Since the musical bio of rocker Ritchie Valens was released, Phillips says "I've been on so many planes that when I sit in a chair I expect to take off"

Thursday night he rides high again, this time on a camel in the tv movie The Three Kings at 8p.m on Channel 8. Phillips, Stan Shaw, and Jack Warden play mental patients who fancy themselves the Magi and escape to seek the Christ child in Los Angeles.

In Dallas last week to accept industry honors, Phillips said the Christmas movie represented a new phase for producer Aaron Spelling. "He's done Charlie's Angels and Starsky and Hutch. Now he's going for respect The Three Kings is his flagship in that direction.

Phillips has recently undergone a sea change himself. Last year he went from acting in a few Christian films to a Hollywood movie - one that grossed more than $54 million and made history by being released the same day in Spanish and English.

Those who knew the University of Texas at Arlington graduate in Dallas realized he was something special. But even they were taken aback when he returned trailing stardust like a comet's tail.

Interviewed at Adam Roarke's Film Actors Lab in Las Colinas, where he used to teach, Phillips says he got his first whiff of what was coming after appearing on Miami Vice. "Suddenly, I began getting stopped on the street and in the supermarket. A guy at the stoplight looked over and yelled, 'Hey, you died great last night' And that was before La Bamba was released.

"About 75 percent of the people are just wonderful. Most of them say, 'May I have your autograph ?' But I've been in situations, say, standing in a shopping center, where someone will turn me around and a flashbulb goes off in my face. I appreciate privacy, but it's not necessary for me to keep a bodyguard on the set and have him walk me to my dressing room the way Don Johnson does."

It was different when Phillips showed up at Los Angeles' Pacoima Junior High School on Ritchie Valens day. More than 3,000 turned out at Valens' old school and began to close in. The actor, who had worked out and pumped up for the role, was pummeled and mauled. He was stretched out cruciform and headed for the ground when three policemen came to his rescue.

"My first thought was that half of these people have cameras. I can't struggle. The wrong picture might get taken. I've done enough press to realize things get taken out of context."

Phillips is still stinging from an interview with People magazine. "They made me look like the latest kid out of the brat pack and the new Puritan in Hollywood. I took offense at it. Not that I'm afraid of being accused of being a Christian - which I am (Phillips wears a gold cross around his neck) - but at the same time, I don't want to appear to be a religious zealot. I have my spiritual side, and that's how I live my life, but I'm not about to get up on a soapbox"

He suffered another case of media burn at the October funeral of Ritchie Valens' mother. During the making of La Bamba, Phillips drew close to Ritchie's family. "I got the news (of Connie Valenzuela's death) on my answering machine which is how I get most news now. I didn't know that Connie had been diagnosed terminal last January and given three months to live. Nobody knew this except the family, and Connie held on. She was a rock anyway. If any of us were portrayed accurately in the film, it was Connie(exuberantly played by Rosana De Soto). She found the strength to jam herself in death's door until the movie came out and Ritchie's music was famous once more.

"The last time I saw Connie, we were giving away a scholarship in Ritchie's name in Los Angeles. Mayor Tom Bri1dley showed up, and she said, 'Sitting next to Lou is like sitting next to Ritchie.' When she died, it was so strange. It was a doubie interment (at San Fernando Mission, where Valens is buried and where the funeral procession in La Bamba was filmed). They buried her with Ritchie.

"I was so happy to see Taylor and (director) Luis Valdez, Rosana De Sota and all the Columbia Pictures and (production company) New Visions people, and to feel a part of this family. When they played We Belong Together, I went to pieces.

"The thing that hacked me off (Phillips actually used other terminology) was that word got out, and there were as many paparazzi as there were members of the family. I was there with tears running down my face, and I looked across the street at a dozen people with long lenses taking pictures of me. I was furious. At that moment, I understood Sean Penn." The intense, dark-eyed Phillips, who was born in the Philippines to an American Navy man and a Filipino mother, will be seen on the big screen in Walking on Water. The film will also feature Edward James Olmos, best known for his role as Lt. Martin Castillo in Miami Vice.

The film, a PBS American Playhouse production for TV and theatrical release, is "a performance film, an actors' film," Phillips says. (In the previews, his character proved so popular that deleted scenes were restored.) Phillips says critics who have seen Walking on Water at festivals are calling it "Eddie's finest performance yet, and the most sought-after independent film of the year."

Scheduled for theatrical release March 4, Walking on Water should also support Dakota, a film Phillips made with the Kuntz Brothers in Dallas last summer .

"Dakota will be a success," says the actor, who doubles as associate producer. "That's a relative statement," he add's;. He doesn't expect the story of a street kid who finds love and redemption on a Texas horse ranch to reach the box-office heights of La Bamba or to garner the critical acclaim of Walking on Water, but he says it will call attention to the Dallas film business."Especially to director Fred Holmes and actors like Dede Norton and Eli Cummins. Fred is in the same situation Valdez was before La Bamba. They loved his stage work, but he was not a bankable director. Based on the direction and cinema-tography alone, Dakota will be a surprise."

Phillips thinks so much of Holmes, with whom he worked in a couple of prize-winning Christian films, that he has asked him to serve as line producer on a project. Nothing is signed, Phillips says, but he has written two screenplays and hopes to direct at least one with a name actor. "If either of the scripts go, I intend to come back and shoot in Texas. One is set in Dallas; the other in Corpus Christi, where I went to junior high and high school."

During his recent stay in Dallas, Phillips' wavy, crow-black hair fell below his shoulders and he was working on his tan. He was getting ready for Young Guns with Emilio Estevez (who plays Billy the Kid) and Kiefer Sutherland. In the history-based western, to be shot around Santa Fe next spring, he plays one of seven young delinquents known around Lincoln County, N.M., in 1878 as "The Regulators."

"It's an ensemble piece, not a Billy the Kid story, and we end up being chased by everybody and his dog - the bad guys, a posse, the cavaIry. It's kind of 'a Magnificent Seven, where each of us has a talent. Mine is knife-throwing.

"Young Guns is very physical. We'll be on horseback about 50 per-cent of the time. I'm getting with a knife trainer, and Emilio is in Montana now with a gun trainer. The two weeks' rehearsal period is to get a lot of us proficient at the weapons we're using. It could be very dynamic, seeing all of us twirl guns and throw knives without killing each other."

Phillips has been so busy since La Bamba that he and Julie Cypher, his wife of more than five months, couldn't manage a honeymoon. So when Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous offered them an all-expense-paid trip to the Bahamas, the couple agreed. But that didn't keep Phillips from feeling a little ridiculous.

"I can just hear it," he says, mimicking Robin Leach. " And now for someone who is definitely not rich and only slightly famous."

Just to prove that he hadn't forgotten his roots, the actor shimmied up a coconut tree for Leach's cameras.

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