This Crew Gladly Went Overboard

Actress Allison Janney sits at a swellegant Art Deco bar, her hair a dark curtain of Louise Brooks bangs above her eyes. Then she begins to sexually harass a swizzle stick with her tongue.

But it’s not her swizzle sizzle that has people behind the camera laughing: It’s the shameless hootchie-coo her eyes and eyebrows are dancing as accompaniment. As she completes her optical tango with a flourish, director Stanley Tucci calls “Cut!” then, with a knowing smile to Janney, says, “That was cheap and shameless. I’m not even going to edit it. I’m just going to show it like that.”

Yes, the take may be a winner--not of a place in Tucci’s new film, “The Impostors,” but of a Jambon d’Or--the Golden Ham award given out for the most outrageous take of the day. And the competition is fierce.

Janney, after all, is up against Tucci himself, as well as the Sundance All-Stars cast he has assembled for this Fox Searchlight-backed comedy: Oliver Platt, Steve Buscemi, Lili Taylor, Alfred Molina, Campbell Scott, Tony Shalhoub, Dana Ivey, Hope Davis, Isabella Rossellini and Billy Connelly, among others.

The cast is having a ball; Tucci, after all, is directing a farce. So he’s allowing his actors (most of whom are old friends of his) the latitude to have a little fun on the Depression-era ocean liner set he has built at Silvercup Studios in Queens.

“We’re doing farce, and it’s a very physical piece,” Tucci, 36, says. “Although I hope it’s about something--it’s not just stupid gags. Everybody has at least two sides they show in this film. And the story focuses on a pair of actors who are constantly trying on different personalities. It’s about ideas of who people are, how they present themselves, how they’re perceived, and who they really are.”

Jonathan Filley, the film’s executive producer, says, “It’s fun to see these actors doing stuff you don’t expect them to do.”

Such as Buscemi playing a suicidal big-band crooner? “How about Oliver Platt in a dress?” Filley offers.

As enticing a prospect as that may seem, it apparently was not enough to get a film company interested in taking the plunge with Tucci into the kind of slapstick farce the writer-director envisioned. Despite being firmly located on the Hollywood radar after the independent success of his 1996 debut film, “Big Night,” Tucci and producing partner Beth Alexander kept running into the same reaction whenever they pitched “The Impostors” (initially titled “Ship of Fools” and playfully referred to on the set as “All Hams on Deck”).

“The response was always the same: ‘A farce? Nobody makes farces,’ ” Alexander says. “When Hollywood hears ‘farce,’ they head for the hills.”

Some executives simply didn’t think the script was funny; others thought it would be fine, if Tucci and Alexander could cut the budget from $12 million to $6 million, despite the expense of shooting a period film. The duo finally hooked up with Fox Searchlight; division president Lindsay Law, an early supporter of the script, was able to convince the Fox hierarchy to finance the film for $8 million.

“We’re in the business of making movies that aren’t like other movies,” Law says. “And this is a kind they haven’t made in years. It’s like a Marx Brothers movie, unlike anything in the marketplace.”

The film focuses on two Depression-era unemployed actors, played by Tucci and Platt, who spend their bountiful free time creating scenes in public, just for the practice. When they insult and unintentionally assault a famous thespian (Molina), they’re forced to flee for their lives--and wind up as accidental stowaways on a ship headed for England. As they try to stay one jump ahead of the authorities, they uncover a variety of plots, including murder, fraud and terrorism, involving the seemingly normal passengers and crew of the ship.

“The idea of these two characters came out of an improv Stan and I used to do to warm up together,” recalls Platt, who met Tucci in the late 1980s in a production of John Guare’s “Moon Over Miami” directed by Andrei Belgrader at the Yale Repertory Theater. “We would amuse ourselves playing these two ridiculous characters. Stanley said nothing more about it and went off end wrote the script.”

