How to make stupid, mindless, moronic, gross, slob movies and make millions of dollars and live happily ever after. Last in a series. : SO RAUNCHY, EVEN GROWN MEN BALK

Several weeks ago, writer-director David Beaird excitedly invited his 13-year-old nephew to see “Uncle David’s movie.” Christopher Carson was equally gleeful, proclaiming to all who would listen that he would be the first kid on his Houston block to see the raunchy “Party Animal,” about a nerd who gets his comeuppance for treating women like sex objects.

But Christopher’s mom had other ideas. She explained to her son that she would attend the special advance showing in Corpus Christi, Tex., while Christopher saw a G-rated film in the theater next door.

Christopher appealed to Uncle David.

Beaird pleaded with his sister. “I explained that my film was geared specifically to teen-agers, that kids of Christopher’s age would see absolutely nothing in ‘Party Animal’ that he wasn’t already accustomed to.”

Beaird’s sister stood tough: She exiled Christopher to the re-release of “Pinocchio.” (Christopher was not amused.)

Beaird was crestfallen. He hadn’t expected artistic censorship so close to home: “When it comes to these R-rated teen-age comedies, a major generation gap has opened up. Things that shock parents are easily shrugged off by the adolescent audiences of these teen-age comedies. To them, these ‘awful’ things are quite innocent.”

His sister, Joanna Carson, didn’t agree: “I thought parts of ‘Party Animal’ were quite funny, but, overall, it wasn’t something I wanted my 13-year-old to see,” she said in a phone interview.

Carson believes Hollywood is wrong when it insists that only raunch and sexual innuendo will lure teen-agers into the theater. “Day after day, my sons (Christopher and Kevin, 11) avidly watch the afternoon reruns of ‘Leave It to Beaver’ and ‘The Brady Bunch.’

“But I’m really angry that a man as talented as David has to make a movie this junky just to get started in Hollywood. It makes me very, very sad.”

As for Christopher, he said emphatically: “I believe that I should be able to see Uncle David’s film. I know it’s funny and that I would like it. But maybe it’ll show up on cable TV.”

Beaird, like many film makers of this genre, feels that most of the raunch is quite innocent and that the “spirit of fun is what dominates in the genre. . . . Let’s face it; the teen-age audience is well-schooled and already knows what to expect from these movies. They don’t perceive them as dirty in any sense of the word.”

As much as these defenses of such movies appear to be cop-outs, the official Classification and Ratings Administration of the Motion Picture Assn. of America agrees: “The teen-age and young adult audience has experienced a great revolution in taste since ‘Animal House’ received its R rating in 1978,” said Richard Heffner, chairman of the ratings board. “When it comes to this genre, we on the board have seen a major bastardization of culture and of standards.” He added that the trend “offended and saddened” him.

Another spokesman for the ratings board, who asked not to be identified, said that some on the six-member panel mightily wished for the power to shelve dozens of the tasteless films. When it comes to taste alone, however, the panel is impotent. (The only thing that will guarantee an R rating--which most of these films receive--is the use of the so-called F word more than once. Utterance of the word once only calls for a PG-13.)

In essence, Heffner explained that (in this genre at least) raunch is in the eye of the beholder: “We have no rigid set of rules. Our rulings are now designed to reflect contemporary standards. And taste is seven years older since the R rating was given to ‘Animal House.’ The parents on the board seem to accept more and more each year.”

That is, the flashes of nudity, outbursts of bad language and mild sexism of “Animal House” opened the door for the more blatant nudity and leering sexism of “Porky’s,” which in turn ushered in the entire encyclopedia of grossness now swamping America.

The mere accusation of bad taste sent many of the film makers interviewed into an angry and defensive posture. Neal Israel, who co-wrote “Police Academy” and “Bachelor Party” and also directed the latter, said that much of the so-called tastelessness is actually realism: “Some of the on-screen stunts which offend some adults are simply filmed versions of incidents which actually happen to teen-agers and young adults.”

For example, the scene in “Bachelor Party” in which a male stripper slips his penis between a hot dog bun and serves it to an abashed matron actually occurred during a wild party at one of Los Angeles’ clubs, according to Israel and his partner, Pat Proft.

