HBO TO AIR ‘VIETNAM WAR STORY’

Standin’ tall and lookin’ good, ought to be in Hollywood .

--Marching chant led by a grinning Marine Sgt. Dan Fillmore as he and other extras return from filming new Vietnam show for cable TV.

When “Platoon” became a megahit this year, some thought Hollywood’s motto would become Do Lunch With a Grunt. Nam was hot, Nam was happening. Definitely time to film the hell that was Long Binh.

Sure. But for Pat Duncan, a veteran who’d been trying to sell his Vietnam script for three years, the success of Oliver Stone’s film added an odd new dimension--an argument that America was now officially Vietnammed out.

“It’s funny,” sighed Duncan, Vietnam class of ‘68-’69, Army, 173rd Airborne Brigade. “Before ‘Platoon,’ everybody said, ‘Why do you want to do a Vietnam project? Nobody cares, nobody wants to see it.’

“After ‘Platoon,’ they said, ‘Why do you want to do another one?’ ”

His answer: “Not all the stories have been told.”

Duncan still hasn’t sold the script but through it, he is getting a chance to tell some of those other stories. He is supervising writer and co-producer of “Vietnam War Story,” a Home Box Office project that recently came to this sensual Old South city to film three 30-minute dramas.

The shows probably will air on the pay-cable channel in early September as a 90-minute “HBO Showcase” presentation. If it gets sufficient audience and acclaim, it may become a Vietnam anthology series.

“Vietnam War Story” is the brainchild of producer Ed Gold. He didn’t serve in the war but he developed an intense interest in it after meeting a five-tour veteran, retired Green Beret Capt. Jim Perry, now a “Story” adviser.

Gold said he first proposed the idea for the series to the networks in 1985, suggesting a succession of “vignettes, little looks at the different aspects of Vietnam and what happened back in the States--from soldiers’ viewpoints.”

CBS, NBC and ABC showed interest, he said, “but nobody was ready to make the bold move. . . . ‘Platoon’ wasn’t out yet and they just weren’t ready to give us the nod.”

Home Box Office was. Last year it gave approval to Gold and his partner in the production, Georg Stanford Brown, for three shows, each with a different cast.

(Times change. In May, after the success of “Platoon,” CBS ordered a Vietnam series for this fall, “Tour of Duty.” CBS insists that “Tour” isn’t a “Platoon” rip-off, even though it also is about an Army platoon in Vietnam in 1967.)

Duncan was signed for “Vietnam War Story” after HBO’s Jeff Bricmont and Gold read his Vietnam movie script, “84-Charlie Mopic,” about an Army cameraman filming a long-range reconnaissance patrol team.

“He seemed perfect, given his attitude and the kind of no-nonsense credibility he wanted to bring to the material,” says Bricmont, HBO’s West Coast director of original programming. “He wanted it to stay away from being Rambo-esque, wanted it to be the story of the men and the women, of what happened in Vietnam.”

“Rambo” aside, the typical Hollywood mindset has been that Vietnam was Constant Combat, non-stop grimness, madness and weirdness, the smell of dope and/or napalm in the morning and other such easy, apocalypse-now imagery.

But Vietnam was more complex than that. That’s why, Duncan said, only one of the three “Story” pieces--his “The Mine,” about Marine grunts--is set in combat. And it emphasizes the camaraderie of war, not the war itself.

The others are his “The Pass,” set in a Qui Nhona bar patronized by day by GIs and by Viet Cong at night, and Ron Rubin’s “Home,” a study of the closeness and fierce black humor of war-maimed young veterans at a stateside Navy hospital.

Duncan drew on his own experiences for “The Pass.” The other teleplays were based on interviews with other veterans--New York-based actors Ken Campbell, Ray Robertson and Josh Cruze, the last two former Marine grunts.

Generally speaking, Duncan said, the pattern for “War Story,” should it become an anthology series, would be to do what he has done: base each episode on stories told by veterans or those with whom veterans came in contact.

“I want as many voices as possible, other points of view besides my own,” said Duncan, a mild, bespectacled man with a beard, graying hair and a propensity for wild Hawaiian shirts.

He’s just as happy that the networks didn’t bite on the project: “I don’t think we could do it honestly on the networks. For one thing, they’d fiddle with the (rough) language. And with the ethnic quality of it.

“Do you think they’d let me do three half hours where, in each one, the lead is a black? I don’t think so, unless it were a half-hour comedy show.

