TOTO, I DON’T THINK WE’RE IN HOLLYWOOD ANYMORE

LAWRENCE, Kan. —  The monotonous turnpike from Kansas City to Lawrence is marked by flattened prairie dogs, low wire fences and billboards suggesting that “Kansas Beef Is Good Anytime” and “Pork Is the All-American Meat.” It may be only 60 miles, but the ride is a long one from Kansas City International Airport to the Holiday Inn production headquarters for “Kansas,” the first screen teaming of heartthrobs Matt Dillon and Andrew McCarthy.

Radio talk-show conversation tends to center around poultry (“The chickens we eat today are descendants of the chickens brought to America by Christopher Columbus”) and cattle (“Cows give more milk when they listen to music”). Occasionally there is a startling news note (“Kansas has the third highest eradication record for marijuana as a cash crop, behind Hawaii and Kentucky”).

But, for the most part, Kansas is thousands of square miles of less controversial crops: millet, sorghum, corn “as high as an elephant’s eye.”

Perhaps that’s why the college town of Lawrence, home to the University of Kansas, is an anomaly on the plains.

“It’s a kind of oasis,” said Jerry Nevere, manager of the Kansas Sports Bar where Dillon and McCarthy spent much of their off-time during the summer drinking, playing video golf and watching ESPN over the bar. “Outside of Lawrence, I think most people really do wear overalls and (urinate) off the side of tractors.”

To be sure, Kansas has its charms: the full moon rising over a cornfield, the sweet smell of new-mown hay on the edge of town, the far-off whistle blow of a freight train.

But it’s no place to conduct show biz on a long-term basis.

It’s a Story Called ‘Kansas’

Shortly after they arrived, Dillon and McCarthy had sampled most of Lawrence’s college bars. They wowed the locals, tolerated autograph seekers and cast around for something to fend off boredom. Dillon did his bar hopping in the name of research.

“I kinda hung around some of the dingy bars in Kansas, talked with the people there,” he said. His investigations included “going around to the masses and finding out what they are.”

His co-star was only slightly less condescending.

“It’s . . . different. Nice place to hide out for a while,” said McCarthy. “I don’t want to pack up and move here, but it’s OK for 10 weeks” of location shooting.

It was “Kansas” that brought them to Kansas: an $8-million (or so) romantic adventure about two young drifters involved in a bank robbery, written by a Connecticut screenwriter, directed by an Australian and produced by a South Jersey native who has spent the bulk of his movie years in Hollywood. Throw in the fact that Dillon is from New York state, McCarthy is from New Jersey and that Leslie Hope, the female lead, is Canadian, and “Kansas” becomes something other than a feature film about Kansas.

“The thing is, it’s a story called ‘Kansas’ and it’s not about Kansas,” said Paul Jackson, a Lawrence resident who hired on at $35-a-day plus lunch to be an extra.

Though the setting is supposed to be 1987, the Depression Era look of the film and its corn p one characters hark back to a Midwest of Alf Landon in his prime--a fact that does not set well with the Kansans. In the words of one local resident, the movie “makes us all look like bumpkins straight out of ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ ”

“I think, you know, they came to this little hick town and they expected us all to act like a bunch of little hick people,” said Susan Shepard, whose hometown of Valley Falls (Pop. 1,189) served as the film setting for a bank robbery and a Fourth of July parade.

“They acted like we’d never been anywhere in the world, that we’d never traveled anywhere and didn’t know anything,” she continued. “Most people have been around a little. I mean, you’ve gotta get out of Valley Falls once in a while or you’ll go crazy!”

But Dillon, who portrays a sneering, womanizing lout on the lam in the film, says “Kansas” is an accurate, affectionate rendering of contemporary Middle America.

“It’s about America, the heart of America,” he said. “We’re doing this movie in Kansas. And that’s what this movie is about. People will say to me, ‘I heard this film is making fun of Kansas.’ God, I hope not. Because, then, it will be making fun of me.”

