I don't share Joe Lamantia's concerns with Bernard Shaw playing himself as a newscaster in The Lost World. Certainly, fiction films have long used the device of showing newspaper headlines or articles, radio news broadcasts or television news stories to communicate narrative information (often it is a clumsy or hokey device). The issue seems to be whether using an actual reporter to play the role is somehow compromising or blurs the entertainment/information line. I think that line is very blurred, but for other reasons (the ratings preoccupation of television news; the skewing of tv news to emphasize items with visual impact, etc). This sort of cameo seems harmless to me. As for other examples of news figures portraying themselves, I know there are many, but I can't recall specifics (I know that Entertainment Tonight and its reporters often appear in films). Connie Chung played herself on an episode of Murphy Brown, which certainly provided interesting interpenetrations of fictional and real journalists. On another note, I was surprised by how bad The Lost World was--not even up to the highly commercial standards of Jurassic Park. The Lost World seems very poorly plotted (Goldblum's character's daughter is entirely wasted, for example; Postlethwaite disappears for the final sequence where he might have been useful (great white hunter saves San Diego?); the mass of characters on the island provides an excess of victims and a shortage of developed characters; the cliffhanger scene is excruciatingly long). What a mess! And from Spielberg who generally has extraordinary narrative gifts. Chris Ames Dept. of English Agnes Scott College 141 East College Ave Decatur, GA 30030 [log in to unmask] ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.sa.ua.edu/screensite