I'll this talk about Hollywood giving us aid after the riots is just hype, a bunch of bull," says Chilton Alphonse from inside the Community Youth Sports and Arts Foundation, the south-central community center he founded for "at-risk" inner-city youths eight years ago. "Michael Jackson came and gave us a TV and $5,000. That was nice, I guess. But he could have offered to buy us our building, don't you think?"

Alphonse's lament finds a hearty round of seconds from other minority community leaders, as well as from political activists within Hollywood itself, who agree that the local, multibillion- dollar film and television industry has not contributed its fair share to Los Angeles's reconstruction and anti-poverty efforts. The neglect is particularly galling in the face of the millions of dollars industry figures have contributed to such causes as Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and AIDS research. Some point to a subtle, underlying racism as the culprit. As one local politico- turned-film producer explained bluntly, "It's like the way {the late folk singer} Phil Ochs defined liberals back in the '60s. We're 10 degrees to the left of center in good times. But 10 degrees to the right of center when it affects us personally. And personally, most people in Hollywood are rich, white and scared to death of the inner city."

On the morrow of the three-day riot - which cost 53 lives and more than $1 billion in property damage - hopes were raised that the local show biz industry would now pay more attention to the underprivileged and unemployed in its own back yard. As heavy manufacturing migrated out of the city over the past decades, the film and TV business has been left as one of the mainstays of the region's industrial base. And just as the riots reminded the world that Los Angeles was home to a seething underclass, no group of people better symbolized the other, wealthier Southern California than its movie and TV stars and executives.

It was only natural, then, in the wake of the disturbances to turn to the cash-rich entertainment industry for financial support. Here was an industry that routinely pays a lead actor $10 million or more for a few months' work, and where executives like Disney CEO Michael Eisner earned more than $7.5 million in salary and bonuses last year. (That's on top of the mind-boggling $197.5 million that Eisner reaped when he cashed in stock options in December - more than 10 times the amount the federal government promised Los Angeles in the wake of the riots.) Merrill Lynch financial analyst Harold Vogel estimates that the L.A.-based entertainment industry's collective profits - in just the film and television arenas - hovered near $1.2 billion this past year.

Faith that the industry would come through big-time after the riots was elevated before the embers had even cooled, when actor- director Eddie Olmos led squads of volunteers in cleaning up debris. Actress Lindsay Wagner joined other stars and celebrities before cameras as they passed out canned goods on inner-city street corners, swept up broken glass and helped board up smashed windows. But with the news cameras switched off and the city's rebuilding efforts entering their second difficult and controversial year, Hollywood, it seems, has chosen to be no more than a bit player.

This diminutive post-riot role in Los Angeles contrasts starkly with the center-stage campaigning undertaken by much of Hollywood during last year's presidential campaign. One Hollywood-sponsored event in September, headlined by Barbra Streisand, raised some $1.3 million in a single evening for Clinton and for California's Democratic senatorial candidates.

"No surprise to us that so little has been given to L.A.," says Joe Hicks, executive director of the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). "Many people may have the misconception that Hollywood is a liberal institution because of how it weighed in for Clinton. But as ... a corporate entity, {Hollywood} is pretty conservative. We haven't exactly been inundated with offers from Hollywood in support of nonviolent social change in America."

Margery Tabankin, executive director of the Hollywood Women's Political Committee (HWPC), concedes that some criticism of the industry is justified. "Sure," she says, "Hollywood should and could be doing more." The HWPC, whose membership includes Morgan Fairchild, Glenn Close and Rosanna Arquette, has helped raise millions of dollars over its five years of existence for liberal and pro-choice causes and candidates. But, Tabankin hastens to add, "I think when you say Hollywood you should focus on the corporate side because, really, many individual celebrities have done extraordinary things."

