‘SERIOUS’ DIRECTORS MAKE A COMEBACK

Educated, sensitive, adult moviegoers may disagree.

Some believe that Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple” is racist, manipulative and superficial. Others find it humane, gentle and profoundly moving.

Some find Sydney Pollack’s “Out of Africa” overly slick, boring and, in the case of Robert (“What am I doing in this picture?”) Redford, badly miscast. Others find it beautiful, compelling and, in the case of Meryl (“See if you can guess my accent”) Streep, richly performed.

Some see “Rocky IV” as a loud, simple-minded, jingoistic brawl. Others see it as . . . well, there are times when we can all agree.

But, at least, we’re going to the movies again.

The hot news on the current box-office charts is not “Rocky IV’s” having passed the $100-million mark (remember the old saying, “Fools, teen-agers, Sylvester Stallone fans and their money are soon parted”). Rather, it is the success of movies that have the nerve to be “about something.”

Whichever side you take on the hotly disputed merits of “The Color Purple” and “Out of Africa,” they are the works of serious film makers, and they are raking in grosses from an audience that the studios are in the habit of ignoring. Who knows, maybe they’ll be encouraged to try more.

For adult moviegoers, there are other encouraging signs coming from theaters these days. Such films as “Ran,” “The Trip to Bountiful” and “Fool for Love” are all doing good business without the support of big studios and three others--Bud Yorkin’s “Twice in a Lifetime,” Henry Jaglom’s “Always” and Michael Apted’s “28 Up”--are successes for simply having reached the screen.

For widely differing reasons, all three films fell outside the interest range of Hollywood and are out and doing good business now only through the perseverance of their directors. Call these profiles in stubbornness.

“Twice in a Lifetime.”

If he hadn’t been busy on TV’s “All in the Family,” producer-director Bud Yorkin might have been busy making some of Hollywood’s most sensitive movies. Better late than never.

This domestic drama, about the dissolution of a static 30-year-old marriage in a blue-collar family in Seattle, was one of the most satisfying and honest movies of 1985 and is just now getting its theatrical legs.

Yorkin, who says every major studio turned his film down three times (first in script form, then with a confirmed cast that included Gene Hackman, Ellen Burstyn and Ann-Margret, and finally as a rough cut), has been distributing the $7.2-million film himself.

Prevailing wisdom, that intangible guide to selecting everything from scripts to salads in Hollywood, says it can’t be done.

With the help of Norman Levy, former vice chairman of 20th Century Fox, Yorkin managed to slog through the exhibition mine field and get his film released, to generally good reviews and even better word of mouth, and has done consistently good business.

“Twice,” which went into limited release (181 theaters) Christmas Day, has grossed $3.7 million already and will expand to 600 theaters Jan. 24.

Yorkin, who says he put up everything he owned to get bank financing for the movie, believes that he is already out of the financial woods. The receipts from his network sale to NBC, his cassette sale to Vestron and the licensing fees coming in from foreign markets will cover his negative costs, he says, and he still owns the cable and pay-TV rights.

The lesson for Yorkin is that conventional distribution wisdom isn’t so wise.

“It doesn’t cost as much to distribute a film as the studios want you to think,” Yorkin says. “If I can get away with this, just think what would happen if someone with the box-office clout of Clint Eastwood or Steven Spielberg did it.”

Clint, Steve, are you listening?

“Always.”

Director Henry Jaglom has always been just outside Hollywood’s Circle of Friends.

His films--”Sitting Ducks,” “Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?”--have been the equivalent of art-house cartoons. Funny, offbeat, personal indulgences. The kind of movies Woody Allen might have made if he didn’t want anybody to see them.

Then Jaglom made “Always,” the funny-sad autobiographical tale of how his marriage to actress Patrice Townsend dissolved in a way that would keep a marriage encounter group buzzing all night.

The film, featuring Jaglom and Townsend as themselves and shot in the house in which they lived together, is also very smart, very real and very successful.

Jaglom made “Always” for less than $1 million, and, though the film, which opened in Los Angeles four months ago, is just now starting its national art house roll-out, he is already in profit.

More important to Jaglom than the seven-figure fee he received from Samuel Goldwyn Co. is the distribution deal he struck. Goldwyn agreed to open “Always” in one theater in 14 major cities and keep it there--no matter what kind of business it does--for 12 weeks.

“Word of mouth is what sells the kind of movies I make,” Jaglom says. “If you open it in too many theaters, it just won’t work. And if you put it in one theater and give up on it after two weeks, it’s not fair. I wanted to work with a distributor who understands word of mouth and is willing to be patient.”

Jaglom thinks there is a big future for small distribution companies willing to take on the quality movies being passed up by the studios because they don’t have the potential of grossing $100 million.

“The pattern with quality films is not to go head-to-head with commercial studio films, but to keep the costs down and give the film a chance to find its audience,” he says. “There are a lot of people who want to see intelligent movies. It’s only the studios that think people are stupid.”

“28 Up.”

English director Michael Apted’s instincts were right. American audiences would be interested in his “living soap opera,” a documentary that tracks the lives of a group of English adults he began interviewing on camera when they were 7 years old. (See Sheila Benson’s review on Page 1.)

Apted, best known for the hugely successful “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” did a documentary on class distinctions among children for England’s Granada Television in the early ‘60s. He has checked back with the subjects every seven years since, doing more documentaries for Granada, and, with “28 Up,” a crisply edited compilation of all four interviews, he’s letting us in on it.

“Most of our best work has been on television in England,” Apted says, “but there has always been the attitude that Americans won’t get it, that they won’t pay to see something like this.”

Apted spent months trying to negotiate a release here, but nothing happened until it became one of the hits of last fall’s New York Film Festival. Granada then agreed, with some financial sweetening to its union fund, to allow First Run, a small New York distributor, to book it in American theaters.

Since then, it has broken house records in New York, grossing more than $100,000, and is now getting bookings in other key cities.

Apted, who will revisit his subjects in 1991 for “35 Up,” says there are several things he would have done differently if he had known 22 years ago that they it would become a series. But one mistake stands out.

“I did not include a single middle-class woman,” he says. “Who would have thought in 1965 that in 1985 a woman (Margaret Thatcher) would be running the country?”