wonder of the human body.

"Girls, girls, girls" - if the 2011 season had to wear a neon sign on its head, that is what it would say. Blame it on the "The Good Wife" or Lady Gaga or "Bridesmaids," but suddenly television went all gynocentric. It started in January, with the sight of Elizabeth McGovern, Penelope Wilton and Maggie Smith going head to head on the wonderful "Downton Abbey"; by the fall, all anyone was talking about was "The New Girl" and not just the Zooey Deschanel show but also the concept it stood for - the Pan Am gals, the Playboy bunnies, a double dip of Whitney Cummings ("Whitney," "2 Broke Girls")

The Joffrey Ballet will open its fall season on Sept. 11 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with the company premiere of Sir Fredrick Ashton's "La Fille Mal Gardee." Former Royal Ballet principal (and Los Angeles resident) Stanley Holden will come out of retirement to dance his role of the Widow Simone with the company.

As October glides toward November, the weather skates the edge — one foot in summer, the other in fall. Leaves begin to drift from the trees. Morning brings a cooler edge to the breeze. And every evening the sun sets a little earlier. Time to put away the rosés and lighter reds and bring out the big guns: Cabernet, Bordeaux and Barolo, Chinon and Cahors, Syrah and Sangiovese. Chefs are already anticipating the change of season with heartier dishes. Bring it on, I say. Here are some restaurants that serve rustic fall dishes and have wine lists replete with extraordinary bottles to drink with them.

CBS informed its affiliates today that the network has been forced by the writers' strike and the possibility of further industry labor troubles to postpone the start of its fall season from Sept. 5 until late October. ABC has not set a date for its season start. NBC has fewer problems with the strike because the network will be broadcasting the Seoul summer Olymics from Sept. 17 to Oct. 2, and then has the World Series, which begins Oct. 15.

A Southern California preview of the fall season at Sotheby's New York will be held today through Friday at the auction house's showroom in Beverly Hills. Highlights from Impressionist, modern and American art sales include paintings by Edvard Munch, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Alfred Sisley, Childe Hassam and John Singer Sargent.

Bud agreed with Brandon and Brandon, Brandon agreed with Bud and Brandon, and Brandon certainly agreed with Brandon and Bud. Unanimity was the order of the day as the three network entertainment chiefs--Brandon Stoddard of ABC, Brandon Tartikoff of NBC and B. Donald (Bud) Grant of CBS--appeared together at the Hollywood Radio and Television Society's jovial Newsmaker Luncheon Thursday at the Beverly Wilshire.

It's a jungle out there. This fall, animal prints are everywhere: skirts, shirts, dresses, jackets, belts and hats. If you're not wild about the leopard look, that's the bad news. The good news is that there are a lot of other choices. Designers and manufacturers--still stinging from the consumer rebuff of the miniskirt--are bowing to shoppers more than ever and offering a wide selection for career women. As with every season, a handful of key looks predominate.

Tampa Bay Bandits owner John Bassett said Tuesday that his United States Football League team will resist the USFL's planned move from a spring season to a fall schedule in 1986. In New York, USFL Commissioner Harry Usher issued a statement saying Bassett would be fined an undisclosed amount for violating a directive that "public statements regarding the USFL will originate from the league office."

NBC, third-ranked network for nine seasons, will be in "tremendous shape" when the fall season begins and probably will remain a strong No. 2 to CBS in the prime-time ratings this season, NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff said Tuesday.

This season "Terra Nova" has exhumed the Cretaceous period, but can it also help resurrect another block of time that would seem equally challenging to revive — the family viewing hour? The heavily promoted prime-time show, dubbed internally at Fox as "Little House on the Prairie with Dinosaurs," is an eco-action-adventure series built around a family of five that travels back 85 million years to give humans a second chance at caring for Earth. The ratings have been solid for the show, which counts Steven Spielberg and former News Corp.

The results of the first couple of weeks of the fall TV season are in, and there are some surprises. For the first time in its 25-year history, Fox won premiere week among young adults, which cements the network's dominance in the main demographic that drives ad spending and programming decisions across the industry. It looks like it has a good shot at taking the second week as well, thanks in part to a youth-oriented sitcom sleeper hit, "New Girl," with Zooey Deschanel — already the first new show to get a full-season order.

