WOODS FILMING DIRTY PICTURES

James Woods \nHOLLYWOOD - James Woods will film Dirty Pictures, based on the Robert Mapplethorpe controversy of the late 1980s, for Showtime. And though the timing of Showtime's announcement might tell you otherwise, the film's producers and the network both say the project was in development long before the current hoopla over the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Planned for a spring 2000 showing, the film sets Woods as Dennis Barrie, the director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, who was indicted with the museum for exhibiting a show of Mapplethorpe's graphic, homosexuality and sadomasochism-depicting photography. Barrie and the museum were acquitted, ultimately, but not before they touched off a furious debate on public funding for controversial art works at the turn of the decade.

Showtime's president of programming, Jerry Offsay, tells the Los Angeles Times that the Mapplethorpe flap roiled ten years ago but the "debate over freedom of expression continues to be challenged, as evidenced by the current controversy of the Sensation exhibit."

That Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibit touched off a furor after New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani cut off the museum's city funding, over an image of the Virgin Mary which included elephant dung.

Woods, whose most recent role was in The General's Daughter, tells the Times he opposes censorship in any form. "In an age of self-entitlement, however," he cautioned, "I do wish more people had a sense of responsibility commensurate with their First Amendment rights."