The Prayer

''It was the most hysterical period of time,'' Fisher recalls. During the two weeks before shooting began, Fisher says she met with Goldberg in Malibu, ''talked to nuns about nun logic,'' toned down Goldberg's ''jive-talking" dialogue, and held pow-wows with Ardolino, Touchstone vice president Donald DeLine, and producers Teri Schwartz and Scott Rudin every night at her house. One night the honchos arrived to find Fisher in a panic over her missing Jack Russell terrier. ''It turned out he was at the vet,'' she says, ''but there were these two hours when I got all the executives to wander up and down my street screaming, 'Buddy!'''

The studio insisted on rolling the cameras without a completed shooting script. The start date had already been pushed back twice and ''everybody was on salary,'' says Ardolino. With the meter running, shooting finally began on Sept. 23.

San Francisco. Three weeks later. A half-dozen actresses in habits waited in a vegetable garden to shoot a seemingly insignificant scene in which Deloris breaks her fast by swiping a tomato during garden chores. But Goldberg smoldered and refused to shoot. The scene had already crawled under her skin because earlier drafts called for her to toss a basketball over a fence and have it land in a hoop. She says that she considered such behavior ''stereotypical.''

The basketball was cut, but she was still expected to pocket the tomato. She found that offensive, too. ''She didn't want to be a black person stealing,'' explains Ardolino. ''She wanted to be a very positive image.'' (Also, Goldberg insists there was a suspicious-looking basketball on the set that morning.) Her irritation blossomed into fury when an executive called her manager, Keith Addis, to say that she was being difficult.

A couple of hours later Ardolino coaxed her back to the garden. ''Let's just shoot the goddamn scene the way it's written,'' Goldberg snapped. She begrudgingly snatched the tomato, and the crew went home early. On screen, the scene lasts less than a minute, and it comes across as more an act of hunger than of larceny.

Throughout the month of shooting in San Francisco, Robert Harling (Steel Magnolias) — who joined the team after Fisher's two-week contract expired — manufactured and fine-tuned scenes each day in his Sheraton Palace Hotel suite. ''It was like laying tracks in front of a roller coaster,'' he says. Most days Ardolino would arrive at the set at 5:30 a.m., work until 10 p.m., then head back to the Sheraton to go over new scenes until 1 a.m.

In November Variety published Goldberg's Disney-bashing remarks from the Friars roast for Richard Pryor. They did not play as a joke in print. Touchstone's Hoberman called Addis as soon as he read the article. Addis placated him by explaining that it was just a joke intended for the ears of his client's black colleagues at the roast — ''a really deep expression of her wildly edgy humor.''

''I was working for a company that had 49 stories written about how terrible they were,'' explains Goldberg from a hotel in South Africa, where she began shooting Sarafina! after Sister Act wrapped. ''Not only that, Richard used to talk about 'nigger, nigger, nigger,' and it was my joke to him.''

By now, the Disney-Goldberg conflict had become an open joke around the set. She amused the crew by passing out ''Nigga-teer'' T-shirts with a Mickey Mouse in black face. ''Strangely, the guys at Disney didn't seem to have a problem with that,'' says Goldberg. (''By that point,'' says a producer, ''they just wanted it to be over.'')

In December shooting wrapped and Ardolino retired to his editing room with miles of iffy celluloid. In February he emerged with a rough cut for the first test screening of Sister Act on the Disney lot. From the opening scene, the audience of 400 was roaring, and their exit poll ratings were among the highest Disney had ever seen. If the hodgepodge of writers (a seventh, Eleanor Bergstein, had joined the team for the final weeks) produced a slightly uneven script, no one seemed to mind. In the end, none of the writers pressed for on-screen credit. The screenplay is attributed to a pseudonym: Joseph Howard.

The battlefield is silent now. ''I just gotta tell ya,'' says Hoberman from his office in the Disney Team Building — a whimsical Michael Graves structure with giant columns in the shape of the Seven Dwarves — ''I think she's great.'' He says that the movie was ultimately brought in on time and, except for writers' fees, within its $ 21 million budget. Disney deserves credit for sticking by the project. ''Through all the tribulations,'' says Rudin, ''they never lost faith in it.'' And Goldberg even offers this mea culpa: ''On a six-day-a-week shoot, 18 hours a day, you get a little raw, like having your period all the time sometimes.''

A focus group following the first screening gave the highest marks to costar Najimy and to music supervisor Marc Shaiman's hymns sung in Supremes style. An 18-year-old boy stood up and declared, ''It made me want to be a nun.'' To Disney, Ardolino is nothing less than a savior. Hoberman says Goldberg did a ''fantastic job.'' And Joseph Howard just may become the hottest screenwriter in town.