The Gazette du lieu suivant : Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 45

John Griffin Japanese film Blaek llain portrays Hiroshima's horror and its aftermath. Page F3 i Voices Within Shelley Long stars as Moman I I i i with 18 personalities because of mental and physical abuse. Page F2 Packing it in Newhart and friends at the Stratford Inn pack their bags after eight great seasons. Pags F2 7 MONTREAL, SUNDAY, MAY 20, 1990 tl- wi 1 SECTION Robin Williams plays Joey 'a man with problems masked by strutting, likeable but aschmuck' tes'ir-rs' ftfeir A running around lost, dealing with all these women because he can't deal with intimacy." has emotional consequences. He's basically heem.

All right you can zit down. You won't have to eat standing up any he mugged in a French accent. If Joey O'Brien is the Cadillac of car salesmen, Williams is the Caddie of Co-: medians. This man can captivate an audience, be it an international gathering of world-weary press or a movie crew. According to New York columnist Liz Smith, the popularity contest from cast and crew of the movie Awakenings, which he just finished with Robert De Niro, goes like this: For Williams a tally of 100 plus per cent as a nice guy; for De Niro 100 minus per cent as a grumpy, unfriendly, difficult actor.

Awakenings, directed by Penny Mar-, shall, is based on neurologist Dr. Oliver Sack's 1987 novel about a 1920s sleeping-sickness epidemic and the medical breakthrough allowing dozens of victims to be awakened three decades later. "Sacks is a wonderful cross between Albert Schweitzer and Arnold Schwarzenegger," said Williams, who plays the Sacks character, and De Niro his patient. The cast and crew on Cadillac Man rate Williams right up there, too. The movie was shot in Queens in July, with raging temperatures of up to 100 degrees.

Williams kept his cool. "Robin is a cheerleader constantly," said Charles Rouen, the movie's producer. "He makes it a lot of fun to be working with him. He was always there for us if we were down (shooting) the rain was always a problem. He was telling jokes, singing, dancing around." Pamela Reed, who plays Tina, Joey's ex-wife in the fast lane, even thinks Williams is sexy.

"What's sexy is a guy who has a big, big heart, and Robin is just so kind. He's a really lovely man a real gentleman." Okay, she admitted, he may be off the wall, but "no one in this company will have a book on mental health coming out." What made Williams' job easier, he said, was the similarity between the job of selling comedy and selling cars. "It's the same basic motivation survival. And 'please like When I talked causes few Holds Barred, The Cellar It's Your Worst Nightmare and now Bethune. Kares understands that a film about a Canadian communist-sympathizer does not sound like a winner.

To make matters worse, the rights to the home video of the film have already been allocated. Bethune was one of the most complex films ever financed in Canada. It was a Canada-France-China co-production, which meant each country kicked in cash andor services. In return, each country got exclusive rights to the revenues from sales of the film in a certain area. Filmline, as the major investor in the $18-million picture, reta'ned the rights to revenues from sale to theatres and video in North America.

They're trying to make a deal now with a U.S. distributor. China kept the video rights to its own country and East Bloc countries. And the French producers have the video rights to most of western Europe. Whatever wasn't held by the producers was sold to RCA Columbia last year, sight unseen.

All this means that whoever buys theatrical rights to Bethune has to make their Robin Williams as Joey: "Joey's promiscuity RITA ZEKAS TORONTO STAR OS ANGELES In true Holly wood fashion, Robin Williams had just finished taping the early morning Today show and it was well past cocktail hour. He'd been doing interviews all day for his new Cadillac Man, which opened Friday, and still was fresh and funny, all stand-up and go. Bearded, in gold shirt, he looked just as he did playing a Russian defector in Moscow on the Hudson. Quite fittingly, he was talking with a Russian accent. "Lithuanian government now situated in Berkeley," he cracked.

"We have released Spike Lee's movie in Moscow, it's called Do The White Thing." In Cadillac Man, he plays car salesman Joey O'Brien, so driven, so desperate, he's funny. Joey is overdrawn in the emotional and fiscal bank, overextended in relationships with two different mistresses and his ex-wife, daughter and smothering mother. He's in danger of losing his job, then his life, when one hot afternoon a jealous husband, played by Tim Robbins, threatens to mow down the entire sales force with an AK-47, convinced that his wife, the firm's secretary, is having an affair with one of the salesmen. Everyone in the showroom, staff and customers alike, is taken hostage. Call it Dog Day Afternoon Lite.

In fact, they'd originally considered Al Pacino, who starred in Dog Day Afternoon, for the role. There's even a dog in the movie, a cranky pomeranian named Chester, who makes Joey's life miserable every time he romances their mutual mistress, Joy. This little bundle of yappiness actually belongs to Fran Drescher, the actress who portrays Joy. Williams is hot worldwide. Dead Poets Society, for which he was nominated for a best actor Oscar, is even the rave of toute la France.

"I think the mailer campaign was good," Williams joked. "Sending out the nude photos helped. Now maybe I can get a table at that one restaurant in Paris. 'Oh, it's known for its film festival, now in its 43rd year. But what this city on the Mediterranean really lies down and rolls over for is the 30th Marchd International du Film, the world's biggest market for the buying and selling of movies.

Thousands of movies are hawked from one end of the town to the other. In this circus of 1 5,000 buyers and sellers, journalists and technicians, gawkers and groupies, Bethune finally hit the screen, and barely a soul noticed. After all, in an era of China-bashing and glasnost, a film about a Canadian communist serving Mao Tse-Tung's army docs not stir the imagination quite as much as the legions who bathe nearly nude on the beach or stalk the boulevard in tight white Span-dex. But Bethune is here to be sold, and charged with that responsibility is L.A.-bascd Filmstar. ilmstar, run by president Paul Karcs and vice-president Sudy Coy, is a "rep house." It sells films to international distributors.

