‘Dragonheart’ Takes Cohen for a Wild Ride : The Director of the Fantasy Film, a Surprise Box-Office Hit, Is Soaring Now After Years of ‘Dark, Downer Days’

Director Rob Cohen will verbally joust with anyone who dismisses his new movie, “Dragonheart,” as “a boy’s movie.”

But his office on the Universal Studios lot is full of the stuff boys would love to claim for their own: big picture books on myths and legends; a medieval-style shield used by Dennis Quaid as “Dragonheart’s” errant knight hero, Bowen; an encased scale model of Draco, who becomes a walking-talking-flying buddy of Bowen’s in the movie (care of the voice of Sean Connery and the special-effects team at Industrial Light & Magic). There’s even what Cohen calls “my Rob doll,” a stuffed figure made up exactly like the small-stature Cohen, down to his thinning tresses, and used for miniature special-effects shots for his next movie now in post-production, “Daylight,” starring Sylvester Stallone.

One little boy, in fact, is claiming one of Cohen’s office toys for his own. Cohen says that his 9-year-old son, Kyle, “has gotten it into his head to hang a big sword on his bedroom wall. He was actually saving money to buy one, but I figured I’d just give him one of these neat ones we used in the movie.”

All of this fun stuff, though, has another purpose: “reminders when I’ve had my dark, downer days, that I can actually make movies,” says Cohen, 47. “They stare back at me and say, ‘You can do this.’ ”

Conventional wisdom in Hollywood said that “Dragonheart” was probably going to add to Cohen’s downer days. Last weekend, up against blockbusters such as “Mission: Impossible” and “Twister,” the Universal release was actually slated for fewer screens (2,130) than the studio’s floundering “Flipper” (2,281). Up against rough odds, the dragon movie slew expectations, took in more than $15 million, and a projected domestic box-office figure of $65 million may now be too low.

“I’m still nervous though about upcoming weeks,” Cohen says. “We’ll see if this thing has legs--or in this case, wings.”

It’s getting help from a promotion and advertising budget of about $20 million, according to studio sources. “I had nothing but great praise right away from all of the big brass at Universal, from [Seagram head] Edgar Bronfman Jr. on down,” Cohen says. “The marketing people cried at early screenings, even before we had the dragon effects.

“What happens is that when people in the movie business aren’t quite sure what they have on their hands--and this movie is a lot of things at once, from being a mystical adventure to a comedy to a historical drama--they get conservative. Then they expect less.”

Producer Raffaella De Laurentiis had an early hint of Hollywood’s reluctance for “Dragonheart” when she pitched the original story idea by Patrick Read Johnson to studios in 1989. The standard response, she recalls, was two sentences long: “A talking dragon movie? Are you crazy?”

Screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue waived his usual fee to write the first draft, and though Johnson wanted to direct, he had only one credit (the low-budget 1990 “Spaced Invaders”) and De Laurentiis could only raise $15 million--which wouldn’t make anything fly, let alone a dragon.

Directors came and went, from Jon Avnet to Kenneth Branagh to Richard Donner. Another huge roadblock along the movie’s bumpy 7 1/2-year path to being made: Topline male stars fled the project like village peasants, concerned, according to De Laurentiis, that they would be upstaged by the dragon.

At the same time, she was producing “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” which was Cohen’s first directing effort since the 1984 flop “Scandalous.” “I saw that Rob was capable of stirring emotions as well as staging action,” she says. Selling Cohen to Universal’s executives was eased, to be sure, when “Dragon” also became a surprise hit, with more than $37 million in domestic grosses.

Cohen’s career has been one in the trenches. He appeared to be a wunderkind at 23, taking over Motown’s new movie division and shepherding post-blaxploitation African American-themed movies like “Mahogany,” “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings” and “The Wiz.”

But what he really wanted to do was direct. When he got his chance, in 1979, with “A Small Circle of Friends,” he realized that he was in over his head. “I was full of this hubris that directing was about wearing a viewfinder around your neck and ordering people around,” he says. “When the movie failed, I paid penance for that hubris for years.” He had good breaks, directing Emmy-winning “Miami Vice” episodes, and bad ones as a producer, including repeated clashes with Jon Peters and Peter Guber over the rights to the films “Witches of Eastwick” and “Thank God, It’s Friday”--clashes that he describes on the record in Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters’ new book on the ex-Sony moguls, “Hit and Run.”

Cohen also nearly died--twice. He was one of the survivors (along with Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone) of the March 3, 1979, fire that engulfed Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel, rescued by firefighters as he clung to an outside ledge. An arterial blockage triggered a heart attack in 1992 during “Dragon” pre-production.

“To say they were life-altering experience would be an understatement,” Cohen says, “and I’ve been able to draw upon them for the spirituality in ‘Dragonheart’ and the theme of survival in ‘Daylight.’ ”

The latter film, about commuters trapped in a fiery New York expressway tunnel, is being assembled by editors in Cohen’s Pogo Productions offices for a Thanksgiving release while Cohen tries to make sense of the surprise success of “Dragonheart.”

“You know,” Cohen says, “Bowen is caught between two terrible choices in ‘Dragonheart’--since Draco and the evil king share the same heart . . . killing the king also [would] mean killing his dragon friend. Hollywood can often serve you up those bad choices, but right now, things look pretty good.”