MOVIES : ‘Rose’s’ Rambling Journey : Martha Coolidge’s efforts to film a tender tale of sexual awakening were fruitless--until the director of ‘Die Hard 2’ read the script

A comic but tender bedroom scene between Laura Dern and 14-year-old Lukas Haas in the movie “Rambling Rose” has been drawing astonished laughter from screening audiences and others who’ve seen the film in recent weeks. That scene, says Martha Coolidge, the film’s director, “is one of the two compelling reasons to make the picture.”

The film, based on Calder Willingham’s seriocomic novel, reflects on a time in the 68-year-old Southern novelist and screenwriter’s childhood, when a coltish, flaxen-haired country girl named Rose became his family’s maid in Rome, Ga., in 1935. This good-hearted girl searched for love and knew of no other means to achieve it than through her budding sexuality.

At first, Rose attempts to seduce the father of the household, played by Robert Duvall. When that fails, she slips into the bedroom of the young narrator, Buddy (Haas), with the intent of pouring out her heart. Buddy, however, has other thoughts.

“It’s the most honest, first-person description of sexual awakening that I’ve ever read. Calder told me it was the most painful thing he ever wrote in his life. It’s a scene you read in a book and assume you could never do in a movie.”

The reaction the scene has been getting is testimony to the touch that Coolidge brings to this tale of a woman out of sync with the sexual mores of both the era and Southern manners.

Dern says, “On the written page, Rose reads as manipulative and, in some ways, oversexed. So it’s important for the movie to reveal how what’s implied is not true. The girl needed love. Emotionally, it was a plus to have a woman (director) to deal with a central character who is misinterpreted on the basis of her sexuality.”

Coolidge says only this: “Meeting Calder, it was clear to me his life has been deeply and beautifully affected by his relationship with women and he’s extremely expressive about it. That’s rare. As a woman directing this piece, I was particularly sensitive to making sure the women were well-rounded characters.”

When Coolidge first read the “Rambling Rose” script five years ago, “I felt I had to make this picture. I’ve not had that feeling since I was making documentaries.”

That hasn’t been the response from film executives. The screenplay, adapted from Willingham’s highly acclaimed novel, bounced around Hollywood for nearly 19 years. “It was considered too small, too personal, a period piece and not a blockbuster,” explains ICM agent Barry Mendel, who spent four years trying to set up the project.

At that point, Coolidge was probably best known for the unusually intelligent 1983 teen comedy “Valley Girl” with Deborah Foreman and Nicolas Cage, or 1985’s “Real Genius” with Val Kilmer and was being offered more teen comedies. Mendel, who represents Willingham and now Coolidge, notes that “Martha hadn’t yet demonstrated (to Hollywood) an ability to work on a serious, important movie. When, in fact, she had. Her independent documentaries are really serious, but people didn’t know about that or give her credit for them.”

“I was in a rut,” Coolidge says. “That’s why I did television. I was getting more mature material.” She directed several episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” the pilot for the ABC series “Sledgehammer” and the CBS-TV movies “Trenchcoat in Paradise” and “Bare Essentials.”

When she read the “Rambling Rose” screenplay, Coolidge immediately thought of her friend, Laura Dern, to play Rose. After she directed Laura’s mother, Diane Ladd, in “Plain Clothes,” a 1988 limited release, she asked Ladd to play the mother in the household. As a “package,” though, the project got nowhere at first.

But through persistence, luck and some old-fashioned clout--supplied not by Coolidge but by producer Renny Harlin, the director of “Die Hard 2”--”Rambling Rose” will open Friday.

Seated on a couch in her Coldwater Canyon home, the morning after wrapping “Crazy in Love” for TNT with Holly Hunter and Gena Rowlands in Seattle, Coolidge, 45, is the picture of a director consumed by her work.

Her struggle, in common with most filmmakers, resulted in “economic and personal deprivation.” But that deprivation has been accentuated by both gender and typecasting.

