A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : DAY IN THE LIFE : Gee, Where Are They Now?

It’s a coffee-table book, it’s been a featured segment on “PrimeTime Live” and the subject of a Showtime documentary and now it’s being touted as the perfect holiday gift . . . dated though it already is.

Barely a month in the bookstores, “A Day in the Life of Hollywood” is fast becoming a kind of glossy picture board game where the challenge is to discover who and what has changed about Hollywood since that day of May 20, 1992--and other such company-town fun facts lost on the world at large.

Sales of the tome (150,000 printed) have yet to be tabulated by Collins Publishers of San Francisco, though at Brentano’s/ Century City, a heavily trafficked Westside bookstore conveniently located next to a movie theater multiplex, producer-manager Bernie Brillstein bought 50 copies “as Christmas presents for family, friends and clients” before going upstairs to the movies.

His reasoning: “If you get a kick out of Diane Arbus, you’ll get a kick out of this.”

Unlike the largely anonymous folk featured throughout many of Collins’ other “Day in the Life of . . .” editions, this $45 homage to the industry contains some very beautiful, albeit staged shots of well-known locals. They are identified as Paramount Pictures Chairman Brandon Tartikoff riding Arsenio Hall around the lot on a bike (Page 58), 20th Century Fox Film Chairman Joe Roth and movie production president Roger Birnbaum in a meeting (Page 61), independent film producer Sherry Lansing staring into a film editing viewer (Page 163) and Imagine Films Entertainment partners Brain Grazer and Ron Howard enjoying each others’ repartee in the back of a limo on the way to their company’s “Far and Away” premiere (Pages 186-187).

The status of all these people has changed since the book went to press. Lansing has replaced Tartikoff, he’s left town, Roth and Birnbaum will team up to make movies at Walt Disney Studios and the Imagine duo have got their own deal at Universal Pictures.

As for Hollywood: the workplace, fate (and poor ratings) has dealt an unkindly blow to actress Pamela Gidley connected with the TV show “Polish Hill” (Page 102) and for musicians hired to play the orchestral accompaniment to the cartoon series “Capitol Critters” (Page 159). Both productions have since been canceled.

“We hoped the photographers might have caught someone painting over a name on a parking space or stenciling on a new name on someone’s door, but it just didn’t happen on that particular day,” recounted project director and “Day in the Life of Hollywood” publisher Lena Tabori in a telephone interview from the Collins offices in San Francisco.

Instead, the transient, ephemeral nature of show business was left to Mother Time.