FALL PREVIEW

The crisp snap of an October morn. The distant roar of a football stadium. The chatty drone of Oscar hopefuls being hyped. The inescapable thud as Michael Crichton's next best seller hits bookstores every-where. Yes, fall brings not only nature's harvest but culture's as well. A selective look at the new season's glories...

SHAKESPEARE: THE OLD JANE AUSTEN

School begins, and Hollywood hits the books. Keeping one eye on the Motion Picture Association membership and the other on the guard dogs of media morality, studios are releasing movies from the works of Henry James (Portrait of a Lady) and Thomas Hardy (Jude, as in The Obscure). The film industry has always loved the classics: they're pedigreed, they're passionate, they're public domain. But a few long-dead writers must have great agents--they get their names in the title. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare, it turns out, doesn't need CAA. As if to say, "So there, Jane Austen!", the Bard is back in maximum force. There are two films based on Romeo and Juliet: one using the text but transplanted to a Miami-esque beach town; the other, Love Is All There Is, set in the Bronx and retold by writer-directors Joseph Bologna and Renee Taylor. Royal Shakespeare Company alumnus Trevor Nunn has a Twelfth Night starring Helena Bonham Carter and Nigel Hawthorne. Richard III, recently modded up by Ian McKellen, gets the Al Pacino treatment in Looking for Richard.

But all bow before Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare's most doting and dogged courtier. Last year he played Iago to Laurence Fishburne's Othello and made a film, A Midwinter's Tale, about doing Hamlet in the provinces. This year he directs and stars in Hamlet--every word of Shakespeare's longest play--and has cast it with nearly every tony Brit actor (Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud, Kate Winslet, Rosemary Harris) but Emma Thompson. There are also some ringers: Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon and Billy Crystal. How do you say shtick in Elizabethan English?

HALSTON'S REVENGE--ULTRASUEDE IS BACK

Vegetable tones, maxiskirts--fashion has revived the '70s once again. But nothing has captured the Liza-at-Studio-54 aspect of the era as redolently as Ultrasuede, the must-have synthetic for fall. A wonder of chemical processing, faux suede is turning up in the form of trousers, shirts and belts from such hot young designers as Jill Stuart, Cynthia Rowley and the Morrissey Edmiston team. Stuart's new Ultrasuede "Fonda" dress is long gone from the racks of L.A.'s Fred Segal. But the material doesn't say retro to all. "The feel is casual elegance," explains handbag designer Kate Spade. "I don't look at my bags and think Rhoda."

ON TV, IT FEELS MORE LIKE 1986

If only the minds at Dreamworks had thought to develop a sitcom around Duran Duran, TV's cannibalization of the 1980s would be complete. As it stands, more than a dozen faces familiar from the age of panty-hose-with-Reeboks will be starring in the season's new comedies and dramas. Former teen icons Molly Ringwald and Brooke Shields both have their own single-gal sitcoms (Townies on ABC and Suddenly Susan on NBC, respectively). Meanwhile Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad will be renewing their fictional marriage in CBS's Cosby. Also returning to TV comedy with hopes of another big hit: Family Ties' Michael J. Fox, pop culture's perkiest avatar of the greed years. As the star of ABC's Spin City, Fox plays a deputy mayor who surely isn't making the six figures Alex Keaton would have hoped for. And expect to see thirtysomething's famed yuppies, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Steadman, doing a lot less brooding. The CBS drama EZ Streets features Ken Olin as a non-Volvo-driving cop, while the NBC sitcom Something So Right has Mel Harris as a party planner unlikely to wear a spit-up-stained Princeton sweatshirt.

JASPER JOHNS' GRAND OLD RETROSPECTIVE

With a presidential campaign in full swing, the American flag may be the most pervasive symbol of the season. As a work of graphic design, it may also be the most taken for granted. This wasn't so back in the 1950s when Jasper Johns altered the course of American painting--Abstract Expressionism had been king-- with a series of bright, bold pictures of flags as well as targets and numerals. The works were blunt and direct, with no emotional charge. Johns never got into Pop, but those artists borrowed from him, as did Conceptualists and Minimalists. From Oct. 20 to Jan. 21, New York's Museum of Modern Art will present a retrospective of this idiosyncratic master.

