BEATTY SINGS A SONG OF ‘ISHTAR’

It’s late Friday evening at a recording studio in an office building on West 49th Street. On the dubbing stage, Dustin Hoffman stands at a mike wearing earphones. Warren Beatty strikes a note on the small studio piano to give him the pitch. A green band moves across the image on the screen, providing the cue, and Hoffman begins to sing in a quavery voice, as if the arrangement were pitched a little too high for him.

Elaine May’s comedy, “Ishtar,” a legend before anyone has seen it, is in its last hours of post-production. Hoffman and Beatty, who is also the producer, and May are all but living in these rooms. They are making the last adjustments on the sound track even as the cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro (who won an Oscar for Beatty’s “Reds”), is at the Technicolor laboratory in Hollywood, setting the color balance for the hundreds of prints that will be struck.

Hoffman is this night re-recording his part of a calculatedly awful duet, written by Paul Williams for the movie, that he and Beatty sing as a nightclub act. “Telling the truth can be a dangerous business,” the lyrics insist, and “Life is the way we audition for God.” Beatty and Hoffman play a team of songwriters whose agent (Jack Weston) gets them a gig in Morocco that is nearly the end of them.

“That’s a keeper,” the music editor, John Strauss, says at last. “Perfect sync.” Beatty applauds mightily.

“Now let him hear you sing,” Hoffman says, pointing to the visitor.

“He’s heard me sing,” Beatty says, which is not true, but the point is taken; he is not about to sing. He starts noodling around at the piano.

“He does a terrific Erroll Garner,” says Hoffman. Beatty, who earned a living playing cocktail bar piano before he made it as an actor, runs some very Garnerish full-fisted and rolling chords.

“Once,” Beatty says, “when I first came to Hollywood--I was 19--I went to the Crescendo--remember the Crescendo?--and there was a lovely big piano. I sat down and started playing, doing my best Erroll Garner imitation. Pretty soon there was a beautiful black woman standing beside me. At first I thought, ‘Hey, that’s flattering.’ Then I looked at her again, and I saw that she was seething, about ready to explode. ‘You got a lot of nerve, kid,’ she said. And I looked around to where she was looking, and there was Garner with a party of people. I abandoned the piano.”

Beatty and Hoffman drift back to the master mixing room, which looks, as someone once said, as if a shambles had struck it. On small tables in front of a single row of theater seats are empty beer bottles and soft-drink cans, plastic containers of untouched coleslaw, greasy paper sacks on which rest the slowly curling remains of sandwiches.

Across the screen, over and over again, floats a sequence of Beatty and Hoffman, in red plastic bow ties and headbands, singing Williams’ dreadful song as they audition their dreadful nightclub act for a stunned audience. Beatty does do-wop syllables in an anguished falsetto.

Elaine May, the director, in jeans, is hunched on a stool at the massive console. “What are you doing in town?” she asks the visitor.

“A story about ‘Ishtar,’ ” the visitor replies.

“ Et tu, Brute!” she cries, feigning shock and terror. She equates personal publicity with poison oak.

Another engineer, waiting his turn, putts golf balls into a cup. Beatty paces about restlessly. They all cheer when Lee Dichter, the mixer, pushes a knob and the sound track delivers a much more satisfactory CLUNK when Beatty in the scene accidentally kicks the microphone Hoffman is holding.

(“I’ve been on this for 18 months,” another engineer remarks, quite cheerfully, the next afternoon. “Six days a week, 12 or 14 hours a day. The thing is that after a while you can’t get interested in anything else .”)

Beatty, fighting the flu, is red-eyed and feverish. He turned 50 on March 30 and there is an occasional strand of gray in his shaggy hair. The sedentary life of post-production has given him a small paunch, which Hoffman kids him about. (Hoffman rises at 4 in the morning to get in some time on an exercise bicycle before his three young children are awake.)

It is by now approaching 1 a.m. and there is a call to resume at 9 Saturday morning. “Go home!” shouts Elaine May. “Get some sleep!”

“Ishtar” may go down as the first comedy made by a troika. Hoffman, Beatty and May have all stayed with it through the long post-production effort.

The project began, Beatty says, out of a vague idea he’d had for a political comedy placed in Central America. He and May discussed it when they were touring the region with other film people.

They concluded the political comedy was unworkable but Beatty volunteered to produce any script that May would write and direct. “Ishtar” was it, two years ago. Guy McElwaine, during his tenure as head of Columbia, agreed to finance and distribute it.

May would like to keep the significance of the title hooded in mystery, Beatty says mysteriously. But as your friendly neighborhood encyclopedia points out, the Ishtar of Babylonian and Assyrian religion was a mother goddess of war and fertility. In the most famous legend about her, she descended into the underworld to rescue her lover.

When the film is at last unveiled, it is possible that some vague parallel may be found between Ishtar’s caper and the role of Isabelle Adjani as Hoffman’s love; and then again, possibly not.

Beatty is a past master of the oblique understatement, or of the charming non-answer. He sometimes seems to go one better than playing his cards close to the vest; he doesn’t even take them out of the pack.

His amiable reticences derive partly, apparently, from what he feels is a history of misquotation. He has not read any of the several books written about him, Beatty says, including the remarkable new double-volume by film critic David Thomson, which is in alternating chapters a biography and a novel. (Excerpts, Page 34.)

“They all seem to be made up of things that were made up in the first place,” Beatty says.

