HE’S GOT AN EYE FOR THE WILD-AND-CRAZY STORIES

If you’re like a lot of people, you respond to weird, funny or heart-warming human interest stories in your daily newspaper by shaking your head, laughing or crying and filing them away as good conversation fodder for your lunch break. If you’re like producer David Permut, you try to reach the people in the story and buy the movie rights.

Remember that Venezuelan ship that ran aground in quiet, rich West Palm Beach and wedged itself along socialite Mollie Wilmot’s pool? Or the Newark, N. J., deli owner who became his own worst enemy when he tried to set up a vigilante force in his neighborhood? How about the San Francisco judge who sentenced a bordello madam to spend time in a convent?

The madam was played by Suzanne Pleshette in a TV movie called “Changing Habits.” The vigilante was played by Tom Skerritt in a 1982 feature titled “Fighting Back.” Wilmot, though Permut thinks she might have chosen Catherine Deneuve or Jacqueline Bisset, will be played by Bette Midler in “Palm Beached,” set for production next year for Walt Disney’s Touchstone Films.

Permut, just a street-wise kid from Bel-Air, is the producer of all three projects.

“When you can get a crazy story based on real people, it’s great,” Permut says. “If I went into a studio with a story about a Palm Beach socialite who finds a freighter and 12 Venezuelans in her pool, they would say, ‘Are you crazy?’ But the fact that it happened. . . .”

Permut is a pretty good story himself. At age 15, he had the hottest “Maps to the Stars Homes” corner in Bel-Air, where his family lived. At 19, he was a professional talent agent. By his mid-20s, he had co-produced a concert film that grossed about $30 million, or 40 times what it cost to make.

The film, which Permut co-produced with promoter/showman Bill Sargent, was the 1979 “Richard Pryor Live in Concert.” Before that, they produced “Give ‘Em Hell Harry!,” a one-man play that was videotaped, transferred to film and released to rave reviews in movie theaters. James Whitmore got a best actor Oscar nomination for it.

Permut, who brought more than a little hustler’s blood to the partnership, admits that working with Sargent was like hanging on to the wing of a jet. Rich one month, broke the next, Sargent was always thinking, always dreaming up schemes. In the space of a couple of years, they made a $50-million offer for a Beatles reunion and nearly pulled off the “Death Match,” which was to have been a live closed-circuit telecast of a man fighting an 18-foot great white shark.

The Beatles never got together. Neither did the man and the shark. Now, Permut thinks Sargent may be a better subject than any of them.

“I’m trying to put together a movie on Sargent now,” Permut says. “He’s Mike Todd and P. T. Barnum rolled into one. I have never met a more flamboyant or brilliant promoter.”

You can better understand Permut’s awe for Sargent by taking a quick glimpse at his teen career as a map salesman on Sunset Boulevard. Permut began photocopying gas station maps of Bel-Air when his family (his father was an executive with the Ogden Corp.) moved there from the East Coast. A friend, whose dad worked for one of the major agencies, slipped him a list of stars and their home addresses and he was in business.

“It was Tijuana in Beverly Hills,” Permut says. “I charged three bucks, two bucks, whatever people would pay. Katharine Hepburn and Fred Astaire used to come by and sign the map and I would get more money for it. After a while, I figured, ‘What do I need them for? All I need is a pen.’ ”

Permut says he was making $50 to $60 a day on weekends, more when his parents were out of town and he gave guided tours of his own home, telling the paying customers that it belonged to Jerry Lewis.

There were odd moments on the job. Some of Permut’s classmates at a private high school in Beverly Hills lived at some of his most prominent map addresses.

“Dino Martin, Tina Sinatra. They could never quite figure it out. I’m going to school with them during the week and selling their addresses on weekends. They’d drive by and say, ‘What are you doing out there?’ ”

The movie maps were outlawed for a while after the annoyed residents complained. One of Permut’s rivals was arrested, as a test case, and it went all the Supreme Court where the ban was repealed.

“Because we updated the maps quarterly, we came under the same provision as a periodical,” Permut says. “If they could sell the L.A. Times in Bel-Air, we could sell our maps.”

