JUST THE FACTS, MANK : <i> Director Tom Mankiewicz Is ‘Dragnet’s’ Top Cop </i>

1 960. Moab, Utah.

Tom Mankiewicz, an 18-year-old Yalie, was spending his summer vacation working as a gofer on a John Wayne film called “The Comancheros.”

“I can still remember all of my lines,” Mankiewicz said. “I’d say, ‘Yes, sir.’ . . . ‘I’ll get that right away, sir.’ . . . ‘And I’ll get that too, right away, sir.’ ”

He chuckled. “It was the summer of the presidential campaign and I was wearing a J.F.K. button. I thought Wayne and I were going to get along great until he saw that button on my chest. He came right over and said with obvious disgust, ‘Either you’re taking that thing off or not working on this picture. We have to put up with a lot of crap around here, but one thing we don’t need is some communist on the show!’

“I looked at Wayne and said my usual line--’Right away, sir!’ And I took that button off so fast . . . “ Mankiewicz shook his head. “I mean, when John Wayne tells you to do something and you’re working on a picture for the first time. Well, I would’ve taken all my clothes off if he’d asked!”

1987. Hollywood.

Now Tom Mankiewicz can wear any button he wants. After 20 years as an accomplished screenwriter, TV show creator and lively raconteur, he’s directing his first feature film, “Dragnet 1987,” starring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks, which is due June 26 from Universal Pictures.

A second-generation member of the legendary Mankiewicz movie clan (his father, Joe, won Oscars for writing and directing “All About Eve,” while his uncle, Herman, co-wrote “Citizen Kane”), Mankiewicz has writing credits that include everything from “The Sweet Ride” and “Mother, Jugs and Speed” to the medieval epic, “Ladyhawke.” (Mankiewicz also co-wrote the pilot of “Hart to Hart,” as well as directing a dozen of its early episodes).

But Mankiewicz is probably best known as a master of a peculiar form of Hollywood black magic--he’s one of moviedom’s premier script doctors.

Over the last 15 years, he’s served as a rewrite man on all sorts of troubled projects. He’s had a hand in five different Bond films, beginning with a rewrite of “Diamonds Are Forever,” scripts for “Live and Let Die” and “The Man With the Golden Gun,” as well as polishing work on “Moonraker” and “The Spy Who Loved Me.” Mankiewicz also handled the final draft of the scripts for “Superman,” “Superman II” and “The Deep.”

It’s easy to imagine the script doctor as a bona fide Hollywood romantic hero, the clever wordsmith who swoops in at the last minute with a burst of energy--and some great gags--to help salvage a sinking project. Mankiewicz admits it can be a very enticing arrangement.

“Sure, it’s seductive,” he said, relaxing at a booth in the Universal commissary, taking a break from an all-day session in the editing room. “You’re getting off the plane in the Virgin Islands, as I did when I came down to help Peter Yates on ‘The Deep,’ and you’re the writer coming in to save all these beleaguered characters.

“It’s one of the few times when the writer has a certain control over a film, because you’re coming in when the people on the film are at their most insecure. After all, if you’re there, they’ve had to admit that they needed someone there to help them out.”

As the pressure mounts, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether you’ve been cast as script doctor or witch doctor.

“You’re coming in like Jack Palance in ‘Shane.’ You’re the hired gun,” explained Mankiewicz, a tall, gracious man whose fondness for sweaters and slacks give him the casual preppie look of an Ivy League don. “Everyone is waiting for a revelation. You’re supposed to bring better parts for the actors, better scenes for the director. And sometimes, everyone likes it, not because it’s necessarily better, but just because it’s different .”

1971. Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

In Hollywood, writers usually win the battle, but lose the war. Still, they always remember every victory, no matter how small. Mankiewicz still savors the memory of how he worked a favorite pun into his rewrite of “Diamonds Are Forever.” Bond had snuck some diamonds into a corpse. When asked by Felix Leiter where he had stashed the jewels, Bond replied: “Alimentary, my dear Leiter. . . . “

“(Producer) Cubby Broccoli and I were watching the film at the Chinese, and out of maybe 2,000 people there, maybe two of them laughed hysterically at the joke,” Mankiewicz recalled. “Naturally, I was pleased. But Cubby turned to me and said, ‘Big deal. Two doctors!’ ”

The lesson wasn’t lost on the young writer. Once Mankiewicz had a taste of directing, on the “Hart to Hart” series, he began to view script doctoring as a very unsatisfying line of work. “The real problem is that it’s never your film,” he said. “If it comes out and it’s good, you never get credit for it. And if the film turns out to be a flop, then naturally, you’ve ruined someone else’s work.”

