WOODS’ ‘SALVADOR’ GONE --BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

There are times when an actor can justifiably feel that he is snake-bit, or that his guardian angel was looking the other way at a crucial moment.

James Woods gave the performance of any actor’s life in “Salvador,” Oliver Stone’s low-budget, high-intensity film about a scruffy, scuffling counterculture journalist who becomes reluctantly but deeply involved in that country’s bitter strife.

The film was listed as being eligible for consideration in the 1985 Academy Awards. But this, as it turned out, was wrong. “Salvador” had been announced to play a week in Los Angeles at the end of 1985, which is the basis for eligibility, but it never did. It played a week in San Antonio instead, to fulfill some other contractual commitment.

When “Salvador” did open in Los Angeles early in 1986, it earned blazingly good reviews overall and for Woods’ role in particular, and it did excellent business--for three weeks, until it had to be pushed out for a previously booked film.

The distributor recently ran a trade ad to remind academy voters that “Salvador” and Woods’ performance are, in fact, eligible for the 1986 Oscars. Woods’ name was misspelled in the ad.

It is not necessarily true that a film which opens early in the year is forgotten when the academy voters mark their nominating ballots nearly a year later. But it can’t be helpful when a film had a brief and spotty initial release and isn’t on view at the moment. And “Salvador” isn’t.

Woods recently won a Golden Globe nomination for his work opposite James Garner in the television movie “Promise,” but the Hollywood Foreign Press voters bypassed or, quite possibly, had forgotten “Salvador.”

The actor is disappointed but philosophical about the invisibility of “Salvador.” The work exists and he is very proud of it, and everything else in his life is going splendidly. He has jobs stretched out ahead of him and he leaves in a few days for a leisurely Caribbean cruise on a sailing ship.

“Five years ago I wondered why I got all these villainous roles,” Woods said at breakfast early this week. “Then I looked at myself and realized it was because I was a raging -------. I was angry at everybody and everything.”

He had made an important screen impression as one of the cop-killers in the film of Joseph Wambaugh’s “The Onion Field.” At best he had risen to roles that were ambiguous: as a crude, tough-talking deprogrammer in “Split Image”; as a fast-talking poor boy-turned-successful writer in “Joshua Then and Now,” both with Ted Kotcheff. He was one of the baddies in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” and in “Against All Odds.”

Woods’ marriage ended bitterly. He sought a psychiatrist, who proved helpful. He has found a new lady. And, after long years in the acting trenches, he is being sought out.

It wasn’t always so.

“My first TV part, right? This is how it was,” Woods says. “Martin Sheen turned it down, Richard Dreyfuss was hired for it and then got sick, so I got it--a third-round draft choice. It was like that in the early days. I’m an Army brat. My father worked his way up the ranks--no West Point, a battlefield commission. I’ve been working my way up the ranks, too.”

He has a film due out in March, “Best Seller,” in which he co-stars with Brian Dennehy. He is a bad person once again, a high-level assassin. But, Woods says, “I call it my farewell-to-villainy role,” which is as it may be.

He is sympathetic in an upcoming television movie, “In Love and War,” co-starring with Jane Alexander in a docudrama based on the lives of Jim and Sybil Stockdale. Stockdale was the Navy pilot who spent more than seven years--four of them in leg irons--as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese in Hanoi.

Woods is also working with producer James Harris on a small independent project, “Blood on the Moon,” a police thriller, which goes before the cameras in March.

Woods and Harold Becker, who directed “The Onion Field,” are also preparing “The Boost,” a Darryl Ponicsan script based on “ ‘Ludes,” the novel by Ben Stein about a yuppie couple fatefully engulfed by drugs.

“You read the script, which is so good; the dialogue reeks with character. It’s such an infusion of language. And I feel like a youngster again. You get jaded, reading all the junk, and you begin to think you’re in a rut you can’t get out of. It’s hard to find something that knocks you out.

“Then you read this and you know how good it can be. But then you wake up and realize all the stuff you’ve got to get through before you’ve even got a shot at making it good.”

Remembering the shooting of “Salvador,” Woods adds, “But that’s OK; you’re better off when you can’t afford it sometimes. ‘Salvador’ was made for pennies. You’d do something really big in one take because the light was going and you couldn’t do it again another day. Oliver (Stone, who wrote and directed “Salvador” and “Platoon”) said after one take, ‘Jeez, man, you know you did a tracheotomy in that scene!’ Well, yeah.

“It’s like the Beatles, playing eight to 10 hours every night in a Hamburg basement. You get to know how to do it. You get to know everybody else’s instrument. And when you’ve been in that basement, nothing later on throws you too much.”