Bumper Crop of Prostitute Films Due

After spending a long, hot summer obsessing over Heidi Fleiss, the alleged madam to the stars, you would think that Hollywood would be hookered out on the prostitution theme. But you would be wrong.

There’s a plethora of prostitute and pimp projects bouncing around town--with only a few cloaked as parables. They include the story of some Civil War call girls, an endangered call girl, a group of misunderstood call girls and even a call girls’ cook.

While there’s no guarantee that all of them will make it to the screen, it’s one of the ironies of the film business that executives still have an affinity for the prostitute/pimp genre, even as they wince at the mention of Fleiss’ name. Another irony is that several of the projects are based at The House That Uncle Walt Built.

Walt Disney Studios has three prostitute/pimp projects in development. Disney’s enthusiasm for the subject apparently springs from the runaway success of “Pretty Woman,” which has grossed $400 million worldwide. It may also owe to the fact that hookers and pimps, like cops and doctors, make for good drama.

Disney’s most high-profile prostitute project is “Pretty Woman II,” which is based at its Touchstone Pictures unit. While discussions are cloaked in secrecy, sources say Touchstone executives have ordered up and rejected several scripts. There’s no start date for the movie, and no word on whether Julia Roberts and Richard Gere will reprise their roles.

Also in early pre-production is “Down Payment,” described as the story of a male chef who goes to work in drag at a brothel.

The other hooker project--which appears to be a tougher take on the profession--is based at Touchstone’s companion label, Hollywood Pictures. “Sexual Healing,” which is being developed by the high-profile production team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, is the story of a high-class call girl and a cop and is set against political intrigue in Washington.

One draft has the hooker working by day as a stockbroker--which makes it easy to imagine a campaign built around the slogan: “She Buys . . . and Sells.”

Most executives declined to discuss their projects publicly Monday, largely because of the publicity surrounding Fleiss. But that hasn’t slowed their momentum. “Everyone’s running for the hills now,” said one. “But the truth is that actresses love to play these parts.”

“Pretty Woman” set the standard for prostitute movies when it was released in 1990, even though it was criticized in some quarters for sanitizing the hooker’s life. But people who might never encounter prostitutes in real life have shown a lot of sympathy for them on screen.

The whore with a heart of gold, or at least some redeeming quality, was a staple of successful movies such as “Elmer Gantry,” with Shirley Jones; “Butterfield 8,” with Elizabeth Taylor; “The World of Suzy Wong,” with Nancy Kwan, and “Klute,” with Jane Fonda. Far less successful was “Whore,” an unrelentingly gritty look at prostitution--which may be a lesson.

Now, unless one of the distributors blinks and changes the title, audiences will have their choice next year of two hooker movies that go by the name of “Bad Girls.”

The more prominent, from executive producer Lynda Obst and 20th Century Fox, is a Civil War-era tale of a group of prostitutes who try to track down the thieves who robbed them. It stars Andie MacDowell, Mary Stuart Masterson, Madeleine Stowe and Drew Barrymore.

The second “Bad Girls,” due in January from independent Castle Hill Productions, follows a “foreigner with writer’s block who moves to New York’s Hell’s Kitchen” in a bid to understand hookers.

A prostitute movie with a cloudier future is “The Last Pimp,” about a street kid who comes under the influence of a pimp and is then seduced by the pimp’s girlfriend. The film initially was developed by Addis/Wechsler and Maverick Films, Madonna’s production company. Maverick said Monday that it has pulled out of the project, and Addis/Wechsler declined to comment.

Noticeably absent from the screen scene so far is Fleiss, who has yet to sell her story. Another holdout is Paramount Pictures, which scotched the strong hooker angle in its upcoming “Milk Money.”

Early accounts described “Milk Money” as the story of “three 12-year-old boys who pool their milk money to go to the big city and buy a hooker so they can see a real, live woman naked.” Sources, however, say Paramount Communications President Stanley Jaffe “flipped out” over the idea of three boys buying a prostitute.

In the version that was made, the kids encounter Melanie Griffith in the big city. Griffith comes to their aid, but instead of getting naked, she ends up taking refuge “in the boys’ world of small-town America.” Andy Hardy does not appear.

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Good Works: One of Steven Spielberg’s pet projects took a big step forward last week when the Starbright Pediatric Network was handed the deed to the old Merv Griffin Studio complex in Hollywood. Coca-Cola donated the land to Starbright, which plans to use it as the site for a state-of-the-art worldwide research center for treating seriously ill children.