If a director is an architect who oversees the entire construction of a spacious new home, then a script doctor is more like a contractor who is called in when the workmen suddenly realize that someone forgot to leave room for a door to the bedroom.

On the set, the director is the final authority. When the cast and crew were ready for a final run-through one afternoon on the set of “Dragnet 1987,” Mankiewicz’s assistant director said to him--only half in jest: “OK, Mr. Mankiewicz. The universe belongs to you.”

“The truth is that film is a director’s medium, just as the stage is a writer’s forum,” he explained. “In Hollywood, it’s an endemic sickness at the studios that three writers are better than one, and for that matter, four writers are better than two. The package has become the rule now. ‘I’ve got Bill Murray’ or ‘I’ve got Sly Stallone.’ Well, if Stallone doesn’t like the script, what do you think they’re going to do--get rid of Sly or get another writer?”

Through “sheer persistence,” Mankiewicz said he finally made the transition to directing.

“Frankly, I got more and more unhappy personally. Finally, a couple of years ago, a very close friend told me, ‘I can’t understand it. You’re single. You’re making lots of money. You don’t have a hideous skin condition . . . but you’re not having any fun!’ ”

Mankiewicz solved part of the problem by buying 3,000 acres of land on the slopes of Mt. Kenya, where he now spends much of his free time. He also signed a development deal at Universal, which would allow him to write and direct his own films.

“The last thing I wanted to do was make another deal that cast me as a fixer,” he said. “And Frank Price, who was then running production, agreed totally. So after two weeks here”--Mankiewicz unleashed a short burst of laughter--”Frank asked me to do a rewrite on the ‘Dragnet’ script!”

As it turned out, Mankiewicz “loved” the script, worked on a rewrite with Aykroyd and co-author Alan Zweibel, and when no one objected, took over as director as well. “When I met with Danny, his first words were, ‘You don’t have to do this picture. I can get you out of it.’ But we’ve really gotten along great. And if I can just pick the right 12,000 feet out of the more than 300,000 feet I shot for the picture, then maybe we’ll be in pretty good shape.”

Just then, a pair of executives sat down at a nearby table. They were accompanied by an actor who looked like he’d just emerged from a burning building--his clothes were tattered and his face was caked with grime and bloodstains.

Mankiewicz beamed. “He reminds me of when Fred Gwynne was doing ‘The Munsters.’ He’d walk by, wearing his big headpiece, with all the bolts in his neck. And you’d say, ‘Hi, Fred. Working today?’ ”

1955. New York City .

Tom Mankiewicz, age 13, was at the dinner table, all ears, as his family debated the issues of the day. During the previous five years, his father had directed such films as “A Letter to Three Wives,” “All About Eve” (both Oscar winners), “People Will Talk,” “The Barefoot Contessa” and “Guys and Dolls.”

“In my family, if you didn’t know what was going on in the world, you didn’t have any dinner table conversation,” explained Mankiewicz, chain-smoking, sipping a Jack Daniels and water and tending the fire at his home high in the Hollywood Hills.

“My father is an extremely literate man, probably a true intellectual. And most of his friends were from politics and the theater. I was taught, by example, that you read--anything and everything. In those days in New York, there were seven newspapers--and we got all of them. The conversation was pretty literate and you just had to catch up.”

Sometimes you get the impression that Mankiewicz is still trying to catch up. Despite his considerable accomplishments, as he pondered his 45th birthday, coming this June, he said, “Maybe it’ll be time for me to do something special--and personal.”

Mankiewicz seems a bona fide Hollywood success story. He has several upcoming film projects in development, gets a quiet corner table at the Universal commissary and sports a pair of Jamie Wyeth originals on his dining room wall.

But when asked if he’s lived up to his potential as a writer, he answered decisively, “No.”

“It’s been my fault, really,” he said after a moment of thought. “Perhaps in the beginning, I was intimidated by my family and its reputation. When I was starting out, 20 years ago, my father was a very immediate presence, still on the scene.

“I think I’ve done good, solid work. I don’t apologize for anything I’ve done. But I wonder if I’ve aimed. . . .