Indeed, the list of individuals who have contributed in one form or another to post-riot projects is long and impressive. Among the many entertainers who have given time and money are Streisand, whose own Streisand Foundation (of which Tabankin is also executive director) donated $100,000 to rebuilding efforts; Arsenio Hall, who quietly financed the building of a youth center; "The Simpsons" inventor Matt Groening, who gave $100,000 toward literacy projects; Debbie Allen, who has helped restore two damaged libraries; and Richard Dreyfuss, who is helping to establish an inner-city production studio.

However, the record of corporate Hollywood - and of the major studios in particular - is far less striking. Disney Studios is the standout, making far and away the most significant contribution since last year's disturbances. The studio has invested $1 million in a south-central bank, donated $1 million to a minority loan program from an employee-company match fund, opened a Disney Store in a riot- scarred area, and hired 250 inner-city youths at Disneyland. "As good corporate citizens we try to touch as many people as possible about the important issues," says Ken Werner, Disney's vice president for business and legal affairs. (However, Disney's contributions should be viewed in light of the more than $800 million in profits the company posted last year.) Warner Bros. has also made what a studio executive called "significant contributions," although it prefers to keep its activities low-profile and would not release specific figures.

But the participation of the city's other major studios is less bold. Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch's vastly wealthy News Corp. Ltd., donated lumber from a movie set for use in home construction in south- central. Columbia Pictures, now a subsidiary of Sony Pictures Entertainment, sponsored a minority internship program, underwrote the activities of a youth group and offered support for a "Citikids" roadshow. Spokesmen for Paramount Pictures (whose parent company, Paramount Communications, reported more than $4 billion in revenues last year) could not be specific as to the company's donations.

Universal Studios - whose parent company, MCA, just built a $100 million upscale "CityWalk" tourist attraction that touts the virtues of an ersatz L.A. - would only say through an MCA spokesman that the company's "historic tradition" of "service to the community" is continuing. And a spokeswoman for Creative Artists Agency, the most powerful of the talent agencies, said her company had contributed "our CEO's time. Individual agents have been involved in individual works. And CAA is one of the many sponsors of L.A. Works - a very hands-on {program}, where people go out to paint, clean up." She said money, too, had been donated, but "I have no idea how much."

"Add it all up," says Chilton Alphonse, referring to the sum of Hollywood support, "and it's still a drop in the bucket."

The relationship between the industry and Rebuild L.A. (now called RLA), the quasi-government organization established by Mayor Tom Bradley to coordinate reconstruction efforts, has been rocky. (RLA itself has been roundly criticized for its failure to attract enough corporate support, and on May 22 Peter Ueberroth resigned as the organization's head.) Several industry honchos, including CAA head Michael Ovitz (arguably the most powerful man in Hollywood), Warner Bros. Vice President Dan Garcia and Disney President Frank G. Wells, sit on RLA's board.

Still, there have been mutual recriminations between Hollywood executives and activists on the one hand, and RLA staff on the other, as to just why the entertainment industry's participation in the rebuilding efforts has been so paltry. "To this date, more than a year after the riots, I haven't gotten one call from RLA asking for help," complains Kathy Garmezy, head of the nonprofit Hollywood Policy Center, which specializes in bringing celebrity support to grass-roots international and local organizing efforts. One RLA board member, requesting anonymity, admits that "what we did was have Peter {Ueberroth} go and meet with a number of studio executives and give them no specifics, only a song and dance routine and then wait for the rain to fall." He continues, "RLA had no real plan and you can't deal with the entertainment industry that way."

Which is the kind of comment that makes Archie Purvis, one of the few high-ranking African American executives in Hollywood, see red. "To blame RLA or anyone else for the lack of support from large entertainment corporations is outrageous, it's the biggest cop-out in the world," says Purvis, president of Capital Cities/ABC Video Productions and an RLA board member. "Many studios speak with forked tongue." He continues, "It's really criminal how so many executives think their company is doing what it should when they are doing virtually nothing." Purvis's parent company, the New York-based Capital Cities/ABC, has donated post-riot relief services and cash that he estimates in the "low seven figures."

