GOING HOLLYWOOD : PORTRAIT of the ARTIST as a YOUNG OPERATOR

AS ALWAYS, Gina Wendkos is on fast forward. She’s plugged into a new idea, and here it comes, spin ning off her mental reel.

“It’s about a casket, in a room, and these Italian guys go one by one to pay their respects, because in the casket is the woman they’ve all slept with and loved, only they won’t admit it ‘cuz they’re macho guys. She reappears in flashbacks and we see what her life was like with each man . . . and oh yeah, she left a child behind and no one knows which of them is the father and they all secretly want the kid . . .”

“ ‘Moonstruck’ meets ‘Three Men and a Baby’.” Ron Sossi cuts to the chase. Sossi artistic director of the Odyssey Theatre, who took an early interest in Wendkos’ career, knows he’s being hustled today over a basil-and-mozzarella salad at Angeli in West L.A. He doesn’t mind a bit. There’s something about her nervy energy that he finds irresistible, and in this town, he’s not alone.

“I keep flashing on ‘Citizen Kane,’ ” Sossi says.

“I dunno.” Wendkos flips a black Shirley Temple curl out of one blue eye. “I haven’t seen that. Should I?”

“Or ‘Rashomon’ . . .”

“Shomon? What’s that?”

Sossi laughs, amused by her unabashed ignorance. “Here’s the question we really should be asking,” he says. “Is the Industry going to bend you to its will, or are you going to bend it to yours? Somehow I suspect the latter.”

THE PINT-SIZED painter/performance artist /playwright crackles on the Industry buzz meter. She’s been in L.A. just over a year, and already she’s written four produced prime-time-TV episodes; directed five plays on local stages, including four of her own; been commissioned to write several feature-film scripts; secured financing to direct her first feature from an original screenplay; sold a prime-time pilot script to ABC. And then there’s her new, lucrative two-year “overall” deal as a writer-producer with Columbia Pictures Television--she’ll do concepts for new series, write pilots, and contribute scripts and ideas to existing shows. Gina Wendkos is an instinctive operator, a textbook case of how to move in on this town and--so far--make it work for her in a big way. To hear Wendkos tell it, the game she plays is a simple one. “I’m a shmata salesman,” says the 30ish New York refugee with the Totie Fields voice. “I just peddle ideas instead of dresses.”

She’s certainly one of the more agile peddlers on the Hollywood block. “Most people in this business go one step at a time--they write for TV, then movies, then they try directing,” says producer Chris Meledandri of Meledandri-Gordon Productions, who has three projects in the works with Wendkos. “Gina’s doing it all at once.”

It doesn’t hurt that she whooshed into Hollywood out of New York experimental theater in time to catch the headwind of two burgeoning trends. One is the cult of the playwright, spawned by the writers’ strike (that sent producers scrounging for new material outside of Writers Guild ranks), and by the successful stage-to-film transitions of people such as John Patrick Shanley, who captured last year’s writing Oscar for “Moonstruck.”

Then there’s the shift in focus from the teen to the adult marketplace, from the fantasy /sci-fi /special-effects genre to people-oriented films.

Which is precisely the appeal of Wendkos’ work. “She derives material from personal experience, from things that mean something to her. There’s been regrettably little of that in Hollywood,” says Interscope producer David Madden (“Three Men and a Baby,” “Outrageous Fortune”) who has commissioned a Wendkos screenplay.

Her turf is blue-collar America, and her characters--from a Southern redneck couple wigging out in the eighth month of the wife’s pregnancy to four loopy Italian Catholic girls sniping at each other in an abortion clinic--are endearing, aggressive, vulgar and full of attitude.

“Gina,” says writer-director Joel Schumacher (“Car Wash,” “The Lost Boys,” “St. Elmos Fire”) who is developing a feature with Wendkos for Paramount, “has a great sense of the contemporary cosmic joke.”

