ONE DAY WITH AN OSCAR UNDERDOG’S PEP SQUAD

The day before being transformed from actress into Best Actress Nominee, Laura Linney hops a plane for New York. Behind her lie the winter-drab hills surrounding the Pennsylvania location of her latest job, a part as a small-town cop in a Richard Gere film called “The Mothman Prophecies.” In front of her: home, the Announcement and the sick magic of fame.

The Announcement comes as anticipated, around 5:30 a.m. PST. Linney’s booster club out in L.A.--or, rather, the team Paramount Classics pays to boost her--would burn Julia “the shoo-in” Roberts in effigy if they weren’t all glued to the TV, snarling at the news of Miramax’s masterfully hyped “Chocolat” as a Best Picture pick.

These staffers, who will go unnamed here out of respect for their all-for-one “We’re a Team!” motto (and because, really, who cares?) had crossed the lot’s rain-shiny blacktop before dawn to tether themselves to their telephones for the media onslaught. At 9:15, the Team, numbering at least 10 now, files past underfurnished offices and framed posters touting “The Virgin Suicides,” “Sunshine,” “The Gift” and other, less-watchable Paramount Classics films into a paneled conference room. It’s Linney’s first time as a nominee. It’s Paramount Classics’ first time handling nominations--its first chance to see what happens when you give a months-old film, “You Can Count on Me,” a big kick in the pants.

“Congratulations, everyone,” says David Dinerstein, the Suit at the head of the table. “Our ability to get Laura on the TV shows she hasn’t done will help bring it to a much greater audience. And what we know is, people who see it love to talk about it.”

The Team briefs Dinerstein on the status of Linney’s interviews and bookings, the mailing to Screen Actors Guild members, the new print and TV ads, the posters, the possible billboard. The offensive push will target the affluent tastemakers of America (readers of the New York Times, watchers of Bravo) but also includes theater bookings in spots where the distributor had until now feared to tread: South Bend, Anchorage, Key West. After a few more inspiring words that amount to Go, Fight, Win, everybody scatters.

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“YOU CAN COUNT ON ME” CENTERS ON THE ADULT LIVES OF ORPHANS. Sammy (Linney) is a past-30 woman raising a son alone and trying to keep her brother from drifting out of her life. She adores Terry (Mark Ruffalo), needs him to feel whole and is deeply conflicted over how to react when he screws up. (Is shouting “You Suck!” too strong?) The real troublemaker in this film, though, is restlessness. It tosses Terry around the country before, broke, he returns to the small town in rural New York where he grew up. Sammy sticks to her job at the bank and to the house bequeathed by her parents, but she wanders off on the men who want her. Together under the same roof, she and Terry struggle just to deal: with the everyday-ness of life, with each other’s limitations, with the tender soul of a serious little boy. More than once, the camera isolates the steeple of Sammy’s church, a hint that some things--some people--stay put.

To validate Laura Linney and “You Can Count on Me” was to validate the good taste and open hearts of Dinerstein and Ruth Vitale, who took in the 2000 Sundance winner that no one else wanted. In fact, the businesspeople close to the film speak of it in the kumbaya tone of social workers promoting for adoption a kid with an attachment disorder. It’s a special-needs case, they say in a near-whisper, a parenting “challenge”--this being a euphemism for “nightmare.”

“You Can Count on Me” wasn’t wet-nursed by a studio, which almost excuses the warm-fuzzy name, a “Kick Me” sign in the mono-monikered world of “Gladiator” and “Traffic.” Far worse, it doesn’t look like anything else in the family. Is it a feel-good film? A spinach (good for you) movie? A comedy? A psych-drama? A star vehicle like “Erin Brockovich”? Answer: None of the above.

It’s a dialogue-driven script delivered by widely unknown actors so far out of the Hollywood loop that they get sheepish in the face of compliments. Take away the characters’ sharp words, tepid sex, smoked joints and trailer-trash brawl, and the film would crown a Focus on the Family Top 10 List. But largely because of all that it is not, writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s ruefully funny love child crawls into your lap and melts there. It has engendered heaps of word-of-mouth affection and awards galore from critics who recognize it as a glowing credit to the independent film movement. The people who have slammed it as a vessel for the patronizing idea that the Common Life is a hallowed thing wear a cynic’s scarlet C.

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EVERYTHING MIGHT BE JUST DUCKY IF NOT FOR THAT SWAN, THAT SUNBEAM Julia Roberts. What’s with her, anyway, issuing through her handlers a pat “I am deeply honored” statement, while Linney, Juliette Binoche, Ellen Burstyn and Joan Allen service the Hollywood Press Corps? (Allen, clever girl, contends that she was blow-drying her parrot when the phone rang, giving reporters the quirky kibble they crave.)

