‘Burning Season’ Emerges From the Ashes : Movies: After several false starts, the story about slain Brazilian rubber tapper Chico Mendes will air on HBO.

Shortly after Brazilian rubber tapper Chico Mendes was assassinated in December, 1988, the film world fell all over itself in an effort to secure the rights to his story.

Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Peter Guber, Ted Turner and ex-Columbia head David Puttnam all joined in the scramble for what became one of the most coveted movie projects in Hollywood history.

At the height of the frenzy, in early 1989, a host of Hollywood heavyweights descended upon the Brazilian rain forest (a seven-hour journey with three stopovers from Rio de Janeiro). Guber even set up private screenings of his movies in a tiny theater in the heart of the Amazon for Mendes’ widow.

But, as it turned out, that was all for naught. Only now, almost anticlimactically, has a project finally emerged about the slain environmental activist and labor organizer: “The Burning Season,” based on the book of the same name by Andrew Revkin, airs Saturday on HBO with Raul Julia as Mendes.

With Puttnam as the executive producer, the project was originally conceived as a feature film starring Andy Garcia. It was to be produced by Warner Bros. under an agreement with Puttnam’s Enigma Productions. But after commissioning several scripts and even building film sets in Costa Rica, Warner Bros. decided to drop its option.

HBO stepped in and scooped up the project, and Puttnam, who had bought the rights to Revkin’s book, stayed attached to the project as executive producer.

Puttnam said he persisted in wanting to make the movie because he saw it as an important “personal journey,” as opposed to simply a way to make money, as other filmmakers had.

“People saw (this story) as a way of making quite quick money in a fairly expedient manner,” Puttnam said in a phone interview from his home in Ireland. “Those people tend to not make a long journey (kind of film). If things don’t come together in six months, they go on to other things. There’s too many hot things.

“At the time of all the hysteria, I was interviewed along with a lot of other people and the press was saying that I was the least likely to succeed. I didn’t have a big name attached and I remember at the time saying, ‘It’s a long, long process.’ I remember saying it’s one business where the tortoise can still beat the hare.”

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In between the early flurry of offers in the late ‘80s and the project begun by HBO in 1993, the rights to the story went from Mendes’ widow, Ilzamar, to J.N. Films, a little-known Brazilian-based production company, to Peter Guber to Warner Bros. to Puttnam.

Hollywood offers to Mendes’ widow and rubber-tappers in his hometown of Xapuri ranged from offering to pay for worldwide television commercials to promote the preservation of the rain forest to dangling hundreds of thousands of dollars to Mendes’ family and the foundation he started.

Redford proposed a feature to be directed by Steven Spielberg and financed by 20th Century Fox. He drafted Brazilian actress Sonia Braga--whom he had directed in “The Milagro Beanfield War” and who ultimately starred in the HBO movie--to smooth the way with local Brazilians.

Turner did produce a documentary on Mendes that aired on TBS in 1989, but also vied for the rights to a made-for-television movie.

At the time, HBO was also involved in attempting to secure the rights in order to produce a four-hour miniseries.

Alan U. Schwartz, a Los Angeles attorney retained by the Chico Mendes Foundation shortly after the environmentalist’s death, was involved in the negotiations surrounding these offers.

Schwartz said that he and others lobbied members of the foundation urging them to agree on one filmmaker who should do the story.

“I went down to Rio Brava with Steve Schwartzman of the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., and we went over all the proposals with the rubber tappers’ board,” Schwartz said in a phone interview. “They couldn’t really get their act together to decide on all the proposals. They were involved in a political campaign there, and there was a problem with the widow, who had made her own deal (with J.N. Films), and they were trying to decide whether or not to stop her. The whole thing petered out.”

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So, he said, “All those proposals went away and David (Puttnam) made his own arrangements with the widow and got the rights to the book (“The Burning Season”).”

Ilzamar Mendes had sold the rights to J.N. Films “under nationalistic premises,” based on her belief that her husband had been against the internationalization of the rain forest and would not have liked the internationalization of his story, according to a source close to the original negotiations. The production company, the source said, “had no wherewithal to do the film” and sold the rights to Peter Guber for $1 million.

Guber was with Warner Bros. at that time, and so the rights transferred to Warners. When Guber left for Sony, the rights to Mendes’ story stayed with Warners, which then hooked up with Puttnam.

When Warners decided to let the rights lapse, Puttnam was the only original player left, said Glenn Whitehead, HBO’s West Coast vice president of business affairs and production.

HBO based its movie on Revkin’s book and on “The Decade of Destruction,” a book by British documentary filmmaker Adrian Cowell. Screenwriters on the final project included William Mastrosimone, Michael Tolkin and Ron Hutchinson.

All the Hollywood hoopla surrounding the story has left observers wondering what happened, why all the other players in the contest scratched their plans for future movies.

“I guess these things sort of blossom and disappear like spring flowers,” said author Revkin.

Or like the trees in the Brazilian rain forest.