Although she’s moving inexorably into the seething heart of Hollywood, a thick layer of New York chutzpah still clings stubbornly. She’s not cowed by the slick hypertalk of agents and producers; for one thing, she talks faster than any of them. The trappings of Making It hold no allure. Not for her a car phone--it’s doubtful that her red VW bug could handle one anyway. She’d rather chug a diet Coke at the Formosa than swoon over the latest boutique Chardonnay at Spago, and her sartorial style is more Army /Navy thrift shop than Maxfield.

This is not to suggest that she’s some Zen goddess, playing it as it lays. Her ambitions are as bountiful, and as diffuse, as her story ideas. They range from owning a cat farm in Italy to becoming “a total film fascist”--like her hero, Woody Allen. “He controls his ideas from start to finish,” Wendkos says.

Much of her frenetic activity is by way of paying her dues into the coffers of artistic dictatorship. She has set out to learn how to create a TV show from top to bottom, to write a feature script worthy of being produced, to prove herself as a bankable film director of her own work.

“Look, I’m short on technique. I didn’t go to drama school, I didn’t major in English, I don’t know the classics, I don’t know what worked for Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill. So I watch, and I listen. Woody already knows everything he needs to in order to do what he wants, but I’m nowhere near that yet. Once I know what I’m doing, I won’t have to compromise, either.”

So far, she’s got the audacity, the drive, and the network of willing mentors to edge her onto the cusp of creative freedom. But whether she can muster the discipline to bring her schizy energy into focus is not yet clear.

“Gina is wildly talented, wildly, but to a degree that may be self-limiting,” says producer-dirctor Frank Perry, who optioned Wendkos’ first screenplay. “If she were less gifted she wouldn’t get so distracted. She burns like a Roman candle, popping off 12 ideas to the minute. But it still comes down to long, lonesome hours locked in a room with a machine in front of you and a sore neck and a stiff butt, not dazzling people all over town. I’d say it’s a tossup whether she’ll be able to go the distance.”

HUGO’S, WEST Hollywood, 9 a.m. People are just nodding awake over cappuccino , but Wendkos, who has been up all night fighting with her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, is in full throttle. She’s taking a meeting with Broadway producer Francine LeFrak who wants to bring Wendkos’ play “Gang of Girls” to New York.

“To open a show out of town is pointless,” LeFrak is saying, “but it’s suicide to open on Broadway, unless you’re doing ‘Nine,’ which was a hit after only a two-week workshop.”

“Sometimes,” Wendkos says with beguiling deadpan, “God visits.”

LeFrak proposes to Wendkos the idea of expanding ‘Gang,’ which is set in an abortion clinic in Queens, into two acts. “Visually it’s a rich world of action, and you could really develop those characters.” LeFrak says. ‘

Wendkos alights on LeFrak’s suggestions for a nanosecond, conjuring up a couple of ways in which she could expand the work, before making another withdrawal from her idea bank. “It’s a Broadway musical. It’s called ‘You Only Need Eyes to See,’ and it’s about a man in his 30s who goes blind. It’s done literally on two levels. The bottom of the stage is all in white; it’s the sighted world, his old life. This guy has never thought for himself, has used his eyes to look only at the surface. It’s about how we have these misguided beliefs and hold on to them until we’re forced to change by something beyond our control.”

“In a way it’s like ‘M. Butterfly,’ ” Le Frak says, drawing a blank look from Wendkos, “about not being able to accept the truth. It’s a wonderful metaphor . . .”

“The thing is, I can write it, but I need some heat to get Stevie Wonder to do the music. I gotta have him.”

“Perfect,” LeFrak says, waving for the check. “We have two projects with Motown right now, and I have a friend who works closely with Stevie . . . we might be able to put it together.”

Once LeFrak is out the door, Wendkos exhales dramatically. “Whew,” she sighs. “I’m already exhausted from being on, and it’s not even 10 a.m.”

For the next few hours she sits cross-legged on the living-room floor of her one-bedroom bungalow on Fountain Avenue. The place is naked, save for a couple of pillows, a dead plant, a 14-year-old Siamese cat named Lenny--after her father’s pal Lenny Bruce--and 12 carefully arranged portraits of pensive men painted by her dad. Oh, there’s one other objet d’art: a black high-tech phone with red buttons, which is pressed to Wendkos’ ear. She’s juggling conversations with her new boss, Columbia Pictures TV executive vice president of comedy Fran McConnell; punk opportunist-turned-film producer Malcolm McLaren; “L.A. Law” co-creator Terry Louise Fisher, and, finally, her Creative Artists agent’s assistant.

