ON LOCATION : Blue Eyes and Blue Skies : Paul Newman’s performance as the flawed charmer reminiscent of ‘Hud’ and ‘The Hustler’ may be a summation of his entire career--whether the 69-year-old actor is ready to summarize it or not

“How’d you like to spend happy hour with these guys?” Gene Saks asks, holding his leg in one arm and gesturing with the other toward the patrons of the dirt-brown Iron Horse.

It’s the tavern that time forgot, no doubt on purpose, and Saks, Broadway director and occasional movie actor, is overdressed: brown suit, cardigan, bow tie, prosthetic limb (“I play a one-legged alcoholic Jewish lawyer,” he says. “Unheard of.”) in a joint where you never need a jacket, but you always need a cap (Yankees, John Deere, police). And where you might want some sunglasses to block both the glare of the Martian-green Saranac beer sign--which gives anyone near it that coveted “Living Dead” look--and the pathetic twinkle of the Christmas lights, the ones that you suspect never come down, because no one ever goes outside long enough to realize it’s July.

It’s not July, though. Not today. Outside the Horse--the fictional watering hole in the fictional town of North Bath in the fiction known as “Nobody’s Fool”--it’s snowing. Again. Up here in real-life Beacon, N.Y., ice jams the Hudson, the streets are impassable, and the economy has been sucker-punched by a downsizing IBM. Real life has intruded on make-believe all winter, which has been one of the more relentless in memory.

Inside, white-haired director Robert Benton (“Kramer vs. Kramer”), omnipresent toothpick balanced between teeth, runs through a scene with his equally white-haired actors, who also happen to be directors: Saks, whose credits include three Tonys and a long-running association with Neil Simon on stage and screen, and Paul Newman, who has directed a few movies, appeared in a few more and whose performance in “Nobody’s Fool” may be a summation of his entire career--whether the 69-year-old actor is ready to summarize it or not.

Donald (Sully) Sullivan is one of those ne’er-do-wells Newman’s been playing since “Hud” and “The Hustler”: the rake, the flawed charmer, the slightly off-center hero whom--in “Butch Cassidy,” “Slapshot,” “The Verdict,” “Absence of Malice”--Newman has embodied ever since the Actor’s Studio in the 1950s.

(“I saw his first scene there,” Saks confides. “I said, ‘He’ll never make it. Good-looking kid, but . . . ‘ “

(“It was pretty bad,” Newman concedes.)

A scarred veteran of the construction trades, an absentee father, a part-time lothario, Sully has a bum knee he blames on his sometime employer (Bruce Willis), a crush on the boss’s wife (Melanie Griffith), a mother-son relationship with his former teacher (Jessica Tandy), a dying lawyer named Wirf (Saks), an estranged son (Dylan Walsh) with a failed marriage, and a grandson, Will (played by 7-year-old Alex Goodwin), who’s so fearful even his younger brother terrorizes him.

The film, adapted by Benton from the novel by Richard Russo, is a “portrait of a town,” according to co-producer Scott Rudin, and a story “where nothing happens and everything happens,” according to Benton. It’s about Sully coming to terms with his own failures and abdications, about a fleeting chance at happiness. And, in this particular scene, it’s about fathers and sons and grandfathers.

Sully has won Wirf’s leg in a card game, as it happens, and Will agrees he should give it back. But Sully wants the boy to deliver the leg to Wirf, to walk across the bar full of people and to do something courageous; he’s already given the boy his pocket watch, so Will can see what little time it takes to be brave. With a deep breath, Will punches the watch, puts it on the table, and carries the leg across the room, to enthusiastic applause from the attendant barflies.

Benton subsequently takes a number of reaction shots of the actors at the bar--who are supposed to be watching the boy, but are actually looking at nothing. One character, who’s meant to be sleeping on his stool, starts mumbling (“Good Lord, why is she naked? . . . Why is he naked?!”). It’s a relatively easy bit of filmmaking; the scene is completed and the crew starts changing the set, when Newman’s voice rings out.

“Alex?” he calls, while walking across the floor to young Goodwin. “The motion picture industry would like to present you with the Golden Stopwatch Award, which is only given out every seven years.”

There is real applause now, and Goodwin grins widely as Newman hands him the watch. “Next year, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ kid . . . “

*

As the next shot is set up, veteran cinematographer John Bailey has a little trouble with light bouncing off set designer David Gropman’s peeling walls and paneling, the kind they had a big sale on back in ’47.

