The latest in ring tones? Talk to me, baby

“Please go away, let me sleep, for the love of God!”

It’s not only a classic Chris Farley line from “Tommy Boy,” but it’s also the latest wave in cellphone ring tones.

Once limited to song samples and hip-hop clips, mobile phone ringers increasingly are featuring memorable movie quotes, including dialogue from titles as varied as “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Office Space,” “Without a Paddle” and “Meet the Fockers.” The movie-related clips aren’t always limited to the spoken cinematic word: For “Star Wars” fans, options include Darth Vader’s heavy breathing, R2-D2’s computerized chirps and Chewbacca’s phlegmy roar.

Although the new trend may make customized cellphone ringers even more annoying than ever, they hold the promise of delivering new profits to the studios. Ring tones, as the personal ringers are called, have become a $3-billion worldwide boon for record labels, and Hollywood’s studios and labor unions are now trying to figure out if the movie ring tone market is anywhere near that large.

“I think it’s a great market,” Steven Masur, an attorney whose firm, MasurLaw, specializes in wireless entertainment content, says of film-related ring tones. “People are quoting movie dialogue all the time. It seems like it could make a lot of money.”

For the studios and the companies, or aggregators, that package movie dialogue ring tones, the economics are mouth-watering. Cellphone customers pay as much as $3 per ring tone, and the ringers also deliver free advertising to whatever is being sampled, be it a few bars from 50 Cent’s “Just a Lil Bit” or Angelina Jolie inquiring, “Still alive, baby?” from “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.”

More than 17 million U.S. cellphone customers downloaded at least one ring tone in June, the most recent month for which statistics are available, according to the wireless research firm M:Metrics, with the average customer buying two ring tones in the month. American cellphone users spent $217 million on ring tones last year and are projected to spend $724 million by 2009, according to the market research company Jupiter Research. (Ring tones sell much faster overseas, especially in Europe, where phones are more sophisticated.)

Billboard magazine now carries a chart tracking the most popular ring tones -- a list currently headed by Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together.”

Earlier this month, 20th Century Fox set up free ring tone download stations at Loews movie theaters in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. The studio also has crafted original ring tones, in which recognizable movie characters record new dialogue specifically for cellphone ringers. You can, for example, have your ringer say, “Hey, hey, hey! It’s Fat Albert. Answer your phone!”

In August, Universal Pictures implemented a deal with leading aggregator Infospace for movie-themed ring tones and ring backs, the sound callers hear instead of the usual beeping while phoning another cellphone before it is answered. The Universal library is filled with top zeitgeist movies -- “Scarface,” “Carlito’s Way,” “American Pie” -- that could prove irresistible to hip mobile phone users.

“Your cellphone is your third arm, and now you can personalize it any way you want to,” says Larry Frazin of Zingy, a top aggregator of ring tones. Zingy’s ring tones include dialogue from “War of the Worlds” (Dakota Fanning’s saying, “Are we still alive?”), “Constantine” (Keanu Reeves’ warning “You do this, there’s no turning back”) and “Without a Paddle” (Seth Green’s saying, “I’m not having the fun you promised me”).

With those movie clips and original clips from Snoop Dogg and song shorts from 50 Cent, Ying Yang Twins and Bow Wow, Zingy is selling as many as 9 million ring tones a month, Frazin said.

As has happened with the advent of other entertainment technologies, though, Hollywood’s labor agreements are not clear about how, or even if, the dialogue’s authors will be compensated for this application.

A month ago, screenwriter Jim Herzfeld saw on the Internet that a line of his “Meet the Parents” dialogue -- in which Robert De Niro says to Ben Stiller, “I have nipples, Greg. Can you milk me?” -- was among the more popular movie ring tones available.

Herzfeld receives royalty checks when clips from the movie are used elsewhere, even getting paid a couple of hundred dollars after “Meet the Parents” footage was shown in a De Niro tribute from the American Film Institute. But Herzfeld says he hasn’t received a dime for ring tone dialogue, so he called the Writers Guild of America, West, to ask why that was the case. Herzfeld says the WGA had no helpful information.

“Even if it’s wafer-thin, it seems like we should be entitled to something,” Herzfeld says of possible ring royalties. “We’ve been working off an old [contract] formula, and we always seem to be playing catch-up.”

Kevin Brodbin, who wrote the story and shares the screenplay credit for “Constantine,” says he had no idea dialogue from the film was being sold for ring tones, although he’s not surprised people would want to buy the clips.

“It seems logical -- when I was growing up, we used to quote movie dialogue to each other,” Brodbin says. “But the writers of the words should benefit. The artist gets paid when you download a song from iTunes, and this is like iTunes for a mobile phone.”

The WGA admits ring-tone royalties are not covered by its agreement with the studios and is trying to work with them to craft language that covers the use. “The contract is silent about mobile rights,” says Grace Rymer, the WGA’s assistant executive director. She says the guild is working to make sure writers are paid when their words are resold for ring tones.

Some A-list actors control some reuse rights for the characters they portray, which further complicates ring-tone deals. When 20th Century Fox began distributing Brad Pitt and Jolie’s “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” dialogue, the studio opted to give it away to help promote the movie rather than sell it.

Although Fox might have liked the revenue, selling the dialogue would have required approval from Pitt and Jolie, who have veto power over merchandising and licensing.

Says attorney Masur: “The rights issues are more defined in music. In movies, the rights issues are just now being defined. It’s gray.”

Every dialogue clip requires a separate deal, and those deals can cover voices heard in the background.

“It’s a very difficult product to license,” says Mary Stuyvesant, general manager of entertainment marketing services for Infospace. Among several other lines of movie dialogue, Infospace has made cellphone deals for a number of clips from “Napoleon Dynamite,” including “Tina, come get some ham.”

Unlike movie exhibition, where the studios usually deal directly with theater owners, ring tones involve a middleman -- the aggregators.

These aggregators approach studios, record labels and occasionally individual artists to license existing content and create ring tones. The aggregators then package that content and, while working with specific cellphone companies, sell their subscribers the ring tones. Although deals vary widely from studio to studio, everybody shares the pot. The cellphone companies may pocket about 50% of revenues, while the aggregators could grab 30 to 40% more. That might leave 10 to 20% for the holders of the film copyrights.

With a fractional percentage of an embryonic market, movie dialogue tones represent a tiny business and are not delivering meaningful revenue to studios, the studios and experts say.

In the States so far, wallpaper and games based on movies such as “The Fast and the Furious” have been more fruitful than cellphone applications. A few companies have made original video programming for viewing on mobile phones, called “mobisodes,” including one-minute segments based on the Fox series “24.”

Still, to an industry faced with declining movie admissions and slowing DVD sales, even the undersized income that movie dialogue ring tones could bring in would be welcome.

“It’s definitely a market, and the market is growing. I think people will soon see significant revenue,” says Infospace’s Stuyvesant. Having dialogue ring tones, she says, is not unlike putting up a movie poster in your dorm room or wearing a T-shirt from the hottest band. “It’s a way to identify yourself, and it signifies that you’re in the know.”