A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : JAPAN INK : Was It the Politics? Was It the Script? Nope, the Rollerblades Won Them Over

In “Prayer of the Rollerboys,” which opened in about 60 California theaters this weekend, the United States has fallen into economic disarray. Los Angeles looks like the capital of a crime-ridden, Third World country. The city’s homeless are crammed into huge metropolitan centers, cut off from the world by chain-link fences. Prostitutes and drugs are on every corner. And a fascist gang of youth on Rollerblades has taken over the city.

Japan, however, remains a dominant economic power. (Germany too: That country has just bought Poland.) Harvard has been moved to Tokyo--the first of America’s Ivy League colleges to transfer to Japan. And it’s clear that most of America’s gems have been sold off to foreigners. When the leader of the Rollerboys gang says he wants to “buy back America,” a Japanese arms dealer snarls, “Who’d want it?”

An interesting plot made more interesting by this little fact: Three Japanese companies--Gaga Communications, JVC and TV Tokyo--footed the bill for half of the $2.4-million movie. But from what producer Robert Mickelson could tell, his Japanese investors were more interested in the film’s Rollerblade action scenes than its political themes.

“The fact that (Rollerblading) was an American fad made it more appealing,” says Mickelson, who showed potential investors a video of local Rollerblade competitors as well as W. Peter Iliff’s script. In the film, Corey Haim stars as a rogue and skillful Rollerblader who wages his own war against the fascist Rollerboys and their Aryan-looking leader, played by Christopher Collet.

The Japanese were supportive of the project--even through some tough times in the early financing stages, when two other American partners dropped out--and gave director Rick King completely free rein, Mickelson adds.

Tetsu Fujimura, the Gaga Communications executive who helped pull the Japanese financing together, agrees that the action made “Rollerboys” an attractive investment. “We didn’t want to fail in the motion picture business and this seemed commercially viable,” primarily because of its youth appeal, Fujimura says, adding that the “Rollerblades are a symbol of youth and fashion.”

He also noted that the script was “easy to understand.”

It’s not surprising that the Japanese would feel at home with the film’s themes. The political moral of “Rollerboys” is in keeping with an increasingly influential school of thought in Japan: That America is digging its own grave with its lax economic and social ways. Japanese Parliament member Shintaro Ishihara and Sony Corp. Chairman Akio Morita recently earned a large following in Japan--but ruffled feathers in the United States--with “The Japan That Can Say No,” a book highly critical of shortsighted U.S. business practices.

A similar theme of America-in-decline is at play in Michael Crichton’s upcoming book, “Rising Sun.” But in this murder story, the Japanese are portrayed as more insidious: They have infiltrated America to the point where they are able to exert political, economic and even public-relations influence on such key sectors as the press, the police and technological academia.

Contrary to recent published reports, sources say, neither of Hollywood’s two Japanese studios--Matsushita Electric’s Universal Pictures or Sony’s Columbia Pictures--bid on the book when it recently went out for auction. Executives at Universal, which bought Crichton’s last book, “Jurassic Park,” for $1.5 million, talked about making a low-ball bid but never came through. Columbia executives didn’t like the story enough to make an offer.

The only bidder was Fox Film, run by Australia’s Rupert Murdoch, which paid $350,000 to option the book with a guarantee of another $1.5 million if a film is made. Several directors--including John McTiernan and Robert Zemeckis--expressed interest in the project, but Fox has hired Philip Kaufman (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “Henry and June”) to direct.