Making Book

In Presumed Innocent, the smash new movie based on Scott Turow's 1987 best-seller, the stupefyingly beautiful actress Greta Scacchi plays a fiery prosecuting attorney with a fatal taste for the bizarre. ''We were thinking about doing it as a movie full of sex and blood,'' says screenwriter Frank Pierson (In Country), who wrote three initial drafts for the movie's producer, Sydney Pollack (Tootsie). ''The first image on screen was going to be two people making love, with it turning imperceptibly into murder.''

But when Pierson began rewriting Presumed Innocent with the man who finally directed it, Alan J. Pakula, things changed. Pakula thought the concept of justice was more central to Turow's novel than tussling couples were, so he replaced Scacchi's steamy sex scene with a long, slow, detached shot of an empty courtroom.

Pakula wanted his Presumed Innocent to grapple with ideas, and he wanted to present the story in a visual style that echoed Turow's original voice. ''Scott dealt with the most grotesque, lurid material — infidelity, kinky sex, murder,'' he explains, ensconced in his professorial, book-lined New York office, ''and he conveyed it in this disciplined, rational, one might say lawyerly way. I felt it was the tension between the cold, controlled prose and the heat of the events that made the book such a success.'' (It has sold 700,000 hardcover copies and 5 million in paperback.) Pakula's insistence on a sober approach to the material doesn't mean the director's a prude; rather, he's a man in the grip of a textual obsession. ''I'm looking for a cinematic counterpart to the prose experience,'' he says.