‘Johnny’s’ Journey From the Stage to the Screen : Movies: The film version features a shorter title, a cast of hundreds, and substitutes a silver screen beauty (Michelle Pfeiffer) for the ‘BLT kind of person’ described in the play.

Terrence McNally’s stage instructions at the start of his play, “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune,” are explicit: “At curtain rise, darkness. We hear the sounds of a man and woman making love. The sounds they are making are noisy, ecstatic and familiar. Above all, they must be graphic.”

And, indeed, that’s how the play opened when South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa staged it in 1989.

In the film adaptation, however, Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino don’t begin their noisy mattress dance until the movie’s half over--not until the audience has had a chance to get to know them and their lives outside that tenement window.

In movie parlance, that’s called “opening up the play” and, in many ways, the film of “Frankie & Johnny” is a good example of this challenging, and often murky, journey from stage to the screen. Some of the changes are simple and obvious: the title is shorter (a bow to marketing) and the cast has blossomed from two to hundreds (if you count the crowd scenes).

Other changes are more fundamental: Here we have a silver screen beauty in the role of a woman described in the play’s text as having “striking but not conventional good looks” or, as the waitress describes herself, “A BLT down kind of person.”

In the original 1987 production (which began at Manhattan Theatre Club and then transferred to the Westside Arts Theatre), Kathy Bates and Kenneth Welsh played the waitress and short-order chef who first bared their bodies, and then their souls, in a one-room set with a window looking out on Hell’s Kitchen.

In Costa Mesa, SCR regulars Richard Doyle and Karen Hensel played the leads in the same kind of claustrophobic surroundings.

In the film, the couple have an unlikely new conspirator in their romance--New York City itself.

In writing the adaptation, McNally says he simply forgot about the play. “I didn’t feel that it was my job to preserve as much of it as possible,” he says, “and that was a liberating experience. My mandate was to tell the story using Manhattan as a background. I’m not talking about writing ‘interior shot,’ ‘exterior shot.’ That’s not important. Coming up with good characters and a good story is.”

The saga of a late-inning romance between two blue-collar iconoclasts attracted director Garry Marshall to the project, fresh from his success of “Pretty Woman.”

“I thought it was the other side of the coin,” he says, comparing “Frankie & Johnny” to his box-office smash. “ ‘Pretty Woman’ said somebody’s going to climb up your fire escape and take you away from all this. This movie is saying, ‘Your Prince Charming got hit by a truck. Midnight is coming and you still got nothing!’ ”

Well, that’s at the beginning. In the course of the film, Frankie indeed discovers that she does have something--Johnny--but she kinda wishes he would be hit by a truck.

He’s a borderline pest, the type of guy who crashes your bowling night and ruins your game, who runs up five flights of stairs to stand bug-eyed and panting at your doorstep, the type who stokes feelings you’d rather leave tamped down.

If, as Marshall insists, any good story is defined by what its characters desire, then Johnny, fresh out of prison and eager to bury the past, just wants to connect and Frankie, emotionally bruised and battered, just wants to be left alone.

From the beginning of its off-Broadway run, the play proved to be a magnet for film stars and nearly every conceivable name was bandied about for the movie version, including the odd coupling of Jack Nicholson and Penny Marshall (Garry’s sister).

Pacino came as no surprise, but Pfeiffer did, and much of the theatergoing public was skeptical that someone who was that slinkily gorgeous could be believable as a woman who had taken her lumps and--gasp--hadn’t had a date in three years.

The director had no such qualms. “The play was about an older woman who was having her last chance at love,” Marshall says. “The movie is about a bruised woman who has shut down. That can happen at any age. It doesn’t matter what you look like. What’s important is the vulnerability and Michelle has that. She’s very down to earth. She was once a checker at Vons so she knows how your feet can hurt when you have a job like that.”

In the film, Frankie and Johnny play out their story in a city as febrile and neurotic as the lovers. “Frankie and Johnny” has been made by New Yorkers, present and former, and it shows. Bronx-born Marshall, now living in California, says that when you arrive at Port Authority, “You step out into an opera.”

More apparent in the movie is the picture of New York as the naked city of a million different stories. The Apollo Cafe in Chelsea, where Frankie and Johnny work, is the hub of dozens of little dramas--a small village within a metropolis where lives are proscribed within a radius of two or three blocks.

Also, in contrast to the lovers’ story, the film follows the love lives of a couple of ancillary characters: Cora (Kate Nelligan), a gum-cracking, wise-cracking tootsie who works at the Apollo, and Tim, (Nathan Lane), Frankie’s best friend and a gay actor who is, as he says, “dating Huck Finn.”

But all of the characters in the film are decidedly in the lower economic range. Says McNally: “In a sense, this film is my response to yuppiedom. There’s not a yuppie in the film!”

In fact, when the film was being scored by composer Marvin Hamlisch, Marshall says that he felt compelled to question whether “all those violins” were appropriate in a film dealing largely with blue-collar workers.

“Marvin told me, “When people fall in love, Garry, they have the same music in their hearts as rich people. It’s the same emotion whether your rich or not.”

“Frankie & Johnny” goes even further in exploring the voyeuristic aspect of New York beyond the Apollo cafe and its habitues. In a good example of how a movie can open up a play, the film zooms in on the dramas occurring in the apartments surrounding the courtyard of Frankie’s building.

In one scene, Frankie watches a woman in the apartment across from her being beaten up by her lover--an event, which in the play, takes the form of story that Frankie tells Johnny.

Here, we not only witness the brutalization but, later in the film, there is also an encounter between Frankie and the woman in a supermarket. “The film was an opportunity to show all the facets of the modern condition: loneliness,” says McNally, “and what people will endure to erase it. It’s not just men that Frankie is off. She doesn’t need anybody, just a VCR and take-out service. One of the scenes that has affected women in preview audiences the most isn’t even a scene. It’s that shot of her standing up in her kitchen, eating all alone. Women really identify.”

Yet as much as the film may have expanded the play, McNally says its themes remain the same. “ ‘Frankie & Johnny’ has always been about two flawed people and the minor miracle that comes late into their life,” he continues.

“This is very much about falling in love with eyes wide open. People marry illusions of one another but that’s not what love is all about. It’s about brushing your teeth together, not running off into the sunset.

“I suppose you could say Frankie and Johnny’s love story is small potatoes on the scale of the universe. But it’s not small potatoes to them.”