"Hey, that's from a company in New York," Purvis says with obvious frustration. "What's the matter with the industry people out here {in Los Angeles}? We're talking about a $5 billion industry with its own corps of financial planners, analysts and strategists. And they say they need someone to present them with a plan for south-central? What's wrong, don't they read the newspapers?"

David Clennon, who played the amoral advertising executive Miles Drentell in the "thirtysomething" TV series, is an actor who has not shied away from politically unpopular stances in Hollywood - such as opposition to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Clennon points to what he sees as a fundamental hypocrisy: It's easier to organize in Hollywood against South African apartheid, he says, than it is against discrimination in Los Angeles. "Our racism functions more clearly at home than at a distance," Clennon says. "It's easier to idealize oppressed people a half a world away than when they live around the corner from the white enclaves we function inside of."

While some in Hollywood will certainly disagree with Clennon's theory, it is nevertheless indisputable that celebrity politics tend to focus on international and national issues much more than on local affairs - even when the locality in question is disintegrating. Says a top executive at one major studio, "Look, this industry has never shown any real commitment to the inner city. It's been far too busy giving money to Liz Taylor." (Taylor heads the American Foundation for AIDS Research, which has raised $58 million since 1985, a "significant" portion of which, according to an AMFAR spokesman, has come from the entertainment community.)

And recently, a bevy of celebrities have rushed to embrace and counsel President Clinton on national issues. But their political passion, it seems, fails to carry over to the local level.

"Industry people are just beginning to see the city as a microcosm for national problems," says Donna Bojarksy, a political adviser to Dreyfuss. "As recently as five years ago no one in Hollywood would have even paid attention to a Los Angeles mayoral election."

Take, for example, music executive and film producer David Geffen, dubbed "the richest man in Hollywood" by the New York Times. Geffen reportedly chats regularly with President Clinton's chief of staff and is so taken with national affairs that he is looking for a Washington residence. But he has had only "minimal" involvement in riot-related Los Angeles politics, according to one of his staff members. The mogul's own Geffen Foundation - which gives away $5 million to $8 million per year - has only some funding for a documentary and one "cultural event" to show for its L.A. riot- relief contributions. Compare this with its support of such good causes as AIDS, abortion rights, assistance to Ethiopian and Soviet Jews who have emigrated to Israel, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Likewise, TriStar studio chief Michael Medavoy has turned many heads recently over the gap between his national and his local political stands. A longtime supporter of liberal causes, Medavoy is also a Clinton administration intimate, having already been an overnight guest in the White House's Lincoln Bedroom. His wife, Patricia Duff Medavoy, is a founder of the Show Coalition, a group dedicated to raising political awareness in Hollywood's celebrity circles that has helped line up the glitterati for more than one Democratic National Convention. Yet Mike Medavoy, who did not respond to interview requests, sat as one of the organizers of the $1,000-a- plate May 20 fund-raiser for L.A. mayoral candidate Richard Riordan, a Republican. Like Ross Perot, Riordan is a multimillionaire businessman who is financing his campaign primarily from his own fortune; with scant inner-city support, he has built his base in the conservative, mostly white suburbs of Los Angeles, fueled in part by an endorsement from Ronald Reagan. (President Clinton, meanwhile, has endorsed Riordan's rival, Michael Woo.)

Sitting as "co-chairs" with Medavoy for the Riordan event are Disney President Frank Wells and longtime conservative stalwarts Clint Eastwood and Pat Boone.

"What this Medavoy thing tells me," says one Hollywood agent, "is that individual celebrities will get involved in a lot of causes but that literally no one in the industry has stood up and taken it upon themselves to organize on behalf of poor people in Los Angeles. Nicaragua? Okay. El Salvador? Okay. Watts? Forget about it."

