MOVIES : Hollywood’s Monster Fall : Remember when the season after summer was a movie dumping ground? Well, not this year. Nearly 60 films are coming out before the traditional holiday crunch. Grown-ups, rejoice.

Fall. The kids refill their loose-leaf binders. The leaves depart the old ash tree. Sweaters and coats are pulled out of the cedar chest. So much to do. Not much time to catch a new movie.

Fortunately, Hollywood perennially puts some slack in its release schedule for the season as people get back to their lives apres the deluge of summer movies.

But not this year. Some of it has to do with films’ having been pulled from summer so they wouldn’t be run over by blockbuster express trains: the Meryl Streep action/suspense movie “The River Wild”; the Albert Brooks baseball comedy “The Scout,” and “Only You,” a romance between Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr.

In other cases, the movies’ premises required more advance groundwork than can be packed into a 30-second high-concept TV commercial: “Pulp Fiction,” starring John Travolta and Bruce Willis; “Ed Wood” with Johnny Depp, and “Exit to Eden,” featuring Dana Delany and Rosie O’Donnell. These three self-described “comedies” deal with contract murder, transvestism and sadomasochism, respectively.

The fall is also used to get a running jump on the holiday season, when the major studios cram as many movies as they can into a space no bigger than a phone booth. This year, there’ll be Paul Newman and Melanie Griffith starring in the drama “Nobody’s Fool,” Kenneth Branagh returning to the Mary Shelley novel for his “Frankenstein,” and Tim Allen attempting a smooth TV-to-film ride in “The Santa Clause.”

“I’m no fortune-teller,” says 20th Century Fox distribution head Tom Sherak, “but fall looks strong on product. It’s not a dumping ground this year.”

Nor, says Touchstone Pictures President David Hoberman, will fall merely be the preserve of sophisticated fare with limited commercial potential. “There are a number of films this year with great playability,” he says. Playability means box-office appeal.

With limited playing time and a smaller available audience than in summer or around Christmas, it’s a challenge for a fall movie to build a substantial audience. Still, everybody hopes against hope for a “Fatal Attraction” or a “ ‘Crocodile’ Dundee” or an “Under Siege”--fall releases that each grossed upward of $80 million.

No baseball playoffs or World Series this year could boost movie attendance too, some industry wags say.

On the other hand, a real-life murder mystery will be playing out on television. The O.J. Simpson trial will begin Sept. 19 and is expected to run through December. “If there’s gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial, it could have a major impact on the movie business,” Universal Chairman Tom Pollock says.

For struggling independent companies, fall is a time to snare some attention for themselves, although this year, says Samuel Goldwyn Co. production head John Manulis, the studios are crowding them as never before. And since the independents can’t spend what studios do on ad campaigns, they have to find other ways to call attention to their wares.

One way is to get there first. Goldwyn is releasing David Mamet’s controversial sexual harassment drama “Oleanna,” two months before Warner Bros.’ adaptation of Michael Crichton’s similarly themed “Disclosure,” which opens Dec. 16. Renewed debate about the topic “should stir up the Internet,” Manulis predicts.

Also on the independents’ side is the fall film festival hoopla--starting Labor Day with the Telluride Festival and continuing at Toronto, Montreal and New York.

“It’s a time when independent films get a lot of press attention,” says October Films principal Jeff Lipsky. “That makes it easier for us to reach our core audience than for the major studios--if we have cutting-edge films.”

And there’s nothing like controversy to stoke audience interest. Two independently made fall movies have run afoul of the Motion Picture Assn. of America ratings board--the romantic drama “Jason’s Lyric” and the low-budget comedy “Clerks”--over sexual content and language, respectively.

Still, when all is said and done, one senior studio executive says, this fall season is likely to fit, more or less, into the pattern of years past: “There’ll be five movies that work and about 15 to 20 movies that break even. All the rest will lose money.”

With nearly 60 movies due for release between Labor Day and Nov. 11 (Nov. 18 will see the release of such holiday films as “Interview with the Vampire”), that means about 30 flops. Small wonder that the principals involved in the major fall releases are working hard to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack.

“We work hard to sell these movies. But word-of-mouth is the still most potent way,” Paramount head Sherry Lansing says.

Battle of the True Romances

“Warren Beatty and I have duked it out before,” jokes director Norman Jewison, whose romantic comedy “Only You” is due mid-October, around the same time as Beatty and Annette Bening’s amorously inclined “Love Affair.” (Jewison’s “In the Heat of the Night” and Beatty’s production of “Bonnie and Clyde” opened at the same time in 1967.)