Pizza, Gambling but No Absolut

“When they first came to town, there were 50 girls dressed to the nines hanging around the Kansas Sports Bar in the basement of the Eldridge Hotel where they’re staying,” said Randy Walker, a regular at one of the nearby bars where Dillon and McCarthy hung out. “It was like Teen magazine come to life on the streets of Lawrence with packs of roving teen-agers stalking them everywhere. You could hear ‘em in the alley behind the Eldridge, screaming ‘Matt! Matt!’ ”

Several young women pooled their money and actually checked into the hotel during the first week or two, hoping to sidle up to Dillon.

Then perceptions began to change.

“Dillon acted like a real jerk,” said Kimberly Angino, daughter of a Lawrence City Commissioner and a special education major at the University of Kansas. “He came into the Sanctuary (a private club in central Lawrence) one night and tried to make them stay open until 3 a.m. and he hit on all the girls.”

Sanctuary bartender Paul Karnaze described McCarthy as stand-offish but basically “pretty fun.”

“The only thing that upset him was that we didn’t serve Absolut vodka, but he didn’t seem to mind after a while,” Karnaze said. “They both got pretty toasted.”

Karnaze said he had to escort Dillon from the bar after last call. To show his disdain, Dillon “banged his head three or four times against the wall on the way out,” Karnaze said. (Several attempts to contact the “Kansas” co-stars about their sanctuary sojourn failed last week.)

Dillon’s and McCarthy’s reputations among the masses seemed fairly evenly split by the time the summer was winding to a close: Like the characters that they portray in “Kansas,” Dillon was generally regarded as loud and belligerent and McCarthy brooding and sensitive.

Complaining about the lack of local sophistication while cozying up to milk-fed teeny-boppers was amusing during the first few weeks. But as they approached the end of shooting, Dillon and McCarthy were bored. The only time McCarthy was able to satisfy his citified-lust for gambling was at the poker tables in Fargo, N. D., where the crew flew to shoot some wheat field scenes.

“And there’s a $2 limit,” he sniffed.

When the threshing scenes were over, he brought back a stack of chips to Lawrence and passed them out to crew members as a joke, to show how big-time players fare in Fargo.

His other current passion, golf, got old, playing time after time on the same course. Out on location inside his Winnebago, McCarthy was reduced to sending for pizza, drinking Budweiser and reading the complete works of Dashiell Hammett.

By the time he was winding up his big barn-floor love scene with Leslie Hope about the first week of September, McCarthy was finished with “The Glass Key” and halfway through “The Maltese Falcon.” He was also dead certain that Kansas was as tired of him as he was of Kansas.

“They were as excited as hell that a movie was coming to Kansas,” said McCarthy as he waited for his lukewarm pizza to heat up in a microwave. “They get to know you and then they want you to leave. They’re not pushy at all. They’ll say: ‘I don’t want to bother you but. . . .’ Then they’ll ask for your autograph or something. Hey, this is Kansas. The people are real.”

There’s Not a Lot in Kansas

“There’s a word for these people,” said producer George Litto. “The word is ingenuous ,” he said while dining at Lawrence’s Alvamar Country Club.

The country club was built on a hill overlooking the home of the University of Kansas and suits whatever high-falutin’ needs the ingenuous natives might have. While his stars tolerated room service at the Eldridge Hotel in downtown Lawrence, Litto holed up at a rented fairway home at Alvamar. There, at least he could have some of the luxuries he had grown accustomed to on the Coast.

Fairly good wine. Passing good food. OK service.

“That’s about it,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot to do around here, eh?”

Another bite of tender Kansas beef, another slug of Napa Valley wine and a sigh. The end of principal photography for “Kansas” was still three weeks off.

The school year had begun a week earlier at the university. The wholesome ingenues were back in class, apparently their interest in Dillon, McCarthy and “Kansas” just a vacation memory. When director David Stevens needed a young woman to shed her clothes for a transitional “Kansas” bedroom scene, he could find no co-ed starry-eyed enough to disrobe. Litto finally had to wire Playboy to send him a bunny.

