Dial File: Finally, it's nearly Showtime for 'Lolita'

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul."

-- Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita"

A SHOW OF guts or just plain nuts?

It's a fair question to ask about Showtime, the premium cable channel that rescued "Lolita" from the cinematic slagheap. The controversial flick -- is it high art or child porn? -- was effectively banned from the big screen. It makes its small screen debut -- its only debut -- Aug. 2. Its dubious distinction: the most expensive ($50 million-plus), talked-about film ever exiled straight to cable TV.

And the above question? I'd go with guts, goaded by raging opportunism. Nothing tastes as financially sweet as forbidden fruit, especially when viewer curiosity plants the seeds of ripe ratings.

Though it's a close call and Showtime's motivation surely stops short of selfless crusading for artistic freedom, I'll side with the cable guys -- and artistic freedom.

More TV sex? At least in "Lolita," sex services a story of substance instead of setting up sitcom snickers.

This isn't new territory for Showtime, which televised "Bastard Out of Carolina" after basic cable's TNT bailed because of child molestation scenes. Based on the book by Dorothy Allison, who was sexually abused as a child, it was gut-wrenching TV with something important to say, powerfully said.

"Lolita," starring Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert and Dominique Swain as his smoldering stepdaughter/nymphet, is the latest update of the classic novel, a poetic tragedy about a morally compromised, emotional wreck of a man. Last translated into film in 1962 by legendary director Stanley Kubrick and starring James Mason, the novel is an eloquent account of obsession, shame and stolen innocence -- an absorbing work that challenges and disturbs its audience, as good art should. It is not a peep show.

No film distributors would touch the new "Lolita" in the U.S. -- it was released in Europe -- because, the film community charged, of its frank focus on pedophilia, certainly incendiary after the JonBenet Ramsey murder and heated child-as-sex-objects arguments. Some distributors countered that "Lolita" never made it to American multiplexes because it was "too dull," which sounds suspiciously like a convenient cover.

(Dullness as a deterrent to distribution? If that was true, I could rattle off the titles of a few dozen recent movies -- most of them with ear-shattering special effects and characters as complex as geraniums -- that would have never soiled local theaters; so, probably, could you).

Then drop this into the mix: An admirable 1996 federal child pornography law -- obviously aimed at crushing kiddie porn but also rolling over classic literature such as "Lolita" that stumbles into its path -- deems it a crime to produce any visual depiction that "is, or appears to be (crucial point there) of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct."

The Associated Press reported that earlier this year, a federal appeals court in California questioned attorneys as to whether the law would ban every version of "Lolita," regardless of the actress' actual age, since it depicted a minor engaged in sexual activity.

A complex tale of human yearning runs smack into renewed child molestation awareness, and the line between compelling art and social responsibility is re-drawn -- with help from the government.

Quite a dilemma -- legally, artistically, morally.

All this, ironically, dovetails with the ascent of Hollywood's latest "Lolita"-ish vixen, Christina Ricci. The actress is collecting kudos for her tour de force as an adolescent tart and ruthless sexual predator in "The Opposite of Sex." Her character wields a sexual malevolence and serrated sewer tongue like a machete, a sizzling, unsettling portrait of an adolescent.

Ricci is 18, but her character is 16 -- and no distribution debates in sight, perhaps because she's never nude (she appears topless to a male character, but not to the camera) and never glimpsed in sexual activity (she's seen covered, post-coital). True, the down-'n'-dirty sex of a slutty 16-year-old is merely implied -- but with all the coy subtlety of a Times Square hooker.

We like our titillation, as long as it's legal -- even barely.

"Lolita," however, is dicier: a plot about a man sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, played by Swain, who at 15 was still a minor at the time of filming; plus reported images of graphic kissing, two brief lovemaking scenes of the couple -- clothed -- with Lolita clearly in orgasmic mode, and one brief nude shot with a body double for Swain.

And it's the sexual bluntness of the late '90s "Lolita" that separates it from its restrained 1962 ancestor, made in a more circumspect filmmaking era.

Is it too vivid to veer clear of the law? The courts may still have to sort out such situations vis-a-vis a vital child porn law with which, in spirit, one absolutely cannot argue.

But art exists to explore the human condition in all its discomforting reality and disturbing mutations, and that requires some leeway. As famously noted, "the unexamined life is not worth living" -- or viewing.

CROON A TUNE: Right actor -- wrong show. Readers who took a crack at last week's Croon-a-Tune guessed that "the rippin'-est, roarin'-est, fightin'-est man the frontier ever knew" was "Davy Crockett" (nope) instead of "Daniel Boone" (yup). Fess Parker played both roles, Crockett for ABC's "Walt Disney" anthology in 1954-55 (but not in its own series) and Boone for six seasons, 1964-70, on NBC.

Next? Who ended each show by singing, "Seems we just get started and before you know it, comes the time we have to say so long."? Be the first to get started identifying that longtime TV theme -- actually, end theme -- and we won't say so long next week without giving your name some Dial File-style fame.

AGE GAUGE: Based on each network's programming profile for next season, the research company TN Media has projected the median age of a typical viewer on each network: UPN will age eight years, going from an impetuous 32 to a more seasoned 40. Meanwhile, ABC, 41, and NBC, 42, remain comfortably middle-aged, while Fox combines youth and maturity at 33 and the WB claims the little whippersnapper title at 25. Graying CBS, desperately trying to dye its hair and lose the paunch, has seniority at 52.

Once fall shows start flopping, the average network executive is projected to feel 102.

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