MAGNIFICENT OBSESSIONS

E. M. Forster would have understood Hollywood. In 1912, he got a germ of an idea for a novel: “Something happens in the Marabar caves--but I don’t know what.” Twelve years later, he had the answer, and published “A Passage to India.” Forster lived almost another half century, but never published another novel. At 89, though, he did finally give his blessing to a film of “Passage.” Little did he know--or maybe he did know--it would take another 15 years to get the movie made.

“Forster gave us a verbal go-ahead,” remembered the film’s co-producer, Richard Goodwin, “but my partner (John Brabourne) and I never got it in writing. So it was another 10 years before the Forster estate arranged the sale of film rights.” And another five years before the $14.5-million budget was secured (in a complex arrangement involving HBO, Columbia Pictures and EMI).

Only now, 26 years after reading “Passage” and deciding one day he’d produce it, can Goodwin even remotely smile about the struggle. “You never give up. But I must say that after one rainy month of rejection in Hollywood, I hit a true low point. The day I was attacked by a swan at the Bel-Air Hotel . . . was the final indignity.”

Local swans are always unfriendly, in one way or another, when it comes to serious films--and not just to visiting British producers. The nominees for Monday night’s presentation of the Oscar for best picture--”Amadeus,” “The Killing Fields,” “Places in the Heart,” “A Soldier’s Story” and “Passage”--are more serious and similar than in years past: None began life as a star package or a pre-sold best seller. None wound up (a la “Terms of Endearment” or “Kramer vs. Kramer”) as the out-front runaway favorite. None is a blockbuster. None is in the currently hot genre of Eddie Murphy-Bill Murray comedies. All are period pieces, and none was the product of a young director. Each took years to get launched. Finally, each is a fluke.

These five films have something else in common. In a series of interviews with those involved with each of the best-picture candidates, a gossamer thread emerged. Call it obsession, not with Oscar, not with potential revenue, or even with just getting the picture made. It was, in every case, something more personal.

Sometimes the obsession was communicated from film maker to colleague (as in the case of “Places in the Heart” costumer Ann Roth) and sometimes--as with the New York Times’ Sydney Schanberg (“The Killing Fields”)--the obsession transcended the personal and became international.

“I still see myself as a Canadian,” said director-producer Norman Jewison (“A Soldier’s Story”), “and my own obsession is with America, from the outside. It started I guess at 17 when I hitchhiked around the American South.” It didn’t stop with the Oscar-winning “In the Heat of the Night” (1967), which Jewison directed, and it continued with “A Soldier’s Story,” which got financing against the odds.

For playwright Peter Shaffer (“Amadeus”), it’s something simpler. While Jewison has had his Hollywood ups (“The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming”) and downs (“F.I.S.T.”), Shaffer has yet to be satisfied with a film of his work. From “Royal Hunt of the Sun” through “Equus,” no director until Milos Forman (“Amadeus”) got it right. “My final dream for ‘Amadeus,’ ” revealed Shaffer, “was a musical ‘Amadeus.’ Only on film, and finally could we have, a musical ‘Amadeus’!”

Composer Maurice Jarre (“Dr. Zhivago”), working for the fourth time with David Lean, found himself with a very specific, nearly unsolvable problem: To answer E. M. Forster’s question, What happens in the caves? “David (Lean) said to me: ‘Maurice, I want you to write music right from your groin for this very long scene in the cave. This isn’t a story of India, it’s a story of a woman. I want you to write music that evokes awakening sexuality.’ I had to discover how.”

A different dilemma emerged for “Places in the Heart” costumer Ann Roth (“Silkwood”). Writer-director Robert Benton was making a movie about his Texas hometown, his childhood, and in his own eyes he saw it plain. Roth then had to see Texas in the ‘30s as Benton saw it; Benton, after all, had been an art director himself (at Esquire magazine), and is what Roth calls “visual in the extreme. He would say ‘oil cloths on the table, and tea in the jelly jars,’ and I knew immediately what the character cooked that morning, and wore, and if she did her own ironing. I suppose his obsession communicated itself to me--for real.”

Even more real was the Cambodian saga unraveled in “The Killing Fields.” For journalist Sydney Schanberg, the saga was something else: He was trying to write about the best friend he ever had (his aide Dith Pran). And Schanberg wanted the friendship portrayed “warts and all,” until he realized that “warts really meant warts!”

