Jurassic Park

Welcome to Week 3 of the William Donald Schaefer campaign for comptroller. Official colors: Navy blue and orange. Official funny cap: "I'm a Wm. Donald Schaefer supporter and damn proud of it." Official disease: amnesia. How else to explain Schaefer's visit Wednesday to the 22nd annual J. Millard Tawes Crab Feast, where he rhapsodized about the Eastern Shore as if no one would remember that he once compared the region to an outdoor plumbing facility."Jurassic Park East" was the not-so-hip quip from former City Council President Walter S. Orlinsky earlier in the week, at Schaefer's first rally.

Steven Spielberg thought he was moving too fast. Several months ago, he told David Koepp, the screenwriter for "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," which Spielberg was making, that such sequels should wait at least four years, and possibly far longer, before even beginning production."

Hey, dinosaurs are people too, you know.You think they like eating all those human beings in Steven Spielberg's movies? Of course they don't. They're just trying to be good parents and do their part for the ecology. Hell, most of them probably belong to the Sierra Club.Rest assured. All your old favorites from "Jurassic Park" are back in "The Lost World." There are T-Rexes in spades and the velociraptors are as lethal as ever. But this time around Spielberg is striking a bargain. Before thrilling you with dinosaur mayhem, you've got to endure the lecture about animal rights and corporate greed and yadayayada.

Director Martin Scorsese joins a pantheon of movie greats, stretching from John Ford, Lillian Gish and Alfred Hitchcock to Steven Spielberg, Elizabeth Taylor and Jack Nicholson, when he becomes the 25th recipient of the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, tonight on CBS."Grace Under Fire" (8 p.m.-8:30 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2) -- In a repeat from November, Grace and daughter Libby (Kaitlin Cullum) go to New York, where Libby's growing fascination with boys could threaten her performance in a national poetry contest.

Film critics hated "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," which hauled in a record-breaking $90.1 million over the weekend. So Sun columnist Susan Reimer took four kids to check it out. Here's their review.Joe "Show Me the Money" Mihoces, 13.Immediately demands payment for his opinions.Paul "The Answer Man" Macknis, 13.Considers himself "Lost World" expert.Jessica "Clueless" Mihoces, 11.L Can't fathom seeing a movie in which no one changes clothes.Joanna "The Real Thing" Macknis, 10.Most frequent comment: "That is sooo fake."

On a mountainside near Thermopolis, Wyo., a father and son are blazing the West the hard way. They are carving up the prairie, bit by bit, with knives and dental picks.My 10-year-old son and I are at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center and Dig Sites, and I'm on my hands and knees, filthy and hot, holding an instrument used to remove plaque and fretting over what appears to be a prehistoric bone I just smashed beyond recognition.Drew, meantime, has headed down the hill and cavalierly begun another excavation.

Other than being dead for 65 million years, this would be a great day to be a dinosaur.You're a movie star. You're the subject of new books and museum exhibits. Your mug is on the side of soft drink cups at Burger King. If you weren't so big and so, uh, extinct, "Oprah" would undoubtedly book you for the full hour.Get ready for Dinomania '97 -- a summer-long, mass-media extravaganza tied to today's opening of "The Lost World," the sequel to "Jurassic Park."Like velociraptors on the prowl for chow, marketers are scrambling for a seat aboard Steven Spielberg's prehistoric money train.

YOU CAN HAVE the '90s; David Gelernter will take the '30s. When I heard him speak a couple of years ago, he was a Yale professor working on whether emotion could be designed into computers. But his topic that day was modern technology. Mr. Gelernter thinks it is pretty mediocre, driven more by narcissism than human need.Thus we have a lot of gee-whiz computer stuff, from virtual shopping to virtual sex, but too few technologies aimed at alleviating social problems -- or even making life easier or more pleasant.

How many opera singers can you fit into a 6 1/2 -hour marathon concert? The answer is on MPT."Metropolitan Opera Pre-sents" (7 p.m.-1: 30 a.m., MPT, Channels 22 and 67) -- I guess when you've been at the helm of the Metropolitan Opera for a quarter-century, you get to throw yourself one heck of a party. That's just what James Levine, the Met's artistic director, is doing tonight with this live concert featuring: Cecilia Bartoli, Carlo Bergonzi, Marilyn Horne, Luciano Pavarotti and Teresa Stratas.

