For Crudup, a Chance to Expand Horizons

When Denis Johnson walked on the New Jersey set of “Jesus’ Son,” the upcoming film version of his acclaimed, best-selling 1992 collection of short stories, he experienced an eerie sense of deja vu.

“I was so astonished. The actors looked like they had strolled right in from my past,” Johnson said in a phone interview from the University of Texas in Austin, where he has just finished a semester teaching. “It was spooky.”

But Johnson eventually became so enthusiastic about the production that he ended up lobbying the producers for a part in the film, which opens in Los Angeles today. “I was taking an acting class, and I thought I was a big-shot actor,” he said. “I made a tape. I auditioned for the part that Dennis Hopper got.

“I’ve never really gotten them to be candid about this--or even wanted them to be--but I kind of suspect that when they got it, they really racked their brains for something to let me do.”

The part they found for him allowed Johnson to show off his deadpan delivery and comic timing playing a man who goes to an emergency room with a hunting knife stuck in his eye after a domestic argument; it’s a lot funnier than it sounds. He said he asked actor Jack Black (“High Fidelity”), who plays a hilariously incompetent hospital attendant, for acting tips.

“Jack said acting is all about your facial expressions, and you don’t have to worry about that; you’ve got a knife sticking out of your head!” Johnson, 50, recalled. “I got the best part.”

Maybe so, but the man who got to play his alter ego is Billy Crudup, who won a best actor award at the Paris Film Festival in April for his portrayal of a guy with such a spectacular knack for bringing bad luck on himself and those around him that he is called FH, shorthand for an unprintable nickname.

Johnson’s largely autobiographical book takes its title from the Velvet Underground song “Heroin” (“When I’m rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus’ Son.”). For Crudup, the handsome, perennially up-and-coming 31-year-old who has been the leading man in such films as “Without Limits,” “The Hi-Lo Country” and most recently “Waking the Dead,” playing the lovable screw-up bumbling through the 1970s in a haze of petty crime, drugs, sex and other distractions gave him a chance to loosen up his acting style and unearth the comedy buried in the wasteland of FH’s life.

Crudup said he had fun finding a physical vocabulary for the character’s aimlessness; FH trips, drops things, bumps into door frames and otherwise stumbles through every scene.

“He doesn’t have any hopes or dreams in life, he doesn’t want to resolve this relationship or attain public office or be the president of his corporation,” Crudup said while sitting in a hotel lobby on a rainy afternoon in Paris, where he had traveled for the film festival.

“Playing a character who’s lost, you can’t ever play that you’re lost. . . . You have to look. If you’re lost, you’re looking. There’s nothing interesting about watching somebody just sort of fumble around. “

Director Alison Maclean (“Crush”) said Crudup is “an enormously skilled actor, and he brought a certain openness and honesty to the role. That’s not true of all the parts he plays, but I think he really found it in this one.”

Theater Producers Weren’t Aiming for Film

Johnson has often chronicled the quest for human and spiritual meaning among disaffected Americans, from his early collections of poetry (“The Incognito Lounge” and “The Veil”) to novels (“Fiskadoro” and “Resuscitation of a Hanged Man”). The rights to the largely autobiographical “Jesus’ Son,” the first screen adaptation of the writer’s work, eventually landed in the hands of Elizabeth Cuthrell and David Urrutia, New York-based theater producers who said they hadn’t previously thought about making a film.

Cuthrell became an instant fan after reading excerpts from “Jesus’ Son” in the New Yorker and Esquire.

“When the collection ‘Jesus’ Son’ came out, I saw the film in my head,” Cuthrell said. “It felt like some bizarre calling.”

She and Urrutia secured the film rights in fall 1996, and for the next nine months, working with writer Oren Moverman, they turned Johnson’s spare, interlinking short stories into an elliptical, nonlinear screenplay.

The story relays FH’s escapades the way he might have told them to a stranger on a cross-country bus ride: in fits and starts, with detours and revisionist hindsight.