Such passion isn’t translated to film quickly. Or even successfully, in all cases. For every obsession that won an Oscar (Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People,” for instance), there are a slew that barely even score (Warren Beatty’s “Shampoo,” Barbra Streisand’s “Yentl”). All too often, the movies that are most obsessional in subject matter--Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz,” Herbert Ross’ “Pennies From Heaven”--are those that least excite the Academy membership. (Last year’s standout obsessions that failed to win much Oscar favor were Sergio Leone’s acclaimed “Once Upon a Time in America” and “The Cotton Club.” Producer Robert Evans, for all his legend, believes his obsession to get “Cotton Club” madewasted five years of his life. “The other side of obsession is disillusionment,” Evans says. “Those five years taught me nothing. I’ve always been a believer that one learns from his successes, not from his failures.”)

“Memory fades,” claimed “Passage” co-producer Goodwin, who as an Englishman has an outsider’s perspective on Hollywood. “When we brought ‘Passage’ to studios, most of the executives were too busy to see us. Or not busy enough! Now we’re about to film a Dickens book, and I’m expecting to go through the whole thing all over again. The quest for money, for receptivity. When you spread a producer’s fee over four years, it comes to next to nothing.”

The irony is clear. “Originally, your American movie moguls were gamblers whose first priority was to make good movies, and then money,” Goodwin said. “They got very rich that way. Now you have executives whose first priority is to make money, not movies. I don’t know that they’re getting as rich. . . . There’s only one secret. You never give up, ever. You never give up if only because so many people do give up.”

Here, then, is a look at five who didn’t.

Obsession, when a writer gets lucky, is also an exorcism of ghosts. Haunted is the only word to apply to journalist Sydney Schanberg. For four years, Schanberg spent “not one whole day free of worry or guilt” over the whereabouts (and well-being) of Dith Pran, the Cambodian tour guide who became interpreter and aide to the Pulitzer-winning reporter in covering the Cambodian civil war.

In 1975, Pran saved Schanberg from death by gunfire at the hands of peasant revolutionaries; three days later, the tables turned--but Schanberg was unable to save Pran from what became a four-year separation. Schanberg saw his friend herded, helplessly, toward a slave labor camp in the Cambodian countryside. While Sydney Schanberg returned to America, Dith Pran wound up in an agricultural gulag, and was not able to make even the slightest contact until he resurfaced in Thailand in 1979.

Schanberg seems still to have scars on his scars when he talks about the separation and his return to America. “I would go to dinner parties, and I wouldn’t talk to anyone. The people were nice, but the conversations seemed stupid. The talk was of mortgages and private schools and the basics, and I didn’t care. There was just no way I could function in those situations.”

Now, five years after Pran resurfaced, Schanberg can talk about what he learned as well as what he endured. His search for Pran lasted so long that it forced him to face certain truths, the first of which was professional.

“Writers are told to write about these things, to get them out of their stomachs, so I sat down to write a book. I did a few chapters of what I would call throat-clearing, but Pran was still missing--so I didn’t feel it made much sense going on. And this is the point: He and I functioned as the same person. It’s as though the same head was operating, and that’s why the separation was unimaginable.”

Perhaps only crisis--especially war, especially on remote turf--allows such a bond to develop, reveal itself and be expressed. Even writers (and especially journalists) shy away from such declarations unless discussing, say, Butch Cassidy and Sundance or the Hardy Boys. The friendship of Schanberg and Pran would seem to be a modern myth, a heroic couplet.

“Oh no,” Schanberg insisted. “To call it mythic is asking me to carry too much of a burden. It’s not that simple. The relationship grew out of an inequality. Pran grew up in a culture where the tradition was ‘to serve’ Westerners. And you just don’t announce you’re equal to somebody who’s serving you. First of all, you don’t believe it yourself. And secondly, it’s not true just because you say it. It was the journalistic process that brought us together, that let us function as one person.”

Schanberg was the outsider in an alien land. But Pran was, after all, at home. Is it possible that Schanberg’s need was greater? It’s unnecessary to hedge when asking Schanberg about Pran’s side of the story. He knows it inside and out.

