OPERA : Taking a Fresh Eye to ‘La Boheme’ : Film director Herbert Ross enjoys nothing so much as a new challenge, and he’s got a big one in the new L.A. production

Herbert Ross was ready to start, his sleeves rolled up, his body poised at the edge of a high black stool. The veteran director had been through opening days before, plenty of them, after turning out 24 films in as many years. But this was something new, he told his assembled cast and crew: “We are embarked, I hope, on an adventure.”

They certainly are. The man who brought us the movies “Steel Magnolias,” “The Turning Point,” “Footloose” and “The Goodbye Girl” is directing Puccini’s “La Boheme” for the Los Angeles Music Center Opera. Ross’ production of the popular romantic tragedy opens Sept. 9 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for seven performances.

Stage directors frequently direct opera as well, but film directors are less frequent crossovers to that more rarefied world. Ross is the first major filmmaker to work for the opera here, and, at 66, he is making his own opera debut as well.

For a man whose career spans everything from the “Coral Gables Swim Show” and early TV to Broadway choreography and film production, opera was one of the very few artistic arenas yet to tackle.

“It doesn’t surprise me that he would take it on,” says playwright Neil Simon, whose work Ross has directed twice on Broadway and in five films. “And I do believe he’ll bring it off.”

So, apparently, did Peter Hemmings, general director of the Los Angeles Opera. When New York-based Ross was here last year working on MGM’s “Undercover Blues,” a comedy action film starring Kathleen Turner and Dennis Quaid that opens Sept. 10, Hemmings gave him a call. Puccini’s fourth opera was a classic, the Los Angeles Opera needed a new production of it, and, Hemmings says, “it was the sort of piece that he would enjoy doing and do well.”

Ross had been asked to direct operas before, he says, and this time the timing was right. He was between projects, and he relished the idea of directing an opera as familiar to him as “La Boheme.” He knew the score and felt at home with it.

“I direct in theater, and because of my background in ballet, I think musically,” says onetime dancer Ross. “The challenge is to meet this fusion of drama and music that the opera represents.”

Ross likes challenges. A high school dropout, he is always in school, whether it’s learning a new craft or immersing himself in a new world. He studied ballet, modern and ethnic dance concurrently as a teen-ager, and he set about his opera assignment with similar fervor.

This is a man who once spent two weeks with Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign to learn politics for a film project that fell through, then recycled the experience in his last film, “True Colors.” More recently, he haunted martial arts studios studying movement and Louisiana streets listening to music for “Undercover Blues.”

In the case of “Boheme,” his focus was 19th-Century Paris, Puccini and opera. He saw more operas than usual, working them into his schedule here and in New York, London and Paris, wherever he happened to be. He watched half a dozen videos of “La Boheme”--”including one Pavarotti did in China,” he notes--and listened to every recording of the opera he could find.

Ross enlisted friend and opera maven Marit Gentele Gruson to suggest operas, attend them with him, then even accompany him to Los Angeles, where she serves as associate director on this production. Gruson, the widow of Swedish opera impresario Goran Gentele, is close by during rehearsals and on hand at Ross’ rented Beverly Hills home just in case he needs her expertise during a press interview.

“I doubt there’s anything new you can do with ‘La Boheme,’ conductor Randall Behr says a few days into rehearsals, “but Herb’s eye for detail and concern for characterization make these people leap to life in ways that I have seldom seen. If he didn’t tell us regularly that this was his first opera, you’d have no idea.”

The fresh take, of course, is why opera impresarios call people like Ross. David Hockney, for instance, has designed for the Los Angeles Opera and other opera houses here and abroad, following in the tradition of such artists as Chagall and Picasso. Stage directors working here and elsewhere have included English directors Sir Peter Hall and Elijah Moshinsky, as well as American directors Harold Prince and Gordon Davidson.

Although Franco Zeffirelli directed theater and opera before turning to film, the number of prominent film directors crossing over to opera is still fairly small. Ken Russell and Bruce Beresford have both directed opera abroad, and Robert Altman directed the world premiere of composer William Bolcom’s “McTeague” at the Lyric Opera of Chicago last year.

“Hollywood likes to call itself the entertainment capital of the world, and we are all here to provide entertainment for the public,” impresario Hemmings says. “I’m very anxious that people who come to work with films in Hollywood should work with us from time to time.”

With its lush music and tragic story, Puccini’s “La Boheme” is among the most popular operas of all time, and one that has appealed to filmmakers as well as to audiences. Joseph Mankiewicz directed it at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1952, and Zeffirelli did the same in 1981.

