COVER STORY : Remember the ‘Ghost’ of Summer Past? : Last summer’s ‘little movie’ blew the blockbusters out of the box office. This year, while ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘Terminator 2’will be hard to beat, there is a more varied menu.

You’ll see something at the movies this summer you haven’t seen in years: variety. Not just action heroes. But comedies, adventures, romances and action heroes, in just about equal amounts.

Some Hollywood executives and industry observers believe that this summer’s movies are a reflection of an inward-turning, postwar America where people are looking for a way to escape the headlines.

Others say it shows that Hollywood is running more than a little bit scared about changing tastes. Last summer, the studios loaded the schedule with action movies and sequels--”Days of Thunder,” “RoboCop 2,” “Another 48 Hours” and “Total Recall”--only to watch audiences largely desert the blockbusters for a little romantic comedy called “Ghost.” When the studios offered violence, the public ate up romance. When the hype was on action, the lines formed for comedies.

So this year’s diverse scheduling is the industry’s way of taking out insurance against the public’s fickleness.

There will still be plenty of heroes: The firefighters of Ron Howard’s “Backdraft”; “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” starring the all-American Kevin Costner; “The Terminator” making a comeback, and a flying comic-book hero who is due for a landing in “The Rocketeer.”

But they will be competing with a host of life-size characters, in locales and situations that are decidedly American in outlook--whether the surfers in “Point Break,” the West of “City Slickers” and “Thelma & Louise,” the wacky fantasy of “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” the interracial romance of the urban “Jungle Fever” or the foibles of daytime TV in “Soapdish.”

“Anytime the economy is bad, and there is lots of bad news in the world, it tends to make people want fantasies, comedies, even horror movies, that take them away from the daily grind,” said Orion Pictures executive vice president David Forbes.

“The stakes are higher in summer because it’s prime time,” said Art Murphy, a longtime industry analyst for the trade paper Daily Variety. “It’s simply why so much energy and thought goes into the summer releases . . . nearly 40% of the year’s business occurs between Memorial Day and Labor Day.”

That 40% of the annual $5-billion box-office gross in the United States translates to about $2 billion. Not bad for three months.

But there are about 45 major releases this summer chasing after that money, not to mention a whole lot of smaller films set for the marketplace. At an average cost of $40 million per major movie (for production and marketing), it means producers and distributors are rolling the dice to the tune of about $1.8 billion.

In the typical scenario, the producers and distributors hope to recoup only a fraction of their investment at the U.S. box office, Murphy said. In most all cases, the difference may then be made up with income from foreign sales, cable and home video.

So what will be different about this summer?

For one thing, that name you’ve come to expect as a staple of the season, Steven Spielberg, won’t be on the first-run screens. (He’s finishing “Hook,” a new film version of “Peter Pan” in time for Christmas.)

You won’t see as many sequels, either. Depending on how you count, there are only four or five on the schedule. That’s quite a change from the summers when you could depend on Indiana Jones, the crew of the starship Enterprise, poltergeists, various Jedi or Gremlins to pop up.

This summer, there are few familiar names like Rambo, Superman, Clint Eastwood or Marty McFly either.

There also seems to be few major lead roles for women--as usual. Kathleen Turn er will star in “V. I. Warshawski,” Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in “Thelma & Louise,” while Julia Roberts will be seen in “Dying Young”--though its date is not certain and its title may change.

Tough cops and violent thugs are--for the most part--are pulling a disappearing act.

Ditto the kind of movies that parents can comfortably send their kids to. Only a tiny number of the films will be G-rated, like “101 Dalmatians” and “Wild Hearts Can’t be Broken,” both from Disney.

After years of prevalence, the young male audience isn’t the driving force in the market.

And what’s this? Not a single movie takes place in outer space.

On the other hand, the summer will have a larger-than-usual helping of comedies, romances and adventures, and generally smaller-than-usual production budgets. (When you make comedies and keep your stories Earth-bound, you usually don’t need quite so many of those costly special effects.)

There’s always an exception, of course. And, this summer, the budget-buster is the action-minded “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The special-effects-laden production, made by Carolco and released through Tri-Star Pictures, has a budget that some insiders estimate is nearing $100 million--which would make it the most expensive film of this era.

But with the international star status of Schwarzenegger, many of the film industry executives and observers interviewed for this article included it on their short lists of the most likely summer hits.

Other titles in this rarefied stratum include:

* “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” starring Kevin Costner as the hero who robs the rich to give to the poor.

* “Backdraft,” a story of fire-fighting heroes with lots of scenes that take the viewer inside the fire, from director Ron Howard.

* “City Slickers,” a comedy about midlife crisis starring Billy Crystal.

