How to Be a Drama Queen: The war in Hollywood is a special kind of thing.

In the mid 1960s, a friend of mine landed his first job as a comedy writer. He was hired by Jackie Gleason's manager, or "wrangler," to use the term we prefer to describe the guy whose job it is to mollify, coddle, and keep tense company with the star. His job was to write a few jokes for one of Gleason's appearances.

As he and the wrangler walked slowly to Gleason's hotel-room door, my friend clutching his jokes on a few damp pages, Gleason's wrangler suddenly stopped. He turned to my friend.

"Before we go in there, kid," he said, "there's something you gotta know."

Wide eyes from my friend.

"Ya see, kid," he said, "what you gotta know is that Jackie Gleason, he's broke right down the middle."

"He's broke?" my friend asked.

"Not no-money broke. He's got money. I mean his head. His head is broke right down the middle."

An uncomprehending stare from my friend. The wrangler leans close.

"He's nuts, kid. His mind, it's like scrambled eggs in there."

Scrambled eggs in there. It goes without saying, of course, that Jackie Gleason was a comic genius, and that his talent on the stage and screen was nothing short of luminous. He was also, according to all reports, volatile. Irrational.

A little nuts.

Which brings us to the Oscars.

All that restraint! The knowing peace sign from Susan Sarandon, the tortured holding back of Nicole Kidman, the whole banquet of sad- looking, serious faces -- as if they all were about to say something and then just thought, No, let's keep it dignified. But really it was just a form of self-dramatics -- they didn't want to make statements about the war, or about Bush, or about any topic that might lend itself to tedious debate. No, these are show-business people, with a smart- bomb's ability to zero in on the dramatic center of any scene and play the hell out of it. They realized, because they're all professionals, where the heart of the moment was, and it wasn't in speeches, it was in almost-speeches. Thus, the heavy glances, the sighs, the pauses, the bitten lips.

There is a term for all of this, and the term is drama queen.

Poor, fat Michael Moore didn't get the Norma Desmond vibe of the whole event, and so went out and made a poor, fat speech. What an amateur! So easily upstaged. There he was, in his slovenly rented suit, neck spilling out over his collar, and you could actually hear the thoughts of a theater full of antiwar almost-speechifiers: Yikes! That coulda been me! Better just to drop my top eyelids a skosh and look saddened by world events.

An actor friend of mine tells the story of his first day in a Los Angeles acting class. The participants were asked to stand, wrap their arms around themselves in a big self-hug, and chant, three times: "Wonderful, wonderful me!"

So it's scrambled eggs inside of wonderful, wonderful me -- which is all you really need to know about Hollywood's position on the war, or, frankly, on anything else. Because acting is really all about being dramatic, it's no wonder that the debate about the war quickly becomes, when actors are involved, a debate about me and what I think and why shouldn't I be allowed to speak? And notice, also, how the more thoughtful and informed antiwar celebrities -- like, say, Mike Farrell -- are the least talented. A funny, nimble, sharply comic actress like Janeane Garofalo can't quite muster the sustained, methodical argument necessary to hold her own on a Sunday talk show, as Farrell recently did, but she's way, way better at her day job.

The American people aren't such drama queens, of course. No matter who's asking, no matter how the question is phrased, the answer is roughly the same: The American people know it's going to be hard; they know that there are going to be dead soldiers; they know it's going to take a while. And guess what? They're okay with it. Not thrilled. Just okay.

Because ordinary people live in a land of consequences. A world of tough choices, without the possibility of artistic abandon. Artists -- and I use the term loosely here, to refer to both Michelangelo and the Dixie Chicks -- rarely pay the price for their carousing and irresponsibility. The whole point of being an "artist," it seems to me, is to be apart from the world of mortgages and child-raising and shopping at Target. This is why actors and musicians and painters tend to live in expensive, funky parts of New York City; gated, hilltop estates in Malibu and Bel Air; or hovels; and not in places like, say, Englewood, N.J., or West Covina, Calif. And I guess you have to ask yourself this: When it comes to the really big questions, of life and death and war and peace, who are you going to listen to? Somebody whose worldview is grounded each month by the requirements of the Home Fidelity Mortgage Corporation and carpooling a high-school hockey team, or someone whose life is so unstructured that she gets, as Janeane Garofalo put it recently, to stay home and "watch a lot of news"?

What makes Susan Sarandon such a magnetic and compelling actress -- just watch Atlantic City or Igby Goes Down -- is precisely what makes her such a dubious political theorist. She's a drama queen. She's not into politics, she's into political theater, and she's got the two all mixed up in her head. Broke right down the middle.

A few years ago, when my writing partner and I were casting a television series, the network wanted us to meet with an aging movie star with an eye toward casting him in the lead role.

This happens quite often in television. Movie stars, especially former movie stars, regularly become "available" for television shows, usually around tax time. It's an alluring gig for an actor: a steady paycheck, six months off, short workdays . . . and still in the public eye.

The actor we met with, though, wasn't your regular long-in-the-tooth, graceful-exit type. He was one of the biggest movie stars of all time. Twenty or thirty years ago, he was, in fact, the biggest box-office attraction in the world. Now he was broke and in our office, trying to pretend that he wasn't broke and he wasn't asking for a job.

The meeting was heartbreaking. As much as we wanted to give him the job, we knew we couldn't. Not only was this guy broke, but he was also broke right down the middle. The few people who had worked with him in the intervening swan-dive years all gave us the same advice: Run. He's crazy, they said. He refuses to work for days. He's late. He's impossible. He argues with the director. He re-blocks the cameras. He'll accuse you of trying to murder him. And worst of all, he punches people. Writers especially.

"If you cast him, you'll have to get a side agreement," my agent said.

"What's a side agreement?" I asked.

"It's an understanding. A legal understanding between you and the studio. It means that if the guy hits you and you don't want to come to work anymore, they can't sue you for breach of contract."

"Do you think he'll really hit us?"

"You're a writer, aren't you?"

"Then forget it," I said. "Who needs this kind of aggravation?"

There was a pause on the line.

"Well," my agent began, slowly, "before we get all 'forget it' about this, let's remember that the guy is a huge star. A gigantic star. He's not just a piece of casting. He's a piece of business. He's an element to the show."

"Meaning?"

"A star like that could make your show a hit. Do you really want to say no to

that kind of opportunity?"

"Well . . ." I said, wavering.

"Look," my agent said, "what's so great about being easy to work with? I'm horrible to work with, and I'm doing okay. Everything has its drawbacks. Some stars make you hire their idiot friends on the writing staff, some insist you donate to their crackpot charities, some drink, some bang underage kids, and some . . ." My agent paused, winding up: ". . . and some even want to write. So in the grand scheme of things, what's a couple of swings from a former box-office sensation and star of your hit television show?"

I thought about this for a moment.

"He can't hurt us, though, right?" I ask. "What are we talking about? A black eye? Swollen lip?"

"Honestly? As your agent and legally enfranchised representative, I'm ethically bound to inform you that the guy was, in fact, an amateur boxer. What we are talking about is something on the order of a broken jaw or burst eardrum."

In the end, we passed. The actor was charming in the meeting, but then, he was an actor. He's supposed to be charming in the meeting. A television show, even a hit television show, isn't worth having your teeth knocked out.

"You're crazy," my agent said. "You'd have a hit on your hands."

"Sorry," I said. "I like my teeth and my jaw and my eardrums."

"What are you?" my agent asked. "Broke right down the middle?"