Tim Appelo

Cameron Crowe can’t stop the music. Trudging out of an editing studio in Seattle after 80 grueling hours of working on a three-minute video for his new grunge-music-scene movie, Singles, he looks as slack and scattered as the footage he’s been wrestling with. ”The whole mix is tough — I think it needs another day,” Crowe says wearily. On the other hand, there’s a 10 o’clock show by the Boston band Lemonheads at The Backstage, across town, and right now Crowe needs a pop-music infusion the way Popeye needs spinach.

It’s another wig movie!” exclaims Diane Keaton. ”I’m the Wig Woman now!” The 51-year-old actress is referring to Northern Lights, a TV movie she stars in and executive-produced for the Disney Channel (airs Aug. 23). Her other movie costarring synthetic hair was Marvin’s Room, in which she played a woman undergoing chemotherapy. That heartfelt performance earned Keaton a 1996 Oscar nomination for Best Actress. So perhaps a wig doesn’t hurt.

”Old man, look at my life, I’m a lot like youuuu arrrre!” Richard Dean Anderson croons in a quavery Neil Young falsetto. The actor is patiently enduring a three-hour makeup session in a trailer in Vancouver one morning. Thanks to an assortment of wrinkles and liver spots, the 47-year-old star of the new Showtime series Stargate SG-1 will soon look like a centenarian. The series is based on the 1994 Kurt Russell movie, and, as Air Force Colonel Jack O’Neill, Anderson will leap through cosmic ”wormholes” to kick alien butt on other planets.

In Austin Powers, Mike Myers plays both the ’60s-spoof superspy and his world-domination-craving nemesis, Dr. Evil. But some of Myers’ fellow Saturday Night Live alumni say that the actor-writer gave Evil a secret identity.

”You smell like sandalwood,” murmurs Jeff Goldblum as he sniffs Laura Dern’s hair in the rather restrained restaurant of L.A.’s Four Seasons Hotel. Dern — her leopard-spotted Dolce & Gabbana pants pressed against his lanky frame — responds softly: ”Do you like my manicure? I did it with my teeth.” The former lovers and Jurassic Park costars smooch noisily, hamming it up. ”I love Jeff,” says the 30-year-old Dern after he exits. Does this mean their on-again, off-again wedding is back on? ”You never know,” she teases.

Anthony Edwards has blood on his hands. But they aren’t the hands of savior Mark Greene, the doctor he plays on ER. They are, for the moment, the hands of a sinner. In perhaps the most audacious career move since Madonna became a mother, Edwards has chosen to ditch Greene’s trademark hypersensitivity for the hyperdysfunction of a child molester and sociopath: Dick Hickock, the real-life mastermind behind the mass murder of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s 1965 true-crime classic and now a $10 million CBS miniseries (Nov. 24 and 26).

”I was quite shocked when [press reports] said the paintings in Surviving Picasso were ‘knockoffs,”’ says Vernon Witham. ”I’m not a knockoff artist — I’m a very great painter. This could ruin my whole reputation!”

If you want to get a sense of what the President is really like, as opposed to what defensive partisans and rabid right-wing character assassins want him to be, check out First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton, by David Maraniss, the reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Washington Post dispatches on the 1992 presidential campaign. Seemingly evenhanded, Maraniss gives you the grand tour of his subject’s life right up to (but not beyond) the day he announced his presidential candidacy.

”You know what I really like about cyberspace?” asked Laurie Anderson from the stage of Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre on Feb. 6. ”The rumors. Such as the recent so-called fact that the Vatican had been bought out by Microsoft…One world, one operating system!” The software-conscious crowd applauded warmly as Anderson kicked off her first tour in five years.

Thirteen-score and four issues ago, when ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY was first brought forth, the nation was still writhing in the grip of the lambada, Driving Miss Daisy was the No. 1 movie, the best-selling book was Robert Fulghum’s It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It, and Tower Records had just decided it would quit stocking new 45 rpm records. If that seems like only yesterday, does everybody still recall what rpm stands for? And who has noticed that 1.2 million LPs are selling per year now, and back then sales topped 34 million?