“What Pran needed in this mutual obsession was not to be in competition with me. Otherwise his ego would have been a problem. But the better my work got, the bigger high he got. It was not a case of two writers, thankfully. We complemented each other. Together, we got the story of his people told.”

Only when Schanberg realized his task was to write about the friendship--not just about Cambodia or war--was he truly able to write. The separation was the drama, and the metaphor for the reporter’s war correspondence. (That it made for a perfect movie plot was coincidental.) Wind up Schanberg on the subject of heroism, and he gets very specific, detailing minutely the day in 1975 the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia. Listening to him is a way to learn what reporters really do.

“Our actions are complex and of many pieces, but on the day the country was captured I knew Pran’s mind and he knew mine. I can see him now, standing on the street, and then being gone. For a moment, I couldn’t see anything else but him. On some practical level I was thinking, ‘I can’t speak the language, what will I do?’ It was an unthinkable, visceral moment to be that torn up and traumatized. I just wanted to get him out. On a rational level, you know there is just nothing you can do. But you become irrational.”

And no subject makes for better movie drama. In 1979, Pran’s release made the pages of Newsweek and Time, and caught the eye of producer David Puttnam (“Chariots of Fire”). The journalist and the producer lunched in Manhattan a month before Schanberg’s New York Times Magazine piece (“The Death and Life of Dith Pran”) appeared in January of 1980. Thus Puttnam, by one month, beat the dozen or so other producers who would soon be pursuing Schanberg.

Remembered the journalist: “I wasn’t cynical about a movie version because I was euphoric about life. Pran had escaped, which was the rosiest thing that could have happened to me. Finally I’d written the story. How could anything bad happen? That was probably a whole bunch of ego on my part, but I’m naive in dozens of ways.”

Also, Schanberg gave Puttnam two conditions, “which were very simple and thus horrendously hard to meet. First, I did not want to be portrayed as a plaster saint. I didn’t want us to be like the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Secondly, I wanted the Cambodians shown as full-blown people with whom you could identify. How many films about Vietnam and the Third World have faces or people you actually remember? Think about it.”

Schanberg thought better of going to the Thailand location, but he did on one occasion involve himself in casting. The result was pure folly. “I never wanted a star who goes twinkle, but there was a very good actor I did want to play me. This was an ego trip for me, and I was arrogant enough to think if I called the actor I could persuade him to say yes. He was very nice for 20 minutes on the phone. But he couldn’t and didn’t take the part, and he probably would have been disastrous. I understood then that at some point you must let go.”

(Schanberg has: He won’t be in the audience at the Oscar ceremonies Monday night. “It’s a show business evening, and though the movie deserves all the honors, I’ll just hide out in New York and hope for the best.”)

But what Schanberg doesn’t want is for audiences to see “Killing Fields” as a fairy tale--”Man finds friend.” “I wish the movie had shown us in our gentler phases, as we hung out and dined out and caroused. Pran was very funny when he smoked pot. But the movie would have lasted four hours, and it was about something else.”

Schanberg was talking about limits. “Separated, I was irrational, and so was Pran. He had the same fantasies, of me flying in in a helicopter to save him. When separated, you cling to memories, and you romanticize. We no longer have to do that, to paint each other in lionized proportions.” Ever looking for the precise right phrase, Schanberg added: “As in any growing closeness, we now like each other better and hurt each other more.”

Sometimes an obsession can begin in the most innocuous manner. One afternoon in 1977, playwright Peter Shaffer (“Equus”) was reading an account of Mozart’s funeral, and found himself startled by an obscure contradiction. Five mourners at the shabby third-class funeral claimed it was raining--and yet meteorological reports of that day showed no storm. All of a sudden, Shaffer was full of questions like “Who’s lying, and why?”

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians acknowledges the contradictions around Mozart’s death and burial, and dismisses both the storm and allegations that Mozart might have been poisoned as undocumented and false. Shaffer, however, wasn’t going to stop at one source: In an even more obscure French book on “The Magic Flute,” he came upon a claim (later verified) that there had been no reference to the storm until 65 years after Mozart’s death.

Simultaneously, he also discovered that Antonio Salieri (the rival of Mozart and the protagonist of “Amadeus”) was one of the mourners. Of such stuff are obsessions--and plays and movies--made.

