What's wrong with this picture? A Hollywood comedy emerges as one of the summer's biggest hits with the MTV crowd and rakes in nearly $150 million at the box office, yet its major label soundtrack featuring gold and platinum-selling rock acts tumbles down, and eventually off, the charts after just seven weeks in stores. How can that be, especially during 1998, Year of the Soundtrack, when movie album sales are up more than twenty percent from last year and it seems every other Hollywood release comes with its own Top 20 album?

Yet that's exactly what happened to the soundtrack for There's Something About Mary, which peaked at No. 123 and fell out of the top 200 this week. The more people flocked to the Cameron Diaz/Ben Stiller sex comedy, the fewer copies of the soundtrack were sold. The disappointing results were a tough lesson for Capitol Records, which released the soundtrack, as well as the rest of the music business. Because contrary to popular perception, movie soundtracks can't simply attach themselves to a hot flick and expect to sell millions of copies.

"Everybody jumped on that bandwagon because of Titanic," says one Capitol executive. "But it doesn't always work that way."

The simple problem with Mary was "there were no hits," says the Capitol source. (The album features songs by Ben Lee, the Dandy Warhols, Propellerheads, the Lemonheads and indie rock icon Jonathan Richman.)

In order to thrive commercially soundtracks don't necessarily have to accompany a smash movie, but they do need a radio-friendly hit, complete with an extravagant video. That's how Armageddon (with Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss A Thing,), Dr. Dolittle (Aaliyahs' "Are You Somebody."), City of Angels (Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris"), Godzilla (Puff Daddy's "Come With Me") and Hope Floats (Garth Brook's "To Make You Feel My Love") went platinum this summer. Either that, or soundtracks have to be genre specific, the way The Wedding Singer soundtracks, volumes one and two, mine New Wave nostalgia from the Eighties, or the way 54's soundtrack delivers a collection of disco classics.

Efforts by Capitol to win over radio programmers with the little-known Propellerheads failed, and the idea of trying to revive the Eighties one-hit wonder, "Mary's Prayer" by Danny Wilson, was called off after being deemed too "cheesy," according to the Capitol source.

What's particularly odd about the flop of Mary is that Richman actually performed his three songs, including the title track, on screen. That's rare today when so many soundtracks are filled with songs never even heard inside the movie theater, and certainly not ones that advance a film's plot the way Richman's did. Nonetheless, commercial modern rock radio deemed Richman and his deadpan vocal style off-limits, and the Mary soundtrack never really stood a chance.

ERIC BOEHLERT