Playing to Win : Don’t ask him how he does it, but Daniel Stern keeps scoring one Hollywood success after another. With ‘City Slickers,’ he’s poised to join the big boys

Hollywood is full of people whose parents shoved them onto a stage or in front of a camera when they were children. This was not, however, the case with Daniel Stern. “My mother told me the first time she saw me in a play that she was so sad because she thought I was so desperately in need of attention that I would do this,” Stern says. “I mean, maybe she was right, but I thought it was fun. She thought it was crazy and sad. I thought it was fun.”

This non-Hollywood moment occurred back in Maryland, where Stern grew up and attended high school. His father was a social worker and showed little enthusiasm when his son told him upon graduation that he wanted to go to New York and be an actor. “They weren’t discouraging,” Stern says. “It was just so far out of anybody’s experience in the family. So I feel really untrained for a life in show business.”

Stern’s life in show business so far has included work for directors Barry Levinson, Woody Allen and Robert Redford. He has been the grown-up voice of Fred Savage’s character on television’s “The Wonder Years” and has made a place for himself as a distinctive comic actor with dramatic possibilities in the movies “Breaking Away,” “Diner,” “The Milagro Beanfield War,” “Born in East L.A.,” “Coupe de Ville” and “Hannah and Her Sisters”--all the while persuading audiences that he is probably a really nice guy if you get to know him.

Not to mention that he managed to get cast in “Home Alone” (he was one of the two bumbling burglars), a movie that has grossed more than $270 million in the United States and already has been admitted to the box-office hall of fame, behind “E.T.” and “Star Wars.”

Not a bad deal. But how does it look to him now, 15 years out of Bethesda and sitting in a delicatessen on Beverly Boulevard, awaiting the release of “City Slickers,” this latest movie of his, the one with Billy Crystal and all those horses and cows and probably the best role he’s had since “Diner”? Maybe this is the one, the one that will make people sit up and love him or just be pleased to be near him on the sidewalk. In Hollywood, your credit is always on the line, and it’s hard not to feel that every day is a day at the track.

“When you say, ‘Hollywood,’ with capital letters, whenever I even start to talk about it, I find my voice kind of trailing off,” Stern says, his voice trailing off.

“It’s a thing I don’t have totally worked out: How to win the game. Except that I do win the game. I mean, I’m in the movies. But it doesn’t ever feel like you win. I wonder if it ever feels like you win. Does Bruce Willis say, ‘I’m there, I’m it’? Does Sean Connery? Or does Sean Connery just walk away and not even think twice about it? That’s what I’d kind of like to do. That’s one reason I moved up to San Francisco. So that I didn’t even have to think about it. But in fact I do think about it. I do want to make more movies. It’s the only thing I really know how to do. So I don’t know how you win at the game or figure out where the finish line is. Except at that AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. Is that the only finish line? Where you can say, ‘OK, that’s it, I won!’ I don’t know.”

Joe Roth, now 20th Century Fox chairman, who directed Stern as a combustible Air Force sergeant in last year’s “Coupe de Ville,” says about him: “I wouldn’t know who to compare him to on the current scene. He’s unique. I had a very difficult time casting that part. I wanted to find a guy who was big and imposing yet came off as bright and was good with physical comedy. Danny was that. What’s deceptive about him is that he’s a very good athlete--very good basketball player, tennis player and a highly competitive person. He kind of masks that in this (slouchy) slovenly physical comedian. He’s really always playing against type. The part he played in ‘Diner’ is much closer to who he is than the character in ‘Home Alone.’ ”

Stern, 34, is taller than he appears on the screen. He’s 6 feet 4, with a nose and chin that remind you of Bob Dylan and with the large blue eyes of a leading man. Today he’s wearing blond stubble and a thrift-shop ensemble of black shirt (with blue tie), worn jeans and scuffed boots. He sips a chocolate soda and hears a familiar pop song coming from the back of the deli.

“Is this Boy George?” he asks. “I’ve got to dance.”

But not really. No one else is dancing in the deli. There are only two other people in the place.

Stern started out in Shakespearean dramas and other serious roles on the East Coast, but it’s in comedies that he seems to have shone a little brighter. In Barry Levinson’s 1982 movie “Diner,” he made a lasting impression as Shrevie, the Baltimore kid who started thinking about divorce after discovering his wife (played by Ellen Barkin) had touched his cherished rock ‘n’ roll record collection and hadn’t put the discs back in the right order.

In “City Slickers” he plays another man with marital problems, only this time it’s his wife who’s the bully. Along with his two best friends, played by Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby, Stern takes off on a wifeless summer vacation that will change each of their lives. They sign up for a dude ranch cattle drive in Colorado that turns into a version of “Lonesome Dove” and “Deliverance” before it indeed makes them new men. The script, by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (“Splash,” “Parenthood”) is a comedy, but a grown-up one that, as Stern notes, “never really gets into ‘Three Amigos’ territory” (a reference to John Landis’ 1986 slapstick movie with Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short).

“City Slickers” was a windfall for Stern, who came in at the eleventh hour as a replacement for Rick Moranis. Arriving late, he had little time to prepare for the film’s array of physical challenges, which included horseback riding through swollen rivers and dodging steers during a prairie stampede. For the movie’s opening scene, he had to run alongside bulls down the narrow streets of Pamplona (actually a back lot at Universal) without getting killed.

