A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : HOLLYWOOD U. : No Nutty Professor Jokes Here, Please

The 1973 movie “The Last Detail” was before their time. References to his disco label Casablanca Records (“Donna Summer and Kiss were the Guns N’ Roses of that era”) went over their heads. Still, none of the T-shirted grad students packing the UCLA lecture hall were the least bit foggy about their instructor, Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Peter Guber.

“He’s a big producer . . . ‘Batman,’ ‘The Color Purple,’ ” explained 23-year-old MBA candidate Piya Dhawan, who had arrived from Bombay three weeks earlier. “There was another guy with him . . . Jon Peters? They were supposed to be the brightest and the best. That was before the two of them broke up. I only have a casual interest in the field, but read about them in Time and (India’s) magazines.”

That’s exactly the point, according to Guber, who, with Rob Friedman--president of advertising and publicity for Warner Bros. films--is teaching a course this fall on the movies and the media for UCLA’s Independent Film and Television Producers Program.

“They write about the entertainment business in the ‘90s the way they wrote about the investment business in the ‘80s,” Guber told the class, prancing back and forth in a double-breasted designer jacket and jeans. “There’s an obsession about the executives, their salaries, where they’re eating, who’s going to be fired. At the same time, movies are more dependent on the press to create awareness and position a film. Making a movie is only half the game. Selling it is the other half . . . and that starts the moment you get the idea.”

Friedman, who missed the first class because of the Jewish New Year, elaborates by phone. “The symbiotic relationship between the film world and the media has always been in place, but the bond is now much stronger and more sophisticated. With the advent of TV entertainment shows and entertainment publications, the number of outlets has increased considerably. And, with entertainment the second most profitable U.S. industry (after aerospace), the business is a regular news beat in almost every daily newspaper.”

Among those invited to speak to the class: director Spike Lee, MPAA head Jack Valenti, critic Gene Siskel (“one of the thumbs,” in Guber’s words), talk-show host Larry King. If Producers Program co-chair Howard Suber has anything to do with it, there will be a smattering of politicians, including Vice President Dan Quayle. News stories about “Basic Instinct,” a film from Sony’s TriStar Pictures that elicited protests from the gay and lesbian community, and Warners’ “Malcolm X,” which made headlines when Spike Lee went over budget and again when he put footage from the Rodney King videotape in the opening credits, will be examined as case studies.

No picture, Guber stressed during the initial lecture, arrives in a void. How a film was financed, which studio is releasing it, any perceived Japanese involvement, on-set battles are part of what he calls “the contextual reality.”

Reviews, he told the future filmmakers and entertainment-oriented law and business students, are the last--and possibly least important--part of the process.

Criticism of the casting of Michael Keaton as “Batman” in Guber’s 1989 film was a case in point. “We wanted an ordinary guy, someone who puts on a costume which permits his truer, extraordinary self to come out,” Guber said, between gulps of Evian. “The Wall Street Journal evidently missed (the point) because they vilified us on the front page. Their point of view appeared in every ‘Batman’ article for a year. Because of LEXIS and NEXIS, (the electronic news retrieval systems) a story isn’t ‘one day’--it’s forever.”

Anyone attempting to “manipulate” the media, suggests Guber, is headed for a fall. A more realistic goal, he says, is “managing” it. “The press is either a well-oiled machine or a Rube Goldberg machine gone amok,” he said. “Of course, there’s the ‘tilt’ factor, but you can only wiggle a bit. It’s risky.”

Sony’s TriStar, Guber acknowledged, walked a tightrope with Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives,” which the studio released shortly after racy front-page accusations between the director and star Mia Farrow. “The media was so ferocious, it was like a feeding frenzy of great white sharks,” he remarked. “All we could do was provide our own information and hope to put the best possible spin on things. Because we had too much ‘awareness,’ it was really a case of damage control.”

Guber concluded that the media can be a valuable ally--within bounds. “The key is making their needs mesh with yours,” he cautioned. “At times, they’re a dragon breathing fire. Be careful about giving them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”