ON LOCATION : Meet Six-Gun Sharon Stone : The actress dons high-plains drifter gear to dish out her own brand of frontier justice in ‘The Quick and the Dead.’ And she really loves it.

“Do we have any blood around?” asks Kevin Conway, looking up from the mud puddle in which he has been wallowing for several minutes. The question is instantly distilled into a command, and echoed up a line of recent film school graduates in headsets.

“Blood!” A makeup artist bursts through a set of swinging saloon doors and scuttles into the street, where the actor lies cowering at the feet of Sharon Stone.

Conway is not the first man in Hollywood who has found himself in this position. Or deserved to. Holding a gun to his head, Stone looks down at the spot where a red liquid is being applied to what is left of the lap of Eugene Dred, brothelmaster of the fictional town of Redemption. “Your penis has been shot off!” she observes cheerfully, as the makeup person scurries off again.

Stone rode into town on horseback in November, a cigarillo dangling from her lips, and the bit very much in her teeth as the star of Sam Raimi’s “The Quick and the Dead,” a big-budget twist on the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. With Stone cast in the Clint Eastwood role of the mysterious outsider, “The Quick and the Dead” intends to be something far more ‘90s than spaghetti. Think of it as Hollywood’s first fusilli and chevre Western.

Conway crosses and uncrosses his legs uncomfortably, waiting for the apocalyptic rain to begin again, while Stone asks director Raimi if she should kick Dred’s gun away. “That’s the way Angie Dickinson would do it,” Conway mutters from his mudhole.

What is surprising about this scene is how easily Stone has transformed herself from Catherine Tramell, the ice maiden of “Basic Instinct” (and Sally Eastman, the ice matron of the current “Intersection”), into this cayenne Sgt. Pepper of the old frontier. She is a cold fish out of water--Camille Paglia in “Annie Get Your Gun”--whose very presence in a Stetson and spurs invites the question Gene Wilder once asked Cleavon Little in “Blazing Saddles”: “What’s a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic setting like this?”

Well, for one thing, she is attempting to reinvent the Catherine wheel, to move beyond the hothouse flower in the police interrogation room to something far more interesting: a leading lady who is actually leading to something other than retirement at 40. “I really like that the woman plays what is classically the man’s role,” Stone says. “Because I’m learning that that’s what I’m best at. Not that I play it like a man. I think it’s woman revealed in a new way.”

From the very first showing of dailies, some executives at TriStar expressed a preference to see woman revealed in the old way. “Some people, who shall remain nameless, wanted me to wear a dress to ride into town,” Stone says. “I thought, ‘Oh yeah, the gunslinger’s gonna ride into town side saddle.’ ”

Her voice becomes a combination of mince and menace. “ ‘ I am just so darn mad! You had better watch it now! ‘ And there were some people, who shall also remain nameless, who were concerned that there really weren’t a lot of places for me to be naked in this movie. But there are a lot of ways to be sexy other than flouncing around in your birthday suit. This character’s not trying to run around in the nude so she can get control over somebody.”

Which is not to say she won’t be nude in “The Quick and the Dead,” just that she doesn’t spend the majority of her day that way. “ ‘Will she be naked when you interview her?’ Say yes! Say I was!” The image pleases her. “There’s a stereotype to everything,” she goes on. Stone looks into the beady eyes of her ink-stained visitor. “You, for instance, get a certain amount of pressure that you’re a despicable, untrustworthy ferret. And as you can see, I’m nude. So there you have it.”

With “Basic Instinct,” America proved it would go see Sharon Stone in a man’s fantasy of what a woman should be. And the surprising success of the much reviled “Sliver” demonstrated Stone’s power to embody the European voyeur’s fantasy of what a woman should be. Her four-day war of nerves in “The Quick and the Dead” with the allegorically evil Herod--played by Gene Hackman--should answer two questions: Is the world ready for Sharon Stone’s fantasy of what a woman should be? And can Stone make frontier feminism fun?

“It’s a pleasure because every day I get to come to work and experiment with what that is,” she says, “what would it be like to be trapped in this situation in the Old West? And because I don’t have to fit into some agreement of femaleness, I get to really be female.”

