Fall Movie Preview: December 1993

Schindler's List
Starring: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Jonathan Sagalle, Embeth Davidtz.
Directed by: Steven Spielberg.
They called themselves Schindlerjuden — ''Schindler's Jews.'' During World War II, when the Jewish population of Krakow, Poland, was being eliminated, they worked for German war profiteer Oskar Schindler. For three years, the handsome, cognac-sipping factory owner charmed, bribed, and cajoled the powerful Nazis around him in order to save his workers from executioner Amon Goeth, who ran the Plaszow camp where 40,000 to 80,000 Jews died. The 1,200 on Schindler's list survived.

In 1982, Australian writer Thomas Keneally turned the stories of the Schindlerjuden into the novel Schindler's List, and Hollywood came calling. Though Steven Spielberg quickly purchased rights to the book, the project went through two other directors and three writers before he finally decided to make the movie himself — as a three-hour drama shot in documentary-style black and white, no less.

''Schindler was a rare character — amidst all this evil was the emergence of this inexplicable goodness,'' says MCA president Sidney Sheinberg. But the magnitude of the story's Holocaust setting stymied the first two screenwriters. Novelist Keneally tossed in the towel after giving the script a lengthy first pass. Kurt Luedtke (Out of Africa) toiled over his draft for four years before calling it quits. At one point, Spielberg backed away from directing the film and decided instead to produce it, but his plans to use Sydney Pollack behind the camera came to nothing. Martin Scorsese, too, was in, then out.

Last year, when writer Steven Zaillian (Searching for Bobby Fischer) turned in a script that met with Spielberg's approval, the director put it on his schedule, getting Sheinberg's okay to supervise postproduction of Jurassic Park from Poland. ''A lot of people at Universal thought he was crazy,'' says Sheinberg. ''I didn't. Steven is the most organized man on earth.''

By the time cameras rolled in Kraków, Spielberg had spent a year trying to find his perfect star. ''Harrison Ford was a little too old to play 34,'' says veteran Spielberg producer Gerald Molen. ''Costner wanted it. But Steven wanted [someone who could personify] Oskar Schindler for the role.'' Spielberg found him in Irish actor Liam Neeson (Darkman, Husbands & Wives), 40, whom he saw on Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie.

Working with 119 actors and 30,000 extras, Spielberg completed filming three days under his 75-day shooting schedule and within his lowest budget ($23 million) since 1985's The Color Purple. The only thing he didn't anticipate was stepping into a controversy. The World Jewish Congress protested his plans to shoot at Auschwitz/Birkenau — ''within the perimeter of what is the largest graveyard in the world,'' says Molen. ''Steve met with them in New York, respected their objections, and we devised a way to shoot outside the gate. We built our own barracks and backed trains into Birkenau.''

With Schindler's List complete, the first verdict comes from the Universal brass, and it's an unexpected one, given the director's known ability to put the squeeze on the emotions of his audience: ''It looks like it was directed by Ingmar Bergman,'' says one surprised exec. ''It's almost underplayed. Will he get credit for not being manipulative?''
Buzz: Good question, and probably the one that will determine Schindler's fate. If the critics back it, Spielberg could finally win his Oscar.

Heaven And Earth
Starring: Hiep Thi Le, Tommy Lee Jones, Joan Chen, Haing S. Ngor, Debbie Reynolds.
Directed by: Oliver Stone.
In January 1992, with turmoil spiraling around JFK, Oliver Stone escaped to Hawaii, where, in three weeks, he wrote the first draft of Heaven and Earth. "It saved my life," Stone says of the strategic retreat, during which he adapted two memoirs by Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace. ''With JFK, there was so much noise and such strong emotions. It was the best thing for my head to have some detachment from the ongoing crises and paranoia.''

It might have felt like detachment to Stone, but he was really returning to an obsession: Vietnam, the touchstone of his career and the source of two Best Director Oscars (1986's Platoon and 1989's Born on the Fourth of July). With Heaven and Earth, however, Stone attempted a different approach: Vietnam from a Vietnamese woman's viewpoint. Born in a tiny village, Hayslip struggled through two wars, was raped by Viet Cong soldiers, worked the black market in Da Nang, escaped to America, built a new life, and, finally, returned to her village for an emotional family reunion in 1986. Stone felt her odyssey could be ''a Gone With the Wind kind of Vietnamese story. It's a warm, human story about a woman's odyssey through life in which she goes through the entire roulette wheel of experience.''

Stone's casting team saw 16,000 Vietnamese expatriates in Hong Kong, Canada, and the U.S. before choosing Hiep Thi Le — a 23-year-old University of California at Davis physiology major who fled Vietnam as a 9-year-old boat person — to play Le Ly. Preparing for the shoot, Stone, Hayslip, Hiep, and Joan Chen (The Last Emperor), cast as Hayslip's mother, made a pilgrimage to Hayslip's home village of Ky La. ''I was so thrilled to have Oliver and the people who work with him come to my village,'' says Hayslip. ''The people there didn't know him, they didn't even know his name. But he's like the king, walking through the poor village.''

Though Stone considered filming in Vietnam, he quickly abandoned the idea. ''The Vietnamese would never let me make this movie there. They would have preferred a more simplistic view,'' he insists. Instead, production designer Victor Kemper re-created Ky La in Thailand, building authentic-looking structures of concrete, brick, and tile rather than the usual movie cliche of thatched huts.

Hayslip, on hand throughout the filming, endorsed the major alterations Stone introduced into her life story, including the creation of U.S. Marine Steve Butler (Tommy Lee Jones), a composite drawn from four men in her life. Two scenes proved difficult for her to witness: the rape (''I didn't want to see that'') and a scene in which her father is beaten. Although she has yet to see the completed film, Hayslip, 44, who now lives in San Diego, hopes that Heaven and Earth will play some part in healing the wounds of war. ''When Oliver first came to me, I knew in my soul that this was meant to be,'' says Hayslip. ''This story is not for me but for 58,000 American men who died in Vietnam and 3 million Vietnamese who lost their life in war.''
Buzz: Oliver Stone + Vietnam = Attention Must Be Paid.