MOVIES : Previews--How Early Is Too Early? : Some filmmakers really hate it when the media report on test screenings of works that are far from finished. But for members of the press, these <i> real </i> sneak previews are an increasingly important part of the movie beat

Director Barry Sonnenfeld was in the midst of screening “Addams Family Values” last fall when he decided to show research audiences a more daring rough cut of the film.

After mulling it over, he changed his mind. The Paramount film had played well in past screenings. Why add something that might prompt a negative reaction? A nightmarish fantasy began swirling in Sonnenfeld’s head.

“I thought to myself, ‘What if the film didn’t play well and the Los Angeles Times finds out about it? Then suddenly I’m going to pick up the paper and read that I’m the director of a movie that’s in trouble.’ ”

From the point of view of Hollywood filmmakers, Sonnenfeld isn’t being paranoid. Over the past year or so, The Times, Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times and other publications and entertainment TV shows have been aggressively increasing their coverage of what were once closed-door show-biz events: test screenings, movie re-shoots and multimillion-dollar budget overruns. Just a few examples of the controversial practice that industry powers call “let’s get ‘em” journalism:

* In December, 1992, the “Today” show interviewed Jim Meigs, then Entertainment Weekly’s film editor, who predicted that “Toys” would be the bomb of the season--even though he hadn’t even seen it.

* Early last May, two weeks before “Sliver” was due out, the Los Angeles Times wrote about rumors that the Paramount film was “in serious trouble” and had undergone re-shoots of scenes that amounted to as much as 40 pages of dialogue.

* In September, Entertainment Weekly pounced on James L. Brooks’ $40-million musical, “I’ll Do Anything,” offering details from a “disastrous” test screening that one anonymous attendee described as “the worst torture possible.”

* In what proved to be the most controversial story of all, the Los Angeles Times ran a news item last June 6, citing anonymous sources talking about a poorly received test screening of Columbia Pictures’ “Last Action Hero.” The news item, written by free-lance writer Jeffrey Wells, was hotly contested by Columbia, which briefly threatened to pull the studio’s advertising and deny the paper’s reporters access to future Columbia film releases.

Eight months later, Columbia marketing chief Sid Ganis is still seething about negative pre-release reporting on “Hero.”

“It’s almost yellow journalism,” he says. “The press is in an ‘Oh my God, is this film in trouble’ mode. How can a film be in trouble if it isn’t finished yet?”

The practice has also extended to coverage of TV and pop music. Before Conan O’Brien’s NBC show “Late Night” hit the air, for example, Entertainment Weekly reviewed a dress-rehearsal show, panning the fledgling host’s “painful” banter with his sidekick, Andy Richter, noting how frequently his jokes bombed (“often”) and deriding what it called his lackluster interviewing style.

And five months before Nirvana released “In Utero,” its much- anticipated follow-up album to 1991’s “Nevermind,” the Chicago Tribune and Newsweek ran stories saying that Geffen Records, the band’s label, had been unhappy with the album’s abrasive sound--and had persuaded the band to hire a hit-making engineer who would give the songs a more polished sheen.

But the really big battles have erupted over coverage of Hollywood work-in-progress decisions. Filmmakers see such stories as a sign of the media’s growing obsession with easily digestible info-bites and gotcha-style reportage. Action-movie impresario Joel Silver, angry after being stalked by the press while making “Hudson Hawk” and “Die Hard 2,” says the intrusive media scrutiny has made him wary of producing risky, high-profile movies.

“When I made ‘Die Hard 2’ for 20th Century Fox, it was followed by clouds of bad press--every publication said I was a crook and that everything was out of control. That’s why I didn’t make ‘Beverly Hills Cop 3,’ ” contends Silver, who was asked by Paramount to produce the sequel after its original producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, left the studio.

Nonetheless, entertainment reporters say poorly received test screenings or a sudden flurry of re-shoots are newsworthy events, since they often serve as early indicators of the success or failure of high-profile film projects. And in many cases, it is a coterie of top Hollywood producers, agents and studio executives who are the first to whisper in reporters’ ears about problems plaguing a rival’s film.

