Three new films debuted at the top of the box office this weekend, with less than $300,000 separating the top two: the spy thriller The Recruit, starring Al Pacino ($16.30 million) and the teen horror flick Final Destination 2 ($16.08 million). In third place was the Laurence Fishburne starrer Biker Boyz, targeting a black audience, which took in $10 million. Warner Bros.' Kangaroo Jack continued to play well in its third week as it earned $9 million. Continuing to look impressive, Chicago slipped into fifth place with $7 million while continuing to play in only 623 theaters. Its $11,321 per-theater gross was about twice that of the top two films. Chicago is due to "go wide" next weekend, more than doubling its current number of screens. Despite freezing temperatures in much of the country, ticket sales for the top 12 movies totaled $93.7 million, a 19 percent rise from a year ago.

The top ten films over the weekend, according to final figures compiled by Exhibitor Relations (figures in parentheses represent total gross to date): 1. The Recruit, Disney, $16,302,063, (New); 2. Final Destination 2, New Line, $16,017,141, (New); 3. Biker Boyz, DreamWorks, $10,106,992, (New); 4. Kangaroo Jack, Warner Bros., $9,048,362, 3 Wks. ($45,886,113); 5. Chicago, Miramax, $7,052,983, 6 Wks. ($50,631,500); 6. Darkness Falls, Sony, $7,018,472, 2 Wks. ($21,802,315); 7. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, New Line, $5,088,421, 7 Wks. ($316,026,494); 8. Catch Me If You Can, DreamWorks, $5,075,589, 6 Wks. ($152,158,678); 9. Just Married, 20th Century Fox, $4,811,257, 4 Wks. ($49,730,339); 10. About Schmidt, New Line, $4,515,337, 8 Wks. ($4,419,330).

Record producer Phil Spector, whose credits include a cameo appearance as The Connection in the classic 1969 biker flick Easy Rider and who reportedly financed Bruce Lee's last movie, Enter the Dragon, was arrested Monday on suspicion of first-degree murder after the body of 40-year-old actress Lana Clarkson was found at his mansion in Alhambra, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles. Clarkson had appeared in numerous B movies, including Roger Corman's Barbarian Queen in 1985 and its sequel, The Empress Strikes Back, in 1992. In numerous magazine articles and biographies, Spector has been portrayed as a man with a psychotic personality, who reportedly has threatened performers with a gun. He is being represented by Robert Shapiro, who gained international fame when he won acquittal for O.J. Simpson.

AOL Time Warner has informed Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service, the principal credit-rating agencies, that it will be compelled to boost its $25.8-billion debt by at least $4.7 billion in coming months in order to fulfill certain obligations. Analysts for S&P immediately indicated that any significant increase in debt could result in a downgrade. However, analysts at Moody's, were more reserved, noting that the company has shown by several recent acts that it is working on reducing its debt.

The A Beautiful Mind team of actor Russell Crowe, director Ron Howard, and producer Brian Grazer have reportedly agreed to come together again for Cinderella Man, a film about Jim Braddock, who won the heavyweight title in 1935, Daily Variety reported today (Tuesday).

The Walt Disney company has asked a Los Angeles judge to throw out a lawsuit brought by Stephen Slesinger Inc., which controls the domestic merchandising rights for Winnie the Pooh characters, on the grounds that Slesinger's attorneys had stolen Disney documents from its trash bins and offices for use in the case. However, Bert Fields, the Slesingers' lawyer in the case, maintained that while they had hired a private investigator to look for documents pertaining to the suit in Disney's trash, they had never gone onto Disney's property and took items only from "publicly accessible trash bins." He added: "This motion is not just about garbage, it is garbage."

Onetime money-manager-to-the-stars Dana Giacchetto, who was sentenced to 57 months in prison in 2001 for bilking dozens of clients out of some $10 million, has been released to a halfway house in the Bronx after serving only 24 months (in addition to the 10 months he had spent in prison awaiting trial), according to Fox.com's Roger Friedman. Giacchetto's firm, The Cassandra Group, once included clients like Leonardo DiCaprio, Courteney Cox, Ben Stiller, Tobey Maguire, and the rock group Phish.

A nearly two-hour documentary about Michael Jackson broadcast by Britain's ITV attracted more than 14 million viewers Monday night -- 54 percent of the television audience. Interviewed by Martin Bashir, famous for persuading Princess Diana to open up publicly about the breakup of her relationship with Prince Charles, Jackson discussed his plastic surgery, his "Peter Pan" relationship with children, and the recent "baby dangling" incident. ITV news chief Steve Anderson told Britain's Guardian newspaper: "It's an astounding audience and a testament to Martin Bashir's journalism and the production team at Tonight. It's far in excess of our expectations." Although Living With Michael Jackson exceeded the ratings of all but two British TV programs during the past year, it fell far short of the 21 million viewers who tuned into Bashir's interview with Diana, broadcast in November 1995. The Jackson film is due to air in the U.S. (on ABC) Thursday night.

