MOVIES : Tonight, Jay’s Guests Are . . . Real Storytellers

“U nbelievable! . . . Dickensian! . . . An amazing visual feast!”

Gene Shalit providing a blurb for the movie ads? Gene Siskel, perhaps? John Simon? Jim Whaley?

Nope, just suddenly prominent film enthusiast Jay Leno, rave-reviewing “Batman Returns”--kind of--in the course of interviewing director Tim Burton.

Leno hasn’t turned into a critic upon assuming “The Tonight Show” throne. “I’m probably a movie buff the way the average person is a movie buff,” he says modestly. But he’s quickly become one of the most important and avid filmgoers in America by virtue of a guest-booking policy that represents a marked change from the Johnny Carson regime.

Under its former host, “The Tonight Show” declined, as a rule, to book movie directors. But with Leno in charge now, famous auteurs of filmland are suddenly showing up on the couch with the regularity that Rat Packers and Vegas headliners once did.

According to one source who worked on the show in the Carson era, only two directors ever appeared on his “Tonight Show”: Sam Peckinpah and Barry Levinson.

But suddenly, with Leno, the revamped show is virtually looking like a Directors Guild convention. During one week in mid-June, Robert Altman and David Lynch appeared on back-to-back nights. The following week, Penny Marshall, Burton and young directorial upstart Eric Mendelsohn all appeared on succeeding evenings.

Reginald Hudlin (“Boomerang”) and Robert Zemeckis (“Death Becomes Her”) are among the July bookings, and the show’s producers say they have queries out to John Singleton, Brian DePalma and Levinson, among others.

To Leno, it’s not just an acknowledgment of the fact that average viewers are more movie-savvy in the post-”Entertainment Tonight” ’90s, but that filmmakers make good, provocative guests, period.

“My thing has always been, if you can shoot a movie, you can probably tell a story,” says the host. “I mean, that’s what movies are about, and most directors are pretty good storytellers. Barry Levinson used to be a comedian, and most of the directors that we’ve met were performers or something else at one time. So they have a sense of how to sell something. They know it’s got to have a beginning, a middle and an end.

“And a lot of times, too, when you get a star, they’ve worked with their press people and they have a couple of stories that they’re gonna tell, and sometimes they’ve told them a number of places before they come to you. By going to the director, you get someone who probably hasn’t been on elsewhere all over the place before, and who has a new slant.”

The show’s executive producer, Helen Kushnick, is more direct: “There are only so many actors you can talk to. There are other people in the world.”

Not that the show’s booking policy evidences any anti-thespian bias. The show averaged three or four big film stars a week at the outset, including Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson. More encouragingly, unknown faces also popped up right at the outset at a pace that they rarely do on, say, “Arsenio”--such as “Sister Act” supporting actress Kathy Najimy on the very second night.

But the directors, not being so practiced at the chat-show circuit, don’t always come off so smoothly. Altman, for one, nor mally the very model of self-confident curmudgeonliness, seemed a bit nervous during his visit.

“Now they know how the actors feel,” says Kushnick, laughing.

With Burton and Lynch, true eccentrics both, there was a bit of the sideshow feel. (Stupid Director Tricks?) Lynch was prompted to talk about the years he spent having the same lunch every day at Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake. Burton, while being asked about visual design and the aforementioned “Dickensian” elements in his films, was also interrogated about his Burbank upbringing, and was gently chided about his rather unkempt appearance. (“I guess you’re not in charge of wardrobe on your films” was Leno’s opening line.)

It’s a tricky dynamic, straddling the line between West Hollywood and West Virginia. The artist in Leno has to admire these guys, and the Midwesterner in him has to acknowledge that they’re a little strange.

“Lynch killed me. He was probably the most off-the-wall. But I don’t find him weird at all,” Leno insists. “We were talking about both having the same thing to eat every day. I said, ‘We both like simple, repetitive tasks; they’re easy and you don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about them.’ I thought he was a great guest. It’s like my dad would say: ‘Who’s that oddball fella you had on there?’ ”

Whether their filmmakers come off as goofballs, geniuses or both, the studios, naturally, are delighted to have more possible ins for the coveted guest slots on the show.

