Ms. Alexander Goes to Hollywood : Politics: The chair of the National Endowment for the Arts urges the show business community to join the fight against government budget-cutters.

Jane Alexander, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, had to walk a fine line during her two-day visit to Hollywood this week. Her mission was to court the support of the show business community--a group criticized not only in the halls of Congress, but also by President Clinton--while trying to save the NEA from extinction.

“The agenda of the House (of Representatives) is to cut our budget 40% this year, 40% next year, 20% the year after--zeroing out by the year 1999,” Alexander told a packed audience at Paramount Pictures on Thursday night. “The struggle is not about money but about values.”

The NEA chief acknowledged that Hollywood has been understandably “tentative” about what role to play in the NEA struggle. Since Alexander is legally constrained from offering specific suggestions, that task was delegated to actors Ted Danson and Sally Field. As part of a “Call to Action,” celebrities were advised to do on-air interviews on National Public Radio stations in key cities and NEA sympathizers were urged to attend an arts “Advocacy Day” in Washington on March 14.

Politicos caution, however, that when it comes to celebrities, less may be more. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) has dismissed the NEA as a costly “plaything for the rich,” an image that heavy-handed Hollywood involvement might reinforce. And, in the wake of Clinton’s criticism of media violence perpetrated by the Hollywood establishment in his State of the Union address, even more delicacy is called for.

“Barbra Streisand is good. Norman Lear is good,” says Washington lobbyist Tony Podesta. “But Charlton Heston testifying before Congress last month was great. Declaring himself a foot soldier of the revolution, he expressed his support for the NEA. And, because he’s philosophically attuned with the majority, it carried more weight.”

Academy award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri (“Thelma & Louise”) refutes the notion that celebrities are a liability. “Maybe when you’re dealing with an issue like nuclear waste,” she said. “But the arts is our area. They’re treading on our turf.”

Alexander says she has received support from both sides of the aisle. Though Gingrich has yet to return her calls, the Senate’s conservative stalwart Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and the more moderate Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) have lined up behind the NEA. Among the show business ranks, liberals Paul Newman and Streisand have spoken out publicly on the issue, and Christopher Reeve testified before Congress Thursday. Heston, flanked by a National Rifle Assn. lobbyist, made a strong impression on Capitol Hill. And Gerald McRaney, the star of “Major Dad” and an outspoken Republican, recently called Alexander to offer his help.

Los Angeles, Alexander noted, has a vested interest in the NEA battle. One in four artists in the county work in both the commercial arena and the nonprofit realm, which is dependent on NEA support. And many of the stars who have turned the film and video industries into the nation’s second largest export (after aerospace), got their start in NEA-funded productions.

Alexander, herself, first came to prominence in the NEA-subsidized stage production of “The Great White Hope,” which won Tony Awards for her and co-star James Earl Jones. The career of Faye Dunaway, an attendee at Alexander’s Paramount stop, took off when the nonprofit American Place Theater cast her in the hit “Hogan’s Goat.” And Annette Bening, who introduced Alexander at an earlier event sponsored by talent agency ICM, the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee and Women in Film, got her inspiration--and Equity card--from regional theater.

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“Three hundred and fifty-five million people attended NEA-sponsored events in the last five years, but few people realize it,” Bening pointed out.

One of the key goals of Alexander’s visit was to defuse criticism leveled at the agency in the wake of a $355,000 cut in funding for the American Film Institute’s film preservation program last October. The decision to abolish this and other “sub-grant” programs, she said, was an outgrowth of three cuts in the NEA’s $167-million budget since she took office 16 months ago. To make up, in part, for the loss, the NEA has made a “modest” sum of money available to film preservation groups.

“Applicants now have to match our grant two to one--instead of one to one, as before,” Alexander explained. “We’re counting on the private sector to pick up the slack.”

Bob Rosen, chairman of the department of film and TV at UCLA and director of the Film and Television Archive, calls the cuts a “strategic mistake”--one that was greeted with “disbelief” in the film community.

“It would seem that the film preservation program is one the NEA would want in the foreground,” he said during a phone interview. “All the money goes to demonstrable work. The preservation of our film heritage crosses all political boundaries. Cutting our funding entirely sends a signal that film is no longer one of the ‘arts.’ ”

If the NEA budget grew nearly 10 times under President Nixon and reached its peak under Presidents Reagan and Bush, the funding of controversial work by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano has made the agency a partisan issue in the last five years. Alexander said these artists were not funded through the agency’s rigorous panel process but by “seasonal support” to cultural institutions. To maintain more control, she says, the NEA now reserves the right to allocate funds to specific projects meeting its specifications.

Paramount Pictures Chairman Sherry Lansing, a co-sponsor of the studio event along with Women in Film, suggested that controversy is the price paid for artistic freedom--and is fleeting, in any case.

“Impressionism, Cubism, were once labeled dangerous,” she said. “And they’re now an accepted part of our heritage.”

What’s at stake, Alexander said, is the very lifeblood of the nation. “Winston Churchill was asked during World War II whether he’d consider scrapping the country’s arts budget,” she recalled. “ ‘God no,’ he replied. ‘What have we been fighting for?’ ”