Daily News from New York, New York • 249

CITRAT A CITRAT A 34 DAILY NEWS Wednesday, October 14, 1987 Movies HARD TIMES When Hollywood goes behind bars in life in on-screen 1 prisons will be grittier than you've ever seen before By LORENZO CARCATERRA T'S ABOUT TIME. DAYS shedding off a corner calender, young men turning old, hard muscle gone soft, overhead sky always dark with clouds. Angry voices fill halls during daylight hours, soft moans of pleasure and pain rock the night. They're called the walking dead. Captured criminals caged inside a concrete den of thieves.

Jailbirds. Convicts. Master killers of time. "Basically, not the kind of gentlemen you would like to see with an arm draped around your daughter's shoulders," Nick Nolte says. "Not before they get in and usually not after they've come On Friday, "Weeds," starring Nolte, William Forsythe, Joe Mantegna, Ernie Hudson and J.J.

Johnson, opens. It is a film about convicts. In this case, a losers band given new life as an acting troupe. It is the latest, and, if advanced whispers can be believed, one of the best attempts by Hollywood to bring the feel and smell of a prison cell to your local theater. "You think of films set in prison and you always end up thinking about Cagney, Eddie G.

and Bogart," Forsythe says. "You never really had much of an idea what went on in those prisons. Usually, you MAMA'S BOY: James Cagney and Edmond O'Brien in "White Heat" stayed just long enough for Cagney to plot his escape or get the chair." In "Angels With Dirty Faces" (1938), James Cagney stopped in for a hot meal and 2,000 volts. In "White Heat" (1949) he sat pat until he got wind Ma died and had the getaway car gassed. In "Each Dawn I Die" (1939) he was a framed reporter forced to do time.

None of these films, PASTS IMPERFECT ECT did real EAN time. thing PENN He hardly didn't. LIKES talk TO Men about who THINK it. do When the HE they do, they call it college. The following are four actors who finished college before starting screen careers: I Richard Foronjy: Spent nearly eight years in a couple of upstate holes, including Dannemora.

In prison, learned two trades- butcher and actor. Sidney Lumet cast him in his first film, "Serpico." Since then, he has worked steadily in both movies Gambler," "Once Upon a Time in America," "Prince of the and television St. Blues," "Taxi" and the Serpico series). He is currently at work on a commissioned screen play about his early life. Johnson: Did 18 months in prison for drug-related offenses.

Was spotted by "Weeds" director John Hancock at Rahway 202 THE PLAY'S THE THING: Nick Nolt freedom; "The Longest Yard" (1974) allowed Burt Reynolds and fellow convicts a chance to beat back the guards with a not-so-friendly game of football. great as they were, offered films have become as hard even the slightest glimpse edged as a three-time loser. into the darkened echoes be- "Brubaker (1980) had Robert hind prison walls. Redford as an idealistic warBack then, they used soft den out to revamp a corroded tones to deliver a message. system; "Bad Boys" (1983) The screams and shrieks of threw Sean Penn into a juveCagney, seconds before the nile correctional institution executioner's twitch, were with the expected deadly rethought to be enough to chill sults; "Escape From Alcathe bone of any criminally- traz' (1979) saw Clint minded audience member.

Eastwood break back and In recent years, prison bone as he chiseled toward State Prison, performing with The Families, a traveling troop of ex-cons turned actors. Hancock cast him in "Weeds," as Lazarus, a member of Nick Nolte's acting company. "I quickly found that I got higher on acting than I did on drugs," Johnson says. I Charles MacGregor: Heavyweight time. Served 28 years in a number of state prisons for a couple of murders.

Has acted in films: "Blazing Saddles," "Super Fly," "The French Connection." Wrote a book, "Up from the Walking Dead," about his prison life. Active in community and ex-con organizations. I Miguel Pinero: His play, "Short Eyes," was based on his drug-related prison experience. Has done well both as an actor Apache: The Bronx," "Short Eyes') and writer Still has occasional runins with the law. Lorenzo Carcaterra NTO THAT CROWDED prison yard comes "Weeds," written by director John Hancock and his wife, Dorothy Tristan.

A large portion of the movie was filmed at the Stateville Penitentiary in Joliet, Ill. Many of the men seen as guards in the film are actual convicts working off double-decade sentences. Daniel Hernandez, one of those convicts, called the casting "a cool change of pace." Mike Nolan, another guard for a day, calls it "a tension-breaker." Director Hancock calls it "realistic. I wanted the riot scene to be as real as any ever put to film. Mixing real convicts in with real guards inside the walls of a real prison has made it that.

These guys seemed to like hitting each other." "Weeds," unlike many of the earlier prison-set films, attempts to break down the day-to-day monotony of longtime cell life. It parts company with those hard-faced films of the '30s and '40s which failed to give any indication of what the world looked like inside these closed chambers. Prison is the violent domain of men the rest of the country would just as soon forget existed. A film like "Weeds" reminds that they are there. That they will always be there.

"It was very easy to forget who these men were and why they were locked up behind bars," says Forsythe. "There was a guy walking in the yard Miguel Pinero.