The gentleman’s agreement on Hollywood femaleness, as portrayed in the classic Westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks, consisted primarily of dance hall girls, prostitutes, and dance hall girls studying to be prostitutes. “They made them wear those unbelievably stupid hairdos,” Stone says, “like, excuse me but where did they get the cream rinse and the curling iron?

“The whole depiction of women in film has been a joke. It’s rarely been a picture of a woman as women really are. It’s much more a man’s perspective, a man’s fantasy of a woman, than it is of the way women actually do anything. I go to the movies with my girlfriends, and we come out of the picture going, ‘Do you do that? I don’t do that.’ ”

For her gunfight with the lamentable Dred, Stone spent the better part of a week caked in mud, her hair wet and stringy, wearing a wet suit under her clothes and plastic bags on her feet. “She’s very unglamorous in this movie, and she’s the one who wanted that,” says costume designer Judianna Makovsky, who found many of the original costumes used in the Sergio Leone Westerns in a vault in Italy, now authentically aged. “Of course, the studio wanted her to look good, and we certainly never wanted to pretend that she wasn’t feminine. The leather pants will help with that.”

For a 35-year-old sex goddess who had to campaign in the B-movies for more than a decade before she achieved stardom, Stone seems particularly unconcerned about asserting her femininity in this picture. “Well, you know, I think we’ve pretty permanently established my gender,” she says. “I think that’s an element we don’t need to view as a mystery anymore.” In this picture, it is Stone’s gender politics that aren’t wearing any clothes--but the leather pants will help with that.

If Redemption reminds moviegoers of no other Wild-West town they have seen, it will be because of the house that is perched, buzzard-like, at the end of the main street. The house not only blocks off one end of the street from the high desert beyond--a great rarity in a genre that practically hums the tune “Home on the Range” under its breath--but it has been made to look so completely evil that production designer Patrizia Von Brandenstein has actually given it razor-sharp teeth just over the front door.

The house is occupied by Herod, played as a deadly dandy by the mutton-chopped, bowler-hatted Hackman. “I thought about predatory birds when I designed Herod’s house,” says Von Brandenstein, “and about Dickens, because this is a place where bad is very bad, good is very good, and in the end, people get what they deserve. This is a town in which there is no commerce, no society, no school, and no sheriff. Children don’t thrive here, and babies aren’t born. But now a cleansing rain has hit Redemption. It’s all very allegorical, but it’s not tongue in cheek.”

Allegorical Westerns have a way of galloping over the top if they aren’t carefully reined in, which explains Hackman’s sure-footed and stabilizing presence in “The Quick and the Dead.” After making only one Western in his career, Hackman is well on his way to becoming the Gabby Hayes of the ‘90s, having reeled off “Unforgiven,” “Geronimo” and now “The Quick and the Dead,” in just three years.

Whatever else its effect on Hackman’s career, this little midlife gambol has paid an unexpected return: He is now the fastest draw in the Westwood movie district. “Gene has the quickest draw around here, maybe in the business,” says Thell Reed, the film’s gun coach and a former world record holder in the fast draw. “He works at it pretty hard.” Feared by all the other bankable cowpokes from Brentwood to Bel-Air, Hackman was the natural choice to slap leather with Stone.

A lot of leather gets slapped during the course of the movie’s four days, and not all of it is holsters. Russel Crowe, the brooding Australian who played a skinhead in “Romper Stomper” last year, and 19-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the retarded boy in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” are Stone’s unlikely love interests. In fact, the two young tyros were attracted to the picture by the opportunity to watch Hackman work his close-up magic, rather than any particular interest in either Stone or the chance to play cowboys. “I never really liked Westerns,” says DeCaprio. “I thought they were extremely boring.”

Despite this posse of talented actors, the picture belongs to Stone. That she will receive top billing is a testament to her international star power, but it is also a kind of bullseye for plummeting grosses. “The Quick and the Dead” will likely stand or fall based on how willing audiences are to accept Sharon Stone as a cranky cowgirl.