Now comes Ross’ production. During rehearsals here, singers sometimes joke about going off to their trailers between scenes. But conductor Behr says Ross “is keeping his other worlds out of it. He’s very focused on the work at hand and not making the singers feel second class by bringing up names of famous stars he’s worked with in other media.”

Ross has drawn on his experience, of course. Rehearsals began with singers reading their parts aloud, something standard for plays, but less frequent with opera. And his singers are younger than those usually drafted for major operas, because he decided that seamstress Mimi, poet Rodolfo and the other young “Bohemians” would not only sing well but “be physically who you might cast in cinema terms for appearances.”

Ross’ world for “Boheme” also sets the opera in 1897, rather than its traditional 1830 because, he says, “it seemed to me more romantic and more relevant to our time.” His Paris reflects a time when the Impressionists were painting, Erik Satie was composing, and the city was awash in artists and artistic discovery.

He read John Richardson’s biography of Picasso, which he found particularly evocative of Paris, as well as biographies of other artistic figures of that period. He drew inspiration, he says, from Eugene Atget’s photos of Paris, and to a lesser extent, those of Jacques-Henri Lartigue. He used photographs of a young Picasso to costume Rodolfo and dressed philosopher Colline after a photo of Satie.

Research and preparation, says Ross, “allows you to enter into whole worlds of culture and society and attitudes that you wouldn’t know about if you didn’t experience them.” For both his films and this opera, painters and photographers often provide “a source of reference or a feeling I want to have.”

In making “Pennies From Heaven,” his risky, bleak 1981 film starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters, he modeled several scenes on paintings by Edward Hopper, sometimes even going so far as to reproduce canvases exactly. For “Underground Blues,” he says, “I kept finding myself drawn to certain works of Roy Lichtenstein.”

“Boheme’s” sets are similarly crafted, and set designer Gerard Howland concedes he was a little worried at first about working with a film director. “I thought he wouldn’t be able to make the adaptation from large-scale film projects to the confines of a proscenium arch where you can’t move the camera around and get the angle you want,” says Howland. “But it’s been the opposite. It’s been liberating.”

“La Boheme” may mark the first time Los Angeles Opera has employed a major film director, but Hemmings says he expects more film people working at the Music Center in the future. He notes he has talked, for instance, with filmmaker John Schlesinger, who has directed abroad and will have his Metropolitan Opera debut directing “Otello” in the spring. Opera directing is not for everyone, of course. While considerably less money is at stake--between $1.5 million and $2 million for an opera here, versus about $25 million for “Undercover Blues”--opera can also be a nightmare logistically. Both genres require enormous planning, Ross explains, as well as decision-making about people and equipment long before they’re needed.

Add the problem of timing action to music. “If you’re directing a play or film, you can speak the lines fast or slowly, and you can have long pauses,” says Hemmings. “In opera, the pace, loudness and softness are all dictated by the music.”

Ross sees the opera’s action on two planes, he explains. “On the realistic plane, you’re dealing with the cold and lighting of the fire. But there are moments when the music is able to take you out of the realistic plane and into the emotional state of the characters, so when Rodolfo sees Mimi standing in the moonlight, only they exist.”

Ross has also marked the score in 30-second intervals. That way, he says, “I know where I am in real time--how long does it take to open the door--as well as musical time--the passage of music the composer has written to open the door in. You have to find out how to convey the reality of opening the door in the unnatural time the composer has designated.”

That means counting the bars, a skill Ross acquired as a dancer and choreographer. Asked if he reads music, he says, “I read music badly and very laboriously, and I don’t play an instrument. But I am able to commit a score to memory totally, and that comes from ballet.”

Ross is big for a dancer--a tall, fit man with a very deep tan. And operating in the public eye for most of his life, the director has also acquired a celebrity’s patina. His remarks are delivered as much as spoken, and he speaks with the assurance of a powerful Hollywood player.

All those big-budget films didn’t just make themselves. Through picture after picture, for studio after studio, Ross has grown accustomed to directing such stars as Barbra Streisand, Goldie Hawn, Steve Martin and Kathleen Turner.

Turner, for instance, worked long and hard with a trainer for her role in “Undercover Blues” as a spy who “can kill three different ways--without ever using her hands.” But Turner says reports that she lost 30 pounds for the part “are exaggerated,” and so is Ross’ reputation as a directorial tyrant. “I had heard from other sources in the industry that he was difficult or even abusive to work with,” says Turner, “but I can honestly say I never saw that side.”

At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where Ross has been taking his singers through rehearsals, “he uses a combination of cajoling and bullying and, like any other good director, whatever combination of interpersonal skills are required at the moment,” Behr says. “His arsenal is well-stocked.”

