Candid Camera: Behind the Scenes With David Brown : Movies: The producer has just published a book filled with recollections of his Hollywood career.

There was a time when David Brown and a partner earned $600 for writing a month’s supply of astrological forecasts suitable for use in a penny vending machine.

“We tried to be cautiously helpful,” Brown said at breakfast earlier this week’Avoid unnecessary risks,’ ‘Drive with special care,’ that sort of thing, or ‘Your luck will soon change,’ not indicating whether it would change for better or worse.”

Brown, now 73, has done a lot of things. Just out of Stanford and Columbia, he was a copy editor and second drama critic on the pre-chic Women’s Wear Daily. “Our readers were the buyers and they wanted to know about the musicals and the hits. Kelcey Allen did those. I got the leftovers--T.S. Eliot, Odets, all the really good stuff.”

Among other things, he wrote textbooks on journalism, was fiction editor and then editor-in-chief of Liberty magazine, story editor under Darryl Zanuck at Fox and then partnered in production with Richard Zanuck. Together, they did “Jaws,” “The Sting,” “The Verdict,” “Cocoon” and other less conspicuous films. Not long before they came to what Brown calls an amicable parting, he acquired the film rights to “Driving Miss Daisy” for the partnership.

“It was a highly contested negotiation,” Brown says. “I think I got the rights only because my wife (Helen Gurley Brown) warned everyone that I might jump out the window if I didn’t.” Then the partners went separate ways and Dick and Lili Zanuck produced the Oscar-winning film. (As he has for 25 years, Brown writes the lively cover blurbs for his wife’s Cosmopolitan magazine.)

With his own company, the Manhattan Project (home base is New York), Brown has since been producing in several areas. The first three of a series of classic short stories he is making for HBO here and Granada in Britain have finished shooting and will start to air in August. “Perversely,” Brown says, “I call the series ‘Women and Men.’ ”

The first, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” stars Melanie Griffith and James Woods and was directed by Tony Richardson and shot in Spain. Dorothy Parker’s “Dust Before Fireworks” was directed by Ken Russell and stars Molly Ringwald and Peter Weller. Mary McCarthy’s most famous story, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” has been adapted and directed by Frederic Raphael (“Glittering Prizes”) and features Beau Bridges and Elizabeth McGovern.

Brown has a play opening next week in London, a satire on New York dinner parties called “Vanilla,” directed by Harold Pinter from a play by Jane Stanton Hitchcock. Running on Broadway are other Brown productions: “Tru,” the one-man show about Truman Capote for which Robert Morse just earned a Tony nomination, and “A Few Good Men,” one of whose stars, Tom Hulce, has also been nominated for a Tony. Coming along after successful out-of-town dates in Cleveland and Washington is “Cemetery Club,” a comedy by Ivan Menschell about three women who meet once a month to visit their husband’s graves.

He has four films in what Brown calls active pre-production. With Joe Wizan, Brown is co-producing “Midnight Club,” which will star Sylvester Stallone, and he is working on a screen version of “A Few Good Men.” Two more thrillers are coming along: Michael Tolkin’s “The Player,” about an executive threatened by an actor whose calls he won’t return, and Ruth Rendell’s chilly “The Bridesmaid,” about a couple both fatefully obsessed with death, which Brown hopes Ken Russell will direct.

Brown is also marketing a couple of television talk shows, one that would feature David Frost in a kind of updated “Information Please,” the other with astrologer Joyce Jillson.

But Brown was principally in town in behalf of his book, “Let Me Entertain You” (Morrow: $19.95), a roughly chronological grab bag of anecdotes and recollections out of his multicolored career.

The book, he says, has been in work longer than some of the people in it have been alive. It began at the urging of his pal, Gene Shalit, who said Brown should set down some of his stories. “Nineteen years ago I began carrying a tape recorder around and I’d talk to it on planes, everywhere, as stories came back to me.”

The tapes transcribed out at more than a million words. “It was sort of like a data bank. Two-and-a-half years ago, I started writing it out as a book. I had some role models: Alexander Kings’s ‘May This House Be Safe From Tigers,’ Harry Golden’s ‘Only in America’ and what I think is a classic, Alexander Woollcott’s ‘While Rome Burns.’ It’s not an autobiography, just selective memories. Given the attention span of present audiences, I thought it might be a sensible form.”

It is a charming exercise in recollection, glimpses of everyone from J. Paul Getty to John Belushi. But Brown says, “I try not to be a Shintoist, worshiping ancestors.” In particular, he does not really yearn for the Hollywood past, although he was part of it in the waning days of the major major studios.

“That Hollywood was a dictatorship,” he says. “This Hollywood is a bureaucracy, layered with non-authority, which is not entirely a bad thing. The system seems designed to prevent any one person being able to say yes or no. The art form is to get a picture made.”

Brown remarks with some irony that the present generation of studio leaders is uncommonly well educated, with degrees from all the better colleges. “They’re quite different from the rogues and carnival men of the past. But still nobody reads. If an executive starts talking about a script’s Kafkaesque qualities, you have to believe that somebody in the San Fernando Valley did a report. I once thought about writing an article called ‘Why Sammy Can’t Read.’ The higher you go, the less you read. Still true, although there are exceptions. I remember that Darryl Zanuck once demanded a one-page report on ‘War and Peace.’ We did it, somehow.”

Somewhat heretically, Brown adds that “what’s reassuring is that the agents have replaced the studios as discoverers of talent. If you can get a script read by an agency, you’re very lucky. The hot stuff is coming from the agencies.”

Brown pursues his projects with a small staff of six associates. “I’ve always thought of myself as a multimedia man,” he says, “all based on the written word. I like being into a lot of things. It save you from an excessive single-mindedness.”