FRANK PERRY COMES IN FROM CRITICS’ COLD

The doghouse is no place for a director to be. Ask Frank Perry. He spent a lot of time in there after the critical flops of his last two films.

“Mommie Dearest,” the movie version of Christina Crawford’s book about her mother, made him eligible for entry. “Monsignor,” about a priest who fools around with the Mafia and gets involved with a woman, pushed him in and slammed the door.

So forget about his earlier movies--”David and Lisa” and “Diary of a Mad Housewife.” His last two pictures bombed. Don’t bother to return his calls.

So Perry and his wife, writer Barbara Goldsmith (“Little Gloria, Happy at Last”), went back to their New York base where, as he says, “It’s easier to walk around with leprosy than it is here in Los Angeles. Here everyone knows you’ve got it; in New York there are still some people left who don’t think a film flop is the end of the world. So I went there and waited.”

And waited. And waited. Scripts stopped coming; the phone stopped ringing. And this was the same Frank Perry of whom the great director Jean Renoir had said, after viewing “David and Lisa”: “His film is a turning point in world cinema.”

But, in or out of the doghouse, the name of the game is survival. You pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start reading scripts again. Or, in Perry’s case, books. And the book he read again was Susan Isaacs’ “Compromising Positions,” which he’d first tried to buy in 1977.

Now look at him. Suddenly he’s ensconced there in Bungalow 7 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, his face wreathed in smiles, his mood buoyant and bubbling. His movie “Compromising Positions” is out, and the notices, most of them, are very good indeed.

“And I don’t think Paramount would have put me in this bungalow if they weren’t optimistic about the picture,” he says dryly. He’s right. Had the advance word been bad, he’d have been in a back room at the Chateau Marmont--and he’d have had to pick up the bill.

“Comedy of a high order,” said the New York Times of Perry’s whodunit about a murdered dentist and numerous suburban housewives who might be suspect. “A refreshingly sophisticated comedy,” said the Daily News. The Times’ Kevin Thomas called it “a blithe, sparkling, sophisticated comedy-mystery laced with dark humor.” For a guy who’s just come in from the cold, such notices come as manna from heaven.

“There seemed to be grounds for reasonable optimism,” said Perry carefully, sitting back in his bungalow. “And I’m proud of the film, I admit it. We made it for under $5 million, which isn’t bad with a cast like that (Susan Sarandon, Raul Julia, Judith Ivey, Edward Herrmann, Mary Beth Hurt). I don’t think I’ve felt this good about a movie since ‘Diary of a Mad Housewife,’ and that’s a long while back (1970).”

When Perry first tried to buy Isaacs’ book, he was outbid by Warners, which held the property for five years. Then, two months after the disastrous debut of “Monsignor,” Isaacs got the rights back.

“So I went to her and I said, ‘I’ll make you a proposition nobody else can make. I’ll make you my partner. We’ll make the film together. You will write the screenplay and I will include a provision that nobody else can be brought in--ever. You can never be replaced.’

“Susan had never written a script before, but I had enough faith in my ability as an editor to know I could help her. At first, it was an investment of my own time and money. That can make you nervous if you have high overheads, but Barbara and I don’t. We live the way we can afford (a house in East Hampton, an apartment in New York), so I’m not subject to the same panics which affect some people out here who have to maintain a rich life style.

“So we set to work, raised the financing in dependently, got the film to Paramount--and here we are.”

If there is a smell to success--and it seems there is--what about the scent of failure? Could that not also have been spotted early on with movies like “Mommie Dearest” and “Monsignor”?

“Well, there did come a time when I knew we were in trouble. That was during the editing. There were lines in there, clinkers, particularly in ‘Monsignor,’ which should have come out during the editing.

“But everyone said ‘No, wait for the previews; don’t take them out now.’ Well, we never previewed. They were left in, and that was a terrible mistake.

“I previewed this film, ‘Compromising Positions,’ extensively. And I learned a lot. So much so that after previews I went back and reshot the ending--all in our $5-million budget. It’s now a much better ending. And it came about because of the previews.

“If we’d have previewed ‘Mommie Dearest’ first, I’d have known enough to take the top 5% off Faye Dunaway’s performance. I thought she was wonderful in the picture, but I could have made her performance more palatable for audiences. And if we’d previewed ‘Monsignor,’ I would have known to remove a lot of those clinker lines. I’m not saying this would have made either film a lot better, but I’d have felt more comfortable about them.”

Perry has always enjoyed working with writers--people like Truman Capote (“A Christmas Memory”), Joan Didion (“Play It as It Lays”) and Thomas McGuane (“Doc”).

But he says he has no intention of ever working with Barbara Goldsmith. In part, he says, this decision may be motivated by his experience with his first wife, Eleanor, now deceased. A writer 16 years his senior, she teamed with him on “David and Lisa” (shot in 25 days) and “Diary of a Mad Housewife,” two movies that won Perry high praise.

Then, after their divorce in 1971, she wrote a novel, “Blue Pages,” about a woman writer whose young husband, a director, leaves her for someone else and then loses a lot of weight (at one point during Perry’s marriage he weighed 250 pounds; it was Barbara who encouraged him to go on a strict diet).

“I have such respect for writers,” he said, “I admire what Barbara does inordinately (she is now at work on a new book), but I will never work with her. I’m crazy about her and we are each other’s best friend, but I think it would be a big mistake to collaborate on anything--we both do. Marriage is hard enough without having an extra burden.”