Viewers are likely to assume that the Pamplona sequence (representing an earlier thrill-seeking vacation) was done with trick photography and stunt doubles. Which is what Stern thought until he spoke to director Ron Underwood the first time.

“I said to Ron, ‘So how do we do this now? Are there going to be a lot of stunt guys?’ And he said, ‘Well, not a lot. I want the action to be real.’

“That was actually pretty scary because not only are the bulls running--and basically I don’t think the bulls want to hit you--but the problem is there are all these extras who want to be in the movie, so they’re going to run right next to you to get in the shot. And then there were the stunt guys falling down. But I never felt like I was going to die. I’ve felt more scared in other situations.”

While making the 1983 helicopter drama “Blue Thunder,” playing Roy Scheider’s rookie partner, Stern had to do a scene that simulated a helicopter crash. “The camera was glued on the outside of the bubble on my close-up, you know, and then they take the helicopter straight down. And I was laughing hysterically because I was absolutely petrified.”

“He was pretty much scared to death on his horse,” director Underwood recalls. “Which worked out well for the film because they are city guys and it would have been wrong for them to have been too comfortable on horseback.”

“City Slickers” was the result of an idea that came to Crystal while he was watching a television show about fantasy vacations. The casting of Stern and Kirby--instead of big-name actors--guaranteed Crystal top billing and attention, but the picture doesn’t play like a star vehicle. Crystal’s character, a radio ad salesman from New York, shares the main plot with Stern’s character, a beleaguered grocer, and Kirby’s sporting-goods salesman.

“The safer way would have been to have stars around him,” Underwood says.

Crystal “didn’t take the center stage and have us be sidekicks, where he could have,” Stern says. “He left me with a great part to play.”

But not an easy one. More than the other two, Stern has to move from scenes of laugh-out-loud humor to ones of pain and reflection as his domestically battered grocer takes stock of his sorry/funny life and rises to moments of heroism.

“I like playing characters that arc, that start someplace and end up someplace else and kind of hit the points along the way. You plot out the change in your mind, and figure out how uptight you’re going to be in this scene, a little less uptight in the next scene and so on.”

Stern does not come from the Robert De Niro school of acting that emphasizes immersion in character. Actually he doesn’t come from any school. He never studied acting. “Don’t tell anyone,” he says before admitting that he did study once in New York--but after two weeks in class, his teacher, Austin Pendleton, hired him to be in a play. That was the end of his formal training.

“I don’t exactly know how I work or develop a character. But it doesn’t involve a lot of history. I don’t, like, wonder who the guy was. I basically wonder how I am going to play a particular scene, which to me makes more sense. The character is the culmination of the scenes in the movie. That’s all the audience is going to get. So how you play a scene determines who they see.”

Stern spent five years transplanted in Los Angeles before moving with his wife, Laure, and their three children to the Bay Area a year ago. He coaches his son’s Little League baseball team and tries not to look nervous. “It gets my stomach in a knot,” he says. “When the game’s over, it’s like, ‘Thank God, that’s over. Life is good.’ ”

Of Southern California, he says, “There’s some good people here, but I don’t like the terrain.” He continues: “I was just back in New York, upstate, and it was beautiful, lush, rivers and lakes. People flush their toilet whenever they want to. They don’t care!”

He commutes to Los Angeles to do his voice-over for “The Wonder Years” (he has also directed 10 episodes) but has been forced by his film commitments to send his narration back from recording studios in Washington, Chicago, Reno, South Carolina and, during the “City Slickers” shooting, from Durango, Colo., and Santa Fe, N.M.

Ahead is the sequel to “Home Alone,” though even if he does reprise his burglar role he doesn’t think it will put him any closer to what he calls “Tom Hanksland”--the destination of the tough journey from successful character actor to leading man. “That’s a whole big game that I kind of have a toe in, or a foot. Do you think Hollywood would accept me in the Tom Hanks parts? Tom Hanks is one of my favorite actors. I love him in his movies. He makes me very comfortable, and he’s very funny and very charming. Certain guys in the movies you can count on. Maybe it’s because their own personality is so strong it comes right through the character. And my personality, I don’t know if it comes through or if it’s of interest to anybody.”

When Joe Roth hears this self-analysis later, he says, “I would imagine that Tom Hanks is somebody he would identify with because you could certainly see him playing the part in ‘Big.’ ”

Stern says: “It’s very confusing to think of my career in an abstract sense. I can basically only see what’s right in front of me. I’ve seen friends working for years not making any money or getting any good parts. And I’ve been really fortunate. The first movie I was ever in was ‘Breaking Away,’ which won an Academy Award for best screenplay and was nominated for best picture. And on that Oscar night, I was out here making “Honky Tonk Freeway” and staying at the Tropicana Hotel on Santa Monica and I’m sitting in my room watching the Oscars and they showed my biggest scene as the clip and I’m thinking, ‘I’m the luckiest guy. . . .’ ”

Which was perhaps not exactly what his mother was thinking at the same moment, though by now, maybe even she figures that this acting thing, where Danny is concerned, is, well, not a bad deal.