Walter's way with words Stanley Tucci's 'Winchell' is faithful to the columnist's passion for playing with language

"Winchell" will air at 7 tonight on HBO. When viewers tune in for Stanley Tucci's portrayal of Walter Winchell in the biopic "Winchell" at 7 tonight on HBO, they ought to know that the real star of the program is not Tucci or Glenne Headly or anyone else who appears on screen. The real star of "Winchell" is the English language. Or rather slanguage, that ear-tickling gumbo of euphemisms and unexpected turns of phrase that made Winchell the progenitor of the modern gossip column. It was Winchell who used "blessed event" to describe a pregnancy, something celebrity journalists simply did not cover in the 1920s, and "Reno-vated" to describe a divorce, another verboten newspaper topic. Winchell's column was a guaranteed head rush. He took on Hitler and life's little annoyances with the same fervor, inserted himself into the column wherever possible to give items extra urgency, and made all the ordinary folk reading his column feel like they mattered, that their frenetic friend W.W. was keeping them in step with an ever-quickening world. "He used words like bullets," we hear a voice say in the movie's opening moments. "He could kill you with a comma." The column begat the radio program - the aural equivalent of machine-gun fire - and in the 1930s, the one-two combo gave Winchell unprecedented popularity and power. J. Edgar Hoover and the Roosevelt administration began courting him. At last he could kiss off his critics in the print world, including his bosses. Winchell's editor at the New York Mirror, the well-heeled Arthur Brisbane, once told him he didn't have "ethics, scruples, decency or conscience." "Let others have those things," Winchell shot back. "I've got the readers." "Winchell" the movie is largely devoted to these battles with management. But Winchell accumulated much more history than that, much more than this run-of-the-mill, two-hour movie is able to carry. Herman Klurfeld, the longtime, long-suffering ghostwriter responsible for as much as half of Winchell's material over the years, wrote the memoir on which the screenplay is based. Not surprisingly, the relationship with Klurfeld is covered thoroughly in "Winchell" (Paul Giamatti is a nicely self-effacing Herman). But other vital characters in Winchell's life are omitted, and Dallas Wayne (Headly), an ambitious blonde who is shown supplying Walter with some of his biggest tips, is a distorted composite of several Winchell acquaintances. The movie, however, does faithfully re-enact Walter's love of language and the way he used it to keep "Mr. and Mrs. America" glued to their radios. In so doing, it draws out one of the sadder aspects of our media culture: Today's commentators are so tin-eared, they've even managed to make a presidential scandal dull. Matt Drudge is trying to model his career on Winchell's - wearing W.W.'s trademark fedora being the most obvious ploy - but Drudge hasn't had a lyrical thought in his life. One of the few commentators Winchell wouldn't have buried outright is the caustic Keith Olbermann. Now, conscience-stricken, Olbermann has quit MSNBC and gone back to covering sports. To reach Aaron Barnhart, television writer for The Star, call 234-4790 or send e-mail to tvbarn@kansascity.com