Tales of Hollywood, Told by Hollywood : Theater: Starry readers offer a crash course on the image of Hollywood in American fiction in a 10-week series.

The crowds are different from the restive, hard-eyed fans who straddle the red carpet outside the Music Center at Oscar time or bunch up behind velvet ropes at movie premieres.

These followers are a different stripe of Hollywood camper--some carry first editions of “The Day of the Locust,” “The Last Tycoon,” or “What Makes Sammy Run?”

They don’t rush or mob the screen celebrities who come to read aloud from novels about the movies but treat them with the deference of someone delivering a recital on a leafy campus.

Except this is no Ivy League garden. It’s the Met Theatre, a 99-seat house off seedy Western and Santa Monica. But no matter. The valet parking is safe, and the presentations inside the theater each Tuesday night are full of surprises.

There was Dustin Hoffman on opening night reading a chapter from “What Makes Sammy Run?” while the book’s robust 80-year-old author, Budd Schulburg, sat a few feet away. You could feel the pride felt by Schulberg, who had also just listened to another actor, Tom Bowers, read from Schulberg’s “The Disenchanted.”

When Hoffman finished reading a particularly biting passage about Sammy Glick (a crass Hollywood studio product of the ‘30s and ‘40s), he looked into the audience, grinned and said “nothing in Hollywood to this date has changed.” Schulberg, who read a short story of his own, agreed that Sammy Glick would still feel right at home.

Interviewed later, Hoffman said: “The first novel I ever read in my life, when I was 14 or 15, was ‘What Makes Sammy Run?’ I read all Schulberg’s books. I can’t think of a bigger honor to read before the man whose work influenced me early on. It was a heightened rush.”

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Welcome to the Met Theatre’s “Great Writers Series V: Movies in Literature,” an oasis of reflection about movies, a civilized repast from the hurly-burly of “the industry” and the frenzy of media locusts.

“This is the best-kept secret in town,” chortled one patron, Nick Beck, a retired Associated Press reporter and former journalism professor. “You see some of the best screen and stage actors for just $10 in addition to the writers who show up.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s low-life, Hollywood hack, out-of-pocket screenwriter Pat Hobby, from Esquire’s old “Pat Hobby Stories,” was humorously brought to life by Arliss Howard.

And last Tuesday there was Raquel Welch, in a devilish touch, reading from Gore Vidal’s stinging Hollywood satire, “Myra Breckenridge,” which was made into a witless, disastrous 1970 movie in which Welch played the title role.

Teamed with reader Harry Hamlin, she read smoothly and in an interview backstage said that she had prepared hard and “had diagramed the material.” Nearly a quarter century after filming the movie, she said she still remembers it as a “chaotic experience . . . in which no one knew what anyone else was doing.”

Launched in late April with little fanfare and extending into late June, this unusual 10-week, 10-session series is a crash course on the image of Hollywood in American fiction. It’s a hot topic at the Met, which is demonstrating that creative fiction about Tinseltown is vaster than we imagine.

On the bill tonight, for instance, Bruce Wagner reads from his novel “Force Majeure” and his screenplay “Maps to the Stars,” which will be embellished by special guests Rosanna Arquette, Dana Delany and Kim Cattrall.

The brainchild of producer-director and genial host Darrell Larson, the sessions are drawing packed houses of all ages.

Storytellers, of course, have been around since the ancient world. Today authors regularly read from their work on public radio, and poetry corners abound. But Larson’s innovation, initiated with his first writers’ series four years ago when he landed William Styron (Larson’s father-in-law), has underscored people’s hunger for oral literature in a formal setting, particularly when it’s anchored to a theme. (For next year, Larson is considering such themes as Native American literature and “angels in literature.”

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Future weeks will bring L.A. novelist James (“The Black Dalia”) Ellroy reading his “Dick Contino’s Blues”; Roddy McDowall (who Larson says “embodies the history of Hollywood”) reading from Christopher Isherwood’s novel about a young screenwriter, “Prater Violet,” and Ed Harris, Michael Ontkean, Amy Madigan, Penny Fuller, Mariska Hargitay (Jayne Mansfield’s daughter) and writers David Freeman and Gavin (“Inside Daisy Clover”) Lambert, among others.

“The fun for me,” said Larson, “is casting the right actor to fit the material. I liked Hoffman’s edginess for Sammy Glick. If they ever make ‘Sammy’ into a movie, Hoffman would be great.”

* “Great Writers Series V: Movies in Literature” is presented Tuesdays, 8 p.m., at the Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood, through June 21. $10. (213) 957-1152.