Coppola Tracks Coppola

Filmmaker Eleanor Coppola got the idea for her latest documentary, a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process, while visiting her director-husband on location in Memphis, Tenn., during the making of “John Grisham’s The Rainmaker” (1997). “I would go with Francis in the early morning to the set,” Coppola recalled the other day from their Napa Valley home in Rutherford, Calif. “He was doing really unusual improvisations with the actors.”

As she watched him rehearse a scene with Mickey Rourke, Matt Damon and Danny DeVito, the first assistant director--who remembered her footage for “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” (1991), about Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now”--mentioned that she should record what was happening precisely because the directing was so rare.

“So I began,” Coppola said. “It was the kind of thing that nobody else would have seen. What I saw was a really mature director making a movie that was not about typhoons and car crashes. He was focused on the acting.”

The scene, which takes place in a restaurant, happened to be a crucial one: Damon and DeVito realize for the first time that there’s something fishy about Rourke’s handling of the case they’ve been investigating.

The results of her effort, “Francis Coppola Directs ‘John Grisham’s The Rainmaker,’ ” (1998), will be screened Sunday at 11:30 a.m. at the Art Institute of Southern California, 2222 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. The screening, a benefit for the institute, will be presented by a support group, Designing Women. $65 with brunch. (949) 376-6000.

“In terms of the creative process, I’ve observed Francis more than anyone else,” Coppola said. “He’s always going for that fresh, alive moment, something unseen before. He does what it takes to get that. He gains the actors’ trust by taking the time to rehearse with them.”

Her husband’s style is well known in the industry for its painstaking, time-consuming, sometimes quirky uniqueness.

“He has long and exhaustive rehearsal periods, so the actors come equipped to play the roles,” Coppola said. “Then he’ll throw something in from left field, and they’ll react as the characters. They’ve prepared. They know the characters. They’ve explored their roles extensively.”

Coppola recalled Jon Voight, who played a nasty, high-toned corporate lawyer in “Rainmaker,” telling her all about the lawyer’s father (who is not in the movie).

“He said that the father had high standards and was very competitive, and that it was important to the father to win at golf. Jon invented this whole other character to help him play his own role.”

A UCLA graduate in applied design, she met her future husband on location in Ireland for his first movie, “Dementia 13.” She was an assistant to the art director and had been making “conceptual art movies.”

Her first real experience with documentaries began in the Philippines in 1978, during the staggeringly difficult location filming of “Apocalypse Now,” which was based on Joseph Conrad’s literary jungle classic, “Heart of Darkness,” and transformed into a Vietnam War parable. At the time, Hollywood was promoting its spectacular productions with short documentaries about how they were made. “Apocalypse Now” was an ideal candidate.

“But Francis was in hot water and didn’t want anybody to come out there,” Coppola said. “He said, ‘We’ll do it in-house,’ and then he couldn’t find anybody. He said to me, ‘You do it.’ One day I found all this equipment at my doorstep. So I read all the manuals to figure out how to use it.”

Besides shooting that footage, Coppola wrote a memoir about the making of “Apocalypse Now.” Titled “Notes,” it was published originally by Simon & Schuster and is out in paperback (Limelight).

“I like writing,” she said, noting that she’s begun another memoir (not about the making of “Rainmaker”).

The reason she’s coming to Laguna Beach to help present “Coppola Directs,” she added, is that one of her oldest friends, Darlene Ware, is part of Designing Women. “She and I went to first grade and all through Huntington Beach High School together.”

In fact, Coppola, who grew up in Sunset Beach (where her mother still lives) keeps in touch withmany old school friends. “I know a whole community of people down there,” she said. “We’re about 20 women. Five of us went to first grade together. At Christmastime, we gather.”

Recalling the ‘80s

When you think of Hollywood in the ‘80s, certain large movies loom as reminders that the Reagan era wasn’t completely lost to “Porky’s” or “Police Academy” and their equally mindless sequels.

Some of the significant pictures--notable for what they said about the scourge of war and revolution or the catastrophes of history--were “The Killing Fields,” “Hope and Glory,” “Ran,” “The Last Emperor,” “Reds.”

Others were memorable for their exotic romanticism or their emotional impact or sweet humor: “Out of Africa,” “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Roxanne,” “Moonstruck.”

