MOVIES : They Won’t Let ‘Sleeping Dogs’ Lie : Fourteen year’s after actor Peter Finch’s death, his son and ex-wife have become a director-writer team : ON LOCATION

It’s only a couple of miles from Peter Finch’s crypt, which is near Rudolph Valentino’s in Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, to a street called Camino Palmero in the Hollywood foothills where, in recent weeks, a film was being made that the late actor might have foreseen.

At the top of what some residents call “The Street of Dreams,” because of its historical ties to the film industry, Finch’s 28-year-old son Charles was directing his first Hollywood feature from a script he co-wrote with his mother, Yolande Turner--Peter’s wife for more than a decade.

The $1.8-million film, “Where Sleeping Dogs Lie,” which will be released next year, has nothing to do with Peter Finch’s sudden death at the Beverly Hills Hotel 14 years ago. It has much to do with his son’s life since, however.

“Originally, this was written as a script called ‘Imagination,’ one of the earlier things mummie and I wrote four or five years ago,” Finch explained, during a break in shooting on Camino Palmero. “It was a comedy about a young writer being forced to sell real estate. Eventually this rather whimsical story became a much more autobiographical one about a young writer--me--not being able to sell the things that would keep him alive. He’s a screenwriter, a playwright, a writer. He comes here trying to make a living but can’t (sell) the kind of stories he wants to tell. The mechanics of surviving in the world are just too difficult to him.”

The primary location for “Sleeping Dogs” is a huge Mediterranean-style, 22-room house complete with outdoor and indoor swimming pools built at the top of Camino Palmero in 1928 by C.E. Toberman, architect of many of Hollywood’s golden age landmarks (including Sid Grauman’s Egyptian and Chinese theaters) and often called the “father of Hollywood” because of his development of the Hollywood Hills area. Sid Grauman himself reportedly lived there briefly during the ‘30s.

Adjoining the two-acre property is Errol Flynn’s old estate. (Flynn’s daughter, Rory, is the unit photographer on the film and shot the pictures accompanying this article.) Down the street is one of the most photographed houses in America; it’s the one in which Ozzie and Harriet Nelson raised their two boys. On the same block, there are houses once owned by Sam Goldwyn, Preston Sturges and Al Jolson. Around the corner is the plantation style mansion built for Fatty Arbuckle.

“It was incredible to see this house,” said Turner of the location, which the set decorators had turned into a creaking, rotting hulk. “Charles brought me to see it on the first day and it stood there more or less as I saw it in my own mind.”

In the film, the writer Bruce Simmons (played by Dylan McDermott) is convinced by his agent (Sharon Stone) to “sell out” and write a highly commercial book about a multiple murder that occurred years before. He moves in to the house where the crime supposedly took place, takes in a roommate (Tom Sizemore) and finds himself smack in the middle of a terrifying mystery.

“The movie is about money, power and fame,” said McDermott, “What they do to a person, the corruption they entail and how this person rejects them.”

Money, power and fame were, in fact, among the elements that nearly destroyed Charles Finch’s film career at its onset. Six years ago, when he was 23, he wrote (with his mother), produced and directed a film in Italy called “Priceless Beauty,” starring Diane Lane and Christopher Lambert. “They fell in love and are very happy,” Finch said. “But I made every makeable mistake as a director. It was a total disaster. . . . There is not one day that goes by without me thinking about that film. It cost me $196,000--the only money I had--to try and protect my cut of the film.”

What Finch had written and directed was a romantic fantasy. The final cut, as re-edited by the Italian investors, was “be-bop on the beach,” according to Finch, so bad that when he saw it in Cannes he fled to London and was unable to write for months. “It broke my heart,” he said. “I cried for four months.” The film has not been released in the United States.

As much as he loathed the final cut of “Priceless Beauty,” Finch looks back now and sees some threads of a personal style in both that and his current film. “I look at the dailies now and see the same sort of baroqueness that I see in ‘Priceless Beauty’ . . . the same sort of operatic, passionate style. I guess the films I’ll make will be like that. Very different and passionate, not sexual but about heightened emotion.”

