ON LOCATION : Tommy-Gunning for Siegel and Luciano as Mini-Mobsters : Instead of seeking out modern-day Cagneys and Bogarts, the filmmakers have turned to teen idols

Christian Slater, a 21-year-old veteran of 10 movies, has a thing about his costumes.

He complained that his tank tops in “Pump Up the Volume” were too loose. He refused to wear tights in the upcoming “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.” And he’s not crazy about the clothes that help turn him into Lucky Luciano in “Mobsters,” the semi-fictional tale of the early years of underworld bosses-to-be Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, recently filmed in and around Los Angeles.

“Those removable collars--stiff as a board. They are the most uncomfortable things I have ever worn! I get very agitated in those clothes!” Slater says, grimacing. But they gave him a key to his character. “They must have been the most uncomfortable people in the world. . . . No wonder they were killing each other!”

As Luciano, Slater shoots his way to the top of organized crime in New York’s Little Italy in the 1920s and ‘30s. “I think the way it is turning out is surreal,” he says of the movie, “with a weirdness to it . . . an offbeat ‘20s gangster movie.”

That, apparently, wasn’t the original intention of producer Steve Roth, whose credits include “Secret Admirer,” “Scrooged” and Hal Ashby’s last film, “8 Million Ways to Die.”

“I saw it as a classic gangster film in the tradition of Warner Bros. in the 1940s,” Roth says, “inspired directly by ‘The Roaring Twenties.’ ” But instead of seeking modern-day Bogarts and Cagneys (the stars of Raoul Walsh’s 1939 gangland classic), Roth and Universal cast teen idols Slater, Richard Grieco (TV’s “21 Jump Street” and “Booker”) and Patrick Dempsey (“Coupe de Ville”) and a new candidate for Hollywood hunkdom, Australian soccer star Costas Mandylor.

Were they trying to make Young Tommy Guns?

“We’ll all look like geniuses if the picture goes out and does a god-awful lot of business,” Roth answers indirectly. He admits, though, that the producers’ first choices for leads were the better known--and surer box-office bets--Matt Dillon and Johnny Depp (“Edward Scissorhands”).

Even the choice of a director for the $25-million project seems geared to have the movie speak the language of the young--a 36-year-old rookie named Michael Karbelnikoff--a veteran director of commercials whose main credit is a series of gritty, documentary-style Levi’s 501 Jeans commercials.

Karbelnikoff, who wanted to go to the USC film school but started a commercial production company in Phoenix instead, acknowledges that he is inexperienced in feature films but says that he knows his market. “I didn’t want the film to be trapped in the period so much that you couldn’t be entertained,” the director said recently, on location in the decaying elegance of downtown L.A.’s turn-of-the-century Million Dollar Building. He believes he found an escape from what he worried could be “a stodgy history lesson.”

“I feel the characters have an almost surreal aspect,” he says, echoing Slater. “There’s a little bit of Fellini in this movie, and that is strange--it came by itself. There have been scenes in this movie that were probably meant to be played completely the opposite of the way they turned out. I want a sort of ‘Amadeus’ gangster movie.”

An “ ‘Amadeus’ gangster movie” is virtually the only variety of mobster film left unexplored by Hollywood, after the recent “Miller’s Crossing,” “GoodFellas,” “King of New York” and “The Godfather Part III.” This year, Hollywood seems to be taking on Bugsy Siegel.

Siegel, played by Grieco in “Mobsters,” is a pivotal character in the current film “The Marrying Man.” Tri-Star’s $40-million biography “Bugsy Siegel,” starring Warren Beatty and directed by Barry Levinson, is scheduled for release in December. A Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne script titled “Playland” (based on Siegel) was developed by Roth before Roth’s “Mobsters” and was planned as a starring vehicle for Andy Garcia. “It was blown out of the water by Beatty’s film,” Roth says. “I don’t know if it will ever get made. ‘Mobsters’ is a different period (the Levinson film takes place a decade later), and there really isn’t any comparison.”

“All I know is that I have his production designer,” Roth adds a bit defensively, referring to Richard Sylbert, who created the “look” of such Beatty projects as “Shampoo” and “Reds” and has won Oscars for “Dick Tracy” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1967).

Sylbert is a veteran, but Karbelnikoff? Roth explains the director’s selection: “The original director we picked didn’t work out, and I was concerned the picture wouldn’t go. I went to meet Casey Silver (president of production at Universal) with my wish list of directors, and he shows me a tape of the work of some guy named Michael Karbelnikoff.

“I kept calling him ‘Boris Raskelnikoff.’ I could never get his name right. I said, ‘Who is he, a member of the Politburo?’ Casey said he wanted to give him a shot. I told him, ‘This is one of the more insane decisions I’ve ever heard of. I think you’re out of your mind, but because you’ve got the guts to do it, I’ll meet the guy.’ After five minutes,” Roth recalls, “I called Casey and said, ‘This guy is fantastic.’ There was no pretense, no bull. I saw a real desire to tell a yarn. And his reel! It had some of his 501 Jeans commercials, it had his Union Bay jeans commercial that was a tongue-in-cheek takeoff of the chicken race in ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and an award-winning 7-Up ‘Beautiful Rain’ commercial. I was blown away by it.”

Slouched in his mobile home, parked across a rain-soaked, traffic-jammed 3rd Street from the location, Patrick Dempsey, playing Meyer Lansky, doesn’t seem particularly happy this day. Little wonder--a month earlier, the 25-year-old actor stepped too far into a fight scene, was slugged squarely in the face and had his nose broken. The resulting month of recovery wrought havoc with the film’s three-month shooting schedule.