“I’ve done pictures on location in small towns before,” he said. “Jackson, Miss. We shot ‘Drive-In’ in Terrell, Tex., where they got a gas station and a motel and that’s about it. But this, Kansas, I mean. . . .”

“Ingenuous,” he said.

Some Happy, Some Bitter

The noon whistle outside Mark’s Automotive shrieked above the incessant, high-pitched hum of cicadas in the town of Valley Falls.

Ray Madorin, one of Mark’s mechanics, knocked off tinkering with the valves in the belly of a Chrysler Cordoba long enough to become a movie critic.

“The city council give ‘em the damn street,” he muttered, pointing his ratchet wrench at the broad expanse of red-brick roadway out front of the garage.

“You allow an outfit to come in like this and say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna close down your business for five damn days,’ that’s just wrong, see?”

The trouble was, the town fathers thought the production would roll into town, shoot a batch of film and then move on, Madorin explained. Maybe spread around a little of the $4 million they were rumored to be spending in Kansas while they were in Valley Falls. But that’s not what happened.

“They don’t just film it once, see, ‘cause they can change it around anyway they want to. They gotta shoot it a whole buncha times. So they got that Matt Dillon and that McCarthy kid robbin’ the bank all damn day long. They shoot it over and over and then they fix it up later,” Madorin complained.

“That’s why if I was ever on a jury, I wouldn’t believe no pictures they showed me because they could change it around, doctor it up any way they wanted to, see? That’s what they do with movies. What they got in the movie’s what they want. You got you a bad angle, you fix it up later, see?”

But the film crew couldn’t edit out the financial damage done to Mark Boyce’s auto shop. He and Ray and the rest of the mechanics raised hell and threatened to interrupt the film shooting with the sounds of carburetor and brake jobs unless they got paid for their loss of business. Boyce got $2,500 in hush money. So did Jim Ricketts, who runs the used car lot on the west side of town and also complained of lost business.

But most people were like Sherry Fralks, who runs Lee’s Flower Shop and Videocassette Rental.

“If they were gonna reimburse one business, they should have reimbursed all of us,” she said.

For the six days of shooting in Valley Falls, Fralks simply hung a “Closed” sign on her front door. Not only did the movie crew take up all the parking places in front of the flower shop, but they also blocked off the streets and stationed security guards throughout the center of town to prevent customers from coming and going during filming. Owners of places like the weekly Valley Falls Vindicator newspaper and Frank’s Pharmacy, where some of the interior scenes were shot, were paid a token $200 for the use of their offices.

The rest of the businesses got nothing.

Fralks went to City Hall and got a copy of the mayor’s resolution that allowed the filming. Other than a requirement that the film crew have its own insurance, the city asked for nothing of Trans World Entertainment.

“I think the great percentage of people were very happy that it happened,” said Mayor Dan Sheldon. “A few folks that we’re not very proud of and who weren’t very good hosts did raise hell. . . .”

Though it was true that the film crew took over Valley Falls for a hot week in August and that the city earned nothing for it, the 69-year-old Sheldon says no harm was done. Having Valley Falls selected was a privilege and it was every citizen’s duty to act with dignity around those visitors who extended that privilege.

“Now, how often’s someone gonna make a movie in Valley Falls?” he asked. “I tell you, I’m still damn bitter about all the (fuss) I had to take. I don’t get paid nothin’ to be mayor, you know.”

Fralks remained philosophical. She neither wanted nor sought Matt Dillon’s autograph, just as she neither wants nor seeks Sheldon’s ouster as mayor.

“You can’t blame the movie people because they came in and said, ‘Can we do it?’ and the city said, ‘Yes you can,’ ” Fralks said. “I don’t think the city council ever even thought about the complications that would arise out of it. The people around here didn’t know any better. It was just a lesson to learn.”

