MOVIES : It’s Great to be Steamy, But . . . : William Baldwin bares his derriere--once again--in the upcoming thriller ‘Sliver.’ Sure, drooling fans are great, but he wants (you guessed it) respect. Hey, it’s a tough town

The day the movie “Three of Hearts” opened in Los Angeles, KROQ-FM deejay Richard Blade predicted big things for the film because “all the ladies out there love to go see Billy Baldwin, especially when he shows off his butt.”

“They said that on the radio? That’s amazing,” said William Baldwin, who then proceeded to run through his movies, admitting that he did show at least a flash of his rear end in “Flatliners,” “Backdraft,” “Three of Hearts” and the upcoming “Sliver.” The former Calvin Klein jeans model and political science graduate from the State University of New York at Binghamton did keep his pants on in “Internal Affairs.”

“I don’t think I am renowned for that, but I guess I am. But I really don’t think that I’m typecast as the actor who shows his ass all the time. I mean, if you tell me I’m a sex symbol for some people out there, it’s great. Part of me is flattered by that. And if that helps me get good roles, I can only see it as positive. But if I had my choice of what I want chiseled on my tombstone--’Billy Baldwin: He was so sexy’ or ‘Billy Baldwin: What a great actor’--I’d really rather people admired me for my work.”

And--whether it’s because women swoon for him or because he’s another Al Pacino in the making--work he will. Coming off mostly wonderful reviews for “Three of Hearts” and caught up in advance speculation about the new Sharon Stone sizzler “Sliver,” which opens May 21, Baldwin, 30, is the Hollywood man of at least this moment. He’s helping fuel “the buzz” himself, appearing for the first time on “The Tonight Show,” the network morning shows and at the Cannes Film Festival (where “Three of Hearts” will be shown out of competition) as well as doing interviews with just about any magazine or major newspaper willing to pepper him with questions.

And that publicity surge has paid off, even before anyone gets a look at “Sliver,” in meetings with A-list Hollywood directors considering him for their next film. One week last month, Baldwin met with Robert Redford in New York about his upcoming film “Quiz Show” and then Lawrence Kasdan about the Kevin Costner movie “Wyatt Earp” and the top executives at 20th Century Fox here in Los Angeles.

“That is precisely the most exciting thing about what’s happening,” said Baldwin. “It’s not the celebrity stuff and getting to be on ‘The Tonight Show,’ but that I’m breaking into a different level now where I have access to the people that I always wanted access to. I haven’t worked with any of them yet, so who knows, but it’s just nice to know that now I have the chance to at least have a meeting with Scorsese or Barry Levinson or Peter Weir or Lawrence Kasdan or Redford. These are the people, man. These are the filmmakers. And it’s the whole Hollywood hype factor that creates this. Redford and Kasdan know my previous work and I assume they like it enough to meet me, but these movies hadn’t even come out and yet already I could sense that things are about to change.”

His collaborators from “Three of Hearts”--a low-budget movie about a sexy, charming lesbian and a sexy, charming male prostitute who are both in love with the same woman--proclaim without hesitation that Baldwin is going to be “the man” of more than just this moment.

“He has a boyish charm and is very endearing,” said David Permut, the film’s executive producer. “He played a male escort and he was able to make that character sympathetic and to ingratiate himself with the audience because of those qualities. He has an incredible potency that just jumps right off the screen. And it’s more than just being great-looking. With Billy there is intelligence and humor going on behind his eyes and people in this town are paying attention.”

“I think there is going to be a Julia Roberts thing with him. He’s going to be huge,” said Kelly Lynch, who co-stars as the brokenhearted lesbian in “Three of Hearts.”

“He is aware of the power that he has with his looks. He’d be an idiot not to, but he doesn’t feel the need to embellish that,” Lynch said. “He starts from the place, OK I’m a nice-looking guy, and then he wants to explore the comedy and his goofy side. He’s so, so handsome, but there is also an intelligence and charm there as well. He’s very vulnerable, very open, and he’s not afraid to show this stuff, which so many guys are afraid of. I’ve worked with lots of big stars and so many of them are concerned with being heroic or cool and are so afraid to show their heart or vulnerability. And that’s something Billy doesn’t even think about.”

