Usa Films

Universal Pictures is starting a division to handle specialty films, an increasingly lucrative business for studios that have found they can make sizable profits from independent movies, the Seagram Co. unit said Monday. The company named former Gramercy Pictures executive Claudia Gray and Paul Hardart, a strategic-planning executive with Universal, to run the unit.

Watch this week to see if Tina Turner's farewell concert tour will be simply the best of 2000. As the year draws to a close, the music industry is turning its eye to the bottom-line winners and losers, and one of the key yardsticks is the annual Pollstar magazine ranking of top-grossing concert tours.

While "Cast Away" and "What Women Want" remained America's top two-grossing pictures over the weekend, it was the surprisingly strong showing of "Traffic" that had Hollywood talking Monday.

Scott Greenstein is expected to head a combined specialty film division of USA Networks Inc. and Universal Pictures, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Film distributors, which in the past have found room for their classier, adult-oriented fare on a relatively uncrowded winter release schedule, are suddenly facing a glut of ambitious pictures fighting for space in theaters and audience attention.

Despite the contention that adult-oriented drama has become the exclusive domain of cable and network television, movie patrons have braved long lines and winter storms in recent weeks to make hits of such diverse and non-formulaic films as "Cast Away," "Traffic," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and, to a lesser degree, "Finding Forrester," "Thirteen Days" and "Chocolat" and art-house films such as "Before Night Falls.