A Working Stiff With the Right Stuff : Movies: Gene Hackman, the everyman who seems to always work, is back before the cameras in San Francisco, playing a rumpled lawyer in ‘Class Action.’

As the lights and camera are readjusted, Gene Hackman munches popcorn in a corner, amusing himself with a “Pacific Flyer” article about his new acrobatic plane. Nearby, the crew of “Class Action” are collecting on Super Bowl bets--Hackman won $100.

“We’re rolling!” The playfulness stops abruptly, the set falls silent and Hackman, playing a rumpled balding lawyer on the side of the underdogs in a class-action suit against a car company, saunters into a board room of a prestigious San Francisco law firm where he faces his opponent in the case, a hard-edged lawyer in an Armani suit, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

With undisguised contempt, Mastrantonio snipes at Hackman then savagely cross-examines his witness, a man crippled by a defective car manufactured by her client. She’s a corporate lawyer snarling at the 1960s-style people’s advocate, but it’s a relationship whose tension is heightened by the fact that the aggressive young attorney is her opponent’s daughter.

It’s jungle warfare in this high-tech glass law suite 20 floors above the San Francisco morning mist and the bullets are words. Hackman picks up his tattered briefcase and British director Michael Apted yells “cut.” Another perfect performance in only three takes. For Apted, it’s an easy swing from his “Gorillas in the Mist” to lawyers in the mist.

“Class Action” is ahead of schedule, but it had a shaky beginning back in October. The 7.1 quake hit as the preproduction crew was reading for shooting. “We thought it was all over for us,” recalled Apted. “We spent 10 days frantically considering other cities.”

Hackman was in San Francisco, watching trials and researching his role. “I heard people screaming, then we all ran downstairs in panic,” said Hackman, who was on the third floor of a shop when the temblor started. The production office was closed and Fox flew the preproduction crew back to Los Angeles.

Some of the sets were affected. The fireplace in Hackman’s woodsy Berkeley home collapsed and a Marina District apartment chosen as Mastrantonio’s was declared unsafe. Books and glass were strewn over Hackman’s law office, which belongs to J. Tony Serra, the attorney whose exploits inspired James Woods’ character in “True Believer.”

After the earthquake, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which had initially refused to grant permission to film key courtroom scenes in their stately Legislative Chamber in City Hall, gave in. After pressure from Mayor Art Agnos and some political squabbling, the supervisors voted 8 to 3 to let “Class Action” shoot. The film means about $3 million to the financially strapped city. Fox was wooed back.

Crews went into action, using special “earthquake kits” to fix cracked plaster and to paint and install false facades at the battered City Hall. Whenever moody San Francisco fog failed to appear, special effects technicians brought out fans and smoke canisters. One day, they created such a thick fog outside Hackman’s law office, a fire truck rushed to the scene, mistaking the billowing clouds for smoke.

Apted, who started his career making documentaries, also happened to have a law degree from Oxford. He insisted that this film be accurate. During the last 10 years, the bi-continental director has made his mark with such films as “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Gorky Park” and “Gorillas in the Mist.”

In “Class Action,” he moves into an environment of ambition and high money stakes, where lawyers lie and conceal evidence to defend a corporation. “It’s a junk-bond culture creating a junk society,” Apted said. “A chilling aspect of life in America is that acquiring wealth and paying less taxes are more important than dealing with the nightmare of growing poverty and cities falling to pieces.”

Hackman, who has made more films in the last six years than any other American actor, said he can’t remember how many lawyers he’s played, but called this one his meatiest yet. “There are a lot of highly emotional, gut-wrenching scenes,” he said. “I don’t have to shoot anybody or ride in fast cars and best of all, Michael keeps the set calm, listens to what I have to say. He’s very civilized, great to work with.”

Apted urged Hackman and Mastrantonio to watch Tony Serra deliver a 2 1/2-hour opening argument of a murder case. “My character,” said Hackman, “is a similar kind of people’s advocate--very theatrical, powerful, impressive.” Ironically, Hackman played a scene for Francis Coppola’s 1973 “The Conversation” in Serra’s law office. Like both Serra and his film character, Hackman is a liberal who proudly recalled making Nixon’s notorious “Enemies List” because of his work for George McGovern. During filming he made two public service TV spots for charity and spent his 59th birthday teaching acting to kids in a San Francisco high school.

“It’s rare to see a father-daughter relationship explored on film,” said Hackman, who brought his two grown daughters and son to watch his tense courtroom scenes with Mastrantonio. “A conservative daughter raised by a very liberal father--this is very fertile territory.”

Hackman talks with obvious wariness to reporters, but he loosens up when talking about his three stunt planes; he’s been doing aerobatics as a hobby for 12 years. “I just bought an Eagle, a two-seater plane. I wish I could fly more, but I can’t when I’m in a picture because of insurance. You can’t be a weekend acrobatic pilot . . . otherwise you will be an ex-acrobatic pilot.”

After he finishes his next film, “Dinosaurs,” with Mikhail Baryshnikov in Berlin, Hackman said he’s going to take a break and relax in his planes and in the race cars he often drives in celebrity events. On his days off here, he has been house-hunting. “I love it here,” said Hackman. Since his 30-year marriage ended in 1986, he’s been sharing his Santa Fe adobe with 29-year-old Betsy Arakawa, whom he met while she was working at a fitness center.

Greg Goosen, Hackman’s stand-in for his last nine movies, calls him “Everyman, a working man’s actor.” It’s a term many critics have applied to him, as well, and Hackman winces when it’s brought up. “I don’t like being called Everyman--that sounds like I’m not acting, that I’m not putting thought into my performance. It’s hard work making the character look easy.”

It was an uneasy, long road to the screen for Hackman. A poor kid from Danville, Ill., his father abruptly left home when he was 13. The troubled adolescent lied about his age and joined the Marines at 16. During his five years in Asia, a stint as an Armed Forces radio announcer hooked him on acting.

But it took years to make it to the screen. For the next decade he drifted around the United States working as a truck driver, soda jerk, doorman, shoe salesman, furniture salesman. He finally made it to the Pasadena Playhouse, only to find that he and “beatnik” pal Dustin Hoffman were considered least likely to succeed.

He hitchhiked to New York, where he did menial jobs and talked his way into summer stock and bit parts for another decade. In 1967, Hackman finally earned enough money to support his wife and three kids, after Warren Beatty cast him as his older brother in “Bonnie and Clyde.” His Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor proved Pasadena Playhouse wrong.

But it was his landmark performance in “The French Connection” that showed he was more than a character actor. As Popeye Doyle, the vulgar New York police detective, Hackman won the Oscar as Best Actor in 1971. Despite his new fame, an insecure Hackman did what he called “the poor-boy thing,” working non-stop, making some forgettable films, buying and selling real estate, cars and planes.

Suffering burn-out, Hackman quit acting in 1978 after “Superman,” a time he remembers as “probably a mid-life crisis”--he took to the cockpit, raced cars, and painted impressionist oils. He returned to acting two years later, discovering “there wasn’t much else I was suited for.”