Authenticity Took Effort

Screenwriter Spencer Eastman, who had never been to Kansas when Litto first optioned “Kansas” three years ago, wrote a fanciful tale that called for poor-but-proud townsfolk who turn out to see the governor give a speech in a red, white and blue-festooned speaker’s stand, freight-jumping drifters who knock over a bank that still has cages for its tellers and farmhands who pilot threshers through a rich rancher’s wheat field.

But the last of the Kansas wheat was harvested six weeks before director Stevens was ready to film. So the Kansas wheat harvest was staged in North Dakota.

And the rustic overalls and housedresses that wardrobe wanted extras to wear were so grubby and out-of-date that many Kansans balked at getting into them for the camera. Old-fashioned speaker’s stands, festooned or otherwise, are also an anachronism. So the “Kansas” crew built one, along with a couple of dated-looking gazebos, to give their film a touch of Kansas “authenticity.”

And the Kendall State Bank in Valley Falls--with its automatic teller machine, its computer terminals and its drive-through teller booth--didn’t look like producer Litto’s idea of a Kansas bank. So Litto built his own in Mary List’s Maytag appliance store.

“It’s kinda nice,” she said, a week after the crews had come through. “I’ll leave it up, I suppose.”

For $200, she let the film crew clear out her washers and dryers and put in the Crescent County Bank. Production designer Matthew Jacobs created a rickety two-teller bank with a walk-in vault that looked more like a target for Frank and Jesse James than Matt Dillon and Andrew McCarthy.

Mary is second cousin to Mark Boyce of Mark’s Automotive next door. She could have profited from the film crew same as Mark, but she counts that beneath her dignity. Like Mayor Sheldon, she deemed the presence of Hollywood in her hometown an honor, not a profit-making opportunity. The crew scratched up the enamel on a couple of new $550 washers, but she dutifully reported the damage to the location manager and expects that, sooner or later, they’ll make it right.

Instant Wheat Farm

It’s not so easy to find prosperous wheat farmers in Kansas these days, but the script called for one. So the movie people built a prosperous wheat farm on a 160-acre spread owned by Reed and Harriet Byers, 26 miles southeast of Lawrence.

“I didn’t know anything about it and had no idea what it was all about,” said Reed Byers, a bank executive.

He says a neighbor noticed a couple of people from the Kansas Film Commission poking around his place at the tail end of May and a few days later, eight more showed up. By the time they were ready to make him an offer, Byers called the publisher of the local newspaper and asked him to see what the going price for a location shoot might be.

“So, he kind of gave me an idea what the ballpark was,” Byers says, and with that information he struck a deal. Byers won’t say how much money changed hands, but one source said the film company paid him $10,000. The script also called for a tennis court scene on the prosperous wheat farm, so Byers got that thrown into the deal too.

“The only smart thing I’ve done is the deal I made that I had to approve the specs for the tennis court,” Byers said.

No ‘John Wayne’ Games

Rowland and Dolores Stevens were not as deferential as Mary List nor as shrewd as the Byers. All they wanted was the money for their ruined Chevy.

“Them people from California come in and think they can intimidate ever’ body,” said Rowland (Rod) Stevens. He doesn’t intimidate as easy as some. That’s why he got a check for $12,000 from the film makers when most everyone else in Valley Falls got spit, according to Stevens.

“I wasn’t gonna play none of their John Wayne games,” he said.

In addition to staging a bank robbery, the Trans World Entertainment crew wanted a Fourth of July parade through the center of town. All cars were ordered off the street and the tow truck from Mark’s Automotive was called in to assist in removing them--part of owner Mark Boyce’s excuse for demanding $2,500 from Trans World later in the shooting.

But the tow truck didn’t move the Stevens’ 1987 Chevy Corsica. For the past year, Dolores has parked it each morning at the west end of Valley Falls and caught a commuter van to her job in Topeka. Each evening, the van dropped her off and she drove back to the Stevens’ farm a couple of miles out of town.

On the day of the big “Kansas” parade, the car disappeared. When Dolores found it, she was convinced the automatic transmission was ruined: A group of people must have forced it to move while it was in park.

