PEOPLE

By Joel Stein

FEUD OF THE WEEK

SPIKE ("DOING THE RIGHT THING") LEE AGE: 40 OCCUPATION: Director who really wants to act BEST PUNCH: Blasting Tarantino for using "nigger" 38 times in his new film, Jackie Brown, he told reporters, "Quentin is infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made--an honorary black man?"

QUENTIN ("MR. WHITE") TARANTINO AGE: 34 OCCUPATION: Director who really wants to act BEST PUNCH: Trying to sound like an honorary black man, Tarantino went on television to brag to Keenan Ivory Wayans that he "bitch slapped" producer Don Murphy during a fight at a swank L.A. restaurant.

THE WINNER: Lee. Tarantino's street cred is weak

REPEATING HISTORY

Just as her grievance charging that DreamWorks stole her ideas for Amistad was getting some traction, novelist BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD got stuck in her own little plagiarism mess. A New York Times reporter doing research on eunuchs (hey, they've got a lot of sections to fill now) discovered that one chapter in Chase-Riboud's Valide: A Novel of the Harem has seven instances--some as many as 600 words in length--lifted directly from a 1936 nonfiction work on harems. Chase-Riboud is continuing her $10 million lawsuit.

Q & A

JULIE DELPY plays a werewolf in the new movie An American Werewolf in Paris.

Q: Did you study a lot of classic werewolf parts for the movie?

A: Yeah. I went to meet this guy who's a werewolf. There's really not much to do. You just take it pretty lightly. She's a dark and mysterious werewolf, but also sweet.

Q: She's a sweet werewolf?

A: She's a good werewolf because she bites people and feels guilty about it. She's a Catholic werewolf.

Q: In the commercials for the film, you stick your tongue down a guy's throat and take off your shirt. Can the movie really be that good?

A: Yeah, I kiss and and take off my shirt, but there's nothing nice under my shirt. I'm kind of hairy and I have like six nipples.

Q: You ever bite a man?

A: Let me think. You mean rip the skin off?

Q: No. Just nibbling.

A: Yes, of course. When I was a kid it was my favorite thing.

Q: You're French. Do you find Jacques Chirac attractive in that manly, bad-boy kind of way?

A: You must be kidding me. He's the worst. Blech.

Q: How come French women are so beautiful and French men are ugly?

A: Yeah, I've always wondered that.

AS NASTY AS GODZILLA

Imagine what would happen if they watched The Nanny. Last Tuesday 600 Japanese children were hospitalized after going into convulsions triggered by the optical effects of an episode of POKEMON, a cartoon based on a Nintendo game. Later that night 100 more kids went down after the news showed clips from the program. Flashing lights have long been known to trigger photosensitive epilepsy. In this case the reaction seems to have been brought on by the combination of the graphics, the children's age, and the way many Japanese TV viewers sit really close to giant screens.