Within hours, Linney makes a dozen prearranged calls, running down a list of numbers provided by the Team. And what with the photo shoot for People magazine and all the dazzling smiles for “ET” and “Access Hollywood” and CNN, her parenthetical dimples must really ache. Compounding the pressure to perform is the fresh memory of pre-Oscar pageants in which either Linney (New York Film Critics, National Society of Film Critics) or Roberts (L.A. Film Critics, Golden Globe) took the prize.

“How’s she behaving?” Dinerstein asks the Team during the pep rally. “She’s perfect,” says the Head Cheerleader in the black twin set, black slacks and faux leopard-skin slip-ons. “She’s a lovely interview.”

Maybe so. But to many people, including the top talk-show bookers, she’s still Jim Carrey’s animatronic wife in “The Truman Show.” Neither that performance nor its predecessors (“Absolute Power,” “Primal Fear,” “Congo,” to name a few) thrust Linney over the threshold of celebrity. At 37, she’s unlikely to become a major leading brand. Still, her nomination and, to a far lesser degree, Lonergan’s for Best Original Screenplay, unleash a swell of interest that will mean more quality scripts for Linney and perhaps millions more dollars for Paramount Classics. The goosing that she and the Team can give the film via free publicity and media buys--now, and in the event of an Oscar win--will jack up its box office. It will also enhance the 3-year-old Paramount Classics’ ability to seduce the writing-directing Kenneth Lonergans of tomorrow.

To help make sure this opportunity arrived, Dinerstein expanded the Team in November. He hired Harry Clein, a refreshingly fashion-backward Hollywood publicist who got his leg up in the biz in ’81 flacking “Sophie’s Choice.” Over the years he begat PR progeny like Bumble Ward and now teaches a Los Angeles Film School course on film marketing. When he’s not lollygagging on memory lane, reminiscing about the happy pre-”E!” days, Clein turns cartwheels with his side-by-side Rolodexes (which, for nostalgia’s sake, still contain the numbers of dead people), putting out the word on films ranging from “Forrest Gump” to “The Blair Witch Project.”

There’s a breed of publicist geared to analyzing how Julia’s je ne sais quoi will translate to a billboard; whether Russell Crowe should engage Jay in some funny swordplay. Clein’s the guy who really watches a movie and talks about it in ways that show sincere appreciation and attentiveness to artistic detail. With “You Can Count on Me,” he’ll tell you that all the Team had to do was FedEx videos to Academy voters, critics and editors, then sit back and wait for the gushing to commence. Without Clein as doting uncle, though, Linney’s subtle glories might go unnoticed. Remember the moment, he says, in which her character locks eyes with her brother, fresh off the bus, through the restaurant window? Her hands wag like a puppy’s tail. “It’s a wonderful gesture, right down to the tips of the fingers,” he says. Or the fleeting scene when she’s driving alone in the car after doing her married boss for the second time? A groan of regret/disgust yields to a hoot of incredulity, then dissolves into another groan. Also, Clein doesn’t mention it, but her dimples flinch whenever she’s disappointed. Which is often.

The film is full of such small moments. But don’t even suggest that small moments make for a small film. “The word ‘small’ and ‘little’ get in the way,” Clein says. He’s cranky that Leonard Maltin used the ‘L’ word in hyping “You Can Count on Me” as his favorite film of the year. Argh! “You fight that word.”

And what of fighting such tangibles as the super-size Julia Roberts as Erin In-Your-Face Brockovich? “The real Erin Brockovich carries her own Klieg light,” and so does Roberts, Clein says. “Julia has that Tom Hanks sort of connection to the audience. She’s also got the weight of her credits [including nominations for ‘Steel Magnolias’ and ‘Pretty Woman’] going for her.” Wait, there’s more, he says. “That hair. That posture. That smile.”

At the end of the day, Linney and Roberts play the same character: a feisty single mom with boss troubles, relationship angst, grievous child-care loopholes. At the end of the news cycle on Oscar nomination day, the Laura-to-Julia media exposure ratio is about 1 to 25. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of “Erin Brockovich” clips featuring Roberts’ high-and-mighty cleavage.

Still, the Paramount Classics Team hammers away at the talk-show bookers. It looks as if Letterman wants Linney. But Leno’s people are signaling thumbs down. Bad sign. A reminder, perhaps, that in the savage arena of publicity, you can’t count on justice, and the little gal only wins when portrayed in a slick movie by a megastar.

Come Oscar night, Linney can shrug it all off with “it’s an honor just to be nominated.” Her gladiator Team, however, must already feel a chill as they listen to the entertainment pundits’ rabble roar: “Dust off your Oscar shelf, Julia!”