WESTSIDE / COVER STORY : Cyber-Cinema : Makers of interactive games are blazing trails in Hollywood with a new entertainment genre for the computer generation.

The sun was setting over a deserted Puerto Rican isle when director John Lafia set about to film his finale. The scene called for a bikini-clad actress and her Rastafarian co-star to cross a white-sand beach, climb aboard a raft and sail away on a peaceful blue-green sea.

But this was not the romantic close to a feature film. Or the end of a television miniseries. It was the finale of an interactive computer game called “Corpse Killer.”

The actors began the scene. But then two men from Digital Pictures Inc., a San Mateo-based game production company, took Lafia aside. The bikini, they said, had to go: Its fabric pattern would “vibrate” when the video was translated into digital bits for the game.

Details. Details. When Hollywood meets Silicon Valley, the mix makes for some odd predicaments--like hunting down a solid-colored bikini in the middle of nowhere by sundown.

Westside directors, producers, screenwriters and actors crossing over to the ballyhooed frontier of interactive media share similar stories. Actors tell of endless reshoots as they fumble through “blue screen” stages lacking props or scenery. Writers discuss the complexities of mapping out scripts that have multiple plot lines and endings. Directors and producers talk about directing by “flow chart.”

In the interactive world, the actors do not improvise. The directors do not shout, “Cut!” Instead, everyone turns to the almighty programmers, the game creators who check to see if the interactive drama will compute.

Once, the computer game world was dominated by Pac-people and cartoon characters. Then interactive technology came along in the form of CD-ROM, which uses silvery disks with the capacity to store video, audio and text. That added capacity meant that live actors could be incorporated into the games.

As flesh-and-blood characters move into the interactive world, directors and screenwriters are playing around with the old rules of dramatic storytelling, creating a whole new art form. As they mix television and computer games, these storytellers are ceding some power to the audience, but they exact a price. As audience members push buttons to guide an interactive plot--selecting what room to visit next or what villain to neutralize--the actors on the screen offer a steady stream of banter, sometimes cheering the players on, but mostly goading them. In interactive, there are insults galore.

The transition to this medium can be tough, but many are making the move, tantalized by the creative prospects, the blush of newness and the chance to get into something big at the beginning. Comparisons to movies in the 1920s or television in the 1950s are common. Who knows? The first interactive star--the Charlie Chaplin or Milton Berle of CD-ROM--may soon emerge.

Regardless of when--and if--that day arrives, the interactive business is keeping Westside professionals gainfully and glamorously employed.

“There’s a sexiness to interactive right now,” said the 35-year-old Lafia, a Westside resident currently shooting his next project: “Bombmeister,” a movie with several plots about a crazed, IRS-hating toy maker.

For all the attraction of interactive, many of those who have dabbled in it have found the transition to the new medium difficult. For actors, it is not exactly Shakespeare. The choice of roles is slim because of the predominance of “twitch” games, a genre that is violent and visceral, high on both body and bimbo count. It tends to appeal to the core of the computer game market: 14-year-old boys and their fathers.

Often, the lead roles go to the actors with the thickest necks and buffest pecs.

Michael Papadol, a wiry West Los Angeles actor, recalls trying, and failing, to get a role in a “killer volleyball” game in which the athletes killed their opponents by spiking the ball.

Gary Kasper, a hefty actor from Echo Park, has had more success, grabbing interactive parts of thugs and executioners.

Peter Kent, 37, a West Los Angeles actor and longtime double for Arnold Schwarzenegger, has flexed his muscles in three different games, including “Thunder in Paradise,” where the high dramatic moment comes when a machine short-circuits while attempting to transfer Hulk Hogan’s brain into his.

“I don’t see it right now as an avenue for anyone to get accolades,” Kent said. “They’re looking for big guys.”

Occasionally, interactive parts for the mild-mannered and the paunchy come along, but they, too, have their limitations.

West Los Angeles actor Tom Finnegan spent several days standing on a mark, staring down the barrel of a camera in a cavernous warehouse, wearing a coach’s cap and reciting all kinds of lines--from solicitous to jeering--to the player of the interactive game “NFL Football Hall of Fame.”

His best-remembered line: “You know, you really stink. Why don’t you just hang it up?” Finnegan, 60, enjoyed the experience, but said interactive is not yet a forum for actors.

“The whole thing is completely planned out. There’s not much improvisation,” he said.

But even as “twitch” continues to dominate the game market, some believe as the technology improves and more Hollywood talent moves into interactive, there will be more sophisticated and adult games, combining movie narrative with gaming interfaces--the term that describes how a player navigates through a game.

“The more complicated these CDs get, it’s going to be as (challenging) as doing a film,” Finnegan said.”

Lena Marie Pousette of Santa Monica, who directs development for Time Warner Interactive, says that the limits of CD storage capacity still greatly confine narrative length and camera movement, but that there are opportunities to elevate interactive to an art form “somewhere between a game and movie.”

“What’s great about interactive is the story and the characters become multilayered,” she said. “You can show different facets of the same character.” Pousette, who co-wrote the successful interactive game “Voyeur,” has won awards given by a new academy for interactive film for best interactive script and writer.

