On-Screen Adventure of Chris Columbus : Movies: The ‘Home Alone’ director reworks his youth in the mother-son adult comedy that teams John Candy and Maureen O’Hara.

Writer-director Chris Columbus either values artistic integrity over star-power, or he’s not quite as sharp as he looks.

In both cases, he had the good fortune to have cast one of the most newly bankable, high-priced actors in Hollywood, young Macaulay Culkin, in a small part in his new film, “Only the Lonely”--only to virtually eliminate the $5-million kid from the movie’s final edit.

“There was a five-minute scene between John Candy and Macaulay that was cut,” Columbus confirms, with the sort of sheepish smile that suggests he knows he’s done something another filmmaker might consider foolish. “So certainly no one can accuse us of commercializing Macaulay Culkin to get people into the theater. We know it’s a completely different kind of film from ‘Home Alone,’ and it would be dishonest to tell people he’s in it. It was a funny scene, but it just really hurt the structure of the film.”

Also changed late in the game was the ad campaign for “Only the Lonely,” which in an early stage prominently featured the legend “From the Makers of ‘Home Alone’ “--a reference to the previous hit teaming of director Columbus and producer John Hughes. “Home Alone” recently became the third highest-grossing film of all time and made Culkin the attraction he is.

Downplaying Culkin and any advertising references to “Home Alone” is in keeping with Columbus’ and Hughes’ desire to promote “Only the Lonely” as the low-key and leisurely paced adult comedy it is.

Hughes, of course, is responsible for a long, mostly profitable string of teen comedies. Prior to getting his directing career in gear by teaming with Hughes for “Home Alone,” Columbus was best known as a screenwriter who wrote action-adventure fantasies (“Gremlins,” “Young Sherlock Holmes,” “The Goonies”) for Steven Spielberg. Neither of their respective canons would immediately suggest a “Marty”-style story of losers in love for the ‘90s.

In the new film--which has its share of silliness as well as an underlying melancholy lilt--John Candy plays a 38-year-old Chicago policeman still tied to the apron strings of his iron-willed Irish-American mother, Maureen O’Hara, despite a nervously budding romance with wallflower Ally Sheedy.

“It was the first film I wrote that was based on aspects of my life that really had no reference to other films I had seen,” says the 32-year-old Columbus. “I can certainly identify with that lonely John Candy character because I was in that situation when I was in high school and part of college. I was a real heavy kid and I didn’t go out on a lot of dates; Saturday nights I stayed home and watched Carol Burnett with my parents.

“I was also an only child. It certainly wasn’t a miserable childhood. I had a wonderful time with my comic books and my Hammer horror films, so I was off in my own world and I loved it, but at the same time I knew there was something else I was missing. So part of that character was based on me.

“But it’s more about people I’ve known. My father-in-law had a group of five friends he grew up with on the south side of Chicago, and he was the only one who got married. The other guys all lived with their mothers till their mothers died, and then they went off to the YMCA or got a single apartment. One of the guys was engaged to a woman for 17 years and finally got married when his mother died, when he was 58 years old. . . . It was a fascinating world to me, equally sad and humorous at the same time.”

The script, which languished unread and unmade for several years, having been deemed “not commercial enough” by Columbus’ agent in the action-pic era, originally took place in an Italian milieu familiar to its writer. When Hughes finally read it and suggested Candy for the lead role, Columbus readily retooled the background to an Irish one with his fair-haired star in mind.

And in making the lead character’s mother an Irishwoman, Columbus thought of the role O’Hara played in John Ford’s 1952 “The Quiet Man,” not yet thinking he might actually lure the long-absent O’Hara back to the screen for the part.

“I wondered what would happen to that character if 40 years later she had moved to Chicago and she had a son,” Columbus said. “Maureen O’Hara is one of the strongest women in film history, especially in ‘The Quiet Man.’ There’s not a weak bone about her. I had no idea what had happened to her; she was just a springboard for me to write the character.

“Looking for her after we finished the script took four weeks, and no one really knew what to expect when she walked into the room, what she would look like, how she would sound, if she still had that sort of energy she had in the old John Ford pictures. She was officially retired. I mean . . . she hadn’t done a film in 20.”

Once persuaded, O’Hara attacked her comeback role with vintage vigor, racism and all; her Rose Muldoon is a matriarch who attacks Sheedy’s Sicilian heritage with the same disdain she shows Jews and Asians.

“Exaggerating it?” Columbus said. “Oh God, no. I’ve seen it in worse cases. I’m Italian but my wife is Irish. The bigotry and racism that’s apparent in Rose Muldoon was a big part of that generation of Italians I had known, and also the generation of Irish people that I’d met. It was humorous to me that it was virtually interchangeable.

“Back when Rose was Italian in the first draft, she was still prejudiced against Sicilians, because Italians break up people into sectors of Italy where they were raised. These people actually think there’s a difference between the Milanese, the Calabrese, the Sicilians. It was fascinating to me that these Ellis Island prejudices still exist among the people of that age.”

As the lead, Candy--who first worked with Columbus doing a cameo in “Home Alone,” and now plans to write a script with him--found the unusual portrayal of mother-and-son bonding harder to pull off than the film’s romantic aspects.

“The relationship between the mother and I was most challenging for me in the movie,” Candy says, “to show the 38 years that they spent together was like a husband and wife, and they had to part, to pull that off in a convincing way that wasn’t sappy or maudlin or over the top. But it was there on the page. Chris is a terrific storyteller, and he really loves his characters, what I think is what sets him apart.”

Despite this apparent knack for getting things “on the page,” Columbus claims he doesn’t prefer to direct his own screenplays--surprising for someone who earned his Hollywood rep turning out scripts on spec.

“It doesn’t really matter to me if I write my own scripts or if I direct someone else’s script as long as I’m directing a film,” he says. “I never intended to become a writer when I was in film school. For me school was purely to become a director, and writing was just a way to become a director as quickly as possible. For some reason after I got out of NYU, the option of making independent films didn’t seem as easy as becoming a writer and using that as a way in.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars in receipts later, Columbus is assuredly in , ready to reprise his directing duties this fall on what he tentatively calls “Home Alone Again,” once more working with a Hughes script, which is now in progress.

“We both have the same sense of humor, the same taste in music,” says Columbus of fellow writer-turned-mogul Hughes, also a Chicagoan. “We found out we both basically wrote to old Elvis Costello albums--that’s one of our connections.”