A look inside Hollywood and the movies : ‘CROWD’ REMAKE : It’s the Wrong ‘Face,’ but It’s All Right With Whoopi

Budd Schulberg’s long-awaited, long-delayed remake of his dark 1957 classic movie “A Face in the Crowd” has suddenly picked up steam at Warner Bros.

Credit Whoopi Goldberg, who is “enthusiastic and very smart about the story’s application to the ‘90s,” said Schulberg.

The 78-year-old Schulberg (“On the Waterfront”), his long-time co-producer Gene Kirkwood and Warners executive vice president Billy Gerber have held several recent meetings with Goldberg about updating and converting the gender of the old Andy Griffith role for the Oscar-winning actress.

Warners, which made the original movie directed by Elia Kazan and owns the remake rights, is hoping to launch production next spring, according to Schulberg. A Warners spokeswoman confirmed that the studio is “actively developing the project and we are waiting for Budd Schulberg’s script.” Schulberg said that directors have been discussed for “A Face in the Crowd” but no one has been set.

In the original version, a country hick (Griffith) is molded into a TV celebrity and cracker-barrel philosopher while turning into an off-camera megalomaniac.

In retooling his script for Goldberg, Schulberg has changed the role to a wildly popular, contemporary TV talk show hostess.

Goldberg, who had her own ill-fated talk show experience and is concentrating on her successful movie career with her current production “Sister Act II” for Disney, could not be reached for comment.

From his home base in West Hampton, Long Island, Schulberg said the impetus for the project came from Goldberg herself by way of an accident.

“Talk about over the transom,” laughed Schulberg. “Whoopi’s a movie freak and a huge fan of horror movies because they relax her. She rents them all the time, and she ordered a cassette of something called ‘The Face of the Beast’ and the store sent her ‘A Face in the Crowd’ instead. Unaware, she put it in her VCR and was dumbfounded at first but watched it through anyway and watched it again. By the end of the evening she said she was fascinated, actually studying it, and then she called me about it.

“She’s very aware of the power of the medium and how it can be used for good or evil, which is what my story is about. She’s one of the smartest actresses I ever talked to, and I was raised with them.”

The son of the one-time head of Paramount Pictures, Schulberg wrote a classic Hollywood novel in “What Makes Sammy Run” (1941) soon after he left the Hancock Park house where he grew up, and shortly after his disastrous trip to Dartmouth as a 25-year-old screenwriting partner of F. Scott Fitzgerald. They were teamed--the veteran, burned-out author of “The Great Gatsby” alongside the young pup of a writer straight out of college--on a dippy, snowbound romantic comedy for Walter Wanger called “Winter Carnival” (later fictionalized in Schulberg’s novel “The Disenchanted”).

Schulberg and Kirkwood have been trying to get “What Makes Sammy Run” to the big screen for the last 12 years.

“It’s been one aborted effort after another,” said Schulberg. The book, which was celebrated with a special 50th-anniversary edition two years ago, will “remain a period piece if it ever gets made as a movie,” grinned the author.

“I would like people to see how things in Hollywood haven’t changed at all.”

Schulberg is also continuing work on an update of his 1954 classic “On the Waterfront.”