A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : SPIKE’S PLACE : ‘X’ Looking Large Over There

Spike Lee’s movies have never excited a lot of interest abroad, which is probably why Warner Bros. happily pre-sold foreign rights to “Malcolm X” to Largo International. Last spring, after screening the film biography of the slain black leader, Warners executives tried in vain to get those rights back.

Largo officials now believe they have a major sensation on their hands. Several weeks before the film’s Nov. 18 opening in the United States and several months before its anticipated March, 1993, opening in Europe, foreign journalists are clamoring for interviews with Lee.

Not limited to the entertainment pages, stories about Lee and the film are turning up in “the hard-news press,” according to a Largo spokesman. More than 100 interview requests from such publications as Germany’s Stern and England’s Economist have come in so far, he said.

“We’ve seldom enjoyed that kind of pressure,” said Jean-Louis Rubin, president of Largo International. “Usually we are begging you guys (to conduct interviews).”

Referring to Oliver Stone’s successful 1991 movie, Rubin attributes the huge reaction to “the ‘JFK’ phenomenon, which brought to the attention of the world that period of contemporary American history (the 1960s),” and to the widespread concern about “the standing of minorities within modern society.”

In addition, he said, “people are looking for a hero. Malcolm X is a hero in the mythological sense.”

Lee, who began promoting his film at the Cannes Film Festival last May by giving away T-shirts and baseball caps emblazoned with the now-familiar “X,” is expected to hold a news conference in New York for the foreign press in mid-November and may tour Europe for two weeks in January. Joel Coler, an international marketing consultant on the film, said organizers of the Berlin Film Festival, to be held in February, asked to show the film without having seen it.

Largo officials said they have made a deal--not yet signed--with a South African distributor, who was undeterred by the film’s subject matter and a scene at the end showing Nelson Mandela praising Malcolm X. “The people who made the deal for the film have seen it and don’t have any concerns,” Coler said. Rubin said Lee has emphasized that he wants “Malcolm X” to be accessible to audiences elsewhere in Africa, who are expected to show great interest in the saga of the former Nation of Islam minister, played by Denzel Washington. Lee’s wishes will be respected, even though distributing the film in Africa will not be a money-maker for Largo, Rubin said. “The economies of those countries are in such bad shape,” the executive said. “The buying power doesn’t exist. There are very few theaters.”

Amid all the brouhaha there is concern in Europe, as here, about the film’s 3-hour-and-20-minute length. “In America, audiences get up and walk around during a movie. In Europe, once they sit, they don’t move,” said one distribution executive. “It’s tough to ask someone to sit for three hours.”