'CAT'S' GOT HIS TONGUE DIRECTOR BOGDANOVICH HOPES TO HIT WHERE IT'S HEARST.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Peter Bogdanovich was fated to direct ``The Cat's Meow,'' it seems. After all, this tale of classic Hollywood intrigue and misbehavior spoke a language he knows well.

``Let's put it this way: I certainly had no trouble identifying certain things in my own life with things in some of the characters' lives,'' says the 62-year-old filmmaker, author and actor, whose own personal and professional struggles have sometimes been a modern-day equivalent of the trials his new film's famous characters - media tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Edward Herrmann), his much-younger mistress Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst), Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard) and early Hollywood producer Thomas Ince (Cary Elwes) - experienced.

``I could understand Hearst's obsession with a young woman,'' Bogdanovich acknowledges. ``I've been there, perhaps not to that degree, but nevertheless I certainly understood it. Ince's desperation, his feeling that he was losing everything, I think I've understood that in my life, in terms of the terrible career fluctuations that people endure. And Chaplin, in this movie, is not a great comedian but more like a star on the make, and I have to say that I know where he's coming from, too. ... So I didn't have a hard time understanding these people, and I found myself liking them all in some strange way. They don't behave likably a lot of the time, but I didn't feel I was about to condemn them, either.''

The film explores a scandalous incident that allegedly took place on Hearst's yacht, the Oneida, during a weekend cruise from Los Angeles to San Diego in 1924. Although some later denied having even been on the boat, ``Cat's Meow'' posits that the above-mentioned personalities, along with English writer Elinor Glyn (Joanna Lumley) and Louella Parsons (Jennifer Tilly), the future gossip queen of Hearst's vast newspaper chain, were on board. By the end of the voyage, one guest was off-loaded with a fatal wound, according to the movie. The ``official'' story at the time was that the person, who died several days later, succumbed to heart failure due to indigestion.

Cut from 'Kane'

One of the few American film critics and historians who actually made the transition to filmmaking, Bogdanovich first heard about the Oneida incident from Orson Welles during a 1969 conversation. The wayward genius told his interviewer that the co-writer of his classic film ``Citizen Kane,'' Herman Mankiewicz, wanted to include the story in the script.

Welles nixed the idea, both because he did not believe that the rumors were true and because, although it's generally assumed that ``Kane'' was a veiled portrait of Hearst, Welles insisted that the character was based on several wealthy plutocrats.

As Bogdanovich tells it, shortly after discussing the story with critic Roger Ebert at a film festival a few years back, he returned home to find Steven Peros' unsolicited script for ``The Cat's Meow'' waiting for him. Aware of the director's interest in old Hollywood, producers Kim Bieber and Carol Lewis had sent the script, which Peros adapted from his stage play.

``At the time, we had no idea of his personal connection to the story,'' Lewis says of Bogdanovich. ``We felt that his vast knowledge of Hollywood history was just one more reason why he was the perfect one to direct it.''

``I was doomed to make it,'' the director says, then quickly corrects himself. ``Fated to make it.''

Rough Sailing

Telling, that, because doom is also a feeling Bogdanovich is more than intimate with. His second full feature, the elegiac ``The Last Picture Show,'' was one of the most-admired films of a very good movie year, 1971. The two that immediately followed, the screwball farce ``What's Up, Doc?'' and the nostalgic road movie ``Paper Moon,' cemented the onetime critic's reputation as a movie-loving genius.

But he had left his wife (and, some say, indispensable collaborator) Polly Platt for his young ``Picture Show'' star Cybill Shepherd, and the next two vehicles he designed for her, ``Daisy Miller'' and ``At Long Last Love,'' were both flops from which his career never quite recovered.

While those setbacks could be called the result of hubris, the next chapter was nothing short of tragedy. By 1980, Bogdanovich and Shepherd were finished, and he'd fallen in love with a young Playboy playmate, Dorothy Stratten, whom he was directing in the romantic comedy, ``They All Laughed.'' She was murdered by her estranged husband in August of that year. Devastated, Bogdanovich lost a fortune securing the rights to their movie and trying to distribute it himself. In 1988, he married Stratten's younger sister Louise; the couple is currently in the final stage of an amicable divorce.

