Whatever else befalls it, Paul Andrew Williams' second feature will not win the critical adulation of his first, the magnificent, bleak London to Brighton.

The epic legal battles over profits from The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy long ago eclipsed anything raging on Middle Earth, but New Line Cinema, the films' producer, has just got sight of its most formidable foe to date: the family of J R R Tolkien himself.

Fresh from a sell-out gig on Brighton seafront, Norman Cook is now working on a soundtrack for Disney. Jonathan Brown charts the rise of a dance-floor king

PEGGY PHANGO was the talented South African who created the role of Rose, the buxom, good-natured tap dancing student in Richard Harris's popular play Stepping Out.

A rare US three-sheet from King Kong expected to fetch between pounds 30,000 and pounds 50,000 is the highlight of Christie's sale of vintage film posters on Monday. One of only four known copies, the poster depicts the film's most memorable image: King Kong on the pinnacle of New York's Empire State Building. The sale also features the largest collection of James Bond posters, including three unique sets of US door panels from Thunderball, You Only Live Twice (both reckoned to go for between pounds 2,000 and pounds 3,000) and Goldfinger (pounds 3,000-pounds 5,000).

Hurlyburly Queen's Theatre, London

'Tis the season to be jolly. And the old, familiar faces are trying their best, off there in a corner. Obviously uncomfortable, yes; a little distant, too, this much diminished band. Hardly touching their wine, watching the drunks, the dancers, the wallflowers, the jokers, as whistles are blown, bottled beer spilled; as guests throw themselves at that thing called fun.

Fantasy films have always attracted me the most. I remember seeing things like Metropolis and The Lost World at a very early age, back in the silent days, because my parents were avid cinema-goers. It was the imagination that goes into fantasy films that really drew me to cinema in the first place. And then, in 1933, when I was 13, I saw King Kong. And I haven't been the same since. It was the greatest excursion into fantasy I had ever seen, and it just struck a chord in me - that was when I knew I wanted to pursue that as a career.

JULIAN BARNES, novelist: My record is Catcher in the Rye, which I bought three copies of in different Penguin editions over a period of 20 years but never read. The title put me off - I thought it was a rural tale set in the rye fields of the Mid-West. I finally read it when I was stranded on a plane. Of course, there are some great classics that I've never read, but I'm not going to tell you which ones.

LAST YEAR, Maria Aitken's Thirties film-set version of As You Like It gave the world its first transvestite Jaques; now, in his Edwardian-period King Lear at the Royal Court (his swansong there as Artistic Director), Max Stafford-Clark presents us with a Fool in a frock.

THE NEWS that Buckingham Palace is thinking of hiring Brian Cartmell, the PR agent who steered Evel Knievel's car-jumping career and who once hung a giant King Kong from the top of Blackpool Tower, can only be good. Or at any rate, it must be an improvement on the present Palace PR effort, which often looks like a republican plot with Gerald Ratner as marketing consultant. Last week's announcement that the Princess of Wales was giving up her pounds 72,000 Mercedes 'because she is tightening her belt like anybody else' was guaranteed to draw howls of rage from every breakfast table in the country and was an open invitation to the tabloids to do what they promptly did - list a million other ways in which she could save money, starting with cutting down on her staff, her homes, her other cars, her clothes, her pounds 750 membership of the Vanderbilt Club, her San Lorenzo lunches, her astrologers, acupuncturists, masseurs, and finishing inevitably with her phone bill.

THREE soaring plaster ducks are fixed to the great black sky of Sally Jacobs's set at the Royal Court, which surrealistically merges the inside of a seaside cottage with the wintry beach beyond. It seems a droll stroke until you reflect that plaster ducks are a pretty rare species in the homes of successful magazine journalists and / or radical activists (the occupations of, respectively, the house's current and its former owner). This dubious wall decoration is not the only feature of April De Angelis's Hush that shows a cavalier attitude to what is convincing and what isn't.