“Well, honey,” she drawls in her best tough-but-flirty manner, “I gave you all damn day to call me back, don’t you like me anymore?” She lets him recite a few mea culpa s, then hangs up and grins her naughty little-girl grin. She couldn’t have gotten away with such straight shooting in New York, where business, especially so-called creative business, is conducted in doubletalk.

“There’s only one rule out here: The product has to sell,” Wendkos says. “They’re very honest about that. In New York, they pretend it’s something else. In New York, they say--she adopts a patronizing tone--’But it’s just . . . not . . . spiritual enough, dark enough, sophisticated enough.’ What they’re really saying is ‘How’m I gonna make money on the friggin’ thing?’ And here they say out loud, ‘How’m I gonna make money on the friggin’ thing?’ and I say, ‘You’ll make money on the 12-to-14 crowd.’ ”

Although she gave up the noble, if penurious, pursuit of fine art in Boholand for the putatively more crass environs of Hollywood, the word “sellout” is irrelevant to Wendkos’ way of thinking. “The whole idea of art as this idealistic thing was destroyed by Warhol,” Wendkos says. “Art is now just something else that services the economy.. Whether it’s painting or sitcom writing, it’s all about selling. That’s the culture. You have to work within it.”

“Here,” Wendkos says, “if you say art, they say, ‘Art who?’ What a relief.”

SHE WAS A minor cult figure in New York’s avant-garde in the early ‘80s, yet Wendkos refused to wear a mohawk and didn’t touch mousse. Wouldn’t do chemicals stronger than caffeine and hated dressing all in black. Preferred to be asleep in her all-pink loft bedroom in Chelsea when the rest of the aspiring art groupies were slumming at the latest 10th Avenue “in” spot. Her friends called her Donna Reed, and part of her would like nothing more than to be a suburban housewife, chauffeuring kids around.

“I’m a ‘50s girl, very conservative, and I was a fish out of water in New York,” Wendkos says. “My ideas are modern, but my life style isn’t. I didn’t want to have to go to a club at 2 a.m. dressed like an idiot in order to be successful. But style dictates art in New York, and in my time there the style was punk, and if you weren’t punk, just . . . fuhgedaboutit.” As one Wendkos character puts it: “I’m getting real sick of trying to fit into the groove circle.”

Story of her life. Wendkos was raised in Miami Beach in a sea of “upper-class rich white Jews who were very money conscious,” but she grew up poor. Her father, who died when she was 14, was a Jewish hipster eking out a living painting portraits of the guests at the baroque Fontainebleu Hotel. When her Jewish mother remarried (to a first-generation-Italian product of the Brooklyn streets,) and moved the family to Manhattan, Wendkos remained an outsider. She “couldn’t handle” regular classes and had to enroll in a special school for “junkies, rebels, underage professionals, and people like me who just didn’t fit.”

She managed to get an MFA from a tony arts school and tried to paint for her supper, but her work didn’t sell. “I was no Rembrandt,” she admits. Fortunately, Wendkos is nothing if not flexible. “My feeling is, do what comes easily,” she says. “Don’t set up obstacles in order to prove your self-worth, because you never will.” If something in her life isn’t working, Wendkos has a one-word solution: Fuhgedaboudit. So, in 1981, she unloaded her paintings on her landlord and switched to performance art, waitressing to keep herself in cowboy boots.

Her campy multimedia pieces were rough-edged, but they had a certain innocence. In “Boys’ Breath,” Wendkos, demure in a sashed pink party dress, mimed a child fearful of abuse by a roomful of painted men in loincloths. Women in sleazy lingerie lay down on one of Manhattan’s grungiest boulevards for “Four Blonds Give Away 200 Dreams on 14th Street.” The pieces, eight in all, drew a modest following and admiring reviews in a range of journals, from the New York Times to the fanzine Artforum. There were performances at the Metropolitan Museum, commissions by the 1984 Olympics Arts Festival and even Studio 54. But then Wendkos decided that performance art was “obsolete.” Just fuhgedaboudit.