But it was the multitude of foreign and domestic, off-beat, wide-ranging, independent movies--small in size but large in ambition and masterly in execution--that gave us much to remember instead of the triumph of agentry, star packaging and all the rest of Hollywood’s lowest common denominators.

These movies included “Tender Mercies,” “My Left Foot,” “Blue Velvet,” “Henry V,” “My Beautiful Laundrette,” “Shoah,” “Hotel Terminus,” “Down by Law,” “Mystery Train,” “A Room With a View,” “The Dead,” “My Dinner With Andre,” “Hail, Hail Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

Among them was Robert Epstein and Richard Schmiechen’s 1984 Academy Award-winning documentary, “The Times of Harvey Milk,” which screens Friday, 7 and 9 p.m., at the UC Irvine Student Center in the Crystal Cove Auditorium on the Irvine campus (on Pereira Drive, near Bridge Road). $2.50-$4.50. (949) 824-5588.

Milk, one of the nation’s first openly gay elected officials, was a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He was assassinated Nov. 27, 1978, by a fellow supervisor, Dan White, who also shot Mayor George Moscone to death.

The killings sparked the “White Night” riots, among the largest in San Francisco history, and led to the infamous “Twinkie defense” used at White’s trial. (White, charged with first-degree murder but convicted of voluntary manslaughter, served five years of a seven-year sentence. In 1985, two years after his release from prison, he committed suicide.)

Milk’s life and death have been memorialized elsewhere, in opera and theater works. In this haunting documentary, he gets a powerful, sympathetic treatment at once incisive and comprehensive.

Elsewhere in Orange County

“Bang” (1997) ends its run today at the Port Theatre, 2905 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar, and Lars von Trier’s “The Kingdom II” (1997), begins its run there Friday. $4.50-$7. (949) 673-6260.

The Japanese classic “Rashomon” (1950), about the many facets of truth, screens Friday, 6:30 p.m., at the Orange County Museum of Art Education Center, 855 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. $3-$5. (949) 759-1122.

Visualizing Eros continues today, 7:30 p.m., at the UCI Film & Video Center, with a double bill of Ming Yuen S. Ma’s “Toc Storee” (“Thursday”) (1992), about the gay experience among Asian Pacific Islanders, and Deepa Mehta’s “Fire” (1997), about love and sexual desire under the pressure of Indian taboos. In the Humanities Instructional Building, Room 100 (Bridge Road, near Pereira Drive). Free. (949) 824-7418.

Finally, Mexican Cinema of the ‘90s continues Saturday, 7 p.m., also at the UCI Film & Video Center (same room), with “El Bulto” (“The Lump”) (1992). The movie centers on a leftist journalist who is almost beaten to death in a confrontation with the police and lapses into a coma for 20 years. When he awakens, he finds himself in a strange new world of computers and transformed politics. $4-$6. (949) 824-7418.

In L.A. and Beyond

Over the last 13 years, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival has introduced a vast range of films from the Pacific Rim, many of them outstanding--with only a portion of them, unfortunately, receiving subsequent distribution.

Opening tonight at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd., the festival will present 70 individual programs, highlighted by 15 feature films, through May 21 at the DGA as well as the Japan America Theater in Little Tokyo. The festival starts on a light note at a 7:30 p.m. gala presentation of Eric Koyanagi’s knockabout comedy “hundred percent,” which features a screenful of talented young Asian American actors playing a varied group of Venice denizens.

Tamlyn Tomita plays an elegant beauty who happens to come into laid-back, immediately smitten Dustin Nguyen’s coffee shop. A funny punker couple (Darion Basco and Keiko Agena), who are into African American lingo and style, fall heir to a sleek lowrider and lots of trouble, while Garrett Wang plays an actor coping with ethnic stereotyping.

The cross-cultural motif continues with Tim Chey’s warm and funny serious comedy “Fakin’ Da Funk” (DGA, Friday at 9 p.m.) The guys on a South-Central L.A. basketball court think a Chinese youth, Julian (Dante Basco), is faking his black-inflected speech. In fact, he was adopted by an Atlanta couple at birth. Long widowed, his mother (Pam Grier) has just landed a better job in L.A. and has moved there with him and his younger African American brother Perry (Rashaan Nall).

