Casting Search Payoff: Two Fresh Faces : Films: Casting director David Rubin scoured the country to find two young actors ‘just right’ for ‘Men Don’t Leave.’

Claims of “nationwide talent searches” are often the stuff of publicity press kits. But for the Geffen Co.’s “Men Don’t Leave,” released here Friday by Warner Bros., casting director David Rubin insists he “truly scoured the country” to find two fresh performers for the crucial roles of star Jessica Lange’s young sons.

Rubin ticks off the open casting sessions he held in nearly a dozen cities from coast to coast a year-and-a-half ago--Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston, San Diego, Houston-Dallas, Toronto-Vancouver, Minneapolis, among them--working with schools, local talent agencies and theater groups. “I not only attended drama classes, but made my way through lunchrooms, playgrounds and talked to teachers about open and emotionally expressive kids.”

The result: He found and eventually cast two Midwesterners who had never worked in a feature film or television episode, but who had appeared previously in a handful of regional commercials. Both were found through their local talent agencies, flown to New York to meet and read with Lange, then to do screen tests here, before they were signed.

“They won the roles against literally hundreds and hundreds of competitors,” says Rubin, whose current casting projects include Paramount’s “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise, and MGM/UA’s “Delirious,” with John Candy.

Chris O’Donnell, then 17, and Charlie Korsmo, then 9, landed the plum parts in “Men Don’t Leave” despite their lack of experience--or perhaps because of it.

“We wanted a real and documentary feel, so we were exhaustive in our search,” Rubin says. “We didn’t want typical, slick child actors. Unfortunately, (in the entertainment business), many young actors learn to create a false reality, which we wanted to avoid.”

The film focuses on a mother (Lange) trying to keep her family together and get on with life in a downscale section of Baltimore after the sudden death of her husband in the cushier suburbs. At turns dramatic and amusing, it requires performances of the two boys that are “emotionally charged but also laced with the comedy of everyday life,” as Rubin puts it.

Rubin credits director Paul Brickman (who shares screenplay credit with Barbara Benedek) and producer John Avnet for their willingness to work with inexperienced young actors. “We always suspected that if the Gods were smiling on us, we’d find kids that had just the right feel.”

A number of critics have hailed the naturalistic performances of Korsmo and--in particular--O’Donnell, even though they’re billed behind Joan Cusack (playing an oddball neighbor who seduces O’Donnell) and Arliss Howard (Lange’s supportive new boyfriend).

Neither, though, has yet felt the impact of celebrity--the film won’t open in their hometowns until it goes into wider release Feb. 23.

O’Donnell, now 19 and a sophomore finance major at Boston College, thought it was “unbelievable” that he’d been asked to audition for such a demanding part, which at one point calls for him to plead poignantly--and tearfully--with Howard to help his troubled mother. “I never thought I was going to get it,” he says.

O’Donnell was so nonchalant, adds Rubin, that he skipped his first three casting appointments to attend high school crew practice (his family lives in Chicago). When he met Brickman, who wrote and directed the hit, “Risky Business” (1983), O’Donnell confesses: “I had no idea who he was, or who Jessica Lange was. I mean, I’d heard of her, but that was it. I really wasn’t with it, as far as movies go.”

It was just that easygoing attitude that first caught Rubin’s eye. “There was something so offhand about Chris that made him very real as a teen-age boy . . . We were adamant to find an actual 17-year-old who had the complex feelings of a teen-ager intact, so they wouldn’t have to be falsified.

“Chris had to be both a child and an adult simultaneously.”

Once he started shooting scenes, O’Donnell recalls, “I kept thinking, what am I getting myself into? (But) they prepared me a lot before filming. I had a ton of support behind me.”

Despite picking up some spending money by making regional commercials as a teen-ager, O’Donnell is clearly blase about Hollywood--he was busy looking for a new apartment with his college roommates when a reporter called. The youngest of seven children, he says he’s been reading scripts sent by his new Hollywood agent (The Bauer-Benedek Agency, one of whose main partners is married to screenwriter Benedek), but has no current acting plans.

“It takes a lot to give up school. I missed a semester during filming. So I don’t want to just take the next thing that comes up. I’m just kind of checking it out right now.”

Charlie Korsmo, however, is going places, and not just to the classes for the gifted that the 11-year-old attends, studying such subjects as “functional statistics and trigonometry.”

After wrapping “Men Don’t Leave” in late 1988, he was cast by star-director Warren Beatty in “Dick Tracy,” after casting director Jackie Burch heard through the grapevine about the young actor’s work in “Men.” Korsmo, who lives with his two brothers and divorced mother in Minneapolis, has the sizable role of The Kid, an orphan taken in by detective Dick Tracy in the big-budget Disney film, due for release June 15.

The precocious Korsmo had a headache the first time he read for “Men Don’t Leave,” and didn’t feel he’d be called back. But when Rubin asked him to sum up the role he was up for, Korsmo recalls telling him: “ ‘My dad’s dead, my mom’s sick, my life’s a mess.’ I think that got his attention.”

Rubin says younger performers tend to be more expressive than teen-agers. “Up to about 8 or 9, kids are natural actors. Playing pretend is part of their daily recreation.”

For “Men Don’t Leave,” however, he needed a small boy who was also “in touch with his darker side,” to express feelings related to the loss of a father. “It takes a special child who can recall special events in his life or create it.

“Charlie had to trust us emotionally. He was fairly fearless in that regard.”

While “Men Don’t Leave” and “Dick Tracy” will undoubtedly give impetus to Korsmo’s career, his mother, doctoral student Debbie Korsmo, has ruled out the year-round grind of TV series work for her 6th-grade son.

“We aren’t moving,” she says firmly. “(And) I won’t let him audition for something the whole family can’t go see.”

Charlie calls his part in “Dick Tracy” “a pretty big role” in a movie with “no blood but lots of shooting.” He enjoyed working with Beatty and the gang, he says, except for one running gag in the script.

“They make a joke about how I’m always eating. I hate eating (at 4-4, he weighs 56 pounds). In one scene, I had to eat a big club sandwich, three sundaes, chicken and mashed potatoes--all in half an hour!

“Finally, I just stood up and said, ‘I’m done!’ ”

The potential high point during the five month shoot came when Beatty invited Korsmo and his hired chaperon to have dinner at Beatty’s house with co-stars Madonna and Al Pacino. But it was pretty ho-hum for the worldly 11-year-old.

“Mostly,” he says, “I just talked with Al all night.”