EMOTIONAL `GHOSTS' : REINER TAPS INTO HEARTACHE, HATRED BEHIND MURDER OF CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER.

Byline: Amy Dawes Daily News Film Writer

On a recent episode of ``The Oprah Winfrey Show,'' civil rights leader Myrlie Evers-Williams, chairwoman of the NAACP board of directors, presented Rob Reiner, director of the new movie ``Ghosts of Mississippi,'' with a token of her appreciation for his efforts in making the movie - a poll tax receipt taken from the wallet of her late husband, Medgar Evers, who was slain in 1963 by a white supremacist who has just recently been convicted. Reiner, a 51-year-old with a graying beard, began to cry.

``This entire experience has been very emotional,'' Reiner told the Daily News of his struggle to do historical as well as dramatic justice to the highly charged tale of how Evers' killer, Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith, was finally put behind bars in 1994.

Reiner, who was known to television audiences for his role in ``All in the Family,'' has spent most of his directing career making us laugh, squirm or sigh with movies such as ``This Is Spinal Tap,'' ``Misery'' or ``When Harry Met Sally... .'' But he says he has long wanted to do a movie with civil rights as the theme, and in ``Ghosts of Mississippi,'' his goal is to help us remember.

Raised in a show-business family in Los Angeles (he's the son of comedian/director Carl Reiner), Reiner was 16 when he learned of the assassination in Mississippi of Evers, an African-American civil rights activist who was frequently outspoken in the media. ``It was a very shocking and disturbing incident that was discussed a lot in my household and the circles that I ran in,'' said Reiner.

Nonetheless, his treatment of the subject has been somewhat controversial for its focus on a white prosecutor, Hindes County assistant district attorney Bobby DeLaughter, who successfully reopened and reprosecuted the case 31 years after the murder, rather than on Evers himself.

``We are living in a time when people are very critical of white people doing things that have black themes in them,'' said Reiner. ``I think it's very unfortunate.'' In the movie, DeLaughter is played by Alec Baldwin, De La Beckwith is portrayed by James Woods, and Myrlie Evers is portrayed by Whoopi Goldberg. The Daily News interviewed Reiner a few days before it opened.

Q: Do you remember your reaction when you first learned, back in 1963, that Medgar Evers had been shot?

A: I was stunned. Here was this very moderate-thinking, even-keeled person, who was not a rabble rouser, who was just working within the system to get the rights every person is entitled to - to vote, to eat at a restaurant, to send your kids to a decent school - and this is what happened to him. When the trial resurfaced, I couldn't believe they were going after this guy 30 years after the crime, and I thought it would make a compelling story and a good movie.

Q: How much did you rely on the recent nonfiction book by Mary Ann Vollers, ``Ghosts of Mississippi''?

A: That book was one of the books we used as a reference, and we bought it so we could use the title. I also read ``Portrait of a Racist,'' written by De La Beckwith's nephew, a guy named Reed Massengill. Most of our information came from our own research, done by our screenwriter Lewis Colick in talking with people who were actually involved in the story.

Our producer, Fred Zollo (``Mississippi Burning''), was friends with Willie Morris, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who lives in Jackson, and Willie was covering the trial. He called Fred up and said, `You gotta come down here, there's a good story unfolding.' Fred arrived down there the day the verdict came in. He has a development deal with Castle Rock (a production company Reiner co-founded), so he came to us and said, ``What do you think about making a movie of it?'' We said, ``Great,'' so we hired Lewis Colick, who started doing all the research and writing.

Q: At one point, you tried to visit (convicted killer) Byron De La Beckwith in his cell. What was that like?

A: I would like to have talked with him, but they told me I wasn't allowed to because his case was on appeal. They took me down to the prison anyway, and when I got there he was sleeping, which was just as well. He's got racist literature strewn all over his jail cell - pamphlets and books and magazines from the Aryan Nation, the Nationalist Movement, the Christian Identity Movement. He is firmly steeped in his ignorance.

Q: So you don't think his character has been transformed by his ordeal?

A: No. He is totally convinced that he has done a very good thing for society.

Q: Where is he incarcerated?

A: At the Hindes County jail. He was supposed to be moved to Parchman Prison, which is a state prison, but from what I understand, the word got out that he was being transferred up there, and the black inmates let it be known that if they got ahold of him they would kill him, so they decided to keep him in Hindes County Jail. He's been there since the verdict in February of 1994.

Q: Did he express any opinion about the fact that you were making this movie?

A: No, I didn't hear anything, but I know he knows it was being made, because he is definitely in touch with the outside world. He writes five to 10 letters a day to various hate groups.

Q: I understand that your producer, Fred Zollo, did actually have a visit with De La Beckwith.

