BIG BUZZ & HOT TICKETS

“Have you seen ‘Prick Up Your Ears’?” is the first question likely to be raised these days along the circuit traveled by the publicists, journalists, agents, actors, directors and others who make up the film community here. There are other topics of conversation this time of year: the Oscars--Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” is considered the front-runner--and who is and who is not invited to Polly Bergen’s annual Oscar party.

Other buzz: The nearly sold-out, two-week-long “New Directors/New Films” series now under way at the Museum of Modern Art that has introduced such directors as Steven Spielberg and John Sayles in the past. The biggest draw this year is “Sleepwalk,” a film about the downtown Manhattan art scene featuring performance artist Ann Magnuson and directed by Sara Driver, whose long-time personal and professional relationship with Jim (“Down By Law”) Jarmusch apparently serves as the main attraction of the new film.

Stephen Frears’ “Prick Up Your Ears,” about the life and death of English playwright Joe Orton and his companion of many years, Kenneth Halliwell, is arguably the hottest screening-room ticket in town. The story, which ended in 1967 when Halliwell bludgeoned his notorious lover to death, is based on John Lahr’s 1977 Orton biography of the same title.

With no “all-media,” large-theater screening yet planned in advance of the April 17 New York opening of the film, the approximate one dozen scheduled screenings in a 150-seat Broadway screening room have been solidly booked. “I’ve been keeping them away with bats,” said the publicist who is handling the film for its distributor, the Samuel Goldwyn Co. “People call pleading with me to let them sit on the floor, and others try to get in by calling and saying they are people whose names are on the lists.”

“Ishtar,” the Elaine May-Warren Beatty-Dustin Hoffman project that reportedly has cost as much as $40 million, has been the subject of much chatter--that is, until a recent New York Magazine cover story about the movie revealed little to substantiate rumors that the film has been “troubled.” This, coupled with the fact that there are no screenings of the still-being-edited movie yet scheduled, seems to have moved the picture to the back of peoples’ minds. It’s due for release from Columbia Pictures on May 15.

Much more prominent on people’s minds is talk of the possible July 1 Directors Guild of America strike that is propelling at least six major feature films and a slew of movie stars into town by mid-April, calculated by major film studios and producers as the time by which films need to roll in order to be completed by the possible strike date. Pulled off track by the strike threat are at least two previously scheduled New York projects: 20th Century Fox’s “Big,” to be directed by Penny Marshall, and Disney’s “Big Business,” to star Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler. Spokesmen for both companies acknowledged that the films have been “pushed back” because of insufficient time to prepare them to roll before the mid-April cutoff date.

Already shooting on locations here and across the Hudson River in New Jersey is Columbia’s “Punch Line,” an original comedy written and directed by David Seltzer about two aspiring stand-up comics, played by Sally Field and Tom Hanks.

Shooting upstate in Buffalo, and due to shoot in New York City soon, are Steve Martin and John Candy in John Hughes’ latest comedy for Paramount, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.”

Due to roll by the mid-April deadline are Frank Perry’s “Hello, Again,” an original comedy by Susan (“Compromising Positions”) Isaacs about a woman who, in “Topper”-like fashion, returns from the dead. According to Perry, the film, for Disney, will star Shelley Long, Judith Ivey, “L.A. Law’s” Corbin Bernsen and a fourth “major actor” yet to be cast.

Also:

“Bright Lights, Big City,” starring Michael J. Fox as the anti-hero of Jay McInerney’s popular novel of a few years back about a young, New Yorker-type writer on a cocaine binge.

Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” a film for Fox about greed and corruption in the stock market, starring Michael Douglas as a seasoned broker and Charlie Sheen as a newcomer to the business. Also featured are Martin Sheen, re-creating on screen his real-life role as the younger Sheen’s father, and Daryl Hannah as the young Sheen’s love interest.

Out on Long Island, Rob Lowe is set to star in “Dying for Love,” the first American-made film by Bob Swaim, an American who has been living in Paris, where he made such films as “La Balance” and “Half Moon Street.”