The increased scrutiny has prompted a series of ferocious spin battles for control of a film’s image, a battle that can sometimes signal the difference between box-office triumph or disaster. Since a movie’s success is often determined by its opening-weekend grosses, Hollywood marketers are under increased pressure to build a fever pitch of awareness for a film with a barrage of celebrity interviews, TV trailers and ads.

Any negative buzz about an upcoming film can break this marketing spell. Entertainment Weekly recently reported that Kurt Russell, star of Disney’s “Tombstone,” hated a rough cut of the “troubled” film so much that he called it the “worst (expletive) he’s ever acted in.” Russell later disputed the quote, saying he was talking about the movie’s music, not the film itself. Meanwhile, “Tombstone” has gone on to perform well at the box office, despite that bad buzz and mixed reviews.

The heightened tensions between movie studios and the media focus on a simple truth--this is a media age in which perception is reality. If a film studio has a stinker on its hands, its top marketing priority is keeping the press off the scent for as long as possible.

“It doesn’t matter if the movie doesn’t deliver,” Columbia Pictures publicity chief Mark Gill said in Harper’s magazine last year. “If you can create the impression that the movie delivers, you’re fine.”

But if the movie makes a bad impression, watch out. One well- placed news item about a supposedly troubled film can prompt a wave of skeptical press coverage. The bigger the wave, the more likely the impact on the film’s box-office performance.

“It’s a monumental task for filmmakers to overcome,” says PMK’s Pat Kingsley, the powerful and combative Hollywood publicist who has loudly complained about media coverage of her celebrity clients, most notably Tom Cruise. “One little item can do a lot of damage. Once it gets picked up by every other newspaper, it sets the agenda.”

To no one’s surprise, filmmakers never question press accounts of a successful test screening. Francis Ford Coppola blasted The Times for printing “innuendo” about an early “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” test screening. But there were no complaints when gossip columnist Liz Smith hyped a pre-release screening of the same film, saying it “played through the roof” with an audience that “screamed, gasped and laughed in all the right moments.”

Believing they had a potential hit on their hands, the producers of last summer’s “Sleepless in Seattle” didn’t hide their film from the press, either. Though the film wasn’t due in the theaters until June, the producers held two advance screenings in late January, only weeks after the studio first saw the movie.

They invited a handpicked audience of key newspaper, magazine and TV media representatives, who were shown what producer Gary Foster describes as a rough cut of the film.

“By giving the press an early peek, before the film was finished, we felt it put them on our team,” Foster explains. “It was a conscious decision to let the journalists decide for themselves. That way, when they became our mouthpiece, the word of mouth had a lot more credibility.”

Credibility cuts both ways. In Hollywood, bad buzz regularly originates from studio insiders eager to gain an edge over their competition.

“It’s not fair to call the media negative,” says Times movie editor Claudia Eller. “People in this town are so competitive that they’re always putting a negative spin on their rivals’ films. As reporters, we try to figure out what’s really news--and what’s just someone with an ax to grind.”

Part of the problem is that test screenings serve two purposes. Filmmakers see them as an artistic tool, using audience reaction to help them make hundreds of subtle alterations in narrative, theme and character development.

But film studios frequently use screenings in other ways--either as a way of determining whether audiences will embrace a particular ending, or as a marketing weapon, using positive audience reactions as a means of building good word of mouth.

Still, filmmakers say, stories about poorly received test screenings are, in effect, judging a movie before it is finished.

“You’re really reviewing a rough draft of a film,” says Polly Platt, producer of “I’ll Do Anything,” which opened on Friday.

“What is some little old lady in Indiana going to think when she logs onto Prodigy and reads our clips? ‘Oh, it’s that musical film that had terrible screenings and now they’ve delayed the release date and taken out all the music.’ She’s going to say to herself, ‘Wow, that must be a bad picture.’ ”

Many moviegoers may have been thinking the same thing about last summer’s “So I Married an Axe Murderer.” As early as last January, in the midst of a story about a battle over the film’s script credit, The Times reported that the Mike Myers vehicle was in trouble. Re-shoots were in the works after several mediocre test screenings. The film’s release was being bumped back from March to August.

