Dark ‘Chocolate War’ Sweet Debut for Director Gordon

Patrolling the back tables of his Santa Monica eatery, the restaurant owner suddenly stopped and stared at a young man seated by the window. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” the proprietor asked. “You look so familiar.”

Keith Gordon grinned. “I’m an actor,” he acknowledged. “Maybe you saw one of my films. ‘Dressed to Kill?’ Or ‘Back to School’?”

“Hhmmm,” the restaurateur said, obviously stumped. But eager to show off his establishment’s Hollywood credentials, he quickly volunteered: “You know Marty Brest sat in that same chair a few weeks ago. And everyone says he’s a great director.”

That’s just what critics are saying about Gordon, the 27-year-old actor-turned-director, whose directorial debut, the just-released film “The Chocolate War,” has emerged as the year’s latest low-budget rave.

David Sterritt of the Christian Science Monitor dubbed Gordon “a new and original voice in American movies.” The Times’ Sheila Benson described Gordon as a “terrifyingly assured director” with “a lovely feeling for nuance and for ensemble.”

Shot in 24 days for a rock-bottom $700,000, the film stars John Glover, Ilan Mitchell-Smith and Wally Ward in an adaptation of a cult novel by Robert Cormier. Scripted by Gordon, the film has the unsettling air of a modern-day “Lord of the Flies,” showing a Catholic boys school split by a power struggle between a tyrannical headmaster and a rebellious loner, each at odds with a malevolent schoolboy secret society.

When Gordon discovered the book, he wanted to option the property--so he could play Archie, the chilly secret-society leader. “Someone always had the rights to the book, but no one ever could make it,” explained Gordon, a lively, quick-witted conversationalist whose mind easily darts from one topic to the next. “The story is just too dark for modern-day Hollywood, which didn’t want to make a movie about such a strange group of kids. It was just too scary for them.”

Happily, Gordon hooked up with the Management Co. Entertainment Group (MCEG), a film production company run by Jonathan Krane, a Hollywood producer who co-founded Blake Edwards Entertainment and manages a large roster of actors and directors. “For a director, MCEG makes you feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven,” said Gordon. “They’ve let me cut the trailer, they let me have a say in the poster ads, and as long as I stayed within our budget, they gave me complete freedom.”

With a $700,000 budget, Gordon couldn’t stray far. “The movie in a big sense was pre-edited, simply because I didn’t have the money to shoot scenes 30 or 40 times,” he said. “There wasn’t any fat at all. Even the script was only 96 pages, because I knew I didn’t have a day to waste or a scene that I wasn’t absolutely sure I needed to film.”

Actors occasionally make the transition to director. Charles Laughton did the magnificent “Night of the Hunter” and, more recently, Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford have won acclaim. But the transition is often bumpy, perhaps because of the divergent psychological demands of the work.

“The psychology is definitely very different,” said Gordon. “I’m not sure I have the traditional emotional makeup of an actor. Actors are very instinctual and childlike. Directors are passionate, but they also possess a certain emotional stability which allows them to survive all the usual movie-set catastrophes without having a nervous breakdown.”

Gordon laughed. “It’s funny. Put me out on the set. We’re running out of light, it’s starting to rain and we only have one hour left to shoot. I’m fine. I’m very calm. But doing my laundry today--now that I have trouble with.”

Gordon grew up in New York, where his parents were “struggling” actors from the Compass Theatre Company (later known as Second City). “My father was one of those New York actors that--maybe you knew his face--but he never became a celebrity,” Gordon said. “He had the typical actors’ life. He’d do a little theater, a day’s work on a commercial, then be around the house for months, without working, before he’d disappear for weeks on a job.”

At 16, Gordon dropped out of school, eager to start acting. “I don’t think my parents were particularly thrilled, but I never functioned well in school. I wasn’t good at sitting around for 12 hours a day in class. I don’t think school is especially well-designed for most kids. As a child, you have so much passion and energy and curiosity that it’s crazy to be cooped up in school instead of being able to follow your own instincts.”

While Gordon got good notices as an actor, working in everything from “All That Jazz” to “Single Bars, Single Women,” he began preparing himself for film making. Luckily for him, Gordon acted with such directors as Brian De Palma, John Carpenter and Michael Bennett.

“I was somewhere between inquisitive and nauseatingly inquisitive,” he said. “And everyone was very open--they’d spend endless hours with me. De Palma even let me sit in the editing room, watching him cut his films.”

From De Palma, Gordon learned the visual grammar of film: “He taught me why he moved his camera, what mood it created, why he chose each shot--and what effects it would have. It was a series of invaluable learning experiences.”

Carpenter offered Gordon a lesson in leadership. “He taught me how to run a set. He wants his crew to enjoy themselves, so the world doesn’t come screeching to a halt just because your generator breaks down for an hour. We shot an 11-week film, with all sorts of complicated special effects and stunts, and John never yelled once at anyone.”

Appearing in a stage play directed by Bennett, Gordon learned how to deal with different acting personalities. “He never tried to impose his style on us,” he said. “He knew I loved to intellectualize things, so he’d talk with me for hours. With a more instinctual actor, he’d work in a more spontaneous, improvisatory way. The idea was--you’re not here to teach these people to act, but to bring out the best in them.”

Gordon has also learned a lot about his own limitations as a director. “I think I’m good at encouraging actors to come up with their own ideas--and allowing myself to accept them,” he said. “But I had to learn when to shut up. Sometimes I’d talk so much that I’d have the actor over-intellectualizing the part. So I had to get myself to stop talking and let them act.”

“The Chocolate War” is a tale of the perversion of power, where a school’s lofty rituals and traditions have been twisted by greed and authoritarianism. It’s hard to say who scares you the most--the school’s dictatorial headmaster or the malicious secret society whose boyish leader coolly subverts the schoolmaster’s autocratic regime with an arsenal of cruel pranks and hazing assignments.

“That’s what fascinated me about the book,” said Gordon. “Its characters were not just dark, but very smart and dangerous. I’ve always been drawn to people who are on the edge between genius and madness, probably because there’s such a strong connection between cruelty and creativity. That’s why the kids in this story make such good drama--because we all have some of them in us. We all have a crazy side--and the only way to change that part of us is to understand it.”

Gordon wants to make films that would explore equally complex issues, but he realizes the economics of today’s Hollywood make it difficult to bankroll such undertakings.

“The average Hollywood film costs $17 million, so you have to make nearly $50 million to break even,” he said. “So if I were an executive, I wouldn’t make tough, challenging films either. I’d be afraid of losing my job.

“The problem is that as long as you have that one ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ blockbuster, which makes everybody money, then you’re always going to have the studios aiming for the huge hit. I think the future for people like me lies in low-budget, independent films where you don’t need to reach an enormous audience to make money.”

Gordon worries that Hollywood’s blockbuster-or-bust mentality has begun to warp actors’ sensibilities as well. “The business has become so star-obsessed that a lot of young actors feel they can’t afford to be in a flop.

“When I sent ‘Chocolate War’ around, agents would say, ‘Hmm. It’s a fascinating film, but it’s so dark. I don’t know.’ ”

Gordon groaned. “Everybody is so protective of their image. It’s sad, because if you don’t take chances, you don’t get any better. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having the courage to fail once in a while.”