Newman heads back to his trailer, which is slowly disappearing under the heavy snowfall. He has no assistants, no personal publicist, no bodyguard, no help; he walks with the stiff-legged gait of a guy who might have worked construction all his life--something novelist Russo has noted during trips to the set. But his build is still wiry, and the eyes, amid the crinkles, are clear blue.

“These are the best black jellybeans I’ve ever had,” he says, offering a handful. There are barbells on the floor and, up on the mirror, a glorious picture of the young Joanne Woodward, standing in the surf, hair and gown swept by the wind. “I found that picture in a trunk,” he says, eyes never leaving the photo. “That’s back when I first met her.”

He’d love to direct her again, he says, as he did in “Rachel, Rachel” (1968), “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” (1972) and “Harry and Son” (1984).

“I’d like to do a film with Redford again,” he says. “In fact, we were up here and the local radio told some guy in the crew that if Newman will call the radio station we’ll give 500 bucks to a charity. We’d just been shooting in the hospital over here, and their Christmas fund was about 500 bucks short.

“So I called and they said, ‘Why don’t you and Redford do another film?’ And I told them, ‘We’ve been looking for a script we want to do for 20 years and we’ve never been able to find one.’ Well, they said, ‘Why don’t you do “Indecent Proposal II”? Wouldn’t you shack up with Redford for a million bucks?’ I said, ‘You bet your sweet ass.’ But they called Redford and he said, ‘No, it’s not enough.’ ”

One of Newman’s most recent screen appearances was in James Ivory’s subdued “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” a brilliant performance that was eclipsed perhaps only by the brilliant performance of his wife. He is selective: He currently appears in the Coen brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy” as an evil would-be empire-builder. Equally adventurous roles, but worlds apart.

“Hey, there’s so little of it out there,” Newman says, between trips to the jellybeans. “It’s dry. And to find two really adventurous scripts that ask something of you is an absolute delight.”

*

His admiration for the Coen brothers--”I don’t know if I’ve ever worked with that original a bunch of guys”--is unbridled, his thoughts on Benton more thoughtful. “There’s much more of a sense of incubation, gestation,” he says. “You move around in the womb a lot, stretch your legs a lot, more flexibility.”

As for Sully being a composite of earlier roles, well, Newman takes a long pause . . . a long pause . . . a long . . . pause . . .

“Sully’s one of a long line of guys,” he suddenly says, “who’s confused childhood with independence. A guy who in one way or another has avoided his promise. And who finds a possibility for the future and makes a run for it. I don’t think he’s all grown up, but he’s grown up in one area and that’s a start.

“He finds himself available in a way that was unsuspecting. I find it very touching. For one reason or another, and the reasons are irrelevant, he has removed himself from connecting. I told Benton when I read it, it’s a series of connecting spider webs. It’ll have an emotional thrust . . . it may not have the greatest plot thrust. I mean, we’re not blowing up the (expletive) bank and taking the money.”

It has been said around the set that Newman’s ability to articulate his views on this character are dubious. But he seems to know Sully, even though the role is a slippery one.

“It’s devilish. It’s like, you know, grabbing a thunderbolt,” Newman says, “especially when everything is shot out of continuity, when everything depends on a scene that isn’t even written yet. That’s what I mean by devilish, in that way. You have to make judgments about where you’re going to be. But I’m really loose in ways I haven’t been in a long time.”

The cellular phone rings, but when Newman answers it there’s no one there. So he calls home, just in case Woodward was trying to get him. She wasn’t, but they talk for a few minutes.

“This weather confounds her,” he says. “But it’s the slipping and sliding that’s fun.”

So, from all indications, is the “Nobody’s Fool” shoot. “It sure has been,” he says. “It’s been a nice experience. Life has sure been full of jellybeans.”

*

“Do the words ‘no way in hell’ mean anything to you?”

The bearish Scott Rudin is circling the catering table outside the doors of Jocko’s Drug World--just one of the made-for-movies facades here in North Bath/Beacon--and a crew member has just asked about the possibility of Rudin producing “Sister Act III.” But he’s got other, more prestigious fish to fry, and Whoopi amandine is apparently not on the menu.

Since the Rudin oeuvre includes “The Addams Family,” “Sister Act,” the sequels to both films and “The Firm,” it would seem “Nobody’s Fool” is a very un-Rudinlike picture--until you take into consideration “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” “Little Man Tate” and his Broadway production of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical “Passion.”

