A Story That Hits Close to Down Home

‘Be afraid, be very afraid” is John Ritter’s advice when he learns you are spending an afternoon with Billy Bob Thornton, the Arkansas-born actor-writer-director known to his friends as the hillbilly Orson Welles.

“Whenever I’m going to see Billy Bob, I always bring along a portable metal detector,” Ritter adds with a laugh. “That way you know what kind of firearms might be in the vicinity.”

Ritter, who’s one of the co-stars of Thornton’s new film, “Sling Blade,” is exaggerating--but perhaps not that much. Since the 41-year-old Thornton arrived in Los Angeles a dozen years ago, he’s developed a reputation as Hollywood’s gonzo good old boy. Unwilling to suffer studio executive rudeness and inattention, Thornton has walked out on producers who kept him waiting and had such blowups with the top brass at Paramount that he refuses to do business at the studio anymore.

“Billy Bob doesn’t have any problem with people who are nice human beings,” explains Tom Epperson, his longtime friend and writing partner. “He only has trouble with people who are arrogant, hate writers and abuse their assistants.”

Thornton held off making “Sling Blade,” which opens Wednesday, until he could direct the film himself. The movie recounts the saga of Karl Childers, a semi-retarded man who returns to his hometown after 25 years. He has spent most of his life in an insane asylum after he found his mother having sex with the town bully and killed them with a long, scythe-like blade.

The film’s eerie intensity is heightened by the fact that Thornton plays Childers himself. Speaking in a slow, rumbling drawl, growling after each sentence, he gives the character a homely dignity as he befriends a local boy whose home life is unsettlingly similar to Childers’ own childhood memories.

It’s hard to say if the movie will find an audience beyond the art-house circuit. But its critical plaudits have already transformed Thornton from an obscure actor-screenwriter (he co-wrote “One False Move” and “Family Thing” with Epperson) into the recipient of a multi-picture deal with Miramax Films, which paid 10 times the film’s $1-million production cost to acquire “Sling Blade.”

So far, the acclaim hasn’t turned his head. When Thornton calls his agent, he still does it from a pay phone. He spent a recent afternoon recounting his career ups and downs at Outlaws, a favorite Thornton hangout that serves hamburgers the size of flying saucers--he admiringly calls it Three Mile Island food. Smoking cigarettes and sipping beer, he reminisced about his days as a struggling Hollywood actor, working at Shakey’s Pizza and serving “fish heads” (Billy Bob-ese for hors d’oeuvres) at high-toned Hollywood parties.

If anything, Thornton is a bit frazzled by his sudden celebrity--he even developed high blood pressure touting his film to the media after its debut at the New York Film Festival. “All this attention is freaking me out,” he says, picking at a green salad as a concession to his blood-pressure woes. “I feel like I’m Elvis Presley or something. Usually the only time the press talked to me was to ask, ‘What was it really like acting with Kurt Russell?’ ”

To hear Thornton tell it, when he and Epperson first moved to Los Angeles, they were two starry-eyed rubes. Childhood friends from the hamlet of Malvern, Ark., they rented an apartment on Motor Avenue, taking it as an omen that the street began at then-MGM Studios and ended at 20th Century Fox.

The writers finally got a script to a producer, who took them to a movie before telling them their screenplay was awful. It was an apt introduction to what passes for manners in Hollywood. “We saw ‘Rich and Famous’ at the Mann’s Chinese,” Thornton recalls. “And what I remember most is that the producer and his friend spent the whole time making fun of the movie. I was astounded--I’d never been around people who made fun of movies before.”

When Thornton and Epperson were younger, they would prepare for a big pitch meeting by stopping at a bar and having a few beers. When they were kept waiting for a meeting with producer Brian Grazer, they walked out and never came back.

Now that Thornton is having a little success, he notices that executives who were once “kinda” friendly are now “real” friendly. But he doesn’t forget old grudges, especially his unhappiness with Paramount over “The Gift,” a still-dormant Thornton-Epperson script based in part on Thornton’s mother, Virginia, who has practiced as a psychic for years.

“When a studio treats me badly, I remember it,” he says firmly. “I have no patience for studio executives who treat me like an idiot or tell me how my characters should talk.”