Hollywood has warily embraced women directors. Due to their increasing numbers and the success many, including Coolidge, have enjoyed, they can no longer be dismissed. Yet as Coolidge puts it, “your being attached (as director) to material is not often considered an asset.”

Certainly that was the case with “Rambling Rose.”

Willingham--whose film credits include “Paths of Glory,” “The Graduate,” “Thieves Like Us,” “Little Big Man” and “One-Eyed Jacks”--wrote a screen adaptation of his novel for producer Edgar J. Scherick in 1972. In 1980 the project was nearly set up at Universal to star Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau and Lily Tomlin. That deal fell apart.

“Obviously, it was perceived as a more broadly comic piece,” Coolidge comments.

Then Dern had an idea. She gave the script to a man she had started dating. That man was Renny Harlin, a young Finnish director, who at the time was in Denver directing “Die Hard 2.”

One sleepless night, the director picked up the script. “I was hoping it would put me asleep,” he chuckles. “Instead I couldn’t put it down. I had tears in my eyes when, at 3 a.m., I called Laura and asked what do you need to get this movie made. She said money.”

Harlin wanted to direct the film himself. When he learned of Coolidge’s involvement, he immediately agreed to produce the film for her. He brought the project to Carolco’s Mario Kassar.

Carolco, the company made by “Rambo” and made wealthier by “Total Recall” and “Terminator 2,” seemed an unlikely choice. But Harlin has a production deal there. Kassar liked the script but wavered.

“I followed him like a bloodhound,” says Harlin. “When he went to Cannes (Film Festival), I went aboard his yacht and stayed 16 days until he said yes. I did what any independent producer has to do--I lied and cheated. I told him Robert Duvall and Lukas Haas were dying to do the picture. I’d never spoken to them in my life.”

When Kassar agreed to make the film for a budget Harlin describes as being “under $10 million,” he then had to get the actors he promised. Duvall initially turned down the part of Daddy. Willingham personally sent the revised script and a beseeching letter to the actor, asking him to take the role. The actor consented.

The key to everything, says Harlin, was Coolidge’s passion for “Rambling Rose.” “I realized that unlike so many others in Hollywood, she was very intellectually, emotionally and artistically serious about making movies. In our meetings with the writer and actors, I really liked her deep, analytical approach to the material. Martha is definitely an actor’s director. Her emphasis is on story and actors.”

Certainly those skills were put to the test in the two key scenes that compelled her to make the film.

“On the page Rose does not have a full and complete life of her own. The male characters go through the greatest change because this was written by a man and it’s a man’s story. I think the greatest risk had this been directed by some men was that Rose might have been shallow--a symbol of sexuality--and Mother a one-note, bizarre lady,” Coolidge says. The scene between Dern and Haas in bed is, Coolidge believes, “about higher love, but to the boy it starts out as kind of sexual initiation. That’s the time of life when to touch someone’s knee is so thrilling you can’t imagine doing more. I remember. Maybe that’s why I did a good job at teen comedies for so many years. I remember how the blood rushed to your head when someone looks at you.

“But Rose is not even thinking of him as a sexual creature. This is a heightened experience where two young people are on totally different tracks of thought.”

By the end of the scene Buddy turns to Rose with tears in his eyes and says he loves her. “And he means it. It isn’t just touching her; he has truly experienced love and compassion for another human being.

“The scene plays so differently for men and women. The first screening was for two men and one woman. Lukas would say something and the guys laughed. Then Laura would say something and the woman would laugh.”

The other key scene occurs in a doctor’s office, a scene so crucial that Coolidge says “I knew if I didn’t get this right, I didn’t have the movie.”

Daddy, having run out of patience, considers a doctor’s sly suggestion as to how he might cure Rose’s behavior. “I did research and discovered that in the South at that time ovariectomies and clitoridectomies were fairly common. That’s really shocking. People did that to people as a treatment for being over-sexual!

“So the test of the movie is a test of Daddy--and of Mother--as to whether or not they will allow this to happen. I think the ramification, in contemporary life, is: Is a woman’s body her own? We still judge women more harshly in sexual behavior than men.”

