A Woman in the Upper Reaches : Screenplay: Paramount pays $1 million for the work of a 23-year-old Cal State Northridge graduate. It may be the highest fee ever paid a female writer.

A 23-year-old graduate of Cal State Northridge set a new Hollywood record late last week when Paramount Pictures bought her screenplay for $1 million, believed to be the highest fee ever paid for a woman’s script.

Kathy McWorter’s romantic comedy went to Paramount after an intense bidding session that was carefully orchestrated by her attorney, 37-year-old David Colden of Weissmann, Wolff in Beverly Hills, and her agent, 27-year-old Randy Skolnik of the Encino-based Preferred Artists--both of whom began spreading the word about “The Cheese Stands Alone” several weeks ago and sent the final script out last Wednesday.

The bidding lasted all day Friday and drew offers from Disney, the Geffen Co. and Largo Entertainment--and pitted Columbia Pictures against its wholly-owned subsidiary, Guber-Peters Entertainment Co. At 7:35 p.m., Paramount president David Kirkpatrick personally called with the winning bid, and the details of the deal were ironed out over the weekend.

For McWorter, who grew up in La Crescenta the daughter of a construction worker and a teacher, this deal is akin to winning the lottery. “I don’t know what to do with this kind of money,” she said. “I’m still going to shop at Pic ‘n Save.”

Hollywood’s most successful female writers, such as Barbara Benedek (“Immediate Family”), Anna Hamilton Phelan (“Mask”) and Melissa Mathison (“E.T.”)--all of whom typically write on assignment, rather than on speculation--haven’t commanded this level of a fee, according to agents in the business.

“My hope is that they will get paid like men (after the McWorter deal),” said Colden, whose women clients include Phelan. “I do think that women face discrimination in Hollywood. It’s an old-boys network.”

Agent Skolnik discovered McWorter after reading her script “The Boy Who Eats Rocks,” a fantasy-adventure story for children now in development with director Richard Donner at Tri-Star Pictures. He concluded another development deal at Warner Bros. for her script “Bats.”

Under Skolnik’s direction, McWorter then attempted specifically to write a commercially viable script. “We set out to tailor-make it for the market,” said Skolnik, who adds that “romantic comedies are big right now.”

After 3 1/2 months, McWorter finished “The Cheese Stands Alone,” an off-beat romantic comedy about a superstitious Hungarian hunk who blames his loss of sex drive on a hex put on him by a jilted girlfriend.

This rapid success comes to a young woman who had to switch script-writing classes at Cal State Northridge to avoid flunking out. She said she has been writing and telling stories since she was a young child, confident of her talents despite a critical teacher at Northridge and her parents’ habit of not reading her work.

While she said she was surprised at the speed of her success, McWorter said she knew she could write popular screenplays. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “Maybe that sounds pompous, but I knew that someday I would do it.”

It’s also clear that McWorter is fast becoming accustomed to her new position. When her attorney set up a dinner Monday night to hand over the bulk of $50,000 as an option payment on “The Boys Who Eat Rocks,” McWorter replied: “Oh, you mean the baby check.”