MOVIES : Old Novels, New Screenplays

At one West Side art house, record crowds are turning out for a sumptuous movie based on an E.M. Forster novel about upper-middle-class Britons confronting a changing world. Two miles away, moviegoers are showing up in smaller numbers for a second film based on a Forster novel--this one about a family of upper-middle-class Britons wrestling with the unknown and exotic in an Italian setting.

With their dramatic plots and richly delineated characters, Forster’s works seem like a natural for the screen. But during his lifetime, he refused to sell the movie rights to his books, although filmmakers as distinguished as Satyajit Ray pursued him. Not until 1984, 14 years after the author’s death, did “A Passage to India,” directed by David Lean, kick off a Forster craze that has resulted in all but one of his six novels being adapted for film.

The success of the 1985 Ismail Merchant-James Ivory production of “A Room With a View”--dubbed “the ‘E.T.’ of classics” by Variety’s box-office analyst Art Murphy--paved the way for the two current Forster movies, the widely acclaimed “Howards End,” also a Merchant Ivory film, and the less-publicized “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” from British director Charles Sturridge. (Merchant and Ivory turned to Forster yet a third time, with the 1987 “Maurice.”)

But there may be more than Forstermania at work here.

Since the silent era, with its many productions of Shakespearean plays, filmmakers have looked upon the classics as a rich mine of material for movies. In recent years, however, such films have come along only rarely, a casualty of the longstanding concentration on action pictures and teen-oriented comedies.

While few would claim that serious literature is now in vogue in Hollywood, where studio executives are often lampooned for finding screenplays taxing reading, the classics are enjoying a resurgence after a long period of neglect.

Although she may not have Forster’s track record in Hollywood, Edith Wharton, who died in 1937, is also hot these days. The first picture to be greenlighted by Columbia Pictures Chairman Mark Canton when he arrived at the studio fresh off his “Batman” success was “The Age of Innocence,” based on Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1920 novel about a romance doomed by the rigid social conventions of late 19th-Century upper-class New York. “It was a book I treasured,” Canton said.

With Martin Scorsese directing and Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder starring, this film, now in production, is no low-cost rendition of a classic but a $25-million-plus effort that will be “more like the ‘Dr. Zhivago’ version,” according to Canton.

Scorsese said through a spokeswoman there were two themes that attracted him to Wharton’s novel. “One was the telling of a very emotional story set in a time when emotion was not to be displayed, and the other was the deep sense of loss in the story. Telling an emotional story of obsessive love, but within the confines of that restrictive era, appealed to me very much.”

Scorsese has wanted to make this film for five years, said his ex-wife and co-producer Barbara De Fina. Originally developed at 20th Century Fox, the project was scuttled by that studio because “it was just too expensive,” she added, noting that much of the money is being spent to achieve an authentic look. The cast, also including Alexis Smith, Geraldine Chaplin, Alec McCowen, Jonathan Pryce and Claire Bloom, “is making a contribution” to the film by working at below their normal salaries “because they wanted to do the movie.”

Slated to be released this fall is a second, though much more modestly budgeted ($4 million) feature film drawn from Wharton’s “Ethan Frome,” shot in northern Vermont by “American Playhouse,” with Liam Neeson in the title role.

More widely known than most of the other classics serving as source material for Hollywood, the novel “has had a very strange history” where movies are concerned, said producer Lindsay Law. Several earlier attempts fizzled. Long in the hands of Columbia Pictures, the property came into the public domain a year and a half ago, and immediately attracted the attention of a number of producers, said Law, adding: “We were getting extremely nervous.” But Law managed to dive in first.

Pfeiffer and Kate Guinzberg hope to produce a film from another Wharton work, the biting novel of manners “The Custom of the Country,” according to agent Irene Webb, who specializes in obtaining rights to books.

Meanwhile, the fourth filmed version of James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans,” directed by Michael Mann and also starring Day-Lewis, is scheduled to open in early July. This $35-million project is not merely a remake of the 1936 classic starring Randolph Scott, but is “a melange” of the Cooper novel about the French and Indian War, Philip Dunne screenplay, and historical research, Mann said.

Scheduled for a November release is “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Anthony Hopkins (also in “Howards End”), Ryder and Gary Oldman. Unlike previous Dracula movies, it will be based on the 1897 Victorian horror story, as the title emphasizes.

Then there is “Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights,” planned as the first offering from Paramount’s 2-year-old London production offshoot. “Ours is drawn from the original classic novel, not a remake of the Goldwyn film” starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, said Paramount spokesman Harry Anderson. The Paramount film stars French actress Juliette Binoche. Now in post-production is a movie starring William Hurt to be based on Albert Camus’ 1947 classic, “The Plague.”

Additionally, producer Lindsay Doran (“Dead Again”), fulfilling a two-decades-old dream, has a deal with Columbia to develop a screenplay from Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” and has commissioned “Howards End” star Emma Thompson to write it. So far only one of Austen’s novels--the 1940 “Pride and Prejudice”--has made the transition to film.

“Howards End” producer Ismail Merchant takes credit for stimulating interest in classic novels.

“We have proven all along that there is an audience for a good story, beautiful characters and wonderful dialogue,” said Merchant, who produced “The Europeans” in 1979 and “The Bostonians” in 1984, both based on novels by Henry James. “Since (our) reaching out to that audience, many studios are willing to take risks for much larger amounts of money.”

Predicted Webb: “There definitely will be more (films based on classics) with ‘Howards End’ being so successful.”

The strong pull of that picture may signal that adult filmgoers are looking for movies they can connect with emotionally, said film scholar Leo Braudy, a professor at USC. “One side of the movie business has gotten so cinematic,” he said, “It’s all action, all violence, all special effects. . . . You don’t know anything more about the character than you do for the purpose of a plot. The plot (determines) the character rather than the character generating the plot.”