Check out this range of tastes that can be served tonight: a how-did-they-do-that? "Jurassic Park" special, family drama, opera and country music.* "The Making of Jurassic Park" (8 p.m.-9 p.m., WBAL, Channel 11) -- You could also call this "Making Sure You Know the Blockbuster Dino Movie Is Coming to TV" (May 7). Actor James Earl Jones, taped in front of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, offers a look at the special effects of Steven Spielberg's film of the Michael Crichton thriller.

LOS ANGELES - Michael Crichton, the doctor-turned-author of best-selling thrillers such as The Terminal Man and Jurassic Park and a Hollywood writer and director whose credits include Westworld and Coma, has died. He was 66. Dr. Crichton died in Los Angeles on Tuesday "after a courageous and private battle against cancer," his family said in a statement. For nearly four decades, the 6-foot-9 writer was a towering presence in the worlds of publishing and filmmaking. "There was no one like Crichton, because he could both entertain and educate," Lynn Nesbit, Dr. Crichton's agent since the late 1960s, told the Los Angeles Times yesterday.

Robby Rackleff wriggles and writhes his way into a homemade fat suit. If you go They Should All Be Destroyed (A Jurassic Park Play) will be performed at the H&H Building, 405 W. Franklin St., sixth floor, tomorrow and Saturday. Doors open at 8 p.m. A $5 donation is suggested. Information: whamcity.com.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet." Before it was a cliche, it was a prophecy: Eighty years ago this month, audiences watched - and listened - as a character in a major motion picture spoke to them for the first time. The actor was Al Jolson, and the movie was The Jazz Singer. The effect was revolutionary. Within two years, talking pictures were everywhere, no one was releasing silent films, and three decades of silent-filmmaking was obsolete - tossed on the scrap heap.

Albert and David Maysles' Run- ning Fence, a documentary on artist Cristo's four-year project to run a fabric fence across 24 miles of California farmland, will be shown outdoors tonight at the Evergreen House, 4545 N. Charles St. Also showing will be Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten, a close-up look at two picnickers in a park. Gates open at 7 p.m., with the movies starting at 9 p.m. Tickets are $8 for adults, $5 for children 11 and younger. Infants get in for free. Food will be sold by the Creative Alliance, co-sponsors of the event.

Critic's Pick-- Cloned dinosaurs become neat zoo attractions. Then they get loose in Jurassic Park (9 p.m.- midnight, USA). Laura Dern (above) stars.

More green and majestic than Jurassic Park, Dominica was the recent film location of Pirates of the Caribbean's sequel, Dead Man's Chest. More importantly - to my wife and me - it was the scene of our 25th wedding anniversary. It's said to be the only Caribbean island Columbus would still recognize: virtually unspoiled with no all-inclusive resorts cluttering the coastline. That means no walls to keep the real Dominica and its people hidden. Almost anyone will be happy to give you directions to a secluded beach or waterfall, reminding you to "keep drivin' on de left," British style.

They draw fantastic creatures that no one has ever seen, based on scraps of ancient bone and scanty threads of information. And their critics? Merciless experts they don't even know. Yes, illustrating dinosaurs and other prehistoric life can be a challenging job for an artist. "Most of the public is looking at the pictures. That's why their work is so important," said James Kirkland, a Utah State paleontologist and member of a team that recently discovered a new dinosaur species. Paleontologists like Kirkland spend years digging in sun-baked wastelands, pawing through fossil remains in search of prehistoric life.

At the start of Jurassic Park III, Sam Neill's formidable Dr. Alan Grant (a welcome returnee from Jurassic Park), says that when dinosaurs ruled the world, the swift, mean, toothy raptors were smarter than whales or dolphins: even smarter than primates. He finds out they still are - at least smarter than the primates in this movie. The comic engine of Jurassic Park III is that every human in it is even stupider than you fear. If this were Survivor, the dinosaurs would vote them off the island.

To see the slickest examples of artificial intelligence, forget the robots of A.I. Instead, study the curvy frame of Aki Ross and her craggy-faced sidekick, Dr. Sid. Aki and Sid are the virtual stars of Columbia Pictures' Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the first Hollywood blockbuster to feature a cast of super-realistic computer actors. The movie, which opens today, already is being held up as an example of the cutting edge of computer animation and a giant step toward realizing the effects industry's Holy Grail: creating digital humans so believable audiences can't figure out whether they're real.

Summer reading has taken a new twist at St. Paul's School for Girls in Baltimore County. This summer, ninth-graders are reading Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park," not because they want to be grossed out by the eating habits of prehistoric predators, but because it's required - for geometry and biology. Three teachers - known collectively as "the three L's" - teach an interdisciplinary course called "Journey Through Exploration," a curriculum they created to challenge students to test mathematical theories in nature.