‘ORPHANS’ FINDS A HOME

The stage is a hot source of movie material right now, what with “Extremities,” “ ‘night, Mother,” “Children of a Lesser God,” “Duet for One,” “Crimes of the Heart” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

And now--”Orphans,” Lyle Kessler’s 1985-86 off-Broadway hit. Director Alan J. Pakula, who just wrapped his film version of the play, is reasonably certain that he and his creative team--including actors Albert Finney, Matthew Modine and Kevin Anderson--have managed to avoid the usual play-into-film pitfalls.

“In general, novels are easier to translate into films than plays, and some plays are not translatable at all,” Pakula said during a break in shooting. He filmed novelist William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice” in 1982 and earlier had successes with the Watergate book “All the President’s Men” and the original screenplay “Klute.” “Orphans” is his first attempt at adapting a play, and he thinks he has chosen wisely.

“I think it’s a piece that can be enhanced by film,” he said. “Film is a medium of contrasts. What we have here is the story of two boy-men, orphan brothers: Treat (Modine) has, for emotionally complex reasons, led Philip (Anderson) to believe he’s allergic to the air outside the house they live in. When a stranger named Harold (Finney) comes into their lives, he not only alters the relationship between them, he convinces Philip he can go outside.

“Seeing the play,” Pakula said, “at the moment when Philip went toward the door, I turned to my wife and whispered, ‘It’s a movie.’ There was a natural, non-arbitrary opportunity to go outside and contrast the world of people with the isolated world inside the house. In fact, the first 15 minutes of the movie (which playwright Kessler wrote with Pakula’s guidance) is set outside the house, in Manhattan, before the action of the play began.”

Despite this opening, plus occasional sorties into the outdoors by Treat and Harold before Philip’s exit at the end, most of the movie’s action takes place inside the house. Pakula spent six weeks of his eight-week schedule at Kaufman-Astoria Studios in Queens, on a set representing this interior.

Here, according to Pakula, “Philip expresses himself almost entirely in a physical way, which, again, is very cinematic. He’s a caged animal, almost bouncing off the walls as he tries to break out of his limited space. Shooting him is almost like photographing athletics, and there’s more camera movement--and, I think, judicious, non-arbitrary camera movement --in this than in anything I’ve ever done.”

Pakula--and Lorimar Pictures, which provided the budget of about $10 million--can’t really be accused of casting it with a star package.

Anderson, who starred in the Chicago, New York and London productions of the play, appeared in a small role in “Risky Business,” but is for practical purposes unknown to movie audiences. After half a dozen consistently well-received screen outings--including the tour-de-force title role in “Birdy”--Modine is a more familiar face. Still, he can’t be said to have the box-office allure imputed to his Brat Pack contemporaries. (Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” which Modine completed just before beginning “Orphans,” could change that.)

Though Anderson has had to work on scaling down his stage performance for the camera, and Modine has had to work up a manipulative meanness that is probably foreign to him, Pakula said they are the best men for their jobs.

That leaves the well-known, four-time Oscar nominee Finney. He appeared with Anderson in the London staging of the play and produced it. While that would seem to indicate his suitability for his role as an American gangster type, a skeptic might say that effective stage impersonations and believable screen performances are often poles apart.

Finney seems aware of this and has a dialect coach on the set to drill him in his American accent. He also noted that, even on stage, in order to work the material needs “a very up-front emotional directness and honesty. My work as an actor has always owed a lot to the American tradition of naturalism--movie naturalism.

“Growing up in the north of England, I didn’t know about theater, and I always identified strongly with the actors in American films. They seemed to have much more of a connection to the (working-class) life around me than the actors in the (then largely genteel) British cinema. Harold is in a way a Warner Bros. character, my tip of the hat to all those characters played by Bogart and Cagney.”

Pakula observed that Finney has taken on some of the same paternalism toward fellow actors Modine and Anderson that his character shows theirs in the script.

Asked about the number of father or father-figure roles he has played in recent years as in “Annie” and “Shoot the Moon,” the 50-year-old Finney said he thought it was “more coincidence and my time of life” than conscious choice. “Unless,” he added with a laugh, “I’m unconsciously trying to work off all the aspects of fatherhood I didn’t give my own son”--who is now a 28-year-old apprentice film editor.

For Pakula, the personal connection to the father-and-son aspects of “Orphans” is more conscious.

The play moved me deeply. . . . I’m a stepparent--five children from two marriages, so there’s definitely that.” But I’m also a son--and the play reminded me of the physical freedom of childhood, before it’s banged out of you by parents and school in the civilizing process. “And while the characters are not like me, I felt a closeness with them that left me feeling, at the end, a little less alone.