For 'Mr. Goodbar' author, a worry

By Art Harris

•Washington Post

NEW YORK Judith Rossner burrows deep into her second-row seat and tries to hide. There is popcorn, but she isn't hungry. For courage, she has stashed a bottle of wine under the seat.

A quarter of a million dollars and a piece of the film the deal her

agent cut for movie rights to her novel "Looking for Mr Goodbar" is little comfort.

As screening hour approaches, authors who sign away their creations to Hollywood come to feel like the father in the delivery room: They can't wait to see how things will turn out, but it's too late to make any changes.

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Rossner, 42-year-old author of five novels, Bronx-born, brassy, divorced mother of two, waves the glossy program festooned with a langorous Diane Keaton in disco-heaven. In "Goodbar," Woody Allen's endearing, foot-in-the-mouth girl friend in "Annie Hall," plays Theresa Dunn, devoted teacher of deaf children by day, singles-bar devotee by night.

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"They should put her on the cover of the paperback," Ms. Rossner is saying. "They have these giant sheds out in L.A. where they keep the books. Over the stacks of 'Goodbar' they have a big sign, ‘DO NOT SHRED.' I was taken there by this obnoxious paperback salesman named Arnie: Actually, his only sin was taking me to a cheap Hollywood restaurant for lunch....

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Ms. Rossner... she sneaked out.

Ms. Rossner squeals. She spies actor Richard Kiley in the credits. "I love Richard Kiley," she says. Three times she says she loves him.

Kiley plays Theresa's overbearing father, a stern Irish Catholic who trots around the house in a Notre Dame jacket and spits fire when his daughter moves into a place of her own. Kiley fawns over James (Williám Atherton), the upstanding social worker Theresa brings home for dinner; it delights him that James once studied for the priesthood.

The lights dim. As“... based on the novel by Judith Rossner" flashes on the screen, she sighs and shrinks lower in her seat. "It's one thing to

be ready for it intellectually, but it's another thing to be here."

The movie rolls and, for the first time, Ms. Rossner sees how director Richard Brooks ("The Blackboard' Jungle," "Elmer Gantry," "In Cold Blood") has transformed Theresa.

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In the book she was the afterhours thrill-seeker whose anti-gay, anti-black prejudices seem to make her at least partly liable for im pending doom. In the film Miss Keaton plays a freedom-loving romantic whose bounces from man to man leave her the wounded doe. The victim.

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That Ms. Rossner observes, is a weakness in the film: "She didn't do anything to provoke Tony (Richard Gere). In the book they set each other off."

The scenes of homosexual violence bring hisses from pockets of gays in the audience. The film has a somewhat macho tone..

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Ms. Rossner covers her eyes; she nudges a neighbor, she fidgets in her seat. When it is all over, she hungrily eyes the emergency exit.

"I'd like to get out of here without having to talk to the producer," she says. "I feel like the mother who delivered her 13-year-old daughter to the door of Roman Polanski and didn't know what was going to happen.'

Producer Freddie Fields, the former theatrical agent, who packaged "Towering Inferno" and "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid" before jumping into owning what was inside the package with "Lipstick” and now "Goodbar," is receiving handshakes at the top of the stairs.

Ms. Rossner keeps her head down, passes within 10 feet of Fields without saying a word and plows onto Third Avenue. His face wears a cloak of gravity: he does not expect to see

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her. She was not invited and learned of the screening only when a reporter with an extra ticket called her. "To try and understand these Hollywood people is to flatter them," says Rossner, who didn't want to write the screenplay and kept her distance from the film, figuring it "was Richard Brooks' movie and he could do whatever he wanted. So word got out I hated it. What a joke! I just didn't want to intrude.”

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Later after two Courvoisiers in a West Side restaurant, Ms. Rossner confesses, "I hope it makes a lot of money. And she decides that Diane Keaton is fine as Theresa. Ms. Rossner is a fan::

“She has that marvelous, neurotic, ambivalent self-hatred. She's very endearing. Not everyone who hates themself is lovable, but she is."

Ms. Rossner, in fact, claims to have recommended Ms. Keaton for the part. "The summer after he bought the movie, Freddie took me to lunch and asked, Do you have any ideas about casting? I told him, well, my friend Dolores Karl, a banker with Morgan Guaranty Trust, says Diane Keaton for Theresa. She's not sure. she can play a straight role, but she's very funny and I have a feeling she'd be good: Fields dismissed it. The s.o.b. probably would deny it now. And I told him that my sister wanted William Atherton to play James...

"In the book James is a lawyer. In the movie he's a crazy social worker. In theory, it was good casting. But it had some of the things I tried to get away from in the book, like pop sociology. You know, her father did this, and therefore she turned out like that It ain't that simple. But Diane Keaton was very believable, wonderful, most of the time."