O.C. Film Team Hopes It ‘Can’t Lose’ : Movie: New company banks on talented director, well-casted lead actor and star James Earl Jones to boost project, based on life of disabled Fullerton man.

By the time Bruce Jennings finished a cross-country bicycle trip in 1976, the Fullerton man was something of a local hero.

It wasn’t just that Jennings had been a high-school track star and football player. He had made the 3,000-mile trek with just one leg.

The local press trumpeted Jennings’ success. Then-New York City Mayor Abraham D. Beame issued a certificate of appreciation to the 24-year-old, who had lost his right leg years earlier, the result of a motorcycle accident.

Now, five years after Jennings’ death, a movie based on his life is being made by a fledgling, independent Fullerton company. The MRB Group Inc. is banking the movie’s success on the talents of a first-time film director, a novice lead actor who, like Jennings, lost a leg but won a victory, and a major star who believes in the low-budget project.

“Do it. Try.” That’s the message of “I Can’t Lose,” said director William Brown, an English teacher on sabbatical from Fullerton High School who scored a coup of his own by engaging veteran actor James Earl Jones to play a supporting role. “It’s a story about life and people helping people.”

Jones, on the set here this week, said: “It’s been my experience, after 30-some years of being in this business--and not focusing on feature films--that the small, independent films . . . are the ones that work.”

Cruising along Brea Canyon Road in 1970, Bruce Jennings lost control of his motorcycle, crashed into a guardrail and was then hit by a truck that dragged him about 150 feet. He remained in a coma for 15 days. His leg was amputated after an infection set in.

About five years later, then a Cal State Fullerton student, he was hit by a car while he was riding a bike. He suffered internal injuries, a broken leg, shoulder and ribs.

It was during rehabilitation from this accident that Jennings decided to attempt the cross-country ride from Newport Beach to Atlantic City, N.J. Known for his determination, he made it across mountains, deserts and plains in 39 days, intent on proving he could do things many thought impossible. He didn’t have a prosthesis, but used a toe strap to both push and pull on the left bicycle pedal with his remaining leg.

“I’m stereotyped as being handicapped, and I don’t like that stereotype,” he told The Times the day in 1976 that he took off on the ride. “I’ve done everything I could do to change that image, but I still couldn’t do it. I think this will open some people’s eyes.”

The film’s script concludes with the climax of Jennings’ bike trip and a ticker-tape parade in his honor.

According to his parents, who live in Riverside County, Jennings had gone to Colorado seeking a job. Ruth Jennings, who conceded that her son was “impulsive, even reckless” and that “sometimes he wouldn’t look before he leapt,” said he was found dead, at age 34, in a car off the side of the road. Authorities never determined the exact cause of death, she said, although he was known to have taken some tranquilizers and consumed beer before he died. “He just simply drove off the road and went to sleep, is what I think,” she said.

In “I Can’t Lose,” Jennings is played by Matt Geriak of Villa Park. The handsome 24-year-old, who lost his left leg to cancer in 1988, was named last year as a member of the U.S. Disabled Ski Team and plans to enter the 1992 Olympics. A senior at USC majoring in chemistry, he had only dabbled in acting, though he was coached privately for the film.

Jones portrays the benevolent Perry Williams, a fictional character, who owns a convalescent home where Jennings undergoes rehabilitation. Jones’ character, himself paralyzed 21 years earlier from an accident, helps lift the youth out of self-pity and motivate him to overcome his handicap.

“Perry is full of life, and he brings out the life in others,” said Brown, who wrote the film in 1977 after spending months consulting with Jennings, who had gone to high school with Brown’s sister. The Perry character was created for dramatic reasons, Brown said. Jennings, who had turned himself around, didn’t have such a mentor, “but I couldn’t have him staring out a window” and then suddenly deciding to take charge of his life.

On the movie’s second day of filming Wednesday morning, Jones and Geriak shot a scene at a home here that takes place on Williams’ plant-covered balcony.

Jones was on hiatus from his successful TV series “Gabriel’s Fire,” which will resume in the fall with a new title, “Bird and Katt,”. He seemed to embody Williams’ kindly, inspiring spirit, his portly and dignified bearing radiating goodwill, his gold, wire-rimmed glasses magnifying the twinkle in his sweet, expansive eyes.

