Sweet Success of ‘Flirting’ : Director Is Getting Raves for Film That Updates the Screwball Tradition

Like many things about writer-director David O. Russell, what he considers the key selling points to his new film “Flirting With Disaster” are gleefully twisted.

“There’s an armpit fetish!” he declares proudly. “There’s the first hypospadias joke in history! There’s the first visible pup tent in cinema history with a prosthetic!”

We’d explain hypospadias and, for those unfamiliar with the vernacular, the pup tent, but the film does it much better, and anyway, this is a family newspaper. We’ll just add that there are plenty of other reasons to see Russell’s film, as critics who have anointed it with ecstatic accolades will point out. It stars Ben Stiller as Mel Coplin, a monumentally confused young man whose journey to find his birth parents with his wife (Patricia Arquette), a psychologist (Tea Leoni), a baby and whoever else might pop up along the way snowballs epically out of control.

Russell, whose first film, the black comedy “Spanking the Monkey,” was made for $80,000 and emerged as an art-house favorite, has created a smart yet mainstream comedy--Miramax plans to play it eventually in 1,000 theaters--by exploring the sort of daft, rollicking territory moviegoers have rarely seen since the days of Preston Sturges.

Of course, he didn’t even realize this until he was finished with the movie. “After I had made the film, I was tormenting myself, saying, ‘It’s not as serious as “Spanking the Monkey”!’ and my wife kind of cracked me across the face the way she’ll do playfully, and she said, ‘You set out to make a comedy, what are you talking about?’ ” Russell recalls over a breakfast of oatmeal and fruit. “She left this book, a coffee-table book, on our dining room table for me one morning, this book ‘Screwball’ [about the screwball comedies of Hollywood’s golden era]. And then I realized what I had done. And I’m glad I didn’t know that because I’m so compulsive I probably would have copied the genre too much and it wouldn’t have been as interesting. I’m happy that I backed into it and ended up rediscovering the genre in a different way.”

Russell was inspired to write the film after his own sister had a similar experience. “She tried to find her biological family and she had this strange experience where one minute it was the second coming and the next it was, ‘Help, get me out of here,’ ” he says, “and I was able to connect that with my own foolishness in terms of always looking around for something else and feeling I could be somebody else other than who I am.”

“He’s a really funny guy, but he’s also very serious,” Stiller, the film’s star, observes. “He’s kind of neurotic, but extremely calm on the outside. He’s been through a lot of what the character is going through, so he’s able to give it some perspective. He’s a very honest writer.”

Leoni adds that his directing chops are in order, as well. “I wasn’t sure I could pull this role off--it was the first time I had played a truly sad character, and how to do it in a comedy was very, well, frightening,” she says. “David called me at home, and he pushed me. He said, ‘You’re perfect, you’ve got to do this.’ I thought, ‘Wow, I like that.’ It’s rare in Hollywood that you meet a director with such incredible understanding, sympathy and control of their ego. He has a tremendous career ahead of him.”

Russell went through 15 drafts of the script. “It looks fun and breezy, but it’s really hard to keep it that way, so that it’s just the right tone but it keeps one foot on the ground. It’s a hard pace to achieve, and I was weeding out the cliches. I wanted it to lure you into this type of realism and then ambush you.

“The m.o. of this movie is the weird digressions. It’s family surfing, city surfing, culture surfing, and you can surf weird ideas. But you have to stay close enough to the highway that it doesn’t meander off and totally lose you.”

One eyebrow-raising scene involves Mary Tyler Moore--playing hilariously against type--in a state of undress and indulging in an activity not usually associated with Laura Petrie or Mary Richards. Which wasn’t as hard to convince her to do as one might imagine, Russell says.

“You cajole a little bit,” he says. “She said, ‘I want to do this in my robe,’ and you say, ‘No.’ She says, ‘I’ll do this in my nightie,’ and I say, ‘C’mon, your underwear.’ She says, ‘Well, if it’s a one-piece thing,’ and I say, ‘You’ve got a fabulous figure, two-piece.’ Every step of the way, I’m wondering when I’m going to go too far and she’s gonna blow up. That’s where you’re kind of like a pimp.”

Russell studied literature at Amherst and worked as a political organizer, making video documentaries seeking to improve tenant conditions in a mill town and immigrant conditions in Boston’s South End. “I had this John Reed vision that I was going to write and I was going to do good political work which was completely out of sync with the rest of the country, which was busy reelecting Reagan, and all my friends were busy climbing the corporate ladder. Now, they’ve been downsized out of jobs--who has the last laugh?”

“Spanking the Monkey” erupted at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994, and the movie’s theme--incest--raised the question of just how autobiographical the movie actually was. Russell skirts the issue artfully, though he does say his mother “was a little mortified by the film. But for me, part of my growth as a writer was giving myself permission to write about these things. Although I wouldn’t want to do it again any time soon.”

Russell does admit that the armpit fetish comes from personal experience. “It’s a big G-spot, I can attest to that personally,” he says. “I wonder if we’re gonna start a little craze, maybe? I think you’re gonna be seeing the cut-out armpit on Armani suits. I think you’re gonna see a new posture in restaurants, a lot of women with their arms up, their hands behind their heads. Men will say, ‘Did you get a load of the depth of that pocket on that woman over there?’ ”

When not considering armpits, Russell is working on his next film, which he hopes will be a period thriller. Stretching as a filmmaker is necessary, he insists, “because after you make a ‘Spanking the Monkey,’ they say, ‘Hi, here’s 20 dysfunctional youth movies, do you want to make all of them?’ Now, they say, ‘Hi, here’s a big comedy! Cash in!’

“So you say, ‘This is great, and I want to be in business with you, but I don’t want to do a comedy right now.’ And then they offer you a lot of money and they say, ‘You really mean that?’ And you say, ‘That’s a lot of money, but--’ ” and here, he grimaces in a bite-the-bullet sort of way--” ’yeah, I really mean that.’ ”