‘High School’ Confidential

Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino emerge from their trailers at the same time, and that alone puts an end to one piece of tawdry gossip: the tabloid report that had Kudrow refusing to set foot on the set of “Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion” if Sorvino wasn’t there first.

“Whoa! Oh my God, I can’t imagine,” Kudrow says. She and her co-star are well aware of the published report about their supposed rivalry.

But first-time movie director David Mirkin, whose on-set mantra is work hard but make a lot of jokes, can’t resist taunting his two stars.

“Now that you’re here,” he assures a reporter in front of them, “this will be the one day they won’t feud.” The two actresses balk in unison.

They certainly appear friendly. As the two stand on a Beverly Boulevard sidewalk waiting for a cue, they chat and giggle. And just in case anybody missed the point, Kudrow calls out breathlessly: “Swear to God, we’re friends! Swear to God!”

Indeed, Kudrow and Sorvino have more in common than their starring roles in Mirkin’s new film, being touted by its cast and producers as a smart female-buddy comedy. Kudrow has gargantuan TV fame from her role as the cleverly ditzy Phoebe of “Friends.” Sorvino won an Oscar playing the trashily ditzy prostitute in Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite.” They both graduated from elite East Coast schools--Kudrow from Vassar, Sorvino from Harvard.

“Smart and smarter,” Kudrow nicknamed the two of them.

“Smarter,” Kudrow says, pointing to Sorvino.

“Smarter,” Sorvino says, pointing to Kudrow.

“Smarter,” Kudrow says and points to. . . .

Oh, all right, girls, enough--we get it.

“People always think women are going to fight,” says the film’s screenwriter, Robin Schiff, who also serves as executive producer. “These two get along great. The key to this movie is their connection and their believability as friends. Without that, the whole movie doesn’t work. So they damn well better find a way to connect for their own survival.”

They may not be as fiercely bonded as the title characters they play--two eccentric friends who survived high school together and have been roommates ever since--but Kudrow and Sorvino currently share that fairy-dusted aerie in the Hollywood skyline reserved for hot stars of the moment. Janeane Garofalo, who just starred in “The Truth About Cats & Dogs,” rounds out the cast, playing the kind of sardonic, biting character that has become her forte and won her legions of fans among smart people who like smart comedy.

So for several weeks this summer, a movie that languished in development for four years was suddenly rolling with three hot actresses and a little frisson of excitement--as much as Hollywood can muster for a film that centers on women (eeew!) instead of aliens, Marine pilots and prison convicts.

“The dailies are very popular,” says director Mirkin’s agent, Robb Rothman, who dashed over to the Hollywood location shoot from a meeting. Touchstone is considering releasing the film next summer.

For both Kudrow and Sorvino, it is a first chance at leading roles in a major Hollywood film. At 33, Kudrow has wound her way through improvisational comedy, theater and television. In six years, Sorvino has gone from college graduate to movie star--with all its attendant perks and worries.

Age must be one of the latter. Sorvino says she’s 26, but the 1990 Harvard yearbook indicates she’s just two months shy of her 29th birthday. (Sorvino could not be reached for comment; her publicist, Heidi Schaeffer, said, “We’ve never really discussed her age.”)

Being hot when you’re making a movie means having an audience before you’re done--the visiting reporters, the camera-wielding snoops, the stars of similar status who wander by to have a look.

Between takes, Sorvino rarely loses sight of a reporter, solicitously offering long, earnest answers to questions or worrying self-consciously about her conversations with the director being overheard.

“There was only one film I had done up until last year that ever had any behind-the-scenes-making-of,” Sorvino says, referring to “Barcelona” (though she also had a small part in the high-profile “Quiz Show”). “I was used to working in isolation with the crew and the director. And I felt like it was completely our baby until it was done. And now it’s this thing of sharing the process with the public. That’s been a little unnerving for me.”

