NEWS ANALYSIS : What Pathe Is Getting for $1 Billion MGM Buyout : Movies: The major acquisition is the 1,000-title UA library, which includes the Rocky, James Bond and Pink Panther series.

When you consider the number of times its bones have been picked in recent years, there is still a lot of meat left on the carcass of MGM/UA that Pathe Communications Corp. agreed to buy Wednesday for about $1 billion.

There is no more studio; the venerable Culver City lot where Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg once reigned is now the lair of Sony’s Columbia Pictures. The great MGM library, which stored such classics as “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz,” is owned by Ted Turner. And the current MGM/UA doesn’t own a clod of physical property; it just sold its last building to Kirk Kerkorian, the same man who profitably dismantled the studio in the early ‘80s.

But Pathe still gets the untouched United Artists library, a studded collection of about 1,000 titles dating back to the post-World War I days when founders Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith were massaging it into major studio status.

But while Pathe benefits from that early outpouring of classics--Griffith’s “Broken Blossoms” and “Way Down East,” Fairbank’s “Robin Hood” and “The Thief of Baghdad,” Pickford’s “Pollyanna” and “Tess of the Storm Country,” and Chaplin’s “City Lights” and “Modern Times”--it is the films of the Arthur Krim-Robert Benjamin management of the ‘50s through the ‘70s that will be best exploited by their new owner.

Krim and Benjamin went on to form Orion Pictures in the late ‘70s, just before Michael Cimino brought the original studio down with “Heaven’s Gate,” but they left behind three major movie franchises--the Pink Panther, Rocky and James Bond series--that are still bearing ore today.

“Rocky V” is in current production, with Sylvester Stallone reunited with the series’ first director John Avildsen. The untitled 17th James Bond episode will soon go into production. And the pilot for a prime-time “Pink Panther” series is being developed by MGM/UA for CBS.

Among some of the other prominent UA films: “Marty,” the recently reissued “Raging Bull,” “Exodus,” “West Side Story,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Some Like it Hot,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “The Apartment” and “The Magnificent Seven.”

During the ‘70s, a decade that many critics consider Hollywood’s true Golden Era, United Artists made many of Hollywood’s toughest, timeliest and most commercial movies. UA’s films of that decade alone--”Annie Hall,” “Coming Home,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Rocky,” “Bound for Glory,” and “Women in Love”--will guarantee Pathe pride of ownership.

MGM/UA, sometimes together and sometimes operating separately during the ‘80s, have suffered insecurity, inconsistent management and oft-rumored deaths, and product has also suffered. One of the few recent bright spots was “Rain Man,” the hugely profitable 1988 film that swept the Oscars. Industry analysts expect the studio’s coming video release of “Rain Man” to be one of the year’s top sellers in that market.

In addition to its film library, Pathe’s acquisition of MGM/UA brings it the worldwide home video and foreign pay-TV rights to the 2,950 films in the Turner/MGM library, that great batch of films that Turner took with him when he bought and then sold MGM five years ago. Turner bought the library to assure himself years of product for his Super Station, and has since begun colorizing scores of the best-known black and white films from the library (which also includes Warner Bros. films previously acquired by MGM) for TV syndication.

Pathe, an international film production and distribution company that just last year bought the less glorious Cannon Films, brings several of its own projects to the party. The company, whose production chief Alan Ladd, Jr. came to them from MGM, has three films in production--”Russia House,” starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer; “Fires Within,” starring Jimmy Smits and Greta Scacchi, and “Quigley Down Under,” with Tom Selleck. According to a studio spokesman, Pathe has also green-lighted a Sally Field film titled “Not Without My Daughter” and Mel Brooks’ “Life Stinks.” Mel Brooks’ last film, “Spaceballs,” was for also for MGM.

MGM/UA’s production head, Richard Berger, used to work for MGM under Ladd, prompting immediate speculation that he will resume that role once the Pathe deal is completed. MGM/UA Chairman Jeffrey Barbakow said on Tuesday that a Berger-Ladd merger is possible “down the road,” but for now, it’s business as usual.

Upcoming releases for MGM/UA, films made under Berger, include “Blue Steel,” with Jamie Lee Curtis and Ron Silver, “Lisa,” with Cheryl Ladd, “Daddy’s Dyin’, Who’s Got the Will?,” with Beau Bridges and Tess Harper, and--for fans of irony--Michael Cimino’s “Desperate Hours,” which was picked up for distribution from Dino de Laurentiis.

Pathe is also buying into a television operation that is building up steam. MGM/UA has three series on the current prime-time network schedule--”thirtysomething,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Young Riders”--and is about to go into production on both the CBS “Pink Panther” pilot and a pilot for “Dark Shadows,” which is being developed for NBC as a prime-time version of the Gothic day-time series that mesmerized college students of the late ‘60s.

MGM/UA operates out of leased space in the Filmland building adjacent to its former lot, and out of the Gateway building in Santa Monica. The last property owned by MGM/UA--an office building in Beverly Hills--was sold last month to Kerkorian’s Tracinda Corp. for $48 million.