“Instead of opening up a world, I felt I was going into this myopic tunnel, making performance art for like 100 other people who were doing the same thing,” she says. “I wanted something more . . . universal.”

She’d never written anything, not even a recipe, before a woman she’d met while waitressing got her a gig composing pornographic sound bites for Penthouse’s phone-sex line--at $25 a paragraph. “It sure beat slinging hash browns,” Wendkos says. Meantime, Julia Miles, artistic director of The Women’s Project in New York, which develops new playwrights, saw photographs of Wendkos’ performance pieces and had a hunch. “I thought she had imagination and a distinctive theatricality,” Miles recalls, “and I suggested she try writing a play.”

Without the burden of literary expectations, Wendkos wasn’t daunted by the prospect. “I saw it as a way to make my characters speak,” she says. Three months later, she presented Miles with “4 Corners” (produced off-Broadway in 1984), a well-received drama about agoraphobia and family life seen through the eyes of a teen-age boy. Though she had a co-writer, the conception, direction and surrealistic set design--all in pink--were Wendkos’ own.

But New York isn’t the place to flex muscle as a young playwright. The critics can be paralyzing. Even with good notices, you’re not exactly awash in offers unless you also happen to win a Pulitzer, or you’re a graduate of the Yale Drama School. Over the next couple of years, Wendkos continued to waitress, still broke and relatively unknown despite a few more minor theatrical successes. “No matter how well you do in New York, you just don’t get the kind of heat you get here,” Wendkos says.

In August, 1987, Wendkos went to L.A. for a working visit. She’d persuaded Ron Sossi, who was intrigued by Wendkos’ piece for the Olympics Arts Festival, to produce and let her direct her 16-character play “Boys and Girls /Men and Women” at the Odyssey, despite the expense of such a large cast. “ ‘Boys and Girls’ had problems,” Sossi says, “but Gina herself was so wiggy and unique, I couldn’t resist gambling on her.”

Neither could David Burke, who had met Wendkos in New York where he was working as a TV news producer and had been a fan of her play “Four Corners.” Now based in L.A. as a supervising producer of the TV show “Wise Guys,” Burke was in a position to help Wendkos take the town. He introduced her to her current CAA team of agents and gave her her first TV-writing job. “If you have the ambition, all you need is one godfather,” Wendkos says, “and David Burke was mine.”

Wendkos also landed assignments for “Crime Story” and “Private Eyes.” And once she was on the Creative Artists gravy train, her script “Dinosaurs” (a tongue-in-cheek play about a bunch of acerbically disillusioned, competitive 30-something MFA’s who are taught The Truth About Life by a sweet young manicurist) rapidly circulated. Columbia TV’s Fran McConnell read it overnight and called Wendkos’ agent the next morning--the eventual result was Wendkos’ overall deal. The script also prompted the Joel Schumacher and David Madden script commissions.

The heat is finally on. Clearly, it’s time to fuhgedaboud New York and concentrate on this place that actually wants to pay her obscene amounts of money just for her ideas. For the first time in her life, Wendkos feels as if she belongs.

“It’s like that ‘Twilight Zone’ episode where the ugly person who didn’t fit in anywhere on Earth goes to the planet where everyone is ugly, and suddenly that person becomes beautiful,” Wendkos says.

SHE IS TWO days into her new job as a writer-producer for Columbia Pictures TV. In the few seconds remaining before her next meeting, she scribbles one more story idea onto the yellow legal pad that already holds a list of 20 composed that morning for “My Two Dads,” on which she is the story editor, then races down the hall of the Sunset-Gower studio complex. On the up elevator, she obsesses over her figure. “Do I look fat?” asks the 5-2, 102-pound Wendkos, somewhat ludicrously.

