CATES & COUNTER: DUEL IN HOLLYWOOD SUN : DGA Leader Cates Flexes Political Muscles : DGA LEADER SHOWING HIS POLITICS

As a movie and television director, Gilbert Cates never achieved the star status of a Steven Spielberg or a John Huston.

As president of the Directors Guild of America, however, the 53-year-old Cates has emerged as one of the most important leaders in the guild’s 51-year history. He has also displayed political skills that could be nudging him toward a wider political arena.

One source close to Cates on Tuesday confirmed a Daily Variety report that the guild leader was at least tentatively entertaining suggestions that he enter California’s Democratic primary next June as a candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Republican Sen. Pete Wilson.

In an interview, Cates said only that he was “aware of the rumors” of a candidacy, but didn’t “have time to digest them” because of the guild’s tense contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

Despite the political talk, Cates said that he’s been only “slightly active” in Democratic politics in the past.

Cates declined to say whether he would stand for election to a third two-year term as DGA president at the guild’s convention Saturday.

For the moment, indeed, the tall and articulate guild leader has no shortage of more immediate problems on which to hone his political wiles.

With a possible industry-wide directors’ strike looming as early as next week, Cates must persuade other unions that film directors, despite their Mercedes image, are solid labor people. He must also keep his own union from disintegrating into factions of the sort that damaged the Writers Guild of America during its 1985 negotiations. And he must get the ball back from shrewd company negotiators who have kept discussions toward a new three-year contract focused squarely on company demands for give-backs.

Negotiations are set to resume Thursday, and the guild has set 6 p.m. Friday as a deadline for a producers’ reply to contract proposals submitted by the directors last week. Meanwhile, negotiations are continuing with respect to a second contract covering about 1,000 DGA members employed by the major TV networks.

“Cates has got the most difficult job of any man in Hollywood,” industry attorney Peter Dekom said Tuesday. “He’s the man caught in the middle. There really have been some big financial changes in the business, and he’s aware of it. But how can any labor leader in his right mind go backwards?”

In his public statements, Cates actually has made no concession to entertainment industry claims that the movie and television business is in deep trouble because of excessive payments to labor. In rallying his 8,500 members, in fact, the DGA president has resorted to rhetoric worthy of an old-time labor leader.

During a guild meeting here last week, Cates lashed out broadly at big conglomerates such as Gulf & Western and Coca-Cola that have taken control of many entertainment concerns. “We will rock the very foundations of those high-rises and offices in distant cities,” he said at one point. And then added, “Anyone who has survived the rigors of a typical Hollywood production can eat business-school graduates for breakfast--and still have room for an early lunch.”

Ironically, Cates says that his own father, far from being a labor leader, was a New York dressmaker who at one point served as president of the United Dress Manufacturers, an industry group.

Cates received a master’s degree in fine arts at Syracuse University, where he became interested in drama when he was drafted--as a freshman member of the fencing team--to serve as technical adviser to a production of “Richard III.”

Like many DGA members, he has been more prolific than brilliant during a Hollywood career that appears to have been split almost evenly between movie and television work.

His latest movie, “Backfire,” is an erotic suspense thriller starring Karen Allen and Keith Carradine. Screened for potential buyers last spring at Cannes, one viewer described it as a “twisted murder mystery in the mold of ‘Body Heat.’ ”

As a movie director, Cates is probably best known for his work on “Oh God, Book II” (of which critic Steven Sheuer wrote: “(Star) George Burns is out to give God a bad name in a sequel to the mild 1977 hit”), and for “The Last Married Couple in America,” a 1980 comedy that raised some eyebrows because of some explicit language from star Natalie Wood.

As a TV director and producer, Cates created “Hootenanny,” a folk-singing variety series that ran on ABC in 1963 and 1964, and received an Emmy nomination for directing “Consenting Adult,” a 1985 ABC drama about a son who declares his homosexuality to his parents. Other TV directing credits include “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” “After the Fall,” “Burning Rage” and “Hobson’s Choice.”

Actress Phoebe Cates (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High”) is the daughter of Cates’ older brother, Joseph, also a film producer and director.

Cates disputes widespread claims by guild insiders that personality clashes with national executive director Michael Franklin led to Franklin’s decision earlier this year to leave his guild post next January. “I would say that isn’t true. I’ll only add that Michael brought this guild into the 20th Century” during his nine-year tenure, Cates said.

During contract negotiations in Room 8 at the Sherman Oaks headquarters of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Franklin has continued to do most of the guild’s active bargaining, Cates said.

Despite apparently solid support for a strike by directors, assistant directors, stage managers and unit production managers, and other guild members in votes in New York and Los Angeles last week, Cates said that he isn’t satisfied that the DGA has recaptured bargaining momentum from the producers. “They’re still in the drivers’ seat,” he said of the producers’ alliance, which represents more than 200 of Hollywood’s major studios and small production companies.