By that time, Permut was off the street and into a three-piece-suit, working as a talent agent. But he was not forgotten by his neighbors. Early in his new job, Permut was visiting a client on the set of a TV show and was introduced to her director, Hy Averback.

“Hy Averback lived across the street from where I sold my maps,” Permut says. “He knew me as the movie-map kid. Thank God, he didn’t say anything in front of her. Outside, he said, ‘What happened to the maps?’ I said, ‘I went into the agency business.’ ”

Permut, who talks fast enough and has enough stories to cook a tape recorder in about 60 minutes, has been basically hustling movies instead of maps ever since. He had production deals with Columbia Pictures and Lorimar, and he now has one with United Artists.

Right now, he is on a streak.

Among the more than half-dozen projects he has in either development or production: Blake Edwards’ “Blind Date,” starring Kim Basinger and “Moonlighting’s” Bruce Willis, set for Christmas release by Tri-Star Pictures; “Dragnet,” a comedy based on the 1950s TV series, to star Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks, in pre-production at Universal; “Highway Patrol,” another comedy spun from a ‘50s TV series, this one planned for John Candy and United Artists; and “Buried Alive, the Janis Joplin Story,” an uncast project he said he is preparing with Sherry Lansing and Stanley Jaffee for CBS-TV.

Permut is still reading the newspapers carefully, and lately, he’s had success flushing some pretty good writers out of the brush. He’s been able to get development deals (development deals are producers’ paydays) for writers he found working in (1) a Federated stereo store in the Valley, (2) a hotel in Detroit and (3) a bar in Inglewood.

But enough of these sober credits. What about Mollie Wilmot?

“When that freighter got in her pool, Mollie became a celebrity for about 15 minutes,” Permut says. “She was in People magazine, she was everywhere. . . . She has blond hair to here, never takes her sunglasses off, smokes with a cigarette holder, lives next to the Kennedy compound. She’s worth about 50, 60 million dollars, talks in this throaty Lauren Bacall voice . . . . She says things like, ‘My second husband was chief operating officer of an oil company called Chevron.’ There were Mollie Wilmot look-alike contests being held in bars.

“I called her up and told her what I was interested in. She said, ‘Darling, I think this would make a divine Broadway musical.’ I was on a plane that night to Palm Beach.”

It took more than three months to get the ship out of Mollie’s pool (there was some debate as to who would pay the $300,000 tow charge), and more than seven months to get her signature on a contract. Wilmot had a battery of lawyers, including the late Roy Cohn, and agents, including Irving Lazar. She wasn’t from hunger.

But it was worth it, says Permut, describing (with presumed hyperbole) a scene that perhaps only Bette Midler could play.

“When this ship came in, it was 4:30 in the morning. The house was supposed to be shot for the first page of Town & Country (magazine). The photographer was staying at the Breakers Hotel. She called and said, ‘You can’t come by today. There’s a boat in my pool.’

“What it was was an oil tanker, and she had 12 Venezuelan Blutos in her living room. She invited them in. She didn’t have anything to eat, so she fed them Beluga caviar and pate. She didn’t speak Spanish, so she had a friend come over to interpret. The friend says, ‘What Manuel wants is some white bread and peanut butter to go with the jam.’ The jam is the caviar.’

“If the boat had landed in Armand Hammer’s backyard, we probably wouldn’t have heard much about it. But Mollie brought these guys in the house, put plastic runners down on the rug and started taking down the Chagalls and Picassos and putting them away. There are pictures of the 12 characters sitting in her living room.”

The hook on “Palm Beached” is not so much Mollie Wilmot’s character, Permut says, as the clash of two cultures. The Venezuelans stuck around, mingling with the locals from their grounding Nov. 23, 1984, to the celebrated undocking of the tanker the following March 6.

The Venezuelans will have to look out for themselves, but Wilmot is representing her interests as a technical consultant on “Palm Beached.” Permut says the socialite has been following the movie’s development closely.

“When I told her about the deal with Disney, she was very calm. She said, ‘Maybe I should buy a little of their stock.’ I don’t know if she did, but the next day, Disney went up 2 1/2 points.”