To give the stories a clear cinematic line, the writers fleshed out a romance between FH and the lovely, mercurial fellow junkie Michelle (Samantha Morton).

The screenwriters lifted a good deal of material directly from the text. Said Urrutia: “Our books were constantly at our side. Even at the points where we had to make up for purposes of the story, we always found inspiration in an idea that was in the text.”

They were so inspired by the 100-odd-page book, in fact, that their first draft was “probably 210 pages, and we loved every word of it and thought that it would make an incredible 15-hour film,” Urrutia said with a laugh. “Cutting it was very painful.”

When they had a workable draft, the anxious screenwriters sought the author’s response. “I never felt moved to offer any advice at all,” Johnson said. “I mean everything just seemed absolutely perfect. My only disappointment is that in every translation from page to film, a lot gets cut. So it’s very condensed.”

Johnson agreed to write additional dialogue between FH and Michelle and made himself available for consultation.

“I called him about everything,” Cuthrell said. “He answered any questions; he was so encouraging and supportive.

“I always thought of FH as an unreliable narrator,” Cuthrell explained. “But I was talking to Denis, and he said, ‘What do you mean? He’s not an unreliable narrator! He’s the most reliable narrator you’ve ever read because he’s trying so desperately to be honest and to get things exactly right.’ ”

Think of the Character as ‘a Young Bob Newhart’

“Jesus’ Son” was shot in six weeks in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Arizona. In addition to Crudup, Morton and Hopper, Denis Leary and Holly Hunter play smaller roles, and work for scale.

“They ate horrible food, no one had a trailer, and I swear to God no one complained,” Cuthrell said.

The filmmakers chose to finance the $2.5-million film through private investors, not wanting to compromise on casting decisions or the integrity of the original work (Cuthrell said one potential investor was willing to “bring a lot of money to the table, if we changed the title to ‘Moses’ Son.’ ”).

The producers said they were picketed by nuns who objected to the film’s title. (The film is being released in the U.S. by Lions Gate, which is used to this kind of thing, having also released Kevin Smith’s controversial “Dogma.”) They also worried that “Jesus’ Son” would be pigeonholed as a drug film.

“With most films that have drugs as a major component, there tends to be an air of hipness, like ‘Trainspotting’ or ‘Rush,’ ” Urrutia said. “Denis said FH was like a young Bob Newhart. He’s more nerdy. Whatever you do, these characters are not groovy, cool hipsters. They are lost, searching souls.”

Heroin is just an acquaintance on FH’s path to enlightenment, a vehicle to exaggerate the blur between reality and hallucination that is at the base of his series of ecstatic visions--such as a scene in a snowy drive-in parking lot that FH mistakes for a cemetery, or the neon-red sacred heart that pulses to life on the chest of a stranger in a coin laundry.

“They wanted to keep that quality, and they did,” Johnson said. ‘It would have been easy for a screenwriter to ignore, but in the absence of spiritual core, it would have been sensational with the drugs and the violence.”

FH eventually learns that there are those less fortunate than him, and the ending represents such a redemptive message of hope that the London-based International Catholic Organization for Cinema and Audiovisual gave it the ecumenical award at last year’s Venice Film Festival.

“The character that Billy Crudup played was a good-natured kind of person,” said Peter Malone, president of the international group, “but he’s struggling with drugs and his relationships. But he went to detox, and gradually he was someone who was transformed by his experience, who had such a capacity for healing people without drawing attention to it.”

Johnson said that the humor in “Jesus’ Son” is always more apparent when it’s read aloud to an audience, and he said he’s pleased that the film has gotten a lot of laughs in screenings at the Venice, Paris, Telluride, Toronto and New York New Directors/New Films festivals.

Johnson credits Crudup with finding ways to make FH funny and likable, a bad boy with a believable heart.

“A lot of actors would have been tempted to make him a little more heroic, and that would have been all wrong,” Johnson said. “He really played it perfectly. He gave the guy a face.”