OLIVER STONE’S NEW FILM : WALL STREET AS A WAR ZONE

Ugliness junkies, take heart.

Sure, Oliver “War Is Hell” Stone has swapped his M-16 for a Quotron and his flak jacket for a gray-flannel suit. The screenwriter-director who raped, tortured and blew us away in movies like “Platoon,” “Scarface” and “Midnight Express” is hard at work on a new film about, of all things, high finance.

But don’t worry. He hasn’t gone soft. Wall Street is just about to get a lot meaner.

One of the hottest bits of underground reading in Hollywood these days is the third draft of the screenplay for “Wall Street.” The script is written by Stone and Stanley Weiser. Stone is currently on location New York, directing the film.

If the third draft is any indication (and scripts do have a way of evolving even as movies are getting shot), Stone’s rendering of the “most famous third of a mile in the world” is going to make the airstrip at Khe Sanh look like Club Med.

This particular Wall Street is vicious . We are talking about a world in which lip-curled corporate raiders don’t just pick up a 5% stake in some poor dope ‘ s paper company. No way. They want to “ dilute the sonofabitch “ until “every orifice in his body is flowing red.”

Guys like this aren’t happy just to screw their enemies. They like to play around with the whole bloody foxhole lexicon of sex and death.

“Wait for it to come down then we’ll raise the sperm count on the deal,” the movie’s chief bad guy barks into his silver-plated, 130-line phone. “If it looks as good as on paper, we’re in the kill zone. We lock and load pal,” he snarls at the next caller.

Stone’s movie is frankly keyed to the still sizzling insider-trading scandals that have burned several of Wall Street’s biggest players in the last year. It all started when federal investigators caught arbitrageur Ivan Boesky swapping cash for illegal stock tips from Dennis Levine, a high-powered investment banker who had worked for both Shearson Lehman Bros. and Drexel, Burnham, Lambert. Boesky started singing, and the indictments have been flying ever since.

The dramatic possibilities in the situation haven’t been lost on Hollywood. “Dynasty” recently added Dirk Maurier, the evil arb, to its cast of sleazy characters, and at least a half dozen Wall Street movie projects have been bouncing around the studios for the last six months.

In Stone’s version, an innocent young broker named Joe Fox, a.k.a. Charlie Sheen, is taken under wing by “Gekko the Great,” a hideous, green-mailing insult to humanity portrayed by Michael Douglas. At its best, the script promises to play a bit like “Sweet Smell of Success,” the 1957 masterpiece in which press-agent Tony Curtis got his education in evil at the knee of a corrupt, Walter Winchellian columnist portrayed by Burt Lancaster.

But the “Wall Street” script also promises to play a lot nastier than anything I remember from five years of financial reporting for Forbes magazine and the Wall Street Journal.

Granted, reporters probably never get in on the very worst stuff that financial types say and do. Still, I’m not completely naive. Hey, a Drexel, Burnham investment banker once explained junk bond buyers to me by pointing across the dining room at a sleek blonde and her escort. “I could offer her a hundred dollars to come home with me, and she’d be insulted,” he said. “But if I offered to fly her to Europe on the Concorde for dinner, she’d come running. Everything’s got a price.”

Another investment banker even hinted that tips and sources beyond imagining would be mine if I could “get something” on a fellow reporter who was giving his firm trouble. “Does he like boys?” the banker wanted to know.

All of which seems pretty tame compared to the goings-on that Stone and Weiser have in mind. “Rollover,” move over. Our boys are dealing in double-crosses and under-cuts so hateful that audiences will hardly even notice the occasional sermonette on the forgotten discipline of buying stocks backed by good, old-fashioned earnings potential.

(“Stick to the fundamentals, that’s how we built Hilton and IBM,” drones one lonely voice amid the Babel of tipsters and thieves. But who’s going to listen to stuff like that when you’ve got a trader nicknamed “Terminator” hanging around?)

My favorite part, but this is just a personal thing, comes when the bad guys tip a couple of pending takeovers to a Wall Street Journal reporter by calling him with a five-word code. The reporter turns to an editor and solemnly announces that such-and-such corporation is “in play”--and before you know it, the presses are rolling.

Once, a Big Investment Banker actually gave me a coded tip. Never mind the circumstances; I don’t want to get Deep Throat in trouble. The point is, I breathlessly passed the word on to my Journal editor. A level-headed sort of guy, he asked, more or less: “Now how on Earth do you figure we could use a cockeyed thing like that?”

But that’s just real life.