‘MOTHER’: FROM STAGE TO FILM AND BACK AGAIN

The clock on the kitchen table--as do all the clocks in this neat frame house in rural Middle America--reads 7:05 p.m. Precisely.

“Five minutes after seven,” director Tom Moore mused recently on the movie set of “ ‘night, Mother.”

“The story starts at five minutes after six; that means we are one hour into it. On Broadway, we started it at 8:05 p.m. But this was the latest we could go and still have it light outside.”

But at the Mark Taper Forum, where “ ‘night, Mother” the play opens Thursday night, the kitchen clock is once again set at 8:05 p.m. And Moore, along with playwright Marsha Norman, is in the delicious position of taking the work from play to movie--and back to play again.

While Moore faced the unenviable, whirlybird task of rushing from Burbank during the last days of movie shooting to downtown Los Angeles to begin Taper rehearsals--from Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft in the movie to Kathy Bates and Anne Pitoniak of the original cast in the play--Norman had other deadlines to meet. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, having flown back to New York, was holed up in her apartment, putting finishing touches on her first novel.

“ ‘night, Mother” first ran at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater and went to Broadway in March, 1983--just in time, it seemed, for the Pulitzer, which it won less than three weeks later. The play caused quite a sensation--as much for the subject matter as for the award.

Early in the two-character production, as in the movie adapted by Norman, Jessie--divorced and probably agoraphobic, because she doesn’t go beyond the enclosed back porch--says matter-of-factly: “I’m going to kill myself, Mama.”

On the surface, the subject is suicide; the underlying themes, according to Norman, Moore and “ ‘night, Mother’s” other guardians, are the struggle to survive, controlling one’s own destiny, indeed life itself.

Or, as Mama notes in movie and play: “I like it here, and I will stay here until they make me go, until they drag me screaming--and I mean screeching--into my grave. . . .”

On the Burbank Studios lot, Moore, whose range of work includes the musical “Grease,” lovingly picks up the white plastic clock with its caramel face.

“I made sure to get this clock from the Broadway production. It was sentimental to me. I liked the fact that all four women handled it.”

He’ll also bring the clock to the Taper stage for opening night.

“It’s not exactly the way I would have planned this,” Moore said with an edge of sarcasm about the scheduling overlap. “ ‘ ‘night, Mother’ was originally put into the Taper schedule on the basis of us going in November, which meant the film was supposed to be finished by Christmas. We just got postponed. Anne Bancroft wasn’t available because of a carry-over from another project, then it got postponed.”

But he said the fact that Bates and Pitoniak are once more working for him has its own rewards.

“The play came to life with these two actresses. This is their baby. It kind of brings to full circle our experience together. Their work goes beyond acting. It’s almost as if we’re eavesdropping.”

In turn, despite the similarity of dialogue, movie and play are different productions. As for Spacek and Bancroft doing the movie, Moore says: “I think that’s just the circumstances of film. Some things need that kind of power, that kind of star power, and these two people are perfect for their roles. Both Anne and Sissy, they’re so loyal to the material that when a mistake is made in the dialogue it forces them to stop, even on places where I wish to God they wouldn’t. . . .”

In mid-production, “ ‘night, Mother” (an Aaron Spelling production for Universal Pictures) is all but a closed set. Bancroft walks about as if in tunnel vision, rehearsing, repeating lines to herself. Spacek is uncomfortable seeing a strange face. They are, after all, just the two of them on screen for virtually the entire movie. The intensity is palpable.

Ironically, because of the emotional wallop of Norman’s script, because of its zigzag of emotional highs and lows--and because it has only two distinct scenes--Moore decided to rehearse Spacek and Bancroft, as if in a play, for two weeks before shooting began. Then, going to film in late January, Moore shot “in absolute chronological order.”

“It’s the only way the actors have any idea where they are, so they don’t go high-high there and low-low there.”

In the transition to movie, Spacek was the catalyst. She saw “ ‘night, Mother” on Broadway New Year’s Eve, 1984; two days later, a column item appeared saying she wanted to do the movie role of Jessie with her husband, Jack Fisk, as director.

Having someone else come into the mix was the last thing wanted by co-executive producers David Lancaster and Dann Byck, who is Norman’s husband. But they said they did want Spacek.

Byck, 49, a third-generation owner and manager of a top-of-the-line fashion emporium in Louisville, Ky., who gave up the store to move to New York with his wife, and Lancaster, 33, also from Louisville, had begun negotiating for the movie on their own. They were determined to stick with Moore; moreover, they intended to retain control.