David Wheeler, director for Trilobyte, an Oregon-based company that produced one of the most successful CD-ROM games--”The 7th Guest”--says there will be more experimentation with plot line and character development in interactive games.

“I’m not interested in (players) controlling the movement of story line,” he said. He prefers to “create a parallel (story) line,” in which players could explore characters in other contexts while the main drama unfolds.

Robert Weaver, who directed “Voyeur,” is interested in creating narrative games that tell a story but allow viewers to “play a little.”

“We have 2,000 years of Aristotle, with the three-act structure, the protagonist and the antagonist. We know that an audience will sit and watch a character on the screen and identify with that . . . and weigh that against themselves,” Weaver said. “A lot of the games, with the way they’re structured, throw all that out.”

The list of Hollywood crossovers is growing.

The three professional guilds now keep track of a growing list of “interactive” talent.

Last year, the Writers Guild of America accepted its first three members on interactive credits alone. There’s also the young, 400-member Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, established by a Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer Andrew Zucker. It held its first awards ceremony, dubbed “Cybermania,” in November. The organization honored various types of interactive games with “Voyeur” sweeping some categories.

Those Westside professionals who have moved beyond “linear”--the current argot for television and film--say interactive is becoming another door into Hollywood for newcomers. For those established in the industry, interactive is the ultimate sandbox--a nascent entertainment form in which the rules are uncharted and the promise is unlimited.

“How many chances in life do you get to to be among the first people to try something, to create a new storytelling medium?” said Bob Gale, writer of the film “Back to the Future.”

Gale, a longtime “computer gamer” from Pacific Palisades who dropped out of engineering school to become a screenwriter, counts among his recent projects a video game called “Tattoo Assassin” and an interactive movie, “Mr. Payback,” which opens Friday. In the film, audience members direct the lead character by pressing pistol grips.

But the transition to working in interactive has not been easy, Gale said. The process of creating not one but several possible stories for a player to enjoy is complicated, to say the least.

His script for “Mr. Payback” was over 200 pages--more than twice the length of a typical movie script. He included cross-references, linking one scene to another several pages away.

Once Gale moved into directing the movie, he confronted a new set of problems, namely, making sure actors didn’t lose track of the plot line.

“There was some point in the movie with every actor where I’d be explaining how (the day’s shoot) related to something they did yesterday, or three days ago, or last week, and they inevitably threw up their hands and said, ‘Bob, just tell me what to do.’ ”

Michael Corbett, a veteran actor in the soap opera “The Young and the Restless” who has been carving a niche as a high-tech actor, agrees that plot lines in interactive games can be “incredibly difficult to follow.” He starred in “Voyeur” and in Doug Trumbull’s interactive movie/ride at the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas.

In one “Voyeur” scenario, Corbett fights with his wife. In another, they work as a team.

“It takes an intelligent actor,” said Corbett, a 37-year-old Laurel Canyon resident. “You can’t just feel it and play the scene.”

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Before CD-ROM technology evolved, actors’ images could occupy only a quarter of the computer screen because live action took up so much disk space. As a result, most projects shot in the early 1990s involved extensive shoots against blue screen. The three-dimensional backgrounds were programmed in later.

Blue screen might work well for weather forecasters, but for actors, it can be a headache. Corbett remembers shoot after reshoot because he had inadvertently walked through a wall or strolled off a ledge.

Today, with better technology, more interactive games can be shot as straight video, but the resolution of the picture remains grainy. Such limitations make shooting of interactive scenes difficult.

Westside producer David Calloway, who recently worked on a game called “Supreme Warrior” for Digital Pictures, said he had to keep checking with the programmers to make sure certain effects could be created.

Programmers balked during the opening sequence, when evil Chinese warlords were setting fire to a vendor’s cart in an ancient village. Smoke and fog would not convert to data bits easily, resulting in a distorted visual effect, they said. The production crew set up some fans to blow the smoke out of the picture, but eventually the programmers had to figure a way around the problem.

“We said, ‘Look, how do you have firecrackers and fire without smoke, guys?” Calloway recalled. The fans helped somewhat, but the problem was finally resolved by the technicians. Something else these Westside professionals have to get used to: an interactive budget usually is low--averaging about $1.5 million per production. “I’m trying to shoot a 90-minute movie for $1.5 million,” said director Weaver. It’s “not as much as if I were directing episodic TV. Not nearly as much.”

Some actors are waiting to see if there will ever be a solid contract and pay scale for interactive work. Currently, pay scale issues are sometimes handled on a case-by-case basis. When particular actors come with some star power that could help sell the product, they command higher salaries, but nothing in the mega-range of actors like Sylvester Stallone.

For now, the interactive industry appeals to the risk-takers and the restless in Hollywood.

The 41-year-old Weaver, son of actor Dennis Weaver, grew up around the television industry, but today he is transforming himself into a “director/designer,” a title reflecting his hybrid expertise in technology and directing. He founded a Brentwood-based interactive production company called InterWeave Entertainment.

“Producing games with video is the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. It’s so detail-oriented and the planning--it incorporates so many different disciplines,” Weaver said. “I’m solving problems in five or six areas of discipline. It keeps you on your toes. It doesn’t get boring.”