Still Lucky Jim?

By RICHARD CORLISS

Jim Brooks doesn't want to let go of people. Especially the people he creates. As TV's most admired comedy writer-producer-impresario, he has lived intimately with such enduring characters as Mary Tyler Moore's Mary Richards, the Taxi drivers and all the Simpsons. For years on end, he has stage-managed the human crises, triumphs, compromises that keep the best sitcoms fresh and true.

As a feature-film maker, Brooks is just as determined to hold on to his people. Terms of Endearment -- his first film as writer-director, which in 1984 earned him three Oscars, including one for Best Picture -- begins with the birth of the Debra Winger character and ends after her death. Broadcast News, his delicately furious 1987 comedy about network infotainment, opens when the star newsfolk are kids and ends seven years after the climax. His ultimate film would be the life story of everyone on this planet -- painful emotional reality, but with great jokes. As a writer and a guy, he can imagine nothing worse than abandonment. "Until recently," he observes, "just saying that word made my legs shake. And even now they're not so steady."

That he can stand without crutches today is a minor miracle because, at 53, James L. Brooks has endured his harshest professional challenge. Last August, after three years of work, he had the first test screening of I'll Do Anything, his Hollywood father-daughter story with musical numbers written by Prince, Carole King and Sinead O'Connor and with choreography by Twyla Tharp. It's tough enough under the best of circumstances for the fretful filmmaker to let go of his babies and present them to audiences. But this time Brooks saw his anxiety justified. Audience response was calamitous: 100 people walked out, and opinion cards showed they hated the songs.

So Brooks took his movie project back to the editing-room body shop in hopes of saving the chassis, while Hollywood and the press looked on like rubberneckers at a freeway crash. Release of I'll Do Anything, planned as Columbia Pictures' big Christmas movie, was delayed two months to allow for reshooting. When the film opens next week, only a fragment of one song will remain.

Virtually every movie is reshaped during editing, but has any musical ever had its songs removed after the picture was shot? The surgery threatened to upset the delicate texture of the story, the balance of personalities, that Brooks always seeks. "The ripple effect drove me crazy," he says. "You spit in the water and cause a tidal wave." And few films have been so avidly, publicly scrutinized while its director was trying to fix things. "It's antithetical to everything you need to do your job," Brooks says. "There's a time when you gotta close the door."

Close it and hope people don't remember I'll Do Anything as the last action musical. "Jim was trying something very interesting," says actor-writer- director Albert Brooks (no kin), who plays a Hollywood mogul in the film. "But that doesn't mean that if it didn't work, the project doesn't work. After all, every single thing in our lives was something else before we got to it. Would you like to stand in a restaurant and watch them cook your meal? If you saw the Mona Lisa three weeks into it . . ." He pauses. "Actually, the Mona Lisa didn't look that great when it was completed."

All right then, let's take Albert Brooks at his word and not mince superlatives. I'll Do Anything is better than the Mona Lisa. It's also pretty darned fine as a movie, though it takes a while to find its pace and tone. You won't miss the songs; this is not the husk of a musical. It is a lovely, wayward comedy in high Jim Brooks style, with all his pinwheeling wit and edgy ruminations. Who needs production numbers? I'll Do Anything still sings.

Brooks has plenty to sing about. His wife Holly, their three young children and their Brentwood home were relatively unscathed by last Monday's earthquake. His Anything ordeal is over. His new cartoon series The Critic -- created by Simpsons swamis Al Jean and Mike Reiss -- premieres on ABC this week, preceded by reviewers' raves. The show, with its post-Woody Allenish wit and deft movie parodies, looks like a winner.

But Brooks is less likely to sing than sigh. Just ask Polly Platt, executive vice president at Brooks' Gracie Films (which also produced Say Anything and The War of the Roses). "If I'll Do Anything fails," she says, "Jim will be unhappy for a month. If it succeeds, he will be unhappy for a year." So maybe it is not the best news to hear Brooks say, "I'm beginning to feel like myself. I'm seeing that there is a self -- that I'm a person who does exist, a step away from the movie." And does he, finally, like the movie? "I do," he says, and sighs again. "I think everything in it is really wanting to be truthful."

In truth there is pain; in pain there is laughter. That might be Brooks' motto, in comedy and life. Brooklyn-born, New Jersey-bred, Jim was a lonely child whose father had left home. "In I'll Do Anything," says Platt, "I think he is unconsciously, or consciously, investigating what might have happened to him had his father not left, if he had not been raised by his mother and sister." After New York University, he worked for CBS as a newswriter, then in 1966 moved to Los Angeles to make TV documentaries. Three years later, he created the series Room 222, produced by Allan Burns. It was a hit, and the two left to hatch a show for Mary Tyler Moore. That series changed TV comedy for the better -- maybe as good as it would ever get.