Upstairs in the art-filled office of Marla Ginsburg, Columbia TV’s vice president of comedy development, Wendkos settles into a Santa Fe-style armchair, tucking her legs beneath her. She’s here to practice her spiel about a pilot that she’ll pitch to ABC next week. The network was looking for a writer to develop a series about a Brooklyn-Italian working-class guy, and Wendkos, who writes men well and has an affinity for tough-talking, tender-hearted Italians like her stepfather, had long been nursing an idea about a multigenerational Brooklyn-Italian family. “Everyone thought of Gina right away for this one,” Ginsburg says.

“Let’s say this family lives in a house in Brooklyn, and the grown-up son lives in the garage, which he’s made into Hef East,” Wendkos says to Ginsburg and Steve Mendelson, director of comedy development. “The two unmarried sisters each have a room, and the parents have a room, but grandpa’s room has a leak and he needs a place to sleep. The guy doesn’t want grandpa at his pad, ‘cuz he’s got a babe comin’ over, and the two girls won’t move into the same room ‘cuz they don’t get along. Then the son becomes the good guy and gives up his night with the babe for grandpa’s sake, who’s like this Old World smoothie himself.”

“What occurs from a plot point,” Ginsburg asks, “to make the grandson want to share his place with the grandfather after all?” It’s a question that wouldn’t have occurred to Wendkos, who is, after all, still green, still learning the structural requirements of television packaging.

After Ginsburg, Mendelson and Wendkos devote 20 minutes to thrashing out the pitch, the basic skeleton of Wendkos’ idea has been radically altered. The father and grandfather have been killed off; the story now revolves around the son’s having to give up his cool bachelor apartment, not to mention his macho job working construction, to move back in with his mother and sisters and take over the family flower business after his father’s death. Wendkos eagerly accepts the technical expertise of her bosses. (“I’m responsible for the emotional content,” Wendkos says later, “but I don’t yet know how to make it attractive to the buyer. It’s like Michelangelo looking at the marble and saying, ‘It’s in there, but I need help from more skilled people to carve it out.’ ”) For all of her lofty fantasies of creative control, she hasn’t forgotten that the point at this moment is to sell the pilot.

“Great,” Wendkos says to Ginsburg and Mendelson. “I like that. He wants to say, ‘Get me outta here. I’m tripping over the flowers, tampons, dresses, women.’ But he’s a mensch , so he takes care of business.”

“Right away I’ve got a much better idea of what this series is about,” says Ginsburg, pleased.

“Me too,” Wendkos says.

A few days later, ABC buys the idea. Wendkos has been on the job less than two weeks, and Columbia has already earned back a chunk of her salary. “Thank God,” Wendkos says. “I can stop feeling guilty about all this money they’re paying me.”

THE LONELY little misfit who was miserable in Miami and broke in New York has finally stopped feeling like an outsider. She’s found her form, her rap, her town, and if there’s an obstacle to her ambition, she’ll finesse her way around it. “Gina,” says actress Ellen Ratner, who’s known Wendkos for 15 years, “is absolutely ruthless about getting her voice heard, whatever it takes.” It’s just a matter of coming up with . . . the right idea.

Take the opening-night crisis of “Boys and Girls /Men and Women,” Wendkos’ first major Los Angels production. The play’s male lead breaks his rib on the afternoon of the debut performance. At 7:15 p.m., 45 minutes before curtain, the actor returns from the emergency room and tells Wendkos that he can’t do the show, he’s in too much pain. The cast prepares to leave. “All the critics are coming, the heat’s on, the energy’s up, I’m freaking out,” Wendkos recalls, “while he’s sitting there crying, this little Italian prince.” Suddenly, she’s inspired.

“C’mere,” Wendkos summons the actor, pointing to the dressing room. He groans and protests that he can’t walk, but she takes his arm. They hobble into the room. Wendkos closes the door, turns to the actor, slowly unbuttons her shirt, and opens it ever so slightly. She knows he thinks she’s sexy; maybe she can distract him from his discomfort. The actor stares at her, entranced.

Wendkos waits a beat and says, “So how are you feeling?”

“What are you talking about?” the actor says, still transfixed. But Wendkos is already buttoning up her shirt. “I guess you’re not sick anymore,” she grins, “so let’s do the show.”

The curtain rises, on schedule.