Show Business

After nine cities, two more to go, Ben Stiller is learning the real work of moviemaking. Interviews, Q & A sessions, news conferences, photos. Fueling up with gulps of room service grub in between. Actor and first-time director Stiller, 28, is in town to stump for Reality Bites, an edgy romantic comedy starring Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke, which opened Friday. "All this is totally separate from the process of making the movie," says the fledgling filmmaker, laughing. "I thought it was over Christmas Eve when I finished the mix. " As son of actor-comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, the business is in his blood.

In its first 200 years, the United States built the world's strongest economy on its rich farmland and powerhouse industries - steel, oil, railroads, automobiles. Now, it is a nation whose vital economic assets include Mickey Mouse, Captain Kirk and Cheers. Last week's high-stakes bidding war for Paramount Communications Inc., the producer of The Godfather, Entertainment Tonight, and Wayne's World, dramatizes the economic importance of the U.S. entertainment industry. Entertainment - movies, music, cable television and home video - brings an estimated $50 billion to the U.S. economy.

Julie Wilson - Queen of Cabaret, epitome of soignee, apex of style. The quintessential "saloon chantoosie. " The one who played all the legendary rooms, interpreting with singular drama and gravelly vocal style the great popular American art songs. Fifty years in show business - 43 of them famous after the night she knocked them dead at the Mocambo club in Hollywood wearing a girlfriend's gown and $27,000 worth of borrowed jewels. The one still after all these years with the chignon, the gardenia ear garnish (in tribute to Billie Holiday)

They don't take bets at Garden State Park like the kind Stephen Gorse made a few weeks back. Gorse was so sure the forthcoming Kenny Rogers concert at Garden State's Pavilion Theatre would be a winner, he put his home on the line to make sure the show would get proper financial backing. "Let's just say that I signed a note," said Gorse, president of the Greater Cherry Hill Convention and Visitors Bureau. "The note's been paid off. It was paid off two weeks early, that's how well the ticket sales went.

My car is so slow, it's got dead bugs on the back window. Will Miller, the comic with the Main Line, mainstream, mainly respectable look, commands the stage in the little comedy club - the perfect picture of confidence in front of a noisy, occasionally intrusive audience. And why not? The guy's got two day jobs. He is a minister at a handsome, century-old Baptist church in a wealthy North Jersey suburb, and he is a clinical psychologist with experience in treating schizophrenic crack addicts as well as patients "with more sophisticated defenses.

He looks every bit the successful businessman: immaculate dark blue suit, beautifully patterned silk tie, gray ponytail, a half-dozen enormous turquoise-and-silver rings, and at least that number of heavy silver bracelets. (We're not talking IBM here.) But singer Richie Havens has always gone his own way. It seemed as if the whole world was listening when Havens, now 50, opened the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in August 1969 with his song "Freedom. " His singular voice, husky, impassioned, tinged with pathos, was accompanied by his insistent, driving guitar.

Every weekday except Wednesday, 9-year-old Jarrod Spector of Abington tussles with such normal elementary-school problems as subtraction-with- borrowing or how his fourth-grade class can read enough books to earn a pizza party. Three nights and one afternoon a week, sometimes more often, he copes with other problems - climbing an eight-foot barricade, taking three shots to the body and falling down dead - on the stage of the Forrest Theater. As Gavroche, the young urchin of the Paris streets who aids the student uprising in Les Miserables, the student at Meadowbrook School is one of a special group of five young cast members, three from the area.

Allen Shore found his inspirational message, the one that turned his life around and made him "angelic," in the Wall Street Journal. He was drinking coffee from a big mug that morning in 1984 with the newspaper spread across his desk. A lean, athletic-looking businessman, he was, at age 57, successful, active and almost happy. Then he saw the message that would make him happy. "It was a little ad, saying they were looking for someone to invest in the making of an original-cast record album," Shore recalled, drinking coffee from a big mug on his desk at the Elkins Park headquarters of his company, Perfect Host Enterprises.

Education is no joke to Ben Peruso, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun. Peruso, a Harlem-born comedian known to audiences as Ben Perri, has spent more than 30 years in show business and about 75 days substitute-teaching in several Pocono schools. Peruso's stage-to-school odyssey may sound unusual, but the performer's methods of applying his show business experience to the classroom might make students more eager to study. "I don't care if it's toothpaste. If it gets them to learn, I'll try it," Peruso said.

ICI Americas Inc. went to Sheila Kutner and Lynn Katz last year and got a real song and dance. Actually, that's exactly what ICI, of Wilmington, was looking for. The company was inaugurating an in-house computer system and was looking for an unthreatening way to introduce it to employees. Enter Kutner and Katz, who own and operate something called the Showplace. You might say they're in show business: They write and perform original musical productions for corporations. They also run sales-training seminars.