Lords A-leaping

After three years as the under-age Princess of Pom during the mid-eighties, Traci Lords is going legit. She's done an episode of Wiseguy, starred in a remake of Not of This Earth, and is soon to be featured in John Waters's Cry-Baby, playing a precocious knockout and sharing the screen with former alleged Symbionese Liberation Army cadet Patricia Hearst, who makes a brief acting debut as Traci's mom. No actress has successfully crossed over from hard-core to Hollywood films before, but in Lords's favor are her age— she's still just twenty-one—and the fact that stigmata aren't quite what they used to be. Witness Hearst's real-life rebirth as a society chairwoman. Witness John Waters, an ex-X-rater himself, making a PG-13 film for Universal. Anything's possible.

JIM RASENBERGER