Canton, however, does not believe the public is tired of action movies, but said there are different audiences for different pictures. “You have to have a balanced program,” he asserted.

In the 1960s and ‘70s “auteurist” film critics frowned on movies made from classics. “There was a feeling that the best movies are movie movies, not classics, because the whole idea of a classic is that it’s something that is perfectly expressed in the medium of words, so why should it be adapted?” said film critic Molly Haskell.

Now, however, she sees “a kind of hunger for adult stories, for dialogue, for psychology, that we haven’t had in a long time.” The response to both “Howards End” and “Where Angels Fear to Tread” shows that “the time is right . . . (for) getting grownups back into the theater,” she said.

Depending on whom one talks to, the nearly simultaneous release of the $8-million “Howards End” and the $6-million “Where Angels Fear to Tread” is or is not a coincidence.

Jeffrey Taylor, executive producer of “Angels,” said the film missed its scheduled release date by seven months because of post-production problems. As a result, it got only a two-week head start over “Howards End,” which opened in a single theater in New York on March 13.

But Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, distributor of “Howards End,” accused Fine Line Features of trying to “cash in” on his film’s success. Anticipation of “Howards End” helped build audiences for “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” when that was the only Forster film playing, Bernard said. Both films feature Helena Bonham Carter, who also starred in “A Room With a View.”

“They were calling our publicists every week so they could position themselves accordingly,” the Sony executive said. He noted that “Where Angels Fear to Tread” opened in Miami on April 17, one week before “Howards End” was due to arrive in that city.

Ira Deutchman, president of Fine Line, called Bernard’s accusations “ludicrous.” But he and Taylor acknowledged that their film has indeed benefited from being linked in press accounts with “Howards End,” which did a sensational $380,417 at a single theater in only 31 days. “Where Angels Fear to Tread” has been “holding very well” everywhere but Los Angeles, according to Deutchman, pulling in a total of $855,540 through last weekend. “We’re very pleased with the results,” he said.

Not surprisingly, the success of an art film is measured by a different yardstick than an avowedly commercial release. Variety’s Murphy points out that “A Room With a View” was considered a smash hit when it took in $20 million at the box office in a year. By contrast, “E.T.” sold $360 million in tickets in one year.

“Howards End” has also sent some moviegoers to the bookstore. While still showing in a single theater, the novel landed on the Newsday paperback best-seller list. “Basically, it’s given the book a second life,” said Doris Ung, a spokeswoman for Vintage International, the publishing house.

However heated their argument over distribution, the filmmakers’ rivalry did not extend to the source material. Merchant and director Ivory said they never wanted to make a film from “Where Angels Fear to Tread.” Forster’s first novel, it tells the story of a British family’s response to the marriage between one of its members and a young Italian man. Given that “A Room With a View” was also set in Italy, Ivory said, “it would be like repeating myself.” He also cited the “inherent difficulty” of filming a climactic tragic moment in the story, which Sturridge handles by having it occur offscreen.

Instead, Merchant and Ivory said, they discussed the possibility of producing a filmed opera based on the novel. “I don’t know if it will ever happen,” the director said.

Similarly, Taylor said he, Sturridge and producer Derek Granger--who teamed up earlier for the 1988 film “A Handful of Dust,” based on the Evelyn Waugh novel, and (minus Taylor) for the 1982 television series based on Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”--never had any ambition to make “Howards End.” “We thought ‘Howards End’ would be extremely difficult to do,” Taylor said. Widely considered Forster’s masterpiece, the 1910 novel of social upheaval and class consciousness brings together two widely differing Edwardian families, the cultivated Schlegels and the commercially oriented Wilcoxes.

It was apparently not a distaste for translating his work into other forms that prompted Forster to refuse offers to turn his books into movies. He authorized stage and television renditions of his novels, including Santha Rama Rau’s dramatization of “A Passage to India” and a BBC version of “Howards End” starring Glenda Jackson. When it came to movies, however, Forster “thought he would lose control over his work, that what appeared on screen would not have much relation to what he had written,” said Barbara Rosecrance, author of a scholarly work, “Forster’s Narrative Vision.”

He even turned down Ray, who came to see him bearing a print of “The World of Apu,” and others examples of his highly regarded films, in the hope of securing the film rights to “A Passage to India.”

“Forster is supposed to have liked them very much, but he still said ‘no,’ ” Ivory said. Later, when the rights to “A Passage to India” did become available, Ray planned to make the film but “lost interest in it,” Merchant said.

Since Forster’s death, Kings College at Cambridge University has owned the rights to his works. Filmmakers, who must now negotiate with college officials to buy film rights, may find themselves subjected to “long-winded, crazy conversations with crusty dons who don’t know too much about the film business,” according to Taylor, but they no longer come away empty-handed.

Just one more Forster novel remains--”The Longest Journey”--but neither Sturridge nor Merchant Ivory plan to make it. “I think I’ve done enough with Edwardian England,” Ivory said. Merchant said future prospects include James’ “The Golden Bowl” or “Portrait of Lady.” Sturridge’s next film will be based on Alison Lurie’s 1984 novel, “Foreign Affairs.”

Film critic Stephen Farber predicts that more films based on classics will go into production, in part because of the copycat tendency always prevalent in Hollywood. “Then, if a couple bomb, they will either cancel them or be very anxious,” Farber said.

Haskell agreed that a lot is riding on the costly “The Age of Innocence.” If it fails, she said, “that will probably be the end. But maybe not. There will always be Merchant and Ivory.”