A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : Can’t <i> ($25 Million) </i> Think <i> ($25 Million) </i> About <i> ($25 Million) </i> It

Director Michael Hoffman laments the fact most independent filmmakers use their films strictly as “audition pieces” for Hollywood.

But he understands it. “There is no good or clear way to make small movies,” Hoffman explains. “It’s getting tougher and tougher.”

Hoffman has made four “small” movies, including the bleak 1988 drama “Promised Land,” developed at the Sundance Institute and executive-produced by Robert Redford, and the acclaimed 1989 comedy “Some Girls.” But now even he’s gone Hollywood.

His new film, “Soapdish,” a screwball comedy about life on and off the set of a daytime soap opera, is Paramount Pictures’ first summer release. Written by Robert Harling (“Steel Magnolias”) and Andrew Bergman (“Blazing Saddles,” “The Freshman”), “Soapdish” boasts an ensemble cast that includes three Oscar winners--Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg--as well as Cathy Moriarty, Robert Downey Jr. and Elisabeth Shue.

The budget for “Soapdish” was somewhere around $25 million. The combined budget of Hoffman’s first four features was under $9 million.

Though “Some Girls” made Hollywood take notice of Hoffman, he says he wasn’t interested in doing a film for a major studio. He was developing--and still is--an adaptation of novelist Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs.”

But Paramount was insistent and so was Hoffman’s agent. “My agent said I should at least develop something (at Paramount) and I thought, ‘Well, I could still get involved in this and get ‘Rock Springs’ off the ground.”’

He initially chose “Soapdish,” because he thought, at least in its first draft, it was far too quirky and campy ever to get made. But the project didn’t die. “It gained extraordinary momentum when Andrew Bergman came on board and he did a lot of structural things which had to be done,” Hoffman said.

“The problems on a big-budget film are the same problems as on a low-budget film,” Hoffman explains matter-of-factly. “But if you went out and thought about it every day that these people had just given me $25 million and what were they thinking, you would never get your work done,” Hoffman says.

“Most of my anxiety was (are) we are going to get this scene right? Or is it going to work? Is it going to be funny?”

Hoffman called working with the star-laden cast “a pleasant experience,” though he admits “the studio hired someone just to trouble-shoot actor ego problems. Not particularly because of these people, but they didn’t want it to become like a ‘The Women’ situation where Norma Shearer is not coming out of her trailer until Joan Crawford does. But that didn’t happen.”