Billy Crystal Acts, Produces and Directs, (and May Even Host the Oscars Again). You Could Call Him . . . : The Nice 800-lb. Gorilla

While Whoopi Goldberg was performing the duties of host of this year’s Academy Awards show, the two most interested members of the estimated 1 billion people watching on television were in Pacific Palisades and San Francisco, talking to each other over the telephone.

The one in Pacific Palisades was Billy Crystal, the Oscar host the previous four years, and the one in San Francisco was Robin Williams, America’s first choice as Crystal’s replacement.

“Robin and I were rooting for her all the time,” says Crystal, recalling the evening months later in a hotel room in Manhattan. “All during the show, we kept the phone line open. ‘How do you think she’s doing?’ ‘She’s terrific, that really went over, didn’t it?’ It was like she was our kid sister.”

Disinterested reviewers were less impressed with Goldberg’s performance than her “Comic Relief” co-hosts, and Crystal thinks the criticism was unfair.

“I was upset that she got hammered in so many places,” he says. “It’s a tough job to do. She was working on a movie, and she had to write her own stuff. People don’t appreciate how much is involved in that job.”

Crystal, who began practicing Academy Awards speeches by standing in front of a bathroom mirror and talking into a toothbrush when he was 8, says it was the months of preparation that caused him to skip this year’s show.

“Nobody could understand it, ‘How could you not want to do it?’ ” Crystal says. “How I feel, what I do with my family, are more important. I did not need the four months of stress. Once I say, ‘Yes,’ I have a headache until I say, ‘Good night.’ ”

Crystal was also busy on “City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold,” which opened Friday, and, frankly, he says, life is too short to be consumed by one gig, even if it is for the most watched event on the planet.

“I sense the clock ticking all the time,” he says. “Robin and I were talking about this the other day. He’s 47, I’m 46. He said, ‘I think I’ll work until I’m 60. That’s 13 years, I can do about five movies.’ Then he got sad. ‘Jesus, only five movies!’ ”

Although Crystal will talk about the Oscars--past, present and future (he says he probably will host again, maybe even next year)--he has become a multiple-threat entertainer, a writer, director, producer and star with the power to do almost anything he wants. This fall, he will begin directing and starring in “Forget Paris,” a comedy inspired by events in his own 24-year marriage, and, after that, he says he may fulfill an old dream of doing a one-man-show on Broadway.

In the meantime, he’s trying to drum up business for “City Slickers II,” which returns Crystal, Daniel Stern and Jack Palance to the West they won in the original 1991 comedy hit about three New Yorkers whose dude ranch vacation turns into a true Western adventure. In the sequel, they hit the trail to follow a treasure map found in a dead man’s hat.

“We felt we wanted to go back into sort of familiar territory,” Crystal says of his and co-writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel’s decision to revisit the West. “Even though this movie is very different, there is a familiarity that I think is just right, just the right amount of winking at the first movie that helps this movie.”

To some, “City Slickers II” may be familiar enough to seem like the same movie. Palance, whose rawboned cowboy Curly died in the first picture, does an encore as Curly’s long-lost and equally weird twin, Duke, who is also after Curly’s gold.

Palance won the best supporting actor Oscar for his first performance in “City Slickers” and used his acceptance speech to show off his physical prowess and, inadvertently, to set Crystal up for his best performance as the Academy Awards host.

It was during the first half-hour of the ’92 Oscar telecast that Palance, then 73, dropped to the floor and began a series of one-armed pushups that we thought would never end. In the wings, Crystal looked on with as much amazement as everyone else.

“At first, I’m thinking, ‘What is he doing? This is too weird,’ ” Crystal recalls. “Then I went out and made a couple of jokes about it, got huge laughs, and knew I could run with this thing the whole night.”

And he did, returning between commercials with updates on Palance’s continuing adventures. He’s backstage on a Stairmaster, he’s going to enter the Ironman competition, he just bungee-jumped off the Hollywood sign. Later, Crystal brought the house down when he walked onto the stage after a huge “Hook” production number and quipped, “Jack Palance is the father of all those kids.”

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Crystal, who once aspired to be a professional baseball player, talks about that ’92 show as Ted Williams might talk about his .408 batting season. But it was the circumstances under which he worked that set that performance off.

“That was a weird night, and maybe the greatest night of my career as a comedian,” he says. “I had pneumonia. . . . I had a temperature of 103; I couldn’t hear anything. I rehearsed my medley (that morning), but that was it. I went home and took some vaporizer treatments and shots and went to bed. Earlier, we called Tom Hanks and asked if he would pinch-hit for me.”

But Crystal made it to the show, got through his opening monologue, then saw Palance hand him “the greatest setup in the history of Oscar comedy,” and he fell into a groove that only comedians, musicians and athletes can fully appreciate.

It wasn’t the Palance jokes that Crystal recalls with the greatest pride, however. It was the line he came up with when “Our Gang” comedies creator Hal Roach, whose 100th birthday Crystal paused to acknowledge, stood in the audience and began an impromptu speech that no one more than a few feet from him could hear.

Suddenly, 3,000 people in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and a billion or so more watching on TV were joined in a silent void, and Crystal says his mind was racing through “a million jokes” trying to rescue the moment.

“That is only fitting,” he said, as Roach finished, “because Mr. Roach started his career in silent movies.”

Looking back on it, the line seems less a joke than an inspired observation, but it got Roach, the audience, the network and the show off the hook and gave live TV one of its finer examples of grace under pressure.

“For that one moment, I can always say I was a really good comedian,” Crystal says. “In baseball terms, I got all of that one. I could quit now and say, ‘That was a good thing.’ ”

Crystal says he regretted not quitting the Oscar show after the ’92 telecast. “Just ride in like ‘Shane,’ solve the problem, and ride out.” Chances of another Palance setup were slim and, without it, he says, it’s just an awards show.

Sure enough, critics found him flat and off the next year, and although the job seems to be his in perpetuity if he wants it, he decided not to return in 1994. He admits he wasn’t sure until the show was under way with Goldberg that he’d done the right thing.

Crystal says he would have opened the show by pulling Frank Sinatra out of the wings and letting him finish his Grammy speech, and he would have countered the soberness of all those “Schindler’s List” speeches by poking a little fun at the movie.

“All I know is that the first woman who won, the set designer, was named Ewa Braun,” he says, pronouncing it the same as Hitler’s mistress. “They pronounced it ‘E-wah,’ but it’s really ‘E-vah,’ and the guy who came up with her had a little mustache and his hair was sort of down. . . . I would have been all over that.”