HOLLYWOOD MEGA-DEAL : Over Lunch, MCA Workers See Pluses in Working for Seagram : Hollywood: Between wine-cooler jokes, employees say future may be brighter under Canadian firm.

Rank-and-file MCA Inc. employees had plenty of questions Friday about their company’s expected sale to Seagram Co., a Canadian liquor conglomerate. They just weren’t the questions you might expect.

A sample: Now that Seagram is poised to replace electronics giant Matsushita as MCA’s majority owner, will happy hours replace coffee breaks as a hallmark of corporate culture? Will the water coolers start dispensing wine coolers? And what about employee discounts on Chivas Regal and Crown Royal?

In the absence of hard information about the sale to Seagram, workers on their lunch hours from MCA’s Universal City headquarters had to settle for half-baked humor--an appropriate response, perhaps, for people in the business of filmed entertainment. Most had gleaned details about the latest development in their company’s history from news reports.

“Basically, everybody is taking a wait-and-see attitude,” said Rory Roberts, 52, a project manager in MCA’s data-processing department. “They are joking about it, like wondering if the company store is going to change from selling electronics to a liquor store.”

“I work five floors below (Chairman) Lew (Wasserman) and (President) Sid (Sheinberg), and I didn’t hear anything about this until late yesterday,” said Stewart Pera, 25, a reader in the story department of Universal Pictures, the studio arm of MCA.

The bad beverage jokes, though, seemed to stem more from comfortable curiosity than anxiety about MCA’s future. Workers far removed from the turmoil in the company’s executive ranks said they did not think their lives would change much under the new ownership. As a result, they were inclined to look for positive signs in the sale.

“Change might be really good. There are a lot of empty stages on the lot right now,” said Sally Romin, 35, a set painter who was part of the regular lunchtime crowd that rides bicycles from the Universal lot to the Universal Bar and Grill down Lankershim Boulevard.

Inside the bar, nursing a beer with his buddies, was Ken Price, 44, who has been a carpenter at Universal for 18 years. Price said there have been more independent contractors working in his department since Matsushita took over, making him one of the few people there with a long history at the company.

“We think it’s great. The Canadians are union-friendly, a lot more friendly than the Japanese,” Price said.

“Especially when you have someone running things who was involved in the movie business before,” added carpenter Roy Petersen, 36, referring to Seagram Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. who co-produced “The Border” with Jack Nicholson.

“Instead of getting into it for the money, he seems to want to be getting into it because he thinks it’s cool,” Petersen said.

Dan Payton, 39, a sound effects editor at Universal for 10 years, echoed Petersen’s vote of confidence in Bronfman’s credentials. Despite widespread rumors that Wasserman and Sheinberg will be leaving MCA, Payton said, “the sense is that (Bronfman) will have enough sense to get them to stay. Nothing succeeds like success.”

After living through the 1990 deal in which Matsushita acquired MCA, Gary Guarino, 44, who oversees the storage of props and sets, didn’t even bother to speculate about the sale.

Asked what questions he would have for his new bosses, Guarino shrugged. “I don’t know if I would be that interested,” he said. “As long as I get a check every week, I’m happy as hell.”