A CHIP OFF THE OLD HUSTON

“They say the children of famous people find it a handicap. That’s baloney!” Danny Huston says with admirable candor. “Dad and I made a great team hustling projects. One big hustler, one little hustler.”

Danny and father John Huston had hustled a production deal on “Mr. North,” based on Thornton Wilder’s somewhat autobiographical last novel, “Theophilus North,” about a tutor to some rich kids in Newport, R.I. Danny is now in Los Angeles finishing post-production on the film.

The attractions to Skip Steloff of Heritage Entertainment, which financed the production, were that the elder Huston would play the crusty patriarch who contends with the tutor. Huston had also co-authored the script with Janet Roach, who did the script on “Prizzi’s Honor,” and he would be executive producer.

The without-which-no-deal was that Danny, who had discovered the property, would direct. In his last, failing years, John Huston had been arranging a kind of pre-inheritance for some of his children: seeing Anjelica’s career relaunched through her Oscar-winning performance in his “Prizzi’s Honor,” directing “The Dead” with another son, Tony, as producer, and helping Danny hustle the deal on “Mr. North.”

Seriously ailing but magnificently gallant, Huston began the role but collapsed during the first week of shooting in Newport and died a few days later. But Huston, a realist, had briefed old friend Robert Mitchum on the role even before he left Los Angeles for Rhode Island. Mitchum took over and the film went forward.

“Mitchum kidded and said Dad had pulled off the greatest hoax of his life, knowing he wouldn’t be able to do the part. But I don’t think so,” Danny says. “He was just being a professional; he was covering himself.”

At 25, Danny Huston is not exactly little. He is a strapping 6-footer with curly brown hair and a mischievously youthful face. He was born in Rome in 1962 to Huston and his then-wife Zoe Sallis. It was home base while Huston was preparing “Freud” in Munich and Vienna. Danny started wandering onto his father’s sets at age 4, when Huston was making “The Bible” in Rome.

After his parents were divorced, Danny lived with his mother in Rome for 15 years. He visited his father in Ireland during the summers. At holidays there were gatherings, affectionately remembered, of the five-times-married Huston’s fairly complicated family.

Danny attended prep school in England, then went on to art school. “Dad was a painter and for a while I wanted to be a painter. I have to admit that all the intrigues and hassles of the film business scared me. I’d seen all of that with Dad.”

But the pull of making movies was strong and he attended the London Film School in Covent Garden, with his father keeping a fond but sharp eye on his work. (Danny carries an English passport, although he is no longer quite sure where home is.)

Father John put him to work at 21, doing second-unit direction on “Under the Volcano” in Cuernavaca and shooting the eerie title sequence of masks, which established the Day of the Dead mood of the film.

Danny shot a documentary on the making of “Santa Claus” and was cinematographer on a documentary about the alpaca in Peru. His first unescorted outing as a feature director is an hourlong television film, “Mr. Corbett’s Ghost,” which will air New Year’s Eve on commercial television in England. It stars Paul Scofield as a ghost, John Huston as the Collector of Souls and Burgess Meredith as what Danny calls “a Tom O’ Bedlam character.” He has also since done a television film called “Bigfoot” for Disney. “Mr. North” is his first effort at a feature film for theatrical release, but he has had a fair apprenticeship.

“Even as a child,” Danny says, “Dad would let me sit in while he went over the pages he was going to shoot the next day, and then I’d have a chance to see them come to life before my eyes.”

For “Mr. North,” father and son had assembled a crew of Huston regulars, including the composer Alex North, who did the music for “Prizzi’s Honor” and “Under the Volcano.”

“Danny,” said an old family friend who was at the location, “was totally at home. He’d been on his father’s sets all his short life. He knew every technician by his first name. He’d known many of them for years.”

“It was tough,” Danny says. “There were long shooting days and then we’d rush to the hospital or to the house he’d taken. Then it was over. What kept us going was that we all wanted to get the film made properly, out of respect. Even after Dad was gone, I had the feeling he was keeping an eye on us.”

“Mr. North” will be released next spring. Meanwhile, Danny Huston is readying some new projects. He will, of course, be hustling solo now, but not exactly starting from scratch.