Royals Go Behind the Scenes but Stay in Front of Cameras

Now then, what did nanny always tell you? After you’ve first gone to fund-raising dinners and museums and boutique openings like good little dukes and duchesses, then you get to go to a movie studio and smash a whiskey bottle over your secretary’s head and scare yourself half to death on a roller-coaster ride.

And see? Nanny was right. On Tuesday, the midway point in their Southland tour, Britain’s Duke and Duchess of York got to do something they specifically asked to do--see the real thing, which is to say the fake thing: a Culver City special-effects film studio called Showscan. They spent the morning playing with movieland toys--a fake whiskey bottle, fake bullets shattering glass, a fake screaming roller-coaster ride and a fake car plunge down an icy Alpine road.

Were they having fun yet?

Ask the Duke of York, who began the two-minute film-and-motion simulated thrill ride on a roller coaster with regal aplomb, his arms coolly folded, leaning casually back in his chair on the eight-seat ride.

But within moments, he was clutching the railing, even letting loose a little shriek, a companion said, as the device careened wildly in synch with the film in front of him.

The “hot seat” ride is not advised for heart patients and pregnant women, and Showscan President Roy H. Aaron said the duke signaled “no” to the pregnant duchess after his first wild roller-coaster ride. So from her red director’s chair, the duchess, wearing a gray double-breasted suit and gray-trimmed ivory hat, called out, “You want to go again? . . . You looked very funny.”

He agreed gamely. She rubbed her gloved hands with relish, urging the operators with a wicked smile to “Take him for a real spin . . . nice and fast--a bit of action .” The seats plunged and dipped with the 90-m.p.h. sensation, and when the shaking stopped and the riders “plowed” into a snowbank, she asked brightly, “You all right?”

If Angelenos have spent four days pressing their noses against the glass cordon of royal fantasy, Tuesday was the royals’ turn to marvel at the fantasy that movie wizards dish out.

Close-up Look at Duchess

“I want to see what Fergie really looks like--on TV you can’t tell,’ said secretary Veronica Ancrile, whose boss answered the phones so she could catch a glimpse. “We see people shooting movies all the time, but this is special.”

It was what the Yorks--and the press trailing them--had been waiting for.

There was the standard welcoming sheaf of flowers outside Showscan’s warehouse studio, but the duchess accepted this bouquet from the claw of “Number Five,” a movie robot who dropped a hydraulic curtsy to the pair.

“We’ll see you later?” Sarah hopefully asked the robot, who then banged into the duke’s ankle before introducing the couple to movie executives, including Oscar-winning special-effects whiz Richard Edlund, whose resume includes “Star Wars” and “Ghostbusters,” and Showscan Co-chairman Douglas Trumbull, special-effects master of movies like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Brainstorm.”

“Nice hat . . . charming couple,” commented the robot’s remote “voice,” Tim Planey, as the pair swept inside to see mock-ups and models. The duchess, apparently at least a minor-league Trekkie, “wanted to know if the Enterprise on Star Trek was that small,” said Aaron, and both Yorks laughed at how effects men create the sound of someone getting slugged: smacking a packaged steak. “How does it feel, hitting the meat all the time?” Aaron said they inquired.

Then, in what is becoming a bit of royal “shtick” almost as common as christening ships (Diana, the Princess of Wales, recently coshed Prince Charles on the head with a gimmick bottle), executives demonstrated an ancient bit of movie business: whacking someone with a harmless resin bottle. Then they waited for Sarah’s puckish nature to take its course.

“That’s what you’ve been waiting for me to do, isn’t it?” Aaron said she remarked, when she was handed a resin whiskey bottle. Instead of walloping Andrew, she said, “Sean, where are you? . . . Come here.”

Lt. Col. Sean O’Dwyer, her private secretary, stepped up dutifully. “Does it really hurt?” she asked, before smashing it over O’Dwyer’s head, then helping to brush off the splinters. “It’s quite all right,” said O’Dwyer, with courtier-like sang froid.

After a stopover at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the exhibit “The British and the Oscar,” the couple attended a luncheon honoring the British film industry at the local branch of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, meeting actors Jack Lemmon, Joseph Cotten, Dudley Moore, Vincent Price, Roger Moore, Jack Nicholson, Roddy McDowall, Pierce Brosnan and AMPAS President Robert Wise.

Told by Writers Guild Foundation President Mel Shavelson that they missed by a day a possible picket-line confrontation by striking writers, Andrew replied, “I’m sorry I missed it.”

After they greeted scores of guests, Lemmon likened their receiving-line duties to “doing a scene over and over about 100 times.”

Today the schedule includes highlights of the UK/LA ’88 festival: exhibits at the Los Angeles County Art Museum and Pacific Design Center, and a meeting with British-to-California artist David Hockney.

But as the duchess remarked wistfully to Aaron before they left Showscan, “I wish we could spend the whole day here.”