Elizabeth Taylor

"A pointless, pompous nightmare.""An ordeal in tedium.""Outright junk."That's what the critics were saying about "Boom!" when it was released in 1968. But not John Waters. "I saw it, I think, probably at the New Theater, or somewhere in downtown Baltimore," Waters recalled last week. "It was a big flop. There were, like, three people in the audience, and it vanished in one week."But that wasn't the end of "Boom!," Joseph Losey's adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore."

The Maryland Film Festival hosts a varied series of unlikely blockbusters this weekend at the Hippodrome, starting tonight at 8 with Cleopatra, which at a price tag of $44 million in 1963 (equal to more than $270 million in 2005) makes it the costliest movie ever. Amazingly, the film made its money back, mostly because of the highly publicized off-set fireworks between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (they didn't quite translate to the screen) and the ineluctable pull and spectacle of the story.

Lore Noto, 79, producer of The Fantasticks, the world's longest running musical, died in New York yesterday after a long battle with cancer. It was Mr. Noto, a former actor and artists' agent, who saw the possibilities in a small one-act show written by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt when it was first produced in 1959 at Barnard College in New York. He commissioned the authors to expand the musical, which opened at the tiny Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village on May 3, 1960.

"American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation," by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor. Little. Brown and Company. 614 pages. $26.95. In 1960, various movers and shakers thought Richard J. Daley could easily be elected governor of Illinois. He wasn't interested. He had a more powerful position. He was mayor of Chicago, machine boss of Cook County and the man to see if you wanted to be governor -- or president of the United States. Sen. John F. Kennedy was in the latter category then, and so he had the requisite conversations with Boss Daley.

In another week or so, we'll all be plunged into the madness and stress of the holiday season. For today, though, pour yourself another cup of coffee and test your knowledge of pet trivia.The test0 Match these U.S. presidents with their dogs:1. Lyndon Johnson a. Rob Roy2. Franklin Roosevelt b. Him3. Gerald Ford c. Fala4. Calvin Coolidge d. Liberty5. Name the breeds of those presidential canines.6. During George Bush's presidency, a book "written" by the family's springer spaniel, Millie, was a best seller.

IT HAPPENED THREE WEEKS AGO,as I was entering the lobby of a posh Washington hotel, one known to be frequented by celebrities visiting the nation's capital."

Celebrities say the darndest things.Take retired Hollywood designer Mr. Blackwell, for instance. He, of indeterminate age ("if I tell you, you'll print it"), was in Seattle recently to discuss his new book, "Mr. Blackwell's Worst 30 Years of Fashion Fiascos." It's a compilation of three decades of celebrity barbs known to the public as Mr. Blackwell's Worst-Dressed List.Certainly he wanted to talk about how he just loved all the celebrities, and meant no harm, and how there's really nothing mean about describing Bette Midler's appearance as "potluck in a laundromat."

This week's suddenly cold weather might make viewers want to warm up with another ice-skating spectacular on CBS, while political observers have a chance to see the candidate-who-wasn't -- Gen. Colin Powell -- on the PBS series "The Challengers '96."* "Strange Luck" (8 p.m.-9 p.m., WBFF, Channel 45) -- Chance and Angie (D. B. Sweeney and Frances Fisher) trek into a wilderness area, where they encounter a mysterious parachutist (Gregg Henry) who soon seems to disappear into thin air. Fox.* "The Challengers '96" (9 p.m.-10 p.m., MPT, Channels 22, 67)

All fathers must deal with the ultimate broken heart which will, sooner or later, be administered by their daughters. That melancholy destiny is chronicled in "Father of the Bride."Yet no matter how universal a chord it may sound in those of us lucky enough to have little girls, the movie itself is so insipidly mild it hardly exists. A remake of a storied 1950 Vincente Minnelli production -- with the legendary slow-burner Spencer Tracy and the then-nubile Elizabeth Taylor -- it offers an antic Steve Martin in the title role.

Mike Nichols' latest movie, Closer, adapted from a play by the British dramatist Patrick Marber, is about four people, arranged in crisscrossing couples, who spend most of two hours slicing one another to bits with witty and vengeful repartee. In this respect it is a lot like his first movie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which in 1966 was adapted from Edward Albee's celebrated play, which remains unequaled in its portrayal of heterosexuality as a form of ritualized verbal blood sport.