A ‘Lolita’ for the ‘90s

“It’s a minefield, a movie that’s guaranteed to offend everyone.”

That’s how screenwriter James Dearden (“Fatal Attraction”) describes his task of adapting Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” for filming in the 1990s. Carolco Pictures International paid $1 million to the Nabokov estate to acquire rights to film a new version of the tale of 40ish professor Humbert Humbert’s obsessive lust for a 12-year-old girl. Adrian Lyne (“Fatal Attraction,” “9 1/2 Weeks”) will direct.

Recall that the 1962 adaptation of the novel, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring James Mason and Sue Lyon, raised Lolita’s age to 15, with a pedicure as the film’s most erotic scene. And, in observance of the prevailing Hollywood moral code, an epilogue was added in which Humbert Humbert was said to have died of a heart attack--properly punished for his implied lechery.

Agent Irving (Swifty) Lazar, who made the original “Lolita” sale for $250,000 and also handled the new deal, feels the novel is “more make-able as a movie today because when it was sold (30 years ago) there were all these prohibitions and censorship. You could not show two people in bed together. Now, the sexuality of the original piece could be more explicit.”

Dearden tells us he’ll meet with Lyne shortly to discuss just such touchy issues.

“Perhaps it’s much more honest if you show (the intimacy),” speculates Dearden from London’s Shepperton Studios, where’s he’s just wrapped “A Kiss Before Dying” as writer-director. “Obviously, you don’t want to (get into) pedophile pornography and the exploitation of children’s images. This film is in a very different light. . . . I see it as a story of a doomed love affair, ultimately a tragic love story.

“If you’re honest, it’s possible for a man of 40 to be infatuated with a girl of 12, or 13 or 14. It’s really not that abnormal to be attracted to a young girl. It’s really the image of youthful beauty that’s a temptation and damnation for Humbert Humbert’s weakness. There’s a kind of hopelessness about his infatuation.

“She’s not his victim. If you think about it, Lolita comes out on top. Humbert Humbert is destroyed by it.”