Brooks' colleagues on MTM, Taxi, The Associates, The Tracey Ullman Show and the ever glorious Simpsons speak in awe of his knack for sitcom storymaking. "He'll jump out of his chair," says Reiss, "and start spilling out a story as if he's recounting something he's already seen. But he's making it up on the spot. He'll pitch the whole story, the turns it takes; the jokes are there, and it'll have a sweet ending. Once we started to tell him a Simpsons story line: Homer has to work at the Kwik-E Mart for Apu. Jim goes, 'Oh, great. And Apu will say, "There are only two phrases you have to know, I assure you: 'That is the full-size box of corn flakes' and 'Shoot if you must, I don't know the combination to the safe.' " ' I think he writes comedy the way they portray Mozart writing music in Amadeus. It just spills out of him, fully formed."

And when Brooks was hot, the spillage could scald people. "He would spew whole runs of dialogue and scenes," recalls David Lloyd, the brilliant comic dramatist who provided many of the best Mary Tyler Moore scripts, "and expect somebody to have taken it down. And if people lost the key words, he'd glower murderously at them. More than one secretary was reduced to tears." Brooks could find script ideas anywhere, as Lloyd recalls from the days of the MTM spin-off Lou Grant: "We were at a story conference, and I didn't have an idea in the world. Jim proceded to pitch to me an incident involving surgery I had had for a thyroid cancer. I wrote it, and I thought: I even need Jim Brooks to dredge up material from my own life."

Brooks' feature films are utterly personal. He writes them alone, he draws characters from his own drives and insecurities, he creates stories for himself that he hopes audiences will like. The films are intimate sagas, chamber epics, where a life and a movie can pirouette on the subtlest default of principle.

The hero of I'll Do Anything is Matt Hobbs (Nick Nolte), a gentle character actor in a career dry spell. Matt must suddenly start raising his troubled six-year-old daughter Jeannie (Whittni Wright), whom he has not seen in two years. He juggles his awkward responsibilities to Jeannie with his new interest in a junior executive (Joely Richardson) at a production company run by a blustery mogul (Albert Brooks), who is attracted to a truth-telling market researcher (Julie Kavner). Will Matt win the big role? Will the love teams stay united? Will the child, in a plot twist that echoes Broadcast News, be able to cry on camera?

However "inside" this sounds, the film's people are complex, attractive and familiar; they could be working at the next desk or sleeping on the next pillow. They can be loved and can betray almost simultaneously. Matt can be both timid ("I'm actually afraid of my own kid") and, when defending his craft against a studio creep, vindictive ("You know nothing but how to pose for this little picture of you that nobody is snapping"). The insecure mogul somehow appeals to the sensitive researcher ("I think it's so wonderful that you don't worry about even trying to act strong"). All are trying to raise their moral sights in a business in which they must also toil to perfect the kind of personality they have to apologize for having.

In his early TV days, Brooks was famous for being able to suggest to actors some bit of business that could save a scene or a show. In I'll Do Anything, he gets spot-on performances -- especially from Nolte, who displays all the intensity that somebody who wants to think of himself as a nice guy dares to show, and Richardson, whose gorgeous, frazzled perkiness suggests a cheerleader on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The great turn, through, is from Wright, who plays a tough, often sullen kid -- precariously poised between acting and acting up. On location, setting up a shot where the five- year-old wore a coat, Brooks told her, "This is a magic coat, Whittni. There's great acting in it." And he was right.

The crucial word for Brooks, in I'll Do Anything and his other work, is decency; it defines the goal and the pain of most of those smart, middle-class folks he writes about from the inside. "Every character is struggling toward decency," says Brooks, "except for Matt, who is struggling to stay decent. That's a hard road for a lot of us in Hollywood. And not just out here, I would imagine. This is a tough time to be absolutely certain about moral truths. We have to be careful about what makes us feel good about ourselves. Saying 'Good morning. How are you?' should not make us feel good about ourselves. Out here you can feel self-righteous simply by being an O.K. person, because you stand in stark contrast to things around you. But it's not enough."

Surely not. And it's not enough for Brooks to give more pleasure to people than he seems to give himself. But let him suffer for us, so long as he creates characters neither he nor we ever want to let go.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland and William Tynan/ New York