Who Knew Greed Could Be So Fun? : HBO’s farcical ‘docucomedy’ of high finance, ‘Barbarians at the Gate, ‘ makes the leveraged-buyout crowd a hoot.

Can stratospheric high finance, which appears so tedious and complicated on paper, really be this much of a hoot? You can’t imagine a more deliciously entertaining movie about the $25-billion leveraged-buyout of a corporate giant than HBO’s “Barbarians at the Gate.”

It’s television’s first “fact-based” docucomedy.

HBO is serious about pioneering this new TV hybrid--witness the dark humor of its April 10 movie (“The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom”) about Wanda Holloway, the woman convicted of putting out a contract to advance the high school cheerleading career of her teen-age daughter.

But first comes “Barbarians.” Airing at 8 p.m. Saturday, it turns the 1988 no-quarter-given takeover of R.J.R. Nabisco Co.--maker of Camels, Salems, Lifesavers, Ritz crackers and Oreos--into whopper whimsy. Larry Gelbart’s script, based on a best seller by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, demonstrates that the former “MASH” head writer is as acutely clever and witty as ever.

This time Gelbart bequeaths Hawkeye’s wisecracking mouth to a real person, former R.J.R. Nabisco president F. Ross Johnson (James Garner), mingling farce, one-liners, double-entendres and sight gags in a wheeling-dealing Wall Street atmosphere polluted by greed, deception and tobacco smoke.

It was Johnson’s campaign to take over the publicly owned company at a bargain price--during R.J.R. Nabisco’s disastrous experiment with a so-called smokeless cigarette--that set off a savage bidding war ultimately won by Henry Kravis, the prince of leveraged buyouts.

By most accounts, Garner’s sympathetic, self-effacing, good-ol’-boyishly likable Johnson differs greatly from the real Johnson, whose backslapping charm is said to have been matched by a darker, Draconian side not even hinted at in “Barbarians.” Nor is Jonathan Pryce’s ominous, regally polished, coolly close-to-the-vest Kravis a good likeness of the reputedly coarser, earthier real Kravis. Instead, he’s nearer to a description applied to famed Napoleonic diplomat Talleyrand: “A silk stocking filled with mud.”

Thus do Gelbart and director Glenn Jordan collaborate on a story that swishes together fact and fun in an effort to keep viewers watching something that ordinarily might render most viewers comatose.

“Ross Johnson could sell ice to Eskimos,” a neighbor observes about young, super-selling newsboy Ross in his hometown of Winnipeg. “Barbarians” uses similar fast-talking to sell its version of events.

“We are shooting the script,” Garner has said. “We aren’t shooting the real story.”

It’s easy to gloss over the issue of docudrama as skewed history when it comes to a film as amiable as “Barbarians.” After all, a certain amount of dramatic license is permissible around the edges. And “Barbarians” is not on the ludicrous level of a TV movie showing Columbus and his crew being greeted on the beach by nude dancing girls. Nor does its subject occupy the same cosmic realm as the assassination of a President, a la Oliver Stone’s liberty-taking “JFK.”

Yet if “Barbarians” is not the “real story,” then why the confusing pretense of naming real names? Of identifying the real company as the core of the plot?

For the sake of clarity, why not take the next step and create total fiction? Or at least do what Orson Welles did in “Citizen Kane,” whose title character was patterned after newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst without naming him or any other real people?

Why not? Because today’s TV movies--whether about the aberrational Wanda Holloways of news headlines or about the high-rolling predators of Wall Street--appear more credible and draw bigger audiences when labeled “fact-based.”

The mold for the protagonist of “Barbarians” was set with the casting of Garner, whose plethora of nice-guy roles have so indelibly stamped him that disliking him as the power/money/luxury-lusting Johnson would be highly unlikely, even if Gelbart had written the character as Charles Keating.

Viewers of “Barbarians” will watch the greedy but goodly Johnson and his allies, then-American Express chairman Jim Robinson (Fred Dalton Thompson) and Peter Cohen (Peter Riegert), CEO of Amex’s Shearson Lehman Hutton, sail into their proposed buyout only to sink.

Humorously.

Even before that, R.J.R. Nabisco’s $750-million investment in smokeless Premiers goes into the toilet when it turns out that the new cigarettes taste and smell like excrement.

It is Kravis, ironically, who first plants the idea of a buyout with Johnson when they meet in Kravis’ swank, painting-filled Manhattan apartment, where one particular masterwork captures Johnson’s awe. When told it’s a Monet, he replies, “Right, tons of it.”

Johnson never meets a straight line he doesn’t pounce on. And Gelbart never misses an opportunity to exploit absurdity, some of it seemingly of his own making. When beefy Amex CEO Cohen is invited to join Johnson in the buyout, for example, he’s dressed as Superman for a costume party, and his wife (Joanna Cassidy) is dressed as Marie Antoinette.

In this bizarre, Marx Brothers universe, serious business is done at frivolous moments. At a square dance benefit for the 1988 Bush/Quayle ticket--a sort of do-si-dough for aspiring billionaires--Western-costumed financiers tap their toes to buyout music as they hoedown together on the floor. During a break, a Wall Street player pursues Johnson to the men’s room to urge him to include the man and his brother on the buyout team. “My brother and I are real people,” says the man, who is wearing an American Indian costume. When Johnson seeks serenity in a stall, a financier in a coonskin cap pops his head over the top of the next stall and hands Johnson his card.

Meanwhile, a pulsating score and Jordan’s snappy pacing drive the plot toward a conclusion that, although disappointing for Johnson, doesn’t stop him from cheerfully cracking one-liners all the way to retirement. Maybe it was the reported $53-million settlement he received after getting tossed out.

Or maybe much of “Barbarians” is funnier than it is factual.