Loves Movies, Hates Big Spiders : Mild-mannered Jeff Daniels, one of Hollywood’s leading straight men, becomes a hero in spite of himself in ‘Arachnophobia.’

So you’re making this movie about a small town overrun by killer spiders. You need a likable but not too forceful leading man to play the central role of the sweet-tempered young doctor who becomes a spider-fighting hero in spite of himself. You don’t want Stallone or Willis or Ford or Schwarzenegger, Hoffman, Cruise, Gere, Costner, Woods or Dafoe.

You want Jeff Daniels.

Jeff Daniels is the guy with the face like a $100 cotton-flannel shirt. He was born to the picnic table, bred for family portraits. The station wagon was invented with him in mind.

True, there is a touch of mischief in his mouth. In other guises, he ran around on his wife (“Terms of Endearment”), stepped down off the screen as a matinee idol (“The Purple Rose of Cairo”) and was handcuffed to a bed post by Melanie Griffith (“Something Wild”). But his wholesomeness remains largely undiminished.

“He was always my first choice,” says Frank Marshall, who directed the movie in question, “Arachnophobia,” after producing such box-office hits as “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Poltergeist” for Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment company. “No offense to Jeff, but the studio (Disney) said, you know, would you talk to Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner and all the ‘A’ people? But it’s not a movie about that sort of a character. Jeff made it what it is. I couldn’t imagine anyone else in it. He has a great sort of sardonic humor in a soft, subtle way, and he’s very accessible to the audience.”

Says Daniels, “I’d been close on a number of other films at Amblin in the past year or two, where I was the guy who didn’t get it.”

Daniels, who makes his home far from Hollywood, in a small town in Michigan, has worked for some of America’s most prominent directors, including James L. Brooks, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Robert Altman and Jonathan Demme. Before coming to films, he acted on stage with New York’s prestigious Circle Repertory Company. Yet when he talks about Spielberg’s hit factory, it is with a tone of reverence.

“It’s like working for Woody Allen. Every actor wants to work for Amblin. It’s the biggest safety net. You sit in Frank Marshall’s office and you look at the posters on the wall and you think, what do I have to do to stay here, guys?”

He must be talking about the posters for “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “The Color Purple,” “Back to the Future” I, II and III. . . .

“These guys know how to make movies that work, that make money and that people see. You can do your best stuff, but if nobody sees it, who cares? So I went and met (Marshall) and sat around the table, and they asked me if I had a problem with spiders. I said, not that I know of.”

Daniels’ most recent string of features has not exactly made headlines around the world: “The House on Carroll Street,” “Sweetheart’s Dance,” “Checking Out” and “Love Hurts” (a Vestron picture that was never released). He was last seen in the unusual and much-praised television movie “No Place Like Home,” with Christine Lahti, about a working-class family whose hard luck drives them into homelessness.

“Sometimes you do movies like that and from a performance point of view, you’re really going for something, trying to dig as deep as possible and all that stuff. It’s an actor’s workout, not to mention the subject matter and the social relevance and all that. But ‘Arachnophobia,’ that’s Saturday night.

“Yes, OK, film is art and all of that, and you do those occasionally, that’s fine. But I’d get bored doing those all the time. This was a lot of fun, a lot of fun. A lot of fun to go to work, three and a half months of sometimes 15-hour days. I’m a big believer in entertaining people on a Saturday night. Don’t blow it for them; there are too many bad movies out there.”

“Arachnophobia,” which means “fear of spiders,” is a comic thriller about a man (played by Daniels) who was so frightened by a spider in his youth that even as an adult he still cannot abide the sight of one. As it happens, Daniels’ character arrives with his family in a rural California town at the same time that a deadly tarantula from a South American jungle finds its way into his barn and mates to produce hundreds of evil offspring.

John Goodman co-stars as a laughably macho exterminator.

In good melodramatic fashion, Daniels overcomes his arachnophobia at the film’s climax in order to save himself, his family and his town.

But first, he becomes the victim of coincidences that make him appear incompetent and possibly dangerous to the townsfolk. “You’ve got to be believable, more subtle,” he explains about his part. “I’m the guy who has to make the movie work. You’ve got to see the movie through me.

“It’s actually easier to do a role like ‘Something Wild,’ where you’re bouncing all around, than to make the role work in ‘Arachnophobia,’ where you have to make sure that the audience feels this and sees this .

“In ‘Rain Man,’ (Dustin) Hoffman got all the press, but (Tom) Cruise really made the movie work. The straight man--those are hard roles to pull off.”

In “Arachnophobia’s” big scene, when Daniels is locked in his basement fighting the South American spider to the death, he finally gets to chew a little scenery.

