Hollywood Will Lend a Hand to Israeli Film Industry : A proposed alliance aims to help aspiring Israeli filmmakers hone their creative skills and achieve a more universal focus.

If the bond between Israel and the U.S. entertainment community has been primarily fiscal, a proposed alliance between Hollywood and the 4-year-old Jerusalem National Film and Television school is a departure from this tradition.

This spring, sponsors of the program hope to send two American screenwriters to help aspiring Israeli filmmakers hone their creative skills and achieve a more universal focus. If everything proceeds on course, directors, producers, and cinematographers would follow in their wake.

Producer Andrea King, addressing a gathering of 100 producers, directors and agents at Creative Artists Agency on Thursday evening, called the project an “Israeli Sundance (Institute)”--a reference to the annual independent film festival in Park City, Utah.

“The philosophy of both is to nurture talent,” said King, who originated the idea with producer Carol Polakoff. “While the technical end of Israeli filmmaking has always been strong, they say they need help with story structure and character development. Though English, Australian--and French and Italian movies in their heyday--spoke to Americans, Israeli films missed the boat when it comes to ‘crossing over.’ Israelis no longer want to be confined to making movies about Orthodox Jews or the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

If the three short student films shown at the event are any indication, a breakthrough may be at hand. The first, Dan Geva’s “Jerusalem: Rhythms of a Distant City”--a series of images of the Holy City--presents an artistic, less political view than that exported before. Adva Magal’s “Cotton Balls,” a peek at a prostitute/mother and her adolescent daughter, provides an interesting take on an age-old theme. And “Party Line”--a tragi-comic glimpse at some wacky neurotics (reminiscent of Spain’s Pedro Almodovar) brought its director, Ohav Flantz, first prize as the most promising new talent at this summer’s Edinburgh Film Festival.

“If this last film were in English, everyone at Sundance would be proclaiming the director ‘the hot filmmaker of the moment,’ ” says CAA agent David Lonner. Adds TV producer Marshall Herskovitz (“thirtysomething”): “I applaud the way the school is trying to encourage an individual vision. Clearly, that’s what’s going on here.”

Polakoff, who lived in Israel for five years, goes one step further. “We’re seeing the next wave--the birth of an industry,” she says. “There’s a synergy between peace in the Middle East and the artistic output of the nation. These films reflect a looseness, a refusal to take itself too seriously that wouldn’t have been possible in Israel two years ago.

The potential, says Neal Levy, West Coast director of the Jerusalem Foundation, is vast. Israelis have one of the highest per-capita movie-going rates in the world, attending the 15 to 18 films the country turns out each year as well as a spate of films from abroad. And next week will see the emergence of a second (and the first commercial) television network that will create a host of new broadcast positions, the demand for millions of dollars’ worth of commercials and a major new market for broadcast product.

“Movies are especially important because TV didn’t arrive in Israel until 1968,” Levy explains. “Our first prime minister, (David) Ben Gurion, believed it corrupted the values of youth and, as an untelegenic sort, knew it would change the face of politics to his detriment. Last year, we got cable, 40 or 50 channels which penetrate 75% of the households. We’re on the verge of an explosion in our communications industry.”

The school, it is hoped, will also play a part in fostering the multiculturalism central to sustaining the Middle East peace initiative. Though none of the 90 students currently enrolled in the three-year program is Palestinian; film school director Renen Schorr hopes that that will change.

“We’re out to encourage pluralism--not only in the our artistic point of view but in the student body as well. Non-Jews, non-Israelis are welcome--though the classes are taught in Hebrew. People from England, Russia, the U.S. and South America are already attending.”

Long-term, sponsors of the project hope to raise $300,000--the interest from which will send two groups of filmmakers to Israel each year.

Among those who have expressed interest: screenwriters Todd Graff (“Angie, I Says”), Randi Mayem Singer (co-writer of “Mrs. Doubtfire”) and Tom Schulman (“Dead Poets Society”).