ORION WILL SIT OUT THE HOLIDAY SEASON

Orion Pictures has decided not to enter the crowded 1985 Christmas movie derby, making it either the first winner or the first loser of the season.

The studio, which earlier showed both Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School” and Tim Conway’s “The Longshot” on its Christmas form, has notified its exhibitor clients that it is sitting out this holiday season.

“It’s like a horse race,” says Orion President Irwin Yablans. “It’s just foolish to enter unless you’ve got a movie with an incredible want-to-see.”

Yablans says Christmas has become a trap for studios in recent years, causing them to rush big budget movies into a competition period so brief and frantic that quality films often get buried and lost.

“If you guess wrong in summer, you’ve got lots of time to recoup,” Yablans says. “If you guess wrong at Christmas, you’re out and that’s the end of it.”

There may be more juggling on the Christmas schedule, but right now, here’s what the rest of the studios are planning to put under our trees.

Columbia: Richard Pryor’s semi-autobiographical “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling”; Taylor Hackford’s “White Nights” with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines, and “Murphy’s Romance,” starring Sally Field and James Garner.

Disney: A reissue of “101 Dalmatians.”

MGM/UA: “Rocky IV.”

Paramount: “Steven Spielberg’s Young Sherlock Holmes” and “Clue.”

Tri-Star: “Santa Claus--The Movie.”

Fox: The “Romancing the Stone” sequel, “The Jewel of the Nile,” and the science fiction adventure “Enemy Mine.”

Universal: Sydney Pollack’s “Out of Africa,” with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, and Steven Spielberg’s “The Money Pit.”

Warner Bros: A Dan Aykroyd/Chevy Chase comedy “Spies Like Us”; Al Pacino’s “Revolution,” and “The Color Purple,” the first film Spielberg has directed since “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

CLOSED DOORS: The Picwood Theater, one of the oldest theaters on the city’s West Side, closed its doors last week for the last time. The 900-seat theater, across the street from the new Westside Pavilion, is being demolished to make way for an additional shopping complex.

The Picwood, built in the late 1940s, was showing Tri-Star’s “Volunteers” through last Friday. Its passing (the theater’s, not the movie’s) is to be mourned.