Major businesses throughout California already nervous about the impact of pending electricity rate hikes are up in arms over state legislation that could end their ability to sign contracts with outside electricity providers and leave them stuck paying high electricity prices locked in by the state.

The lock-in provision, buried in the massive $10 billion bond authorization signed into law in February, would allow the state Public Utilities Commission to ban such third-party contracts at its own discretion, effectively ending the state’s experiment with competition in the retail electricity market. Some of the most vulnerable are actors who also have producer deals. One example is Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment, which went to Universal Studios in a high-profile, multi-year deal covering music, film and television. Smith has yet to produce any significant product under the deal, which is up in January. A strike would allow Universal to terminate the contract before then, and save a bundle.

Another Universal deal that has yet to produce a film is the one it has with Tom Hanks’ Playtone, although insiders said that deal was recently renewed and the company has several high-profile projects in development. In short, Hanks is bulletproof.

Not so Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Lovespell Entertainment, which industry insiders say is an especially vulnerable candidate. The company has not produced anything for the studio.

Besides Hanks, other bulletproof producers are such top-level operators as Jerry Bruckheimer (“Pearl Harbor”) and Brian Grazer (“Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”), who earn fees in excess of $3 million per picture and whose films have been so lucrative that any studio would want them around.

But they are the exceptions, as studios remain burdened with a slew of exclusive production deals that are yielding nothing.

Several such deals signed at Warner Bros. during its freewheeling days under Robert Daly and Terry Semel are now being terminated. In the past few weeks alone, it has cut its ties with the husband/wife team of Richard Donner and Lauren Shuler Donner (“Lethal Weapon,” “Free Willy”), and with Jon Peters, producer of Warner’s lucrative “Batman” franchise.

In January, Warner Bros. ended another deal, with Kevin Costner’s Tig Productions, which had been unproductive for the studio.

“The Kevin Costner deal at Warner’s (where his Tig Productions was based) was all about paying for his jet fuel and they are not about paying for jet fuel any more,” quipped one executive.

Sources say that quietly, behind the scenes, each studio has drawn up lists of the producers who can be axed without too much trouble though the studios themselves refuse to admit it.

One reason that studios can drop their producer deals is that burgeoning management/ production companies like Michael Ovitz’s Artists Management Group are doing a lot of the producers’ work for them not only finding scripts, but packaging them with stars and directors.

“We are in a position to fully package a movie and then come to a studio on a finance-distribution-marketing basis,” said Rick Hess, president of Propaganda Films, which represents such clients as director Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic”). “It’s very advantageous to the studios because there is minimal risk to them.”

As a result, studios have steadily trimmed their producer ranks over the past two years. Most studios have halved their ongoing producer deals in that time, ending job security for many producers.

But even after those cuts, the average studio still has anywhere from 10 to 30 producer deals. Producers serve as a development machine, funneling projects up to the studio executives. But those deals can cost a studio anywhere from $750,000 to $3 million per year each, and studios have been rethinking their usefulness.

“There aren’t that many big deals left,” said producer Joe Singer (“Courage Under Fire,” “Dr. Dolittle”), who went outside the studios to raise $350 million from four international partners to make 10 films over five years. “In the last 18 months to two years, you’ve already seen an attrition.”

From a studio point of view, this is understandable, given that fewer pictures are being made than before Disney alone has cut back from around 40 a year three years ago to some 15 to 18 today. At the same time, several high-profile deals have failed to yield results. “The Fugitive” producer Arnold Kopelson signed a five-year pact with 20th Century Fox that cost the studio an estimated $5 million annually, with not a single greenlit picture to show for it.

Kopelson is just one of several well-known producers who recently had his deal terminated. Others include “Traffic” producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, whose deal at Fox also was not renewed.

So what happens to the producers whose deals are cut?

Some of them have found other backers outside the studios, raising international financing on their own. In fact, raising financing and then bringing it to a studio is becoming a more and more important part of a producer’s job.

Just last week, Zwick and Herskovitz’s Bedford Falls Co. signed a deal to develop films for Alliance Atlantis. Kopelson has entered into a similar arrangement with Germany’s Intertainment. But such deals are harder and harder to find.

“A lot of the older producers who stuck with the studios are now out looking for money, but the money isn’t there so much any more,” said Singer.