Even though executives at TriStar, the film’s distributor, said the film had tested well and Myers’ agent insisted that re-shoots “are more the rule than the exception” these days, the bad buzz spread quickly.

“Axe Murderer” producer Rob Fried compared the process to a wildfire. The Times piece was followed by an Entertainment Weekly piece about bickering between Myers and “Wayne’s World” co-star Dana Carvey, which also mentioned “mixed reactions” to “Axe Murderer.” People magazine ran a gossip item saying the film was getting bad word of mouth after poor test screenings.

These were followed by more negative press in Us, Premiere and the New York Times.

“It got to the point where everybody in Hollywood thought our movie was in trouble,” Fried says. “My mother in Boca Raton was talking about it at the mah-jongg table.”

By the time the “Murderer” production team did a junket to promote the movie, the film’s perceived problems--and accounts of Myers’ difficult personality--became a major part of nearly every feature piece on the picture.

“It affects you everywhere,” Fried says. “Theater owners hear the bad buzz and they get reluctant to book the film. The studio marketing executives hear about it and they get nervous about supporting the film. When the movie came out, even the critics--who should be judging the film on its merits--were writing about problems on the set.”

“Toys” producer Mark Johnson says he and director Barry Levinson were on the dubbing stage in late 1992, working on the film’s score, when they turned on the “Today” show and heard Entertainment Weekly’s Meigs tell host Bryant Gumbel that “Toys” was going to be the Christmas season’s big bomb.

“It’s very unfair and demoralizing,” Johnson says. “The film wasn’t even finished. No one had seen it yet. Yet everyone who watched ‘Today’ already thought we were a flop.”

Meigs’ prediction was accurate: “Toys” grossed only $23 million. But Johnson believes it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: “It just created a terrible climate. It really branded us.”

But not every film is harmed by negative advance press. Also in late ‘92, the press was full of bad buzz about “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” including a Los Angeles Times piece by contributor Jane Galbraith that reported on re-shoots and negative comments from anonymous test-screening audience members, who said they found the film “hard to follow.”

“Dracula” director Francis Ford Coppola was so incensed by the story that he wrote a letter to The Times, disputing the piece. He concluded by saying: “What does an incomplete, early preview . . . have to do with a finished movie? How can a movie be anything but formula if you can’t even preview it as part of the creative process without printed gossip?”

The movie went on to become a major box-office hit, prompting some filmmakers to argue that test screenings aren’t especially reliable indicators of box-office performance--and hence aren’t especially newsworthy, either.

“Of all the films I’ve made, ‘For Love or Money’ had the best test-screening scores,” says director Sonnenfeld. “Yet ‘The Addams Family’ made 10 times what ‘Love or Money’ did.

“To say a movie is in trouble because of a bad screening is like looking at a building when it’s still all raw steel girders and scaffolding and saying it’s going to be ugly. You really can’t tell until it’s finished.”

One reason for all this jousting between filmmakers and journalists has been the explosion of media interest in Hollywood. Visit any newsstand and you’ll see a tidal wave of movie industry coverage, from magazines with puffy celebrity profiles to newspapers with savvy business reporting to tabloids with sharp-tongued gossip items.

“We have become an entertainment junkie culture,” says Entertainment Weekly’s Maggie Murphy, the senior editor who oversees the magazine’s News & Notes section. “Now there’s a generation of entertainment consumers who are curious about the decisions that come into play before the films reach the theaters.”

With the arrival of chart-oriented publications like USA Today and info-hungry shows like “Entertainment Tonight,” movie studios shrewdly began using a new film’s opening-weekend business as a sign of box-office success. Early each week, movie fans can find weekend box-office results in hundreds of newspapers around the country, not to mention on CNN, E! Entertainment cable and innumerable local TV news shows.

“By Monday night, everyone knows that some movie didn’t open as big as it was supposed to,” says People magazine senior editor Leah Rozen. “That’s part of moviegoing in the ‘90s.”