Shaffer, a playwright since his mid-30s, was previously a book clerk and librarian (in Manhattan), a publicist (for an English sheet music firm) and a music critic (for England’s Time and Tide Magazine). With his twin brother Anthony (the playwright of “Sleuth”), he also wrote thriller novels early in his career. Certainly no background could be more suited to the writing of “Amadeus,” a thriller woven of music and self-promotion and reimagined historical detail.

At 58, with half a dozen successful plays behind him, Shaffer was at just the right place and time to tackle his saga. Twenty years ago, with “Royal Hunt of the Sun,” Shaffer was praised for the “musical grandeur of his speech.” And with “Equus,” Shaffer threw himself into obsession. A stable boy who blinds horses was indeed fodder for a psychiatrist, if not a movie camera.

“I wasn’t very happy with that film,” said the square-jawed Shaffer recently. “It was simply too literal.” Dreamily, almost like Salieri, Shaffer began to free-associate about the lost possibilities of “Equus.” “Had Jean Cocteau directed the film, it would have been highly poeticized, unliteral and probably stylized. I dare say it would have been better. It was never about blinding animals, but I’m not sure the director (Sidney Lumet) understood that.”

And so, with “Amadeus,” Shaffer (an Oscar nominee for his screenplay adaptation) made sure the director was the right director. In November, 1979, serendipity entered the picture. On the night of the first preview performance of “Amadeus,” director Milos Forman (“Hair”) introduced himself to Shaffer and began talking about a film. “This was before anyone knew what ‘Amadeus’ was! Milos was thus a virgin enthusiast. But sometimes a play is blessed from the beginning.”

And “Amadeus” seemed to be. “In Washington, before we got to Broadway, I remember writing something like six different scenes in two days, and being intoxicated by the work. Possessed, really. In creating drama for those two figures, Mozart and Salieri, the natural climax seemed to be death. And yet one of them lived another 33 years and was thought to be smug and happy. Well, this elaborate set piece needed a second-act finish. Finally, it came.”

If Shaffer sounds like one of his characters, it’s unintentional. It’s just that this particular play has taken all his professional time for eight years. “I always say I write very fast, very slowly. By that I mean, in four years I wrote some 30 versions of ‘Amadeus.’ ” His screenplay was written mostly in an intense four-month period, most of that time spent in a Connecticut farmhouse. He and Milos Forman listened days on end to Mozart LPs, improvised scenes, argued and finally agreed on major points--especially the scene in which the dying Mozart dictates music to Salieri at bedside.

“That scene came very late in the writing process, and pleases me more than anything in the final script. I wanted the music to be celebrated. So I thought of having this ravenous wolf, Salieri, sitting at the end of the bed taking dictation. There’s almost an erotic charge to the way he receives Mozart. Salieri has duality: He’s half wanting to have written the music himself, and half moved by what’s coming from the genius. And it was fitting to have a new ending for the movie. Otherwise, you’re just birthing the same child twice. . . . As for Salieri, once and for all I could make him the wicked center of things.”

Shaffer was talking about his real obsession, with success. “Salieri was a most successful musician, in a very sophisticated community. But success depends on what you demand from life. Salieri, my Salieri, in a proper world would indeed be content with his worldly accomplishments. He should have been content with them; they were sincerely wrought. But I put a joker in the pack.”

Shaffer paused long enough to let his premise sink in, then continued: “Salieri was the one man alive who realized what music can be. Therefore, it’s difficult for him to settle. He was condemned to 30 years of being merely distinguished. You could say both composers just want to be happy, but I don’t think there’s a play in that.”

But what about the gap between a writer’s idea and the execution of that idea? To have succeeded with “Amadeus” meant Shaffer passed up any number of other projects. ‘Ah yes, I’m beset with how wide the gulf is for a writer between impetus and execution. Any time you start writing anything, you know that behind you is this vast mountain range of truly great playwrights.”

There’s no such mountain range in Hollywood. Monday, Shaffer will make his first appearance at the Academy Awards (though he was nominated for “Equus”). Musing about it, he sounded almost boyish. “Oscar is really the American ritual. All of one’s life, it’s been a famous award. But, frankly, it’s a bit dizzying, isn’t it?”