“My daughter called me and said they was messin’ with Mom’s car so I go down there and they got a big fat rent-a-cop up at the end of the street, tellin’ me I can’t go up the street because they was shootin’ their damn movie,” Rowland Stevens recalled.

“I told him, ‘By God, it’s still a public road!’ And he threatened to arrest me! A rent-a-cop! I went up there anyway and ‘course nobody’d say who moved the car, but I told ‘em somebody was gonna have to make it right.”

There was some dickering and dawdling. Clearances from California, Stevens was told. But he stuck to his guns and kept raising hell and threatening to march into the middle of main street.

By the time the movie company left town, Stevens had handed location manager Kevin McAteer the pink slip to the Corsica and McAteer confirmed that he handed Stevens a check for $12,000. Rowland Stevens said today Dolores Stevens drives a new Dodge van into town each morning to catch the commuter bus to Topeka.

Youngsters Approve

While adults are split on how they feel about Hollywood in Kansas, youngsters were unanimous in their approval.

“I guess it was the biggest thing to happen in Valley Falls since the train wreck last summer,” said Stephanie Schwartz, 14. Four people died in that disaster, she said.

Like the rest of the members of Connie Goeckel’s ninth grade physical education class at Valley Falls Grade School, Schwartz took full advantage of movie stars roaming the streets of Valley Falls. Of the 12 girls in the class, 10 liked McCarthy best, one was a Dillon fan and one abstained from voting.

“Actually I liked the crew the best,” said Heidi Jeanneret. “They weren’t stuck up at all and they were real nice mostly.”

In her “Official Beach Bum” T-shirt, Cindi Welborn, also 14, spoke about film making:

“I’ve been to Universal Studios and it was different here than it was there,” she said. “It was set up real awkward here but real organized at Universal. . . . Everything was a mad rush. Like, they’d tell everyone to be on the set at 6 a.m. and then they wouldn’t start until 8 a.m.”

Like some of the miffed merchants, Jennifer Chockley was afraid that the script would “make Kansas look like a desolate area with a few towns scattered around.”

“There’s already people who think that we’re way behind because we don’t have a movie theater in town,” she said. “We used to have one but they tore it down. But you can still go to Topeka for the movies.”

It Has Happened Before

“Every few years someone comes makin’ a movie in Kansas, seems like,” observed Ray Braun of Braun’s Conoco Service on the outskirts of the tiny town of Edgerton, 25 miles southeast of Lawrence.

Lawrence was blown off the map in the 1983 TV movie “The Day After.” And, 20 years ago, director Richard Brooks blew away four members of a well-to-do ranch family in the film version of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” (In fact, Braun’s vintage-looking, wood-frame gas station was used as a backdrop to the opening minutes of “In Cold Blood.”)

When the crew shot a couple days down at the pond on the south side of town, Braun thought there might be a chance that he could cash in on the character of his service station.

“They give me $50 for ‘In Cold Blood,’ ” Braun said. “They said they wouldn’t be here over an hour but they was here a lot longer than that.

“So I thought when they was makin’ this ‘Kansas’ it was some kind of documentary film. I thought it had something to do with the Chamber of Commerce. Then they come down here to shoot at the park and all the folks in town was jumpin’ ‘cause they get to be an extra. I guess they give ‘em their lunch and that’s about all.”

Nobody from “Kansas” was interested in shooting his service station this time, he said. Braun looked across the highway for several silent seconds.

“Them movie people’s like havin’ a Southern Baptist Convention come to town,” he said. “You get your little city all gussied up and the Chamber of Commerce gets the people pumped up and then hundreds of conventioneers come in and you wait and you wait and then they’re gone. And afterwards, you ask the hotel keepers, ‘How much they spend?’ and he answers, kinda gloomy-like:

“ ‘Each one of ‘em come to town with a $10 bill and the 10 Commandments. And while they was here, they didn’t break neither one of ‘em.’ That’s how she be when Hollywood comes to Kansas.”

Carolyn McMaster, arts editor of the Lawrence Journal-World, contributed to this article.