“And there’s the (graphic) violence, although we’re not glorifying violence--whereas even on a straight dramatic series, the networks try to make it look like shooting people is fun.”

The first “Vietnam War Story,” “The Mine,” directed by Brown, was shot on a former plantation about 20 miles outside Savannah. Ironically, filming had to stop more than once because of noise from passing Army helicopters--including Cobra gunships of Vietnam fame--based at nearby Ft. Stewart.

The film’s Marine platoon had 20 actors and extras. The latter included a young ex-Ranger who’d just finished his Army hitch and three off-duty Marines, two of whom doubled as helicopter door-gunnners.

None of the troupe was old enough to have seen combat in Vietnam. Not so some in the production crew. It was producer Gold’s policy to hire veterans, locally or in Hollywood, wherever possible.

The old Vietnam hands included Gold’s brother, Dave, the company’s transportation captain; and the chief technical adviser, retired Marine Capt. Russ Thurman.

There was a modest measure of sympathy from them for the actors, who filed through marshland and a rice paddy, sweating under helmets, packs, M-16s and old-style Marine flak jackets.

Don Davis, a short, powerfully built former Marine grunt, was among the veteran observers. The plantation had no real rice paddy, so Davis, locally hired by the company’s art department, helped create one.

He felt odd about it too he said: “I used to blow these things up, not build ‘em.”

One actor jokingly shouted, “Hey, medic!” at the production’s off-camera first-aid man, Stan Bielowicz. The breezy, mustachioed medicine man just grinned.

“I don’t do house calls,” he hollered. “Take two APC’s (aspirin) and mail me the $5.”

“Old Bill Cosby joke,” he told a visitor. “You know, Cosby was a Navy corpsman.”

So was Bielowicz. Slight difference, though: Cosby was in before Vietnam. Bielowicz logged Vietnam time, 31 months, most of that grunt time, with rifle companies, including the famous, bloody Marine battle for Hill 881 in what they called I Corps near the Demilitarized Zone.

Hill 881 was fought 20 years ago to the month they were filming the war here. Bielowicz had no gripes about the project at hand: “They’re doing it right.”

Bielowicz, now a civilian nurse at Ft. Stewart, helped them do it right. Without being asked, he quietly showed Lesean Hall, a shy, young actor playing the platoon’s corpsman, how to hold his gear, how to stop the bleeding in a leg torn apart by a mine explosion, how to prevent shock.

After running him through the drill several times, he told Hall: “You’re a bac si now. Vietnamese for doctor.”

The lead actor in “The Mine” is Eriq La Salle, a tall, quietly confident New York stage actor educated at Julliard and New York University.

He had once auditioned for “Platoon,” he said, and had it not been for a one-year delay in its filming, he might have been in the movie along with a few of his friends--Tony Todd, Keith David and John C. McGinley.

Still, he was in his second Vietnam drama as a Marine corporal, the first being off-Broadway’s “Wasted,” by Fred Gamel.

La Salle was only 4 years old when Bielowicz was getting shot at on Hill 881. He was only 12 when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. He didn’t know much about the war when he was growing up: “It was just sort of a specter.”

Now? “I feel the American psyche was so retarded through this whole thing,” he said, explaining that he meant retarded in the sense of an inability to comprehend or deal with the war.

But two days of field training had left him, as it did the actors who underwent two weeks of far harder training for “Platoon,” with a new way of thinking about the men who did the actual fighting in Vietnam.

“The bottom line,” he said, “is that my respect for them has multiplied by so much, and I think it will always be there. . . . I think vets need to be paid a certain homage. We need to say ‘Thank you.’ ”

If “Vietnam War Story” becomes a series, it won’t be uncritical of the GIs, the Marines and their officers.

“We’re going to do some bad guys, yeah,” said chief writer Duncan. “For all the good I’d seen in Vietnam, there was also evil--on both sides. We’re going to show that.”

However, it’s very likely they won’t show one favorite Hollywood stereotype: the drug-spaced, guilt-ridden GI whose brain has been forever fried by the Nam.

“That’s always irritated me,” Duncan said, sounding a complaint that many veterans often voice.

“There is post-traumatic stress syndrome--I recognize that,” he said. “But the ‘60s were rough on everybody. I’m sure there are a lot of people who spent the whole time in San Francisco who are having trouble today.” He grinned.

“But I don’t hear anything called ‘the post-hippie syndrome.’ ”