“Sometimes I wish he’d relax into his role a little more,” Karbelnikoff said of Dempsey, who comes across like his character--a cerebral brooder. Lansky, Dempsey says, “had it all planned out. All he had to do is walk in and he knew what to do.” He echoes that style describing his own work: “I want to understand what it means by doing my homework . . . what does this mean, what is that process.” He even had a sample of Lansky’s handwriting analyzed to get “a breakdown of his emotional life. It gave me a framework to work in.”

That framework created confusion on the set, especially for Slater. “Patrick’s a very interesting actor, and one like I’ve never worked with before,” Slater says. “He gets into his role more than anyone I’ve seen. My method is instinct. . . . Dempsey is the kind of actor who, if there is a confrontation scene, you know there is going to be confrontation on the set. Not like an argument, but a lot of eye contact and stirring each other up. In the beginning, I was really confused by him, but by getting into it so far, I believe he helps me and everybody else.”

Mandylor, who plays Frank Costello in the film, is of Greek descent and claims “the day I met Anthony Quinn (who plays a Mafia elder in the film), was one of the greatest days of my life. He knew Frank Costello and the first thing he said was Costello was a very warm human being; on the other hand, he was a killer. But if you didn’t cross him he was fine.”

Historically, Bugsy Siegel was the most flamboyant of the quartet, and he is being played by the most outgoing member of the cast, heartthrob Richard Grieco, whose first film, “If Looks Could Kill” opened recently.

“When I met him,” Roth recalls, “Richard was wearing what I like to call his ‘fashion-reject clothes.’ But he’s so God-damned charming, I looked at him and thought, ‘Bugsy had all this charm too.’ . . . It wasn’t a hard call.”

Karbelnikoff agrees: “He is the biggest pleasant surprise in the whole group. He has a number of really keynote scenes where he’s out front, where he really has to have a sexual magnetism, where he has to have humor and pathos. Underneath, he’s really a sensitive kid from a small town, and we were able to make use of that. There is a scene where he has to undress a woman with an ice pick,” Karbelnikoff says of a seduction sequence in which Grieco alternately terrifies and turns on a young woman. “With that, you’re walking a thin line between making it work or going into some kind of sick, campy thing. . . . He did a really good job of it.”

“I loved the character,” says Grieco, relaxing on the set in a torn T-shirt and ripped jeans. “He is such a contradiction. Such a gentleman and such a ladies’ man on one hand, and on the other, a coldblooded psychological killer.

” . . . And he has the scenes. He’s psychotic . . . but I’m not,” says the 26-year-old actor, who owns and rides five Harley Davidson motorcycles “for meditation.”

Waiting for the slow, tiny and creaking elevator in the lobby of the Million Dollar Building, Christian Slater looks uneasy. A tough scene coming up, or maybe it’s the clothes again. Today he’s dressed in a dark-brown double-breasted suit that looks more like early Lyndon Johnson than 1920s gangster. But on the set, the tommy gun he carries is very real, and Slater knows how to use it. “You don’t know what loud is until you hear a tommy gun go off in a closed room,” a production assistant says, handing out earplugs.

True enough. Slater blasts the gun, loaded with blanks, directly into the camera lens as cast and crew wince, ducking spent brass shell casings. Nine floors below, pedestrians are stopped dead in their tracks by the racket.

“I couldn’t believe they were going to let me play the lead in this thing,” Slater says. (He was originally penciled in for the role of Lansky.) “What scared me was that the character required a lot of research, and there was only a week between the completion of ‘Prince of Thieves’ and the beginning of ‘Mobsters.’ ” Slater plays Will Scarlett in the Kevin Costner epic, which opens in June.

So Slater embarked on a crash course on the life and times of Lucky Luciano while still in London shooting the Robin Hood film. And immediately upon his return, he spent a weekend in the Al Capone Suite at the Two Bunch Palms resort near Palm Springs (Capone’s character makes a cameo appearance in “Mobsters”). “I tried to call forth his spirit, but that didn’t work,” the actor says, laughing.

Neither did an uncanny encounter he had soon after production on “Mobsters” began. Slater stopped by his favorite deli, sat down and saw seated in the next booth the archetypal cinematic Mafia boss: Marlon Brando. “I was speechless,” says Slater, who had no trouble talking in “Pump Up the Volume,” where he played a ham-radio Hamlet of high school Angst . “When I get around massively famous people I can’t speak to them. The people at the restaurant deliberately seated me next to him to see if I would ask for an autograph or something. I couldn’t do anything.”

Ironically, Slater himself has spent more time in jail than Luciano did during the years he portrays the gangster--from 17 to 30--and, apparently, the memory of that experience helped him find his character.

After Slater’s arrest for a second case of driving while intoxicated, his driver’s license was revoked for several months. He says hasn’t had a drink since--”just Gatorade”--and he certainly sees high irony in being filmed as Luciano with bottles of hijacked Scotch: “ ‘Jeez,’ I told the director, ‘a year ago I was put away for this stuff, you know?’ ”

After that arrest, the actor opted to spend three weeks in jail in lieu of a year of penalty classes that could have made it impossible for him to make last year’s “Young Guns 2” or, after that, the Robin Hood film.

Embarrassed, Slater assumes the Jack Nicholson delivery he used in the 1989 black comedy “Heathers.” “My experience was definitely beneficial for playing gangsters and outlaws,” he says sarcastically. “I did it so I could learn the hard way, but I don’t recommend it.”