She’s also reluctant to have her father, actor Paul Sorvino, or her filmmaker-beau, Quentin Tarantino, see her at work.

“I hate it,” she says. “It’s the idea of them watching me act and thinking about it critically--not that either of them would. But I think that they are.”

Sorvino did let Tarantino go to a night shoot for the film--but he arrived just as the cast and crew were wrapping up.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s coming, don’t let me see him when he arrives,’ ” she says. “But then I became so paranoid I kept looking for him. I was like, ‘Wait, is that him? Did he get here?’ ” She laughs. “It totally threw me.”

On this day, the cast and crew start out on a 3rd Street sidewalk doubling for Venice. To ward off sun and heat, there are bottles of sun block in a bucket on the sidewalk and bottles of water everywhere. Sorvino’s dog, a whippet-Chihuahua mix named Deer, skitters by on a leash guided by Sorvino’s assistant.

Kudrow and Sorvino talk with the director on the sidewalk, stray rollers still in their long blond hair. Sorvino wears her wire-rimmed glasses until the cameras roll. They sport short, kitschy outfits in lollipop colors and an array of campy jewelry. As soon as Kudrow eases into a chair on the set, she is swarmed by people armed with makeup and hairbrushes and accessories. She looks down as someone straps red patent-leather high heels on her feet.

“I can’t do it myself,” she deadpans.

“They can wear anything,” swoons the film’s costume designer, Mona May, who also did the costumes for “Clueless.” “They’re like Barbie dolls.”

Sorvino, in particular, is possessed of an impossibly Barbie-doll figure--all legs and cleavage--which she has poured into a sliver of a skirt and a tight yellow top. In the movie, the eccentric and chronically underemployed Romy and Michele sew their own clothes, but in real life, half of Sorvino’s outfit is from Versace.

“Well, they copy Versace,” May explains brightly.

Kudrow has been attached to the project since before it was a project. She played Michele in Schiff’s play “The Ladies Room” when Michele and Romy were little more than comic relief. Then Schiff spun off Romy and Michele--a la Rosencrantz and Guildenstern--into their own movie, a tale of two high school friends who live blissfully clueless lives in L.A., partying and hanging out, until an invitation to their 10-year reunion unearths memories of high school angst and leads them to concoct a grand scheme for their return.

But it wasn’t until Kudrow’s star rose that the studio began to move on the project.

And Sorvino wanted a chance to do another comedy.

“I didn’t actually used to do comedy before ‘Mighty Aphrodite,’ ” she says. “I’d done like eight dramatic films before that, and then all of a sudden I was known as a comedic actress. But I was sort of afraid--’Well, if I don’t do it again soon, I’m going to forget how and I’ll be so afraid of it I’ll never do it again and I’ll just do crying parts the rest of my life.’ ”

Sorvino, who lives in New York, and Kudrow, who lives here, hadn’t met before they were slated to do the project. They first talked over the phone in a late-night conversation.

“Against my wishes,” Mirkin says, laughing. He comes to his first movie directing job as an Emmy-winning former executive producer of “The Simpsons.” “No, no, I thought that was a good idea. You just sort of want to be there when they first are getting together to make sure that nobody says anything.”

In their first conversation, they talked about college, friends, marriage. (Kudrow is married; Sorvino is not.) During filming, they spent some of their weekend time together, once heading off on a Saturday night “with our men,” as Kudrow puts it, to “Saturday Night Live” alum Julia Sweeney’s one-woman show.

For the duration of the filming, Sorvino rented a place here. In New York, she leases a one-bedroom apartment.

“People talk about square footage out here,” Sorvino says, as she and Kudrow ride in a van on their way to the day’s second location, the restaurant Swingers on Beverly Boulevard. “I’m like, ‘Well, I have about 600 square feet.’ ”

Kudrow gasps.

“See the reaction?” Sorvino says.

“Oh my God,” Kudrow says.

“It’s two rooms. It’s a living room and a bedroom,” Sorvino says.