Perhaps no one in Hollywood better symbolizes that dichotomy than Michael Douglas. In the early '80s Douglas was among the prime movers of the so-called Committee of Concern, an entertainment industry coalition that vigorously opposed U.S. intervention in Central America. And though Douglas is part owner of the alternative and liberal L.A. Weekly, and like Medavoy and Geffen recently made his own pilgrimage to Clinton's Washington (Douglas as a guest at the White House correspondents dinner), he recently starred in the vigilante-style "Falling Down." In the film - which has stirred virulent debate as to whether it encouraged, or at least legitimized, the most racist and xenophobic tendencies in this city - Douglas's character blithely bashed Korean shop owners, kicked homeless people out of his way and blasted Latino gang members.

"I look at `Falling Down' and I have a lot of trouble with Hollywood's chest-beating over what it does for L.A.," says lawyer Angela Oh, leader of the Korean-American Bar Association. "Hollywood has only hurt our community. I think that people who profess to be politically conscious have to take responsibility for what they do for the sake of profitability."

And just what the entertainment industry does to improve that fabled bottom line has convinced many community activists that Hollywood is much more part of the problem than it is part of the solution. Even the community projects Hollywood has come up with since the riots, says Chilton Alphonse, among others, have as much to do with "self-promotion," or with providing a salve for guilty consciences, than with providing the one element almost all agree is central to inner-city revitalization: good and plentiful jobs. Hollywood, they charge, has done as much as any other local industry to export jobs out of the city and thereby help create the nonunion, low-wage employment market that many say directly contributed to last year's riots.

Over the past decade, entertainment industry trade unionists point out, the percentage of American feature films that were shot nonunion, or produced outside the country, nearly tripled. High- paying craft jobs that were a staple of Los Angeles for decades have recently fled to havens of cheaper, often nonunion labor ranging from Florida to Canada. At the same time, many movie-related jobs that have stayed in the city have become nonunion.

Hollywood's indifference to this state of affairs was starkly demonstrated at this year's Academy Awards ceremony. During this year's awards, the Service Employees International Union, whose members clean many of the major studios and talent agencies, organized a protest by some 800 nonunion, mostly Latino maintenance workers as part of its Justice for Janitors campaign. In the weeks before the protest, organizers sent requests to Oscar celebrity presenters to mention the janitors' plight during the awards ceremony. And though causes as diverse as AIDS, Haitian refugees, the U.S. invasion of Panama and Chinese threats to Tibetan culture were mentioned during the worldwide awards broadcast, the protesting Los Angeles janitors were not.

"I know a lot of studios in this town used to have good-paying union jobs for janitors but now are going nonunion and low wage," says Jono Shaffer, organizing coordinator of the campaign. He points to the William Morris Agency, Fox Television, Paramount Pictures and Sony studios as entertainment groups that have switched to janitorial contractors that use nonunion, mostly minimum-wage labor. "These studios, like Sony, say they are leading proponents of rebuilding L.A. I say put your money where your mouth is and start by putting your own house in order," Shaffer says.

But whatever the shortcomings of Hollywood, some prime Los Angeles activists have not yet given up on the dream factory. Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, the most powerful of the city's black politicians, is counting on the major studios to fund one of her pet projects. With more than $25 million in government and union funds, Waters has set up the "Community Build" organization, which functions, unofficially, as an alternative to RLA. A key element in Waters's revitalization strategy is the establishment of a massive, state-of-the-art entertainment production facility in south-central Los Angeles - one whose physical structure alone would cost $13 million to purchase.

"Instead of faulting Hollywood, I fault the political leadership, which has not been able to present the entertainment industry with somewhere to put their money," Waters says. "Now, we've got somewhere."

Waters says she has already contacted MCA Chairman Lew Wasserman, and that means serious business. Wasserman is the legendary Hollywood political powerhouse and confidant to a string of presidents, going back three decades. "I told him, `Lew, we're going to have lunch and talk about something real important,' " Waters says with a chuckle. "This will be a way to make Hollywood's support meaningful. It's a very costly idea. I'm talking millions and millions. But it will be very job-intensive. Hollywood's got the money. We've got the site."

And then, using the most traditional of all Hollywood lingo, Waters adds: "This is going to be big. Big. Real big."

Marc Cooper is a Los Angeles-based staff writer for the Village Voice.