He takes particular exception to an anecdote, cited in a review of the Thomson book, in which he reportedly refused to produce a movie with Orson Welles in 1985 because Welles refused to let Beatty have final cut of the film, identified in the book as “The Big Brass Bed.”

“It’s simply not true,” says Beatty, “and in fact, it’s the exact opposite of the truth. In the first place, the film was ‘The Cradle Will Rock.’ ”

The studio, which Beatty declines to name, was excited about the project but apprehensive--as studios always were--about Welles’ reliability. The studio would go ahead with the project, Beatty says, if he would agree to take over if anything went awry. “But I wouldn’t take over final cut from any director, and of all the directors in the world the absolute last would be Orson.” The project languished, and Welles died not long afterward.

Elaine May’s reputation for going greatly over schedule and budget in her meticulous pursuit of perfection made “Ishtar” an item of Hollywood gossip even before the cameras rolled. A long and difficult location in the Moroccan desert and in Marrakesh and Casablanca fueled the legend.

“Shooting in the desert,” Beatty says with a grin and characteristic understatement, “has complexity to it.”

Rumors on the cost of “Ishtar” have run upwards from $40 million. Beatty replies only that they are inaccurate. “I’m not going to talk money unless it’s with Columbia or Coca-Cola, and they’ve been totally supportive from the beginning.

“I don’t think . . . I don’t want to make cost a matter of interest to the audience. To the movie audience, it’s the price of the ticket that matters. Their interest should be in the movies themselves, not in the profits or the losses of the various companies.”

Beatty is generally reluctant to talk about the films he has been in, or made, even “Reds,” the most monumental and artistically impressive of the films he has directed, although it was not a financial success. Movies, he says, have to speak for themselves. (This is why he has been increasingly reluctant to help promote his films, even “Reds.” Significantly, the subhead on the cover story on “Ishtar” in the current issue of Life magazine is “Hoffman talks . . . Beatty listens.”

“It’s a little easier to speak about a film when you haven’t directed it,” Beatty says. “But even then, just talking about a film seems a shortcutting of it. And if you’ve directed a film and you try to talk about it, you feel as if you’re reducing it to some slick capsulization. ‘Reds’ is in many ways a fragile subject. I don’t want to get in its way, you know?”

He thinks about it for a minute. “We shot in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, New Mexico, New England, Oregon, London, Manchester, Leeds, the south coast of England, Helsinki, Stockholm, Lapland, Madrid, Granada, Seville. Six-and-a-half months.. . . Yeah,” Beatty says at last, as if violating a code of secrecy, “it was nice to be able to make it.”

About “Ishtar,” he allows only that “It’s light. Very light.”

The original plan to release “Ishtar” last Thanksgiving allowed an “unnaturally short” editing time, Beatty says, especially since there were some extra scenes to be shot, “which we had suspected from the beginning would be necessary. It’s always a good idea to allow for extra shooting on a picture, as Woody (Allen) does.”

He says the postponement was mutually agreed upon with the studio. The studio chose the May 15 release date, having preferred not to open in the first quarter of the year.

“They suggested May 22. We were actually able to move it up earlier ,” he says.

Although he used Storaro as his cinematographer on “Reds,” Beatty as producer does not take credit for getting Storaro to film “Ishtar.” “It’s important,” Beatty insists deferentially, “not to say who had what idea on a movie. What I wanted to do was support Elaine as fully as I could and have people that she was happy with. She was happy with him.” Then again, as Beatty also said, “Watching Storaro is like watching Magic Johnson.”

Films have made Beatty a very wealthy man. But, he says, “I don’t think I’ve ever been mainly motivated by money. I’m paid so much more money than I’d ever expected. I’ve been very lucky in that area. But it’s only interesting as a symbol.”

His company, Mulholland Productions, is becoming more active. Cousin and longtime associate David MacLeod is producing a James Toback film, “The Pick-Up Artist,” with Molly Ringwald and Robert Downey Jr., which has just finished principal photography.

Beatty continues to be interested in politics, specifically in the candidacy of Gary Hart. “He’s interesting,” Beatty says carefully. “He doesn’t shoot from the hip. He’s taken a long time to decide what he thinks. He’s a very cautious man. There are a lot of divergent interests in the Democratic Party. He might be the one who can provide some clarity and simplicity on the problems that run the risk of alienating some segments of the party.”

Beatty’s next project will, he intends, be “Hughes,” the biography of Howard that he has been researching for years, as he did “Reds,” and for which he has written the initial script. (His customary plan, he says, is do the first script and then bring in other writers.) “Hughes” will be “the other side of the coin from ‘Reds.’ ”

Whether he will produce, direct and star in “Hughes,” he is not yet sure. “Movies are all collaboration,” he says, “and you get more fun out of working with people. I never set out knowing what I’m going to call myself on a movie. But especially when you’ve written the script, it’s important to know how to set limits on the sort of job you’re going to do.

“You’re so liable to be utterly obnoxious. You don’t set out to be intimidating, but you sure can work your way up to obnoxious. Unless you set out guidelines when you’re working with another director or producer, they won’t want you around.”

“But what we’re all doing is just helping each other to make movies. That’s all it is.”

Now, late on Saturday, he slumps back on a sofa in the sound company’s reception area. He contemplates a half-consumed sandwich before going back into the mixing room. Two more days and they would be finished.

“It’s as glamorous as exhaustion ever gets,” Warren Beatty says.