“Listen, when I first started out, the whole family reputation business was terrifying. Your fear always was that everyone would say, ‘Well, his script isn’t bad, but he’s no Joe or Herman Mankiewicz.’ ”

Mankiewicz offered a faint smile. “I even had trouble deciding what credit to take. My father had always been Joseph L. Mankiewicz. So on my first film, I put down Thomas F. Mankiewicz. Then I stared at it for a while, and it looked so stupid and silly, that I went with Tom.”

The family still keeps up. Mankiewicz has been working with his cousin, John Mankiewicz, who has been a producer on “Miami Vice” and is finishing a feature film script. Frank Mankiewicz, another cousin who was press secretary for Robert F. Kennedy and now is an executive at a leading corporate public relations firm, also has dinner with Tom whenever he’s in town.

But are they close? “Well, it’s a strange family,” Mankiewicz said, throwing some logs on the fire. “We are quite close, but not necessarily like a normal family. Our idea of affection isn’t so much hugging each other as caressing each other with one-liners.”

1987. Universal Studios.

“AAAAAHHHHHHHH!”

Mankiewicz had an incensed star on his hands--Dan Aykroyd had blown his stack.

The actor clenched his fists, threw his hands in the air, shouted, raged, cursed, stamped his feet, and then cursed some more. “I can’t get the . . . line!”

Aykroyd wasn’t throwing a typical Hollywood-star temper tantrum. The actor had spent most of the last hour, standing in front of a men’s room stall, delivering a long comic monologue for a key scene from “Dragnet 1987,” which co-stars Aykroyd as the nephew (and namesake) of TV’s most famous LAPD detective, Sgt. Joe Friday.

Mankiewicz tried to soothe Aykroyd’s ruffled feathers. “Listen, don’t worry,” he told him. “We can do the dialogue in sections. I can always cut away. . . . “

Aykroyd nervously paced around the set, trying to regain his concentration. He looked exactly like a ‘50s cop set in formaldehyde, outfitted in a short, brush-cut hairdo, a brown suit (with matching tie clip) and huge FBI-issue clodhoppers that were so thick you could probably drive a Dodge pickup over his feet without him ever feeling a thing.

“This is very out of the ordinary,” Mankiewicz explained to a visitor, digging his hands deep into the pockets of his seersucker trousers. “Dan’s got a steel-trap mind. He can remember miles of dialogue. Later today, he’ll go through four pages of dialogue and never miss a beat. It’s almost a relief to see that he’s not perfect.”

Aykroyd plunged into his revved-up speech again, rattling off his lines at a pace normally reserved for Federal Express commercials. Staring at the door of the men’s room stall, he boomed: “Sure, this city isn’t perfect. We need cleaner streets . . . better schools . . . a good hockey team. Then we’ll. . . . “

Aykroyd stumbled over the line.

“Ugh!” he growled. “At this rate, we’re gonna be here all day!” Aykroyd’s voice echoed across the set. “Call your wives! Call your families! ‘Cause we’re not going anywhere till I get this RIIIIIIIGHT!”

Mankiewicz grinned, seemingly unconcerned by this new delay. “We’ve been at this for 48 days and I’m only three days behind schedule, which really isn’t bad, especially when you consider that we’ve had 35 locations in 52 days,” he cheerily explained, sipping coffee.

“I mean, I know it’s not up to Michael Cimino standards, but I’m working on it. I told (Universal production exec) Sean Daniel the other day, ‘Maybe you should fire me and find somebody who can fall farther behind.’ ”

1987. The Hollywood Hills.

Mankiewicz has finished shooting “Dragnet” and is now spending six days a week, closeted in an editing bay, rushing to complete the film for its summer release. The endless hours on the set are over. He’s seeing old friends again--and of course, regaling visitors with his favorite stories. Noting that he’d had dinner with an old friend, Tuesday Weld, the other night, he explained, “She’s married to Pincus Zukerman now. Can you imagine that, after all these years--Tuesday Zukerman!”

He’s also halfway through a new script, tentatively titled “Wrinkles.” After chronicling the exploits of everyone from James Bond to Superman, Mankiewicz has finally turned to a favorite hero--the scriptwriter.

“I have a scene where we see him at his desk, presumably laboring over a difficult scene in his new screenplay,” Mankiewicz explained, lighting another cigarette. “The camera moves in, getting closer and closer, until we see what he’s really up to. . . . “

Mankiewicz chuckled. “He’s redoing his phone book.”