New Yorker, New Yorker

Let's play word association. I say ''movies" and ''magazine," you say . . . ''Premiere"? ''Sight & Sound"? ''Photoplay"? Maybe even (pourquoi pas!) ''Cahiers du Cinema"?

Consider another answer: ''The New Yorker." Those other magazines are about the movies. With The New Yorker, it's the other way around: There are movies about the magazine, a surprising number of them.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's title character in ''Capote" (which opens tomorrow) is on assignment for The New Yorker, and a major character is the magazine's then-editor, William Shawn (played by Bob Balaban).

In ''Adaptation," Meryl Streep plays New Yorker reporter Susan Orlean.

In ''Joe Gould's Secret," Stanley Tucci plays another New Yorker reporter, Joseph Mitchell.

''Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" is a veritable New Yorker alumni meeting: Jennifer Jason Leigh is Dorothy Parker, Campbell Scott is Robert Benchley, Sam Robards is Harold Ross, David Gow is Donald Ogden Stewart, Tom McGowan is Alexander Woollcott, and so on.

In a New Yorker movie category of its own is ''Willow," the 1988 fantasy epic directed by Ron Howard. The story is by George Lucas, and a leading villain is the evil General Kael (played by Pat Roach). Lucas gave him the name as a swipe at the magazine's legendary film critic, Pauline Kael.

Then there's ''Annie Hall," in which New Yorker staffers appear off-camera and serve as a punch line. Woody Allen is in the bedroom trying to avoid a party going on elsewhere in the apartment he shares with his wife. She urges him to rejoin the party. When he suggests they make love instead, she's outraged. ''There are people out there from The New Yorker magazine. My God! What would they think?"

Except for ''Capote" and ''Mrs. Parker," the movies noted above are available on DVD. Now so's The New Yorker. Last month Random House released 80 years' worth of the magazine -- 4,109 issues, comprising some 500,000 pages -- in an eight-DVD set. It's the ultimate in seeing The New Yorker onscreen. Just don't expect it any time soon on VHS.

MARK FEENEY