While Chey reveals the very real prejudices Basco faces and the pressures placed upon Perry to join a drug-dealing gang (run by a suavely sinister Tone-Loc), up pops in the neighborhood an exchange student from China (Margaret Cho). She’s appalled to find that she hasn’t ended up in Beverly Hills with a fellow student.

“Fakin’ Da Funk” rambles a bit, but its heart and sense of humor are always in the right place. The large, capable cast includes Nell Carter, Tatyana Ali and Ernie Hudson.

For his captivating documentary “Kelly Loves Tony” (DGA, Saturday at 7 p.m.) video maker Spencer Nakasako turned over a camcorder to Kelly Saeturn and her boy-friend, Tony Saelio, to record a year and a half in their lives. At 17, Kelly is a bright, pretty Oakland-area resident graduating from high school and looking ahead to college. But earlier she had met Tony,a beefy 24-year-old ex-con, who like her is a Iu Mien refugee from a hill tribe in Laos, and has become pregnant by him.

What emerges is a portrait of an articulate young woman who is caught between two cultures with conflicting values and priorities. “Kelly Loves Tony” illuminates much in a mere 57 minutes.

As a first-time writer-director, Francisco Aliwalas has a deft touch in his wistful comedy “Disoriented,” in which he stars (DGA, Saturday at 9 p.m.). Set in the lovely old city of Albany, N.Y., a fresh location if there ever was one, “Disoriented” finds Aliwalas’ Filipino American West Cordova at loose ends.

You quickly understand how his well-meaning but overbearing mother drove away her husband and her older son. But then, after a four-year absence, West’s football player brother (Wayland Quintero) suddenly turns up at the bus station--in full drag.

What happens next is at once funny and serious, much like “Fakin’ Da Funk,” but with considerably more polish.

Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s “Milagros” (DGA, Sunday at noon) is a boldly successful attempt to transform lurid soap opera into a potent tale of sin and redemption. In the title role, Sharmaine Arnaiz plays a beautiful young woman who quits dancing at a small-city bar to become a servant in the household of a landowner to pay off her recently deceased, no-good father’s debt. Her gesture involves her desire to fulfill her father’s promise to take her to the mountain of Banahaw, regarded in the Philippines as a sacred place attracting pilgrims in search of spiritual enlightenment.

The Philippine feature that follows “Milagros” at 2:30 p.m., “Rizal in Dapitan,” is unfortunately a stodgy historical drama about the Philippines’ revolutionary hero Dr. Jose Rizal, a brilliant and courageous intellectual whose story could make a great movie.

Lin Cheng-sheng’s “Murmur of Youth” (DGA, Sunday at 9 p.m.) is a thoroughly demanding work, which if not quite possessing the wallop of other Taiwanese pictures, is nonetheless rewarding. Lin evokes the soullessness of contemporary Taipei as he introduces us to two young women, both named Mei-li, which means “pretty.”

Both girls are loners full of longing who, some 45 minutes into the film, meet when they each get jobs as cashiers in the box office of a multiplex theater. They wind up, in a moment of desperation, in each other’s arms. “Murmur of Youth” is a somber, subtle work of considerable perception and reflection.

Closing the festival May 21 at 7 p.m. at the Japan America Theater, 244 S. San Pedro St., is Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting’s “The Soong Sisters,” a sweeping epic tale of the three fabled sisters who have played such a major role in the destiny of 20th century China.

Charlie Soong (1866-1918) had four remarkable children. The focal point is his noble middle daughter, Ching-ling (Maggie Cheung), who married the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen. Serving as minister of finance for Sun’s republic was banker and industrialist H.H. Kung--the husband of the practical-minded Ai-ling Soong (Michelle Khan). Heading Sun’s military forces was Gen. Chiang Kai-shek, who in 1927 married Mei-ling Soong (Vivian Wu), who was to become the formidable and eternally glamorous Madame Chiang Kai-shek, now 101.

Although the film is a conventional bio-epic, it not only provides fine roles for three of Hong Kong’s major stars but also shows how the sisters were strong figures in their own right and no mere reflections of their powerful husbands.

The highlight of the festival’s special events is a tribute Monday at 7 p.m. at the Japan America Theater to the late Toshiro Mifune, international star whose career spanned five decades. For festival information: (213) 680-4462; for ticket information: (213) 680-3700.