MUSICAL THEATER: BRING IN THE RINGERS

Rent may or may not have revolutionized the Broadway musical, but the form certainly is attracting some interesting playwrights. David Mamet is helping revamp the book for Randy Newman's Faust, which made its debut to much fanfare at California's La Jolla Playhouse last year and will resurface Sept. 30 at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. (Look for long, circular conversations between Faust and the devil.) Terrence McNally (Master Class) is tackling the book for Ragtime, a musical based on E.L. Doctorow's novel, which begins a pre-Broadway run in Toronto in December. And Britain's prolific Alan Ayckbourn (Absurd Person Singular; Woman in Mind) wrote the book for and is directing a revamped version of By Jeeves, based on the P.G. Wodehouse character, at Connecticut's Goodspeed-at-Chester theater. The musical was a flop back in the 1970s, but its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, seems to have done all right. He's got a new musical too: Whistle Down the Wind, which opens in Washington in December and is due on Broadway next spring. No falling chandeliers--just some kids who find a stranger in the barn--but it will probably be a hit anyway.

POP MUSIC: SO WHAT DO THEY DO FOR AN ENCORE?

There is something fascinating--and sometimes a bit tragic--about the plight of successful first-time recording artists faced with cutting their second album. Splashy debuts behind them, they stand poised between maturation and one-hit wonderdom. So many don't pass the test there's even a phrase for the failure: sophomore slump.

This season offers an unusually full sophomore class, including singer Sheryl Crow, a fresh face three years ago. Her second album, bluntly titled Sheryl Crow and due out Sept. 24, is a sometimes amusing, mostly blah disc that may move units but doesn't move the soul. In better form is Counting Crows, whose first CD was a multiplatinum hit and a consistent delight; the band's Recovering the Satellites (Oct. 15) is a wise, worthy successor. Also, teen singer Aaliyah's second CD, One in a Million (just out), is soulfully soothing, and neo-soul performer Tricky's Pre-Millennium Tension (Nov. 5) should generate buzz. All three of these sophomores look ready to graduate to stardom.

There are also acts with more and less experience worth watching out for this fall. In terms of freshmen, there's the ska band the Blue Beats, whose Dance with Me (October) will be released on tiny Moon Records, and vocalist Madeleine Peyroux, whose Dreamland (Oct. 1) is an enchanting mix of jazz, country and blues. As for returning upperclassmen, saxman Joshua Redman's Freedom in the Groove (Sept. 24) is wonderfully listenable, and the reformed New Edition's Home Again (Sept. 10) no doubt aims to recreate the R.-and-B. group's old chart appeal.

MOVIE MUSICALS: THEY'RE ALIIIIVE!

To most people under 40, music is the word that comes before video. But what about musicals? That word is obsolete. And movie musicals? As if! A Chorus Line, the last film based on a Broadway tune show, came out (and flopped) more than a decade ago. As for original movie musicals, they exist almost exclusively in the cartoon form perfected by Disney. Aladdin and The Lion King did blockbuster biz and sold quillions of CDS. Still, Hollywood refused to sing along.

Until now. After the drought, the deluge: five new movie musicals. The big news is the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber Evita, a stage hit that Hollywood has wanted to film for nearly two decades. Alan Parker (Fame) finally got it done, with Madonna as Argentina's Material Girl, Jonathan Pryce as Juan Peron and Antonio Banderas as the narrator Che.

Woody Allen, whose dialogue has often provided ironic counterpoint to Gershwin melodies, has made Everyone Says I Love You, in which Allen, Goldie Hawn, Julia Roberts, Alan Alda and others break into song. Fortunately, the scary prospect of Alda warbling is balanced by the songs themselves--swank standards of the '30s and '40s.

Two quasi-musicals are set in the '60s: Grace of My Heart, in which a songwriter very much like Carole King meets a songwriter very much like Brian Wilson; and That Thing You Do! with writer-director Tom Hanks playing a record-label exec who manages a one-hit pop group. Both films boast new songs composed in period style. And The Preacher's Wife will offer Whitney Houston putting over surefire spirituals with a gospel choir. That's the kind of musical both Variety and Billboard can understand.

THE HOT ACCESSORY: FRECKLES

The current issue of Harper's Bazaar proclaims that we are entering a new era, the age of an "unintimidating, personalized kind of pretty." What this means is that for the first time in quite a while, models are opening their mouths, cracking a smile and looking in many instances as though they would rather play beach volleyball than snort heroin. So what is one of the greatest assets that a model can possess in this, the latest dawn of the girl next door? Freckles. You will find them all over the faces of such newcomers as Stacey McKenzie (above, center) and Elizabeth Moses (left), featured in splashy ads for Todd Oldham Jeans and the Gap. Meanwhile, old-timers like supermodel Nadja Auermann are no longer masking their freckles with cover-up. "Editors want women to look touchable, not ostentatious, not perfect," explains Allure's Linda Wells. "Freckles make you look friendlier." Pippi Longstocking, get your Revlon contract.

