September 16, 1984

They were, Peter Shaffer recalls, quite the odd couple. To turn his play ''Amadeus'' into a film script, the English playwright spent four months holed up in a Connecticut farmhouse with Milos Forman, the Czech film director. Isolated from the rest of the world in what they called their ''torture chamber,'' the collaborators suffered from writer's block together, listened to Mozart records together, and improvised scenes from the play together. Much of their afternoon work sessions, however, was devoted to arguing. They argued about scenes and words, and the order of scenes and words. They argued about who would say what in the film. They even argued about which of them would cook dinner. In the end, nothing went into the movie that both did not agree upon; and on Wednesday at the Paramount and Tower East - some two and half years after their first argument - ''Amadeus,'' the motion picture starring Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham, is finally opening. Filled with scenes from Mozart's operas and permeated with the sounds of his glorious music, the movie of ''Amadeus'' not only works a glittering improvisation on the composer's life - as the original play did - but also conjures, in sumptuous detail, the musical worlds he inhabited and created. But if Mr. Shaffer succeeded, as Mr. Forman puts it, in ''giving birth to the same child twice,'' the task was anything but easy.

TOP-ECHELON hotel-casino executives here say that unless government at every level, especially the city, finds effective solutions to transportation and parking problems and has them in place by 1987, the gaming industry is heading for dangerous financial shoals. Some have raised the specter of bankruptcy for one or more ''marginal'' casinos. Analysts had predicted that the growth in the number of visitors here would level off at 20.8 percent this year; instead, it is between 10 and 11 percent. Twenty-three million people visited Atlantic City last year; 27.5 million were expected this year, but it appears that the actual number will be about 25.5 million. The number of casinos has grown from one to 10 in six years, and four more are expected to be opened by 1987.

FINDING THE CENTER Two Narratives. By V. S. Naipaul. 176 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $13.95. Two schools of writing have been exciting great enthusiasm lately. The Latin Americans, with their tall tales of limitless extravagance and abundance, of myth and passion - so many stories bursting the covers of each novel that it seems the au thor could have lighted his cigars with the surplus of them - remind us of our own frontier beginnings, our virgin exuberance, when North America too was an oyster bed, a goldfield for a writer. The Eastern Europeans, on the other hand, in briliantly elucidating their boxy anxieties, their governed, circumscribed and claustrophobic expectations, present us with the sort of diminished future that even without a Czechoslovak dictatorship we fear for ourselves. V. S. Naipaul, who swims with neither school but is one of the most interesting writers alive, rather splits the difference. His novels picture a kind of limitless

He is a slight man of 37 now, confined to a refugee center and looking for a new home. In 1975, when the North Vietnamese took Saigon, he was a captain in the South Vietnamese Army and, like tens of thousands of his compatriots, he was sent for ''re-education'' to a prison camp. There, he spent the next six years of his life. One day, without explanation, he was freed.

Any day of the year, somewhere in the world, an audience will be found applauding a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. The play is most likely to be ''Oklahoma!'', the first, the favored work; these days, the players are apt to be amateurs on high school stages - youngsters born after death had ended that wondrous Broadway collaboration. But a revival of ''South Pacific'' will open a national tour on Christmas day in New Haven and ''The King and I,'' with Yul Brynner, continues to tour, closing today in Toronto and opening tomorrow in Boston. In addition, every year a few of those profoundly American works are also rendered in a scattering of foreign tongues. Not long ago, ''The Sound of Music'' finished a two-season run in Swedish in Stockholm. For reasons no one can fathom, the Japanese are partial to ''South Pacific,'' a play in which they are the unseen, omnipresent foe. It is possible to know all this and more because Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein 2d were not only the most successful creative team in the history of the American musical theater, but they were also practical men. The place from which all permissions flow, the address to which royalty payments stream, the enterprise, in fact, that controls everything the two partners wrote together and the best things they produced with others is the Rodgers and Hammerstein office on Madison Avenue at 57th Street.