‘I’ll Do Anything’: Terms of Endurement : Movies: James L. Brooks’ film, revised from musical to romantic comedy after a test screening, has secured a place in history.

Writer-director James L. Brooks’ “I’ll Do Anything” drew a lot of unwanted attention last summer when people recruited for a test screening said some of the musical numbers, performed by actors not known for their voices, stopped the action cold. Drastically revising his movie, Brooks took most of the music out, and audiences responded more favorably.

Even so, Brooks was determined to make a musical about Hollywood. So he tried again--this time using voice-over renditions of songs by Prince and Sinead O’Connor. That version pleased him least of all.

“It was a lesser version of the thing I couldn’t win acceptance for and that didn’t work,” the 53-year-old director said recently over a lunch of tuna carpaccio. “I’m glad I got off that horse.” In late November, eight songs commissioned for the movie--all except for one Carole King number performed by then-5-year-old Whittni Wright--were removed for good.

Whatever happens at the box office after “I’ll Do Anything” hits the screens next month, the musical-turned-romantic-comedy, starring Nick Nolte and Albert Brooks, has already secured a place in film history. The director himself cannot recall another instance in modern filmmaking when a major studio movie that started life in one form metamorphosed into another.

Though battle-scarred from his ordeal, Brooks, who also wrote and directed the Academy Award-winning “Terms of Endearment” (1983) and the Oscar-nominated “Broadcast News” (1987), is finally as much at peace as this complicated, emotionally turbulent man with a movie about to open may ever be.

“The picture we’re releasing is my film,” he said. “It’s startlingly different in terms I never would have imagined in a million years. . . . But I don’t think there’s anybody who’s made pictures who didn’t end up doing something at the end that they couldn’t imagine doing at the beginning.”

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The film, which Brooks--also its co-producer--estimates cost just under $43 million--is being closely monitored throughout the movie industry not only because of this unprecedented transformation but also because it is the first release this year from Columbia Pictures, which is trying to recover from a dismal 1993.

Though he could offer no breakdown of how much the musical numbers added to the movie’s cost, Brooks admits that taking them out was expensive; the film was originally budgeted at $35 million, according to a knowledgeable source.

In “Anything,” Nolte plays Matt Hobbs, a character actor who suddenly finds himself forced to take care of his troubled young daughter, Jeannie (Wright). Unable to land a movie role with producer Burke Adler (Brooks), he takes a job as Adler’s driver. Self-centered and arrogant, the producer begins a relationship with Nan Mulhanney (Julie Kavner), an outspoken woman who, to the amusement of preview audiences at earlier incarnations of Brooks’ movie, runs a company that administers test screenings.

Many movie directors are scornful of research screenings, but Brooks, who began his career in television (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Lou Grant”), is a staunch believer in the process, though he maintains it is just one of a number of influences on his work.

“There’s nobody who’s ever gone to one of these screenings who doesn’t feel differently about the picture after watching it with an audience,” he said. “They’ll tell you when it’s funny, and you’ll know when it’s confusing and when it’s slow.” He held seven research screenings each for the two other movies he directed and six for “Anything.”

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While the controversy about “Anything” focused mainly on the musical numbers, the director himself also had another major concern. Test audiences kept doing flip-flops on the character of Cathy Breslow (Joely Richardson), a movie development executive who gets involved with Hobbs.

In writing his screenplay, Brooks said, his own view of Breslow became more complex as he began to see her as a metaphor for his feelings about Hollywood. As a result, he did not want audiences either to forgive her failings or resent her so much that they could not see why Hobbs would be attracted to her.

To achieve the “delicate balance” he was after, Brooks, who normally does the bulk of his reshaping in the editing room rather than by rewriting and reshooting scenes, eventually had to go back to the word processor. These and other changes necessitated three days of reshooting in mid-December--a surprisingly small number, considering the film’s permutations. But the director said he worked frenetically, cramming six days’ work into three.

Brooks had wanted “Anything” to be a musical for the sake of what he describes as “emotional resonance.” Once the music was gone, he felt he needed to restore what now seemed to him a missing element. “Every scene I went back and did (in reshooting) was designed to put back some of the emotion that I believed I was getting from the (deleted) song,” he explained.

Much of the emotion revolves around the struggle faced by actors like the Nolte character. “Matt Hobbs is a decent guy,” Brooks said. “He lives in a place where that’s special. In the best of all worlds, that’s not special at all.”

That rather unflattering view of the entertainment industry permeates “Anything,” although his movie is scarcely a scathing attack like “The Player” (1992) or “S.O.B.” (1981). Still it seems fair to ask why Brooks is biting the hand that has fed him so well. For the first time in a lengthy conversation, his voice rises in protest. “This is not about me saying, ‘Look at these terrible people in my life,’ ” he said. “This is me looking at my life.”

He said the Albert Brooks character, though reportedly inspired by producer Joel Silver (“Lethal Weapon”), actually represents one facet of James Brooks, whose producing credits include “Big” (1988) and “The War of the Roses” (1989). Unlike his fictional producer, Brooks is generally revered by actors who have worked with him. Yet he said: “It just knocks me out when people say Burke is based on somebody because I think Burke is the worst in any of us.”

Hollywood is also the subject of Brooks’ other new project, “The Critic,” an animated series featuring Jon Lovett as the voice of the title character. The show, teaming Brooks once again with Jean and Mike Reiss, the producers he worked with in developing “The Simpsons,” debuts Wednesday on ABC.

Brooks has no other plans for now, but at some point hopes to revive the discarded musical numbers from “I’ll Do Anything,” although he refuses to make them public at this point. Danny DeVito has offered to help him tell the story of the movie’s evolution on laser disc. Someone--he won’t say who--has approached him about adapting the movie as a stage musical.

At its root, he insists, “I’ll Do Anything” is still the picture he wanted to make. “The characters never changed. What the picture wants to say never changed, and it’s as honest as I know how to make it,” he said. “The characters live for me, and I could write more about any of them.”