MISSING IN ACTION

Some of the fall's most eagerly anticipated (or at least most hyped) cultural events won't be turning up after all:

INK Ted Danson's new CBS sitcom--co-starring wife Mary Steenburgen--has been postponed for creative retooling.

U2'S NEW ALBUM The untitled record has been put off from October until early next year.

O.J. PART II Simpson's forthcoming civil trial won't be televised, thanks to an order by Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki.

IT'S 9:30. WHAT'S ON? THE MOST NETWORK TV EVER...

Public Morals (CBS) From Steven Bochco, a would-be Barney Miller for the 1990s

The Drew Carey Show (ABC) Returning show is Friends in a lower tax bracket

Men Behaving Badly (NBC) Definitely not TV's most feminist-minded sitcom

The Jamie Foxx Show (WB) A show-biz aspirant takes a job in his family's hotel

Star Trek: Voyager (UPN) The network's sci-fi line-up angles for male viewers

Party of Five (Fox) The acclaimed orphaned-kid drama is back for another season

TV'S WEDNESDAY NIGHT FEVER

Consider it not necessarily a night of must-see TV but rather a night of hard-to-avoid TV. With all six networks--the big four plus the fledglings the WB and UPN--going head to head with fall programming for the first time, Wednesday will be the busiest night ever on TV. Viewers will be barraged with a choice of 23 shows ranging from Grace Under Fire to Star Trek: Voyager. Overload? Not according to scheduling executives, who believe they have manipulated time slots so effectively that they will be able to call very specific segments of the viewing public their own.

"No one has put the killer home-run show on Wednesday nights yet," concedes Kelly Kahl of CBS, whose network offers Rhea Pearlman's new overaged-college-student comedy Pearl for Wednesdays. "Our main goal is women 25 to 54." The WB is chasing younger men and women, in their late teens and early 20s--tough, given that Fox serves up the adolescent-friendly Beverly Hills, 90210 and Party of Five on Wednesdays. With its sci-fi lineup, UPN is courting older male viewers--but, notes senior executive VP Len Grossi, "not 50-plus CBS older."

The less serious-minded young man is the target of NBC. "Our approach," explains the network's Preston Beckman, "is to go for broad, funny, male guy kind of comedy. If guys want to watch comedy there'll be something there for them." And if guys want to watch other guys use old underwear as coffee filters, as Rob Schneider does in the new sitcom Men Behaving Badly, NBC will indeed be the only place for them.

JUST HOW GREAT ARE THE GREAT BOOKS?

What with the spread of the World Wide Web and the increasingly cluttered electronic sight-and soundscape, the act of reading and turning wood-pulp pages may strike some as hopelessly passe, the informational equivalent of the fondue party. Two of the fall's more interesting books argue, perhaps unsurprisingly but also quite persuasively, against this view; they are about books and the wealth of contemplative pleasures they afford.

In Great Books (Simon & Schuster; 492 pages; $30), David Denby, film critic for New York magazine, recounts a personal odyssey. Some 30 years after taking the two core-curriculum courses--Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization--at Columbia University, he takes them again, traveling with students several decades younger the long road from Homer to Woolf and Socrates to Nietzsche. Denby finds the so-called--and currently much maligned--great books more exhilarating the second time around: "They scrape away the media haze of second-handedness." The overarching impression left by his account is that education may be wasted on the young.

Translator Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (Viking; 372 pages; $26.95) is an impressionistic, engrossing look at what books have meant to people since the first inscriptions of signs on stone nearly 6,000 years ago. No one who follows Manguel's narrative to its conclusion need ever again feel guilty about putting off errands, chores, the bills, the kids, sleep--whatever--and curling up with a good, or even a great, book.

OPERA: BEYOND CARMEN

For most audiences, Hispanic opera means Carmen (written, of course, by a Frenchman). Placido Domingo, in his new role as artistic director of the Washington Opera, means to broaden the definition. This season the company will present Manuel Penella's 1916 Spanish opera El Gato Montes as well as Antonio Carlos Gomes' 1870 Il Guarany, written, alas, in Italian but set in the Amazon. Meanwhile, the Houston Grand Opera offers the world premiere of Daniel Catan's Florencia en el Amazonas, based on stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.