Todd Solondz

Technically, "The Breakfast Club" sparked the tinder 25 years ago that ignited "St. Elmo's Fire." In the fleeting-but-influential panoply of Brat Pack movies, John Hughes' high school detention drama opened a mere four months before Joel Schumacher's post-collegiate ennui chronicle. But in the blink of a cinematic eye, many of the same "Breakfast Club" actors — Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez — had not only graduated from college but also were boozing and fist-fighting, snorting coke and sleeping around in "St. Elmo's Fire."

Without much apparent fuss, one of the last great movie taboos is being tossed to the winds. Recently, in film after film from France and Scandinavia, the boundaries between hard-core pornography and regular art-house movie fare have been all but erased. In "Intimacy," a new, unreleased-in-the-U.S. British film from French director Patrice Chereau, a taxi driver's wife and a barman meet regularly for a Wednesday-afternoon rendezvous in the barman's flat.

Unimpeachable sources? We got 'em. The weekly testimony in Whatever's Hollywood hearings has come from both sides of the aisle--veteran stars and sizzling newcomers, industry power-brokers and rebel outsiders. Did their predictions, picks, pontifications and pet peeves of 1998 pan out? What's in their crystal ball for 1999? Read on. . . . You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll turn the page when you're done. HANKY PANKY: Might be time to buy stock in Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Kleenex.

TELEVISION The New TV Season, Round 1: NBC's "Deadline" and CBS' "Yes, Dear" posted respectable starts as the fall TV season got underway Monday, while the fifth-season premiere of "Everybody Loves Raymond" scored the highest rating ever for that series. Despite poor numbers for the NBC sitcoms "Daddio" and "Tucker" preceding it, "Deadline," the new drama starring Oliver Platt, climbed to a solid 14.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Noah Baumbach would like to clarify the chief misunderstanding about their collaboration on "Margot at the Wedding." Yes, the husband and wife independent film stalwarts took full advantage of their intimate acquaintance while working together for the first time, a creative symbiosis that has yielded the year's most emotionally wrenching family dramedy. But corner them on the subject and both will tell you that the movie was never intended to become a family affair.

Linda Ronstadt broke barriers for women as one of the top-selling artists of her generation, and she's going to detail how she did it in a new memoir for Simon & Schuster. The book publisher announced Thursday that it had acquired her autobiography, titled "Heart Like a Wheel," after her Grammy-winning, multiplatinum album. Ronstadt sold tens of millions of records starting in the 1970s with pop hits such as "You're No Good" and "When Will I Be Loved. " But she also segued into country, pop standards and mariachi music, among other genres.

Audiences anxious for a peek into the work of future film makers will have had samplings of student work from both coasts this week. Five prize-winning works from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts will be shown--today at the Director's Guild (a private screening for industry people) and then, open to the public, Thursday at Laemmle's Monica 4-Plex. And 18 films--from the first year of UCLA's graduate Pilot Program--were screened Monday at Melnitz Hall.

"Affliction," the searing drama starring Nick Nolte, scored big Thursday night when the Independent Feature Project, the nonprofit group dedicated to promoting American independent filmmakers, announced its nominees for the 14th annual Spirit Awards. "Affliction," directed by Paul Schrader, received six nominations, followed by "High Art" with five. "Gods and Monsters" and "The Opposite of Sex" came in with four nominations.

The voice-over introduction to each episode of "Beauty and the Geek," Ashton Kutcher's reality hit on the WB, claims that the competition is "a social experiment, designed to find out if seven beautiful women and seven geeks can help each other to become a whole lot more." As a made-for-television clinical trial to examine what happens when you combine brainy, awkward men and attractive, uneducated women, the show hasn't lived up to its banal promise.