Los Angeles--It's late August in the town that has become, in the public consciousness, O.J. Land. Downtown, the defense attorneys of O.J. Simpson are battling to convince Judge Lance A. Ito that those who assembled the evidence linking the football great's DNA to the site at which his former wife Nicole and her friend were killed were more bumbling than the Keystone Kops.

Step over the Hollywood Hills into Sherman Oaks, however, at a home doubling as Mr. Simpson's Brentwood mansion, and simultaneously, the momentous initial meetings between Mr. Simpson and famed attorney Robert Shapiro are being re-enacted for a Fox TV movie.

Mr. Shapiro: "You were pretty broken up about the divorce."

Mr. Simpson: "Yeah."

Mr. Shapiro: "Pretty angry."

Mr. Simpson: (pauses, then sighs) "Yeah."

Mr. Shapiro: "Did you ever threaten her?"

Mr. Simpson: "I said a lot of stuff I didn't mean. You're married, right?"

Mr. Shapiro: "Sure."

Mr. Simpson: "Then you know how it is."

This exchange is from "The O.J. Simpson Story," produced by Robert Lovenheim and set to air, until last week, just before jury selection was to begin on the Simpson trial.

Bobby Hosea, the man who would be O.J., says other African-American actors have warned him away from playing the football hero-turned-murder suspect. "They say, 'Don't do it, don't do it, they won't do it right.'

"Another guy told me, 'No brother in town who works with any integrity is gonna touch this movie,' " says Mr. Hosea, who will portray Mr. Simpson in the movie. "I said, 'Why not?' He goes, 'Because it's exploitative.'

"I said, 'You don't think the performance is going to help a brother?' I've been on all kinds of shows, comedies, dramas, 'China Beach,' and no one's been sending me any scripts. I'm auditioning right now for a Klingon. He says, 'No, that's not gonna help your exposure. All that's gonna help is some producer and some network.'

"That's the kind of input I was getting from the outside," says Mr. Hosea. A showbiz veteran who has appeared in a dozen or more TV series, he bares a chilling resemblance to the eminently handsome suspect from certain angles. "I wanted to hear what they were saying, but I knew in my heart that what I was doing was right."

Guilt or innocence

Even though the film purports to offer a non-judgmental version of events, try telling that to the crew. At the Sherman Oaks set, the prop crew has fitted the foyer with a fake Heisman Trophy and some sympathy cards. Peek inside one of those cards, and an anonymous crew member's sentiments come through loud and clear: "The DNA proves you did it" is scrawled inside the greeting card. "FRY."

But Mr. Lovenheim is maintaining his equanimity. "I was in my office one Friday afternoon and started getting furious and frantic calls from some execs at Fox, asking if I'd be interested in joining them in this," he says. "At first I said no, then I said maybe, then I said, 'Well, if you've been doing research on this, send it over.'"

That was the same Friday Simpson and his friend A.C. Cowlings made their celebrated driving tour of Southern California's freeways, which Mr. Lovenheim caught, like the rest of the country, on TV. "After that, I was hooked," he says.

Fox, after complaints from Mr. Shapiro and other media critics, relented and postponed the air date, a decision the principle actors agreed with.

"It was the humane thing to do," says Bruce Weitz, who plays Mr. Shapiro, the man whose protestations about the movie were the most vocal.

"This movie doesn't have to do with the trial, it doesn't have to do with guilt or innocence, but certain people out ther believe that it could be injurious, so sure, why not postpone it?" says Mr. Lovenheim. "As far as I'm concerned, it's a reprieve. I get [more time] to cut the movie."

Regarding charges that the film will be exploitative and spurious, Mr. Lovenheim says 60 percent of the movie will focus on Mr. Simpson's life before the scandal. "Our efforts are twofold: to base every scene here on actual research or 'attitudes,' " he says.

What does he mean by "attitudes?"

"With Bob Shapiro, he's no wallflower when it comes to being able to jump forward, cross the room and grab a microphone," explains Mr. Lovenheim. "The statements he's made to the press certainly indicate enough of what his attitude is, how he sees his client, how he intends to defend him and how he's advised him, that we can base some scenes on that."

Mr. Hosea admits he had reservations when he read the script. "The main thing was drug use," he says. "Now, I'm not being naive, I know cocaine is abused in the real world. But O.J. was never arrested for that. That's hearsay, that's gossip.

"The aspect of spouse abuse, that's recorded," Mr. Hosea continues. "When you have nine times that we know of that the police came to your house, you know you have a problem with your relationship. Yes, it's gonna be ugly, but that's the reality."

'Morally upstanding'

Mr. Hosea also had reservations about the fact that Fox planned to air the film on Sept. 13, before jury selection was to begin. "You can debate whether or not people are going to be swayed by a movie," he says. "I thought, the 911 tapes, when they got released, they changed my perspective of O.J. . . .

"When you put that in a visual perspective, it's much more impactful. When you see a man beat up a woman on screen, it's going to affect you. When they decided to wait until the jury was sequestered, that was a burden released from my heart. I felt, we don't have to hide behind the Constitution. Sure, we have a right to air it, but let's be a little morally upstanding here. . . ."

Now that the film's air date has been delayed, it may run sometime between the selection of the jury and November sweeps, according to Mr. Lovenheim.

"There's an aspect to this case that is unsettling far beyond the case," says Mr. Lovenheim. "It defines Los Angeles at a particular point in time, where there were so many things in chaos and there is so little security in what the future might bring. . . . For African-Americans, this is case of black vs. white, it's about a man who has reached the pinnacle in a white world and has been pushed back down. For the majority, it's a case of rich vs. poor -- can justice work if you have all the money in the world the same way if you have no money? . . . For the politicians, it's how do we prove we can control law and order when we can't win a case? We lost Rodney King, we lost Reginald Denny, we didn't win the Menendez brothers, and now, it's O.J.

"And it's about a city that's going broke," Mr. Lovenheim continues. "Most of the police cars are these 1986 Chevy Caprices with hundreds of thousands of miles on them. The streets are bumpy because they can't afford to keep the city going. It's like saying, 'If we can't give them bread, we'll give them circuses.'

"Those are the questions," Mr. Lovenheim says. Then he adds, "Those aren't the questions of this movie."