Wyatt Earp

It's as if they remember it wrong. Baby boomers, Kevin Costner and Lawrence Kasdan included, have the lyrics to a hundred mid-'50s TV series theme songs inscribed in their cerebellums, but somehow, when those two were calling up the last line from the hokey chorus to Hugh O'Brian's "Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp," they didn't remember: " . . . and long may his story be told."Oh no. They remembered, ". . . and may his story be told long."This may explain why the extreme length of "Wyatt Earp" pushes it beyond the merely mediocre and into the realm of the ordeal.

Panned by critics and ignored by the public, the movie ''Wyatt Earp'' quickly vanished into oblivion this past summer. Americans seemed to prefer the ''feel good'' movie of the summer -- ''Forrest Gump'' -- to the biography of the legendary frontier lawman. But there is much the 3 1/2 - hour Lawrence Kasdan epic tells us about the crime and violence that plagues Americans today.Director Kasdan depicts the young Wyatt Earp as a peaceful soul adverse to violence. He vomits when he sees two men gun each other down in the street.

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral took less than half a minute, but its legend has sustained this dusty town for more than a century.Founded in 1877 when a prospector named Ed Schieffelin staked a silver claim there, Tombstone -- billed as "the town too tough to die" -- is more like the cliche "too tough to kill."Every dozen or so years, a Hollywood director offers his take on lawman Wyatt Earp, his brothers and his buddy Doc Holliday. "Wyatt Earp," featuring Kevin Costner in the title role, opened in theaters this summer.

Movies Sylvester Stallone, below, has returned with the fifth in his ''Rocky'' series, and the good news is that "Rocky V" is better than the fourth chapter. The new film begins a bit slowly but builds with time and moves on to a conclusion as exciting as those in the other ''Rocky'' movies. This time out, Rocky -- his brain slightly scrambled -- wants to retire but a greedy promoter hopes to force him back into the ring. Violence, language. Rating: PG-13. ***Art/Linell SmithArtist Carole Jean Bertsch has assembled a series of mixed media works into an altar-like display which recall sepulchral tributes of many Mediterranean cemeteries: Photographs of the deceased laid to rest among wreaths of plastic flowers.

Television's ability to explore and educate is on display tonight in a pair of PBS documentary series -- but so is its ability to take talented performers and reduce them to mushy misfits.* "The 1995 Essence Awards" (8 p.m.-10 p.m., WBFF, Channel 45) -- Sinbad and Natalie Cole preside over the annual show that honors outstanding African-Americans. Among the recipients this year: Janet Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Gen. Colin Powell. Local note: Jada Pinkett, a graduate of the Baltimore School for the Arts, is among the scheduled performers.

WALL, S.D. -- What do Wyatt Earp, T. rex, a flea-scratching hound and a 6-foot rabbit have in common? Absolutely nothing. But you'll find them all on the edge of the Badlands, at the intersection of Kitsch and Camp. Wall, population 800, is a dusty cow town at the geographic center of nowhere. But it draws a million visitors a year, thanks to a drugstore that morphed over the decades into a 76,000-square-foot Western wonderland. Welcome to Wall Drug, where you can spend an hour or a day among the wacky and whimsical.

Sony just wrote off a whopping $2.7 billion on its investment in Columbia Pictures. The proud Japanese giant discovered that mastering Hollywood is no walk in the park.But it's not just Sony. Industry insider Peter Bart puts his finger on the issues in "That Sync-ing Feeling" (GQ, November 1994); it's one of the best analyses of innovation failures I've come across.The problem Bart unearths: mimicry. When Wyatt Earp got hot in Tinseltown, Disney put out "Tombstone"; Warner released "Wyatt Earp."

James Stewart was afflicted with all the earmarks of a has-been actor in 1950 -- his last few films (including It's a Wonderful Life) had been moderate successes at best, his acting style seemed hopelessly outdated to postwar audiences and good parts were seeming fewer and further between -- when he took a chance on a movie whose real star was a rifle. By the end of that year, Stewart was back up among the kings of Hollywood -- he'd crack the box-office top 10 for the first time and stay there for the rest of the decade -- and Westerns had a new star.

THEATERMusical classic An outstanding version of the perennial Rodgers and Hammerstein musical favorite, "South Pacific," is on stage at Toby's Dinner Theatre. Directed with flourish by Toby Orenstein, the romantic story of a French exile and an American nurse caught up in the drama of World War II features excellent performances by Braxton Peters and Natalie Wolf. Jesse Foreman is a riot as the conniving Seabee Luther Billis, and TyJuana R. Morris is a delight as the raucous Bloody Mary.

The invigorating quality of June's fiction suggests the novel's expanding vitality. The great social novel of the 19th and early 20th century has re-emerged as biography. Novels of manners which depict the temperature of an epoch have retreated; psychological novels dedicated to examining how we perceive have disappeared. The self-conscious post-modernist novel, where artifice becomes story and language is about only language, is gone, while experiment resides finally in the competent hands of a DeLillo or a Pynchon.