``One of the things that definitely was compelling to me was the aftereffects of a single death,'' Bogdanovich says of ``Cat's Meow.'' ``We've been so brutalized by events on the screen - and, I suppose, in history also - but there's been an awful lot of killing and violence on the screen in recent decades, much more than in other days. I think that has made people a little insensitive to death in the movies, and I thought it would be interesting to make a movie in which a single death would have extraordinary reverberations that would affect everybody.

``That is, of course, my own experience of murder. A single murder can be like the explosion of an atomic bomb, and yet everybody survives on some level. There's been an awful lot of talk about that since Sept. 11, but my own personal Sept. 11 was Aug. 14, 1980. I've been living with that kind of thing since then, and my experience is that you learn to live with it, but you don't actually get over it. Life does change, the world is never the same - and that is a big part of what 'The Cat's Meow' is about.''

The Stratten murder was swiftly brought to both the big and small screen, and Bogdanovich still bristles at how the late Bob Fosse's movie ``Star 80'' luridly recounted the tale.

``It was an extremely poor and ill-conceived version of events,'' he says. ``The events happened, but not the way they happened in the movie. And the people that it depicted, I did not recognize as anybody I knew - in particular, Dorothy.''

Copycat portrayals

With such experiences, you wonder if Bogdanovich took extra care to present ``Cat's Meow's'' events and characters as faithfully as he could to reality.

``I have been portrayed in a couple of movies - actually three that I know of - and I didn't think I was portrayed very accurately in any of them,'' he says. ``It did make me feel that I needed to try not to do the same thing in this film. Even though the people were dead and I'm not (laughs), I still felt some obligation to their ghosts to try to get it right.''

Lumley noticed that care permeating the set's working environment. ``I love him ... because he loves our business and he loves the greats in our business,'' she says of the director.

Of course, some historians are going to quibble.

``Of course, there is no proof,'' Bogdanovich says of his movie's thesis, ``except there are some very telling incidents that came about. The only person who ever spoke about this on any kind of record that's come down to us is Chaplin's chauffeur Kono, who claimed he'd seen the victim being taken off the yacht with a bloody bandaged head. Chaplin denied even being on the yacht, but then why was his chauffeur at the dock? And Louella Parsons got a lifetime contract from Hearst immediately after the trip.''

``Cat's Meow'' also marks Bogdanovich's first movie made for theatrical release in almost a decade - the last, also stung by tragedy, was ``The Thing Called Love,'' which was barely released in 1993 following the drug overdose death of its star, River Phoenix. Since then, Bogdanovich has been directing movies for TV and acting, most notably in a recurring role on HBO's ``The Sopranos.''

In another fateful metaphor, ``Cat's Meow'' addresses what happens to Hollywood careers as they mature. Bogdanovich's talented but often star-crossed generation of filmmakers has, with a few exceptions, had to deal with serious setbacks as audience tastes and studio structures have changed.

``I feel like I'm sort of at a new beginning,'' Bogdanovich says. ``That's what this movie is about, in a way. It's awfully difficult to deal with success. It's awfully difficult to deal with that kind of celebrity and fame, and it does funny things to people. Surviving with some dignity and grace - and, hopefully, keeping some of your talent intact - is what you hope for.''

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Kirsten Dunst and Edward Hermann as Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst in ``The Cat's Meow''

(2) ``I thought it would be interesting to make a movie in which a single death would have extraordinary reverberations that would affect everybody.''

Peter Bogdanovich with actress Kirsten Dunst, on ``The Cat's Meow'' set

(3) Edward Herrmann, left, Kirsten Dunst, Eddie Izzard and Joanna Lumley star in Peter Bogdanovich's version of a tragic cruise taken by William Randolph Hearst and friends.