Damage Phase of Buchwald Trial Begins : Entertainment: A court has already found that Paramount used the humorist’s idea for a film. Now it must decide what the studio owes him.

Humorist Art Buchwald and producer Alain Bernheim should receive between $5 million and $10 million for their contributions to the 1988 hit comedy, “Coming to America,” their attorney told a Los Angeles Superior Court judge Monday as the third phase of their trial against Paramount Pictures began.

The long-running breach-of-contract case, filed in 1988, has captured as much--if not more--interest than the Eddie Murphy comedy itself, and has already had a profound impact on the way business is conducted in Hollywood.

Seeking to bolster his argument, attorney Pierce O’Donnell introduced evidence showing that producers on six comparable films earned from $900,000 to $15 million in net profits. To meet court-specified criteria, the films that were used for comparison had to gross at least $75 million and cost at least $10 million to make.

Although the films were not named at Monday’s session, court records indicate that they include “Beverly Hills Cop,” “An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Nine to Five,” “Stir Crazy,” “Terms of Endearment” and “Robocop.”

A seventh film, “The Blues Brothers,” generated no net profits for its producer, but O’Donnell said he will seek to show that the film does not meet the court’s criteria.

Rejecting the contention that the first six films are financially comparable to “Coming to America,” Charles P. Diamond, Paramount’s attorney, said it is the ratio of cost to earnings--not gross profits alone--that indicates whether a film will return net profits.

“Pictures that do better in terms of costs to receipts pay off bigger bucks,” he said in his opening statement. Later, Diamond told reporters: “ ‘Coming to America’ was not the gold cow” because it was costly to make.

Judge Harvey A. Schneider ruled in 1990 that “Coming to America” was based on a treatment by Buchwald titled “King for a Day.”

Subsequently, the judge ruled that a contract Paramount signed with Bernheim in 1983--providing Buchwald $65,000 plus 1.5% of net profits and guaranteeing Bernheim $200,000 and 17.5% of net profits--was “unconscionable.”

This phase of the trial, expected to last about a week, is limited to the question of damages. Paramount has contended that “Coming to America,” which grossed $145 million, returned no net profits. Therefore, the studio argues, Buchwald and Bernheim are entitled to no more than the fixed fees set forth in their contract.

Buchwald and Bernheim suffered a setback Monday when Schneider refused to let Academy Award-winning producer David Brown (“Jaws,” “The Sting”) testify on his opinion of what Paramount should have paid Bernheim.

Brown, a longtime friend of Bernheim and Buchwald, praised the producer, saying he had a good eye for a story line. But he testified that Bernheim’s contract “was in the range of what producers were getting” in 1983.

Much of the testimony addressed a true Hollywood mystery: What producers do.

Producer Paul Maslansky, called to the stand by O’Donnell, described in colorful detail how he came up with the concept for the six “Police Academy” films.

Maslansky said he was in San Francisco working on another film when three or four busloads of “comical-looking” police officers alighted.

He was told that the police were cadets, not full-fledged officers, and that some could potentially flunk out of the academy.

“What if they wanted to stay?” Maslansky said he asked himself. That night he wrote a treatment for what would become the first of the comedies. Together, the six films grossed $750 million, he testified.