"I do not belong on network television. It's a complete fluke!" says Whitney Cummings, sprinting across the studio backlot. She is late for a rehearsal for her new sitcom, "Whitney," because, she says, "I have really low self-esteem, so I told my assistant she didn't have to get up early this morning. " Walking onto the set, she apologizes to everyone she passes. "I'm so sorry I'm late, so sorry!" This is the woman NBC Chief Bob Greenblatt has dubbed the "It" girl of the fall TV season.

The TV news was all about the "upfronts" last week, a yearly ritual held in New York City, where the networks present upcoming series to the sponsors they hope will pay to keep them on the air. This used to be a basically private, minimally newsworthy affair, but over the last several years it has become increasingly a publicly reported one, pushing the fall-season news cycle back to late spring. Some of this is because of the mutually reinforcing relationship between a news media increasingly concerned with earliness and an industry out for as much coverage as it can get. But just as movie receipts have long since become mainstream news, the inner workings of television are now part of the way many enjoy the medium — much as knowing something about the back office can enrich your experience of baseball or learning that the members of a band hate one another might perversely increase your enjoyment of their music.

Guys with fangs are so last year. This fall, witches are taking over. You'll find them on HBO's "True Blood," where Sookie will face down a coven this season. They'll be casting spells on their fellow high school students in the CW's "The Secret Circle," a drama from "The Vampire Diaries" creator Kevin Williamson. A particularly wicked one shows up in ABC's "Once Upon a Time" to place a curse on the town of Storybrook. Plus, with NBC's mystery "Grimm" riffing on various fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel's friend with the black pointy hat might soon join the others.

Time Warner's cable network unit Turner Broadcasting, parent of TBS, TNT and Cartoon Network, announced new shows to advertisers Wednesday morning. Among the new shows are: "Major Crimes," starring Mary McDonnell, which premieres on TNT after the series finale of "The Closer" early next year. Also new is a mystery movie lineup on Tuesday nights from a host of bestselling crime authors. Among the works and writers slated for the new movie slot are: Scott Turow's "Innocent," Richard North Patterson's "Silent Witness," Sandra Brown's "Ricochet," Lisa Gardner's "Hide," April Smith's "Good Morning, Killer," and Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark's "Deck the Halls.

Don't look now, but the first new TV series of the fall arrives tonight--a glitzy syndicated music program called "You Write the Songs" (7 p.m., Channel 2). The distinction is accidental but nonetheless foreboding as a possible harbinger of the season to follow: It's an overproduced mixture of elements from other programs, spun together at such a dizzying pace that it manages to be diverting without actually being entertaining.

With the opening, three days ago, of the New York City Opera season--135 performances in the State Theater at Lincoln Center through Nov. 19--the 1989-90 opera year is launched.

As the broadcasters rush to unveil their fall lineups to advertisers next week in New York, no network has more riding on the outcome than NBC. The brand that dominated TV for 20 years starting in the mid-1980s with smash hits such as "The Cosby Show," then "Friends" and "Seinfeld" has spent the last six years stuck in last place as its managers pursued what they believed was a forward-looking strategy aimed at cutting costs. Now the network has a new owner — cable giant Comcast — and a much-admired new programmer — Bob Greenblatt, formerly of Showtime — who are bent on restoring the luster of a network that once set standards for both quality and ratings in prime time.

Theatrical marathons, those all-day affairs adored by festival-trotting Europeans, are quietly staging a comeback in New York. Nothing as momentous as Peter Brook's production of "The Mahabharata" or the Royal Shakespeare Company's "Nicholas Nickleby" has landed. But "Gatz" and "Angels in America," which combine for roughly 15 hours, are unquestionably two of the hottest events of the fall season. One would think rear ends would be rising up in revolt. But a metropolitan lust for camping out has taken hold off-Broadway, where both these works are persuading audience members to turn off their smart phones for extended periods and surrender to fictional worlds whose scope and intelligence can't be gobbled in fast-food gulps.