Coolidge’s first documentary, “Not a Pretty Picture,” told the story of her own date rape. “That obviously relates to Rose,” she says, “the idea of being judged sexually. I was raped, but in those days we didn’t call it rape. People thought I was promiscuous. I got a little reputation after that. So I know what it’s like to have people judge you.”

The theme of the movie, Coolidge says, is “you can experience love and it can leave, but you have its memory for the rest of your life. It teaches you to love. I worked hand in hand with Johnny Jensen, my cinematographer, and John Vallone, my production designer, to design a look in the interior that is like a memory. There’s something about memory that heightens light.”

The filmmakers created a period set that was a little too dark intentionally. “The only way to see light is to see it in contrast to dark. That first scene when Rose is sitting in the living room, the light suddenly strikes her and the other characters, illuminating them. That is Rose. She brought light and life and love into this family.”

Coolidge’s documentaries played a hand in this careful attention to detail. “You learn quickly to observe details that explicate your themes. There is no insignificant thing in that camera’s view. Everything becomes part of the story you’re telling. That’s why the choices you make--the books on the table, the kind of lamps, certain gestures actors make--are so important.

“We designed this whole picture to have the feeling of memories of places that are no more. I based a great deal of the interior on my grandmother’s house, which was from the same era even though she was a Yankee.”

Coolidge’s parents were architects. Coolidge, a fourth cousin to President Calvin Coolidge, was born in New Haven while her father was teaching at Yale. She took drawing lessons with Josef Albers and would visit Alexander Calder’s home with her parents.

“Surrounded by architects and artists, I was raised to be an artist. It was my destiny to paint in a private studio in my back room.”

She rebelled against that destiny first with theater and later, at the Rhode Island School of Design, with filmmaking. She pursued a film career through the School of Visual Arts at Columbia, on commercial and documentary crews, writing and producing live TV in Canada and, finally, making documentaries.

“Two things shaped my career. At 21, I observed the workshop production of an A. R. Gurney play called ‘The Odyssey of the American WASP From 1929 to 1979.’ (which later became ‘Scenes From American Life”). It changed my life.

“I felt I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say. When I saw the play, I realized I belong to a certain ethnic group and class and there was an enormous wealth of detailed experience that I could draw upon. ‘Rambling Rose’ is a direct reflection of that class of people.

“The second thing was expatriating myself to Montreal during the Vietnam War. At a time, the Quebecois were going through an incredible identity crisis. It made me go through my own identity crisis. What I realized was I was a middle- class American. I had to come back to America and make movies about who I was. I came back and made a documentary on my brother (“David On and Off,” 1972), my grandmother (“Old-Fashioned Woman” in 1973) and my own rape.”

Eventually moving into features, she made a film, “City Girl,” which though never commercially released brought her an offer to direct “Valley Girl” (1983). That hit film became her “calling card.”

With “Rambling Rose,” though, she’s probably broken out of the teen ghetto for good. “I’m already getting totally different kinds of material. This is the kind of movie I should be making.”

In 1984, Coolidge astonished herself by marrying Michael Backes, a screenwriter and computer graphics consultant. “I’d really given up the idea (of marriage). I wanted it but it has never been my primary goal of life ever. I had serious relationships, but found that it was very, very difficult for a man to live with a woman director. So I was quite surprised when I met Mike and got married two months later.”

She now has a 2 1/2-year-old son, Preston, who goes to every location with his mother.

“I have to tell you, (being married) is a lot better than being alone. When you’re alone and a director, your whole life becomes directing. It took me 20 years to get where I was when I got married, and it probably was necessary (to do it alone). It was that difficult.

“I hit pits. The depths of despair when you are totally alone and have nothing in your life but filmmaking and filmmaking isn’t happening--I cannot tell you how far down that can be.

“But the benefit of marriage is that my life is not all about directing anymore,” Coolidge said. “I think it’s made me a much deeper director. The marriage and child definitely made ‘Rambling Rose’ a better picture.”