DIRECTOR REEVE TO BEGIN CASTING FOR `TRUE'.

Byline: Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

Christopher Reeve will be spending the fall in Manhattan - directing the big-screen ``Tell Me True.''

``We're making a few changes in the script, will soon start casting and expect to start the film in October,'' reports producer David Kirkpatrick.

This was the vehicle Reeve agreed to direct before he took his tragic fall from a horse in May 1995. Kirkpatrick told this column days after the accident, ``We'll do the movie whenever Chris is able.'' And he's delighted to report that the time is now.

According to Kirkpatrick, now that Chris is finished with HBO's ``In the Gloaming'' film, which Chris directed and in which Glenn Close stars, he's working on his autobiography and providing input into the ``Tell Me True'' story by Larry Atlas David describes ``Tell Me True'' as a ``modern-day fairy tale about a man who has a gift that is his biggest burden - he knows when people are telling the truth and when they're lying. He's lonely, isolated. Everyone avoids him - because everyone else (benefits) by not telling the truth.''

The ``True'' hero eventually does find romance, and Kirkpatrick expects that both lead characters will be played by major names.

He feels he'll have no trouble lining up those stars, because ``so many feel so much good will toward Chris.''

Meanwhile

Kirkpatrick is still trying to cast his feature, ``Homemade Sin,'' that has been slated to roll in April. ``Travolta passed, and we've got an offer out now to Matthew McConaughey.'' Says the filmmaker, whose ``Evening Star'' film got trounced in the crush of holiday pictures, ``I've learned this: In today's marketplace you need to cast high. Or go the other route and make a small movie that can get nurtured.''

The Cosby case

Some five weeks after the slaying of Ennis Cosby, LAPD detectives continue their search for the killer. ``We've still got some decent leads, and we've added four more investigators to the case,'' reports police Cmdr. Tim McBride. None of those leads, he says, has come about as a result of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in reward money that's been posted for the murderer of Bill Cosby's son, and that fact surprises McBride. ``You'd think that with that kind of money, someone would turn this case.''

And baby makes two?

The word's making the rounds that, at Michael Jackson's directive, his wife is sequestered in Arizona and is air-expressing mother's milk home to California, where Jackson's playing mother and father, apparently. No comment from Jackson's camp.

Aloha, again

Interesting that CBS and producer Stephen Cannell reportedly have lured Jack Lord to make a cameo appearance in the soon-to-shoot pilot for their prospective new version of ``Hawaii Five-0'' - considering that Lord has kept a reclusive lifestyle since the original, long-running series left the airwaves in 1980.

Of course, as things stand, he won't have all that much to do in the telepic. We've learned that his character, Gov. Steve McGarrett (yes, Governor - he's done all right for himself) gets shot at a police event in the beginning of the story. For that matter, so does his right-hand man, Danno Williams. A team of top crime fighters, including an FBI agent and a beautiful young Eurasian Five-0 detective, set out to solve the case, which naturally turns out to be much more complex than it first appears. And by the time they get to the bottom of it, why, they're ready for a series of their own.

The industry eye

Steve Martin and Diane Keaton dined with ``Father of the Bride'' filmmakers Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer the other night. They will be teaming in ``Father of the Bride III'' - but not for a while. Meyers and Shyer have just completed the script for their remake of ``The Parent Trap'' and now plan to resume work on ``Love Crazy,'' the film they expected to make last year, until Hugh Grant bowed out of the project.

October Films, on a roll with two Oscar-nominated films, ``Secrets & Lies'' and ``Breaking the Waves,'' soon might join the ranks of ``independents'' owned by a major Hollywood studio. In a way, that would be nice. When we checked with October the other day, they were still waiting to send videos of ``Waves'' to all the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - because they couldn't afford the cost of the cassettes. They'd better hurry. Nomination ballots are due into the academy by March 18.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Michael Jackson

Playing both mom and dad

(2) Jack Lord

Cameo in new ``Hawaii Five-0''