For Thornton, the ultimate indignity came when he was pitching a movie version of the Hank Williams story--a project a New Line executive rejected after describing it as “your baseball story,” having confused the legendary country singer with baseball slugger Ted Williams. At another studio, when an executive passed on the pitch, he suggested Thornton and Epperson tackle his pet project: aliens on the space shuttle.

“Tom knew I was going to lose it,” Thornton recalls. “So he very diplomatically told them, ‘Maybe you oughta find someone who’s more interested in the space program than we are.’ ”

As a boy, Thornton was only interested in two--well, three--things: rock ‘n’ roll, Southern literature and girls. He’s been married four times, once briefly to “One False Move” co-star Cynda Williams.

He and his current wife, Pietra, have two young sons, one named after TV producer (and Bill Clinton confidant) Harry Thomason, whose show “Hearts Afire” featured Thornton as a cast member.

Thornton’s career as a rock singer never took off, its high point being a stint as an opening act for Black Oak Arkansas. He’s had better luck as an actor, appearing in “Tombstone,” “Indecent Proposal” and “Dead Man,” as well as the Burt Reynolds TV series “Evening Shade.” Before “Sling Blade,” Thornton’s showiest part was a role he wrote for himself--Billy, the drug-dealing killer in “One False Move.”

But his experiences as an actor helped Thornton develop a voice as a writer, while his writing skill has helped build relationships with gifted actors. “His acting and writing blend together,” Epperson says. “He’ll tell you about some old black man he met at a barbecue stand and he’ll just become that guy. He’s got such an uncanny ear for dialogue it’s almost supernatural.”

Thornton created “Sling Blade’s” Karl Childers character when he was trapped in a nightmarish acting job in a long-forgotten mid-’80s cable movie. After a particularly bad day, he retreated to his trailer, sat in front of his makeup mirror and began talking to himself, speaking in a strange gruff drawl that became the voice of Karl Childers.

“I was full of self-loathing and I was making faces at myself and saying, ‘What are you doing out here? Why did you take this stupid job? You’re just a failure--you’re never gonna get anywhere.’ That’s when I started doing the whole monologue you see at the beginning of the film. I don’t have a clue where it came from. It just came out of me.”

Thornton finally got “Sling Blade” made last year, shooting it in Arkansas on a minuscule budget, recruiting old pals such as Ritter, Robert Duvall and J.T. Walsh, as well as country star Dwight Yoakam, to play key supporting roles.

“It was the hottest place I’d been to in my life,” Ritter recalls. “It was 90 degrees at night, with no wind and we all shared a dressing room that had no running water. It was like the Unabomber shack on wheels. But we couldn’t have had a better time, because we knew we were doing something so original and real.”

For Thornton, the film was a reexamination of his roots. Like many Southerners, Thornton is preoccupied with the past--all his scripts, to some degree, are about men from small towns who are forced to confront something ugly from their pasts. When Thornton talks about Childers, it’s easy to assume that he’s talking about himself.

“Karl was my character--all mine,” he says. “I always felt like an outcast, and I always felt a lot uglier than I am--he’s not that far away from me.”

As an actor, Thornton portrays Childers as a man who moves at turtle-like speed--and the film unfolds at a similarly deliberate pace. “It’s the anti-rock video movie,” Thornton says. “I wanted people to get into the pace of a small, Southern town and if you’re gonna do that, you have to shoot it in real time, not like it was ‘Knot’s Landing’ or something.

“I’m a little disillusioned by the kind of films people want to see these days. I wouldn’t know how to blow up a bridge--I don’t have the energy or the interest. I want to make movies that you have to watch. I’m interested in simple stories about complex characters, not flashy stories about cartoon characters.”

Thornton sounds awfully pessimistic for someone who should be enjoying his current acclaim. “I guess I’m impatient,” he says. “You see movies about all these big issues, like civil rights and the Kennedy assassination. But I want to tell stories about what affects people in their everyday lives, stories about little people and little situations.”

Thornton stares at his empty beer bottle. “That’s what I do best. Not the big stuff, but the little stuff--telling stories about someone messing up in their own back yard.”