Five years ago in a Miami museum, Ann Roth’s motto about movie costuming came to her in a flash. The Broadway and Hollywood designer was attempting to find authentic pirate gear for the film “The Island,” and she was gleeful at the treasures she was uncovering: Anaconda vests, whalebone bodices, Oliver Cromwell-style jackets. “You can’t improve on the truth,” she said offhandedly, and went back to work.

When Edith Head died four years ago, Ann Roth surfaced. Roth, who says she works only for friends, must have lots of them on both coasts. Right now on Broadway, she’s represented by “Hurlyburly” and the about-to-preview stage version of “Singin’ in the Rain.” On film, her 1950s clothes for Jessica Lange as Patsy Cline in “Sweet Dreams” will appear later this year, as will her 1920s clothes for Glenn Close in “Maxie.” Her 1980s clothes for Close (as well as for Jeff Bridges) will also appear this year in “Jagged Edge.” She costumes every Mike Nichols project, most every John Schlesinger project, almost all of Neil Simon’s films and plays, ditto the work of Brian De Palma and Jane Fonda--but until “Places in the Heart,” she’d never worked with writer-director Robert Benton or star Sally Field. Now “Places” has brought her an Oscar nomination for costume design.

“Usually, the first time with a director is the hardest,” said Roth, a New Englander who manages to have a life in Vermont (between bicoastal commutes). “At the beginning with a director, you’re hedging around, wondering, ‘What does he really mean?’ And when you don’t honestly know, then you’re in trouble. With Benton, you know what he wants because he communicates.”

The first communication between director and costumer surprised even Roth. “One day, Benton turned up at my extremely uncomfortable loft on 19th Street. This is not the kind of place that shows one off in the best possible light. It’s not a place you hang around in. But Benton came, and sat there and literally told me everything about every character in the film.”

When Roth retells what Benton told her, she does it in imagery. “Benton said, ‘The character is canning apples and peaches, her slip strap is hanging down, and there’s perspiration. . . .” Well, I could see it. From the first day, he could start a sentence and I could finish it.”

It wasn’t simply a case of folie a deux , however. Benton, in “Places,” was dealing with his roots and an idealized version of his family in Waxahachie, Tex., in 1935. Roth understood. “I’m from a town smaller even than Waxahachie. And Benton and I are exactly the same age (53). I know it’s mere coincidence, but of such things are films made.”

More than coincidental, though, is Roth’s way of characterizing directors. “I’ve decided there are two kinds, film makers and theatrical directors. A theatrical director is somebody like Paolo Taviani who did ‘Padre, Padrone.’ I loved the film, but I would never have been hired for it. That man hasn’t any interest in costumes at all. You know within five minutes of meeting a director which type he is. If he wants an actor to invent , then he’s a film maker. If he sees a character like a character in literature, then he’s a film maker. Benton’s like that.”

And Benton’s attention to detail is what hooked Roth. “He was interested in what everybody wore and how much closet space each character had. But then this had to do with the thread of the piece, which is an extremely romantic look back.”

Roth has a feisty manner, but claims to be a romantic when working. A feisty romantic. Example: When she costumed “Murder by Death,” Roth knew that Truman Capote, making his movie debut, would be wasted in the simple tuxedo he demanded. “It took some work but I got him into a silver fox smoking jacket,” she remembered. “It made the difference between hit and miss.” In other words, if Capote’s acting wasn’t memorable, at least his presence was.

Star presence is not Roth’s favorite subject. Her career began as assistant to the legendary Irene Sharaff, but Roth, unlike Sharaff, doesn’t cater to stars. “I would never have worked in Hollywood’s Golden Era,” she insisted, “because I have no interest in maintaining star images. I’m interested, or fascinated, with character.” Ironically, of this year’s best-picture nominees, “Places” is the only one featuring a bona-fide movie star, Sally Field. Roth’s initial meeting with Field sounds suspiciously like a sizing-up session.

“We had this preliminary chat, and I remember saying: ‘Sally, listen, I don’t work with wardrobe ladies and so on. I have my own gang, and it somehow all gets together. But if you want a maid, we can get you a maid.’ And she said, ‘No, your way is fine.’ But I wanted to be sure, so I said, ‘Sally, I can be a real pest. And I need a lot of you. ‘ She was very good about it. Star behavior? Not at all.”

