TINSELTOWN LOWDOWN.

Best Actress, E! Entertainment's first movie, takes us to the Oscars through Hollywood's bedrooms--and closets

When wicked E! Entertainment Television went looking for a suitably salacious property to adapt as its first original TV movie, it was obvious that John Kane's over-the-top book Best Actress was just the ticket. Tracking five Oscar-nominated monsters from nomination morning to statuette evening, the 1998 cult novel packed in more E!-ready sex, drugs, and naked ambition than a year's worth of the network's True Hollywood Stories.

Most fun of all, readers got to supply their own real-life counterpart for each of the characters. Connie Travatano (Travers in the film) is the diva whose long-awaited return to the concert stage is wrecked by an ill-timed sex act. Fiona Covington is the too-wholesome Brit who's losing her man. Lori Seefer is the former child star who's now an acclaimed--and closeted--actress.

"Let's just say that, like women in a harem, all my characters are thinly veiled," says Kane, laughing. A "40-something" openly gay writer who worked for years as a movie and television publicist, Kane admits he's inside Hollywood enough to have "been amused" firsthand "by a lot of bad behavior"--notably that of the "truly heinous" Bette Davis, with whom Kane worked on the HBO movie Right of Way in 1983.

As for the veracity of his characters' bedroom habits, however, the author insists, "I know you'd love for me to say I once caught Michelle Pfeiffer in bed with Denzel Washington or something--and I wish I had--but I didn't. The sexual stuff is all made up."

Even that of tormented lesbian Lori? "I'm gonna let that [question] just sit there," Kane says. "But you'll notice that at the end of Best Actress I have Lori come out, and it turns out to be the best thing she's ever done."

Elisa Donovan--the former Clueless actress who plays Lori and admits to knowing more than one closeted gal about town--is not so sure: "Realistically, I think after she came out they wrote a bunch of articles about her, had her all over Entertainment Tonight, and then she had a real hard time getting a job. "Still, she thinks Lori did the right thing, adding, "Ultimately, people have to come out and make those statements. Then it will finally change."