Whereas Beatty wonders whether an “unabashedly romantic” movie might be viewed a bit of a gamble in these hard-bitten times, Jewison is confident that romance is always in fashion and love always in bloom. “Everyone told me that no one would come to see ‘Moonstruck,’ ” he says of the Cher/Nicolas Cage close encounter he directed several years ago.

“Love Affair” is the second remake of Leo McCarey’s 1939 romantic drama starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. McCarey himself remade it in 1957 as “An Affair to Remember,” with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, one of the great weepies of all time. Beatty says the 1994 model hews closer to the original yet has a contemporary sensibility. A delicate juggling act. But, Beatty points out, his “Heaven Can Wait” updated the 1941 comedy “Here Comes Mr. Jordan” without losing the original’s emotional underpinnings.

In “Only You,” Jewison may not have the publicity value of a real-life famous married couple playing lovers on screen, but he is pleased with the chemistry between Tomei and Downey.

Down Memory Lane

What do Woody Allen, George Lucas, Robert Redford and Kevin Costner have in common? Going into the past to create contemporary entertainments.

Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway” is an out-and-out comedy about a ‘20s mobster who finances a Broadway show. It features a younger ensemble than usual for the Woodman--including John Cusack, Mary-Louise Parker, Chazz Palmintieri and Jennifer Tilly. After a string of financial disappointments for Orion and TriStar, it’s Allen’s first film to be released by an independent company, Miramax. Producer Jean Doumanian is counting on Miramax’s TLC, which worked so well for “The Piano” and “The Crying Game,” to help Allen broaden his audience. “Miramax cleverly takes movies that are not necessarily mainstream and sells them to a mainstream audience,” Doumanian says.

Producer George Lucas is also dabbling in nostalgia with his first big-screen venture since the third “Indiana Jones” movie in 1989. “Radioland Murders,” he says, combines the humor of Nick and Nora Charles, “His Girl Friday,” the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. Brian Benben of HBO’s “Dream On” gets his first starring role in a film that Lucas promises has six murders, 16 musical numbers and more than 100 speaking parts. “It’s a very active film,” Lucas says. “Lots of different things are happening all the time. It starts out as a murder-mystery and then the hero’s on the run. I guess you could say it’s a sequel to ‘The Fugitive.’ ”

Robert Redford has dipped into the past in a more personal way. “Quiz Show,” which he directed, stars “Schindler’s List” Oscar nominee Ralph Fiennes and John Turturro in a film centering on the 1958 “Twenty-One” TV game show scandal. The moment has resonance for him, Redford says, because it marks the year he first arrived in New York at the age of 19 and became aware of the immense power of the new medium of television; in fact, he got his first acting break on a TV quiz show.

“That event set something in motion,” Redford says of the scandal. “It provides a context to look at ourselves today and why we’re now in a place of moral ambiguity and cynicism.”

Director/producer Jon Avnet (“Fried Green Tomatoes”) returns to another pivotal moment in our history, 1970, the height of the Vietnam War, to tell the story over children’s battle for a tree house in Mississippi in “The War.” The title is a metaphor for violence from a child’s (Elijah Wood) point of view. Avnet acknowledges that the comedy-drama will need strong word-of-mouth to draw audiences in. Fortunately, “it has Costner” as the boy’s Vietnam vet father “who teaches him what’s worth fighting for.” A star of Costner’s magnitude, even in a supporting role, could bring attention to the film whose concept, like that of “Fried Green Tomatoes” “doesn’t exactly reach out and grab people by the throat,” Avnet says.

In a League of Their Own

Director Michael Ritchie was adamant in insisting that his “The Scout,” starring Albert Brooks and Brendan Fraser, is not a baseball movie. Since the start of the baseball strike, however, he’s been telling people: “It’s the movie to see if you miss the national pastime.” There are no big games, he says, no villains, no underdogs in this movie based on a “classic unproduced script” by Andrew Bergman (rewritten by Brooks and Monica Johnson) about a down-and-out scout who discovers an idiosyncratic talent out in the boonies. Ritchie says he’s not worried about anti-baseball backlash affecting the movie’s commercial chances. “But you should call Albert and ask him if he’s worried about opening against a Meryl Streep action picture,” he said, referring to “The River Wild.”