At first, Marsha Norman had no interest in turning her play into a movie.

“My attitude was, I did not know initially if the story could be told in another way, and so I did a good bit of wait and see. There was great interest in it as a film, but it was not something I set out to do. You understand about ‘ ‘night, Mother’s’ life. ‘ ‘night, Mother’ is currently playing all over the world. It’s been running in Spain, Australia, New Guinea. In New Guinea! Now a list New Guinea is on is a long list.

“Very early, we knew Sissy was interested,” she said. “And Sissy’s interest was a powerful force. People want to see movies Sissy is in.

“As we began the project . . . the difficult part was the thinking. Once I knew that what I wanted to do was approach it as a mystery, that the act itself is a mystery, then I understood how I could go about it.”

The act is a mystery?

“A suicide is a mystery,” Norman said, “for the people who remain.”

The Kentucky-born playwright appears the epitome of the sophisticate from Upper West Side Manhattan, where she and Byck live. At 38, with auburn hair and grayish eyes, Norman looks like Leslie Caron. She is a small woman with grit.

The country may be gone from her voice, a deep resonant alto, but not from her writing.

“Inevitably, I write about people that don’t have any money,” said Norman, who grew up in Louisville, eldest of four children. Her father was an insurance salesman; her mother, a fundamentalist Methodist.

She majored in philosophy on a scholarship at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., and worked as a volunteer in a pediatric burn unit in an Atlanta hospital. After marriage to her first husband, Michael Norman, who had been her English teacher, and a masters’ degree in English from the University of Louisville, she taught disturbed adolescents at Kentucky Central State Hospital. She also taught at a school for gifted children.

In “Getting Out” (1977), her first play for Jon Jory of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Norman drew upon her experiences at the state hospital. The play is about a young woman trying to piece together her life after getting out of prison.

Talking about “ ‘night, Mother’s” transition to film, Norman noted: “I made some very basic decisions. The traditional dumb question that everybody asks: ‘Did you open it up?’ Well of course, I couldn’t open this up, because Jessie doesn’t go out of the house! Now what are we going to do, go to the grocery where Jessie never is, and say, ‘Oh she doesn’t ever come here?’ No, I didn’t want to do that.

“What I decided was that I would simply go further in , so that you watch this as if you were standing between the two of them, that you are on the line the way they are. You hear it, you see it, you watch, you breathe with them.”

However, Norman and Moore do open it up a bit in the traditional sense. Instead of being confined to living room and kitchen, Jessie and Mama have the entire house to themselves as they go through the movie-length last hour and 40 minutes of Jessie’s life.

“These people move through the house like the Los Angeles freeway system,” Moore said. “They’re almost constantly in motion. . . .”

The bigger roadblock was “ ‘night, Mother’s” subject. As Moore explained: “People saying, this can’t be a movie. People saying, ‘Nobody’s interested in seeing a story about two women,’ first. Secondly, ‘Nobody’s interested in seeing something about a mother and daughter.’ Thirdly, ‘Nobody’s interested in seeing (something) about a mother and daughter where one doesn’t make it.’ ”

Asked when he decided to make “ ‘night, Mother” as a movie, David Lancaster, who had co-produced David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” and Beth Henley’s “Wake of Jamey Foster,” said flatly: “From day one.”

Byck was more cautious.

“I really didn’t think about a movie-movie, a feature film,” he said, “until I knew that there was broad appeal, that it wasn’t just the New York intellectuals.”

That didn’t happen, he said, “until three or four months into the Broadway production. . . . The Pulitzer is a reflection of a relatively small group of people, and the old gray-heads on Broadway, the supposed experts, told us that if we won it could hurt as well as help. It’s not box office like the Tony.”

Until they made an agreement with Aaron Spelling and Alan Greisman last spring, it would take nearly two years to find a backer. They went, as Lancaster noted, to “every studio, every major independent, every minor independent, every guy with six bucks in his pocket.”

Said Byck: “Most of the movie companies said, ‘Hey, this is really great. This is brilliant. We just can’t make it. We have an edict from our board saying we have to do “Ghostbusters.” ’ “

After meeting with several film companies, after hearing that Spacek was fine but Moore was not, or that both were OK, “but that everyone would have to work for minimums,” sniffed Lancaster, “we felt like they wanted to take the control away from us.”

“That ultimately got to be the major sticking point,” said Byck. “Then the process was to do the screenplay, this is the director, these are not negotiable points.”