He’s even been shopping for a Manhattan apartment.

“The only one I liked was one I used to live in,” he said. “They actually showed it to me, and I didn’t realize till I was in it that I used to live there. And they wanted less than what I paid for it.”

Rudin’s New York activity may mark a return to his roots--he was an assistant to Broadway producers and a stage casting agent before beginning his four-year tenure at 20th Century Fox. Or, it might be the result of too much success.

“I made a bunch of movies last year and felt I was getting really burned out on it. I felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again, I didn’t feel like I was learning anything anymore. And I felt,” the 35-year-old said with a laugh, “that I was sort of too young to feel like I was in a rut.”

His initial foray into Broadway production was with David Henry Hwang’s ill-fated “Face Value.” But, Rudin said, “even though it was an epic crash-and-burn it was a great experience. And in addition to fulfilling this fantasy, it got me re-interested in movies”--and not just because his luck had been better on screen.

Rudin has long wanted to work with Benton, and is co-producing “Nobody’s Fool” with Benton’s longtime partner, Arlene Donovan.

“I loved the book,” Rudin said, explaining his interest in what is, admittedly, a cinematically small story. “And I’d also been a big fan of Rick’s other books, ‘Mohawk’ and ‘Risk Pool.’ I thought it was funny, and raunchy and ultimately very touching.”

Paul Newman was, Rudin said, the only guy to do this movie. “I felt the part was good enough to get him, and if I had a good script and a good director there was no reason he wouldn’t do it. I don’t think the entire film needed to be cast exactly how it was cast; we went after good people and several of them happened to be movie stars.”

These would include Melanie Griffith, whose third film, back in 1976, was “The Drowning Pool,” in which she played opposite Paul Newman. “I was 17, and scared to death,” she said from her home in Aspen. “And I was scared to death this time, too.”

“It’s Paul’s movie,” Griffith said, but what drives it is the script. “At the same time,” she said, “it’s not on the page--Bruce said that. You need the background, the history of these characters. There’s no way you can wing it.”

It’s a script that Benton said he’s revised as much as he revised his Oscar-winning “Kramer vs. Kramer” screenplay--”which is as much as I’ve ever revised anything.”

“I had read ‘Mohawk’ and loved it,” said the slightly built New Yorker. “And ‘Risk Pool’ had been optioned by another director. Arlene called me, because we worked on what, five pictures?”

“Five pictures,” Donovan says.

“Five pictures,” Benton concludes.

“And we’re still speaking,” Donovan adds.

“But never in weather like this,” Benton says. “Anyway, I had been working another screenplay and gotten bogged down, and Scott had given Arlene this book to see if we’d be interested. At that point, my head was such that I had to be talked into reading it. But early on you realize what an extraordinary book it is. The biggest obstacle, of course, is taking a book as complex and dense and rich as this and getting it into the narrow narrative that a film requires.”

*

To this end, the filmmakers called on Russo, whom Benton called “the most generous writer” he’s ever worked with.

“Benton did an extraordinary job taking this long sprawling novel and turning it into a real movie narrative,” Rudin said. “‘But there were certain things in it we were never happy with and I had the notion of going to Rick Russo and asking if he’d like to come in and do a little bit of writing on the movie. He basically sends us pages every day. He’s been doing a tremendous amount of writing and it’s been extraordinary. And his language is great. He writes this wonderful Hecht-MacArthur tough talk, and this movie needs that.”

For his part, Russo is pleased by the praise, but says that as a writer, you have to consider the two works, novel and film, as totally separate entities. And besides, he liked Benton’s treatment from the beginning.

“He couldn’t have been faithful to the novel entirely, it’s just too long,” Russo said from his home in Maine, “but he’s been faithful to its spirit.”

As for seeing his characters take flesh, Russo--who says he identifies with his characters more through their dialogue than through any physical description anyway--is getting used to that, too.

“I’ve always imagined Sully as more physically wasted,” he said. “He never eats; there’s a lot in the book about people trying to get him to eat. He’s rail-thin. I always pictured one of those Don Quixote sculptures made out of wrought iron. Now, Newman is slender, but he doesn’t have all those miles of bad road behind him. And yet he manages to convey it. And even with those astonishing good looks, he can also convince you that it all makes sense that every woman in the movie isn’t madly in love with him.”