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Not that Gibson feels like being touched right now. ''Everything is screwed up with the outsides and the insides,'' the convalescent actor says of the snowstorms and the surgery for acute appendicitis that landed him in Cornell Medical Center in the middle of the night. ''The schedule's gone to hell.'' But much to Gibson's delight, it's not his problem. ''I love lying back and watching Ron on his rat wheel, throwing little pieces of cheese at him while he's in agony,'' he says. For the first time in his career, Gibson isn't even attending dailies. ''I'm too tired,'' he says.

''If Mel thought I was a moron, then he would be frustrated,'' Howard says, as he stands outside watching crew members paint rust stains onto the kidnappers' van. ''But he doesn't, and I'm fairly confident in saying I don't think I am. Although every day you do have your moronic moments. The scariest part is wondering if you know what the hell you're doing. That's always what's exhilarating about the job, the fact that every day you have any number of opportunities to totally screw up and destroy everything.''

Mel Gibson wasn't the first actor considered for the role in Ransom: That honor went to Glenn Ford in 1956, when he costarred with Donna Reed and Leslie Nielsen in the obscure original version of the film. In October 1994, Touchstone president Donald DeLine approached screenwriter Richard Price (Clockers) with an updated draft of Ransom by Alexander Ignon (Gibson had already read the script--''a stinker,'' he now says--and passed). Price agreed to sign on for a two-week rewrite, and producer Rudin decided to go ahead with the project. Rudin liked the premise but thought the kidnappers were too sketchy and Tom Mullen was too wholesome (''He was Captain America,'' Gibson says).

At about the same time Rudin was reading Ransom, Grazer, Howard's Imagine Entertainment partner, was considering the project as well. ''Some little peewee in our company got the script and really liked it,'' Grazer says. ''I called [chairman of Disney's Motion Picture Group] Joe Roth and said, 'You own it, what's the status?''' According to Grazer, Roth didn't think Howard would go for such a depressing topic. ''But I knew that he was interested in the subject matter,'' Grazer says, ''that he has this ambition to make dark, repressed [movies].''

Price had already finished the rewrite, but then, he remembers, ''Scott [Rudin] came in and said, 'I have some thoughts,' so I was hired to rewrite again. After that draft, Ron Howard came on and said, 'I really like this, but can we get Richard back?' and I was brought in a third time. Two weeks turned into two years.'' At issue was how to turn two parents' grief and terror into a plotline, and how to make the characters more than perfect parents wronged by kidnappers. As Gibson says now, ''it must have driven Richard f---ing crazy.''

And it wasn't close to being over; after Price was done making Howard, Grazer, and Rudin happy, in came Gibson. ''The premise was fantastic,'' Gibson recalls in his trailer, straddling a chair and rubbing his chin along the top of it. ''The fact that the guy doesn't want to pay the ransom--that's intriguing. But how do you get to the point [where he cracks]? The man is crazy.'' Gibson was impressed enough by Price's third rewrite, which made Mullen's character morally ambiguous, that ''I went for the risk, but I thought I'd better [be involved with] this development. Without a doubt, it was the most productive period of script development I've ever spent.''


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