A: Yes, but it was brief. De La Beckwith asked him if he was a Jew, and Fred said he wasn't. De La Beckwith said, ``Oh, because you know I won't talk to a Jew.'' We ended up putting that in the movie. Fred said, ``Well, I'm a Catholic,'' and De La Beckwith said, ``Then you know the `Hail Mary,' '' and he made Fred say the Hail Mary before he would talk to him.

Q: I understand that James Woods, who plays De La Beckwith in the movie, did not want to have any contact with him. How did he develop his characterization, then?

A: There was tons and tons of video. The interview that is shown in the film is taken, verbatim, from an hour-and-a-half video interview he did with Ed Bryson, a reporter from WLBT Channel 3 in Jackson. Bryson went up to Signal Mountain, Tenn., which is where De La Beckwith was living at the time. Jimmy Woods looked at this tape over and over again to study it.

Q: How did you choose James Woods for the role?

A: He came to meet me for another part, and he lobbied very heavily to play De La Beckwith. He said, `Just let me read for you.' He did, and I was blown away. I told him I had concerns about whether he'd be believable as a 73-year-old man, so we did some makeup tests, and we were convinced.

Q: A key scene in the movie is where De La Beckwith confronts DeLaughter in the men's room at the courthouse during the trial. But your only source for that conversation would have been DeLaughter, right?

A: Well, the tough thing in making this film was that I had to stick to the facts. I took that very seriously, because I know that some people get their history through movies. So I wanted to be accurate and factual. If I'd had a free hand as a dramatist, I would have made De La Beckwith take the witness stand and have him and DeLaughter go at each other in the climax, but it didn't happen that way. What did happen is that, in the course of the trial, Bobby told me, he ran into De La Beckwith in the men's room at the courthouse. He said that De La Beckwith basically said, ``How do you think it's goin' for you, son?'' with this kind of big grin on his face, and Bobby said, ``Well, we'll see soon enough, I guess,'' and De La Beckwith said, ``That we will, son, that we will,'' and he had this cocky grin on his face, like nobody could touch him. I took that little nub of an encounter and I made a full scene out of it.

Q: I understand you filmed at the actual house where Evers was killed.

A: We filmed the scene right there on the driveway, and right inside the house, and also at the Hindes County courthouse and on the Mississippi Delta. We tried to use as many of the real locations as we could.

Q: What made this movie such an emotional ordeal for you?

A: When I was scouting the locations, I stood on that driveway and it hit me that this wasn't just a movie I was making - it was about something that really happened, and I started crying, because I imagined myself in that position, being taken away from my family, because I have little kids also, and I thought to myself, this is just unconscionable.

After we shot the assassination scene, Myrlie Evers came to visit the set, and she wanted to see the footage. I took her into my trailer, and her daughter, Reena, was there, and Darrell Evers, her son, and Yolanda King (daughter of the late Martin Luther King) who plays Reena in the movie. I said, ``Are you sure you want to watch this?'' She said, ``I've been living with this for 30 years, I'm sure I can watch it.'' We watched it, and her daughter and Darrell and Yolanda were crying and they were holding hands. I started crying, too. The whole experience was like that.

Q: What do you think drove Bobby DeLaughter to see this thing through, given the lack of support he got from his family and his colleagues?

A: Bobby DeLaughter is a very ordinary man who did an extraordinary thing. He is a very good prosecutor and a very principled, religious man. I think he stood on that driveway and had the same feeling. What kind of a man shoots another man in the back in front of his family? It wasn't a racial thing for him, it was more a feeling of, ``This is just plain wrong, and I'm a prosecutor, and this is what I do for a living.'' So he went after this guy.

Q: Do you think Mrs. Evers was suspicious of your motives, as in the movie she was suspicious of DeLaughter's motives?

A: I think she was cautious about it. She didn't know me, so it was a process of winning her over and making her feel comfortable. I made it very clear to her, I said, ``This is not the Medgar Evers story, and it's not the civil rights movement. It's the story of the reinvestigation and reprosecution of Byron De La Beckwith, and if you don't feel comfortable with what we're doing, then I'm not going to make the movie.''

She expressed on many occasions that she wishes there was a movie about her life with Medgar, and there may be a very good movie in that. I chose to tell the story of a man who came from a racist background, who was the product of segregationist parents, and who spent 4-1/2 years of his life working on this thing.

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4 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Rob Reiner discusses a scene with Alec Baldwin during filming of ``Ghosts of Mississippi.''

(2) Myrlie Evers (Whoopi Goldberg) and children Darrell (playing himself), left, and Reena (Yolanda King) celebrate the 1994 conviction of the man who murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963 in Rob Reiner's ``Ghosts of Mississippi,'' a chronicle of the investigation and trial that put Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith behind bars.

(3) ``The entire experience has been very emotional,'' director Reiner says of making ``Ghosts of Mississippi.''

(4) ``Ghosts'' focuses on the roles of Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter (Alec Baldwin), left, investigator Charlie Crisco (William H. Macy) and District Attorney Ed Peters (Craig T. Nelson) in the case.