Avarice Unbound : HBO MOVIE ABOUT THE NABISCO BUYOUT OFFERS GREED ON THE OUTSIDE, FARCE ON THE INSIDE

In the high-flying ‘80s, few in the upper reaches of leveraged buyouts, junk bonds and Reagonomics ever thought the economic bubble would burst. Former junk-bond kings Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky were riding high on Wall Street. And five years ago, Wall Street movers and shakers kept their eyes on the deal of the century: a staggering $25-billion bidding war for the R.J.R. Nabisco Co.

In 1988, Nabisco’s stock seemed stuck in neutral and its new smokeless cigarette was going down in flames. To bolster the company--and pick up several million in the process--F. Ross Johnson, Nabisco’s tough chief executive officer, contemplated a leveraged buyout of his own company. But it wasn’t as easy as the former salesman first thought. Even though Johnson eventually offered an outrageously high $112 per share, he still had competition. Henry Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., a master of the leveraged buyout, and First Boston and Forstmann Little--both also formidable high-stakes players--all began vying for the maker of Oreos, Ritz Crackers, Lifesavers, Salems and Camels. Ultimately, the Nabisco board of directors accepted Kravis’ lower bid.

HBO’s movie “Barbarians at the Gate,” premiering Saturday, chronicles the often-farcical maneuverings and shenanigans behind the nation’s biggest buyout. Adapted by award-winning writer Larry Gelbart from the best-selling book by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, “Barbarians at the Gate” stars Emmy Award-winning James Garner as Johnson and Tony Award-winning Jonathan Pryce as Kravis.

Producer Ray Stark originally wanted to turn “Barbarians” into a feature film for Columbia Pictures. “We thought it might be a wonderful idea because it was such a well-written book and a bestseller,” he says. “I think we got the best writer in the entertainment business with Larry Gelbart, who is so sophisticated and so funny. The basic problem is, unfortunately, the movie audience is not necessarily a sophisticated adult audience today. More people are concerned with opening with a bottom line than with reviews. This is a picture I cared about, and Columbia and I decided it would really be better to let it go on cable, where you have a locked-in sophisticated, adult, middle-class and upper-class audience.”

Emmy-winning director Glenn Jordan concurs. “There are some wonderful things you can do on television that would never get made as a feature,” he says. “The feature world doesn’t deal with issues like this or subjects.”

Adapting the dense, 515-page bestseller was a challenging task for Gelbart, who created the classic TV series “MASH” and penned the Tony-winning “City of Angels.”

“There were a lot of pages, a lot of characters, lots of numbers and dealspeak,” Gelbart says. “Probably the most daunting of all was the fact for the first time I was taking on the task of writing living people. However, fantastic they are, they do exist. So that was something I had to adjust to. The first thing was to do a lot of judicious weeding.”

Minor characters were the first to go. Next came the task of simplifying and clarifying a very complex scenario.

“The first job was to tell the story so an idiot like me could understand it,” Gelbart says, laughing. “I did a number of drafts, each one, hopefully, an improvement on the one before. The big task was to make it about people and not numbers--to make it about characters and not stock quotes, to flesh out these people somehow and make you care about them positively or negatively and to get you involved as human beings.”

The curious thing about the book, Gelbart says, is that even though it is a factual account, “it reads like fiction. These people were never really real to me. The one thing I did know was that their lawyers would be very real.”

“Barbarians,” Gelbart says, is really an old-fashioned farce. “I don’t think of it as a black comedy. Some of it is very Marx Brothers and Three Stooges. The main thing about Ross Johnson is that he cast himself in real life, and it carries over into the movie, as the fish in the wrong water. He was just not cut out to deal with the Wall Street people. He was basically a salesman all of his life and he tried to become a buyer. He was just way, way over his head.”

The Welsh-born Jonathan Pryce also finds “Barbarians” amusing in a way subtle way. “You play it as straight as possible,” says Pryce, whose credits include the controversial film “Brazil,” and the musical “Miss Saigon.” “The ridiculousness of the whole situation takes care of itself.”

Peter Riegert (“Crossing Delancey”) plays Peter Cohen, the head of Shearson Lehman Hutton, the investment company that allied with Johnson but was eventually squeezed out of the deal. Riegert believes the story is “all about folly.”

“Barbarians,” Riegert says, is a wonderful portrait of “something that deteriorates. Certainly, the average person in any culture is more happy to see the fall of people whose hubris has led them to believe they are unique when they are not.”

The trick in playing Cohen, Riegert says, was to “get into the essence of it, which is the fact that these people weren’t distracted by what anyone would have thought (of their actions). They were so involved in it. They had no objectivity and there was no reference or ethic to guide then.”

Though the character of Johnson might seem tailor-made for Garner’s easygoing charm, the veteran actor acknowledges that he had a hard time getting a handle on playing Johnson. One of the reasons, he believes, is that he knows too much personally about Johnson.

“I met him,” Garner says, during a break in the filming at an empty office building in downtown Los Angeles. “I met F. Ross Johnson at the Nabisco Dinah Shore Golf Tournament. I know a lot of people who know him. The script is a little different. I think we are going to come off a little nicer than he came off. I have nothing against him, but I think for the purpose of the film, I think he is nicer. But we are shooting the script. We aren’t shooting the real story.”

Garner decided to play Johnson as a man who cared for his company, though, the actor says that “greed played a lot” in Johnson’s decision to buy out Nabisco.

“Ego played a lot and in the process, what happened in the ‘80s with Reaganomics, it just blew everything out of proportion,” Garner says. “It is part of an attitude that has run this country into its depression.”

Director Jordan was heavily involved in the casting of “Barbarians.” At first glance, casting a British actor to play the Oklahoma-born Kravis might seem to be an odd choice. But Jordan immediately thought of Pryce, who also played an American in the film version of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” because of his strength as an actor.

“(Kravis’) power is so important,” Jordan says. “I felt it would be so telling in his scenes that it would pervade the other scenes, so he would always be this kind of strong presence in the background. I felt Jonathan could do that.”

Unlike Garner, Pryce wasn’t familiar with the Nabisco buyout. He did a lot of research on Kravis. “There were things you know about him from the book and by talking to people who worked with him and for him. Even if they are not shown in the script, they (become) part of your psyche,” he says.

Pryce doesn’t see Kravis as the villain of the piece. “I perceive the villain to be Johnson because he wanted in on that game,” Pryce says. “They were already playing by their own rules, and he wanted in.”

Casting Garner, Pryce says, will trick the audience into believing Kravis is the bad guy. “What you get is ostensibly a most-attractive character with a most-attractive personality played by an actor with enormous charisma who will seduce the audience into thinking that he is actually a hero,” he says. “Kravis did nothing wrong, he just made a great deal of money.”

In fact, Pryce says, there are no heroes to be found in “Barbarians.” “The script makes no moral judgments,” he adds.

Gelbart agrees. “I tried to make this comic reportage rather than a judgmental piece,” he says. “I would love the audience to draw whatever conclusions they wanted.”

And viewers, Jordan concludes, “will be astonished by some of the incidents. It is obviously true, and it all happened. I think they have a hard time believing that. They will be obliged to believe.”

“Barbarians at the Gate” premieres Saturday at 8 p.m. on HBO and will repeat March 23, 28 and 31.