Director Sean Cunningham (“Spring Break”) was hot too: “I took endless flak because of the wet T-shirt contest and wide-open voyeurism of ‘Spring Break.’ And I resented it. I was merely portraying on screen the phenomena I witnessed when college kids invaded Florida resorts. Maybe parents were mad because they didn’t know these things went on.”

Such artistic disclaimers aside, rampant tastelessness of the basest sort typifies the genre and it’s deliberate. In one instance, “Party Animal” was sent back to director Beaird by International Film Marketing, the releasing company, which wanted more nudity. “It was incredible and embarrassing,” Beaird remembered. “I was shamefully forced to go back to my cast and ask them to debase themselves.”

Beaird empathized with his cast to such an extent that he made sound-stage history by stripping himself to film the scene. “I wanted to show them that I wasn’t willing to have them do anything that I wouldn’t do myself.”

“This is movie making at its (most crass),” Beaird charged. “It’s no great accomplishment to achieve nudity and violence--you can buy them.”

Still, Beaird himself conceived “Party Animal” and beat the bushes for the $280,000 to pay for it--in order to break into Hollywood. The director, 31, worked in Chicago and L.A. theater as both an actor and a playwright for 10 years before venturing into film. He debuted at 19 in Chicago’s Ravinia Arts Festival’s production of “Look Homeward Angel” and founded the Wisdom Bridge Theater of Chicago, for which he wrote six plays, including “Dignity,” a comedy about Socrates that will be aired on PBS in March.

He then raised $100,000 to make a modern fairy-tale movie, “Octavia,” an innocent story of a crippled teen-age girl that will be distributed here this summer by International Film Marketing--ironically, the same company that’s distributing “Party Animal.”

So why did Beaird, with a background of classical drama, turn his talents to “Party Animal,” which Daily Variety called “a tasteless, amateurishly made, sexploitation film which aims for the lowest common denominator”?

“I found out that I could only sell this sort of film and only on the basest of terms,” he explained. “It was my breakthrough.”

The experience opened his eyes to what he called a “great, gulping appetite for tastelessness in this teen-oriented genre.”

“I’ve watched grown men of 50 or 60--top executives in a major film company--sit around in three-piece suits and argue for half an hour about whether or not to put a whole nipple onto the wide screen,” he said. “And I heard some of them say with a very straight face that perhaps only half a nipple would be far more tasteful .”

When “Party Animal” grossed more than $1.5 million in its first two weeks in Los Angeles and Texas theaters, he said he was immediately offered six figures to make “Revenge of the Party Animal.”

He replied, “Never!”

Irving N. Ivers, president of worldwide marketing for MGM/UA and one of the men who helped sell “Porky’s” when he was at 20th Century Fox, says that he has no regrets about that one or the similar “Hot Dog--The Movie,” a 1984 MGM film referred to as “Porky’s on skis.”

“All of the so-called distasteful elements in this genre are really quite commonplace for the teen-age market. I took my children, one 12 and the other 14, to ‘Porky’s’ gladly and watched them enjoy it to the fullest. Personally, I think it’s really bad taste when people get hurt on screen.”

Linda Goldenberg, Fox vice president of field operations/national productions, emphatically defended the taste level of the films she has helped market (“Porky’s,” “Bachelor Party,” etc.): “Raunch, when it is used in the context of these films, is really quite warm and wonderful. The audiences take it in a great spirit of fun, much as earlier audiences loved the slightly tacky antics of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers. Taste is in the eye of the beholder.”

Sherry Lansing, who was president of Fox when “Porky’s” was offered to it for distribution (she’s now is a partner in Lansing-Jaffe Productions) championed the film through vehement in-studio quarrels over its rampant raunchiness. She said in an interview last week that she liked “Porky’s” from the first moment she saw it: “It was so special, so honest, so innocent and so funny that I fell in love with it.”

