BOOK REVIEW : Film Buffs: It’s Nostalgia Time : MOVIE ANECDOTES <i> by Peter Hay</i> ; Oxford University Press $19.95, 384 pages

The plain-wrap title of Peter Hay’s new book tells it all: “Movie Anecdotes” is, simply enough, a collection of well-chosen (and sometimes thrice-told) tales about the motion picture industry.

At its best, “Movie Anecdotes” is wry, telling and tinged (not drenched) with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia. But even if more than a few of Hay’s stories are chestnuts, the book still amounts to a bonbonnerie where we are invited to browse and sample the wares--tasty but not filling.

Hay is a self-appointed folklorist of the entertainment industry, and he has gathered the oral tradition of the Hollywood tribe with both love and cunning.

“The genre is not about facts or history,” he writes. “With anecdotes, story is everything.” (He’s done the same thing, by the way, for the theater in “Broadway Anecdotes” and “Theatrical Anecdotes.”)

And while he tried to cull out the apocrypha and the obvious fakes, he was not too meticulous about the “provenance” of the stories that he picked up along the way: “(S)uch scruples,” he observes, “taken to their logical conclusion, would result in a very slim volume.”

Not to worry. “Movie Anecdotes” is a plump book, and Hay is a generous storyteller. He ranges through the history of Hollywood from its very earliest days (“There isn’t that much talent in the world,” said one director in 1912 when asked to make six pictures a year) to the era of baby moguls and actor-presidents: “No, no, no,” protested Jack Warner when he heard that Ronald Reagan was running for governor, “Jimmy Stewart for governor. Reagan for best friend.”

Along the way, Hay manages to showcase the stars of every generation and magnitude, from Spencer Tracy to Burt Reynolds--and sometimes, as with Tracy and Reynolds, in the the same story.

Still, Hay concedes that most (and the best) of the stories in “Movie Anecdotes” date back to Hollywood’s golden age. “When you ask for somebody’s best stories, they are likely to be of a vintage year, not last week’s,” he explains.

“It is also safe to say that the ruthless egotists of the pioneer era were a good deal more colorful than the accountants, lawyers, and real estate developers who run studios these days.”

So, for example, we overhear an exchange between a very young Katharine Hepburn in her first starring role, and the venerable John Barrymore: “Thank God, I don’t have to act with you any more!” said Hepburn. “Oh,” replied Barrymore, “I didn’t realize you ever had, darling.”

Indeed, Hay gives us all the classics: the day when Lana Turner was discovered at the counter of a malt shop--not Schwab’s, we are told, but the Top Hat Malt at Sunset and Highland--and the comments of a benighted RKO executive after seeing Fred Astaire’s screen test (“Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.”).

Some of the stories bear the fingerprints of a helpful publicist. An English actor named Maurice Joseph Micklewhite was supposedly casting about for a stage name when his eye fell on a theater marquee partially hidden by trees.

“It’s a good job the trees were in the right place,” Michael Caine recalls, “otherwise I would have been called Michael Mutiny.”

And while Hay reminds us that most of the famous “Goldwynisms” (“Any man who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined”) were hatched by his publicity department, he goes on to quote a couple of dozen of them.

But there are some small surprises here too. Ingmar Bergman, we are told, once made soap commercials. When Humphrey Bogart was offered a record-breaking $5- million contract--for service over 15! years--he refused to sign because the payments in the fine print added up to only $4,999,999.25. And the ever-wholesome Walt Disney, who was notorious for examining every foot of film that came out of his studio, succeeded in spotting a single frame containing the image of a naked woman--a prank by some of his staffers.

“If that gal had any clothes,” he cracked, “I wouldn’t have paid any attention to her.”

We discover that studio tours are nothing new at Universal. Tourists paid to see the sound stages as far back as 1915, and the director King Vidor recalls that “the sonorous voice of the professional guide resounded throughout the set and merged with the tinny raspiness of the portable organ employed to keep the actors in the proper mood.”

But not every studio was so forward-looking; when Harry Warner first heard about talkies, he complained: “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”

“Movie Anecdotes” is one book that readily lends itself to a preview. Go to a bookstore, pick up a copy and open it at random.

And if you’re a movie buff, or live with one, I suspect that “Movie Anecdotes” will likely end up on your coffee table--or in some other room where reading in short takes comes naturally.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “The Ice-Shirt” by William Vollman (Viking).