True Fiction : Books: When Hollywood insiders write about the business they know so well, the results can be as outrageously entertaining as the real thing. Well, almost.

Hollywood is like an elephant.

Let 10 blind men touch different spots of an elephant, as the saw goes, and the beast will be many things to many people. So too goes show business--whether you can see it catch the light depends on your vantage point.

If you’re a primo Hollywood lawyer who considers studio heads old friends and has been courted to join their ranks, the gleam can be rather dazzling. But if you’re a successful screenwriter whose greatest artistic triumph coincided with the heyday of bell-bottoms, the tarnish can be more apparent.

And what better elephant gun could you have than the Hollywood insider roman a clef?

Indeed, two recent novels show what a complex beast the movie industry can be: “A Lawyer’s Tale,” attorney Bert Fields’ paean to omnipotence in the face of Hollywood’s scurrilous wheeler-dealers, and “A Cast of Thousands,” screenwriter Steve Shagan’s acrid romp about movie-making.

Screenwriter David Freeman once wrote that the current generation of Hollywood novelists differs from its predecessors in that most are “screenwriters working in the post-studio era. We are, I believe, the first generation to come to Hollywood without thinking we were slumming. Our collective view, if such a disparate and unruly mob can have one, is that we came here to be part of something we thought quite wonderful. As a result we run a risk of becoming elegiac and not immediate.”

Fields’ lawyer protagonist, Harry Cain, has the town by the tail, much as does his creator, whose real-life client list includes such supernovae as Michael Jackson. But although the novel’s twists and turns are largely inspired by actual entertainment industry cases, Fields, 64, isn’t snitching. It was only after some soul-searching that he divulged the author’s identity. He wrote it under the pen name D. Kincaid.

“I didn’t tell anybody for a long time,” he says in his law office towering above Century City. “I thought it might bother people. I thought they might worry that I was going to expose their affairs.”

Fields was already a power in Hollywood when client Mario Puzo suggested he try his hand at fiction. So Fields wrote his first Harry Cain book eight years ago and sent it to publisher Joni Evans, then at Simon & Schuster.

“I said (the author) was a client of mine,” says the lanky Fields. “And I said, ‘Tell me honestly what you think.’ And I was immodest enough to say, ‘I rather like it.’ I thought I’d influence her a bit.”

Even after Harry Cain debuted between the covers of “The Sunset Bomber,” Fields was reluctant to ‘fess up to authorship.

“I kept talking about Kincaid. Two friends (Robert Towne and Warren Beatty) wanted the movie rights to the book, and I said, ‘I’ll talk to Kincaid.’ And they laughed and said, ‘Yeah, talk to Kincaid.’ ”

Fields finally admitted to authorship and to parallels between himself and his super-lawyer alter ego. One thing the attorneys share is a $1-a-year retainer from mutual friend Mike Ovitz in exchange for declining to sue his Creative Artists Agency.

“Actually, (Ovitz) misses some years,” Fields says. “And when he told the story recently he said, ‘$5.’ But it was a dollar, and I wrote him a note saying, ‘Now my partners are going to think I stole $4 from them.’ ”

But Fields only smiles when asked about the inspiration for Cain’s “theft” of a work print on the director’s behalf so the studio couldn’t have its way with it.

“Someone once took a negative of a film,” Fields says in careful lawyerese. “The client in the case had no part in the taking of the film. There was a proceeding against the lawyer and the client. The matter was resolved and the film did come back.”

Fields declined to comment on whether he was that “someone.”

Although Harry Cain is disillusioned by other characters who turn out to be not what they seem, “A Lawyer’s Tale” is ultimately a story about a man who is omnipotent in his professional life, who “conquers Hollywood studios, the legal system and almost Death itself in a single bound,” to borrow from Puzo’s blurb. And although Cain falls far short of perfection in his personal life, that’s not because he’s paying the wages of hubris, the price for being unstoppable.

And although Fields considers the two Harry Cain books as legal novels that happen to be set in Hollywood rather than as Hollywood novels per se, he insists that the genre’s preoccupation with bitterness says more about its creators than its subject.

“I think you’re seeing a seamy, probably steamy side of Hollywood that is being exaggerated in these novels,” he says. “Hollywood novelists--and I don’t consider myself a Hollywood novelist--tend to focus on people who cheat or people who are hostile, people who are insecure. It’s interesting to read about those things. You don’t want to read about a bunch of nice guys. But there are some nice guys out there--people who run studios, lawyers, agents, directors--whose standard of honor is higher in my view than what I’ve seen in many other fields.”

Of course, virtually by definition, the screenwriter’s withering view is more typical of the genre. That acid take sent ripples through the business last year with Michael Tolkin’s piercing screenplay of his novel “The Player.”

And indeed, Shagan’s view of Hollywood focuses on a different part of the elephant’s anatomy. His studio head is idealistic but criminally ruthless in pursuit of his dream. In “A Cast of Thousands,” a producer and director once hailed as geniuses but later discarded are called out of retirement in the service of a studio scam.

If Shagan’s characters are romantically drawn composites of people in the business, they nonetheless seem to spring from his heart. Despite the commercial success of the four thrillers he has written, conversation inevitably and often drifts to his own long-ago artistic Arcadia--his Oscar-nominated 1973 screenplay for “Save the Tiger.”

“(Director John) Avildsen, (Jack) Lemmon and Shagan were kind of an isosceles triangle,” he says. “I don’t remember a day of discord on that film or abrasive behavior.”

Still, that experience has been difficult to duplicate, and Shagan regards the darkness inherent in Hollywood novels as just the right shade for the material.

“If you’re on the outside looking in, as portrayed certainly by Nathaniel West, the rewards are awesome,” says the robust author-screenwriter, who lives in the old Jack Warner estate in Palm Springs. “If you’ve been there and you fall from grace--boom!--you’re back outside that glass looking in and you’re on the sidewalk and you’ve been there. That’s even worse.”

Calling F. Scott Fitzgerald the quintessential elegiac Hollywood literary figure, Shagan says the sorrow lies in realizing “after a while that you’re a technician. You’re a necessary evil. . . . If you’re very young and you have success, which I was fortunate to have, not so much commercial but stuff that was respected, you get your heart broken because then you think this is really art. They really want stuff about what’s going on, and then you write something and people say, ‘Nobody’s gonna make this.’ ”

Shagan says that dark tinge was in part his inspiration for “A Cast of Thousands,” his first Hollywood novel, although he says he flavored the book with his “sense of bemusement.”

“I was at a place in my life professionally when I could look at it from a distance and say, ‘Yeah, when I was doing it, boy, it was hell. I gotta catch some of that in the book because if I don’t it won’t be true. . . .’

“I don’t think you can write about Hollywood unless it’s satirically because it in itself is surreal. It’s not real. It’s a piece of soft goods. You can’t wear it. You can’t eat it. You can’t fix a tooth with it. It won’t keep you warm in the winter.”

Still, some of the more bizarre elements stem from Shagan’s experience in the business because “the fact is the strength of any piece of fiction.” Shagan won’t name these names, but yes, there really have been madams on studio payrolls and larcenous production managers who inflate costs and skim the difference. And hiring pickets to plague a movie opening is an old studio trick, says Shagan, a Paramount publicist in an earlier incarnation.

For all that, Shagan says he’ll always work in Hollywood: “The actors, especially on original work, they’re all your creatures and they’re alive and they’re walking. People are watching them. I can’t sit over someone’s shoulder when they’re reading my novel.”