Celebrities have always sold newspapers. But now newspaper readers are more sophisticated--they want to read spicy coverage about conflicts over financing, budget overruns, on-location snafus and other behind-the-camera Hollywood action too.

“Once the print media started competing with tabloid-TV news shows like ‘Inside Edition’ and ‘A Current Affair,’ you had everyone searching for brand-name material, names that people know,” Joel Silver contends. “Nobody cares if they put out a candy bar in Hershey, Pennsylvania, that doesn’t sell. But if Barry Levinson, the director of ‘Rain Man,’ makes a movie and it doesn’t work, that’s news.”

The question for Hollywood journalists: What part of the filmmaking process is fair game for news coverage?

“If a finished film is being test-screened, I think it’s appropriate to report on the results,” says Anne Thompson, a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly. “But I don’t think it’s fair to report on an unfinished film that’s being tested simply to help the filmmaker decide what works.”

Weekly Variety “Buzz” columnist Michael Fleming says he largely avoids writing about test screenings, pointing to directors like Robert Zemeckis and James L. Brooks, who view the screening process as a crucial editing tool.

Some reporters believe otherwise. Pat H. Broeske wrote an Entertainment Weekly piece that detailed the fallout from a “disastrous” early screening of “I’ll Do Anything.”

“This was a highly touted $40-million musical by a major director which wasn’t going to make its Christmas release,” Broeske says. “When a monster gamble like that is having problems, it’s news. Reporters in Detroit write about problems cars have in their design and manufacture. They don’t always wait till they’ve come off the assembly line.”

Times Executive Calendar Editor John P. Lindsay says newspaper readers have every right to read about the process of movie-making, especially since they’re eventually going to pay money to see those same movies in the theaters.

“Part of our job, especially for a paper based here in Hollywood, is to cover the process,” he says. “If a movie’s out there and the filmmaker is showing it to people, then it becomes our responsibility to write about it.”

Responsible reporting may be one thing, but gossip and innuendo are something else again. Pat Kingsley contends that the print media have taken a “let’s get ‘em” attitude toward the industry. She has repeatedly scolded the press, in particular Entertainment Weekly, for “hostile” coverage of her client Tom Cruise’s casting in “Interview With the Vampire,” citing reports that the actor was wearing shoe lifts and jealous of co-star Brad Pitt.

Kingsley also has been unhappy with The Times’ coverage of “I’ll Do Anything.” She contends that The Times “forced” Brooks into letting staff writer Terry Pristin attend test screenings and question him about the film’s problems for a story that ran in September.

The Times had originally planned to report on an earlier, poorly received test screening, based on eyewitness accounts from several unnamed audience members.

“If we hadn’t agreed to invite the reporter, the paper would have printed an item saying Jim had a negative test screening,” Kingsley says. “I think covering a film before it’s finished is below-the-belt. Jim resented doing the interview. He felt it was a violation.”

Calendar’s Lindsay says The Times never forced Brooks to agree to anything: “It was a negotiation, not extortion,” he says. “It was our way of getting more access and information. I think the story we ran presented a balanced account of the test-screening process.”

Some of the filmmakers who have felt the glare of bad press are pulling their wagons in a circle.

“I can’t imagine that we’d ever preview a movie in town again,” says producer Platt. “We had bad screenings on ‘Broadcast News,’ but we were allowed to experiment without every reporter in town calling. Now the climate has changed. What was once a private process has gone public.”

Says Columbia’s Ganis: “Movie-making is both a business and an art form. And you can’t write about something that’s essentially artistic, like screening an unfinished movie, as if it’s just business.”

Not everyone defines the debate as art versus commerce. From the media perspective, the issue is viewed as a time-honored struggle for access to information, a tug of war reporters engage in while covering every beat, whether it’s Hollywood or the White House.

“Until recently, most entertainment coverage was very controlled,” says Entertainment Weekly’s Maggie Murphy. “But that’s all changing. And I think the studios get uncomfortable when they realize we’re no longer part of their marketing plan.”