There’s also a longer, short list of likely summer hits, including: “Hudson Hawk,” which re-teams Bruce Willis and producer Joel Silver (“Die Hard”) in a comic adventure about a cat burglar; the comic-book adventure “The Rocketeer”; the Julia Roberts melodrama “Dying Young” (a.k.a. “Forever Young”); the comedy sequel “Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear”; the Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson buddy film “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man” ; the perennial Disney favorite “101 Dalmatians”; Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves in the surfing saga “Point Break”; the comedy sequel “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” and Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” from Universal.

Lee’s film is only one of an unusually plentiful crop of movies featuring the work of black artists. Besides Lee’s “Fever,” these include: “Straight Out of Brooklyn”; “Talkin’ Dirty After Dark,” “Boyz N the Hood” and “Livin’ Large.”

In the film industry, not a lot is left to chance. Budgets are calculated over a playing life of years. Stars are cast and paid high salaries for the simple reason that they bring in the business. Name directors bring in the stars, and so on.

Studios can aim the film for a particular market or season. And every angle of a movie’s after-theater life is plotted from the outset too; rights to cable TV and video sales are presold.

But what no one can plan is when all the elements of a production will finally come together. And then, once it is made, whether the public will buy it.

“Maybe last year, when the studios were deciding what to do this summer, there were more comedies on their desks,” Orion’s Forbes speculated, as he glanced over the list of summer films, which is heavy with comedies.

Universal Pictures’ executive vice president of worldwide marketing, Si Kornblit, expressed a similar sentiment: “It’s basically what’s in the pipeline that determines the schedules, plus a little shifting of titles.

Kornblit was certainly on target with that latter assessment.

No one can remember a summer when the studios shifted their movies from week to week and month to month more than they have this year--all in the hopes of beating the competition, or avoiding the competition. No major studio, for instance, has dared to schedule any movie the same day that Warner Bros. opens its much anticipated “Robin Hood.”

“Ironically,” said Miramax Pictures executive vice president Russell Schwartz, “this could be the summer that action pictures really work, because there are so few out there. And then next summer we’ll see seven again. It’s just so much guesswork.”

But Schwartz believes that this summer’s mix is refreshing. “It tells me that the studios are going for more segments of the audience,” he said. His company, currently distributing “A Rage in Harlem” and Madonna’s “Truth or Dare,” has a number of films aimed at specialized audiences.

“I think the sins of our past have not been wasted on the production suites,” said Greg Morrison, MGM-Pathe president of worldwide marketing.

“The recent hits have been films that have not marched to the same old drummer. They are different,” said Morrison, a 23-year veteran of the business. “The public is force- fed so much entertainment that it doesn’t take me or any of the experts to know that if you come in with something that is wearing the same old clothes, in the same old wrapper, you won’t see the same success.

“Those ‘insurance-policy’ sequels do provide comfort in terms of marketing, but in the long run, they have proved to be less successful.”

He said MGM’s offbeat women’s road picture “Thelma & Louise,” starring Sarandon and Davis, was “deliberately programmed to be the thinking man and woman’s choice on Memorial Day weekend. We put it there to defy the usual teen-age movies, which have pretty much laid claim to that weekend.”

“People learned from last year,” said Paula Silver, new on the job as Columbia Pictures marketing president. “We’re in a different time in our society. I think films about personal issues and relationships are what will be hitting in the market this year. . . . There’s a big opportunity for people to care again. Maybe it’s optimism that there is a future.

“We want heroes again,” she added, mentioning this Friday’s release of “Backdraft” as an example, even though the Universal Pictures/Imagine Entertainment release is from a competitor.

From her own company, Silver cites “Boyz ‘n the Hood” as an example of a personal film, describing it as “a very true-to-life, slice-of-life picture” set in South-Central Los Angeles.

“It’s a summer where people don’t know what to expect,” said Warner Bros.’ president of worldwide advertising and publicity, Robert Friedman. Warner Bros. scored two summers ago with “Batman” and “Lethal Weapon 2,” but last summer had only “Presumed Innocent” as a bona-fide hit. Friedman said he believes that audiences will find it “refreshing that it won’t be a sequel-driven summer.”

And all the studios are hoping to have this summer’s “Ghost.”

“Even we didn’t know we had a ‘Ghost’ last year,” said Barry London, president of Paramount Pictures’ motion picture group. “We opened it on Friday, July 13, but originally it was set for a later date. The reason I moved it up was because (up to that point) most of the product in the market was aimed at young males. We believed ‘Ghost’ would cater to the female audience initially and then broaden its appeal.”

This year, the studio is hoping the same July 13 weekend will be a lucky one, as it launches the drama “Regarding Henry,” starring Harrison Ford, from director Mike Nichols.

Meanwhile, the industry waits, and the pacing in the executive suites from Burbank to Culver City quickens.

This last week before the season opens on Friday, is, in analyst Murphy’s words, “like the seventh month of a pregnancy--everything scientific and medical has been done, and now we’re just waiting for the shoe to drop.”