What Fresh Hell Is This?

The Devil is sitting in her office doing needlepoint.

“It’s a glasses case for my mum,” she explains, showing off the floral design-in-progress from behind an impressive teak desk. “Isn’t it sweet?”

As she does, her current mark sits across from her, studiously underlining passages in something he’s reading with the very fountain pen with which in a few minutes he will sign away his soul.

The Lord--uh, Lady--of Darkness in this is Elizabeth Hurley, and the serious young man is Brendan Fraser, and what he’s reading are pages from a script. They’re taking a break on a Fox Studios sound stage set of “Bedazzled,” Harold Ramis’ remake of the 1967 absurdist twist on both Faust and the seven deadly sins, originally starring and written by Dudley Moore (as a forlorn burger flipper) and Peter Cook (a foppishly mod Devil) and directed by Stanley Donen (a long way from “Singin’ in the Rain”).

The scene they’re shooting here is early in the story, with Fraser as Elliot, a lonely klutz whose seemingly unfulfillable desire for lovely Alison (Frances O’Connor, acclaimed for her performance in “Mansfield Park”) was the nibble on the hook cast up from Hell. Soon, the seven wishes he’ll be granted for signing the “standard” contract (about 1,000 pages thick) will take him through a series of misadventures--he’ll become a South American drug lord, a 7-foot, 9-inch-tall basketball dynamo, a rock star and so on--each fraught with the dangers of his failure to be specific enough. The Devil, as they say, is in the details.

The details of this set have certainly been attended to. The oval-shaped office is sleek wood-grain and burnished steel. On the walls are a painting of Adam and Eve with the serpent, another from the familiar vision of Hades by Hieronymus Bosch. Two bowls of apples sit out looking mighty, well, tempting. Hurley is in a natty pinstriped pantsuit, while Fraser is nebbishy in a brown sleeveless sweater over a pale blue shirt and tan slacks. And on the desk, next to a cigarette box, is a caddy containing business cards that read, simply, “The Devil.”

This is a busy, modern Beelzebub with, in her own words from the script, “places to go, people to condemn to an eternity of fiery torment.”

Hard to say if this is your father’s Fallen Angel, but it’s certainly not that of Dudley Moore and the late Peter Cook. In fact, there’s very little resemblance between this movie and its titular precedent.

“I was a big fan of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore,” says Ramis, during a break in his trailer, of seeing the original “Bedazzled” in 1969. “To me they were on the cutting edge. Seeing them in that film combined two things for me. I loved British cinema, the Ealing Studios films. So I saw it when it came out and at the time it seemed so smart.”

Ramis didn’t see it again until two years ago when, coming off “Analyze This,” he was asked by longtime associate Trevor Albert if he’d be interested in a “Bedazzled” update written by Larry Gelbart (“Oh God!,” “Tootsie,” TV’s “MASH”). Seeing the film again was a vastly different experience.

“I looked at it and, God, it’s really slow,” he says. “It’s really ‘60s and very British and not always in what we’d now see as the best sense. But I guess I was stoned enough in 1969 to think leaping nuns were funny. But 30 years later we’ve seen enough British comedians in nun costumes and drag that the impact of those things diminished.”

Still, he saw enough in the raw premise to be attracted to the project, and signed on to direct and to rework the Gelbart script with writing partner Peter Tolan.

He had a distinctly Harold Ramis take on it. He’s proud of his work on “Animal House” and “Caddyshack” and “Ghostbusters”--goofy comedies with an edge which, he proudly notes, echo today in some of the work of the Farrelly brothers and Adam Sandler.

But, he notes, “Since ‘Groundhog Day’ I’ve been on a whole other tack, which someone characterized for me as ‘zany redemption comedies,’ for which I thought, ‘OK, that’s good,’ And this one is right in there. Frank Capra said a great thing at an AFI tribute. He said it was a tremendous responsibility to speak to an audience for two hours in the dark. I really believe that. To go to this much effort and [spend] this much of someone’s money, there should be some worthy purpose to this.”

And that, certainly, was in the basic story of “Bedazzled,” in which a young man, given the chance for wishes to come true, has to learn what he’s really wishing for via a series of comically disastrous attempts.

“And all of it’s in trying to solve his basic problem, which is, ‘How do I make people like me?’ ” Ramis says. “So I thought with that as the core idea, and the fact that we’re seeing so much in the press, particularly as a result of the Columbine tragedy, about the desperation of adolescents to be liked and accepted. It begs the question of what does it take for many people. ‘If only I had this, if only I was blond, had straight hair or curly hair, if I was rich and famous, if I was a great athlete.’ So that’s what we tried to do.”

Don’t get him wrong. He wasn’t looking to make heavy stuff here.

“The original was a stronger satire about religion and faith and Judeo-Christian theology than the film I’m making,” he says. “I’m not interested in theology at all. Kevin Smith did a nice job with ‘Dogma.’ This film is not about God and the Devil as religious construct. It’s really about the struggle within. I’m Buddhish. Not Buddhist. Buddhish. I feel that heaven and hell are right here on earth and it’s up to us how we live.”

