ON LOCATION : A Couple of Cops, With a Twist : Producer-directors Rob Cohen and John Badham’s ‘The Hard Way’ lets James Woods and Michael J. Fox spoof their images

A cop-buddy movie was not what producer Rob Cohen and his partner, director John Badham, had in mind in 1988, looking for their inaugural project as one of Hollywood’s newest teams. The genre was overworked, they thought, and couldn’t take much more spin beyond what it was then undergoing--stories about canines and cops (“K-9,” “Turner and Hootch”).

But there is always another twist, Cohen and Badham found, and they located it in a script called “The Hard Way.” Rooted in Hollywood ritual, it was a comic retelling of what happens when an actor makes a foray into the real world to authenticate a role--tagging along with, say, a dolphin trainer or, in the case of this script, a homicide detective.

“It somehow seemed fresh,” said Cohen. “The cop-buddy genre was stale, but it was done one better by this script.”

“My ultimate test for whether or not to do a movie is, ‘Did I have a great time reading it?’ ” Badham said one day during the filming of “The Hard Way.” “This one, I had a wonderful time.”

Michael J. Fox loved the role of the Hollywood superstar trying to get the edge on a coveted movie part by shadowing a tough New York police detective, and committed to the film two years ago. But he was scheduled to make “Back to the Future II” first, which turned into “Back to the Future III.”

Badham and Cohen had to put their first movie on hold. Instead, they made another buddy movie of sorts, “Bird on a Wire,” with Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn. It didn’t win over critics, but it did make a more meaningful Hollywood first impression--by earning $70 million this summer.

When filming finally got going on “The Hard Way,” New York’s landmark Beacon Theatre, an old, gilded monument to Hollywood, became one settings in which a wry take on stardom is taking shape. Fox and co-star James Woods are typecast in the film, and actually seem pleased to be so.

Still best known as Alex Keaton from the TV sitcom “Family Ties,” Fox plays Nick Lang, Hollywood’s top male star. Lang, despite his fame, still longs for serious roles he believes to be commensurate with his talent. This leads him to a police drama and to John Moss, a driven NYPD homicide detective played by Woods, one of Hollywood’s more driven leading men. This clash of opposites plays out as a serial killer stalks the streets of New York.

“Michael and I both get to spoof our screen personas,” Woods said gleefully while waiting to shoot a scene in which the pair come to blows. “Michael gets to play the rich, young, successful, spoiled movie star, and I get to do a satire on the world’s most intense person.

“John Moss is so maniacal that in the opening scene he’s blazing through traffic and you figure somebody has just blown up the United Nations. Later you find out he’s just late for a date,” said Woods, who is memorable for his intensity in such films as “Salvador” and “The Boost.”

Oddly, it was Woods’ desire to do something light “just for fun” that led him to the role of the dead-serious police detective in “The Hard Way.” Upon being introduced to Fox at a party a few years back, Woods suggested himself for a guest spot on “Family Ties.” The part never materialized, Woods said, but Fox remembered his offer and suggested him for the role of Moss.

At that moment, Fox was at work inside the cavernous Beacon, his lampoon of stardom in progress. His character has joined in the chase for the film’s serial killer, who is known in the film as the Party Crasher. The hunt has led to a theater, and what should be playing there but Lang’s latest movie, an adventure flick a la “Indiana Jones.” Lang scampers from the balcony and swings onto the stage by means of a giant tassle, right at the moment his close-up fills the screen. Lang miscalculates and does a pratfall through the screen, ripping his larger-than-life image in two, figuratively as well as literally.

Fox committed to “The Hard Way” more than two years ago. He said he was naturally drawn to the role because it played so neatly on his own circumstance. Fox is amused by the media’s perception of him as a comic actor who wants to be taken seriously, which inevitably surfaces each time he takes on a dramatic role, most recently in Brian De Palma’s “Casualties of War.”

“That this hinted at my own particular dilemma made it irresistible,” Fox said of “The Hard Way.” “It was so much not what my life is about, yet so much what everyone figures it’s about, that I thought the chance to do it and to exploit the comedy in it was something I didn’t want to pass up.”

