OFF-CENTERPIECE : She Spits on the Girl Next Door

Hilary Henkin strides into the Hamburger Hamlet in Brentwood, pulls up a chair, and gets right to the point. “So,” says the screenwriter, whose neo-noir gangster fable, “Romeo Is Bleeding,” opened Friday. “What are we doing?”

Like the brass-knuckled characters she creates, Henkin comes armed with a daunting M.O. Virtually alone among female screenwriters, she has pounded out action-adventure scripts for producer Joel Silver, Sylvester Stallone and other high-testosterone creatures.

“Romeo Is Bleeding,” which Henkin wrote and co-produced, features a blue-chip cast--Gary Oldman, Lena Olin, Annabella Sciorra and Juliette Lewis--and the sort of violence that makes Janet Reno call press conferences. Except this time, Henkin’s heavy is a Russian femme fatale named Mona Demarkov (Olin), who, in one spirited exchange, nearly strangles Oldman using nothing but her Victoria’s Secret-clad gams.

In a town where image is as important as a reserved parking spot on the Sony lot, Henkin has a heaven-sent rep: The girl who writes boy movies, the screenwriter as gun moll. That movies Henkin wrote or co-wrote have received blistering notices--among them “Fatal Beauty,” starring Whoopi Goldberg, and the Patrick Swayze vehicle “Road House”--hasn’t hurt her reputation for delivering hard-bitten characters and tough dialogue.

“This material came naturally to me,” Henkin says. “Sometimes I wish I wrote frolicsome comedies. But I must have landed on a darker, stranger planet. Why I write what I write, I don’t know.”

Henkin orders a beer. “I’ve been told I write like a man,” she continues. “I’m not exactly sure what that means. What does writing like a woman really mean? If they want the girl next door, they should go next door.”

Henkin, if not exactly the girl next door, looks about as deadly as a corporate travel planner. She sports carefully combed red hair and, today at least, the sort of modestly chic duds that don’t turn heads in a Hamburger Hamlet. Her only disconcerting trait is an exasperating tick of slamming shut when the conversation turns remotely personal. “I’m a very private person,” she says.

Henkin is far more comfortable talking about herself in the abstract, or pondering the novelty of writing a woman antihero like “Romeo’s” Mona.

“I hardly ever write women,” she says. “I always felt the difference between strong female characters and strong male characters was back story. When you see these female characters who are quote, strong, unquote, they’re not only evil, they’re insane. I’ve always thought there was something very provocative in the notion of an evil female character who was sane.”

When Henkin started writing “Romeo” five years ago, she says: “Women were playing wives. Then they progressed to feisty female attorneys and outspoken reporters. I thought maybe it was time for a character who lived outside the law and created her own morality.”

Mona delivers both, in spades. A Muscovite Mafioso arrested for icing some federal marshal pals of Jack Grimaldi (Oldman), who sells information to the Mob about witnesses he’s supposed to be protecting, Mona is “a nightmarish figure that causes Jack to take another look at his life,” says Henkin. “What else could it be but this brutally seductive woman?”

Henkin downplays the violence in “Romeo.” “Up against any George Raft film, it doesn’t seem very violent,” she says. “The reason one remembers the violence has to do with the fact that it’s more personalized--one knows these characters. . . . I mean, there are three acts of violence in this film: (Jack) loses his toe; (Mona) gets shot in the arm. And (somebody) is killed.”

And the scene where Mona locks her calves around Jack’s gullet from the back seat of a speeding Lincoln Continental? “Oh, I thought that was the fun part,” Henkin laughs.

But when the topic turns to Henkin, she is instantly wary and opaque. “I’m a wanderer,” she says at one point. “I move pretty easily from place to place. People have secrets everywhere, you know.”

Including, it becomes clear, Henkin herself. Beyond acknowledging that she was born in New Orleans and raised in Memphis and New York, she won’t discuss even the most prosaic details of her life.

Asked how old she was when she moved to New York, Henkin replies: “I was a child.”

Grade school? Teen-ager?

“Why do you ask?”

Because, she is told, New York affects a 7-year-old and 14-year-old in different ways. No dice.

“I traveled a lot when I was a child,” she says, “so it’s hard to put a specific year on it.”

What about her parents?

“I’d really rather not talk about that.”

Her age?

“That’s part of my private life.’

What about her habit--reported in press clippings in her public relations kit--of slipping on spike-heeled shoes before she writes?

A long pause. “Well, I’m trying to figure out how this notion got started,” she says. “I think this is an old history, an old fable. I’d hate to think what would happen if I put on my heels and tried to write a man’s character.”

One old history Henkin will discuss is her stint as a go-go dancer in New York in the 1970s, before taking up screenwriting. “I was young,” she says. “You didn’t have to be much of a dancer. All you had to do was kind of stand there and shake. I probably had some romantic notion about it. I saw how men dealt with each other and how men dealt with women.”

How so?

Henkin is silent for 16 seconds. “If you’re a young girl,” she finally says, “and you’re pretty, and you keep your mouth closed, you can learn a lot.”

Henkin has killed about three-quarters of her beer. When it’s pointed out that a Hamburger Hamlet seems about the last place one would expect to find Mona or another of Henkin’s Edward Hopper-ish rogues, she replies:

“Life is interesting in many places. You don’t have to be in the seediest bar in the world to find interesting subject matter. One never knows, but I suspect. . . .”

The public address system at the restaurant suddenly crackles to life. “Jan Hopper. You have a call at the host stand.”

“Oh, excuse me,” quips Henkin. “That’s me.”