Even as a male prostitute, Baldwin more often shows a goofy smirk than gorgeous skin in “Three of Hearts.” But with “Sliver,” some of the pre-release hoopla has returned to speculation over what body parts Baldwin does or does not display on screen.

The whole thing has been a fortuitous, if not calculated, campaign to create heat about the movie, Baldwin said. The story started, he explained, when someone saw an early cut of the film and noticed a brief moment of male frontal nudity. Baldwin said that the man baring it all wasn’t him, but another actor. Nevertheless, the word got out--”Male Frontal Nudity”--and some journalist assumed it was Baldwin.

“So the press confronted the studio, which did not confirm or deny the rumor, intentionally perpetuating the feeding frenzy,” Baldwin said. “Then a journalist asked (“Sliver” director) Phillip Noyce: ‘Tell us about Billy Baldwin’s frontal nudity. We hear it’s an unprecedented amount.’ Phillip’s response, which perpetuated the hype even further, was: ‘Let’s put it this way. When you get right down to it, inch per inch of flesh, Billy Baldwin winds up being more nude than Sharon Stone.’ But that doesn’t say there is male frontal nudity. It’s just that in one love scene, Sharon is wearing a dress and I’m not wearing anything. I don’t even know if that shot of this other actor is even in the film anymore, but I’ve been caught up in this great hype that Paramount has allowed to happen to create some heat before the opening. Which is fine with me, but I just don’t want anyone to be disappointed.”

Noyce, who was still editing the film two weeks before the scheduled opening in an effort to redo the ending and to cut some of the sex scenes to please the MPAA ratings board, contended that he was never specifically asked the question if there is male frontal nudity in the film. “There is male frontal nudity,” he said, “but it’s not Billy. Billy does appear frontally nude in the film, but you can’t see anything because it’s dark.”

Male nudity is not the issue with the ratings board, however, Noyce said. “Nudity is OK, but they keep telling me to stop the actors moving when they make love, which is very difficult. They don’t want people to have fun when they make love. As Louis Malle found with ‘Damage,’ there are certain positions of copulation that they get upset about. The missionary position seems less inflammatory than when the female sits on the male. That they don’t want to know about.”

Noyce believes that no matter how much of Baldwin’s body he is forced to trim from the final cut, the handsome actor is going places. Though he is still young and developing, “he has that rare combination of vulnerability and strength,” Noyce continued. “With any performer, you want them to be human, to be just like us, while at the same time you want them to be heroic. You want them to exhibit strength and endurance that is beyond human and Billy has that.

“In our film, he has a marvelous duality in that on the one hand he has qualities that would make you highly suspicious that he could be a criminal or a liar and on the other hand he has qualities that are extremely endearing that would quell even the worst suspicions,” said Noyce. “And that’s both in his appearance and in the vibe he gives off. You’re not quite sure if he’s very, very innocent or very, very guilty and this is a film where the audience’s allegiance to the character’s innocence or guilt is very important.”

Baldwin is somewhat vague when answering questions about appearing in such a high-profile movie opposite today’s hottest movie star. He said there is a “different vibe” working on a huge project like “Sliver” compared to a relatively tiny-budget movie like “Three of Hearts,” where he constantly made suggestions about how to make a scene or performance better. But he is either unable or reluctant to be more specific about the “vibe.”

He said he did have to deal with “the pomp and pageantry that goes along with Sharon,” but, he said, it was really no different working in a scene with her than it was with Kelly Lynch or Sherilyn Fenn in “Three of Hearts.” “Sharon’s bodyguards don’t stand next to me when we’re in front of the camera,” he said.

What it came down to, said Baldwin, who is known to be fairly choosy about the roles he accepts--he didn’t work for 15 months after wrapping “Backdraft”--was that he liked the story. And, he added, “if you’re going to work with Sharon Stone, it’s best to work with her right after ‘Basic Instinct’ made hundreds of millions.”

