A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : POSTER GIRL : Microscopes Ready? See If You Can Find Debra Winger in the Movie Ad

Debra Winger is the female lead of the upcoming Paramount Picture “Leap of Faith,” but you wouldn’t necessarily know this if you happened across the poster for the film, now showing on billboards and bus stops around town.

The poster--bright, colorful and eye-catching--shows Steve Martin (as evangelist Jonas Nightengale) and the illuminated tent in which Nightengale holds his rabble-rousing prayer meetings.

Winger is pictured, too, at the bottom of the broadsheet, smiling in a contained photograph that when put in graphic perspective is about the size of a postage stamp. The picture is so small that one studio executive said he had to look twice before he noticed her image. “It’s a ‘Where’s Waldo?’ situation,” says the executive. “She’s there, but you have to find her.”

Winger’s low profile in the poster for “Leap of Faith”--despite her above-title billing--has set many industry tongues wagging about what it might mean about Winger’s standing with the studio.

A source at Paramount said, “We’re all very happy with the poster, Debra included. Don’t people have better things to talk about? I’m astounded that this is even an issue.”

Most studios spend several months conceptualizing and fine-tuning their posters.

According to marketing sources, A-list stars almost always have approval of their poster image. If the stars have problems with their appearance in the poster (“My body looks too fat,” is a common complaint, which is why body doubles are often used), the studios almost always back down and make demanded changes.

In the case of “Leap of Faith,” the film was made on an extraordinarily short production schedule. The first “coming attraction” poster, admits the source, “was put out in a hurry. But then there was time to take a more studied approach to the rest of the campaign and work on the follow-up poster.”

The first proposal for the “Leap of Faith” poster did contain a large image of Winger, equal in size to that of Martin. But Winger, who had above-the-title and poster image contractual approval rights, wasn’t pleased with the picture. “She wasn’t that happy with her body or her face. That’s not unusual. A lot of stars don’t like certain pictures, and who can blame them? These people live on their images,” the Paramount source said.

And so back to the drawing board. A second poster--the one currently in use--was whipped up. “Everybody liked this one and Debra went along with it. If she hadn’t we couldn’t have used it.”

A spokesman for Winger said, “Debra feels that this is Steve Martin’s movie. She did have equal-likeness rights, but she waived them because she just felt it was Steve’s picture. She’s fine with the poster.”