By Belinda Luscombe

Coppola's Wining Ways

When FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA went looking for a summer house 20 years ago, he ended up moving his family to the Napa Valley and starting a wine business. Now he has coughed up more than $9 million for the place next door and reunited the historic Inglenook estate. "Winemaking is like movies," he says. "You start with material that's not 100% in your control; then you refine what you get." The vintner is also enjoying a good year onscreen: he produced the just released Don Juan DeMarco and My Family, which opens next month, and later this year he will direct a "warm fable" starring Robin Williams.

SEEN & HEARD

Dustin Hoffman needn't worry, but football, baseball and advertising icon Bo Jackson wants to try acting. Jackson, who retired from football in 1990, said he realized during the baseball strike he wanted more time at home. He has signed with the William Morris agency but won't do sports roles. "I'm very serious about this," he said.

Free trade found four unlikely champions last week when monopoly-hating grunge rockers Pearl Jam announced they would tour in June without using Ticketmaster. The band, led by Eddie Vedder, has been feuding with the ticketing giant for a year, claiming its service fee is too high. Band manager Kelly Curtis admits that staging concerts in some cities will be difficult but says, "The struggle has helped everybody."

He'll Do It Her Way

NANCY SINATRA, 54, who poses nude in next month's Playboy, has taken on another potentially revealing project: her father's biography. Sinatra pEre, who has never written his memoirs and has persecuted many would-be Boswells, has been secretly working on the book with his daughter. Modestly titled Frank Sinatra: An American Treasure, it will be out in time for Sinatra's 80th birthday later this year. Nancy has tackled the same subject before, but she calls her earlier book, Frank Sinatra, My Father, "a valentine."

Eye of Newt, Wit of Farley

CHRIS FARLEY has built a career on playing fat, loud, accident-prone losers. But NEWT GINGRICH wasn't insulted when the Saturday Night Live comic (and co-star of the new film Tommy Boy) turned up at a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee acting just like him. Farley first took a swipe at the Speaker's penchant for handing out reading lists, offering up one that included a children's book as well as novels by Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins. Imitating Gingrich's rapid-fire delivery, Farley then pushed through bills declaring all Democrats officially weird and moving the nation's capital to Atlanta. He also proposed that Sonny Bono sing I've Got You, Newt, but the freshman Congressman, in a rare display of stage shyness, politely declined.