THERE’S LIFE IN THIS ‘KISS’

When producer David Weisman began screening “Kiss of the Spider Woman” early this year, he figured that most of the distributors who looked at it would consider its homosexual and political themes the commercial kiss of death.

“You can’t pick up a film with this subject matter and think you’re doing anything but a favor to someone,” Weisman says. “The name of the game is to not take big chances. I don’t blame anybody for passing on it.”

Weisman got a surprise. Distributors lined up for a shot at it, driving the North American rights to a hefty $1.5 million, more than covering the film’s production costs.

“We should have bought the worldwide rights,” says Cary Brokaw, president of marketing and distribution for Island Alive, which is distributing “Kiss” in the United States. “We feel it has the capability of crossing over to a much larger audience.”

The early returns have been more than encouraging. “Kiss,” an English-language film shot in Brazil, stars William Hurt and Raul Julia as cellmates in a South American prison. It was one of the hits of the Cannes Film Festival and has already taken in nearly $400,000 from four theaters in the United States.

The picture has broken house records at Cinema I in New York, grossing $252,109 in three weeks. It will open in Los Angeles and Orange County on Aug. 23.

Island Alive’s $1.5-million rights fee and the $1-million contractual advertising commitment make “Kiss” the Los Angeles-based distributor’s most ambitious release. The film’s quick success has prompted Island Alive, which is in the business of thinking small, to think big.

The company has never had more than 80 prints of one film in circulation. By this fall, Brokaw says, “Kiss” will be playing in from 200 to 300 theaters, and by the time its Oscar campaign ends next March (yes, he says, there will be one), Island Alive will have spent nearly $2 million in advertising.

These are huge numbers for a company that’s been nurturing one low-budget film--the American-made romantic fantasy “Choose Me”--for more than a year. Island Alive has carried that film around like a dog-eared novel, depending more on word of mouth and reviews than on the spare newspaper space its $1-million ad budget could buy.

So far, “Choose Me” has grossed about $5 million, a figure that would make studio execs weep. Island Alive, which has probably netted close to $2 million out of that, is beaming over it.

“A few of those a year makes a nice business,” Brokaw says.

The profits from “Kiss” may put Island Alive in a new tax bracket. Brokaw says he has visions of “Soldier’s Story” and “Places in the Heart”--intelligent films that made lots of money--dancing in his head.

“I feel that the taste of the moviegoing audience has been underestimated more than overestimated,” he says, explaining why Island Alive launched “Kiss” in late summer while audiences are still soaking in the shallow end of the Hollywood mainstream. “There is an increasingly sophisticated audience for movies. Our strategy is to find films that satisfy that audience.”

VICE DETAIL: When Sandy Howard’s violent urban drama “Vice Squad” opened three years ago, few people in either the film or vice industries (there are subtle distinctions) recognized the name of co-writer Kenneth Peters. But the cops on the beat would have recognized him on sight.

Peters was, in real life, their boss James J. Docherty, commander of the Administrative Vice Division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

“I wasn’t trying to hide what I was doing,” says Docherty, who is using his real name on “Hollywood Vice Squad,” which goes into production Monday in Hollywood. “There’s just a certain amount of kidding you have to go through when you become a writer on the department. I wanted to avoid that.”

“Hollywood Vice Squad” (not a sequel) is three stories linked together, Docherty says. One deals with prostitution, one with pornography and the third with gambling--sort of the Big Three of Hollywood vice.

The movie, budgeted at $4.8 million, will be directed by Penelope Spheeris (“The Decline of Western Civilization”) and will be released early next year by the recently formed Concorde/Cinema Group distribution company.

The production company is taking over the vacated Brown Derby near Hollywood and Vine, using its main floor for sets and the second floor for offices. The landmark building is scheduled for demolition when the film company moves out.

Docherty, who has also written vice-oriented scripts for TV (most recently an episode of “T. J. Hooker”), says the accent in “Hollywood Vice Squad,” which stars Carrie Fisher, Ronny Cox and Martin Landau, will be on the lives of the men and women who work vice. The earlier film was a plotted action drama, about a prostitute who helps police catch a serial killer.

“It (writing scripts) is an escape for me,” says Docherty, a 22-year veteran of the LAPD. “It releases stress and tension. It’s a tremendous catharsis. And, of course, it’s profitable.”

ONLY IN EAST HAMPTON: Composer Brad Feidel (“Fright Night”) and his wife were riding a shuttle bus from the airport to a relative’s house in East Hampton, N.Y., last Christmas when they passed a small theater playing “The Terminator,” the hit Arnold Schwarzenegger time-warp adventure for which Feidel had written 85 minutes of original music.

A couple of days later, he read that director Frank Perry (who’s made films as good as “The Diary of a Mad Housewife” and as bad as “Mommie Dearest”) was in East Hampton shooting a movie with Susan Sarandon and Raul Julia.

“ ‘Boy, that’s the kind of film I’d like to work on,’ ” Feidel recalls saying to his wife. “A classy movie with a classy cast. After ‘Terminator’ I was getting a lot of heavy action stuff offered and I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as an action composer.

“In the back of my head, I had this little daydream that Perry would go see ‘Terminator’ at that little theater in East Hampton and say, ‘I’ve got to get that composer for my movie.’ ”

When Feidel got to New York, there were messages from his agent to call Perry in East Hampton. Only in Hollywood. . . .

“That’s exactly what happened,” Perry says, laughing into the telephone from his home in New York. “I just went to see the movie and I walked out thinking composer. I was blown away by the score.”

Feidel, 34, had been working steadily scoring both features and made-for-TV films for five years before “Terminator,” but composers have break-out films too.

“All of a sudden I was a commodity,” Feidel says. “It gave me a certain credibility.”

Besides “Compromising Positions,” a Paramount movie opening Aug. 23, Feidel composed the music for Columbia’s “Fright Night,” now in the third week of a successful run, and is currently scoring “Desert Bloom,” a Jon Voight film, also for Columbia, to be released in February.

SCREEN TRADE: It was reported here recently that veteran writer Stirling Silliphant, working from a story concept, is writing the script for “Over the Top,” Sylvester Stallone’s next movie.

It’s true, but there were at least two earlier scripts--one titled “American Dreamer” by Gary Conway, another with the current title by David Engelbach.

Engelbach, who wrote “Death Wish II” for Cannon Films, says he rewrote “American Dreamer” when it was planned as a $2-million movie, less than a fifth of what Stallone is being paid by Cannon Films to star in it.

Silliphant says he’s aware of the earlier scripts but has not read them.

“I make it a policy with rewrites not to see the previous work,” he says. “This (assigning scripts for rewrite) seems to be the habit today. In the golden days, one guy started and stayed with it.”