Field did what Roth did--she asked questions. Would Edna (Field’s character) take her girdle off to plow the fields? Would Edna’s mother have been an educated woman? How would Edna’s table manners be? Did she have the kind of gentility that comes from no gentility at all? Posing such questions is a way of unraveling a character, or inventing it.

“We discovered Edna is the kind of woman who would pin her hair up just to go from kitchen to bedroom. She was someone who doesn’t walk through her own house in a slip even if it’s in a totally remote area. Because one simply does not do that.”

What Roth couldn’t do was lean on the budget. “What that means is, you’re careful. It means you don’t go to fancy shoe parlors and pay $60 for orthopedics that pass themselves off as 1930s shoes. It means instead, you use 13 gallons of shoe-stretch spray. It means tricks.”

It also meant, on “Places,” listening. “One day (co-star) John Malkovich said, ‘Since my character is blind, what if one morning he puts on the wrong bathrobe?’ And I thought, ‘Perfect.’ That’s an example of an effect you can’t explain or design or draw. I’m talking here about effects you sometimes don’t even see, but sense. If a prowler has a red mole on his behind, you won’t see it--but I as a costumer find it amusing. It’s like the woman in ‘Places’ who wears the $9 dress with her fingernails chopped off. You don’t see the fingernails, but I know they’re chopped off.”

Is Roth biting her own nails about Oscar? “This film is a ‘30s kitchen reverie, and I’m honestly amazed to be nominated. It’s a nice costume job, but it’s not what you’d call a stop-traffic job.”

But if she should win? “I’ll probably thank the Texas Teamsters who got me into a five-and-dime at midnight because I needed yard goods. . . . But the very idea of walking up the aisle? Omigod!”

Certain personal obsessions are shared by the public, if the timing is right. In 1967, the year of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “The Graduate,” the best-picture Oscar went to none of those trend-setters--it went to the thriller “In the Heat of the Night.” Some industryites felt the other three films canceled one another out in the voting--but another theory also operated.

“Bobby Kennedy took an early look at ‘Heat,’ ” recalled the film’s director, Norman Jewison, “and I remember him taking me aside. Bobby said, ‘This picture is going to strike a nerve across the country--because your timing is perfect.’ ”

Last year, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael singled out Robert Benton for having “exquisite feelers” about the mood of the country--for knowing the timing was right five years ago for “Kramer vs. Kramer” and right last year for the inspiration of “Places in the Heart.” But it’s Jewison more often than Benton who not only has the feelers but uses them--for better for worse.

Consider the evidence. In the ‘50s, the Canadian broke into American television by grasping a central fact about U.S. show business: Stars count. He directed the classiest TV specials of the early ‘60s, featuring Harry Belafonte, Judy Garland and Danny Kaye. Making the transition to movie director meant accepting some minor vehicles--but Jewison unlocked Doris Day’s dormant sexuality in “The Thrill of It All,” and launched himself as a commercial movie director. Two years later, when Sam Peckinpah dropped out of “The Cincinnati Kid,” Jewison stepped in and stepped up. In 1966, his “The Russians Are Coming” humorously played on Americans’ fascination with detente. The following 15 years have been a professional roller-coaster, a low point being “Rollerball” in 1975, a sci-fi mishmash that took on the Olympics, multinational corporate intrigue and violence, all in one sitting.

But success or failure isn’t the point in commercial Hollywood movie making; the point is to stay in the game. And Jewison, at 58, not only has staying power, he’s once again got timing. His film “A Soldier’s Story,” based on Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer-winning play about the murder of a black sergeant on a segregated Louisiana Army base in World War II, was the sleeper of 1984. In a viewer’s poll taken last weekend on the syndicated “Entertainment Tonight,” the overwhelming popular favorite for the best-picture Oscar was “Soldier’s Story.”

Not since “Heat” has Jewison had such heat. Curiously, both films cover the American black experience. Jewison is a white Canadian Methodist. The temptation is to label him the new Stanley Kramer. (Kramer, the liberal producer-director of “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” and “The Defiant Ones” was known for taking on causes.)

