MAN WHO KNOWS ‘LUCAS’--AND OTHERS LIKE HIM

Amid the ongoing tide of raunchy teen pictures, David Seltzer’s “Lucas” sticks out like a well thumb.

This gentle story of a boy’s first capsizing infatuation says, among several other things, that while the incidentals of teen-age life may have changed over the years, the fundamental things still apply.

Punk may have supplanted jitterbugging and there are new and different substances for trend-setting fools to abuse. But the smart kid will still be at a serious disadvantage in relation to the jocks in romantic matters, and older girls may be glad to be friends with younger boys--but that’s it. The secret, then as now, is to recognize how rare but enduring the friendship can be, and to welcome it rather than reject it as insufficient.

You have to believe that “Lucas” is seasoned with autobiography, and so it turns out to be. Seltzer, whose first film as a director this is, grew up around Chicago and went back to shoot the film there.

More than that, he went to the very same locker room where the big guys had subjected him to a Mentholatum rubdown (it burns most excruciatingly in tender areas), and there had his 13-year-old alter ego (Corey Haim from “Murphy’s Romance”) subjected to the same indignity.

Seltzer is a single parent raising four teen-agers, including two Vietnamese orphans he met and adopted while he was researching the excellent and award-winning television film “Green Eyes.” So he had access to his own memories and to present experience, including the movie experience.

“I’d gotten sick of what kids were having to dine out on at the movies, what dirty old men offer up to pull out the kiddie bucks,” Seltzer said at lunch this week.

The prevailing film view of teen-agers, he added, was that they are “cynical, gullible, decadent and have a very short attention span.” Seltzer disagrees, and has no doubt that the psychology of adolescence is fundamentally what it was in his youth and probably in his parents’ youth, laden with both pain and decency.

“Lucas” was a hard sell. “A lot of people said they loved the script, but they couldn’t see megahit in it. Neither could I, but I thought there was the possibility of a nice little film, maybe even a beautiful little film.”

He compounded his difficulties by insisting on directing it himself. “I knew that if I’d been a 22-year-old kid out of USC with this script under my arm, they’d have gone for him immediately. That hurt.”

He was also unwilling to use the new brat-pack stars. “My role model, my idol, was Francois Truffaut. I wanted to try to find my own (Jean-Pierre) Leauds if I could.” (There is a direct homage to Truffaut, an emulation from his short “Les Mistons,” in which the boy watches the girl play tennis in slow-motion.)

Larry Gordon, then head of production at Fox, went along with Seltzer’s script and hopes, and the new administration of Barry Diller has been very supportive, Seltzer says. “Lucas” opened quietly but seems to be holding its own in most places.

Seltzer, out of Northwestern, started his career in documentaries, working with Jean-Jacques Cousteau and David Wolper, for whom he wrote “The Hellstrom Chronicle.” The “Hellstrom” experience persuaded him he could write dialogue and he moved into fiction films with “One Is a Lonely Number,” “The Other Side of the Mountain” and then “The Omen.” His own novelization of his script for “The Omen” sold something over 3.5 million copies in paperback.

His approach as a director reflects the documentary days. “I stalked around every day looking for things that weren’t real. I carried a dirt bag and hit everything with it. Somebody finally gave me a T-shirt that said ‘Dirt Bag.’ ”

He spent hours staging the action so it looked real, he says, and then, in effect, chased it with the camera. “I’d spend all morning getting the action right. Everyone would be very nervous. But once the action was right I could do 22 set-ups in the afternoon. We shot ‘Lucas’ in 42 days; that’s a lot of filming.”

His advice to his young actors--Haim, Kerri Green and Charlie Sheen, who plays a sympathetic jock the girl falls in love with--was that “the camera reads your mind; think what you’re feeling, don’t act it out,” Seltzer said. “When they weren’t getting it quite right, I’d give them some more information, not something different to do.”

Over the years Seltzer has taken his critical lumps, more recently for his scripts for “Table for Five” and “Six Weeks,” charged with sentimentality. “What’s wrong is always the writer’s fault; what works is the director’s achievement.” But, he argues, the tears in the eyes and the sobs, and the violins in the background, weren’t in his scripts, which is one reason he wanted to direct his own work.

Now that “Lucas” is finished, scripts are arriving. “A lot of them say ‘Home run, Home run, Home run,’ and any hired gun could bring them off. But I think I’ve made a case for the nice little film, and I want to go carefully and try it again.

“It’s too easy and too cheap to cheat teen-agers with those stale doses of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. We don’t do it in our homes; why should we do it in our theaters? I want to encourage the non-star, low-profile film, and maybe we’ve got a chance.”