NO LAUGHING MATTER 'STEPFORD WIVES' REMAKE POINTS UP THE PROBLEMS OF SELLING SATIRE TO MODERN MOVIE AUDIENCES.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Satire, George S. Kaufman's apt definition goes, is what closes on Saturday night.

No need to feel bad if you don't quite get that. It was coined by the playwright around the peak of the live theater era. That was more than half a century ago, before television and saturation block-booking of movies made the concept of yanking an entertainment out of its venue the day after it opened archaic.

But that points up the main problem with satire: To really enjoy it, an audience has to know a good deal about what's being satirized. And that usually requires a more passionate interest in said subject than the average moviegoer brings to his weekend entertainment choices.

The notion that mass audiences don't appreciate satire is evidenced by the anxiety Paramount Pictures is going through over just how to sell one of its major summer movie contenders, ``The Stepford Wives.'' A postfeminist remake of the 1975 thriller, the new version was designed to take a darkly comic, sociologically critical approach to the notion of threatened suburban husbands reprogramming their rebellious spouses into obedient robo-brides.

The movie has been plagued with many of the common indicators of a box-office train wreck: Reports of on-set fighting between director Frank Oz and some members of the cast, which includes Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Glenn Close, Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken; schedule and budget overruns (production cost has been estimated at $90 million); poor test screenings and uncertainty over which of several endings should be used; and some serious, last-minute reshooting and editing-room tinkering.

But perhaps the most unnerving notion of all, for the marketing department anyway, can be summed up by Oz's statement at a New York press conference last week: ``If we did a remake, it would be a thriller, but I wouldn't touch that, I'd run like hell. This is really a satiric, and at the same time dark and emotional, take on it.'' U requests to speak to Oz and screenwriter Paul Rudnick were declined.

Taking its shots

Others involved in the second film version of Ira Levin's zeitgeist novel - itself a kind of satirical reaction to the then still-young women's liberation movement - point out some of the new ``Stepford's'' sharper satirical points.

``I think we're getting homogenized,'' Close observes. ``There are getting to be fewer and fewer places where you can shop, everybody's getting to look alike and wanting to look alike. So I think this movie, in its funny way, really does address something that's very relevant.''

``It's very scary what happens when a bunch of nerdy white guys get together with a lot of money,'' says Matthew Broderick, who plays the complacent husband of Kidman's go-getter reality TV executive (the couple move to the gated suburban community of Stepford after one of her shows goes terribly wrong). ``It's all comic, but you're reminded of groups of guys who came up with fascism. A lot of bad things happen when guys get together with their cognacs and cigars.''

``I thought Paul Rudnick had done a terrific job of updating it and spinning it around with his new addition of a gay couple and making it more timely, about plastic surgery shows and reality shows and all of the things that are floating around in the media,'' Midler adds.

All of which sounds like great fodder for satire (another definition of which, from the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, is ``the use of irony, sarcasm or ridicule in exposing, denouncing or deriding vice, folly, etc.''). But the same specific political, social and cultural jibes that might make the comedy intelligent could just as easily befuddle viewers expecting a broader kind of comedy or a straight scary movie.

At the same time, pointed satire can alienate people who identify with the viewpoint, lifestyle or set of beliefs being lampooned ... hence the self-satirizing nature of the recent attempt to market the bold put-down of Christian teen culture ``Saved!'' to the same pious audience that ate up ``The Passion of the Christ.''

Most purveyors of parody aren't quite that stupid. But they're probably all equally desperate to expand the reach of their movies.

Politics being one of the classic subjects of satire, that's understandable. If election turnout statistics are any indication, half the country doesn't care a whit about the subject, while the remaining 50 percent is almost evenly polarized on opposite sides of the partisan spectrum. That leaves, at best, one-fourth of the potential viewer pool for a political satire as could be anticipated for, say, a ``Harry Potter'' or ``Lord of the Rings'' film.

Wit, but not profit

The actual show-up numbers are much more minuscule (and the interest in lucrative offshore markets is, for all practical purposes, nonexistent). Recent political satires such as Warren Beatty's ``Bulworth,'' Tim Robbins' ``Bob Roberts,'' Alexander Payne's ``Citizen Ruth'' and ``Election,'' Mike Nichols' ``Primary Colors'' and documentarian Michael Moore's lone fictional feature, ``Canadian Bacon,'' have met with a collective multiplex yawn despite mostly rapturous critical reactions. Only ``Wag the Dog'' really connected at the box office, and that might have been because it was as much a satire of Hollywood as it was of geo- and sexual politics.

Which also connected it, in however tertiary a manner, to the one satire subset that has proven a fairly sure commercial bet in the last quarter century. Moviegoers will laugh at just about anything that parodies movies, a subject that they are, by nature, familiar with.

