`KING KONG' STAR LOBBIES FOR CHANGE IN COPYRIGHT LAW FOR OLDER WRITERS.

Byline: Katharine Q. Seelye The New York Times

In the basement of the Hart Senate Office Building, in the artificial light and clatter of the cafeteria, Fay Wray, 89, was preparing for her next scene. The legendary actress, the luminescent object of King Kong's desire, took out a mirror from her purse. She uncorked her lipstick, ``Really Red,'' and swiped her lips. Beaming, she was ready for her close-up with Sen. Spence Abraham, R-Mich.

Abraham was thrilled to meet her and a clutch of her Hollywood friends, including Julius Epstein, who wrote ``Casablanca.'' They were trooping around Capitol Hill on Wednesday and Thursday to lobby for a change in the copyright laws to give older writers a portion of the payments for replaying their movies.

Abraham said he was especially happy to see how alert Wray was because the last time he was visited by an actress - Melanie Griffith, who was lobbying two years ago for the National Endowment for the Arts - she fell asleep while he was speaking.

Of Wray's visit, the senator said cheerfully: ``I was delighted that at least one Hollywood starlet was able to stay awake while talking to me.''

In this case, it was more of a wonder that Abraham did not fall asleep. The topic that brought the roving band to various Capitol Hill suites is a dry but fiercely fought-over copyright bill. Wray and her friends came to put a human face on it. Every time a movie that was written before 1960 is replayed, all fees go to the studios. The writers get nothing.

Epstein, now 89, was 34 when he and his brother, Philip, wrote one of the most quotable screenplays of all time. Warner Brothers paid him $15,208 for ``Casablanca,'' and he has never earned a dime more for the countless times the film has been shown in the past 54 years.

Over a bowl of chowder in the Hart cafeteria, he gently described how low writers are on the Hollywood totem pole. He quoted Irving Thalberg, the producer, who said that writers are the most important people in film, ``and we must do everything to keep them from finding out.''

Epstein was one of the writers who lost out when the Writers Guild of America negotiated a contract with the studios after a bitter strike in 1960. The contract gave residuals to writers whose material appeared after 1960; the pre-1960 writers received health, pension and welfare benefits and a lump sum for their pre-1960 work, but no residuals. For the 35 movies he wrote between 1935 and 1960, Epstein received the lump sum of $600.

Wray's husband, Robert Riskin, wrote ``It Happened One Night,'' ``Meet John Doe'' and ``Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.''

When they married, Wray abandoned the silver screen to bring up their three children. But in 1950, Riskin had a stroke. The family, having little money, had to move, and Wray went back to work. After a year, she no longer could afford the full-time care her husband required and admitted him to the Motion Picture & Television Country House in Woodland Hills, where he died in 1955.

A statement from the Writers' Guild said on behalf of Wray, who does not like to complain herself: ``For more than a third of a century, she has received not one penny from the studio's exploitation of her husband's films throughout the world, while the studios, as copyright holders, have made uncounted millions.''

Congress is considering a copyright bill that would extend payments to copyright owners for 20 years to bring American law into line with European copyright law.

The Writers' Guild, which represents 8,500 authors, is seizing the opportunity to push for an amendment that would allow the writers of pre-1960 material to negotiate with the studios for residuals comparable to those for post-1960 writers, which generally are between 1.2 percent and 1.8 percent of licensing fees whenever their work is rebroadcast on television or released on video or licensed to other markets.