“The Scout” is straight down the middle compared to a curve ball like “Ed Wood.” The plot--which concerns a schlock-movie director (Johnny Depp) who is also a heterosexual transvestite--is definitely not formulaic. Factor in too that it was directed by Tim Burton, the man who won audiences over to a teen-ager with pruning shears for hands (“Edward Scissorhands”).

Producer Denise DiNovi calls “Ed Wood” “the weirdest ‘Rocky’ movie ever made.” As with most Burton movies, DiNovi says, “it’s about an outsider who wants desperately to be accepted.

“It’s a comedy, really,” she adds.

That’s exactly how producer Lawrence Bender describes “Pulp Fiction,” the already widely praised new film from “Reservoir Dogs” director Quentin Tarantino. “It’s not a comedy like ‘Naked Gun,’ ” Bender says, “but you laugh a lot. It’s an epic, bold movie.” With a high body count. The multistory roundelay of murder, slapstick and verbal idiosyncrasies features an ensemble cast that includes John Travolta, Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson. “Pulp Fiction” has already won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and will open the New York Film Festival in late September.

Action Central

The high-adrenaline crowd will have a chance to see Sylvester Stallone in a suit, Jean-Claude Van Damme in the future and Meryl Streep on a raft.

Director Luis Llosa describes “The Specialist” as a thriller with action, a different kind of Stallone movie, one with a strong female character, played by Sharon Stone. Stallone’s blood-and-guts fans will not be disappointed, he promises, but there will be characters who are developed, who have psychological dimensions.

Van Damme’s “Timecop,” about time travel, was originally set for summer. It got pushed to September, he says “because Universal wasn’t expecting this good a movie. So they held it.”

Streep comes out swinging in “The River Wild,” in which her character must scale the rapids to save her family. “It’s not simply ‘Meryl Streep as Bruce Willis,’ ” cautions director Curtis Hanson. Nor is it “a woman’s movie,” he says, any more than was his last suspense film, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.”

“Guys who are threatened by a strong woman might think of it as a woman’s movie,” he says. “I think women will appreciate a movie of this size and scope with a woman at the heart of it. Usually in this kind of story she’d be in the background.”

Early Birds

If you have the “other” period thriller and the “other” Santa Claus movie, it helps to get a bead on the competition.

TriStar is opening “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” which stars Robert De Niro and Kenneth Branagh (who also directed), on Nov. 4, well in advance of this year’s holiday releases, even though it is a prestige film that could have been expected to be opened over the holidays. One reason is to get a two-week jump on “Interview With the Vampire,” the much talked-about screen version of Anne Rice’s popular novel, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

“I don’t know the Anne Rice novel,” Branagh says, “but anybody would be interested in a Tom Cruise movie directed by Neil Jordan. Both are distinct,” he says of the two movies, “and I hope both will be seen.” The perfect diplomatic answer.

Branagh says that two years’ work on the project has made him every bit as feverish about his creation as the character of Dr. Victor Frankenstein. He promises that De Niro’s performance as the monster--in which he reads from Goethe and Milton--is “terrifying, but he also breaks your heart. He will absolutely make people forget Boris Karloff.”

Tim Allen hopes to appear so at home in “The Santa Clause” that people will forget it’s his first starring role in a movie. It’ll arrive right before the much more experienced John Hughes (“Home Alone”) delivers his Santa Claus production “Miracle on 34th Street.” But in addition to Kris Kringle, Allen’s movie “involves sleighs, kids, reindeer, elves and a smart-ass like me,” he says.

And if that’s not enticement enough, he says: “This is the movie the North Pole doesn’t want you to see.”

Whatever their relative merits, the fall releases will have to catch on fast and stay red hot if they hope to compete once the holiday stampede begins. During the final six weeks of the year, there’ll be a crush of big films.

A partial list includes the aforementioned “Interview With the Vampire” and a new “Star Trek” entry called ‘Star Trek: Generations.” Family fare will include the “Miracle on 34th Street,” “Jungle Book” and “Little Women” remakes and a big-screen version of the comic strip “Richie Rich.” There’ll be biographies of Dorothy Parker (“Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,” starring Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Ty Cobb (“Cobb,” with Tommy Lee Jones). Robert Altman’s ensemble comedy about fashion, “Pret-a-Porter” will debut. There’ll also be romantic comedies such as “Speechless,” with Michael Keaton and Geena Davis; “I.Q.,” pairing Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins, and “Lifesavers,” featuring Steve Martin and Madeline Kahn. Arnold Schwarzenegger will give birth to his comedy “Junior.” And Michael Douglas will be raked over the coals by Demi Moore in the drama “Disclosure.”