These films, almost all of which follow a format established by ``Airplane!'' in 1980, are more technically spoofs (``a lighthearted imitation of someone or something'' - Webster's College). But ever since Mad magazine, the guiding consciousness behind the entire genre, started calling its movie lampoons satires in the 1950s, the expanded interpretation has stuck.

Unlike satires of more serious subjects, movie spoofs don't have to be smart. ``Austin Powers'' and ```Scary Movie'' entries, which often do little more than just reference pop-culture imagery, can do as well or better than the ``Naked Guns'' or ``Screams'' of the world, which actually strive to be clever.

Of course, satire is not just about popularity. It wasn't in Kaufman's day either, nor, likely, back when Aristophanes and Lucian or Voltaire and Swift were practicing the snarky art.

Their works will live forever, as most likely will such classic satirical films as ``Being There,'' ``Dr. Strangelove,'' ``The Great Dictator,'' ``Sullivan's Travels'' and ``Young Frankenstein.'' It would be a shame if the demand of the current corporatized media marketplace prevented future such entries in that hard-to-love but noble field.

Of course, successful satires would have to be funny, too. And that may be the biggest stumbling block of all on the new ``Stepford'' path.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

Mock of ages

Can't get into ``The Stepford Wives''? Compensate yourself with something from the following list of 10 outstanding satirical movies.

``Airplane!'' (1980): The first Mad magazine-style movie genre spoof, and still the best of its kind. Packed with so many jokes, you wonder how the plane ever managed to get in the air. Even more amazing, most of the gags are funny, too.

``Children of the Revolution'' (1995): Every nation has skewer-worthy politics, as proven by this tall tale of an Australian Marxist who, for fighting a clampdown on dissent, earns an audience with her hero and winds up giving birth to Stalin's demon spawn.

``The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie'' (1972): Spanish auteur Luis Bunuel discovered early on that surrealism, done right, can make for some of the most potent social satire. In this mature work, several couples' attempts to hold a dinner party are repeatedly frustrated by absurd intrusions from an anarchic outside world.

``Dr. Strangelove'' (1964): Nuclear Armageddon is played for pitch-black laughs in Stanley Kubrick's Cold War masterpiece. Peter Sellers in three roles, George C. Scott as the ultimate unchicken hawk, Sterling Hayden as the sentimentally deranged Gen. Jack D. Ripper, Slim Pickens riding cowboy on the bang-up climax ... No prisoners taken, no quarter given, not a lame frame in the whole movie.

``Hail the Conquering Hero'' (1944): The most popular writer-director of the wartime years was Preston Sturges. It says something about the truth of his satiric insight - and, probably, a whole generation of Americans - that this gleeful burlesque of overamped patriotism found wide acceptance at the height of the bloodshed. Still knockabout hilarious and sweetly subversive today; perhaps just as important now, too.

``The Icicle Thief'' (1989): Italy's poverty-obsessed, 1940s neo-realist films get taken for a ride when, some 40 prosperous years on, a destitute protagonist escapes from a television broadcast into a universe of titillating commercials and consumer affluence.

``Modern Times'' (1936): In his last silent epic, Charlie Chaplin puts his famous Tramp in conflict with a mechanized workplace gone amok while simultaneously making sublime fun of his alleged Socialist leanings.

``Scream'' (1996): Though big hits themselves, the ``Screams' '' smart disembowelment of horror film cliches did not prove as popular as the dumber, lazier ``Scary Movie'' entries that spoofed ``Scream.'' Which doesn't exactly uphold the conventional wisdom that satire does poorly at the box office, but isn't real encouraging, either.

``Shampoo'' (1975): Sex, Hollywood and the death of liberal idealism get all mixed up and mercilessly lampooned, but with an unmistakable sense of aching regret, in this marvelous moral comedy about a Beverly Hills hairdresser who can't keep his priorities straight or his pants on. Written by ``Chinatown's'' Robert Towne at the height of his perceptive powers.

``Wag the Dog'' (1997): To distract from a sex scandal, a president hires manipulative media types to fake a war with Albania. This on the eves of Monicagate and Kosovo, not to mention the rise of Fox News. Brutally hilarious, like all the best social satires, and as frightening as only the most prescient ones can be.

- B.S.

CAPTION(S):

6 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) On the cover: Roger Bart and Kidman

(2) Nicole Kidman, left, and Glenn Close star in the remake of ``The Stepford Wives,'' which bears an imprimatur that makes film executives nervous: dark satire.

(3) Warren Beatty satirized politics in ``Bulworth.''

(4) Peter Sellers in ``Dr. Strangelove''

(5) Eddie Bracken, left, and William Demarest in ``Hail the Conquering Hero''

(6) Llyod Bridges, left, Robert Stack and Lorna Patterson in ``Airplane!''

Box:

Mock of ages (see text)