Mace Neufeld

"Necessary Roughness" (citywide) offers Scott Bakula, who made his feature film debut last year in "Sibling Rivalry," a delightful starring role as a 34-year-old farmer lured back to college to play football. Bakula, who has made his mark as time-traveling scientist Sam Beckett in TV's critically acclaimed "Quantum Leap," has a laid-back quality that makes him a welcome, easy-to-take presence on the big screen.

Noted courtroom artist David Rose of Hollywood has reached a verdict: that his drawings might be worth something to collectors. The 84-year-old Rose, still active in drawing courtroom scenes for news organizations when cameras are banned, is marketing his original drawings via catalogue through Great Neck, N.Y.-based MLG Distributing.

"A marvelous new invention" is how the voice-over introduces Instant Girl, an acting, singing, dancing comedy troupe made up of three gamin females, Joanna Heimbold, Susan Trout and Janet Bogardus, who grew up together in Greenwich, Conn., and went on to do something about it.

Memories are made of these from this year: Of the 15 babies hired to play the quints in "Raising Arizona," one was fired. The offense: learning to walk during filming. "No Way Out" producer Mace Neufeld let us peek at rejections his project had garnered on the path to production. From one film financier came: "After having this for a couple of months, I just found it in my lower right-hand drawer."

Patrick Swayze is caught between the pedal and the metal in "Black Dog," a movie lacking the charm and style to raise it above a demolition derby with a country music soundtrack. Deliver a truckload of illegal guns to Newark with the FBI and double-crossing transporters on his tail or lose his wife and daughter to the really bad guys and his house to the bank. And all this without a driver's license.

"Clear and Present Danger" does more than provide the summer's most satisfying movie experience--which may sound like damning with faint praise, but shouldn't. It reaffirms, if reaffirmation is necessary, Harrison Ford's position as the most thankfully reliable action star around. With those other big-ticket, big-muscle performers (you know who they are), it's not known until it's too late whether they've made a feast or a fiasco.

When Hollywood big shots take a meeting, they go to Chasen's. So why not go there to take a seder? "When we invite people to Chasen's for Passover they say, 'What, are you crazy?,' " said Evelyn Ostin, who along with her husband, Mo, chairman of Warner Bros. Records, helped host Monday night's otherwise traditional seder for 126. "It's absolutely Hollywood but once they come they love it," Ostin said. "We don't lose the religious aspect and there's a wonderful sense of family here."

In an era when movie capital is tough to come by, David Ellison, the 27-year-old son of Oracle Corp. co-founder and Chief Executive Larry Ellison, has raised $350 million to co-finance films with his studio partner Paramount Pictures. The funds — $150 million in equity and a four-year, $200-million revolving credit facility led by JPMorgan Chase & Co. — will enable Ellison to step up production at his movie label Skydance Productions. Ellison's father, ranked by Forbes magazine as the sixth-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $28 billion, provided an undisclosed portion of the equity, according to people with knowledge of the deal.

As a movie cameraman, Michael A. Benson of Woodland Hills has seen harum-scarum disasters and hairbreadth escapes--at least the Hollywood versions--but this time he was the star in "The Great Flight From the Gas-Filled Volcano." Benson, who worked on "Terminator 2" and "Ghost" among other films, suffered lung problems from inhaling sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide gas while trapped for two days in a Hawaiian volcano crater after a film helicopter crashed.