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Agents want to take 30-year-old Bobby Kotick to lunch. Screenwriters call him daily. And it can't be long before parking valets and waiters start pitching him story ideas.

Is he a movie mogul? A famous director? Is he Tom Cruise?

No. Even better. Kotick owns a video software company, and he's interactive.

"I go to these cocktail parties now and I say I make video games, and people go, 'Wow.' I can attract crowds," said Kotick, whose computer-game company, Activision, moved to Los Angeles from Northern California two years ago to be closer to Hollywood creative talent.

The company's top-selling "Return to Zork," one of the new generation of games played using CD-ROM, features live-action video, performances by 26 actors and a movie-quality soundtrack.

"When Hollywood seizes onto some concept, that's it," said Kotick. "If you're not in it, you're out of it."

The freewheeling frontier where Hollywood and Silicon Valley meet even has its own name, "Siliwood."The frenzy to stake a claim has been marked by a flurry of deal making, joint ventures and company buyouts.

With deals increasingly brokered by high-powered talent agencies, celebrities ranging from Sylvester Stallone to former CIA head William Colby soon will appear in interactive games. They will join old hands such as musician Peter Gabriel and actress Margot Kidder.

Not long ago, movie executives dismissed video games as geeky kid toys designed by computer nerds in the garage, an attitude overhauled almost overnight by advancing technology and bottom-line economics. With up to a third of American households now owning a video game system, sales of game software reached an estimated $6 billion in 1993, up 80 percent from 1992, according to the CD-ROM Factbook, a trade reference guide.

Lagging behind that figure were American movie box office grosses, which totaled $5.1 billion in ticket sales last year.

With such numbers, Tinseltown wants to get into the interaction. From the corporate side, studios have been opening new divisions to retool existing movies into video games rather than licensing their film characters to outside software developers. On the creative end, rock musicians, screenwriters, producers and directors are vying to help create or star in computer video games.

"It's the gold rush," said Strauss Zelnick, who astounded movie industry colleagues when he left his job last year as head of Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. to become president and chief executive of Crystal Dynamics, a computer-game upstart based in that software capital, Palo Alto, Calif.

"The good news," he said, "is there is in fact gold there. The bad news is there are a lot of people mining for it."

As naysaying financial analysts and computer-software companies deride Hollywood's precipitous leap onto this bandwagon, breathless bulletins are emitted daily from Siliwood. The peer pressure to go interactive has been intense.

Hollywood learned fast about computing by 1993, when CD-ROM-based hardware finally took off, with U.S. sales of 3 million to 5 million units, said Lee Isgur, a partner at Volpe Welty & Co., a San Francisco-based investment banking company. CD-ROM, or compact-disc read-only memory, does for video and data what regular compact discs do for music.

"Hollywood wants to get a piece of the video game business because they think it's big," Isgur said. "They're scared because they think it could be competitive."

Compared with the more popular cartridge-based games, CD-ROM technology contains enough memory to store live action video that can turn a game into a truly interactive movie. The player can choose different story lines and manipulate plot twists enacted by real actors, while pursuing some goal, most typically fighting off hostile characters or solving a puzzle.

But the future success and best business tactics for movie makers and executives in this burgeoning market have not been determined. "Everyone up to now has always said, 'You need content and you need Hollywood.' They want to believe that," Isgur said. "The problem is you're dealing in a digital world. ... It has yet to be proven whether what makes a Hollywood movie interesting makes interactive entertainment interesting."

The video arcade, not the movies, traditionally has been the source of the characters with the most popularity in games designed for home use. The top-earning entertainment personalities last year were not live actors but digital game stars, the Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog, each pulling in about $500 million, according to Isgur.

Analysts point out that the oldest and most established interactive studio division, Sony's Imagesoft, has had only middling success marketing its movie game spinoffs, "Cliffhanger" and "Bram Stoker's Dracula."Company executives insist those products have sold well, but they won't release numbers.

The division's uncontested hit, "Ground Zero Texas," the first truly interactive movie game, involved a $3 million budget and a movie crew hired to film the project. In the game, players help military personnel shoot aliens called Reticulans, who are trying to take over the Earth.

While Imagesoft went to an outside developer to make the software for "Ground Zero Texas," independent developers are going to Hollywood for creative talent. After interviewing a number of writers through literary agencies, Activision chose Peter Lenkov, 30, who wrote Demolition Man, to script a game he describes as "The Dirty Dozen" in cyberspace.

Chosen because of his experience with the action-adventure genre and many hours spent playing video games, Lenkov said he was thrilled with the format's novelty and the absence of fearsome Hollywood politics. "You're really motivated. It's very frustrating when you write a script and it never becomes a movie," Lenkov said. "I'm going to see this thing made, and that's far and above money or dinners and lunches. That's the ultimate reward. Getting it made."

Budgets for developing this type of CD-ROM game can range from $1 million to $3 million, an amount competitive with making a television movie, though far below the typical studio movie project. With a set upfront fee ranging from $5,000 to $100,000, interactive scriptwriters typically receive a royalty on each game sold. Though that sum is far below the $500,000 to $1 million fee for an A-level movie script, Byzantine movie accounting methods can leave screenwriters feeling shortchanged on the back end.

"I'll get pay from the first game sold," Lenkov said. "I get statements from Demolition Man saying it hasn't made a dime."

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