“How do you enta-tain?” Kudrow asks in her best busybody voice.

In terms of acting styles, everyone agrees the two come at it differently. Kudrow brings everything to the first take. Sorvino develops from take to take.

Sorvino laughs ruefully. “Basically, Mira’s not as funny as Lisa,” she says.

“You’re Method and I’m not,” Kudrow demurs. “You’re an actor and I’m not.”

“No, she’s funny and I have to try hard,” Sorvino shoots back.

Schiff recalls talking to Sorvino on the phone the night before filming began: “She was incredibly nervous. She was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ And I’m going, ‘Oh my God.’ I said, ‘Are you always like this? Is this your process?’ Now that I know her better, I think she’s always nervous. She’s a real perfectionist.”

Into this mix, Mirkin and Schiff added Garofalo as Heather, a nemesis of Romy and Michele in their high school days.

“It was the part that Janeane was born to play,” Schiff says, “because she’s cynical, bitter, angry and doesn’t have to smile the whole movie.”

Actually, Garofalo has made a cottage industry out of playing those parts--the most vivid example being her role on “The Larry Sanders Show” as the acerbic talent booker.

She spent four weeks on the film, improvising and fiddling with dialogue as she went.

“Lisa Kudrow actually loves when you do that,” Garofalo says, over apple juice one morning in a hotel here.

Sorvino, Garofalo says, took a little longer to warm to her style.

“I don’t think she liked it when I did it, but then as we started getting to know each other, she was fine with it. . . . Don’t misunderstand me. She was very nice. I think she just had to feel like I was at least going to try and do it right.”

Although Garofalo is currently making one movie and has another offer in the wings, she doesn’t consider herself the same hot property as Kudrow and Sorvino.

“Me? No way. If there was any heat at all,” she says of the moderate success of “The Truth About Cats & Dogs,” “it expired. . . . Being that I’m a 31-year-old quasi-charactery looking person, heat can only go so far.”

Garofalo generally sloughs off Hollywood’s edict that women look perfect.

“The emphasis put on a woman’s weight in Hollywood is absurd,” she says. “But the thing is, if we all keep agreeing to lose the weight, nothing changes.”

Garofalo herself tried to conform to the standards of Hollywood. The 5-foot-1 actress shed 35 pounds late last year, getting down to 100. It didn’t last; she gained 20 back in a matter of weeks.

“It’s just not me to be that way,” she says. “I was starving.”

As if high school in the ‘80s was any different from Hollywood in the ‘90s. . . .

The director watches as Kudrow and Sorvino sit shoulder to shoulder in a booth in Swingers, poring over their high school yearbook, reliving agonies and triumphs, remembering how Romy was chubby and Michele wore a back brace.

“God, look how thin you were at the prom,” says Kudrow as Michele.

“Yeah, thank God I got mono. That was the best diet I ever had,” says Sorvino as Romy.

The director calls “cut,” crew members bustle around, and the actors wait for the next take.

Sorvino tries a little unauthorized improvising.

“Until I learned to throw up, mono was the best diet I ever had,” she cracks.

Kudrow has about a year’s more experience dealing with fame than Sorvino has. Kudrow knows about celebrities wearing baseball caps to supposedly disguise themselves, ignoring people who stare and smiling benignly at anyone who tries to videotape them. But both she and Sorvino speak philosophically about fame.

Sorvino says Tarantino gave her some of the best advice she has had on the subject: “Don’t try to hold onto heat, because heat will come and heat will go.”

“To be perfectly honest,” Kudrow confesses, “I don’t feel that hot, and I hope I never do--only because it’s going to go away.” Of course, this was uttered only weeks before she and her fellow “Friends” cast members staged a palace coup to get more money from their employers.

“And if I know what it feels like to be hot,” Kudrow says, “I don’t want to know what it feels like to be no longer hot.” She lets out a little laugh