That Face, Those Eyes . . . : Dana Carvey’s got a new career vision thing. (<i> OK</i> ,<i> OK</i> .<i> No more George Bushisms</i> .) So with ‘Clean Slate,’ can the man of a thousand sendups move from ‘SNL’ to big-screen leading man?

If you were Dana Carvey, you might be happy as hell that George Bush didn’t get reelected.

Nothing necessarily ideological, mind you, just fewer people on the street or on press junkets pestering you to do just a few seconds--please?--of the hemming-and-hawing lisp and ineffectual tomahawk chops that made the real Bush finally seem like a parody of Carvey’s own appropriation on “Saturday Night Live.” A term’s worth of that, and a Bush breather ought to be welcome for a versatility-loving comic.

And yet . . .

“Yeah, I’d done enough of Bush,” Carvey allows, feeling a little more for his spoofee’s welfare than his own, perhaps.

“I think he’d been beaten up quite enough, and it was fine to send him off into the night. I’m working on my (Jack) Kemp. Impressionists gotta get a jump, we gotta think ‘Who’s the front-runner?’

“But . . . it’s kind of weird.” An embarrassing admission is imminent. “I find myself going in a restaurant and thinking (he breaks into his best Bush), ‘Wellll, got a little biscuit . . . ‘ I mean, I find myself still doing him, to myself , so that is a sickness in itself.”

But George Bush seems to be the one recurring “Saturday Night Live” character of the ‘90s that isn’t in development as a feature film these days, though you’d think the ex-Prez would be at least as eligible a spinoff as Linda Richman or Pat. So, whither the film career of Carvey, who exited the show while still its most popular player nearly two years ago?

It’s coming, it’s coming. Enter “Clean Slate,” Carvey’s first real starring vehicle since leaving TV’s preeminent late-night revue, if you don’t count the “Wayne’s World” movies, in which he enjoyed elevated sidekick status. (“Opportunity Knocks,” his sole prior stab at carrying a feature film, was released four years ago while Carvey was still in the midst of “Saturday Night” fever.)

“Clean Slate,” which opened Friday, is the film a very weary Carvey has arrived at a Manhattan hotel to promote, on a one-day leave from a shoot in Canada, though he confesses only half-jokingly that he barely remembers making the movie in question. This forgetfulness isn’t a riff on the script’s amnesia theme but an allusion to the fact that the picture wrapped a year ago and he’s been busy filming other movies ever since, one of the successors being the already rush-released “Wayne’s World 2.”

“A year? That’s like a lifetime,” he reiterates wearily. “I’ve done three films since this. So it’s kinda like ‘What was that again?’ ”

The one with the dog, we remind him. (Barkley the terrier, who has much more time to burn than Carvey, is doing interviews of a sort on another floor.)

“Yeah, people love the dog. That’s good. People were going, ‘Were you afraid the dog was gonna steal the movie?’ I said, ‘Please, God, I hope he does.’ If we can get some dog laughs, that’s great.”

The human laughs in “Clean Slate,” meanwhile, for once in Carvey’s career, don’t rely on his submerging his own persona in the service of exaggerated characterizations. He plays it about as close as he’s going to get to straight in a thickly plotted comedy whose premise is sort of the inverse of “Groundhog Day”: As a private detective newly beset by a rare form of amnesia that causes him to clear out his memory bank every time he dozes, he starts each morning mentally anew, while the rest of the world awakens to the usual continuity.

This role wasn’t written with the comic or his famous mimicry in mind, and here at last, Dana Carvey stays visible as someone who looks and sounds much like Dana Carvey, a romantic leading man thing, without accents and wigs. A breakthrough he’s been striving for?

“Honestly, not really. I like playing characters,” he insists, “and I’ve really come to terms with that, and I realize that I don’t really have a face. I think if there’s anything true about me, it’s that I just change a lot. I don’t think I have a singular persona like Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner or something. I have such a bland, rubbery face that I can change it, so why not play to that?”