Norman finished the screenplay in May, 1984.

Byck said: “We had the rights to it, of course. And we were firmly convinced Tom Moore was going to be the director. The most important reason was the knowledge and love he really had about the material. And Marsha didn’t want to have to work with somebody new and start from scratch.”

“We had deals that came and went,” Lancaster said. In between there was “a Beverly Hills lawyer for $200 an hour.”

“He took us for three, four hours until we fired him,” Lancaster said. “Everybody out there was telling us, ‘You better get you a lawyer.’ So we got one all right. Square in the checkbook.”

Byck and Lancaster weren’t exactly country boys, either.

“Of course, all this time we were exploring everybody else,” said Byck. “Orion, Columbia, Triumph. Before we came out here, we met with Marvin Antonowsky (president of marketing) of Universal in New York. Then we came out here and hustled it all around town.”

Finally, last May, “We got a call from Sissy’s agent at CAA (Creative Artists Agency) asking us to see Alan Greisman,” Byck said. “Alan Greisman, of course, was Aaron Spelling’s partner.”

“And Sally Field’s husband,” added Lancaster. “Sissy’s agent is also Sally’s agent.”

In the end, they made the deal for a $3-million budget with Spelling and Greisman. Universal came into the deal through Antonowsky.

The movie is scheduled for fall release: “Let (Steven) Spielberg and his boys have the summer,” said Byck.

“The act of making a play,” says Marsha Norman, “the act of creating two characters the size of these people, is as mysterious as the act of suicide, and I can’t talk about that. This is why you make plays.

“But what I have found is, there is an understanding in the story that was given to me, I don’t know from where, and my great privilege has been to pass it on.

“I have written a film that I would like to see. I’ve not written the film by other people’s standards of what makes wonderful films.

“In the theater, the point is to be as clear as you can about someone’s intent. . . . The movie begins in a much more mysterious fashion. We simply watch for a great long time while this woman . . . is doing some peculiar things. You don’t know why they’re peculiar but you just don’t do it that way. She’s doing something that probably nobody but Jessie has ever done.

“I don’t expect the film will make it perfectly clear why (the suicide),” Norman went on. “I don’t have the answer to that question. I know her better, and I know Mama better. But I think any attempt to understand such a thing is always a tribute. . . .

“We have all known people who’ve killed themselves. We have all felt destroyed. We have all felt guilty. We have all thought, ‘What could I have done?’

“I remember a friend of mine who committed suicide,” Norman said. “I remember I got this call in the middle of the night, and the next day was the most startling blue sky. I mean absolutely breathtaking.

“And I walked down Broadway in Louisville, and I thought, ‘How can Steve not be here to see this day?’

“But this is not the story of some one person I know. It’s probably much closer to the truth to say it’s me . Not in terms of being suicidal, but in fact when I set out to write two people, they are both going to be me. Mama’s absolute determination to find the reason for this is one of my characteristics. Jessie’s relentless list-making is one of my habits.”

In the transition from play to movie, Norman said, she had to “envision” things differently.

“One of the big changes was the treatment of the gun box. On stage, Jessie comes down from the attic having found Daddy’s gun in a shoe box. . . . It virtually disappears until she is ready to take it into her bedroom.”

In the movie, “you had to approach it as if it were a time bomb.”

“If you don’t want this murder to take place, you must get this weapon and destroy it. Mama knows that, and we watch Mama search for this gun. That’s pure horror-movie stuff. . . .”

Talking about Mama, Norman’s voice fairly purrs.

“I adore her. If you were saying to someone, ‘All right, who do you send into this heavyweight championship bout?’ Which is what it is, debating this question, ‘Why shouldn’t I kill myself?’

“You’d choose Mama to fight this battle? No, no, no. Yet Mama does as fine a job as it is possible to do. She thinks of everything. And what is critical about Mama is her ability to forgive herself. That’s how you know she’s going to make it. She’s going to that silly country fair again next year. And she’s going to be there dragging on that cider and Indian corn.”

“It’s just exhilarating that Kathy (Bates) and Anne (Pitoniak) will be doing the Los Angeles performance,” Norman said the other night. “It means Los Angeles will see the original cast, the people who read the play for me in my living room even before I finished writing.

“I went down to the theater to see them, and it was absolutely dazzling sitting around the (Taper rehearsal) table. I write for theater because of empty rehearsal halls, Styrofoam coffee cups and great talent . . . perfect line readings . . . around ugly little tables.”