Presidential contender John Edwards wisely stayed clear of the O.K. Corral this week where Hillary and Barack shot it out while David Geffen passed the ammunition. Mr. Edwards used Dallas as home base for a campaign swing through Texas.

The 2004 veep candidate was up and at 'em Thursday morning when NBC's Today show interviewed him at 6 a.m. in the Miramar Room at the Hilton Park Cities. Dallas attorney Fred Baron is national finance chair for the former North Carolina's senator's 2008 presidential bid.

Downtown's historic Majestic Theatre ended its long run as a movie theater with the July 16, 1973, showing of the Bond film Live and Let Die. But now that the prestigious American Film Institute is bringing a film festival to Dallas, the Majestic will be transformed into a movie house for the March 22 opening night.

"They're retrofitting it to be able to show movies," says John Wildman, publicity director for the AFI Dallas International Film Festival. It will be a one-night restoration of the Majestic's film heyday when John Wayne, Joan Crawford, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope attended movie premieres there.

Opening-night guests will move on to the downtown Neiman Marcus for a post-screening gala.

With the exception of opening night and the closing festivities at the Inwood, the other 190 independent films (that's right, 190) will be shown at the Angelika Film Center and the Magnolia.

Each night, there will be two red-carpet arrivals featuring filmmakers and actors from the movies being shown that evening.

Ed Bailey owns more than 60 McDonald's franchises plus Patrizio restaurants and a planned Bailey's Prime Plus steakhouse. But lest he ever get too cocky, his wife, Lee, is prepared to put her foot down, right where he can read it.

Last week, the Rolls-Royce-loving couple hosted a dinner at their home to show off the Rolls-Royce 101EX concept car that's touring the country.

Lee occasionally lifted up her right foot to show guests the red bottom of her Christian Louboutin high heels that the designer personally inscribed to her in black marker: "Lee is Right! C. Louboutin."

Journalist Lee Cullum is the Michael Corleone of KERA. Every time she thinks she's out, the public broadcasting station pulls her back in.

At 7:30 tonight, Lee will launch her monthly TV show, CEO, on Channel 13. It will then be rebroadcast on radio Saturday on KERA-FM (90.1). A podcast version will be available at www .kera.org.

The first CEO will feature an interview with Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher.

The program will be a homecoming for Lee, who made her journalistic bones in public TV. Back when Nixon was in his first term and the TV choices in Dallas were limited to channels 4, 5, 8 and 11 (and Channel 39 on cloudy days), Channel 13 launched Newsroom with newspaper veteran Jim Lehrer as the anchor and Lee and Mike Ritchie as reporters.

When Jim went national on PBS, Lee took over anchor duties of Newsroom .

At the time, Bob Wilson (father of actors Andrew, Owen and Luke Wilson) was president of KERA and he got a grant to do a news program from the Ford Foundation.

"The grant was much bigger than the station's total budget," says Bob, "so it enabled Jim to leave the Dallas Times Herald and work in TV."

And the rest is history.