Finished during the fall 1996 period when “Big Night” was being released, the script went into production in mid-July 1997, filming on locations in New York and New Jersey, including a WPA-era medical building in Jersey City that had doubled as the lobby of NBC in Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show.” Then Tucci spent a month on the ocean liner set at the studio in Queens.

Where Tucci had co-director Scott to keep an eye on his performance while directing “Big Night,” he relied on Belgrader, a longtime mentor who served as the film’s creative consultant, to provide the feedback on Tucci’s acting in “The Impostors.”

“The hardest part of doing farce on film,” Belgrader says, “is being able to go overboard and, at the same time, have a sense of reality that’s sustained. Doing farce well means surprising people completely all the time, coming from an angle that no one has thought of at just that moment. I admire Stanley picking something that I don’t think has been done well since Chaplin and Keaton, at least in film.”

And then, of course, there’s the matter of keeping it in period. That’s meant minimizing exterior shooting, in an urban environment that is both too modern and too expensive for sustained location filming.

Still, some things can’t be faked in a studio. So, on the last night of filming in late September 1997, the “Impostors” production moves to Manhattan’s West 43rd Street, in front of the New York Times building. It’s the only night shoot during principal photography; all that’s needed is a shot of Tucci and Platt racing down the street, being chased by police and newspaper photographers.

But even the vintage architecture of the Times’ exterior gives way to more modern fixtures and advertising in the background, which Tucci and cinematographer Ken Kelsch want to keep out of the shot.

So Tucci looks at the location from several angles, at one point sitting on the sidewalk to see if a lower angle will erase 60 years from the scene. He finally wonders aloud if Kelsch can shoot in such a way that the actors’ legs are cut off, to get what Tucci wants.

Kelsch demurs: “Compositionally, the audience wants to see it when they walk,” he says.

“But they know they’re walking on the earth,” Tucci says with mock exasperation.

“Emotionally they think that--but that thought is interrupted by the fact that they can’t see their legs,” Kelsch replies.

Tucci, however, is insistent about at least trying it once the way he’s suggested, to which Kelsch jokingly responds, “This is the one shot I’m shooting under protest. I can already see the reviews: ‘The composition was great, except for one goofy shot.’ ”

Tucci consults a video monitor: “Tilt it up a fetch,” he says. “There--that’s the shot. Let’s shoot it.”

A year later, Tucci is sitting in an empty sports bar in Katonah, N.Y., in Westchester County, near his home. The legs, as it turned out, stayed in the picture. Tucci, who was invited to show “The Impostors” in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in May, is enjoying the waning days of his vacation, even as he rewrites the script for his next film, based on Joseph Mitchell’s story, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” which he hopes to direct (but not act in) for October Films this fall.

Tucci’s hair is an incongruous shade of gold, a remnant of two roles he’s played in other people’s films this year: Walter Winchell in a Paul Mazursky-directed bio-pic for HBO; and Puck in the Michael Hoffman film of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for Fox Searchlight, which also stars Rupert Everett, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline.

He’s getting ready for “The Impostors’ ” October launch. And he’s aware that, unlike “Big Night,” which came out of nowhere, “The Impostors” will reach the market with great expectations and anticipation from audience and critics, who now know who Tucci is, based on his first film.

“That makes me anxious,” Tucci admits. “But people have been responding positively--they really laugh at it. On the other hand, when they don’t get it, they don’t get it--at all. But that was true of ‘Big Night,’ too. You just hope they respond positively and don’t go, ‘Oh. he only had one picture in him.’

“People have responded to it by saying that it’s funny, unusual and takes chances, which is what I want people to see because that’s what I tried to do. This isn’t the status quo.”

Though he’s been offered big-budget studio pictures to direct, he remains focused on his own material: “Hey, I’m still learning, still growing,” he says. “Right now, I just want to focus on stuff I want to do, stuff that calls for lower budgets. I want to make my own mistakes, to learn what I’m doing that’s wrong and right. If there are mistakes or things that don’t work in this film, they’re my mistakes. They aren’t mistakes because someone said, ‘You can’t do that.’ ”