Tuesday was a day for post-coital ceremonies -- press conference in Paris; a quick hop on the Concorde; a second dog-and-pony show in Manhattan followed by ingratiating phone calls to increasingly dubious financial analysts. After weeks of rumors, Jean-Marie Messier, chairman of Vivendi S.A., the French water utility turned telecommunication giant, officially embraced Edgar Bronfman Jr., president and CEO of the Seagram Company. Together, the pair will parent a complicated $34 billion international baby called Vivendi Universal.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, the folks at Universal Pictures, which is owned by Seagram, were doing their best to practice a casual Gallic shrug. After all, movie studios are accustomed to playing the fancy chit in high-stakes global poker.

In 1991, the Japanese electronics giant Matsushita -- driven by a need to acquire a movie library to push its VCRs -- bought what was then called MCA Universal from its aging founder Lew Wasserman for $6.9 billion.

Four years later, Hollywood's Byzantine ways having flummoxed the Japanese, they sold to the eager Bronfman for $5.7 billion. Bronfman went on to transform the company -- slashing away its executive ranks, selling most of its TV operations to Barry Diller's USA Network and then augmenting its music holdings by buying Polygram NV last year for another $10.4 billion.

Under Bronfman's watch Universal has grown, but its motion-picture division has shrunk in importance. It accounts for just 10 percent of Seagram's value (according to Bronfman); its standing in the new mega-company is likely to shrink even further, since the Vivendi/Universal merger is actually a complicated three-way deal.

Vivendi also owns 49 percent of the French pay-TV giant Canal Plus. As part of the deal, it's acquiring the remaining 51 percent. Canal, in turn, already owns its own motion picture production company, Studio Canal.

Universal Pictures, once the engine that powered the whole company, appears to have been reduced to another cog in the corporate wheel. Still, reaction at the studio's San Fernando Valley headquarters was measured. Many at the studio are adopting a cautious, wait-and-see attitude. "Actually, I sense the word at Universal is quite positive," said director Jonathan Mostow, whose recent feature, the submarine thriller "U-571," proved a spring hit for the studio, grossing $74 million to date.

With Canal Plus having already picked up some of the foreign distribution rights to his film, Mostow added, "I've met a lot of the players and I like them a lot. They want to be in the movie business and that's a great thing. They're not newcomers making toaster ovens. They understand that it would be a mistake to install non-Americans to run film operations and they don't seem to have any intention of doing that. Hollywood is a place where outsiders who don't understand the culture can be eaten for lunch."

The merger's effect on the studio is "a non-issue," adds Paine Webber analyst Chris Dixon. "They've already indicated they've seen a lot of people go to Hollywood and get drawn and quartered. I anticipate they'll rely on management that's well-known and comfortable in the Hollywood milieu. I don't view a major change in the operation."

Certainly, Messier was doing his best to assuage nervous Americans. "No little Frenchies are going to run a Hollywood studio," he vowed Tuesday.

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