One day, not long after his screenplay for ”Weekend at Bernie`s” had been transformed into a zany 1989 comedy, Robert Klane went to lunch with its producer, Victor Drai, and its director, Ted Kotcheff.
Klane likes to write novels as well as screenplays. It was his novel
”Where`s Poppa?” that took him from New York to Hollywood, where he turned it into a hilarious screenplay for the 1970 film directed by Carl Reiner.
So, as he remembers his lunch with Drai and Kotcheff, Klane prefaced a discussion of his latest idea by warning them, ”It`s going to be a book.”
”Just tell us the idea,” someone said. So he did.
”And Victor said: `No, no. It`s going to be our next movie.”`
Which explains why Klane has been spending recent months in places like Chicago, and Ft. Lauderdale and Palm Beach, Fla.
His idea has been turned into a comedy, now titled ”Folks,” starring Tom Selleck, Don Ameche and Anne Jackson, with Drai and Malcolm Harding as producers and Kotcheff, whose credits include ”The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” ”North Dallas 40” and ”First Blood,” as director.
”Where`s Poppa?” dealt with a man in the prime of life bedeviled by his aged, widowed mother, and ”Weekend at Bernie`s” dealt with two ambitious yuppies who spend a couple of days at a lovely beach house wondering what do with the body of their dead boss.
”Folks” deals with a highly successful Chicago commodities broker bedeviled by a man and a woman-his aged parents. ”I finally wrote a screenplay with both the mother and father alive, which I`ve been meaning to do,” Klane said.
”My basic idea was, what happens to someone who has a young family and then finds himself with parents who are by this time his second set of children, in terms of being able to fend for themselves?
”Whom do you have to be loyal to-your children, or your parents who are now your children?”
In ”Folks,” Selleck portrays a man who seems have the perfect life, including a lovely wife, children and dog-until he receives a late-night call from a Florida hospital about his parents, played by Ameche and Jackson.
”It`s not work you volunteer for,” Klane said of caring for aged parents. ”He would have liked to duck this whole thing, but he has no choice but to bring them home, and he discovers his father isn`t all there.”
On top of all this, Klane threw in a subplot in which the son is wrongly accused of illegal insider trading. ”The only thing worse than being sick and old in America,” he observed, ”is being sick and old and poor.”
Klane said he hopes ”Folks” will be in the theaters in the spring.
– ”I start the whole creative process with a lot of questions,” Hal Hartley said, ”and I usually wind up with a lot of questions. The questioning is important.”
Lately Hartley, the writer and director who made his debut with ”The Unbelievable Truth,” has been busy with the creative process.
His film ”Trust,” about a pregnant teenager at odds with her widowed mother, and an angry electronics genius at odds with his father, is scheduled to open soon after winning the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival and the grand prize at the 1991 Houston International Film Festival.
Hartley is in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., making a film called ”Surviving Desire” for PBS` ”American Playhouse.” He said that ”Surviving Desire”
deals with a college professor and his infatuation with a student.
At the same time, he is preparing to film ”Simple Men,” based on his screenplay about two brothers-a scholar and a small-time criminal-searching for their radical activist father, a former major-league baseball player who vanished 23 years earlier.
”It grew out of a lot of my constant preoccupations,” Hartley said of the screenplay.
”There is a traditional story form throughout history which, broadly speaking, is called the search for the father-an odyssey kind of thing where the characters try to reconcile their differences with their father.
”And a lot of the movie deals with misogyny. The older, criminal brother pledges himself for various reasons to be a terrible, misogynous man, and as things would have it, he can`t pull it off.”
In terms of his personal preoccupations, Hartley said ”Simple Men” was concerned with ”how a person`s respect for other individuals is manifested, particularly men for women.”
