Preetpal Singh was sitting on the terrace of the Majestic Hotel flipping through Thursday’s edition of the Cannes Daily and pointing out opportunities lost.

“Look at this, ‘Monster in the Closet,’ and this, ‘Nightmare Weekend,’ ” Singh said, his voice worn down by five days of bartering at the Cannes Film Festival.

“Here’s another one, ‘Serpent Warriors.’ I could get none of these into India.”

Singh, a 31-year-old native of Bombay, and a current resident of Glendale, Calif., is in Cannes to buy Indian rights to films on sale in the international market. His problem as a buyer isn’t money, it’s product.

There aren’t many movies available that can be shown in India.

“Censorship is everywhere in my country,” Singh said. “From Kashmir to Sri Lanka, it is the same. No bare breasts, no violence, no horror films where people come apart.” Singh said a Cannes market, and another held each fall in Milan, Italy, is essential to him because of the sheer number of films available. With the censorship limits established by the Indian government, it’s hard to find the 6 to 10 movies he wants to distribute each year.

“I look at everything,” he said, “but there is not much that we can show.”

Singh runs the six-person Los Angeles office of Innovision Communications, while his younger brother, Inderjik, heads the company’s Bombay headquarters. In Bombay, the company employs 35 people, most of them dealing with the red tape of getting the films that Preetpal buys into the country’s theaters.

Singh, whose company introduced commercially sponsored American television programs to India three years ago (“Diff’rent Strokes,” the Oscar telecast, and “The Miss Universe Pageant” were among them), said it normally takes 12 to 18 months to get one of his films through India’s double-check censorship system.

The movies are submitted first on half-inch videocassette tape to the National Film Development Corp. of India, a committee of nearly 20 people. If the cassette version is approved, Singh can send the print to India customs. But the print itself must then pass through the censorship committee.

The committee may demand changes, or it may reject the film altogether. There is an appeals process, Singh said, but it seldom goes the way of the distributor.

Singh’s most recent release in India is “Heavenly Bodies,” an American aerobics exploitation film that he says he got past the censorship board by arguing that it was an exercise movie promoting good health.

“They said, ‘These girls (wearing leotards) are undressed.’ I said, ‘You can’t exercise in a robe.’ ”

“Heavenly Bodies” is doing very well, Singh said.

“It’s not a great picture,” he said, “but in my country, people don’t want to see a Woody Allen movie. Only poor people go to the theater.

“They work 12 hours a day and when they go to the show they are looking for dreams. A guy makes only 20 rupees (about $2) a day and spends four rupees (about 50 cents) on a movie . . . he wants to see action or look at some nice women.” Singh said video piracy may be an even bigger problem than censorship in India. Although there are copyright laws, illegal videotapes of movies are openly sold or rented in stores.

“We have laws on the book against piracy of movies,” he said, “but nobody is throwing the book at them.”

Most middle- and upper-class Indians have videocassette recorders, he said, and can rent the latest American movies for 10 cents a day. They could buy the tapes outright for about $8.

“ ‘E.T.’ was on sale on tape in India two weeks after it opened in the United States,” he said.

With all the problems, Singh said, he has done some buying here this week. He bought the Indian rights to two American low-budget action films (“White Cool” and “Bullies”) and a British horror film (“Raw Head”).

But he knows he could make a lot more money with “Serpent Warriors” or “Monster in the Closet,” forbidden fruit for an Indian shopping in this market.

“We can sit here and laugh at these movies,” Singh said, “but the truth is they’re making a lot of money.”

ON THE STREET: In the aftermath of Cannon Films’ self-promotional non-newsy press conference Monday, rumors began circulating that the company’s negotiations with MGM’s Ted Turner have fallen through.

Cannon has reportedly been talking to Turner about buying MGM’s Culver City lot, and when the company took out full-page ads to announce a press conference Monday, that was the announcement everyone expected.

Cannon’s Menahem Golan opened the conference by saying he had bad news and good news. The bad news was that Cannon had no major stars to trot out this year. The good news, he said, was, “We didn’t buy anything today.”

Our notebooks runneth over.

NOTES ‘N’ QUOTES: Robert Rehme, co-chairman of New World Pictures, and Charles Band, who owns the rapidly expanding Empire Films, don’t mind the fact that the top executives from major American studies decided to stay home this year.

“The heads of the other studios don’t have to be here,” said Rehme, “because they don’t sell their films here. We’re here to sell and that’s about all. We can buy movies anywhere.”

Rehme and Band both ordered full staffs to Cannes and both say business for their action-dominated lineups of films has been heavy.

“There may never be a better period for film makers,” said Band, the young producer who recently bought Dino De Laurentiis’ studios in Rome. “The video market has just blown the movie industry wide open. You can sell anything you can make.”

Rehme agrees with Band that these are boom times for film companies, evidenced by the ease with which New World is raising money.

Shearson-Lehman American Express raised $45 million for New World with a public stock offering in December and last week filed a second offering with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an offering that Rehme said will bring in an additional $50 million to $100 million.

“We’re doing some buying while we’re here too,” Rehme said, smiling. “We have some money.”