How does a 17-year-old veteran actress describe Hollywood?

“It’s fucking bullshit. Steven Spielberg runs the fucking place,” vents Gaby Hoffman, who made her film debut at the tender age of 5 as Kevin Costner’s daughter in “Field of Dreams.”

Trapped in kid roles for the next 10 years, rendering memorable characters in “Uncle Buck,” “Sleepless In Seattle,” “Man Without a Face,” and “Volcano,” among others, Hoffman has finally found an escape route into an adult role.

Sort of.

“200 Cigarettes,” set on New Year’s Eve 1981, is a romantic comedy following various young couples and friends whose lives intersect at a party in a downtown loft.

A Who’s Who of budding actors, it was filmed on location in New York’s East Village and oozes with anti-Hollywood sentiment.

“200 Cigarettes” features notable on- and off-screen rebels Courtney Love, Janeane Garofalo and Christina Ricci, along with Ben and Casey Affleck, Dave Chappelle, Angela Featherstone, Jay Mohr, Martha Plimpton and Paul Rudd.

Hoffman plays opposite close friend Ricci. The two were approached about appearing in the film together almost four years ago, before Ricci became a sexual icon with “The Opposite of Sex” and “Pecker.”

“We play two teenage girls from Long Island who sneak off to the city for the night to go to a New Year’s Eve party and we get lost on the lower east side,” Hoffman explains from her New York City home. “Christina’s character is all for it and I’m kinda scared shitless and afraid we’re going to get raped.”

“I’m the paranoid, annoying one who’s constantly complaining, and Christina, any weird guy that walks in her path, she’s ready to take on. But by the end of the movie, of course, I turn around and end up getting drunk and having a blast.”

Hoffman’s real-life persona is right up Ricci’s alley. Her rugged dialect and bold statements seemingly clash with her history of innocent daughter roles. Despite her heavenly outlook on life, she makes it clear she’s no angel.

“My mother never stopped herself when she wanted to say ‘fuck,’ so I never had a problem with it,” Hoffman says. “I grew up saying ‘god damn’ and ‘shit’ and whatever the fuck I wanted to.”

In filming “200 Cigarettes,” Hoffman and Ricci dressed up in preposterous ’80s garb and hit the town for a few weeks’ worth of walking around in the middle of the night, chain-smoking cigarettes and talking in what Hoffman calls “strange accents.”

“We get the giggles a lot and when you’re doing Long Island accents, it’s even easier to get them,” Hoffman recalls. “There was one night when it was getting kind of late and we couldn’t stop laughing. We probably fucked up about 10 or 11 shoots. But that really happens no matter what you’re doing or who you’re working with.”

During filming, the crew did run into one dilemma it wasn’t expecting. A woman, protesting the title of the movie, sat on her steps singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” making the scene impossible to shoot.

Apparently, her mother died of lung cancer and she believed the title “200 Cigarettes” glamorized smoking.

“If she wasn’t such a fucking lunatic, I would feel sorry for her,” Hoffman says. “I don’t condone smoking, but I don’t believe in censorship at all. When you start taking smoking off of television and movies, then the line gets pushed a little farther and, sooner or later, everything is being censored.

“If ‘200 Cigarettes’ up on a billboard in some fucking movie theater is going to make some little kid smoke, then that’s just the most ludicrous thing I’ve heard in my life. It’s just a name.”

When the plot in “200 Cigarettes” thickens, Hoffman and Ricci’s characters encounter two menacing punk rockers, played by Casey Affleck and newcomer Guillermo Diaz.

Under the circumstances of how the film was shot, Hoffman did not spend much time with other stars of the film.

“Basically this movie is like five or six different movies going on at once,” she says. “You’re basically dealing with six different plots.”

But Hoffman’s history has taught her it’s not always who you’re acting with but what you take from each experience — big words for someone practically raised by seasoned actors such as Costner, Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan and John Candy.

“I can’t remember any sit-down-and-let-me-tell-you-what-this-business-is-about kind of things, but whether you love them or you hate them or they’re great actors or not, you always learn something from somebody,” Hoffman says. “Basically, every movie I’ve done, I’ve come away with something. It’s hard to regret doing anything or working with anyone.”

Although she played a small role, Hoffman says her moviemaking highlight was working on Woody Allen’s musical, “Everyone Says I Love You.”

“He’s so shy and nice; it’s hard to be intimidated by him,” she says. “But when I first met him, I was because I love him.”

In “200 Cigarettes,” Hoffman got to work under the direction of Risa Bramon Garcia, who carved her way into Hollywood as a casting director.

Garcia’s more than 50 film credits, including “Wall Street,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Twister” and “True Romance,” explains how she was able to recruit such a dynamic cast for “200 Cigarettes.”

Whether it was a chance to relive a night in the ’80s or return to the Village, where many of the stars once roamed, each of the cast members had a reason for choosing “200 Cigarettes.”

“The main thing I looked for was an interesting character because before the past year or so, I’ve basically been playing the same character over and over and over again,” Hoffman says. “My character Stephie is completely insane and like nothing I’ve ever done before.”

Like a spinning wheel stuck in the mud, Hoffman has spent her teen years trying to breakout of the cute girl mold she unknowingly built in “Field of Dreams.”

Her memories of the film, however, are still joyful ones.

“It was really beautiful there,” she says. “Is it still a baseball field? They’re probably making a shitload of money aren’t they? I think that kinda sucks. It’s great they’re making money, I just think it sucks they have a baseball field instead of a corn field. It was such a beautiful corn field.”

Next fall, the actress, who accidentally fell into acting by doing commercials to support her family, will follow in the footsteps of her older sister and enroll at Bard College as a literature major.

“I’d leave school for a semester if it’s the ideal, perfect movie, which I don’t think will be coming my way. But I don’t want to. I’ve been wanting to go to this college since I was nine years old,” Hoffman says.

“It’s not one particular role or one idea that would attract me; it’s just doing something else. That’s what’s fun about acting. You get to pretend. You become different people, and you get to live these fake lives.”

Before the year is over, Hoffman will appear in “Coming Soon,” co-starring Mia Farrow, and “Black and White.”

As far as where she will be spending New Year’s Eve 1999:

“Jesus Christ. I don’t even know what I’m doing tomorrow night, honey.”