People

By Guy D. Garcia

At the Old Colony Tap in Provincetown, Mass., everything looks like business as usual as the locals hunker down for a long winter of serious drinking. They hardly seem to notice a good-looking man who answers the telephone, then suddenly bolts out the door and into the street, where a white Rolls-Royce speeds away. Four times this is repeated before finally Norman Mailer says, "Print." The day's twelve hours of shooting will not wrap until 3 a.m. Such grueling conditions might test the patience of a film veteran, let alone a neophyte director making his first major motion picture. But the white- haired auteur remains focused and remarkably relaxed. Clad in a bulky parka to ward off the oceanside chill, he comes off like a cross between a Roman senator and a retired longshoreman as he hobnobs with the crew, rehearses the cast and then stands back to watch the action, his eyes twinkling. Between takes, Mailer crosses the street to another pub and peers in at noisy real- life revelers. "Look at this," he roars with proprietary delight. "That's classic Provincetown."

Mailer, 63, is in his element in more ways than one. Based on his best- selling 1984 novel, Tough Guys Don't Dance, the film is set in the autumnal gloom of the Cape Cod resort that he has frequented for years. In fact, aptly enough, the director's brick-faced home has been taken over to serve as the onscreen abode of his protagonist Tim Madden, a onetime boxer and womanizing writer who wakes up one morning with a case of alcoholic amnesia and the vague apprehension that he may have killed his wife. Due for release next fall, Tough Guys is a step up from three low-budget bombs Mailer directed during the 1960s. "They were interesting to a certain point and terribly unsuccessful past that point," concedes the full-time writer who has also dabbled in politics, prizefighting and performing. "Here I'm trying to make a professional, conventional film on its own terms." The movie boasts a $5 million budget and a cast that includes Ryan O'Neal as Madden, Isabella (Blue ; Velvet) Rossellini as his smoldering old flame and Newcomer Debra Sandlund as his estranged spouse. It is part of a two-picture deal Mailer has with Cannon films; the other part, already completed, was to write a screenplay for Jean- Luc Godard's King Lear.

The Tough Guys screenplay is also by Mailer, but while the novel took two months to write, the film took three times as long. "It was tougher than I thought it would be. Scenes that read well on the page wouldn't play well." The motivating greed that drives the plot wound up being shifted from real estate to cocaine, and some of the gorier scenes were muted. "A horror film has to be delicate or it becomes a butcher shop," explains the author. There was also a larger difference. "When you're a novelist, it's all yours and your relation to the work is husband, father, grandfather and slave all in one. A movie director is directly the opposite: you're living out in the world."

Having expected the shooting to "be seven weeks of hell," Mailer has, to his surprise, enjoyed it (and anticipates finishing it on schedule next month). "I like working with actors." And vice versa. "I think he wrote the part with me in mind," says O'Neal, who remembers boxing occasionally with his current boss. Now "he beats me up a lot worse than he ever did in the gym." Mailer is frankly hoping for a box-office success so that he can direct again. "I think I needed a vacation from writing," he observes. "Oddly enough, directing a film, because it calls on parts of myself that haven't been used in 15 years and allows the parts that have been working hardest to rest, has just been great fun. My mind feels fresher than it has in years." G.D.G.