Baldwin gets to ride along on Stone’s blazer tails, enjoying the benefits of the excessive publicity she generates even before anyone knows whether the movie can deliver. If the movie clicks, it will both confirm Stone’s cache and boost the fortunes of everyone else involved. And while Baldwin was careful to say that if it bombs, it will be “unfortunate for all of us,” he conceded that Stone--who’s been on a number of magazine covers recently in an effort to sell “Sliver”--has much more at stake than he does.

But sipping on a cappuccino and smoking a cigarette he mooched from a woman in a hotel bar, Baldwin grows squeamish talking about business strategies.

He’d rather talk about work, invoking Pacino and De Niro as the actors whose career choices he admires. “There are some actors who willingly participate in the big-movie-star box-office mentality and others who make decisions to fortify their longevity or simply on the quality of the material without factoring in commercial concerns.”

And he’d rather talk about politics. He worked for former Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y.) in Washington before joining his older brothers Alec and Daniel and younger brother Stephen in the acting game. Still, he is an active member of the Creative Coalition--a group of Hollywood celebrities and business people founded by Ron Silver and Susan Sarandon that educates and lobbies on behalf of such issues as health care, homelessness, the environment, abortion rights and government funding of the arts.

Or he’d rather talk about how pleased he is to be a part of “Three of Hearts,” a movie that finally portrays a gay person--in the character of Lynch’s Connie--as an intelligent, beautiful, competent professional rather than “the shaved head, combat boot thing or the ice-pick wielding maniac or the serial killer in ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ ” He even acknowledges the irony that after working on “Hearts,” he’s involved with Joe Eszterhas--who wrote both “Basic Instinct” and “Sliver”--and Stone, who played the ice-pick wielding maniac in “Basic Instinct.” But, he added, his movie with them has nothing to do with ice picks.

He’d rather talk about the time he bashed his most famous brother in the head with a golf club at their house in Massapequa, Long Island. “I was about 7 years old and our yard was adjacent to a golf course and I had mowed the lawn and found three balls. I had worked my butt off all day, and Alec shows up just as I’m finished. So I hit one ball back onto the course and I let him have one ball and he duffs it into the neighbors’ bushes. Then he demands to hit the last one. I said, ‘No way. I found it.’ He said, ‘I’m not asking you.’ I said, ‘You better get out of the way because I’m going to swing this club on the count of three.’ And I counted and closed my eyes and I thought he’d move and I smashed him right in the head with a driver. It split his eyebrow open and if you look you can still see the scar coming through his eyebrow.”

He’d even rather talk about his love life. He’s “very serious” with Chynna Phillips--”an adorable girl with a great spirit”--whom he met two years ago in the MGM Grand Terminal at LAX. Their relationship is so secure that he can admit that when he’s home in New York and she’s at her house here, he doesn’t much listen to her pop group, Wilson Phillips, preferring Van Morrison, Al Green and his favorite radio station’s playlist of U2, the Alarm and Pearl Jam. “I own the Wilson Phillips albums. I’m a fan and I support Chynna in her music, but it’s not really the genre I’m most partial to.”

As for the future, Baldwin said that he is not looking forward to the changes in his daily life all the recent exposure is likely to demand. He’d hate to have to deal with that Sharon Stone kind of attention, restricted in where he can go, where he can walk. Up until now, he said, he’s had no problems out in public except for the occasional moments when someone tells him he was just great in “The Hunt for Red October.” It was Alec, of course, who was “great” in that.

He is, however, looking forward to opportunities to prove that he can be great, too.

“I guess I will be OK in this business as long as people still want to see my butt,” Baldwin concludes. “But really, the great thing about acting is the more you grow as a person, the more I read, the more I travel, if I get married or have children, the more interesting I become as an actor. It’s not like an athlete where the body or the butt breaks down and you can’t do it anymore. That’s exciting to me. It’s discouraging because there is not a whole lot of good material out there. But on average, suddenly, the stuff I’m now getting is of higher quality. It’s not there, but I guess I’m not there, just yet.”