Although Lansing declined to talk about it, she reportedly became embroiled in a nasty fight over whether “Porky’s” was “clean enough” to release. Along with other production executives, Lansing slated the film for national release in the late summer of 1981. But the marketing staff had other ideas, according to a Fox executive who asked not to be identified.

“The marketing people flatly felt it was too grungy to sell,” he said. “And it took much pleading and diplomacy on the part of Sherry to get this film out.” Even then, the studio only agreed to “test” the film in two suburban theaters. When the kids flocked to these special previews, the marketing officials changed their mind.

Alan Ladd Jr. said he was as proud to put his name on “Police Academy” as any film made by the Ladd Co. “I think it was in excellent taste and avoided the salaciousness evidenced in the other films in this genre. It could have been tasteless, but we decided, in the end, to allude to the sexual scenes rather than show them.

“Despite the reviews, ‘Police Academy’ was a very well-made film which succeeded because of its anti-Establishment elements,” concluded Ladd, who was named president of United Artists last week.

Other studio executives, however, flatly refused to comment on the question of taste in interviews for this series. “We pass on this one--none of our executives will be available for comment,” said a spokesman for Warner Bros. At Fox, overall champions of the genre, members of the present executive corps also declined. Said one publicist, “I’ve checked, and you’ll never get an executive here to discuss that hot potato.”

Marvin Davis, owner of Fox, under whose tenure the studio’s slob comedies were made, reportedly was sent copies of both “Porky’s” at his Denver home, but rumors persist that he never actually screened them. Calendar made several attempts to reach Davis for comments on their taste; aides in Los Angeles laughed at the requests for an interview, but they contacted Davis in Denver and reported that he refused to comment. Similar rebuffs came from top execs at Columbia Pictures and Universal.

Ironically, some studio executives have fought to the last gasp trying to keep some of the raunchiest scenes ever filmed in the final cut. Perhaps the best example occurred during the making of “Police Academy.”

In the original script (by Israel and Proft), directions called for a vignette entitled “the psychological sit-up.” The hero, Steve Guttenberg, was to have challenged an evil training sergeant to a contest involving a lewd maneuver. The sergeant was to do a series of 25 sit-ups with Guttenberg crouching over him. At the crucial moment, Guttenberg was to lower his pants so the sergeant’s face would end up touching Guttenberg’s bare rear. Director Hugh Wilson refused to shoot the vignette. Producer Paul Maslansky appealed to executives of the Ladd Co., who ordered the lewd stunt to be filmed at all costs.

Wilson said he replied somewhat angrily, “I’ll film this, but you won’t like it.”

“And I pulled no punches,” Wilson remembered. “I put the camera right up close to the sergeant and Guttenberg. It looked awful--and I knew it.”

The next day, when Maslansky and Ladd executives saw it, they caved in. “That’s dreadful,” said one of them. “Take it out.”

In this case, Israel and Proft said they were relieved that the scene was sliced. “In retrospect, we knew you couldn’t have your hero drop his pants and still be the likable stalwart,” Proft said. “You really can go too far, and what looks good on paper often becomes impossibly lewd onscreen.”

One series of in-depth studies shows that tastelessness--even when it’s especially effective--only fuels the box-office fire. Steve Arvin and Ed Mintz of the rating service Cinemascore discovered that bad taste was viewed as “campy” by the young audiences. (Cinemascore regularly polls thousands of ticket buyers when movies open and analyzes the data for film companies and other clients.)

“Don’t get me wrong,” Mintz said. “These kids fully realize the degree of tastelessness to which they are being exposed. But they don’t care. They don’t even care how bad and repetitive these scenes are. They sit there waiting for bad taste to ‘laugh down’ at it.”

Mintz said some of those polled deride the baseness bombarding them from the screen. “Many of them say, ‘Yuk, was that a gross-out!’ Then they get back in line to see the movie again.”

During the preview run of “Party Animal” in Corpus Christi, an elderly couple somehow stumbled into the theater with a young grandson in tow. Halfway through the film, the woman huffed out of the theater with the others trailing behind. But the next night, survey takers saw the elderly man back for a second look. Observed a spokesman for the distributor of the film, “And this time he stayed for the entire movie.”