SUBTITLED: FAME : Hollywood, Thy Name Is Seductress

When the Swiss film “Journey of Hope” beat out the favorite, France’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” for the best foreign-language film Oscar in March, life changed dramatically for the film’s director, Xavier Koller.

He got calls from the acting Swiss president and the mayor of Zurich--and 250 congratulatory messages from people listening to the Swiss national radio station, which had broadcast the fax number of Koller’s Los Angeles hotel.

And now he may do business with producer Mark Johnson and his partner, director Barry Levinson. Levinson and Johnson, a member of the foreign-film selection committee of the academy, helped Koller hook up with Miramax Films, the U.S. distributor of “Journey of Hope,” and were hosts for the Los Angeles premiere a week before “Journey” opened officially April 26. The $2.3-million film is the story of a Kurdish family making its way from Turkey to Switzerland.

Levinson-Johnson may end up producing two projects Koller is developing. One is a documentary-style drama, again dealing with the Kurds--a subject so delicate in Turkey, Koller says, that the government there has recently embarked on a campaign to discredit both him and “Journey of Hope.” The other is a feature based on the play “Eclipse of the Moon,” about a man who returns to the village where he grew up and encounters a woman he once loved.

“Barry’s films have a human point of view,” says Koller, who recently spent time with Levinson and Johnson on the set of their next film, “Bugsy,” starring Warren Beatty, Annette Bening and Harvey Keitel. “They don’t seem ‘foreign’ to me. Also, a European-U.S. co-production gives me one foot in Hollywood, one foot independent. It’s a way of making movies with important story values--and reaching an audience, as well.”

Reaching that audience, Koller has found, hasn’t been easy. “Journey”--even with its Academy Award--hasn’t taken off as he had hoped. And Koller blames Miramax. “It was put out fast without a trailer, so how should people know about it?” the director asks.

Miramax says that though no trailer was available for the New York and Los Angeles runs, one is currently in production.

“In a perfect world . . . we might have gotten it out earlier,” acknowledges Miramax spokeswoman Jeanne Berney. “Maybe there wasn’t the lead time (Koller) would have liked. But, remember, the film is still opening nationwide.

“Whatever problems the movie has had--and the grosses aren’t bad for a film of this kind--are due less to the lack of a trailer than to the fact that a lot of critics seemed to review the Oscar race rather than the movie and took the academy to task,” Berney said. “For an art-house film, that’s particularly harmful because they live and die by reviews.”