Fall Movie Preview: September 1993

Now that the last blasts from the barrage of summer action flicks are quieting down, it's time to anticipate the joys of Hollywood's nonsilly season — the fall, when movies come to their senses and get good and serious about nabbing Oscars. Funny boy Macaulay Culkin explores his dark side, while funnyman Tom Hanks and fantasy maestro Steven Spielberg try their hands at tragedy. Emma Thompson rejoins Anthony Hopkins in another Merchant Ivory vehicle, proving Howards End was just the beginning. Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese makes a film you'd expect from Merchant Ivory, and Brian De Palma unveils one you'd expect from Scorsese. Oliver Stone reinvades Vietnam, and Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman do their first tours of duty as directors. Michelle Pfeiffer and John Hurt play their first roles as countesses — she may be cuter, but he outdresses her. Here's our one-stop guide to everything the movies have to offer this fall, with plenty of fun facts, thoughtful overviews, and inside gossip as bad for you as a box of jujubes. Enjoy!

The Age of Innocence
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder.
Directed by: Martin Scorsese.
Through one eye, the package looks foolproof — the lavish Hollywood adaptation of a classic American novel, featuring three of the world's most talented and attractive movie stars, helmed by America's greatest living director. Through the other, the idea of Martin Scorsese — better known for the blistering heat of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull — directing a terminally uptight romance written by a turn-of-the-century blue blood seems ill-advised at best. That, Scorsese happily admits, was the challenge in adapting Edith Wharton's 1920 tragedy of manners, The Age of Innocence — ''to see if I could direct a movie where the emotions and the communication are repressed, so that people say one thing and mean another, or mean nothing at all.'' He laughs. ''It's pretty hard to do — for me.''

Set in the 1870s, the tale of New York aristocrat Newland Archer (Day-Lewis), his thwarted love for the scandal-tainted Countess Olenska (Pfeiffer), and his rapprochement with his wife (Ryder) certainly contains grand if muted passions. But the film chooses not to ratchet up the scandalous longings submerged beneath the novel's good manners. ''You've got to be very careful,'' says Scorsese's writing partner, Jay Cocks, ''because the effect of Wharton's books depends on gradual turns of the emotional screw.'' The screenwriters relied instead on extensive narration (in voice-overs by Joanne Woodward) to fill the enigmatic silences.

''The whole film is also about texture,'' Scorsese emphasizes. The period's thickly daubed layers of etiquette and ritual offered him a wealth of detail, often more articulate than his characters. ''Flowers,'' he points out, ''provide beauty in the home, but also have a sensuality which the characters don't express, which the flowers express for them.''

The meticulous director spent two years on pre-production research, employing nearly a dozen consultants to regulate the finer points of conduct, clothing, and even table settings. ''When they had dinner,'' producer Barbara De Fina says incredulously, ''every coursehad a different china pattern.'' Pfeiffer learned her highbrow mid-Atlantic accent from recordings of novelist Louis Auchincloss and Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, Ethel. Scorsese even had research done on the real-life models for Wharton's characters, to reproduce exactly the paintings that hung in their living rooms. That painstaking preparation also applied to other areas. ''Where I wanted the audience to look, where I placed the camera to communicate those ideas, that had to be well thought out in advance,'' says the director. ''I couldn't really improvise on the set because it's a period piece and there are certain budgetary restrictions.''

Initially, Scorsese was so delighted by Columbia's $30 million budget that he agreed to have the film ready for a Christmas 1992 release; that led to raised eyebrows when Columbia postponed Ageuntil this fall. While his usual tortoise pace in the editing room — and the unexpected illness of his father — contributed to the delay, Scorsese admits the material posed unusual challenges. ''Because of the rhythm of the period, it's not necessarily the intercutting of the dialogue but the intercutting of the pauses which could be maddening.''

While Scorsese is taking a daring professional leap with Age, he's still working with a net. ''I'm usually attracted to similar themes,'' he says. ''In this situation, it's the obsessive love which can't be consummated. So I always had the pure emotion of that theme to feel at home with.'' (Sept. 17)
Buzz: After seeing a rough cut, Ryder proclaimed, ''It's one of the greatest movies I've ever seen! I was watching it, and I couldn't believe I was in it!'' She's not the most objective critic, but early reports indicate her hyperbole isn't just hype.

True Romance
Starring: Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken.
Directed by: Tony Scott.
Working from a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino — whose lushly verbose and violent Reservoir Dogs has made him Hollywood's hottest neo-Scorsese — director Scott propels newlyweds Slater and Arquette out of Detroit (with mobsters in pursuit) and into a hipper-than-hip cast of L.A. oddballs. Scott (Top Gun, Days of Thunder) welcomed the chance to take on this lower-budget ($13 million), more eccentric film. ''I've always worked as a hired gun,'' he says. ''This is the first time I've had creative control, though I was very loyal to the script because it just sucks you in and doesn't allow you to draw a breath.''

Scott snared Oldman with a one-line description of his character — ''a white pimp who thinks he's black.'' Kilmer is similarly almost unrecognizable as Slater's muse, a dream-vision Elvis Presley. Slater, who adopted a buzz cut and dyed his hair black for the part (''We joked on the set that he looked like a toilet brush,'' says Scott) stole mannerisms from Tarantino himself. ''I could have played really energetic, insane, crazy, and gone over the top with it,'' says Slater. ''But Tony Scott really put the reins on me. He kept telling me, 'Do less, do less, do less,' and I liked that a lot.'' (Sept. 10)
Buzz: The star-heavy marquee should excite the twentysomething crowd, but the bloody confrontations may make it a date movie only guys like.