SUICIDAL TENDENCIES : Nora Ephron Calls Designer a Real Lifesaver

Nora Ephron had wanted to work with production designer Bill Groom since she saw his work on “A League of Their Own.” She was so impressed that she ran out of the theater to check the poster and find out his name. “You could see right away that he had a fanaticism about detail,” the director recalls. “It’s something I find very interesting because I’m exactly the same way.”

Groom’s fanaticism was a fortuitous choice on Ephron’s latest film, tentatively titled “Lifesavers,” which TriStar has scheduled for a Christmas release. “Lifesavers” is a loose remake of “Le Pere Noel Est une Ordure” (which roughly translates to “Santa Claus Is a Piece of (Expletive)”), a 1982 French black comedy about suicide hot line workers that Ephron says she “couldn’t watch without laughing hysterically.” She and her sister Delia Ephron re-wrote the story and are also co-executive producers.

The Ephrons’ version is a bittersweet comedy starring Steve Martin as a bumbling good-guy who runs a suicide hot line with Rita Wilson and Madeline Kahn. The action takes place on Christmas eve, in the hot line’s Venice, Calif., headquarters.

But in a twist on the usual re-creation of Eastern settings on Hollywood soundstages, Groom and Ephron decided to construct their main set, a four-story building modeled after an existing Venice apartment house, complete with a working elevator, in New York. Kaufman Astoria Studios offered a rare stage large enough for the four-story set. Total cost: $630,000.

“It’s harder to make a movie with one main set than several,” says Ephron wryly, “because that set has to keep delivering. You need to find new nooks and crannies. It’s difficult.”

Just creating such an intimate set was difficult for Groom, a designer known for his massive constructions, including the baseball stadium in “A League of Their Own,” an entire house built on a Maine stage for “The Good Son” and the full-scale diner on a TriBeCa parking lot for “It Could Happen to You.”

“The geography has to be just right to make the comedy work,” Groom explains. For a scene in which Madeline Kahn’s character throws a fruitcake at Steve Martin from the European-style bird-cage elevator, Groom had to create a sight line for Kahn from the third floor where she’s stuck. He presented the problem to Ephron, who came up with the idea of an empty elevator shaft next to the working one to provide a camera angle. “Shooting in a real elevator would have been too dangerous,” says Groom.

In another scene, a door had to swing open in one direction to allow four characters to spill out, echoing the Marx Brothers’ “Night at the Opera.” Luckily Ephron had begun storyboarding ideas before the set was designed, and knew ahead of time which way the door should open. Groom was impressed. “Not all directors care about floor plans. Nora’s interest made my job easier.”

Ephron’s ’93 hit, “Sleepless in Seattle,” was warmed by the love and compassion she evoked from her actors. In contrast, she says, “the tricky part on this film was not showing warmth, but a sense of place. A place between reality and--elsewhere. We wanted the audience to understand fairly quickly where they were, which is not in a place that necessarily exists.”

Groom remembers Ephron asking for a lighthearted quality in the set dressing to connect the wacky characters to their almost-reality, so he scoured Southern California for furniture--”L.A. has a more playful asthetic,” says Groom, and shipped them to New York.

There were a few weeks of exteriors in Venice, where buildings and arches were wrapped in tiny Christmas lights. “It looked gorgeous,” Ephron recalls. “I just hope people don’t rush over there at Christmas expecting it to look the way it did in the movie.”

Not all props were planned in advance. Ephron let her characters acquire specific props and habits as they developed during rehearsals. Rita Wilson believed her ultra-square character would have a thing for angels. By the time filming began, Wilson’s desk was cluttered with angel candlesticks, blotters and figurines.

Set design became a collaborative effort. Ephron brought in her son’s Christmas stocking as a model for the set dressers. Groom brought in his grandmother’s crocheted snowflake ornaments to decorate the Christmas tree. “Rita Wilson’s character is a chronic knitter,” Ephron explains.

To create photos of Steve Martin’s character in his Peace Corps days in Peru, Martin’s face was pasted over a photo of an artist’s grandfather, a former explorer, in a pith helmet. “These are things no one but us ever notices,” says Ephron. “These are things you do to make the reality of the movie work for the actors, for yourself, and for everyone else.’

Then there’s the hot line office sign. “We had a little sign in script for the suicide hot line that said, ‘Number of lives saved.’ Then Bill found a sign that said, ‘Now Serving,’ and changed it to say ‘Now Saving.’