IN THE SPOTLIGHT WITH ‘EDUCATION’

David Freeman’s new book of linked short stories, “A Hollywood Education: Tales of Movie Dreams and Easy Money” (Putnam’s: $17.95), seems to be selling out as fast as local stores can stock it. Small wonder; it has been receiving the kind of reviews that should be carved in granite on the base of a statue.

In this newspaper, Carolyn See called it “the best book anybody has written about Hollywood, ever . . . a knockout . . . amazing . . . profound.” Wow. And, having read 500 Hollywood fictions for her dissertation, See writes with unusual authority.

Her review, and other encomiums from around the country, have caused Freeman to look at the book again in a kind of dazed, Did I really do that? awe, he said one morning this week.

“My wife was in Hunter’s (book store) and heard that Billy Wilder had come to buy a copy and they were sold out. She sent him our last copy. Billy Wilder!”

Freeman is a quite scholarly or indeed writerly looking man with thinning brown hair, spectacles and an indoor complexion, somewhat suggesting, in the present context, a Clark Kent who discovers to his astonishment that he is wearing a red-and-blue outfit beneath his tweed jacket and chinos.

The narrator who links the stories in “A Hollywood Education” is a New York Post reporter who has found his way to Hollywood as a script doctor.

He is not a perfect alter ego for Freeman, but he is, I have to think, a reasonably accurate facsimile. Freeman never worked for the Post, but he was a successful free-lance magazine writer, contributing primarily to New York and Esquire magazines, before he found his way to Hollywood as a script doctor.

The narrator sounds like a native New Yorker, but Freeman is from Cleveland and started at Kent State before he switched to Yale and then the Yale Drama School, intending to be a playwright. (He discovered movies at the Yale Film Society, but only as relaxation from the rigors of live drama.)

The magazine work sustained him while he did the plays. One of them, “Jessie and the Bandit Queen,” was an Off-Broadway success and continues to be performed around the country, Freeman says.

He later wrote a book of stories, “U.S. Grant in the City,” which was a critical success but did not sell. His agent (“working as an agent should,” Freeman says admiringly) pushed the book and the reviews at film industry contacts. From the exposure came an offer from Richard Sylbert at Paramount to do some rewriting on “First Love,” directed by Joan Darling from the book by Harold Brodkey. So began Freeman’s own Hollywood education.

Subsequently, several doctorings and sold-but-unproduced scripts later, Freeman became the last writer to work with Alfred Hitchcock, reshaping an original spy thriller Hitchcock had initially devised with Ernest Lehman (“North by Northwest”).

The project was, or became as Hitchcock’s health failed, a kindly charade (which the director realized was a charade, Freeman is sure) underwritten by Lew Wasserman and Universal to divert Hitch from the physical and emotional pains of what had become a lonely life. Charade or not, Freeman says, Hitchcock ultimately began to muse how the story (intended for location shooting in Finland and elsewhere) could be rewritten and made on a sound stage.

Freeman wrote of the experience in “The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock,” which did not sell, possibly because it recorded so melancholy a finish to so remarkable a life.

Freeman decided, however, that it would be the first of a trilogy about Hollywood. “A Hollywood Education,” the second, was originally to be a series of nonfiction sketches on the daily life in the business. “Nothing cosmic, just trying to say what it’s like as you live it.” He would deal with the larger forces that shape the industry (the rise of television, the divestiture of the theaters, and so on).

But it went so badly, he says, that he was on the verge of returning his “very modest” advance to Putnam’s. His wife (Judith Gingold, a former editor at Newsweek) and his editor suggested “that I just tell some stories.”

The first effort, a slice of what became “The Presto Brothers,” went so well that he knew they were right, and he finished the book in less than a year. In the story, two brothers from the Bronx who work their way up from the mail room at the William Morris office are estranged when their mother is killed in a mud slide, a bizarre but not unprecedented Hollywood finish.

The reviews that anger him are a handful that have said, even in praise, that his is another roman a clef in which real figures can be detected behind thin fictional disguises. “That’s such an easy, reductionist view of fiction; it’s such a reductionist approach to doing fiction.”

Freeman rightly denies that there are hidden faces to be discerned in the text. Even “The Senator and the Movie Star” is not linked with any senator or movie star we know, and the swing figure in an ironic and understated story is neither of the lovers but a latter-day mogul.

“Life here is not like life anywhere else, and if you live the life, you should try to reflect it. I found myself trying to reflect it truly , not as a journalistic effort but as an interpretive effort. I knew that wouldn’t in itself make the book successful, but it was a start. You hope the fiction reflects and illuminates. What was it Henry James said? The novel should offer recognition and surprise. All at the same time, of course.”

What seems remarkable, verging on extraordinary, about Freeman’s tales is the authenticity with which they evoke the town, from the non-mythic executive offices to the teen-age runaways hustling on the streets of Hollywood (a horror story told, like all else, with level-eyed compassion and no loading of cynicism, sensationalism or anything else that would distort the illumination).

One of Freeman’s scripts, “Street Smart,” has just finished shooting in New York, directed by Jerry Shatzberg and starring Christopher Reeve. Freeman is making notes for the last leg of the trilogy, a Hollywood novel.

“I find myself musing on what’s turned out to be a different kind of success than I’d expected. You hope for good reviews. I’ve had experience with the succes d’estime that doesn’t sell. Now they’re printing more copies, and I’m nonplussed.”