His sweat-popping expressions and adrenaline lurches were possibly facilitated by the proximity of Big Bob, the eight-inch, bird-eating Amazonian tarantula who plays the heavy in the movie.

“The little guys I don’t have a problem with,” Daniels says about the spiders. “But the big guys--it’s this big, as big as my hand--I don’t care who you are, you just don’t want him near you. He will turn and look at you and rear up and hiss. They handled those guys with gloves, big thick leather gloves.”

Marshall and his spider wranglers held a spider orientation on the second day of shooting, “where you let them crawl on you and get used to them,” Daniels says. “I blew that off. I skipped class that day. I figured, I’m supposed to be afraid of spiders, so let’s not get used to them as pets.”

A mechanical replica of Big Bob was used in places, but sparingly. “Ninety percent of the spiders in the movie are real,” Daniels says. “About 10% was the mechanical one.”

The basement scene took two weeks to shoot, and was saved until the end. “All the other actors were wrapped and gone,” says Daniels. “There was one actor on the call sheet the last two weeks. I was in every shot--with blood, fuller’s earth--Spielberg came in and said, ‘Now you know what Harrison Ford felt like in “Indiana Jones” and why he wants to do “Presumed Innocent” and things like that.’ ”

For a straight man, Daniels reveals some unexpected role models. Two of his favorite actors are Al Pacino and Alan Arkin. He was so taken with Pacino’s performance in the 1975 film “Dog Day Afternoon” that he saw it six times. “I said, that’s what I want to try to do. I’d done musicals up to that point, but then I saw that. I kept going back until I thought I could see the script, I thought I could see the ad-libs. That gave me something to shoot for.”

Marshall Mason, the head of Circle Rep, happened to work with Daniels one summer during a stint as a guest director in Michigan and invited him to come to New York and train with the company. “The basis of what I do is what they taught me,” Daniels says.

By the time he was 26, in 1980, he was acting on Broadway in Lanford Wilson’s “Fifth of July.” At the age of 29 he was cast in “Terms of Endearment” as Flap, Debra Winger’s errant husband.

“ ‘Terms’ was the big break. That and Woody. The Woody Allen thing (‘Purple Rose of Cairo’) happened 10 days after ‘Terms’ was released.”

Once launched in films, Daniels didn’t look back, except for a Circle Rep revival of Wilson’s “Lemon Sky” in 1985. “I really enjoy filmmaking. I really enjoy just shooting a lot, just shooting it all right now--boom!--leaving a piece of yourself there that day. Today’s the only day you get to do this big scene, and then walk away with nothin’ left.

“In theater, you’ve got two shows tomorrow, two on Saturday and a matinee on Sunday.

“I’m sorry but I don’t buy that the stage is pure and natural. How natural is it to act in front of 1,100 people? You’re standing next to someone and you say, I love you, and 1,100 people have to hear it. You’re not whispering. The bigger acting,” he says, referring to the demonstrative style often found on the stage, “I just get real bored with. So that’s why I like film better.”

As his career advanced, he says, he kept expecting it to end. “I kept waiting to be told, all right, you’re done. And then kept going up another rung until I turned around one day and realized I’d worked with who? Demme, Brooks, Nichols, down the list. . . . It’s great, it’s very exciting. I still get thrilled being around people like Meryl Streep and Woody and Jack and those people. And I’m not pals. I mean, I don’t hang out with them and call them up. But sometimes I think, I did a movie with Woody Allen! I still shake my head about that one.

“I still want to work with Pacino. I mean, I was all over Goodman, who recently acted with Pacino in ‘Sea of Love.’ ‘Man, what was he like? What’d he say? Tell me about it!’ ”

Working with Goodman, another former New York actor, in “Arachnophobia” was a reunion of sorts. The two of them last worked together back in 1979 in a Butterball turkey commercial.

“We were two of the five or six sons at the table, it was at Thanksgiving. I think I said, Oh, isn’t the turkey good. Umm-umm.”

From Butterball to Amblin, off-Broadway to Steven Spielberg. Has it been a matter of luck, talent or sheer hard work?

“I was lucky in that Jim Brooks fought for me, that Woody Allen fought for me. I was lucky that Marshall Mason came to Michigan to guest-direct ‘Summer and Smoke.’ He could have gone anywhere. If he’d gone to Ohio, I’d never have met him. I would have gone to New York after college for three months and left. I never would have stayed. So that’s the lucky part. The rest of it is being in the right place at the right time and delivering. When you get your two minutes--it may take you five years--but when you get your two minutes, you’ve got to deliver.

“So, yeah, I waited a long time. It will be 14 years in September that I drove through the Holland Tunnel with my car loaded down. Two in the afternoon, September 1st. I was so scared I remembered it for the rest of my life.”