Mel Gibson revives comic western ''Maverick''

A lit cigarette bobbing between his lips, Mel Gibson is running lines with costar Graham Greene on the Maverick location—a valley in central California's Yosemite National Park—when a rumor starts to spread across the set like wildfire: Mel's house in Malibu is burning down.

It's a lie. On this late-October morning, the blazes fueled by the Santa Ana winds are actually raging in Laguna Beach, 80 miles from his home.

Director Richard Donner hands Gibson a message from an Australian journalist inquiring about the story. ''Tell him it's true,'' Gibson says firmly. ''And I was killed trying to save my wife and baby.''

''Tell him I was too,'' Greene chimes in.

''I'd love to set these people up,'' says Gibson, who has been burned by the tabloids down under before. But as he grabs a walkie-talkie to speak to Maverick's unit publicist, Gibson changes his mind. ''I was gonna tell you to plant some real dodgy information,'' he says. ''But it's not a good idea.''

Whether Gibson's idea to revive the 1957-62 ABC Western Maverickon the big screen is a good one won't be known until the movie, which cost a reported $40 million, opens on May 20 in more than 2,000 theaters. Gibson takes over for James Garner as Bret Maverick, a wisecracking poker ace and reluctant gunslinger on the late-19th-century frontier. Garner, who decades ago successfully sued Warner Bros. to get out of his Maverick contract, costars as upright lawman Zane Cooper. And no less an actress than two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster, in her first adult comedy role, plays Annabelle Bransford, the con woman who comes between them.

While some old television programs, like The Fugitive, have been transformed into recent box office smashes, the formula isn't foolproof (anyone remember Car 54, Where Are You?). And in the 32 years since Maverick left network television, it hasn't been widely syndicated. The star power of Gibson and Foster should help attract audiences unfamiliar with the series, though the combination of the easygoing Macho Man and the intense Serious Actress seems an unlikely one-and neither is known for broad-as-a- barn-door Western comedies.

On paper, Maverick may seem like an odd mix of elements-but that didn't stop Gibson from throwing the dice. ''The film business is a gamble,'' he says. ''You set yourself up for a really big tumble.''

Gibson became interested in Maverick in 1991 after his deal to costar with Julia Roberts in the Western drama Renegades fell apart. He and his producing partner, Bruce Davey (Forever Young), hired veteran screenwriter William Goldman (All the President's Men, Misery), then took his script to Donner, who | had directed Gibson in all three hugely successful Lethal Weapon movies.

Goldman tailored Bret Maverick to Gibson's roguish persona. But he wrote Cooper (described in the script as ''just an incredible-looking man raw-boned, blue-eyed'') with Paul Newman in mind, envisioning a '90s version of his own cowboy classic, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Gibson in the Robert Redford role. When Newman decided to do Robert Benton's Nobody's Fool instead, Garner stepped in, much to Donner's delight. ''Mel and I love to improvise, and I know Paul Newman is very rigid-you shoot the script,'' the director says. ''If we had cast somebody rigid in this, we would've been against the wall.''

Garner was more than happy to join Donner and Gibson in treating Goldman's script as nothing more than an outline. ''Dick just throws it all in, then gets out his scissors, and it just comes out great,'' he says.

For the female lead, Donner thought he'd lined up Meg Ryan, but she dropped out about two weeks before production was to begin, saying she wanted to spend time with her husband, Dennis Quaid, and child. In jumped Jodie Foster, an actress not accustomed to quick decisions. ''I agonize over everything I do,'' Foster admits. ''But this thing came along on, say, a Thursday afternoon, and I said yes by Friday morning. And I was in costume fittings on Sunday.''

Foster had been looking for a comedy since completing the romantic drama Sommersby in 1992. ''I hadn't worked in a long time, and I was a tiny bit on the depressed side,'' she says. ''I needed to be light.'' The anarchic tone of the Maverick set perked Foster up immediately. ''With Donner, you get the feeling it's just haphazard, but he knows what he's doing better than anybody I've ever worked with,'' she says.