In a review of the Jackson documentary appearing in today's (Tuesday) Guardian newspaper in the U.K., critic Rupert Smith writes: "Living With Michael Jackson sounded like the title of a compassionate medical documentary -- living with schizophrenia, for instance. And, as it soon became clear, being Michael Jackson is a condition that no amount of money can cure." Jim Shelley, the TV critic of the Daily Mirror, comments: "Bashir hinted at his anxiety but kept his conclusions private and smothered in innuendo, presumably for fear of alienating future interviewees who trust him because of Lady Di."

PBS's board of directors has voted to accept 30-second "underwriting messages" from sponsoring companies that spend at least $2.5 million annually on the public television network, the Los Angeles Times reported today (Tuesday). A PBS spokeswoman, however, observed that no package of ads will run longer than one minute and none of the 30-second ads will be placed in children's programming.

Raising many eyebrows, CNN anchor Aaron Brown was a no-show on CNN coverage of the Columbia accident until late Sunday night, telling today's (Tuesday) New York Times that he did not hear about the matter until 10:00 a.m. Pacific time Saturday, some four hours after it occurred, while he prepared to start a round of golf at the Bob Hope Celebrity Golf Tournament in Palm Springs, CA. While continuing to play, Brown said that he began making cell phone calls trying to make arrangements to travel to CNN's Atlanta studios or to NASA headquarters in Houston. (The Times article did not explain why, if Brown was carrying a cell phone, no one at CNN had tried to contact him earlier or why Brown eventually had to book travel on his own.) Brown also indicated that he did not think he could have anchored from the CNN bureau in Los Angeles, raising questions about the adequacy of the CNN facility in the country's second largest city (although Brown told the Palm Springs Desert Sun that he didn't want to go there "because I didn't have any clothes").

Miffed that its high-rated and long-running series The Practice had been yanked from ABC's Sunday-night schedule, Twentieth Century Fox TV issued a news release late Monday pointing out that the show that replaced it, Dick Wolf's new Dragnet series, "fell below The Practice's first-run season average among adults 18-49." Today's (Tuesday) Washington Post speculated that the news release was intended to placate The Practice producer David E. Kelley, who has expressed outrage about ABC's decision to move the show to Monday nights opposite Fox's Joe Millionaire.

The entertainment industry's primary performers unions, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of TV and Radio Artists (AFTRA), which for years have been unsuccessful in their efforts to merge, are expected to renew their efforts at a joint meeting of AFTRA's and SAG's boards on Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported today (Tuesday), citing people familiar with the situation. The newspaper said that the meeting will receive a report from a joint task force that has concluded that the two unions should "align themselves" through "consolidation and restructuring."

Only a week after it was reported that Sarah Kozer, one of the finalists on the Joe Millionaire series had appeared in S&M porn flicks, the Washington Post reported today (Monday) that Paul Hogan, the butler on the reality show was once fired by Bill Paley, the son of the CBS founder, after he had been hired as a renovation manager at his house in Nassau, Bahamas and allegedly used it for throwing parties where he served Paley's wine. Paley told the Post: "I was up in New York, flipping channels and caught the last two minutes of the first show, and thought, 'Who is that actor? He looks really familiar.' It took me a moment to place that Australian accent. But sure enough, it was my guy."

Warner Bros. Domestic Television is expected to announce "any day now" that it has canceled the tabloidy Jenny Jones Show after 12 years. Robert Feder, the Chicago Sun-Times TV columnist who reported the cancellation, commented today: "The good news is that Chicago soon won't have The Jenny Jones Show to kick around anymore. The bad news is that it took 12 years to finally go away."

In yet another blow to the promise of synergy within giant media conglomerates, CNNSI.com, the website formed as a joint venture between AOL Time Warner's CNN and Sports Illustrated magazine, will become known simply as SI.com beginning Thursday, Feb. 6, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported today (Tuesday).

A spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair has denied a report in the London Daily Star that the P.M. has agreed to appear in an upcoming episode of The Simpsons.According to the newspaper, the episode concerns Bart winning a trip to London for him and his family and being greeted by Blair. The Star observed that Blair's appearance would make him the first prime minister to star in a TV show while in office. However, a spokesman for the prime minister said, "We have not received an invitation for Mr. Blair to appear in The Simpsons. ... Until we do it's difficult to comment on this."