“A lot of people in America feel I do message pictures,” reacted Jewison, who since 1970 has lived abroad. “But a lot of other people feel I spend too much time entertaining, and not enough time revealing my personal feelings. I think it comes down to the fact that I’ve done subjects nobody else wanted to do. But I hope I’m not message-y. My big secret is that I am afraid of boring audiences. It’s that simple.”

It is and it isn’t. If writers write mostly what they observed and felt before age 20, the same can hold true for movie directors. “My own fascination was with America from the outside,” Jewison insisted. At 17, he left Canada and hitchhiked across the American South. In other words, he covered Carson McCullers-Flannery O’Connor country. The impressions haven’t faded.

“I was kicked off a bus in Tennessee,” Jewison remembered, “because I sat in the wrong seat. I barely missed a lynching in one town, but hitched a ride with a truck driver who later told me his truck was used in the lynching. I didn’t know then I would ever make films, but all this stayed with me. Imagine how the American South looked to a Canadian kid!”

What fascinated Jewison about “A Soldier’s Story” was “for the first time on film I had the chance to show blacks relating to other blacks, not just to whites. I felt the play delved very deeply into the black psyche.” With 18 films behind him, Jewison also understood the Hollywood executive psyche.

“As soon as I read the play, I flew to New York where Charles Fuller and I talked into the wee hours of the morning. He was interested in rewriting it for the screen, and I knew it would take time.” Meantime, MGM passed on the project, as did Universal. Jewison had a “personal relationship” with Warners’ then-production chief Robert Shapiro, who said yes to the project. (Jewison was then in the midst of making “Best Friends” for the studio, starring Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn.)

“I got Warners not only to buy screen rights, but also to put up development money for Charles. I suspected it would take something like 10 months for him to write the script, and it did.” (The deal Jewison struck for Fuller amounted to a $150,000 payment for film rights, with a $50,000 bonus if the Off-Broadway play won the Pulitzer Prize--which it did. Jewison’s own deal was structured so that he, too, was paid $150,000 up front--instead of the $1.25 million he got for directing “Best Friends.” But Jewison would collect a percentage of the film’s gross until he got his $1.25-million fee.)

“I remember now Charles coming to the farm in Canada, and us walking and talking about the story. And then him finishing the script, and me wanting to proceed.” Naturally, the next event was Bob Shapiro’s exit from Warners, and Warners losing interest in “Soldier’s.”

Jewison felt a commitment to Fuller, and thus went back to being a salesman. “It’s the hardest part of film making,” he said, then added, “No, let me amend that. Making the bloody thing is the hardest part. But I was getting very tired of hearing the same question from every studio I went to.”

The question was, “Who’s going to go to this movie?” Jewison understood why it was being asked. Black films that don’t feature Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor usually don’t get made. Diana Ross hasn’t been in a movie since 1978. Sidney Poitier, by choice, hasn’t acted in a picture in almost a decade. Magazine editors rarely put blacks on covers and, until “The Cosby Show,” TV series starring blacks were fading. Jewison was trying to sell “A Soldier’s Story” before the success of “Cosby” and after the failure of his own “Best Friends.”

And there were other reasons why not: The subject matter was unremittingly serious, and there were no stars. “Such decisions are not undertaken casually, and I understood that. Two years of one’s life is a long time, but I became more convinced I wanted to do this film. Yet even I had to admit that it was not ‘Tootsie’ or ‘Ghostbusters.’ Finally, though, you just have to listen to yourself.”

In the end, Columbia Pictures listened to Jewison, saying yes if he kept the budget to a tight $6 million. “Soldier’s” became the first film in a seven-picture pact with the studio. (His just-wound “Agnes of God” was the second.) “Again, timing was my final argument. I just felt the climate was tight, and I don’t think I’m being proven wrong. We’re doing surprisingly good business in Europe, and the crossover audience here is what we hoped for.”

But wasn’t an Oscar nomination for best director also what Jewison hoped for? “It doesn’t bother me,” he insisted (making one think of his friend Robert Kennedy’s line, “I’m much too rich and much too tired to worry about it.”) “Oh, years ago it would have bothered me a lot,” he confessed. “But Willie Wyler once told me the only piece of advice a director needs to remember. Willie said, ‘When your legs give out, that’s it.’ And, really, that is it.”

