AN ODD COLLABORATION MAY PAY ON ‘LONGSHOT’

Tim Conway’s last movie was “The Private Eyes,” a slapstick detective spoof co-starring Don Knotts. Mike Nichols’ last movie was “Silkwood,” an Oscar-nominated biographical drama starring Meryl Streep. Paul Bartel’s last movie was “Lust in the Dust,” a raunchy Western starring Divine.

Now, as if united by a computer with a warped microchip, their three careers converge on “The Longshot,” a film written by and starring Conway, and being directed by Bartel for executive producer Nichols.

“It (the collaboration) is a little odd, I suppose,” says Bartel, whose best-known film--”Eating Raoul”--tapped that rare comedy source, cannibalism. “But it seems to be working.”

The film about four schlubs at a track who end up betting their lives on a horse race they think is fixed, will wrap next week, and may be released by Orion Pictures as early as Easter. If hybrid vigor works as well with movies as it does with cattle, “The Longshot” is a sure thing.

“It is a crazy amalgam,” says Conway’s co-star Harvey Korman, who is credited with bringing Nichols into the project. “You never know whether a movie works until you show it to an audience, but it sure feels good.”

Conway, Korman, Bartel and the rest of the “Longshot” company were at Hollywood Park in Inglewood earlier this week, shooting the final race-track sequences. Footage is being sent in batches to Nichols in New York, where he has been preparing to direct Streep and Mandy Patinkin in “Heartburn.”

“I’m crazy about what I’ve seen so far,” Nichols said in a telephone interview. “Tim and Harvey have been two of my favorite funny people for years. When I read the script, I got very excited.”

Korman, who worked in a play with Nichols 30 years ago in Chicago, talked Conway and producer Lang Elliott into sending the “Longshot” script to Nichols last Christmas. “I thought it was the best thing Tim had ever written,” Korman says. “I said, ‘Let’s send it to Nichols and get an appraisal; see what’s there.’ ”

Surprise. That longshot came in.

Nichols, who raises Arabian horses at his ranch in Santa Barbara, says he liked the script so much, he would have directed it himself had his schedule been open.

“I was drawn to the human part of the story more than the equine part,” Nichols said. “It’s very, very funny, and it’s also very serious. It’s about little guys who rarely have a chance at anything. . . . There are very few pictures now about real working guys, and Tim somehow plugged into that thing we all loved so much about ‘The Honeymooners.’ ”

Nichols agreed to serve as executive producer on the film, and was involved in everything from script changes to casting to approving the director. Bartel was suggested by Orion Pictures, but Nichols said he agreed right away.

“I liked ‘Eating Raoul’ a lot,” he said. “Bartel is very swift, very incisive in his style. . . . The main thing is that we all have the same ear for what’s funny.”

Conway seems bemused by all that has happened to his “Longshot” script, which he says he wrote in one day--July 4, 1984 (“I just got up and felt like doing it”).

“Mike Nichols picked out serious things about these losers who are desperate to win,” Conway says. “I’m always desperate to win, so I’m used to it. . . . I guess you can read as much into this as you want. I was just writing a funny story.”

He may have written his first draft in one day, but Conway said he’d been collecting material and characters for it most of his life. His father was a horse trainer, and as a teen-ager growing up in Cleveland, he worked as both an exercise boy and groom.

As an adult, the track has been his second home, and he now owns four thoroughbreds. He said he wrote “The Longshot” to re-create the subculture of the habitual horse bettors--the language, superstitions, fantasies and anecdotes.

“It’s a strange, fascinating group that hangs around a track,” he says. “It’s not like any other sport--there are no fistfights, nobody throws their beer. There’s a lot of compassion here because everybody knows we’re all losers. I don’t know of a winner at the track.”

Conway laces his conversation with stories--personal and apocryphal--that capture the spirit of the betting community. For instance, the one about the guy who had a heart attack and died in the middle of the race program. While he was being carried out, someone yelled, “Take me with him.”

Conway says the collaboration with Nichols and Bartel is giving the film a legitimacy it otherwise might have lacked.

“If Harvey or I had directed it, it would be closer to television,” he says. “It would be a raucous kind of comedy, a Disney movie even. Nichols made it a legitimate piece and Bartel has kept it legitimate.”

Bartel, acknowledging that the attraction for him was the chance to work with Nichols, says, “The Longshot” is a temporary digression from the eccentric material he prefers.

“This is the first film where I’m functioning exclusively as a director. It’s very much a Tim Conway film. Nichols and I both felt it had to be made as real as possible within the confines of the comedy. When they (the actors) get going, they get looser and looser and sillier and sillier.

“I’m trying to suppress the silliness and keep it moving.”

“MAX” HOT, “EXPLORERS” NOT: George Miller’s “Mad Max” series is finally a hit with American filmgoers. The second sequel, “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome,” grossed $10.3 million during its first five days and trailed only “Back to the Future” on the weekend’s box-office hit list.

The first “Mad Max,” released in 1980, grossed more than $100 million worldwide but was not widely distributed in the United States. The second one, released in 1981 under the title “The Road Warrior,” grossed less than $30 million in the United States. “Back to the Future” has joined “Rambo” as the summer’s only runaway hit. “Back” took in another $10.6 million during its second weekend and had $32.6 million in receipts after 10 days in release.

Elsewhere, the news was almost all bad for distributors. Business dropped dramatically for holdovers “Cocoon,” “Pale Rider” and “The Emerald Forest”; Paramount’s “The Explorers” opened to nearly disastrous totals. The Joe Dante alien-adventure averaged only $2,061 per screen on its way to a $3.6 million opening weekend.

“Silverado,” Lawrence Kasdan’s big-budget Western, did a little better than “The Explorers,” but with only $4.5 million after five days it is not likely to join this summer’s elite club of hits.

“Rambo,” the leader of the club, took in another $4.3 million to run its befuddling seven-week total to $125.3 million.