It should be. The Brooklyn-born son of a postal clerk, Ross has been hustling work since his teens. At 15, he spent a summer with a traveling theater troupe, then left high school to head for New York. Living in a $4-a-week room, he read, painted and acted, until after seeing a performance of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, he decided to become a dancer.

Touring with a musical in the late ‘40s, the young dancer broke his ankle in Chicago and waited out its repair by copying Goya etchings at the Chicago Art Institute. He happened upon Goya’s comments to his Caprichos series, envisioned them as dance, and choreographed his first ballet, “Caprichos.”

Ross choreographed on Broadway and in supper clubs, for TV and film. A choreographer in residence with Ballet Theatre (later American Ballet Theatre), he was on tour with the company when he struck up a conversation with celebrated dancer Nora Kaye on a flight to Casablanca. They married in August, 1959, and she left Ballet Theatre to become the star of their troupe, Ballet of Two Worlds, and dance his dances. They toured extensively in Europe, then returned to New York where he continued his choreography.

To hear Ross tell it, he sort of fell into film work. “Like anyone else, I went to see films,” he says, “but I was not one of those people who lived his childhood through film.” A successful Broadway stage director, he went to Hollywood in 1964 to choreograph dances for “Inside Daisy Clover,” starring Natalie Wood, and later returned there to direct the musical sequences in “Funny Girl.” He moved to Los Angeles in 1967 and directed “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” in 1969.

The film assignments kept coming, one after another, sometimes two in a year. Both of his 1977 films--”The Turning Point” and “The Goodbye Girl”--received Oscar nominations for best film. His 24 films have garnered 44 Oscar nominations, including one for Ross for directing “The Turning Point.”

Kaye edited dance sequences on “The Turning Point” as Ross moved on to “The Goodbye Girl,” and for nearly 30 years, the couple was inseparable professionally as well as personally. Theirs was “one of the most perfect relationships ever,” says Ross, who was devastated by Kaye’s death from cancer in February, 1987. “That’s another reason I relate to ‘Boheme,’ ” he says today, “since it’s about losing somebody that you love.”

Ross sold their Santa Monica home and moved to New York in 1988. Then, in September of that year, he married again, this time to Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Their marriage ceremony was at the bride’s home in New York--followed by dinner at Onassis’ home--and Ross barely paused before taking on both “My Blue Heaven” and “True Colors.”

The director took a year off after “True Colors”--a box-office failure--during which time he wrote two screenplays and an adaptation of the play “Chicago.” “I didn’t want to do another picture because I was tired,” Ross concedes. “I undertook too heavy a workload. I did the two pictures (“Heaven” and “Colors”) back to back, and quite honestly, I shouldn’t have. They were both hard work and very difficult. And I had also just gotten married and needed time to devote to my marriage.”

With “Underground Blues,” his enormous energy is apparently back on track. “He was the first one on the set in the morning and the last one to leave dailies at night,” says producer Mike Lobell. “He’s tireless, and for a producer, it’s great to have a director like that because everyone follows that lead.”

Today, at 66, Ross is still in demand. Asked about his endurance in an ageist industry, he seems almost taken aback by the question. “When I started, I was younger than anyone else, and I still think of myself as being that way,” he says. “Age exists, but doesn’t it have to do a lot with your attitude in life and your interests?”

Ross “has enormous taste,” says playwright Simon, who has known the director since they both worked in the Poconos decades ago. “And he’s very experimental with things. He’ll suddenly surprise you and do something you don’t expect.”

Challenge apparently helps keep him young. “You have to keep working and trying to get better,” he told an interviewer in the ‘70s, and he says pretty much the same thing today: “I can’t imagine anything better to do than to rehearse and keep trying to get it absolutely perfect.”

Ross directs plays and films much the way a choreographer works, observes Simon. “He’s very stern. He’s really a tough taskmaster. On ‘California Suite,’ Maggie Smith came to me and said Herb was pushing her too hard. She won the Academy Award (for her performance in the 1978 film) and I thought what Herbert was doing was quite right.”

So does Ross. “There is the truth, and there is not the truth. Your job (as a director) is to find the truth, and the truth leads you to alarming and original choices which are what illuminate the role and the play. So I keep pushing--if that’s the word--until we discover it together.”

Once “La Boheme” closes, Ross moves on to “Boys on the Side,” a film starring Whoopi Goldberg, Drew Barrymore and a third person yet to be cast. He’s polishing his two screenplays, and in early January, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will host a tribute to his work as a film choreographer, dance arranger and director.

He may be back too on the opera stage.

“I hope this is the beginning of an illustrious operatic career for him,” says designer Howland. “Because of his musical background, his staging and conceptual abilities, his understanding of opera and operatic history, he’s made for being an opera director.”