Centuries shuttled back and forth last week on NBC. Italian truck drivers be came Roman legionnaires; butchers were metamorphosed Into gladiators (one burly swordsman was nearly reduced to tears When he got a scratched ear); a woman switched from modern bourgeois matron to sadistic Messalina. These time-machine gambols took place on Fellini: A Director's Notebook, one program in the NBC series called "Experiment in Television" that had managed to escape from the usual Sunday-afternoon intellectual ghetto to prime time.
Idea Gambler. Notebook got out of the ghetto because (briefly) it had a...