“National talk shows are largely always the province of actors,” says Columbia Pictures publicity vice president Mark Gill. “So it is nice to have a new outlet there (for directors). And as it turns out, some of them are actually pretty good guests. From the point of view of a studio, it certainly makes ‘The Tonight Show’ more attractive than it already is.”

A 20th Century Fox spokesperson pointed out that “The Dennis Miller Show” has been booking directors from the outset (“The first guest I ever booked on there was Larry Kasdan”), but said of “The Tonight Show”: “We’re thrilled that they’re finally open to directors . . . and also taking more chances on actors that the previous people--and other shows--wouldn’t be.”

How does this industry “insider”-feel square with the image of Jay Leno, regular guy made good, the man who didn’t even go out to the pictures all that often before, once and forever oblivious to the wiles of Hollywood?

For the host, it’s no contradiction. Leno still considers himself relatively unaware of the “players” in Hollywood, and tells the story of getting caught in conversation the other night between screening rooms on the Paramount lot, where a young man queried him at length on his opinion of “Boomerang.” About the time Leno finally got around to revealing how well-directed he thought the comedy was, the fellow leading Leno along revealed himself as Reginald Hudlin; the host was sufficiently amused to instruct his staff to book the director on the show. “You never know who you’re talking to in this town,” says Leno, sounding still a bit the burg naif .

Actually, the filmmaking guest Leno sounds most excited about was Eric Mendelsohn, the 26-year-old who made his own film, sent it to Cannes and had it accepted for competition in the festival there. This guest shot didn’t promote product per se, but made for feel-good anecdote.

“It’s a great story, like a ‘Rocky’ story. If you’re sitting in a place like where I come from, Andover, Mass., which is as far away from show business as you can get, you have no idea how to get into the business. And I thought that could be inspirational to kids out there who want to be filmmakers--look what this guy did, he just picked up the phone and made a phone call, and now he’s on ‘The Tonight Show’ talking about his movie which is at Cannes.”

Kushnick says, “The thing I’m finding funny about this (attention) is that the bookings we’re doing now really aren’t that different than the bookings we were doing when Jay was guest-hosting. But nobody was paying attention then.” Even so, she acknowledges that the staff was limited in the guest-host days by some of the booking restrictions of the Carson era.

One difference between his guest-hosting days and now: Leno used to miss out on going out to the movies, Kushnick says, because he was going out on the road for 270 or so personal appearances a year in addition to guest-hosting the show once a week. Now that he has time to see the films, he does, lately spending about three mornings or nights a week at the movies with his producers, usually at private studio screenings, occasionally at public matinees.

This differentiates him from, say, David Letterman, who seems almost to make a point of not seeing his guests’ new movies ahead of time. “I think if you’re gonna have people on, you owe them that respect,” Leno says.

With the focus on directors part of a wide-ranging booking policy that was evident the very first night from the inclusion of economist Robert Krulwich on the couch alongside Billy Crystal--and from other guests ranging from author Amy Tan to the “Forever Plaid” theatrical cast to art-poppers They Might Be Giants--Kushnick promises that “we’re gonna do more of a cross section.”

Leno, eager to stay the stand-in for Middle America, doesn’t imagine the talk becoming too technical under his reign. And when he starts to use terms like “Dickensian” and “visual splendor” on the air in discussing films, he almost starts to apologize for it, as if afraid the use of too many qualifying adjectives might irreversibly turn him from a regular Jay into Pauline Kael.

“I still have a lot of friends that I grew up with in my hometown and I say, ‘What did you guys see? What did you like, what didn’t you?’ I mean, I see all the films, but I’m not a movie buff. I’m not someone who collects memorabilia.

“If you’re too much (focused on the work of) a director, then you’re looking at it differently. It’s a bit like when I watch comedy. When I watch comedy, I say, ‘Oh gee, that’s funny, but you know, that’s a lot like Jerry Seinfeld’s thing, he just changed this.’ So when I go to a film, it’s sort of like, I enjoy making love but I don’t want to be a gynecologist. You know what I mean? I enjoy it, let’s get in bed, let’s make love, but I don’t want to know all that (physiology)--let’s keep the romance, the mystery. So when I go to the movies, it’s the same type of thing.”