`AMERICAN' DREAM : DUSTIN HOFFMAN, DENNIS FRANZ TALK ABOUT THE WORK THAT HAS TAKEN THEM TO STARDOM, THEN BACK TO THEIR ROOTS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

A two-time Oscar winner and a double Emmy winner make quite a pair of losers in ``American Buffalo.''

But Dustin Hoffman and Dennis Franz were thrilled to make the movie version of David Mamet's acclaimed early play. In fact, they viewed playing Teach and Don, two down-at-the-heels buddies who plot a doomed rare-coin heist, as a kind of reward for their impressive professional success.

``Obviously, we know this is a small movie for a small audience,'' said Franz, who won his second Emmy on Sunday for playing ``NYPD Blue's'' troubled detective Andy Sipowicz. ``You do that out of love. You do this out of admiration and respect for the material itself.

``Dustin Hoffman certainly had other opportunities that he could have gone into, but he wanted to do this,'' Franz continued. ``This is a luxury that you can afford yourself because of hard work that you've done elsewhere. To do a piece of work just for yourself, selfishly - that's what this was about.''

Hoffman was indeed making other plans - he can be seen in the all-star thriller ``Sleepers'' in October - when Al Pacino dropped out of the ``Buffalo'' movie production. One of the most acclaimed stage interpreters of self-styled criminal mastermind Teach, Pacino had long been attached to the movie project but bailed when Mamet refused to replace the film's young director, Michael Corrente (``Federal Hill'').

Hoffman refused to seriously consider the project until the Pacino matter was settled. But once the path was clear, he, too, welcomed the opportunity.

``When you come from the theater, like I did, you started doing scenes in classes from great plays,'' said Hoffman, who owns Oscars for ``Rain Man'' and ``Kramer vs. Kramer'' and was nominated for his roles in ``The Graduate,'' ``Midnight Cowboy,'' ``Lenny'' and ``Tootsie.'' ``Then suddenly, by serendipity, we became stars and we began getting offered film scripts. But the writing didn't have the same substance, it seemed to us at the time.

``It took me a few years to understand that film scripts were different from plays,'' Hoffman, 59, continued. ``A film script is basically an amorphous blueprint for a director to create from. Whereas the script in a stage play is pretty close to what you're going to hear in the theater. With something like this, you can say, `That's a part, that's a real piece of meat. You can taste it, you can feel it.' Nobody wants to let that go if they're given a chance to do it.''

Hoffman, whose definitive stage portrayal of ``Death of a Salesman's'' Willy Loman was filmed for television, sees the ``Buffalo'' movie as another classic play recorded for posterity.

``I do think this is a great American play, and one of Mamet's best,'' Hoffman explained. ``And, like all important work, it becomes more relevant as the years pass. I think he was cognizant of the way doing business can be the ultimate betrayal, if not consciously then in the way an artist should be, unconsciously.''

Franz's views of Mamet's work are filtered through personal experience. Back when both actor and playwright were getting established in the '70s Chicago theater scene, Franz appeared in the first production of Mamet's ``Sexual Perversity in Chicago.'' Later, Mamet wrote an episode of ``Hill Street Blues'' that highlighted Franz's character, Lt. Norman Buntz, and developed a TV series pilot that featured the actor.

Despite their relationship, Franz was as unprepared - and shocked - as anyone else who attended the first stagings of ``Buffalo.''

``I was knocked out by it,'' Franz, whose own show has broken numerous network television taboos, recalled of the expletive-packed play. ``In the '70s, to hear that kind of dialogue on stage was rare. Now that kind of language has become commonplace, so that that particular aspect of it is not significant anymore.

``But it lingered with me,'' Franz revealed. ``The whole experience lingered. It's a real thought-provoking play, complex and with interesting characters.''

And even if that language has lost some of its power to shock, it's still a bear to say right. Perhaps even more so than such Mamet masterpieces as ``Glengarry Glen Ross'' and ``Speed-the-Plow,'' ``Buffalo'' depends on the proper pronunciation of its vulgar but revealing poetry.

``The difficulty of the work cannot be denied,'' Franz said. ``It is very hard to do David Mamet properly. He has been given credit for having this great ear for dialogue, which he without question does. But it's even more than that, because he adds his own little spin to it and it becomes a kind of stylized naturalism. It certainly does have a rhythmic pattern to it, and if you don't get every `uh, um, yeah,' then it sounds awfully stilted.'' A three-week rehearsal period preceded the bare-bones, 28-day film shoot in a steamy, summertime Rhode Island. (Talk about a labor of love - Franz, 51, who had just married, got his new wife to agree to a working honeymoon so he could make the movie.)

Hoffman found the rehearsal period - which included the acclaimed young actor Sean Nelson (``Fresh''), who plays Don's naive and possibly deceitful young protege, Bobby - invaluable for what he calls the hardest work of his accomplished career.

``By (the characters') use of expletives and half-formed sentences and verbose, disjointed dialogue, Mamet tries to show the breakdown of communication between us,'' Hoffman observed. ``So we had to learn the words of this material the way you would learn Mozart: word by word by word. Every preposition. It was the hardest stuff I've ever had to learn. Much harder than Shakespeare, much harder than Arthur Miller, because the words are messed with.

``It was very hard to get to know Dennis when we're all just trying to learn the words,'' Hoffman continued. ``But he is tremendously hard-working, professional and very, very generous. What actors mean when they say that, is someone puts in the same effort when he's off camera as he does when he's on camera.''

And most actors say something like that. Take Franz on his notoriously difficult, perfectionist co-star.

``There's a real caring, sensitive, supportive man in there,'' Franz said. ``I would say that the work process with him was a thoroughly satisfying, exhausting experience. He is very intense about his work; he tries many different possibilities and he is there for you at all times. So if this sounds like a love fest, it is, because I really did love the experience.''

Yeah. But about Hoffman ...

``So I hate the guy,'' Franz joked. ``He drove me nuts, but it's a wonderful nuts. The guy is a lovable lunatic.''

Compound that with the inevitable lunacy caused by strained budgets, long hours and demanding work, and you do have to ask why two such respected, well-paid actors put themselves through it all, great material or no.

For Hoffman, it had to do with his longstanding professional - and personal - empathy for life's rejects. ``There but for the grace of God go us,'' Hoffman said. ``I mean, nobody should have bet on me. Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall and I were guys in New York who were really hoping to get off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway roles for the rest of our lives. If anyone had said to us we would become movie stars, it would have been a bad joke at a party that had gone on too long.

``A lot of actors that we knew were not only unsuccessful but wound up with tragic, tragic lives,'' Hoffman concluded. ``You don't quite understand why that didn't happen to you.''

For Franz, even the charge of a recent Emmy win can't quite compare with what he got out of making ``American Buffalo.''

``It's very flattering and it's an honor and I'm grateful,'' Franz said of the TV award. ``But that's not what I'm in it for.

``Of this movie, Dustin says, `Nobody's going to see it and it won't make a nickel.' And he could be right. But I said to him, `Yeah, but I got a poster that says Hoffman - Franz.' ''

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4 Photos

Photo: (1-2--Cover--Color) Dustin Hoffman, above, and De nnis Franz star in ``American Buffalo.''

(3) ``A film script is basically an amorphous blueprint for a director to create from, whereas the script in a stage play is pretty close to what you're going to hear in the theater,'' says Dustin Hoffman, left, opposite Dennis Franz in ``American Buffalo,''

(4) ``It's very flattering and it's an honor and I'm grateful,'' Franz says of winning his second Emmy on Sunday for ``NYPD Blue.'' ``But that's not what I'm in it for.''

Phil McCarten/Daily News