WHAT OSCAR SAYS ABOUT HOLLYWOOD

ALMOST 90 YEARS AGO, AN ENGLISHWOMAN NAMED ELINOR Glyn wrote a racy best seller called Three Weeks that had it all: Venice! Illicit passion! Making out on a tiger-skin rug! Eventually, inevitably, she was invited to Hollywood to write screenplays and dine out. At some point in her stay the industry entered one of its periods of uncertainty-or perhaps one should say one of its periods of more-than-usual uncertainty-and someone asked Madame Glyn what she thought might happen next. "Whatever will make the most money," she sagaciously replied.

In a sense, that's all you can ever safely say about Hollywood. The problem has always been to discern, in advance, in helpful detail, how to pass Go and (nowadays) collect $200 million domestic, God knows what in the ancillaries. For movie trends-or even individual hits-do not reveal themselves until they are actually thundering down on us. No executive, no agent, certainly no mere movie reviewer usually spots one until it is actually rolling over his toes, sharp pain belatedly signaling where the most money is likely to be found for the next few months-and that the victim has once again been looking for it in all the wrong places.

Sweetly, touchingly, the human soul yearns to believe complicated enterprises like the movie game can rationally be comprehended and managed. So, beginning as far back as Madame Glyn's day, sober and cautious men wearing double-breasted suits and tasteful ties have paid huge bucks to production executives they thought could realize this dream for them. Such men don't read novels. If they did, they would be familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum: "Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads."

Fitzgerald romanticized the business (as he did everything else) and so vastly exaggerated his census of production genius. Another writer, William Goldman, author and fixer of many a screenplay, came closer to the true figure, which is zip. NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING, he wrote, putting his dictum in capital letters in the vain hope that people would pay serious attention to it.

But, of course, they didn't. Because they don't want to. The dream is more alluring: surely somewhere there has to be someone who knows something. If not, why aren't we in cellular phones like all the other sensible people? This year the popular betting is that there are three such someones, that their names are Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen, and that what passes for a millennium--or, anyway, a damned good special-effects version of it--may be at hand.

I don't know. They are smart guys, all of them, but ask yourself this: a year ago, did you know--or even guess--that when the Academy Awards rolled around again the odds-on favorite to sweep a bunch of the big ones would be something called Forrest Gump? Or that its chief competitor would be Pulp Fiction? And what about Four Weddings and a Funeral, also in the running for best picture? Did you imagine that a $4 million romantic comedy, made in England, with no big stars, would turn out to be, dollar-in, dollar-out, the most profitable picture of the year? For that matter, did you think, a year ago, even if you happened to kind of shamefacedly like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, that Jim Carrey would turn out to be the hottest star of the year?

Bet you didn't. Bet you something else too: that the Messrs. Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen are just as surprised as you are. When it comes to the movies, we are all hostages to the conventional wisdom of the moment--the smart and the smarter, the dumb and the dumber.

A year ago, acting on that wisdom, Katzenberg was getting ready to release The Lion King, and even then, before the $315 million rolled in (not to mention the record $450 million in home-video sales it has racked up in the past two weeks), it didn't look like a high-stakes gamble; Disney animation has been a sure thing ever since Beauty and the Beast. At the same time, Spielberg was preparing to send forth The Flintstones (domestic gross: $135 million), and that was a pretty sure thing too. Lesser men than he had observed that the boomer market was about to turn into a nostalgia market; how could you go wrong with a movie based on the TV show that had addled their little pates 25 year earlier?

If the DreamWorks people were looking over their shoulders, then they were probably worried about Maverick (more recycled television, this time with big stars), about The Client and Clear and Present Danger (best-seller adaptations, also with reliable stars) and about True Lies (Arnold, armed, dangerous and in his best mode, the high-tech thriller). All these movies did all right--a little bit less or a little bit more than expected, but in the ballpark, if not always in the field of dreams. But they weren't Gump or Pulp or Weddings, either. That is to say, the sneaky, relatively unheralded, relatively inexpensive latter have probably turned a better profit than the relatively expensive former--at least in the U.S.

