RICHIE (NO SURPRISE) IS HEADING FOR THE MOVIES

It was inevitable that singer Lionel Richie’s name would show up in a film column.

The successful ones all end up over here eventually. Crosby, Sinatra, Presley, Prince. Records are nice, but the Big Screen is Bogart. The bait is immortality.

Richie calls it “that next step to Frontierland.”

Already holding one Oscar nomination for a song (“Endless Love”) and likely to have another soon (for “Say You, Say Me” from “White Nights”), Richie is declaring. He’ll make his first movie late this year, or early next, with others, he hopes, to follow.

“I want this to be my novelty,” Richie said, during a break at Ocean Way Recording Studios in Hollywood. “I will always have the music business as my main thing, but I want the film business as the playground I can go to.”

Richie hasn’t settled on a film project yet. He says he is considering four of them, but will probably put off a decision until October when he returns from a four-month world tour that will leap-frog from Europe to the States to Japan to Australia.

“I am not coming in (to movies) asking for the lead role in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” Richie says. “Acting is a studied craft, like anything else. You start at the bottom and learn it.”

This is good because Clark Gable Richie isn’t. But there are engaging quotients of humor and affability to the singer that are apparent both on meeting him and in watching his rock videos, and Richie says he will choose a debut role that is close to his personality.

“I don’t expect anyone to say--after one film--that I am a great actor,” he says. “The most I’m hoping for is that they’ll say, ‘He has the potential of being great.’ ”

Richie says he has been offered acting jobs in the past, but didn’t feel secure enough as a solo singer (he broke away from the Commodores three years ago) to take on another medium.

“Now that I feel comfortable as a solo artist, I’m ready to take on the challenge,” he says. “I think, to be successful, you have to keep going to the edge, doing things people don’t expect from you. I’ve done that with my music. Lionel Richie going to movies is certainly Lionel Richie going to the edge.”

Here’s a role that would be perfect for Richie’s film debut.

A black kid, growing up during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s in a house across from the Tuskegee University in Alabama, becomes so mesmerized by the passion of such guest lecturers as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. that he decides to go to college and become a lawyer.

But there is the tug of music, an adopted blend of rock, country, gospel and soul. So when, as a college student, he is asked by a group of five other campus musicians to join them in a rock group that would be a black version of the Beatles, he agrees.

After years of struggle, of sleeping in a van with his head pressed so firmly against sound equipment that you can read the brand name “Compact Amp” on his forehead the next morning, he and the group hit it big.

Then later he breaks away to start a solo career. In the film’s closing scene, we see him on a stage at the Coliseum, telling a television audience of 2.6 billion people around the world how proud America is to have hosted the Olympic Games.

Then he launches into a dazzling 20-minute version of one of his greatest hits while 80,000 people dance in the stands around him.

Richie says that when that moment actually occurred 16 months ago, he wanted to freeze time and step out of the picture and just look at it.

“I wanted it to last forever,” he says.

It’s hard to duplicate a high like that, but less than a year later, Richie did it. He and Michael Jackson co-wrote a song called “We Are the World,” and with music producer/composer Quincy Jones, they managed to enlist 45 of the world’s top rock, pop, jazz and country stars for one all-night session that would--from record and videocassette sales--earn more than $40 million for famine relief in Africa.

That night is memorable to Richie for other reasons. A few hours before the session began, he hosted the American Music Awards and also won six awards.

“Under normal circumstances, that evening would have been the highlight of a lifetime,” Richie says. “But a few hours later, I’m in a room with all these legends and people like Bob Dylan and Ray Charles and Bruce Springsteen are saying, ‘Lionel, how do you want me to sing this line?’ ”

There’s more. When Richie’s “Say You, Say Me” single reached the top of the music charts recently, that made nine years in a row that he has had a No. 1 hit--a record he shares, for the moment, with Irving Berlin.

“You don’t write songs to win awards or set records,” Richie says. “If you tried, those would be the ones that you could count on not working. Is there pressure trying to break a record? No, there’s pressure just trying to come up with another song that works.”

If Richie should win an Oscar for “Say You, Say Me,” or have the No. 1 song that makes it 10 years in a row, the emotional highs won’t approach those he had during the Olympics and the “We Are the World” session.

But looking further ahead, there are the movies. You never know. Crosby, Sinatra, Presley, Prince, Richie?

“I am not counting on anything there,” Richie says. “I’m starting at the bottom, just like I did with the Commodores. The only difference is that I won’t wake up with ‘Custom Amp’ on my face. No matter how bad it gets, I won’t have to sleep with the equipment again.”