Hollywood handles the Gulf War mainly with caution The Mossad agent, who had infiltrated a renegade Iraqi Scud missile unit about to hit the Israel heartland with deadly "rabbit fever" microbes, kneels in the desert sand, quietly reciting the "Sh'ma." As an American agent looks on helplessly, an Iraqi executioner's sword severs the young man's head from his torso. The Mossadnik never had a chance. But neither did American TV audiences, who were kept from seeing the conclusion of "Sacrifices," a two-part episode of the new weekly espionage drama series "Under Cover." Alarmed ABC executives declared the subject matter of the episode too close to current events and yanked it from the airwaves. "The network is trying to sanitize the conflict and coddle the American public," charges Frank Snepp, the series' story editor and technical consultant, and a former CIA agent and ABC News journalist. The war has sent the major studios and networks heading for their own sealed rooms and bunkers. Tri-Star has dropped a project about an armssale to Qadhafi, and Disney has scotched the Arab-terrorist element of its upcoming film "The Ultimatum." "I can't foresee anyone doing anything on the Gulf War, which is at the moment a current issue," says John Wentworth, vice president for advertising and promotion at Paramount Pictures. "The time for such a picture is when it is deemed dramatically interesting to an audience. When that will be is anyone's guess." For a few low-budget producers, however, that time is now.

Several films scheduled for completion in the coming months are related to the Gulf War. All, as it happens, were shotfor scenic and economic reasonsin Israel, and were in the works before the first bombs fell on Baghdad. "Desert Shield," for instance, a production of Menahem Golan's 21st Century Films, was originally called "SEALS," but underwent the first of several name changes after Orion Pictures came out with its own "Navy Seals." The film, starring Rob Lowe, is a buddy movie set against the backdrop of U.S. Navy SEALS operations in the Persian Gulf. According to its director, Israeli filmmaker Shimon Dotan ("Repeat Dive," "Smile of the Lamb"), the outbreak of fighting in the Gulf was, from both a production and marketing standpoint, more bane than boon. The first draft of "Desert Shield" was written more than two years ago, long before any hint of the current conflict. "But even then," says Dotan, now living in Montreal, "it didn't require an act of prophecy to determine that the Persian Gulf would be the world's next trouble spot, or that the issue of chemical warfare would figure prominently." When the war broke out, it became apparent to the filmmakers that they would have to refer to it directly. Unfortunately, the film had already been shot. Dotan reports that they solved the problem with some well-placed news clips and voice-overs, though a new ending is being considered. "No one," says Dotan, "can properly tell a story of a war so soon into the war. Even in World War II, it took months, and even years, to make any sense of where things were headed." Veteran Hollywood director Ted Post ("Magnum Force," "Beneath the Planet of the Apes") was also caught off guard by the war. Produced by Cannon Pictures, his film, "The Human Shield," concluded production in Israel just a week before the outbreak of the war. The narrative, according to Post, was inspired by news clips of the hostage crisis in Iraq last October, and involves a vendetta between a young Oliver North-like American colonel and an Iraqi colonel he stopped from killing an old woman and child in a Kurdish village. The script, rewritten continously during production, evolved into a treatise about the differences between the Western and Arab minds. "The Arabs, like no other people in the world," declares Post, "are irrational. They think only with their hearts, never with their heads. No race on earth will more eagerly or cheerfully cut off its nose to spite its face." "Desert Storm," a production of Roger Corman's Concorde Pictures, was initially titled "Shield of Honor," and stars David Carradine. The film was shot in Egypt and Israel after its makers were denied access to locations in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It began life as a tale about a Libyan-led plot to destroy the Jewish statewhich became an Iraqi plot once the troop buildup in the Gulf began in earnest. With the outbreak of actual combat, however, the production was suspended indefinitely. What further projects will emerge from the war? "It's unlikely," says Variety correspondent Charles Fleming, "that the majors are going to proceed with the kind of exploitation projects that some of the independents have already begun. They don't usually move fast enough or attempt to exploit things that are in the public eye in quite the same way."