FOLLYWOOD : Stunt: Neighbors are trying to keep Paramount Pictures from perching a 75-foot-high likeness of Kim Basinger on the Hollywood sign.

It was Paramount Pictures’ marketing department that came up with the idea: Get the Hollywood sign for a week, put up a 75-foot-high metal cutout of a cartoon character that looks like Kim Basinger and open the studio’s latest film in a blaze of publicity.

But some people who live below the famous sign did not like it, fearing that the spectacle would bring throngs of outsiders to their narrow, twisting streets.

The residents, plagued by tourists in the best of times, went to court this week in an attempt to knock down Paramount’s plans, which are tied to the July 10 opening of the movie “Cool World,” which combines animation and live action.

But they failed to win a temporary restraining order, and although Superior Court Judge Stephen O’Neil scheduled a hearing on a permanent injunction for July 8, the dream of Paramount’s marketing department will have been made flesh by then. Or flesh-colored metal. This is Hollywood, after all.

The Los Angeles City Recreation and Parks Commission approved the plan June 8, overriding its staff’s concerns about the impact on Griffith Park and the neighborhood below.

“The theory on which we went was that with the recent civil disturbances, we need to keep a lot of business in L.A. and not lose it, and we ought to be very nice to the movie industry,” said Richard Riordan, an attorney who recently said he will quit the commission to pursue a possible race for mayor.

Paramount’s fee of $27,000, plus a promised donation of another $27,000 to the Rebuild L.A. campaign, did not hurt its chances.

Riordan said he sympathizes with the homeowners--his neighborhood of Brentwood Park is often disrupted by filming, and he suffered minor damage when his house was rented by filmmakers this month.

“But some of us just have to put up with inconveniences for the betterment of the city as a whole,” Riordan said. “Otherwise we’re going to have a city with no (movie-making) disturbances, but broke.”

Chuck Welch, president of the Hollywoodland Homeowners Assn., is less sanguine about the prospect of a pouting, peroxided pinup poised atop his pied-a-terre .

“We wouldn’t take the Eiffel Tower and the Tower of London and the Washington Monument and make it a billboard,” he said. “To turn it into a billboard is crass. And the related problems don’t exist to the degree they do when we draw attention to the sign.”

Despite its visibility, the sign is in a closed area of the park, inaccessible to all but the most intrepid of pranksters, performance artists and thrill-seekers.

Some have been hurt in the steep scramble up the hillside to the base of the sign.

Others go no closer than the winding streets below, causing traffic problems because there is no place to park, residents complain.

Erected in 1923 to mark the site of the then new Hollywoodland real estate development, the sign fell apart over the years but was restored in 1978--without the “land”--and listed as the city’s Historic and Cultural Monument No. 111.

Over the years, students and other intruders have altered the 40-foot-high letters, making it read “HOLLYWEED,” “CALTECH” and “GO NAVY.”

The city has also authorized two make-overs, one to mark the inauguration of the Fox Television Network and another to herald an advertising campaign for a soft drink.

But James Ward, principal grounds maintenance supervisor for the park department’s Griffith region, said staffers would rather not see any commercial uses for the Hollywood sign.

“We don’t want to create any more of an attractive nuisance than the sign itself creates,” he said. In addition to the traffic problems, he said, the sign is in a fire danger zone and it adjoins a communications tower that is vital to fire, police and other city departments.

Anyone caught approaching it could be fined $103.

Paramount has been told to stay away from the site until just before the scheduled July 6 unveiling, said studio spokesman Harry Anderson.

Plans call for the corrugated metal figure of the character Holli Would--who can be seen on placards around town--to be attached to the top of the D, with one leg hanging down and across it, Anderson said. Most of the weight will be borne by a support structure anchored on the hillside.

“We have had serious restrictions placed on us,” he said. “It all has to be done without disturbing the neighbors.”

The character, he said, is intended to be blonde and beautiful, like Basinger, but different, because Holli Would is the creation of a cartoonist, played by Gabriel Byrne, who falls in love with his handiwork.

“Holli Would wants to become a real person by having, shall we say, a romance with a real live man,” Anderson said.