Well, sometimes cowgirls get the muse. Between gunfights, Stone sits next to an electric space heater in the frigid saloon, steam rising off her as if she were about to spontaneously combust. A makeup person has been covering her left wrist with liquid skin and blood, and at one point accidentally starts to peel back Stone’s real skin.

“I just love the violence,” Stone says. “Whenever somebody suggests cutting it back, I’m like, no, no, more violent, I want it to be more violent. There’s something about a period movie, and particularly a movie that’s this kind of new genre, that takes the reality out of the violence, it doesn’t romanticize it.” Reaching for the Colt Peacemaker on her hip, she adds in a gravelly, tough hombrette voice, “Otherwise I’m gonna kill somebody.”

To make sure the picture would stand out visually in what has become a stampede of Westerns, Stone insisted that the 34-year-old Raimi, whose background was in low-budget splatter films like “Army of Darkness” and “Darkman,” be brought in to direct. Stone says, “He was the only person on my list, and if Sam hadn’t made this movie, I don’t think I would have made it. It’s the kind of picture I don’t think just anyone could have made, even any great directors, because of the kind of material it is.”

Perhaps the most deferential human being ever to look through a Panaflex lens, Raimi unfailingly refers to everyone on the set as “sir” or “ma’am,” and wears a tie every day because he had seen old stills of D. W. Griffith wearing a suit and tie while directing some ancient desert epic. “I do it as a sign of respect for the cast and crew,” Raimi says, though he waited until he was in his mid-20s. “Young kids,” he says, as if recalling some past unpleasantness, “it doesn’t look good if they wear a tie.”

Raimi had never directed a picture with big stars like Stone and Hackman, but the challenge of that quickly paled next to making a Western that is nearly all gunfights. “I was a little scared at first,” he says. “There’s a fine line between the cliche of previous Westerns and the classic aspects of previous Westerns,” Raimi says. “Is the gunfight something that’s so cliche the audience really doesn’t want to see it anymore? Or is it a classic element that has gone beyond the cliche and into the myth of the thing? I just keep asking myself what new edge are we bringing to it.”

Each gunfight has been choreographed differently so that it is stylistically unlike the one before it. The producers also brought along veteran character actors like Woody Strode and Pat Hingle to create a visual link with the old Westerns. But without a distinctly modern look, the endless exchanges of hot lead would fall flat, and Stone--who is credited as a producer for the first time in her career--wanted Raimi’s eye. “When Sharon Stone says, ‘I want you,’ ” Raimi says coquettishly, “what man could feel bad?”

Actually, Simon Moore could feel bad, and did. Moore is the Englishman who wrote the screenplay for “The Quick and the Dead,” despite never having seen the American West, and had planned to direct it. “I was told Simon had already raised the money in Europe to do it,” says producer Josh Donen, “and that I should back off.” Instead, Donen showed a bit of his own gunslinger side by moving Moore aside to get Stone for his leading lady.

Stone had just come off what she said was a blissful experience making “Intersection,” and was determined to use the power conferred on her by the unexpected grosses of “Sliver” to make “The Quick and the Dead” her own vehicle, if not “Stagecoach.”

“ ‘Sliver’ was my big learning experience,” she says. “I had the right to say no to all kinds of things in my contract that I rolled over in an effort not to be difficult, to be a good girl. And everything I rolled over on became the enormous errors of that picture. So I got to the point in the production of this of fighting for everything. ‘I am not rolling over on this. It will not be less than this. It will go like this.’ I became very adamant that the quality of the piece be maintained.”

She was, of course, immeasurably aided in this by her own reputation as a pain in the neck. “That’s OK,” she says, “having a reputation as a bitch makes people stay back a little bit, which gives me room to breathe. I don’t mind it that much.

“By the time we were ready to make the movie, I didn’t want to make it I was so worn out,” she adds. “The night before the read-through I was running a 102-degree fever because I didn’t want to face going. But by the time I left the rehearsal I was all right. We did all the fighting before we got here.” Nobody had to tell her to smile when she said that. She already was.