Replacing the ominous voice he once provided for Darth Vader with a softer, more mellifluous, subterranean rumbling, Jones, in character and with the camera rolling, spoke of learning to “make the best of our situations.” He steered his wheelchair about the veranda, recounting to Geriak, as Jennings, the story of a dog that traveled 3,000 miles to find its relocated owners.

“This dog’s life was shattered when his family abandoned him, right?” he asked, placing his focus on the care and feeding of his tomato plants and flowers so as not to patronize the youth or appear heavy-handed.

“Yeah, I guess so,” replied, Geriak also in a wheelchair in the scene.

“Absolutely! But he didn’t give up. He decided to find his family. His family was his life. And he wasn’t going to give up his life.”

Inspired by Jennings’ determination, Brown, 45, said he never gave up on the “I Can’t Lose” project, even though he wrote it 14 years ago.

The “usual” problem of finding investors waylaid production all those years, he said, until Lois Reade stepped forward last August. Reade is the widow of Dr. Frank Reade, the surgeon at St. Jude Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Fullerton who treated Jennings. She also is the film’s executive producer and chief backer. (None of the film’s officials would reveal its budget.)

Brown, who studied film at USC but has directed only industrial films and commercials, said he cast Jones, who appears in about one-fifth of the film, for the actor’s “lovable face,” his “warmth and his giggle.” (Producers said that insider connections were unnecessary for landing Jones--the actor was sent a script, and he accepted the role. The only thing resembling Hollywood squabbling was a dispute between Reade and the film’s original producer, Jack McLean, which ultimately prompted McLean to quit.)

Jones, winner of two Tony Awards (Howard Sackler’s “The Great White Hope” and August Wilson’s “Fences”) and who, at 60, has made more than 25 films (most recently 1990’s “The Hunt for Red October”), was hesitant to discuss his role. He is known for his absorption in roles, and a visitor was warned that he doesn’t like to break concentration while working.

Eventually, however, he opened up.

“I like characters who are very specific, but who have a large vision,” he said, speaking slowly and choosing words carefully. “(Williams) is a universal man--he’s not limited to his ethnicity or his age or his wheelchair--and that’s what he sees in Jennings, too. They have that connection.”

The actor, who has appeared in several smaller films or television projects and made numerous cameo appearances, had no reluctance to talk about why he signed on to “I Can’t Lose”--about why such independently made efforts “work.”

“They often work because no one is doing star turns on the movie,” he said. “They are written to tell a story, and actors are engaged because they are really right for the role,” not exclusively for their box-office appeal. (Still, no one said that Jones’ name in the credits won’t add some box-office luster to this project.)

“Those kinds of roles rarely qualify as Academy (Award) timber, but those movies, I think, are the most valuable in my career,” he said, citing his parts in 1989’s “Field of Dreams” and 1987’s “Matewan.”

As for working with Jones, Geriak said “he sets the tone, and I follow his lead.” Sometimes, however, Geriak feels as though he’s not acting at all, but “playing himself.”

After doctors discovered a malignant tumor in his leg in 1987, Geriak underwent leg-salvaging surgery. The cancer recurred, however, and his leg was amputated the following year.

“Naturally, I thought, ‘Why me?’ ” he said, but soon realized he couldn’t go on asking that question forever. A longtime interest in skiing helped him turn his attitude around. “It was like an obsession to get back on the snow. I went at it with much more aggressiveness than when I’d had two legs.”

He was also inspired by one-legged runner Jeff Keith, an amputee who ran across the country and who had given a lecture at USC in 1988 that Geriak attended. Geriak, who said he’s had no further trace of cancer, later joined a scholarship program for physically challenged athletes at USC, where Brown went looking for such an athlete to play Jennings.

Geriak knows that forces beyond his control may decide the success or failure of “I Can’t Lose,” which will shoot at other Orange County locations through mid-July, then travel to Boston to film the end of Jennings’ ride. No distribution company has purchased the film, which is scheduled for release in the late fall, producer Gary Schmoeller said.

“I’m just going to try my best at acting and see what happens,” he said.

Brown, who has a realistic attitude as well, isn’t blindly optimistic.

“But we obviously believe in it or we wouldn’t be doing it,” he said.