*

For Hurley, who said she can’t think of any previous movie in which Satan was played by a woman, “It’s actually quite nice” to buck the convention.

Ramis says it was his wife who first posed the notion of making the Devil a woman, but Fraser probably put it most succinctly.

“Why not?” he says. “The Devil can be anything he-she-it pleases. Let’s face it, we want to get this guy’s attention. Elizabeth was entirely game--not just a good sport, but entirely embraced the quality of finding her inner demon, like, ‘How can I enjoy being as fabulous as I am today, and what outfit will I wear?’ And she really goes to work.”

Before her sultry turn in the first “Austin Powers,” she was mostly known for a series of British dramas and for modeling.

“Watching her in this film I realized no one had seen this much of Elizabeth in a movie,” says Ramis, who got a thumbs-up from both Mike Myers and Sean Penn (who worked recently with Hurley in Kathryn Bigelow’s upcoming “The Weight of Water”) before casting her. “It will be a very pleasant revelation for people.”

Though that twist gets the OK from Moore, who was not consulted about the new version (he had relinquished rights to the material years before), he is a bit concerned that the modernization of the story might result in something a little, well, “ordinary.” Hurley, who hadn’t seen the original before being offered this part, says that in England it is still a familiar part of pop culture. That’s not the case in America. In fact, calls to video stores in Los Angeles revealed that not only had clerks never even heard of a movie called “Bedazzled,” many seemed to be unaware that there was even a word “bedazzled.”

Albert, a producer of the new version, says it would be a mistake to cater to fans of the first version with the remake, even though he identifies himself as part of that audience.

“It fit perfectly into my life, taking on the church and institutions,” he says of seeing it while in college in the mid-’70s. “Our sensibilities were shaped by so many influences--from the Marx Brothers to Woody Allen to Monty Python.”

Albert started working for Ramis back in 1980 as a gofer--and a gopher. In his first job as a production assistant on “Caddyshack,” he found himself not only fetching doughnuts and coffee, but crawling beneath the set to operate the puppet of the rodent-bane of groundskeeper Bill Murray’s existence.

At the time, he recalls, either Ramis or “Caddyshack” co-writer Doug Kenney recommended to the young idealist that he see “Sullivan’s Travels,” Preston Sturges’ 1941 film in which a disillusioned director goes out among hobos and workers to find the stories of real life he believes people want to see, only to discover they really want a good laugh.

“That movie was a huge relief for me, showing that you could have a huge message and still give the audience the joy of a fabulous 90 minutes,” he says.

And though the economy today is on the other end of the scale, he sees the same possibilities in the basic tale of “Bedazzled.”

“The stock market’s doing great, it appears everyone has what they want, and yet everyone’s yearning for something,” he says. “The timing of this movie is perfect with the current state of America. There are a lot of people yearning to be rich and powerful.”

The message? Be careful what you wish for.

Fraser’s wish for “Bedazzled” was a break between two grueling projects. He’d just completed “Monkey Bone,” an effects-heavy film in which he plays an animator sucked into a cartoon nether world, and right after “Bedazzled” he would be off to Morocco for a certain-to-be-draining sequel to “The Mummy,” which established him as an action star.

“ ‘Bedazzled’ offered itself as a perfect antidote, though with some similarities to ‘Monkey Bone,’ ” he says.

But Fraser also says he simply loves working and was drawn both by the writing and the opportunity to work with Ramis.

“He never chastised the cast for fluffing anything--he found more value in letting people find who they were,” Fraser says.

More telling, he says, was Ramis’ demeanor when the camera wasn’t running.

“He tied knots,” Fraser says. “He keeps a length of rope in his bag on his chair and can whip it out and execute these knots a longshoreman would be jealous of. He knows the names and it can be a distraction, but it made sense to me. If he can do that as problem-solving, well, a director is someone who is asked to solve problems all day long.”

*

Knots on a rope, apparently, keep away knots in Ramis’ stomach.

Some people’s idea of hell is a high-pressure film production. And the heat is certainly high on this one, not just because Ramis is coming off a big hit, but because Fox has given him tight deadlines, and he’s been shooting by day and editing by night to finish in time for a release that eventually was set for Oct. 20.

With shooting resumed, Hurley’s giving her sales pitch to Fraser. But there’s something not quite right about it--at least in the mind of Ramis.

Having supervised a couple of dozen takes, Ramis now wonders aloud, “Does it seem odd to anyone that when asked what he wishes for, the first thing he says is to be rich and famous when everything was about Alison? That’s the whole reason he’s here.”

And so the script is changed, the completed takes more or less scrapped and the stars told to alter their dialogue after nailing the rhythm. It’s just the kind of thing that could cause a momentary meltdown.

But there’s no evidence of tension or concern. No frustration on the faces of the actors over the time already spent. And no steam coming out of Ramis’ ears. The only sign of pressure is Ramis calmly asking his assistant for some aspirin.

“It’s a comedy supportive environment,” says Fraser. “Harold’s always having kids around and interesting guests. We’ve had a real good time. I think by the nature of who he is it made the job a delight.”

Sounds heavenly.