ON THE TRAIL OF STEIN, TOKLAS

Gertrude Stein, her longtime companion Alice B. Toklas and a small circle of their very special friends were huddled beside a campfire in the French countryside one moonlit night, singing a serenade.

A happy band. Or so it seemed, as the lifelike scene was being shot for “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,” a film by Jill Godmilow and Mark Magill recently completed on locations nearby, where Stein died 40 years ago. The film, starring Linda Hunt as Toklas and English stage actress Linda Bassett as Stein, is due to be released by Skouras Films early in 1987 and to be broadcast on public television as part of the “American Playhouse” series in June.

The story focuses on an imagined incident in 1936 that tests the 40-year Stein-Toklas relationship. In the process, the drama draws on the couple’s actual and well-known relationships with Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, the French poet Apollinaire and other artists and scholars of the era to suggest what their life together was like.

In the words of actor Andrew McCarthy, featured in the fictitious role of a young American hitchhiker who meets the two women on his way to fight in the Spanish Civil War: “It’s as though, with great respect, we’re being invited into a dream.”

Director Godmilow has long been interested in Stein. “Most people know a few things about her,” she said, “that she lived in Paris, that she collected paintings, and so on, but they’ve never read her work.” Godmilow, 42, whose previous film work includes the highly praised documentaries “Antonia: Portrait of a Woman” and “Far From Poland,” was seated on a bench outside the French chateau being shot as Stein’s and Toklas’ country house, reflecting on the fact that Stein’s story has not been told before on film.

“She was a modernist. . . . She really never made friends with mainstream America--even when she gained fame, she made no attempt to compromise or be understood--and mainstream America has never really dealt with the impact she made on literature,” Godmilow said. “And of course a sexist society can’t very well acknowledge this relationship (between Stein and Toklas) and therefore can’t acknowledge that Stein was a genius.”

The film’s script, by McGill, reads unconventionally, with sketchy narrative connecting the snatches of scenes. And unlike the way most films are shot--with various camera angles used to build up each scene--Godmilow was orchestrating and shooting entire scenes all at once. The result is a movie that attempts to replicate Stein’s own minimalist approach to writing, Godmilow said. “We’re trying to find new ways to deal with history, literature --and film.”

“It’s like a series of family snapshots,” said first-time screenwriter McGill, 34. “We’re trying to make people feel and think, fill in what’s not in the script.”

“If anything, we’re challenging the notion that an accurate portrait of anyone can be done in any medium,” Godmilow said. “In Stein’s spirit, we’re actively, consciously refusing to make a representative portrait.”

Godmilow and McGill said they started developing the project two years ago, out of a common desire to make a film about relationships and the problems they encounter and a common interest in Stein and her extraordinary time in Paris.

“Stein and Toklas provide good models because they had a long and successful relationship,” said Godmilow. “And their story can be told outside the boundaries of being seen as a lesbian relationship, because it’s a huge, historical, mythical relationship--one of the greatest of this century.

“Sexuality was one aspect of the relationship, but it did not define it and therefore it’s assumed from the start of the film and treated as naturally as they treated it.”

Hunt was considered vital. The Oscar-winning actress agreed to be part of the project in its early stages, but she asked to play Toklas rather than Stein, as was first intended.

“This is the best film script I ever read,” said Hunt, of her reasons for committing to the project. Of her preference to play Toklas, she said: “I was more curious to play Alice because she usually is presented in Stein’s shadow, passed off as ‘the wife,’ and this script didn’t seem to present her that way. It allowed more room for discovery.”

Hunt said she thinks Toklas provided an emotional balance that “kept something going for Gertrude.”

Finding the funds to finance such a film, eventually budgeted at $950,000, was not easy and involved many people, such as those on locations in France, who have expressed enthusiasm for the project because of its unconventionality.

Among the supporters of the project are Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, where director Arthur Penn consulted on the development of the film; the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and “American Playhouse” executive producer Lindsay Law, who also was present on location; European television networks and a French film production company; and the film’s producer, Sandra Schulberg, a leader of the independent film movement who was born in France and who has maintained important production connections here.

Observed McCarthy, who at 23 already has more experience with the commercial film industry than many of those involved with “On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine”: “This is great: a group of people doing the right things for the right reasons. . . . They may have to stay out in a field late into the night, rushing to get things done, with a lot of limitations. But within the limitations, they’re free.”