(MONEY Magazine) – If you've been hankering to get in on the action in Hollywood, there are plenty of dealmakers ready to rake in your antes. In the past nine months Ron Howard, Dick Clark, Dino De Laurentiis and Aaron Spelling have all gone public, and given the show world's infinite vanity, there could soon be a whole sector fund called Ego Equities.

As with most thinly traded, initial stock offerings, investors should, as Bette Davis once said, fasten their seat belts. Consider the bumpy ride of actor turned director Howard. First offered on the over-the-counter market last July at $8 per unit of stock, his Imagine Films Inc. rose to $18.25 in anticipation of follow-ups to his 1985 hit Cocoon. The units have since fallen to $10.25. The De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, which opened on the American Stock Exchange last May at $12 a share, shot to $19.25, then after a string of disappointments, including Taipan, recently traded at $12.75. Those who paid $14 a share at the August debut of Aaron Spelling Productions -- creator of TV's Love Boat and Dynasty -- saw it plummet to $10 on the American Exchange after the sad bombout of Life with Lucy. Dick Clark Productions, which luckily went public at $6.50 early in the January boom, was up 11% on the OTC. In short, a stock certificate can be an overpriced souvenir, and would-be investors should ferret out from the prospectus if the star retains sizable holdings in the corporation and whether the company participates in all his projects. Dick Clark, for example, may produce movies and TV shows independently, so shareholders could be cut out of his biggest winners. Interestingly, Fidelity's Select-Leisure fund chooses to own none of these four new stocks. There is a difference between Slim and Boone Pickens.