MISSING MOVIE FILE : Why ‘Jack the Bear’ Has Been Hibernating for So Long

If you see director Marshall Herskovitz squinting in the bright fall sun, it’s not because he needs glasses.

You’d be squinting too if you’d spent over a year in an editing room.

Despite his somewhat vampire-like routine during the cutting of his new film, “Jack the Bear,” Herskovitz, 40--best known for the TV series “thirtysomething” with Ed Zwick--says the isolation wasn’t as bad as one would guess. “It was a difficult process, sure,” he says, “but the happy outcome has affected how I feel about the whole thing. I’m pleased and I’m relieved.”

Completed over 14 months ago, tentatively announced by distributor 20th Century Fox as one of its big Christmas of ’91 films and then rescheduled, “Jack the Bear,” by its conspicuous absence from the ’92 release list, has launched a flurry of rumors: “It’s a mess . . . they’ve recut it completely . . . the filmmakers were at each other’s throats . . . it’s coming out next Christmas.”

Actually, according to various sources, none of this whispering is true (similar rumors, it should be noted, swirled around “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “American Graffiti,” and look how they turned out).

The final facts: “Jack the Bear” is due next Easter, it has the complete support of Fox, and everyone connected to the project is quite pleased.

“I want to dispel the idea that this is a troubled movie,” says Herskovitz.

Starring Danny DeVito as a monster movie talk-show host with a unique approach to raising his two young sons, “Jack the Bear” is described by one close to the project as “a story about how we deal with the monsters in life . . . the monsters in our hearts and mind.”

Reasons for the delay, says Herskovitz, “are two-fold. Because he was busy with ‘Hoffa,’ Danny was out of the loop for some additions we wanted to shoot for six months (the four days of additional shooting, none of them re-shoots, were done mostly to clarify some plot points and were finally completed this July when DeVito’s schedule cleared).

“The other reason,” adds the filmmaker, “was that this was delicate material and we wanted to get it absolutely right.”

Set in 1972, “Jack the Bear,” is a most unconventional, ambitious film. Most movies contain an average of 80 to 120 scenes. “Jack the Bear” has 300.

“There’s not one scene that was more than two pages long (a movie page equals about one minute of screen time),” says Herskovitz. “As written, it was very atmospheric, a very unusual coming of age story. It’s not a plot-driven movie where most of the beats are obvious. For that reason it was very hard to edit.”

Shown to preview audiences last fall, “Jack the Bear” received generally enthusiastic notices, says one source, although many were confused by abrupt changes in the film’s tone. Comic for its first hour, the movie then became very dark very quickly. Herskovitz says that fine-tuning has corrected the problem. “We’ve added some darker hints earlier in the film,” he says.

“The editing of the film was a very long and drawn-out process,” adds one source, “but not because of any problems. Because the movie has stream of consciousness feel, it was easy to endlessly fine-tune.”

Herskovitz says he traces some of the negative whispering about the film to a Premiere magazine article that stated that he and producer Bruce Gilbert were so at odds that they were working on a cut of the movie in two different editing rooms.

“Not true,” says Herskovitz, who clarifies, however, that there were early disagreements among the filmmakers. “If anything, there were too many people passionate about this project and that led to disagreements about how to put it together. But these problems were resolved in an ethical, gentlemanly fashion.”

When asked if he was at any point bothered with the negative rumors about “Jack the Bear,” Herskovitz answered no, because he’s made the movie he wanted to. “The thing that does scare me about movies is that you’ve only got one shot. And the media perception of a film, right or wrong, will certainly influence its performance.”

Herskovitz says he is glad for the extra editing time. The movie is being scored this week by James Horner, and after that “we’re going to start screening the movie several months in advance to show the critics and the film reporters this is something we’re proud of.”