TOMLIN, MIDLER GET DOWN TO ‘BUSINESS’

The summer scene at 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, in the heart of East Harlem, was heating up with the arrival of Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin and a film crew, to shoot a scene for the two performers’ first film together, “Big Business.”

Curious residents were leaning out of tenement windows to check out an uncommon kind of commotion on the always-noisy street below. Idle teen-agers were stretching from their posts on neighborhood stoops to check out the gathering crowd. The regulars at the Boss Bar were timidly peeking out the barroom door.

“What’s goin’ on?” one passer-by asked of an onlooker.

“They’re doin’ a movie about business,” was the response.

“What kind of business . . . the drug business?” pressed the newcomer to the scene.

“Who knows? Maybe. They probably have enough money.”

Actually, the title of the film, due to be released by Disney’s Touchstone in the spring of 1988, refers to the big business conglomerate owned and operated by the two characters being played by Midler and Tomlin--actually, two of the four characters they’re playing in the comedy.

Midler and Tomlin are cast as two sets of twins who were accidentally mismatched at birth. One set, Rose and Sadie (Tomlin and Midler, respectively) Shelton, own the New York-based company, Moramax. The other, less affluent pair, Rose and Sadie Ratliff, live in Jupiter Hollow, W. Va., and work in a Moramax furniture factory operation. The film’s story takes off when the Southern set of twins come north to protest the planned closing of the West Virginia factory, thus setting the stage for what sources close to the film describe as “every possible combination of mistaken identity.”

“In one sense, it’s a classical farce, but it’s also got a warm side about people finding their true identity,” said director Jim Abrahams. The Harlem sequence being shot, on what was Midler’s and Tomlin’s first day of filming together earlier this month, focused on the Shelton twins, after they had been abandoned there by a taxi driver. The driver was refusing to take them to their Manhattan destination because they’d confessed they had no cash to pay the fare; earlier, they had been stranded by their limo driver who mistakenly drove off with the Ratliff twins.

Midler and Tomlin, in character, looked appropriately out of place on a Harlem street corner. Midler, dressed expensively in a houndstooth suit and wearing hot pink gloves, spiked heels and a straw boater hat, looked seriously perturbed at finding herself in such unfamiliar surroundings. Tomlin, dressed more casually in a sheer organza blouse, A-line skirt and wearing white gloves and pearls, looked nervously displaced. In fact, the situation seemed suited to the two comediennes’ often outrageous personae, with the scene’s background extras, like their real-life counterparts, resembling some of the street people that Midler and Tomlin have been known to sympathetically portray.

Their sympathies were not going unnoticed by some of the bystanders on the Harlem locations. Several representatives of neighborhood organizations for the homeless turned up when word of the famous visitors’ presence spread, to try to reach them with word of the local work. “Dear Bette,” read a note on one of the brochures intended for Midler, “won’t you please come see what we’re doing here.”

Midler and Tomlin were not talking to anybody except their director as the fast-paced street scene was being shot. In particular, they were not talking to the press or posing for the photographers who pushed their way through police barricades to snap a shot. They were being “protected,” according to a press representative for the film, because they were just starting to shoot the film, for just one week here, before moving to the Disney studios in Burbank for about seven more weeks of filming.

The two women, who have known each other for years, rehearsed together for nearly three weeks, according to Abrahams. He said they walked through “screen tests” to try to establish the four different characters they were playing, contributed to the script by Dori Pierson and Marc Rubell and generally proved to be “hysterical” in preparing for their latest roles.

“Both seem to respect the other’s work greatly,” Abrahams observed. “Both seem to be complementing and stimulating the other, which so far seems to be bringing out the best in both of them. You have to understand, they’re brilliant,” Abrahams said.

By the time the street scene was shot, the neighborhood crowds seemed to have adjusted, as New Yorkers in every neighborhood seem to do, to the business of making a movie. But as Midler, Tomlin and entourage walked to their trailers in a nearby, rubble-filled vacant lot, they were followed by a procession of new-found fans shouting, “Hey, Bette” . . . “Hey, Lily” and by a persistent group of advocates, carrying brochures about the business of helping the homeless.

“Please remember us too,” one man in the group was heard saying softly, as though he knew these particular movie stars would hear his message.