Heard The Tapes? Skip The Script.

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By Mark Miller

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Hers may be the most talked-about screenplay in Hollywood, but it takes only one reading of "Men Against Women" to see that Laura Hart McKinny is no Quentin Tarantino. Mark Fuhrman's outrageous boasting of torturing suspects, manufacturing evidence and tormenting female and minority police officers clearly provides the basis for her work. But only the basis. McKinny's banal dialogue dilutes Fuhrman's gritty tales of a cop's life. The result: an insipid romantic drama.

The 119-page script, a copy of which NEWSWEEK obtained, is the story of Morgan Fraser, a single mother and rookie cop who must learn to make her way in the notorious 77th Street Division. There she must survive the harassment of rogue macho cops in a clandestine organization called Men Against Women (based on a real group Fuhrman belonged to). Fraser must also deal with two lesbian cops who annoy her. B. Jay Moon, her partner, is a member of MAW, too. Naturally they fall in love.

When McKinny testified in the Simpson trial last week, she said she had been offended by Fuhrman's various biases. So it's all the more surprising that one of her lesbian cops can't do a thing without referring to her police manual, and the other can't thee danger without bursting into tears. Moon doesn't want his girlfriend on the street. "OK, you're good. . . ," he tells her one night as he "loosely entwines his fingertips in hers." But "that's not good enough." This bothers Fraser, but not enough to ditch "a man who let's me know I'm the woman he breathes for." Some of Hollywood's bigwigs, in-eluding Oliver Stone's company, have taken a look at this gem. They've all taken a pass.

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