OFF-CENTERPIECE : MOVIES : It’s Finally Time for Sammy Glick, the Ultimate Player

Industry observers have said for years that there’s no audience for movies about Hollywood. These are probably the same folks who said you couldn’t sell tickets to baseball movies until “Bull Durham” or Westerns until “Dances With Wolves.”

Robert Altman’s “The Player” could change the conventional wisdom about Hollywood movies. Two other much-talked about films about Hollywood in the works are Bruce Wagner’s “Force Majeure” and perhaps the granddaddy of all Hollywood-bashing stories--Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?,” the classic novel of the amoral hustler Sammy Glick, who rises--by any means possible--from newspaper copyboy to Hollywood producer.

According to Gene Kirkwood (“Rocky”), who’s producing “What Makes Sammy Run?” at Warner Bros., the success of “The Player” will pave the way for other Hollywood films in the works. “In a way, ‘The Player’ helps because it becomes a trailer,” he says. “It’s like when Oliver Stone did ‘Platoon’ and it opened the doors for other Vietnam films.”

“What Makes Sammy Run” will be directed by Michael Caton-Jones (“Doc Hollywood”) and although Kirkwood declined to discuss casting, Tom Cruise was rumored at one time to be the front-runner for the Glick role. Some sources speculate that the role might go to Michael J. Fox, who worked with Caton-Jones on “Doc Hollywood.” Schulberg, who won an Oscar for his “On the Waterfront” screenplay, is currently writing the script, based on his best-selling novel first published in 1941.

Kirkwood, who says he liked “The Player,” notes that “What Makes Sammy Run?” will be different, however. “In ‘The Player,’ nobody knows how anybody got to the top,” he says. “In our film, it shows where Sammy Glick came from. Also, Sammy loves the business and he loves movies. In ‘The Player,’ there’s no love of anything. Also, they never really showed anybody making movies.”

And is there room for more movies about Hollywood? “The public is fascinated by anything great that’s a story about a person,” says Kirkwood. “Sammy Glick could have been a guy in a mining town.”

The other much-anticipated film about Hollywood is “Force Majeure,” based on Bruce Wagner’s 1991 novel about fictional screenwriter Bud Wiggins. To be produced by Ed Pressman and Oliver Stone, “Force Majeure” (the title refers to the standard contract clause that releases studios from their side of an agreement in the event of an unforeseen disaster) will be directed by Wagner from his screenplay. According to Wagner, the film’s start of production has been delayed because he’s involved in another project, though he says he’s hoping it will begin filming next spring.

Wagner also enjoyed “The Player,” but said that his film would take less of an anthropological approach to Hollywood. He describes “Force Majeure” as a cross between Pedro Almodovar’s “High Heels” and David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch.” “There’s no point in trying to make an ethnographic study of Hollywood, because ‘The Player’ does that so beautifully. I reach more toward the garish and the monstrous. Mine is also different because it’s from the point of view of the writer.”

“Force Majeure” was originally published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies in 1988 and consisted of four separate stories, one of which ended up being republished in Esquire magazine. Although Random House originally contracted Wagner for a collection of stories involving the character of screenwriter Wiggins, the author decided to write a novel that incorporated the shorter stories instead.

Wagner says he still hopes the already-announced cast of Jim Belushi, Faye Dunaway and Debbie Reynolds will still be available when the movie of “Force Majeure” finally rolls.

Of course, there have always been movies about Hollywood--from “Sunset Boulevard” and “The Bad and the Beautiful” to “Sullivan’s Travels” and “The Day of the Locust.”

So what about the people who say Hollywood movies won’t fly? “They’ll always say you can’t make movies about Hollywood,” says Wagner. ‘If you want to make movies about Hollywood, you just have to be passionate about the subject.”