Now He’s Sitting Pretty : * Movies: Screenwriter J.D. Lawton parlays ‘Pretty Woman’ and a million-dollar script and buys his own studio.

There is something about J.D. Lawton the writer that can tell you a few things about making it in Hollywood.

Sure, they say the party is over for writers in Hollywood. Studios claim they are cutting back on their spending habits. The day of a million-dollar script has passed. No one is holding story options anymore.

All that may be true, but for J.D. Lawton of Riverside and Cal State Long Beach the party is just beginning as he goes from spec-script writer to mini-mogul.

A few years ago, Lawton was on the fringes of Hollywood, just another film school kid hoping to be a writer or a director while working occasionally as a film editor.

Two years ago, using the name J.D. Athens, he saw his first film released. It was called “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death” and it went directly from shooting sets into home-video stores, bypassing movie theaters. The film, which Lawton wrote and directed, did achieve some fame as the official movie of Carpinteria’s annual avocado festival.

Last year was another matter, however. Earlier, he had sold a script called “Three Thousand.” Eventually, that script got over to the Disney people, who bought it and retitled it “Pretty Woman” ($3,000 was the amount that businessman Richard Gere in “Pretty Woman” paid the Julia Roberts character for her week’s services). It became a surprise hit of 1990, running for 18 months and grossing $178 million before it, like “Cannibal Women,” hit the home-video shelves.

Here was Lawton’s breakthrough. The phones began to ring. He had two thoughts at the time. One was that this would be his chance to sell another unproduced script, “Red Sneakers,” which he thought was more commercial than “Three Thousand.”

Because of “Pretty Woman,” Lawton had developed a reputation as a writer who could produce a hit if someone else changed his ending, but he didn’t want any more of that. He decided he would change his direction completely and concentrate on a high-concept action script. The result: “Dreadnought,” or as he describes it, “ ‘Die Hard’ on a battleship.” That script--its ending intact, he says--sold quickly to New Regency Entertainment and Warner Bros. for $1 million cash, a promised $300,000 when the film is made and a net-profit deal if ever that should happen.

The sale made Lawton a millionaire one month before he was 30.

It was then that Lawton again changed directions. After paying his taxes and all of his commissions, he had about half a million dollars left. That’s when he started his own studio, Megalomania Productions.

He found a large, empty building on Beverly Boulevard, five minutes west of downtown, and then started shopping for camera, lenses, lights, editing equipment, everything it would take to make his own films.

“Pretty Woman” gave him a chance to write for anyone in Hollywood. “Dreadnought” gave him the financial freedom to work for himself whenever he wanted. Now he can write without someone else demanding changes and direct the same way.

He’s already shot his first totally own movie. Using his earlier pseudonym, J.D. Athens, he calls the movie “Pizza Man,” a spoof told Raymond Chandler-style. Instead of a hard-boiled detective tripping over Los Angeles corruption, Lawton has a jaded pizza-delivery man finding corruption while trying to collect on an extra-large $15.23 pizza. The film is being edited now and Lawton plans to find a distribution deal.

If that doesn’t come about, he’ll release “Pizza Man” himself.

Lawton is also at work on directing “Red Sneakers.” It’s an offbeat love story about a bisexual comedian with all sorts of strikes against her. It was bought by a new company, Karen Films, and will go into production this September. Lawton will direct and edit the film, taking only an $11,000 basic writer’s fee. He is also guaranteed, he says, complete artistic control. And one other thing: Producers Rudy Cohen and Uri Harkham promised to find him an appropriate empty building just for that shooting.

Come September, Lawton will find himself operating in two downtown facilities.

For a lot of reasons, Lawton prefers his status as an independent mini-mogul. He looks back at “Pretty Woman” and thinks the original script could have succeeded just as well as the final one. “ ‘Pretty Woman’ cost $17 million to make. It would have cost $3 million to make what I had written, without all the changes.”

Lawton has a theory on why the once very hot market for Hollywood scripts cooled in the past year. “Hollywood people hate to lose,” he says. “Certainly there is a concern about increasing costs, but the truth is an auction of a script produces more losers than winners among the bidders. Only one can win.

“Another thing: In Hollywood, writers have power because they have stories. So now when a studio says it is paying a large sum for a movie, that money actually covers two or three future scripts.”

Now with “Red Sneakers” being prepared, J.D. Lawton will soon know how many more Hollywood stories he has to tell.