TWO GIFTS FOR ALL THE FAMILY

Walt Disney’s “One Magic Christmas” opens today in theaters across the country. (Review on Page 17). On Wednesday, Tri-Star will launch “Santa Claus: The Movie.” By Dec. 31, we’ll all know whether one or both will be back same time next year.

Television calls them perennials, or evergreens--holiday movies that are trotted out each year to help the spirit move us. You know the classics by heart: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Bishop’s Wife,” “Miracle on 34th Street.”

They’re all Golden Era films, made under the old studio system when programs changed weekly at local theaters and a movie didn’t have to outgross “The Sound of Music” to be considered a hit.

Today’s film industry economics and prejudices weigh against Christmas movies. The potential playing time--six weeks, maybe a little longer--precludes the kind of blockbuster that all distributors hope the season will bring, and the movies themselves may prove too corny for the coveted teen-age audience.

(If you want to see a studio executive’s mouth screw itself into a green-lemon pucker, ask him when he’s going to release his next Family Movie. Families still go to the movies, he’ll tell you, but seldom together.)

But all of a sudden, here are two. One about a depressed mom (Mary Steenburgen) who needs an angel, Santa and a major miracle to rekindle her spirit of Christmas. And another purporting to tell the “true story of Santa Claus.”

What gives?

“Parents do want to give their kids the experience of going to the theaters,” says Fred Roos, producer of “One Magic Christmas.” “This (Christmas movie trend) may be a rediscovery of that audience.”

The major studios are great at identifying their target audiences in age blocks--the 12-to-17s, the 18-to-24s, the 24-and-ups--and they’re pretty good at knowing where their movies will best perform (“This’ll clean up on the coasts and take a dump in the Midwest”).

But they discovered Roos’ audience only by accident, as they did with an earlier film that he produced called “The Black Stallion.”

“At first, it was considered a kids’ movie,” Roos says, “but then parents who went along with their kids found out they enjoyed it just as much, and then it became a film adults could enjoy with their kids.”

It will always be hard to get the whole family to one movie. It’s a rite of passage that teen-agers will prefer something that is incomprehensibly obnoxious to their parents, a cinematic equivalent to heavy metal.

But parents able to enjoy films through the awe of their small children make up a potentially huge moviegoing audience that Hollywood either doesn’t understand, or doesn’t know how to reach.

We’re not talking about human sacrifice (this occurs when a parent sits through “The Care Bears Movie” or “Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer”).

Two things have combined to crack Hollywood’s resistance to Christmas movies:

First, there was Bob Clark’s “A Christmas Story,” a holiday gem that overcame MGM’s timid marketing campaign and grossed nearly $20 million two years ago. (It will be on cable next month.)

Second, there is the backup financial protection provided by the booming post-theatrical market. Even if these films fail to do big business in theaters, they could become perennials on cable and in video stores.

“One Magic Christmas” and “Santa Claus” reached the market from widely different tracks.

“Santa Claus” is another high flyer from Ilya and Alexander Salkind, the people who brought us “Superman.” The movie’s budget (estimated at between $30 million and $50 million) was reportedly covered through territorial licensing fees before production in London even began.

Tri-Star is releasing the film in the United States this year, and maybe for years to come.

“We’ll see how it does and go from there,” says Tri-Star marketing chief Steven Randall.

“One Magic Christmas,” made in and around Toronto early this year for $8 million, belongs to Disney all the way. It was directed by Phillip Borsos, who came up with the idea (borrowing heavily from “It’s a Wonderful Life”), and Roos shopped it all over town before Disney, which has a tradition of recycling its classics at Christmas, bought it.

Roos says most of the studios liked the script but found it “too soft, too sweet.”

“They said, ‘It’s not youth, it’s not action. Nobody goes to that kind of picture anymore.’ ”

We’ll soon see.

G-WHIZ: In newspaper ads for “One Magic Christmas,” you’ll see something you may have never seen before: a promotion for a G rating.

Conventional wisdom is that the G (general audiences) rating is box-office poison, a warning to hip 7-year-olds that this is kid stuff. Even Walt Disney Studios was following that kind of thinking, putting in just enough “bad” language to get PGs on most of its recent family movies.

But Richard Cook, executive vice president of Disney’s distribution division, argued for the G rating on “One Magic Christmas,” got it, then put it in a big box right under the title in newspaper ads.

“We don’t think there is a stigma to G ratings any longer,” Cook says. “We’re simply saying, ‘Here’s a Christmas movie; it’s from Disney, and it’s for the whole family.’ We think there’s a huge audience that is out there for a film like this at Christmas.”

STAR SEARCH: Remember Garrison True? He’s the casting director hired by Ray Stark several years ago to conduct the celebrated search for a girl to play the lead in the movie version of “Annie.”

Well, True is on the road again, this time looking for a young redhead to play the lead in “The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking.”

He’s already auditioned more than 5,000 girls in London, New York, Toronto and Chicago. Saturday, he’ll find out about Los Angeles.

True and director Ken Annakin will be auditioning girls 8 to 12 years old for the part of the athletic supergirl from Astrid Lindgren’s popular series of children’s books.

Producer Gary Mehlman says they are also looking for a boy, age 10 to 12, and a second girl, 8 to 10, to play Pippi’s best friends, Tommy and Annika.

The auditions will be from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at First United Methodist Church of Hollywood, 6817 Franklin Ave.

The movie is scheduled to go into production near Jacksonville, Fla., early next year.