And you know what? They were more fun too. Because they were unexpected. Because you emerged from them with a sense of discovery, even of exhilaration, that more predictable ventures, however nicely they are put together and marketed, never impart.

This is not to say that movie executives ought to act like they're in the derivatives market. You can do all right playing by the well-established rules. Indeed, you probably have to most of the time. No board of directors is going to question you too quickly for hiring stars with a track record and putting them in genre vehicles that have some prerecognition value. Even when one of these flops, you can always invoke the prudent-man defense. Hey, I did it by the rules; it's not my fault if they didn't come.

But it's necessary to break this basic rule from time to time. There's a paradox here. Big action-packed movies are thought to be less risky these days than their less costly competitors. Those stars, those production values, those clichas can bail you out in foreign box-office and home video, which, unlike the domestic theatrical business, are truly mass (i.e., highly conservative) markets. Smaller movies, starring less potent performers, on the other hand, offer no downside protection. They may represent a smaller investment, but they also pose the risk of near total loss.

So why take such a plunge? For the chance of surfacing with the next Quentin Tarantino between your teeth. Because Producing Man does not live by Mel Gibson and Batman sequels alone. And because on Oscar night it's nice to have some long shots you're actually proud of rooting for--the Bullets over Broadway gang, maybe, or The Shawshank Redemption crowd. Or Winona Ryder's luminous performance in Little Women. Or Paul Newman's in Nobody's Fool. Or Jessica Lange's in Blue Sky, a film that lay unattended in a studio vault for three years before being made semipublic last fall. They were made, some of these movies, precisely because someone perceived Oscar possibilities in them. And Oscar nominations mean more than prestige. They mean dollars, a last shot at recoupment.

In recent years, it's fair to say, the Academy Awards, so often scorned by the smart set back East, have become a true balancing force in the industry. Without the hope they hold out, a lot of good movies just wouldn't get made. Face it: producers who combine sufficient clout and sufficient nerve to trust their own uncalculating impulses have always been in short supply and are now almost extinct. For that reason, the Academy's most instructive award this year may be the Irving Thalberg trophy. Sometimes it's a consolation prize for someone the Academy has unaccountably overlooked (Alfred Hitchcock, for example). Sometimes it's a reward for longevity and inoffensiveness. Occasionally it goes to a producer who comes as close as humanly possible to grasping that elusive equation of Fitzgerald's. This is one of those times, because the winner is ... Clint Eastwood.

I have to confess an interest here; I happen to be writing a book about him that's turning out to be more admiring than I imagined it would. (I also produced the film tribute to him for the Oscar show.) But facts are facts: for close to three decades he's averaged better than a movie a year as a producer. Not one of them has cost the kind of money that keeps studio executives awake at night. All of them have come in on schedule, on budget. And the majority of them were not the sure shots--Dirty Harry sequels and clones, for instance, or easy-riding westerns.

Tucked into Eastwood's filmography are a Capraesque comedy about a hapless Wild West show, two dramas about self-destructive musicians, a couple of explorations of sexual obsession, the best prison picture of our era, a gothic horror story and a pair of funny, nobrow epics in which, against everyone's better judgment but his own, he co-starred with an orangutan named Clyde. And-almost forgot--a haunted western called Unforgiven. That, friends, is producing--achieving a balance between commercial exigencies and the dictates of your heart, following your own best instincts, not somebody else's audience survey. Or last year's box-office figures.

That's all there is to it, according to Clint, who's probably oversimplifying. Knowing your craft, staying grounded, having at your command a certain stubborn willfulness-these help too. But, yes, it all begins with instinct, that indefinable, unquantifiable quality. That is the only reliable power source for a dream factory. Or a DreamWorks.