This picture, he indicates, is more an aberration than a model for his film career: “I basically would look for quirkier, weirder parts at this point, probably more extreme characters, edgier stuff. That’s my thing, just play to my strengths from now on.

“But ironically, my favorite kind of film is an Everyman in an amazing dilemma--’Three Days of the Condor’; pick any Hitchcock film. I love those kind of film noir mystery-detective what’s-going-on movies. That’s what appealed to me about ‘Clean Slate’: ‘Hey, it’d be cool to be in something like that.’ But for me, ultimately, honestly, probably my strengths are characters and comic rhythms, sort of transposing what I did on ‘Saturday Night Live’ into a filmic medium. . . . Listen to me, I sound so pseudo-intellectual.”

He recovers, ever-present modesty intact: “My hero--which I don’t mean to make any comparison--would be Peter Sellers. When I watch him work, I most identify with what he’s doing. He knows how to bend the words, and that’s what I like to do, bend words musically, get a laugh that way. I was just watching ‘The Party’ the other day. He was hitting musical rhythms in his speech, and you could tell that he was having a good time with it.”

*

Self-amusement, obviously, is no small factor for Carvey, who after all is a guy who goes out to eat and can’t resist wondering in that inner lisp if buttering the biscuit would or wouldn’t be prudent.

Carvey’s gift is that he works strictly within the topical realm of verbal comedy but as if he were a physical comedian, relying on vocal nuances and gestures so savvily that it often doesn’t matter if content isn’t up to form, as was too often the case with “SNL.” Satire and scatology may have figured into Carvey’s work regularly enough, but guile has always been secondary to the glee he takes in pure performance, which makes even his most devastating parodies seem sort of innocent. The world is full of angry comics, and Carvey isn’t one of them.

All this talk about Carvey’s acting aspirations is interrupted at one point by a startling declaration.

“Well,” he says unexpectedly, fielding a query about his future in films, “I feel like I’m a comedian.” He says it again for good measure. “I’m not an actor, I’m a comedian.”

So pardon us while we stop to collect our jaws off the carpet. But his declaration isn’t a matter of humility. “People always go, ‘Don’t put yourself down,’ and I say to them, ‘Well, there’s 10,000 actors and about 50 comedians--I’m complimenting myself.’ And I think a comedian has to exert control over what he does.”

Therein lies the rub, and the real point, of his juxtaposition.

“I mean, certainly David Letterman exerts control on his show,” Carvey continues, “and Roseanne Arnold exerts control, and Robin Williams exerted control on ‘Mrs. Doubtfire.’ You’re still a collaborator in film, but you need to exert your influence, because you know best how to make you funny. That doesn’t mean you know anything about film, or it doesn’t mean you understand the history of cinema, but you do--after being a stand-up for 10 years--kind of know what your strengths are comedically and how to play to ‘em.”

Aha, now emerges the ego, figures the cynic. But not really. Reports from impartial sorts who have toiled on film sets alongside Carvey give tale of a prototypical (and Hollywood atypical) nice guy who’s anything but a power wielder. For all his talk of “control,” Carvey’s speaking mostly in the theoretical, as someone who hasn’t much wielded it yet but is lately prone to pondering how to keep his hands near his own reins.

Difficult is not the hallmark of his approach to Hollywood--so far, anyway.

“This is all kind of baby-boom, dysfunctional jargon, but I am a people-pleaser,” he acknowledges. “I want everyone to like me, which really, really is just the way that I’ve learned to operate in the world. It works for me a lot of the time, and it works against me some of the time. I try to assert myself more, because I know that my tendency to please can get me in a lot of trouble, and not following my instincts.”

And who wouldn’t be trying to sharpen up the instincts a little, with the deadly “Saturday Night Live”-”SCTV” curse yet to be outlived?

