Edition: U.S. / Global

HOLIDAY MOVIES; An A-List Writer, Minus the Attitude

Published: November 15, 1998

ASK a studio mogul, top producer or agent for the names of the superior screenwriters in Hollywood, and Steven Zaillian will be near the top of the list.

''He's one of the two or three best screenwriters in town, and I'm being liberal when I say that,'' said Joe Roth, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, which made ''A Civil Action,'' the newest film written and directed by Mr. Zaillian. ''There's an economy and clarity to his writing that's always entertaining.''

Mr. Zaillian, who won an Academy Award for his adaptation of ''Schindler's List,'' is a surprisingly diffident, almost modest and entirely un-Hollywood figure. In contrast to other screenwriters, who may earn lavish sums but complain all the way to the bank about their plight at the hands of producers, stars and executives, Mr. Zaillian, 45, shrugs off any problems he has faced over his 18-year career. ''Maybe I've been lucky,'' he said one recent morning as he sat drinking coffee on the patio of a house in Mandeville Canyon where he and his small staff were editing ''A Civil Action.''

''I mean, not every script I've worked on has turned out the way I've wanted them to turn out,'' added Mr. Zaillian. His screenplay for ''Awakenings'' (1990) earned him an Academy Award nomination, and he also wrote such films as ''The Falcon and the Snowman,'' ''Mission Impossible'' and ''Clear and President Danger.''

But, he went on, ''If you're going to write and not control it then, somehow, you've got to expect that sometimes it's going to turn out different than you thought. Sometimes worse. And sometimes better, if the director is, like, really good and brings something to it,'' Mr. Zaillian said.

''A Civil Action,'' adapted by Mr. Zaillian from the Jonathan Harr nonfiction legal drama that was on The New York Times best-seller list for two years, opens in New York and Los Angeles on Dec. 25, in order to qualify for Academy Award nominations, and then will open nationwide in January.

The movie deals with an eight-year fight by working-class families in Woburn, Mass., who claimed that two large corporations had contaminated their town's drinking water with chemicals, causing the deaths of five children and one adult.

The central figure in the film is Jan Schlichtmann, a self-possessed personal injury lawyer who becomes consumed with the case at the cost of virtually everything else in his life. The film stars John Travolta as the lawyer and Robert Duvall as his highly skilled adversary. Also in the cast are William H. Macy, Tony Shalhoub, Zeljko Ivanek, Kathleen Quinlan, John Lithgow, Sydney Pollack and Kathy Bates.

Mr. Zaillian said he had first read the book, in manuscript form, when one of the producers, Rachel Pfeffer, sent it to him.

''I didn't know if it would make a movie at all,'' he said. ''I had to write the script to see if I could make sense of what was 1,200 pages of manuscript. It was a wonderful book, but what was troubling about it for a movie was the sheer length of it, the number of characters, and it wasn't a whodunit. It was more about the process of the law -- and is that dramatic?''

Mr. Zaillian smiled. ''Also, there was the fact that everybody loses, at least on the face of it,'' he said. ''That's not usually the typical movie fare. It's a tragedy. I mean, that was the thing that we all had to keep in mind. I mean, it's really kind of remarkable that the studio let us do it.''

Mr. Zaillian said he had handled the adaptation much the way he had dealt with ''Schindler's List,'' the Thomas Keneally novel based on the Holocaust. For both screenplays he rigorously concentrated on the main character and avoided the pitfalls of trying to tackle the enormity of the historical circumstances. In ''Schindler's List,'' for example, about a German profiteer who saves the lives of more than 1,000 Jews during World War II, Mr. Zaillian would have been overwhelmed as a screenwriter if he had decided to take on the Holocaust.

''I wanted to focus on Schindler, and Schindler alone, and imagine events almost entirely through his eyes,'' Mr. Zaillian said. ''It's such an imposing subject that you can be overwhelmed by trying to tell too much of it and having too many angles on it. The point was to follow him, just follow him, stick with him, and what he learns about the subject, you learn. The same is true of this one.''

In shaping the script for ''A Civil Action,'' Mr. Zaillian said, the environmental drama and the legal story, and even the human tragedies, were secondary to the story of one man's obsession with the case. ''It's ultimately his story,'' he said.

Mr. Zaillian is far more ambivalent about directing than screenwriting. His directorial debut, in August 1993, was a gentle family drama with an unfortunate title, ''Searching for Bobby Fischer,'' which was far less about chess than about a family's relationships. Few films opened that summer with higher critical praise, but it proved a box-office disappointment.

Mr. Zaillian shrugged. ''Sure, it's a bit depressing,'' he said. ''It's sort of like you work really hard on something for a long time and it lasts two or three weeks and you think, 'I'm going to kill myself.' It's too much work not to have people see it, although the funny thing about 'Bobby Fischer' is, almost everybody I meet has seen it, and not just people in the industry. Maybe it's the bargain matinee. Maybe it's the video.''