McDermott agrees, “I think a lot of filmmakers mistake violence for passion and this film has a lot of passion without the violence. . . . It’s blood and guts of the soul, not of the physical body.”

Finch attributes his style to his heritage. “I spent my childhood in the Caribbean,” he notes of the years living at his father’s place in Jamaica and while going to Gordonstoun School in northern Scotland, where Prince Andrew was a friend and Prince Edward a student at the same time. “There were huge squalls and winds and thunderstorms,” he adds. “And with a theatrical mother and father, I grew up in the elements, if you will, a little like Lear. And I’m a Celt and therefore have that very Celtic feel for drama.”

His mother concurs: “We were an artistic family, bohemian, vagabondish. You hear all show business parents saying they never want their children to be in the business, and inevitably it seems that they do.”

Turner, a South-African-born actress working on the British stage, married Peter Finch in 1959. “As soon as we were married we were on our way to Hollywood,” she recalled. “He was making ‘Rachel Cade’ with Angie Dickenson. My daughter was conceived here,” she adds of Samantha, Charles’ older sister, a writer living in Paris. “We were here for eight months and here we are again--the story never ends.”

Turner, whose West End career included work with Noel Coward with Peter O’Toole and “lots” of British television, worked with her husband in 1962’s “The Girl With Green Eyes.” She also wrote and produced “The Day,” a 1960 film directed by Peter Finch, the Bronze Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival.

Of her collaboration with her son, she said, “Charles is a wonderful story man. He has a brilliant sense of drama.”

Says Charles about his mother: “She is the person who has the maturity, the talent and the brilliance to give my stories depth. I have these stories I want to tell and I jot them down in a rough draft. She takes that and develops it. . . . Out of the thin draft of a screenplay, she pours her soul into it and gives it colors that make it live.”

Turner discusses her relationship with Peter Finch openly, but with sadness. She said that after their divorce in 1970, he saw his children only once again, during a walk in London’s Kensington Park. “I kept his image as their talented father alive in the home with photographs,” she said, “and sent them letters and toys, supposedly from him. It was a harsh judgment on his part not to see the children, not that he hadn’t had a harsh life as a child himself.”

She said that she and Charles heard of Peter’s death on the radio in a taxi on the way to Charles’ entrance exams at the American School in Paris; they attended the memorial service in London. “I believe I was the only person in the world who knew his deepest heart,” said Turner, whose “novelography,” “Finchy,” was published by Simon and Schuster in 1981.

She sees much of Peter in their son: “His great charm and charisma, certainly . . . a bright, acquisitive brain, a worldly man with a gentle, poetic side . . . exceedingly attractive to women and who adores women--very like his father there. Charles doesn’t drink, though. That terrified him, I think. Peter was a bit of a tippler.”

Eventually, Charles worked as a stockbroker in London, hated it, and with Turner’s support moved to America to study with Lee Strasberg during his last year. “I thought, God, after all these years of not wanting him to go into this miraculous business, that’s what he wants to do! He discovered he didn’t want to be an actor but did want to be a director, a writer, a producer. And he hasn’t swayed from it.”

Charles ended up broke in Hollywood, where he worked on scripts and did odd jobs as an assistant to David Puttnam and Peter Guber.

Both McDermott and co-star Joan Chen, who plays the writer’s girlfriend in “Sleeping Dogs,” say that the young Finch is a talented director. “He has all the ingredients,” McDermott said. “He knows how to deal with actors, which is very rare. He knows what he wants and he has control of his set. I want him to be my Scorsese . . . I want to work with him all the time.”

“He obviously loves words, and he doesn’t just want to do a violent piece,” Chen added. “I see a lot of passion from Dylan and Charles, and, being a low-budget film, everybody has a strong personal reason to be there. That gives it a spark.”

What next? The mother-son team says it is starting on a script for Tri-Star, but Finch said he finds it hard to think beyond “Sleeping Dogs,” which is obviously his big opportunity in Hollywood.

“I’m scared as hell,” he said, as shooting was about to wrap on his second film. “I’m as scared as the first day I started, scared of not being good enough. When you’ve made a very bad film, when you’ve been humiliated publicly, you go on, but you also know the pain.”