*

On the plus side, Carvey can enjoy having retired from “SNL” at a personal peak: “I was really happy with the way it turned out, because I started out as the Church Lady, basically, and by the end they were mentioning different characters along with her. That was a triumph, because for a while there I thought I was just gonna be the guy in the dress.”

But in the periphery of the path ahead, there’s a cinematic salvage yard littered with the wreckage of high-concept, low-ball vehicles that lowered public estimation of the once-beloved likes of Chase, Aykroyd, Candy, Short, et al. Carvey doesn’t want to whistle through that graveyard, but he’d still rather err on the side of too many movies than too few, lest he not learn along the way.

“This trip from ‘Saturday Night Live’ into movies, it’s fraught with danger,” he understates. “If anything, I would beg for compassion for the people who make the trip. They’re thrust into this arena they really don’t understand, and yet they don’t get to go make 10 B-movies and learn their craft, because of their success in television. . . .

“A lot of times editors overedit comedic scenes so that the rhythm is taken out of the hands of the comedian. We were shooting up in Toronto and they had this Marx Brothers filmfest up there, and I would come back and watch those movies, and I was just like ‘Wow, they’re playing it in a two-shot, and it’s not cutting, and it’s just Harpo and Chico doing their stuff, and here comes a straight guy, and they’re (messing) with him, and they’re staying on the shot, and they’re staying on the shot, and they’re staying on the shot.’ You watch a lot of modern comedies, and they overshoot everything, and then they just . . . “ He makes a wanton snipping motion.

It turns out Carvey means “Wayne’s World 2,” which was hurriedly written and filmed and even more hurriedly edited for Christmas release, as an example. In the subplot wherein novice-to-love’s-ways Garth falls under the spell of Kim Basinger, Carvey had control almost every step of the way--writing those scenes, casting Basinger (“She was brilliant”), working closely with the director and cinematographer. But being shut out at the all-important last stop, the editing room, was a “frustrating” learning experience.

Likewise, he was disappointed that the setup he wrote, in which Garth imagines himself to have grown up, affording a new swagger in his walk and talk, was scissored from the final edit. “It’s a little embarrassing when you see a performance and the premise of the performance was cut.”

He still hasn’t seen “Wayne’s World 2” or “Clean Slate” from beginning to end. “I have a hard time watching myself on the screen. People say, ‘Oh, what are you, a romantic lead now?’ I see someone with no chin who looks very tired, who has his hair colored and looks uncomfortable.

“And Garth, I see a guy 38 . . . “ This requires a little explanation. “In my mind, look, they never say our ages, and I say Garth is at least 30. I mean,” Carvey offers with a whiff of apology, “I never for a second thought that I looked like a guy who just got pubes, unless he has some kind of disease. When that line came around, I did say to Mike Myers, ‘What’s with this pubes thing? We’re trying to say I’m 14 or something? I don’t know when yours came in, but . . . ‘ “

*

Lest it sound like this no-control issue has soured Carvey on the whole movie thing, that’s not the case. His two most recent shoots have him buzzing, both having presented him with oddball parts of Peter Sellers-ish proportions in reputable ensemble satires.

Recently he completed work under director Alan Parker on “The Road to Wellville,” based on T. Coraghessan Boyle’s award-winning comic novel about rampant enemas and other strange doings at a turn-of-the-century Michigan health spa. Carvey plays central guru figure John Harvey Kellogg’s disillusioned, rat-eating, dumpster-living son.

“It’s a pretty sick film,” he says with a little pride. “I had a big scene with Bridget Fonda--she’s naked in a tub and I strip for her--but mostly I’m getting to work with the world’s greatest living actor. I do throw bottles of feces at Anthony Hopkins’ face.”

Sir Anthony’s face, he means.