He also didn’t want to pass up the chance to work with Badham, whose low-keyed, unadorned directing style held a refreshing appeal for the actor.

“I love him because he has a television background,” said Fox. “Although he’s more sophsiticated in his shot selections and in the pre-editing that goes on in his mind than time allows in most television work, there is a pace a really enjoy. I don’t like hanging around.

“I’m one of those that when a director starts to talk to me about my character’s childhood and how he was locked in a broom closet by his mother, I just say, ‘You mean lean to the left or lean to the right?’ ”

“The Hard Way” strives for a tone of gentle self-mocking in its story, with its plays on Woods intensity and Fox’s serious amibitions and there is an element of real-life mimicry on the set as well. For one, Woods has been living the plot’s basic premise and soaking up reality by following an NYPD lieutenant, who happens to be named James Wood. Woods has not been involved in a murder investigation, but he did participate in a drug bust in which nine guns and 100 envelopes of heroin were confiscated.

And then there are the filmmakers, whose partnership is itself a buddy story of sorts. Like Moss and Lang, Badham and Cohen comprise a chemistry of contrasts.

“He’s tall, I’m short,” said Cohen. “He went to Yale, I went to Harvard. He directed Olivier, I directed Gielgud. I have this sort of small-town Northern upbringing. His is big-city Southern.”

Badham sees the differences in terms of personality. “He is as gregarious as I am introverted. He is as flamboyant as I am low-key,” said the director, whose film-set manner is courtly and reserved. “That goes through a lot of our relationship, and yet when we confront an artistic or a business problem, we see eye-to-eye enough that we are able to come to agreement pretty easily.”

It was Badham who approached Cohen about forming the partnership. He’d already had a stellar career, directing such wide-ranging hits as the disco paean “Saturday Night Fever,” the action film “Blue Thunder” and the romantic thriller “Stakeout.” But, in this era of high-visibility, high-powered production teamings, Badham wanted the consistency of partnership.

Remembering a past kindness, Badham turned to Cohen, who had been so impressed with one of Badham’s made-for-TV movies that he gave the director his first feature film. (Cohen’s co-producer on “The Hard Way” is William Sackheim, a veteran screenwriter and TV producer whom Badham worked for as an assistant.)

That was in 1977, when Cohen was the 23-year-old executive vice president of Motown’s motion picture division. After completing that project, “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Star and Motor Kings,” Motown was producing the film adaptation of “The Wiz.” Again, Cohen hired Badham. The two eventually parted company, though, over the casting of singer Diana Ross as Dorothy. Badham left to direct “Saturday Night Fever,” which became the pop-culture phenomenon of 1978. After leaving Motown, Cohen produced such films as “The Witches of Eastwick,” “Ironweed” and “Light of Day” (which starred Fox). He also has been doing some television directing.

The two filmmakers remained friends, and by 1987 both were at Universal working under separate production deals. They would sometimes lunch together at the commissary, where, one day, after a lengthy discourse on his career, Badham suggested they form a production company.

Cohen was taken aback. “I told him, ‘My agenda is to direct feature films, not to run a company for you or anyone else,’ ” Cohen recalled. But Badham said he envisioned an arrangement in which they both would direct and produce. The Badham/Cohen Group was formed, its 10 employees now housed in two bungalows on the Universal lot.

Cohen is in the preliminary stages of setting up his directorial debut for the Badham/Cohen Group, “The Man With Nine Lives,”which he hopes will start filming in the spring. Badham will be executive producer on the film. Until then Cohen will continue directing television and wrapping up his work as second-unit director on “The Hard Way.”

“It puts me at the level I love,” said Cohen, who explained that the pair’s working relationship is so loose that he is allowed to set up his sequences and film them as he imagines Badham wants them. “We confer about where the two bits of material join,” said Cohen.

“We try to work on it together as partners,” said Badham, not ‘This is 100% John’s movie.” “It gives us the sense that we’re both out there whacking away at it,” added Cohen.

The hoped-for effect is to make “The Hard Way” seem almost easy. “John is a director who has produced. I am a producer who has directed,” said Cohen. “What’s wonderful about the partnership is that we are both keenly aware of the other side of the coin.”