Telephone callers can now reach out and view someone.

Makeup artist Carolyn Rivers has signed up to buy one of the first AT&T VideoPhones that is supposed to go on sale in Los Angeles as early as this week.

She was looking forward to seeing her callers' faces on its credit-card-sized screen, especially if they were cranks. "When you get hang-ups, you know who it is," Rivers reasons.

Well, not quite -- or, at least, not yet. The caller has to have a viewer phone too, in order for you to get that visual image.

So get a pair, if you're tempted to buy the newest tech toy sold in L.A. and across the country. The gadget comes with two-way video cameras and a "self-view mode" to check your own appearance. Steven Spielberg has already snatched two for his film company, which means there will be on other person out there who can see his visage and be seen by him when they chat on the phone.

KIIS-FM in Hollywood has two also. Now Rick Dees yammers to potential advertisers, trying to sew up ad deals via a clever video stunt.

The very first buyers, some daring and some dumb, know what they want, even if it makes others jealous.

"I'm going to get one, because -- it's like the Jetsons," said comedy writer Wallace Wolodarsky. He, his partner Jay Kogen (of The Simpsons writing team), Spielberg and dozens of other Angelenos lined up to buy the first models hot out of the oven, although Kogen had cold feet after seeing the picture quality.

"It looks like communications from the moon in 1968. The technology is clearly not here yet," he said.

The picture quality of this $1,500-a-pop device is jerky and fuzzy. Using the rather narrow bandwidth of standard phone lines, seconds can elapse before a fully different image appears. The result is "Nickelodeon-like," "too damm slow," or "OK for me," according to first-time witnesses.

"Remember how Max Headroom moved?" said an AT&T equipment retailer in the San Fernando Valley, recalling the jerky, computer-animated TV character. But hey, didn't the first cellular phones conk out when your car approached lofty hills?

People who want to be first don't often insist on perfection. "They wanna keep up with the in crowd," said AT&T saleswoman Jessie Lewis in Hollywood.

"I feel like Alexander Graham Bell," said Laurel Canyon resident Denise Avchen who walked away with an early model Sept. 16. Her mother in Fort Lauderdale picked up a copy, and now they beam each other up.

"When you come over, I give you the tour of my house, and you see my mom in Florida," who's frequently calling up Denise's son, Brian, to watch him grow up: "She has all of her friends over for these parties, in Florida. And I just hold the baby up to the phone here, in Los Angeles, and they all scream," said Avchen, a TV writer and fundraiser for the American Film Institute.

AT&T hired an actor, Robert Wagner, to make the first high-profile public demo of the VideoPhone in January in New York, chatting and smiling to his wife and daughter in Los Angeles.

Sounds like there's a show-biz bias to AT&T's marketing plan.

No, claimed Steve O'Donnell, spokesman for AT&T's consumer products division in Parsippany, N.J., which conceived the product and aimed it at the consumer market. L.A., however, is a natural for sales, he said.

"We recognized the first purchasers are those interested in electrical equipment, wanting to experiment, liking the latest gadgets ... and they tend to live on the coasts," said O'Donnell.

The early signs of VideoPhone acceptance or rejection will likely come from the grandmas and the hot-shots -- not businesses, which traditionally pioneer gadget-marketing cycles and have seized on similar technologies, like video conferencing.

When a UC Santa Barbara student named Kim visited AT&T's retail store in Studio City two weeks ago to buy a spare phone chord, she got to playing with the store demo model. The salesman called one of the very few people in the Southland with another VideoPhone -- an AT&T saleswoman in Northridge -- whose face appeared, a little bleary but human no doubt.

"Oh. Wa!" said the teenager, glowing like she'd seen a fuzzy puppy. The woman told Kim the units cost $1,499 each. "Oh, I can't ever buy one," Kim said and hung up.

O'Donnell said interest from businesses has been fairly strong from those who wonder if AT&T has come up with a poor-man's video-conferencer. Video conferencing can cost thousands of dollars for one-time uses.

Skeptics suggest video phones may fizzle, flop or become a respectable footnote in tech-history books, like video phone debuts by Sony and Mitsubishi, perhaps because they were technically lacking on some counts. AT&T itself rolled out a "picturephone" way back in 1964 at the World's Fair in New York.

That was "a bomb," even though its picture quality was "vastly" superior to the VideoPhone of today, claimed A. Michael Noll, dean of USC's Annenberg School for Communications.

In the mid- to late-1970s Noll worked for AT&T and was part of its effort to find any business niche at all for the picturephones after they failed to catch on in the 1960s.

"We spent a lot of money and we couldn't come up with any market," said Noll, a bitter critic of AT&T's picturephone comeback. "AT&T has all the market research in their vault, and I doubt they even looked at it this time."

Central to Noll's criticism is his belief that few people truly want to be seen. He predicts AT&T will lose $50 million to $100 million on the project because buyers will be few, mostly corporate "friends" and business experimenters, like Japanese companies wanting to reverse-engineer it.

Still, the VideoPhone is simple, compared to some precursors. It's powered on conventional voltage from a wall socket and uses a conventional telephone line. No additional charges are tacked on by the phone company for air time.

And a few clever businesses have recognized the stunt value immediately. They pounced, not waiting for the appearance of a rival video phone, announced last month by MCI Communications Corp. at $750 each, half AT&T's price.

KIIS-FM General Sales Manager Roy Laughlin sends salespeople out to "key" accounts with one VideoPhone. Celebrity anchor Rick Dees calls up the soft-drink sellers or car dealers and "associates KIIS with everything that's new and exciting," said Laughlin. "Rick is going to do a video skit, or maybe he'll hold up pictures of naked ladies," said Laughlin. "That's what KIIS is about -- Top 40, new things."

In the past, Laughlin has talked prospects into watching his sales video by showing it on a wallet-sized Sony Video Eight Walkman. "When you go on a sales call, it's gotta be entertaining."