BOOK REVIEW : A Script Straight From Hollywood : THE DEAL, <i> by Peter Lefcourt,</i> Random House, $19, 320 pages

What? you query. Another, yet another book about Hollywood and the making of a movie? And you’re telling us to go out and buy it? Yes, yes, yes.

In spite of the fact that there must be a couple of thousand Hollywood novels out by now, you can count the wonderful ones on two hands and still have fingers left over: Gavin Lambert’s “Inside Daisy Clover,” David Freeman’s “A Hollywood Education,” Ludwig Bemelmans’ “Dirty Eddy.” I’m not talking about admirable works of literature that trash the movie business--just wonderful novels. There can be, and is, a difference.

“The Deal” by Peter Lefcourt is one of those wonderful novels, written from a position of knowledge and affection. Peter Berns, an independent producer of middle years, has hit bottom. True, he still owns a house in the Beverly Hills flats, but a vindictive gardener has dug up all his unpaid-for flowers; the property looks decimated by an “anti-shrubbery bomb.”

Berns owns a $1,900 French wallet, but he doesn’t have a dollar left to put in it, so he gives up and attempts suicide. (Of course! It’s in the tradition of a hundred novels in this appealing genre.) Luckily, Berns’ attempt is foiled by a visit from his long lost nephew, Lionel, a callow youth from New Jersey with a movie script under his arm.

Unfortunately, the script is about Benjamin Disraeli, that 19th-Century Jewish Prime Minister of Britain, and William Gladstone. Neither of these two men in their lifetimes had much interest in anything beyond the Corn Laws, tariffs and the state of Western Europe--that sort of thing.

But Berns, fortifying himself with microwave pizza and Gallo Hearty Burgundy, remembers that Bobby Mason, a martial arts movie star, and a very hot ticket, has just converted to Judaism.

If Berns can get Mason to play Benjamin Disraeli--well, it would be enough to pull Berns out of suicidal thoughts, get him to call up his agent, and devise a (supremely simple) way of getting the script through to the paranoid, semiliterate Mason.

Meanwhile, over at a studio (which will be minutely examined in every detail by the author), Diedre Hearn, a nice woman pushing 40 and increasingly bemused by the world around her, listens to Berns pitch his crazy script, rejects it, finds that the studio has bought it anyway, reads the insanely demented rewrite, rejects that (only, of course, the studio loves that too), watches as hordes of Japanese come in to take over this same studio, and so on, and on and on.

The wonderfulness here comes through in telephone conversations from car phone to car phone as two equally expensive and hard-to-drive imported autos elude each other in steep canyons. In countless “important” meetings where nothing ever happens. In the hundred-proof awfulness of 28-year-old Brad Imprin, an agent so particularly terrible that he transcends his stereotype. In a savvy rabbi who agrees to be religious consultant on this film, but only if his money comes from “above the line.”

And in a truly splendid Yugoslav director who hates actors, and his Polish personal assistant--who finally gets to do what personal assistants are supposed to do. (She does it with handcuffs, rubber gloves and a feather.)

This is a review without quotes, because to touch even one line might be to inadvertently give away the preposterous, endearing plot.

It’s possible to say that Peter and Diedre end up together. That Lionel turns from a callow nephew into an adroit and pragmatic screenwriter, with a crazy streak as wide as his uncle’s. And possible also to say that the Valium and alcohol consumption in this novel will make even the most unregenerate reader feel virtuous by comparison.

Panic attacks, anxiety attacks, crushing hangovers, fresh roses, waltzing under the stars by the Danube, and at the end of it all, a wonderful movie! Peter Lefcourt sees the industry and loves it, too. You can’t ask for anything more.

Next: Constance Casey reviews “Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life,” edited by Jon Halper (Sierra Club Books).