FEAR AND FINGER-POINTING CLOUD BIG-BUCK SKIES OVER HOLLYWOOD : ‘Everybody’s Fearful Because (the Boom) Doesn’t Appear to Make Much Sense. People Think the Bubble’s Going to Burst--or It’s All a Dream’

In the 1980s, new-found billions of dollars have flowed into the entertainment business from sources ranging from videocassettes and cable television to a host of Wall Street stock and debt offerings.

Unfortunately, the rush of money hasn’t created happiness in Hollywood. If anything, it has garnered widespread envy, mistrust and unease.

“Everybody’s fearful because (the boom) doesn’t appear to make much sense,” said a William Morris agent. “People think the bubble’s going to burst, or it’s all a dream.”

Finger-pointing has become the favorite blood sport of industry insiders. Everybody knows somebody else whose bloated compensation is supposedly “ruining” the entertainment business.

“The real inflation isn’t what Barry Diller earns,” said one studio chief. “The real inflation,” the executive said, comes from lower-level managers and production workers who “are getting salaries that are many multiples of what they’re worth.” As it happens, the speaker ranks with Diller among the five or six best-compensated executives in town.

Angered by reports that Meryl Streep can command $4 million for a film, a celebrity screenwriter demanded: “What successful movie has she ever been in?”

“Out of Africa,” perhaps?

“Sure. But she didn’t really carry it,” the writer said, apparently unconcerned that his own fees, as high as $1 million per script, according to several agents, set a benchmark for top writers’ pay.

In other quarters, the finger-pointing has become more ominous. “Reckoning” is a favorite word of the moment in many of Hollywood’s executive suites. It is a term the more aggressive studio managers use for what they believe is a long-overdue showdown with highly paid guild and union members, whose steady wage increases (averaging between about 6% and 9% annually over the last several years) and residual payments, the executives contend, are destroying company profits.

The studios are stockpiling movies and television shows for use well into next fall--just in case that showdown should come in the form of an industry-wide strike June 30, when a three-year contract between the production companies and the powerful Directors Guild of America expires.

“The business is in for a readjusting mode,” said MCA Inc. President Sidney J. Sheinberg, defending the producers’ demand that directors set a pattern for other unions by giving up the residual payments they now receive each time a movie or TV show is resold in syndication or on videocassettes.

Sheinberg and other studio heads particularly resent paying residuals on big-budget turkeys long before they have begun to earn a profit.

“That this company should have losses on ‘Howard the Duck’ that are big enough to arm the contras , and still have to pay out additional money (before recouping expenses) . . . well, it just doesn’t make sense,” Sheinberg said.

The DGA says its members are entitled to share in the long-term return from their efforts and strongly opposes giving back any residuals. Moreover, some union members say that only a fool would agree to a producer’s request that they take residuals on profitable films alone, because, they claim, studio accounting can keep many a successful movie in the loss column forever.

“Between the Mafia and the movie business, all the good accountants are taken,” quipped Mac St. Johns, spokesman for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, repeating a hoary industry joke.

“Everybody’s becoming more cynical as to the value of participations” that defer fees until after a film makes profits, said a Hollywood agent. He estimated that fewer than one out of 25 films ever makes money for its participants--largely because of growing studio overhead and distribution charges, which in turn pay the growing salaries of studio executives.

“Witness,” seemingly one of the most successful Hollywood films in recent years, has also become the latest in a long string of “where’s the profit?” horror stories.

Released by Paramount in 1985, the movie was produced for $14.4 million, according to an individual involved in making the movie, and has brought the studio more than $50 million from box office receipts, videocassette sales and other sources. Yet, he said, by the studio’s reckoning, it is still $3.5 million in the red. A Paramount spokeswoman declined to comment.

“It’s true that Paramount hasn’t distributed any profits yet,” said F/M Entertainment President Charles Meeker, whose company helped produce “Witness.” Meeker said the movie has been slow to profit because Paramount is still recovering distribution and marketing costs that exceeded the production costs of the film.

Deeply cynical about studio definitions of profit, most of Hollywood now demands to have its money “up front.” That insistence, matched with ready capital and sharp competition among studios and independent producers for a relatively small pool of big-name talent, has led to a rapid escalation in payments for stars, directors and writers.

With rare exceptions, top actors and actresses five years ago were paid between $2 million and $3 million to make a movie. Yet several agents privately estimate that up to 15 hot stars--Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford and Jane Fonda among them--can easily get between $5 million and $6 million per picture. (Sylvester Stallone, who will get $16 million to make “Rambo III,” is so highly paid that he has become a curiosity more than a pacesetter for the star community.)

On another front, Francis Coppola apparently became the first million-dollar movie director in 1974, when Paramount paid him what it then regarded as a “superstar” salary to direct “Godfather II.” According to agents’ estimates, as many as 15 directors today command at least $2 million a picture, a minimum that has approximately doubled for that group in the last five years.

At the very top, Sydney Pollack, Ivan Reitman, and a handful of others, when included with top stars in agency “packages,” may command as much as $3 million per film, according to agents.

“For the middle-of-the-road director, the guy you really don’t want, you’re paying $500,000 or $650,000,” said a top Hollywood agent who declined to be identified.

By some measures, screenwriters have lagged other big talent in the grab for big bucks.

Elaine May was recently paid a reported $1 million for the script to “Ishtar,” a $40-million-plus comedy recently released--to mixed reviews--by Columbia. After adjusting for inflation, however, May didn’t quite match the $400,000 fee William Goldman received in 1967 for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

“Writers are just about what they were in the days of Irving Thalberg: jerks with Underwoods,” said Geoffrey Sanford, an agent who represents a number of screenwriters.

Still, a hot movie script, Sanford said, can easily fetch half a million dollars; and a handful of writer-producers, such as Gary David Goldberg of “Family Ties,” can receive payments in the tens of millions of dollars if their television shows hit big in the syndication market.

By conservative estimates, “Family Ties” will ultimately return $200 million to Paramount, and sources indicate that writer-producer Goldberg, 43, will be paid one-third of the total, or about $66 million. Goldberg, who says he didn’t file an income tax return until he was 31, finds his new wealth almost amusing.

“Diana (his wife) and I have gone from having absolutely zero money to having more than we could ever spend,” he said.

“It’s not that different. In the old days, we had nothing, so everything was possible. Now we have so much money that everything is possible.”

The money has also come easier for first-time writers.

Franklin Deese, 26, was enrolled in screenwriting classes at UCLA and working in the geology library for $5 an hour three years ago when an independent producer offered him $30,000 to develop a movie script.

Within months, he was writing an “Amazing Stories” episode for Steven Spielberg and soon had a $175,000 fee for writing a movie called “The Principal” for Tri-Star. Deese took a seven-week trip to Europe and bought an apartment building in West Los Angeles. But he is still too uneasy with his status to give up his rent-controlled student apartment in Santa Monica.

“There’s nervousness about how long this is going to last,” Deese said. Repeating one of the industry’s oldest maxims, he added: “People’s memories are short in this town. You’re only as good as your last project.”

Times Staff Writer Deborah Caulfield contributed to this article.