“Yeah, giant bottles of human excrement go flying at Sir Anthony’s face, yes. So who could turn down a part like that? And I look just hideous in the film. I’ve got this makeup guy, Peter Frampton--when he wakes up, he comes alive--who cut out these pieces from a Coke can and put ‘em behind my ears and made ‘em push out like that. And then he painted my teeth so they looked just decayed and rotten and chipped . . . “

He couldn’t sound more delighted if he was Chauncey Gardner with the clap.

Upon completing “Wellville,” Carvey caught the red-eye to Toronto to commence shooting “It Happened in Paradise,” directed by George Gallo (“29th St.”) and co-starring Jon Lovitz and Nicholas Cage. Here, as with “Wayne’s World 2,” Carvey is being allowed to create his own part--as a none-too-bright Italian American good-fella--and improvisation is being heartily welcomed as the cameras roll. Carvey’s exhausted but intoxicated.

“What I’ve found is that the act of discovering it while you’re filming is the key to comedy on film, rather than rehearsing it, getting it all perfect, ‘now let’s go in front of the cameras and try to repeat that,’ ” Carvey says.

“When I was doing ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I’d try to be bad at read-through, bad in rehearsals. Sometimes the writers would go, ‘ What are you doing?’ Because I was so afraid to hit it on Thursday or Friday and then spend the rest of the weekend trying to repeat myself, and even trying at dress rehearsal not to do it too well, so that when you’re on air you’re discovering where its limits are, right as the camera’s rolling. And on film that’s really hard to do. But on this film, on ‘It Happened in Paradise,’ it’s happening.”

*

Yet how many opportunities will there be to play these kinds of weirdos in Hollywood pictures on a scale commensurate with the billing and budget he’s used to?

For backup, Carvey has at least two of his own projects in development, both Sellers-type riffs on naive immigrants. At Columbia, he has “Tucson,” about a paperback-fed Irishman who comes to the Old West with his own ideas about what a cowboy is; at MGM, he hopes to do “Beverly Hills Ninja,” a Clouseau-esque comedy about a Japanese-born and -bred white guy who stumbles into America still laboring under the delusion that he’s a great warrior.

“If it’s in television or film, I’m trying to protect whatever my strengths are and play to my instincts, don’t sway from that. And it’s hard to do. And they do bring truckloads of money,” he says, laughing.

“To say that money isn’t a factor at all is crazy. . . . But usually you can make a lot of different choices. I had this brilliant acting coach who really helped me quite a bit. He died of AIDS. And he called me from the hospital, from his deathbed, basically, and he said, ‘Don’tchase the Hollywood dream. It’s a dead-end street’--don’t go for fame and money when everyone around you is going to ‘go for the fame and the money.’

“I mean, I was offered a Church Lady commercial this year-- this year; I hadn’t done the character in four years--for seven figures, and didn’t do it. And I’m not Johnny Integrity at all, but I honestly really like the character and I thought that would cheapen her. Isn’t that weird?”

Carvey had paged through the New York Times over breakfast and happened upon an article on Dave Thomas, the veteran of the satirical series “SCTV” who never quite made it outside the show and is now toiling as a wacky sidekick on a hit network sitcom. There are generalizations in the piece about the disillusionment of Thomas’ generation of comics that have Carvey pondering how much they might apply to him:

“There’s a lot of traps in Hollywood--selling your soul. . . . Sooner or later, as somebody from ‘Saturday Night Live,’ you’re in a situation where you’re doing something where they say you would have parodied that in your early days. Did you read that about Dave Thomas? I thought that was real interesting--now he’s doing what once he would have made fun of.

“It’s not a desirable situation,” Carvey adds, thoughtfully, “but maybe it happens to all of us sooner or later.”

This possibility seems to engender the slightest of Angst in the world’s least angry dead-on savage parodist. But not much more than that. He takes his delight in the goofy subversion of the moment more than the expansive scheming and cunning of ideology. And if Carvey did break down, swallow the shame and imprudently go for the Church Lady commercial, chances are he’d wind up having a perfectly self-amusing good time giving the old bag a spin.*