The Great Gold Rush of ’95 : Television: Everyone’s rushing to cash in on ‘Friends.’ And Hollywood is making sure it gets a piece of the action.

It’s pretty simple: If you have anything to do with “Friends,” NBC’s second-year sitcom about six neurotic, pretty pals moaning and loafing around their communal apartment, Hollywood wants you bad--so bad that you’re going to need to rent an armored truck to haul away all the cash that the town seems eager to throw your way.

David Schwimmer, one of the show’s stars, has signed a four-picture deal with Miramax that includes the Disney-owned company’s concession to let him direct at least one of those movies even though he has yet to ever run a reel of film through a camera.

Co-star Matthew Perry will get $1 million to star in Columbia Pictures’ “Fools Rush In,” scheduled to be shot next spring, and he has several other lucrative movie offers to choose from if he wants to squeeze another picture into next summer’s hiatus.

Jennifer Aniston, the show’s ditsy but lovable brat who has never appeared on the big screen, has five movies either in the can or shooting in the coming year now that “Friends” has made hers the nation’s most popular hairdo. She’s also scored endorsement deals for milk with fellow “Friend” Lisa Kudrow and for Microsoft’s Windows 95 with Perry.

Behind the camera, several of the show’s writer-producers, in addition to its actual creators, have signed multimillion-dollar deals with major studios, even though they have yet to produce anything closely resembling a hit of their own.

All these millions, all this mania--there’s now a “Friends” calendar, a “Friends” cookbook, a “Friends” soundtrack album and a “Friends” trivia book--and the show isn’t even NBC’s biggest hit. Both the veteran “Seinfeld” and the second-year “ER” are more popular.

But the stars and producers of those shows--with the exception of “ER’s” creator, Michael Crichton, who was a billion-dollar industry unto himself even before his medical drama hit--have never enjoyed anything like this. “Seinfeld’s” sidekicks--Jason Alexander, Michael Richards and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, for years some of television’s most beloved characters--are making their millions doing pretzel and hair dye commercials, not headlining big-screen studio films.

“It’s all about youth,” said Mike Fenton, president of the Casting Society of America. “Friends” stars Schwimmer, Perry, Aniston and Matt LeBlanc are all in their mid- to late-20s; Courteney Cox and Kudrow are both 31.

“However talented they might be, the ‘Seinfeld’ stars don’t have the same youth appeal,” Fenton said, “and when the studios chart who they are willing to take a big chance on, they’ll do it with younger TV personalities. The film studios are pretty much youth-driven, trying to please the teenage and young dating crowd who are the ones who consistently go out to movies, who are the ones who will go see movies twice. So that whenever they find young stars who can give them instant visibility, they are willing to pay for it.”

Marta Kauffman and David Crane, “Friends’ ” creators and overlords, acknowledge that they and the cast have, as a unit, been struck by lightning. The country has responded to that “something magical” in the chemistry between these six stars playing these particular characters; now the rest of Hollywood would like to get a piece of the action.

In addition to the extracurricular activities of Schwimmer, Aniston and Perry, Cox andLeBlanc star in the upcoming Universal movies “Commandments” and “Ed and Me,” respectively, both of which were filmed during their hiatuses last summer.

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Kudrow got married instead last summer, but she is about to start shooting Albert Brooks’ new film, “Mother,” and is negotiating on other projects for the summer break.

“I’d assume [the studios] are jumping because America has sort of embraced them and wants to see more of them even outside their TV roles,” Kauffman said. “Plus, look at it. How can they not say about any of them, ‘My God, here is someone who is very attractive, wildly popular, talented and proven funny and charming week after week, and they are not [commanding] a gazillion dollars yet’? So movie producers get this instant recognition factor without the huge budget.”

But while the show’s stars get all the attention and magazine covers, they aren’t the ones getting richest fastest. In TV, the creator/producer/writer is king--and Kauffman, Crane and their producing partner, Kevin Bright, signed a lucrative long-term deal with Warner Bros. earlier this year. They have also scored a 13-episode on-air commitment from NBC for their next series, even though they have no idea yet what it will be.

At least they have experience heading up shows--HBO’s “Dream On” and CBS’ short-lived “Family Album” before “Friends.” Even without that, however, several of their employees have been raking it in too.

Jeff Greenstein and Jeff Strauss, both in their early 30s and formerly writer-producers on “Dream On” and the first year of “Friends,” got their own show, “Partners,” on Fox this season. Then, though the show has been a ratings disappointment, Twentieth Television signed them in October to a long-term deal worth about $12 million.

Another of the “Friends” writing teams, Mike Sikowitz and Jeff Astrof, have been lured away by a deal with DreamWorks SKG.

Crane believes the high-priced gambles on the young “Friends” writers have been propelled by the current business climate more than the show’s ratings. The demand for sitcom writers with any sort of tangible talent has skyrocketed within the last year as new TV production companies like DreamWorks and Brillstein/Grey have entered the competition.

Disney’s move to acquire ABC further upped the ante because of fears that the huge studio--which, along with Warner Bros. and Paramount, has for years been hoarding writing talent by offering big contracts--will keep its best shows for its own network. That prompted companies--especially Twentieth Television, a sister company of the Fox network--to jump on the bidding bandwagon.

“It really has been a feeding frenzy in all kinds of directions for writing talent, and it seems that in that climate, the studios have simply taken much bigger gambles than in the past,” Crane said. “I don’t think that will go on forever.”

Despite the writer defections, the producers say they have had no indication that any of their stars want to leave the show to pursue films full time, as David Caruso did in departing “NYPD Blue” after the first season. Will they stay?

“We hope so,” Kauffman said. “And we can offer them some of the things that they won’t always find in their experience doing movies: consistently excellent writing, a chance to have a lot of input on the stage and a whole lot of people--not only us but their fellow cast members and our entire crew--who really nurture them. We have tried to make ‘Friends’ a nice home base for them to come back to for many years.”

* “Friends” airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on NBC (Channel 4).