Now Playing on Cassette

By RICHARD ZOGLIN.

In the cold reckoning of Hollywood's moneymen, The Cotton Club was one of last Christmas' turkeys. Despite its lavish production, a big-name director (Francis Coppola) and star (Richard Gere) and huge advance publicity, the $47 million show-biz epic was squeezed out in the scramble for holiday audiences by such hits as Beverly Hills Cop and The Flamingo Kid.

The crowds are lining up for The Cotton Club at last: not at movie theaters this time but at video shops across the country. Since its debut on cassette in April, only four months after opening in theaters across the country, 150,000 copies of The Cotton Club have been sold to retail outlets (which rent and sell them, in turn, to consumers). The movie has spent 16 weeks on Billboard's chart of the top video rentals, four of them in the No. 2 slot.

The Cotton Club is just one of a growing number of Hollywood films that are packing them in at the video stores after playing to empty seats at the Bijou. Crimes of Passion, Ken Russell's flamboyantly seedy sex drama, was a flop at the box office last October, but has earned nearly $3.6 million in cassette sales thus far. Dune, a big-budget bomb last Christmas, has made $7.5 million in sales to video stores and has been on Billboard's Top 40 chart for 13 weeks. Even the most famous box-office fiasco of all, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, has made $3 million in home video, twice as much as it earned in two abortive theatrical releases.

Home video's hit parade, of course, is not made up solely of theatrical clinkers. Big box-office winners nearly always repeat their success when they appear on cassette (usually four to six months after their theatrical debut). Current video chart-toppers, for example, include such 1984 hits as The Terminator and The Karate Kid. But well-publicized box-office disappointments often do nearly as well as the blockbusters. "Sometimes the best video title is a movie that has run in a number of theaters but had a mediocre response," says Reg Childs, president of distribution for Embassy Home Entertainment. "There are more people who have heard of it but haven't seen it."

An occasional moviegoer, in addition, is more likely to take a chance on a marginal film if it means simply plunking down $2 or $3 to rent a cassette. "It's much easier to rent a movie you're not sure about and turn it off if you don't like it," says Amy Misner, 33, who regularly picks up cassettes for her family in Atlanta. "It takes a little more resolve to walk out on a movie when you've spent $16 for four people." Renting tapes, however, also takes resolve. The lines at the cash register on Friday and Saturday nights have become almost as oppressive as those at the local fourplex. Some newer video stores, like New York City's Cine Club Video, are trying to expedite matters by charging one hefty monthly fee in return for virtually unlimited rentals.

The crowds flocking to video stores represent an important new source of income for Hollywood. Home-video revenues only slightly offset the deficits of big-budget extravaganzas like The Cotton Club and Dune. But smaller films can go a long way toward recouping their costs with cassette sales. "The producer can anticipate a profit even without a theatrical success and, in some cases, without a theatrical release," says Jon Peisinger, president of Vestron Video. "More movies today are created simply on the basis of potential revenues from home video." Vestron was the distributor of The Warrior and the Sorceress, for example, a low-budget action epic starring David Carradine, which had only a brief theatrical run in a few cities, but has sold more than 50,000 cassettes.

Home video has also been a boon for some small films that did well with critics but badly at the box office. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, a sci- fi comedy that got sympathetic reviews but few theater customers, has gone platinum on cassette (100,000 units sold). Cross Creek, a well-reviewed drama about Novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, surpassed its theatrical revenues with $1.5 million in home-video sales. A few films, like Crimes of Passion, have been re-edited for home video to restore racy or violent footage cut for the theatrical release. Some VCR owners actually prefer watching offbeat or "difficult" films on video rather than at the theater. Dianne Ghertner, of Oak Park, Ill., says she prefers to see most movies on the big screen, but enjoyed Louis Malle's critically acclaimed My Dinner with Andre at home because she could digest the two-character talkathon in small doses.

Indeed, watching movies on cassette has become, if not an entirely new form of entertainment experience, at least an interesting hybrid. Like a TV show, a movie cassette must compete with household distractions: dinner, phone calls, children running through the den. Like a book, it can be picked up and put down at will, the good parts repeated--or given up entirely if boredom sets in. George Baxt, a New York City mystery writer who rents up to five movies a day, is typical of the new breed of freewheeling video experimenters. "If it's lousy," he says, "I just do a fast forward and say goodbye."

With reporting by Cathy Booth/New York and Melissa Ludtke/Los Angeles