A Hollywood Ending for Writers : Movies: Graduate students in screenwriting make their first sale, and it’s a big one--they get $1 million for an action thriller.

When Ron Mita and Jim McClain receive their master’s degrees in screenwriting Saturday, their diplomas won’t say summa cum laude --but so what when you’ve just sold your first screenplay for a summa sum?

The thirty-something graduate students at Loyola Marymount University have landed a $1-million deal with Columbia Pictures for their action thriller about a woman engineer trying to stave off a catastrophe in the soon-to-open English Channel train tunnel.

According to a Columbia spokesman, two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster has agreed to play the lead role. Filming is scheduled to begin this summer.

One of their professors, Richard Hadley, himself a screenwriter, gasped at the news that the film was already on the verge of production with a star as renowned as Foster. “That’s amazing,” he said.

Even in a business built on fantasy, the movie deal is a dream come true for Mita and McClain--perhaps the only million-dollar men in Hollywood who have never been inside Spago.

“We’re just the white-bread boys,” said Mita, a 32-year-old Santa Clarita resident. “We don’t have therapists. We don’t wear black. . . . We’re not filled with Angst. “

McClain, a 30-year-old North Hollywood resident, still totes a blue canvas Lands End book bag wherever he goes. “I can’t believe I’m getting paid all this money to do something I love,” he said.

Fame and fortune are so new for the two writers that they are still adjusting to their new tax bracket. They used to sit around with each other and their wives, they said, and fantasize about how they would spend $1 million if they earned that much for a screenplay.

But even though they’ve already received $450,000 from their movie deal--with the rest to come when the film goes into production--they’ve found that old spending habits die hard. “I think I bought three shirts at the Gap since we sold this,” Mita said.

McClain has bought one Gap shirt since signing the movie deal. It was on sale. When he got home and his wife, Denise, a therapist at a family counseling service in Burbank, asked where hers was, McClain said women’s shirts weren’t on sale.

“She said, ‘Jim, you just got yourself a million dollars, you don’t have to wait until it’s on sale,’ ” he recalls.

Still, the money has come at a good time. Mita and his wife, Mary Alice, a health care administrator at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, are expecting their first child in July. And both Mita and McClain say the sale of their script is most meaningful because it validates their efforts as screenwriters.

“I guess a lot of people say that it’s like winning the lottery,” McClain said. “But it’s not like winning the lottery. We worked hard on this.”

Out-of-towners who made their way to Southern California after finishing college, Mita and McClain met in one of their graduate screenwriting classes at Loyola. They hit it off and began writing together. Mita had attended Syracuse University, where he studied commercial art. And McClain had gone to the University of Missouri, earning a degree in communications and marketing.

While studying at Loyola, McClain worked in the legal department at Honda Inc. in Torrance and Mita was an administrative assistant to a Universal Studios executive.

The pair share a passion for the Saturday-matinee fare in movies. They say they write the kind of movies they love to see, the action-filled films in which, two-thirds of the way through, the hero straps on his gun and heads out to avenge a wrong, prompting moviegoers to clap and shout.

Mita’s all-time favorite movie is “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” McClain’s is “American Graffiti.”

The movie they have written for Columbia breaks ground: The hero will be a smart, capable woman, a concept they said came naturally to them but struck the Hollywood people they met as novel.

“We think we’ve found our inner woman in this thing,” Mita jests.

One reason the script was snapped up so quickly is that the English Channel tunnel, which will link Britain with France, is scheduled to open next year--just as the movie would be due for release. The film, tentatively called “Trackdown” or “Track Down” (the spelling is still under discussion), centers on a runaway train in the tunnel.

Mita and McClain spent months researching how the actual tunnel is being built and how political and economic pressures played a role in its construction.

Since signing their movie deal, the pair have done some rewriting Columbia wanted and begun work on new projects, including another action thriller. They have also been making the rounds with their agents, meeting movers and shakers in various Hollywood studios.

There’s one introduction they would die for, they say.

“Jim and I have been in love with Disney films since we were young,” Mita said. “So, if there’s any person we’d like to see it’s Michael Eisner (chief executive of Disney studios). . . . I can’t go to Disneyland enough. We’d love to spend an afternoon chatting it up with him.”

In case such a meeting materializes, they already have a screenplay ready called “Kenny and the Pirates.”