On The Set : Trauma Central : HBO MOVIE FOCUSES ON THE DRAMA INSIDE AN EMERGENCY ROOM

The postscript to the new HBO movie “State of Emergency” proclaims that one out of three Americans will visit a hospital emergency room this year.

Unfortunately, it might resemble the fictional inner-city East End Medical Center depicted in the intense drama, which stars Joe Mantegna (“Searching for Bobby Fischer”) and Lynn Whitfield (“The Josephine Baker Story”).

Mantegna’s Dr. John Novelli is on the verge of burnout, the result of too many patients and too few resources. To make matters worse, the CAT scanner is on the fritz during his shift and a car accident victim, middle-class businessman Jim Anderson (Paul Dooley), may have a head trauma.

“Anybody who really knows what’s going on in emergency rooms says this could happen,” says the Tony Award-winning Mantegna (“Glengarry Glen Ross”). The personable actor is relaxing on location at the former Linda Vista Hospital in East Los Angeles. His dressing room was once a hospital room.

“It’s amazing and scary,” Mantegna continues. “I travel a lot. I worried enough when I was in Russia to say, ‘I hope nothing happens to me. I don’t want to end up in some public hospital in Moscow.’ But on some levels it feels like it’s almost like that here. That’s what this movie is about. Jim Anderson should be at Cedars-Sinai. The moral is drive carefully ... because you will never know where they will take you.”

“State of Emergency” was written by Susan Black (“A Year in the Life”) and Dr. Lance Gentile, a graduate of USC’s film school who still works as an E.R. doctor in Los Angeles.

“I put myself through film school working in the emergency room,” says Gentile, who also has a cameo as a doctor in the film. “I work part-time at Century City Hospital in the emergency room. The good thing about that is I can rearrange my schedule to work on my film and my writing stuff. I have a 24-hour shift on weekends and work here during the week.”

In Gentile and Black’s original script, the emergency room was a backdrop for a love story. When producer John P. Marsh took it to HBO Showcase, the cable channel’s movie division liked what they read but wanted to eliminate the love story and concentrate on the medical aspect. “We wrote it as an entertainment piece,” Gentile says. “I had something I wanted to say about medicine. We thought no one would take a script about the politics of medicine today.”

Though the film doesn’t specifically explore the issues President Clinton has raised in his health care package, “We say, ‘Look at this aspect of medicine,’ ” Gentile explains. “The E.R. is where everything filters down: the AIDS crisis, the uninsured, the old. They have nowhere else to go. In the face of the huge cuts which have been made, hospitals are closing down. Trauma centers are closing down. In the face of the mounting patient load, the idea was to have a story that told how these characters survive in this pressure-cooker atmosphere.”

Since the hospital itself is one of the movie’s main characters, director Lesli Linka Glatter (“Twin Peaks”) was very involved in finding the right facility. “There are 13 out-of-work hospitals in Los Angeles,” she notes. “We had a lot of choices, which just blew my mind with the amount of people who need health care. When we saw this place, the architecture is really interesting. It gave us a really good palate. I wanted to go with something that is older, which has seen better days--which is like our health care system. It has gone to seed.”

Both Gentile and Glatter have been impressed with Mantegna’s dedication and enthusiasm. “Joe Mantegna is just a gem on every level,” Glatter says. “‘I’m the president of the Joe Mantegna fan club,” Gentile adds enthusiastically. “We went on ambulance rides together.”

Mantegna also spent time with E.R. doctors at two Los Angeles-area hospitals.

At one hospital, Mantegna recalls, the E.R. doctor on call dressed him in doctor’s whites. “He said, ‘How should I introduce you (to the patients)’? I said, ‘I do have a doctorate from DePaul University in humane letters. You can call me Dr. Mantegna. It works.’ ”

During his stint in E.R., Mantegna assisted on a spinal tap and helped stitch up a girl’s head. “I was doing things I was afraid to do before I went down there. I said to myself, ‘It’s only a movie. I’m only going to be acting in this thing.’ I expected to see guys coming in holding their legs in their hands. I really didn’t want that.”

But once in the E.R., Mantegna’s fears evaporated. “I’m not a squeamish sort of person, but I don’t think I have that thing to be a doctor, where I can cut a guy open and just stick my hand in and massage his heart. It’s not for me. But here I am, and the doctor pulls up the back of (a woman’s robe) and says, ‘Dr. Mantegna, we’re going to be doing a spinal tap’ and he’s throwing needles in her. I’m right there holding the test tubes and fluid.

“And when we were stitching the girl’s head, he’s right there sticking his fingers in her head. And she is looking up at me saying, ‘You look like that actor!’ ”

Mantegna smiles.

“I said, ‘It’s just the blow you took to the head.’ ”

“State of Emergency” airs Saturday at 8 p.m. on HBO.