The company offers an eclectic selection, including Hulk Ilogan's No fc- A "I grew up in Detroit, it's like piston envy. Fast cars, women or fast women in slow cars if you don't have a big budget. "Joey's promiscuity has emotional consequences. He's basically running around lost, dealing with all these women because he can't deal with intimacy. It's a difficult thing when you find you're going to be playing what could be perceived as a sleazy character.

This guy has a lot of problems masked with a lot of strutting, because behind it is a very scared man. "For me it was interesting to keep both of those in, Joey has to be likeable but he's also a schmuck. "But in that interaction with Tim, he sees someone who's much worse off than he is and sees the consequences of that, something wises him up." In Tim Robbins, Williams said he found a kindred kibitzer. "We were a brotherhood of the bozos. I'd go and work with him again in a second.

We used to improvise a lot to keep the energy going." It was Williams's legendary improvisa-tional humor that earned him his first Oscar nomination, for Good Morning, Viet Nam. Cadillac director Donaldson said he kept getting asked about what he did to control Williams. "He has the reputation of running around the set and ad libbing. No. He knows his lines.

We pinned them down once we were shooting to do the take. Before shooting I'd say, 'OK, it's open to ad And Tim and Robin pulled out all the stops." So let's address Williams's improvisa-; tional fight scene with De Niro on A wakenings, the one in which he broke De Niro's nose. "It was an accident, we were supposed to do this thing where we were struggling. I was trying to restrain him by pinning his arms to his side and he pulled one arm up abruptly and my elbow hit his nose. "Actually, I talked to his plastic surgeon who said I even put his nose back into place.

It looks WASPish now." to all these car salesmen they said the one thing you do is sell yourself first. "Oops, my ride's here," he interjected mid-analogy as a police siren went off outside. When did Williams first suspect he was funny? "When I flunked out of political science. I was a closet comedian, I was absorbing, watching things like Jonathan Winters and Peter Sellers movies. It all came flying out in the first year of college when I went to this improv class.

I had a blast but then I failed all my political science courses." Williams was born in Chicago, where, ironically, his father was an auto-industry executive. "He drove a new Lincoln Continental every month. When he came home one day with a station wagon, we knew he'd quit his job." They moved to San Francisco's Marin County when he was in high school, where he was an undefeated member of the wrestling team, a skill he used in The World According to Garp. He studied under the late John Houseman at New York's prestigious Juilliard School, relocating to Los Angeles in 1976 where he became a fixture at the Comedy Store. Spotted there by agents, he invaded the small screen first as Mork from Ork in Mork Mindy, making "nanu nanu" the "cowabunga" of the late '70s.

He made his movie debut in Robert Altman's Popeye. Williams gets lots of offers. He was reading six scripts the weekend Cadillac's director Roger Donaldson approached him. He chose this vehicle because he liked the whole package. "The characters, not just my character, but the others.

I laughed out loud when I read it on the plane. I think the stewardess thought I was quite crazy: 'Something's wrong, he's "I found it very interesting that it was sad in many ways. Joey's character was like Loman lite, that he has these not exactly tragic elements, but elements bordering on pathetic in terms of what he's got in life. He's living this typical American male fantasy women and cars. World premiere of Bethune ripples at Cannes festival he's prepared for extraordinary measures.

Coy will hold special screenings in London for buyers from territories not sold here. If need be, she'll jump on a plane to the Far East to screen Bethune for buyers there. After theatrical rights are sold, Kares will work on the TV rights because Bethune was also made into a four-hour mini-series. But why would a L.A. agent invest so-much in a Canadian film? "From a commercial point of view, we're not fools," Kares says.

"It shows we're interested in films of a certain calibre. Not every independent distributor has to sell chainsaw massacres." But outside, where the yachts reflect the seemingly eternal sunshine and the photographers close in on the oiled flesh on the beach, Bethune is pretty much ignored. Clermont, after fighting premature ru- mors of the film's demise for three years. tales of rebellious film crews, cost overruns, sniping film press and quarrelling cast members, isn't worried. "As one of the Italian distributors told us." he says, "we will have the last' laugh." DAVID SHERMAN SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE ANNES The long-awaited and much maligned Canadian film Bethune: The Making of a Hero finally premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last week.

But as befits this plagued production from Montreal's Filmline International, it wasn't finished in time to be entered into competition at the festival. Its producer, Nicolas Clermont, got his hands on the finished print "10 minutes before he got on the plane to Cannes," says his partner, Pietcr Krooncnburg. Instead the film had to settle for two little-publicized screenings for about 250 distributors, curious Canadians and members of the cast. Most journalists were barred. Without the spotlight of the competition, in the pandemonium of celebrity, sex and money that accompanies Cannes, the screening of the most expensive Canadian movie of'all time caused not a ripple.

Cannes, which ends tomorrow, is best money back from ticket sales and cannot rely on the long-term revenues that video sales and rentals usually bring. Besides paying for the rights to screen Bethune in their countries, distributors have to invest in the cost of copies of the film or prints and advertising. In the trade it's called simply for prints and ads. "Most theatrical distributors rely on video to fall back on in case of a shortfall or to help in says Kares. "Bethune is rather unique.

We can't sell this film the same way we sell every other picture." As a show of faith in Bethune, Kares is pulling almost $2 million Canadian out of his own pockets to subsidize buyers' costs. It's almost unprecedented, but it may be the only way Kares can get the distributors of the world to bite. "This is a 'high forehead' (intelligent) picture," says Karcs. "It needs special handling, key theatres and spending of a considerable amount of money in promotion." Kares is convinced by the time the market shuts down today, the world rights to theatres will be sold. But if not, he says, 1.