Movie composers, especially the best-known, work almost entirely on deadline. “Lara’s Theme” from “Dr. Zhivago,” which may have lingered in one’s head for the last 20 years, was written in a matter of minutes in a Paris hotel suite. Such deadlines lend a compulsive quality to the lives of movie composers. Composer Maurice Jarre’s most recent scores (“The Year of Living Dangerously,” “A Passage to India” and “Witness”) have been done on four continents--and fast. The latest stop in his perpetual globetrot was Sydney, where he composed the score for “Road Warrior II.”

If David Lean spent most of the last 15 years on “Passage,” Jarre (an Oscar nominee for original score) spent an actual five weeks--but that doesn’t mean the intensity wasn’t there. It’s just that the men have what Jarre calls a “shorthand. After four films (“Lawrence of Arabia,” “Dr. Zhivago,” “Ryan’s Daughter,” “Passage”), we have found that we connect. David has all that Celtic energy. He’s a wonderful publicity man for the Celtic people. I think he and I clicked almost from first knowing each other.”

The click is not without complications, however. “I am, how you say, of two minds about the deadline pressure,” said the talky Jarre one recent afternoon. “On ‘Passage,’ I had plenty of time to rest and research and visit India. David likes me to come to the locations, and that’s not unpleasant. Months go by. Then, wham, always the same thing! The final cut of the film gets to me only days before the music must be recorded. Theaters are booked. So in the end, no matter how much time you research, you’re writing all the music in a few weeks.”

On “Passage,” that meant writing 45 minutes of music in 2 1/2 weeks. “On one side, it’s good: There’s no time for self-flagellation,” reasoned the Frenchman. “But on the other side, it’s awful. Because you know if you just had one more day! If Mozart was commissioned by, say, a prince, he could always say he needed another day. But mon dieu ! In the film world we can never have that one more day!”

Jarre wasn’t truly complaining, especially about “Passage.” Or about David Lean. Lean has taught Jarre volumes about film, from the time of his first major assignment, “Lawrence of Arabia.” “David talks to me in images. A film artist never asks for an oboe to cover up a bad scene; a film artist doesn’t think of music as medicine for a sick movie. David talks to me as he would talk to an actor.”

The dialogue began quite by accident in the early ‘60s. Producer Sam Spiegel was in Paris and saw “Sundays and Cybele,” a film Jarre scored. “Sam spoke in the terminology of the big Hollywood producer, but I must say I was impressed when he talked about ‘the most ambitious movie ever made!’ His idea was unique enough: On ‘Lawrence,’ he wanted to have three composers. The Russian Aram Khachaturian, Benjamin Britten and myself. But then the Russian didn’t want to leave Russia, and Britten asked for one year to write one-third of the score. So I got the job.” In six weeks of 17-hour days, Jarre completed the work. “Panic time, the usual.”

Un usual is the continuing rapport between Lean and Jarre. “It’s unusual because my English is very poor and David is not a musician on a professional level. But he knows what he wants.” And Jarre arrived in India prepared for what would become a 28-week schedule, with some 1,500 camera setups. “I thought myself so lucky to have studied Indian music years ago at the Paris Conservatory.” But Lean was not duly impressed. What dumbfounded Jarre were Lean’s initial instructions.

“The first thing David said to me was, ‘Maurice, I want absolutely no Indian music. This is not a movie about India. It’s about a girl who could be black or Chinese. We are not going to say to people, ‘Look, this is India!’ So no sitar, Maurice.’ I was floored,” added the composer, who went on to explain how he got the last word (or note).

“I haven’t told this before, but because of my Paris training, I knew of an obscure instrument called the tambura. It resonates like a drone, and it sounds like millions of insects, millions of bees. I used it ever so slightly over the main title. Immediately it identifies India.”

Identifying the sexuality implicit in “Passage” was touchier for Jarre. His true challenge was to punctuate a particularly pivotal, erotic scene in the Marabar caves (and to answer, finally, the question posed by E.M. Forster in 1912).

“David put his hands between his legs and said to me, ‘Maurice, write some music coming from here. We need to know that this girl already has some sexual drive. The music must say what she really feels inside.’ I mulled it over awhile, and then I thought, ‘Thank God, the tambura!’ ”