DIRECTOR FRANK OZ GOES FOR THE COMEDY OF ‘HORRORS’

The first audience research screening for Frank Oz’s “Little Shop of Horrors” could not have been going better. The recruited viewers were applauding after each musical number. They were laughing at each joke. They became hysterical during the macabre comedic show-stopper where a sadistic dentist, played by Steve Martin, meets his match with a masochistic patient, played by Bill Murray.

Oz, the Muppets’ right-hand man, sat in the back of the theater with feelings of exhilaration and self-vindication. He had first turned down producer David Geffen’s offer to adapt the Off-Broadway musical comedy, thinking there were too many ways to fail with it.

“I looked at the script and said, ‘No, I can’t do this movie,’ ” Oz said. “I didn’t think I could get my hands around it. There were too many elements. It was a period piece, it was horror, it was comedy, there were 14 songs and a puppet that was going to weigh a ton.”

But the story, about a flesh-eating outer-space plant and the Skid Row flower shop attendant who becomes his Faustian accomplice, eventually proved irresistible to him and he waded in. A year and a half later, at the studio’s research screening in Burbank, an audience seemed to be telling him that he had made the right decision.

Then, with the final credits almost in sight, the floor gave beneath him. Suddenly, the audience didn’t like what it was seeing. Audrey II, the shark-toothed “mean green mother from outer-space,” was eating everyone in sight and by the time he gulped down Seymour (Rick Moranis), the likable shop attendant, and his girlfriend Audrey (Ellen Greene), the audience had turned nasty. “They hated us when the main characters died,” Oz said. “In the play, they’re eaten by the puppet, but you know they’re coming out for a curtain call. But the power of movies is different. . . . They really believed in those characters and they were angry.”

Oz, already over schedule and over budget, went back to Pinewood Studios in London, with Moranis and Greene and others from the cast and crew, and put in more overtime. The ending had to be completely changed.

“I wanted to stay true to the play, but after that screening I felt that it (the play’s last act) was not translatable,” Oz said. “It had to have a happy ending. It was not a matter of Warner Bros. and Geffen saying you have to do it and the director pounding his fist on the table. They did say I had to do it, but I wanted to.”

“Little Shop” may prove to be one of those rare exceptions, a film that is actually improved by radical post-production revamping and becomes a hit despite the delays and cost overruns. Estimates of “Little Shop’s” budget have gone as high as $40 million. Oz insists the actual cost was less than $30 million.

That is a lot of money for a movie that runs only 88 minutes. But there is also more movie stuffed into those 88 minutes than you are likely to find anywhere else this holiday season. Oz resolved the problem of “too many elements” to the “Little Shop” script by actually adding one.

At the suggestion of his costume designer, Marit Allen, Oz took the three girls who appeared as street characters in the play and used them as a soul-singing Greek (or Motown) chorus, like a trio of cloned Aretha Franklins forming musical bridges between dramatic scenes and musical numbers.

“All of a sudden, I got very excited about the three girls,” Oz said. “They became the key to the visual style of the film. They made the whole thing work for me.”

Oz said he auditioned about 500 teen-age girls in Washington, before selecting Tichina Arnold, Tisha Campbell and Michelle Weeks to play Crystal, Chiffon and Ronette, the most improbable knock-off group since the Monkees. We will undoubtedly hear from them again.

It is hard to imagine “Little Shop” working without the Skid Row trio, but it’s equally hard to imagine it working with any other cast, or without Lyle Conway’s astonishing design and the puppeteering that went into the various phases and stages of Audrey II.

Oz will not discuss in detail the mechanics of the man-eating plant (“I don’t want audiences sitting there thinking about hydraulics”), but the plant’s motions, dancing and lip-synching to Levi Stubbs’ three big fast-paced numbers, make Oz’s own work with the Muppets look like hand shadows on a blank wall.

Were the plant’s scenes painstaking to shoot?

“We did maybe 30 takes for every 10 seconds that’s in the film,” Oz said, of the schedule around Audrey II. “The last number took five weeks to shoot. I don’t know if the film would have been any less if I had done only 20 takes instead of 30. But you can’t underestimate audiences these days. They expect effects to look real. If one little thing is off, you can lose the whole scene. You have to be sure you’ve got it while you’re there because you can’t go back.”

The movie’s credits list more than 130 names of people who were involved in the puppetry, animatronics or special effects in “Little Shop,” but to Oz, he was just one of an ensemble of characters. For scene-stealing, Audrey II got a lot of competition from its co-stars.

Diminutive Rick Moranis, the Arnold Stang of the ‘80s, was the perfect physical choice for Seymour, the wimpish flower shop attendant. Oz knew what he was getting with the powerful-voiced Ellen Greene, who played Seymour’s ditsy blond co-worker on stage. It was a bonus for him to discover, at the first rehearsal, that Moranis had the singing voice of a stage veteran.

You don’t realize how good Moranis’ voice is until you’ve heard it a few times on the film’s sound-track album.

With all of those elements, much of the early praise for “Little Shop” has gone to Steve Martin, whose supporting role as the sadistic dentist with an Elvis Presley leer has been mentioned as an Oscar candidate, and Bill Murray, who does a two-minute cameo as a pain junkie who falls into ecstasy at the sight of Martin’s drill.

“Bill was only there for two days, and he ad-libbed nearly the whole scene,” Oz said. “He had about a half a page of dialogue in the script, but he threw most of that out. The editor had a heck of a time putting it together, but it worked.”

Oz said that after 25 years of creating puppets and performing with them, his main objective with “Little Shop” was to get audiences to believe in the characters, especially in Seymour and his girlfriend.

“I felt it was important to care about Seymour and Audrey,” Oz said. “I wanted them to have a sweetness and warmth that audiences would sympathize with.”

At that, the director succeeded so well that the producers had to spend a few millions dollars having him rescue the couple from the jaws of Audrey II, an assignment Oz said he was glad to undertake.

“I am happy about the changes,” he said. “I wanted Seymour and Audrey to live too.”