SHIFTING CAREER GEARS HE TRADED WRITING REVIEWS FOR MAKING FILMS - AND IS STILL HIS OWN WORST CRITIC.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

When Rod Lurie first blew into Los Angeles about a decade ago, the local critical community was not quite sure what to make of him.

The brash New Yorker, who reviewed films in a funny, conversational way for Los Angeles Magazine and later on KABC-AM (790), did not follow the unwritten protocol of critics. Lurie would make purposely outlandish statements (which got him banned from at least one major studio's screenings). He fetishized the Academy Awards to an unseemly extent (and was thanked by name from the Oscar stage by such winners as Mel Gibson, James Cameron and Martin Landau). And he'd talk constantly about this film or that movie that he was on the verge of making himself - like that was ever really going to happen.

But it happened.

``Deterrence,'' Lurie's first feature as a writer-director, opens Friday in L.A. His second film, ``The Contender,'' is in post-production. He has successfully made the transition that barely a handful of American critics (Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Schrader being the most prominent) has pulled off.

So his ego, which was never mistaken for small, should be elephantine by now. But strangely, if logically, Lurie the filmmaker is as becomingly self-effacing as his opinionated previous incarnation aggressively sought attention.

``I think, at some point, every entertainment journalist has the fantasy of being on the other side,'' says Lurie, a fleshy, unfailingly polite and engaging raconteur. ``But this is really humbling, and I can't tell you how profoundly true that is. I don't think, frankly, that I was a very good film critic. I think that I was a very entertaining film critic, but when I would read pieces by just about any significant newspaper or magazine critic, they would be so much more profound and well-written than anything I had done that I really came to respect those people.

``But now these people are going to be seeing my film and ... Look, I've had a lot of tension in my life. I went to West Point, which is an intense place. As I was trying to make 'Deterrence' and other films, I lost my house. But the most tense time I ever had was waiting to read that first review of my picture at the Cannes Film Festival.''

Which was generally laudatory, in case you were wondering. A taut, single-set political thriller that Lurie freely admits commits ``grand theft larceny'' from the nuclear brinksmanship classic ``Fail Safe,'' ``Deterrence'' stars Kevin Pollak as a near-future U.S. president trying to manage a sudden, Middle East military crisis from a snowbound Colorado diner. Timothy Hutton and Sheryl Lee Ralph play his emphatically contradictory advisers, and a dozen-odd civilians and Secret Service agents are also in continuous, frantic, chatty motion around the cramped space. The movie steadily builds end-of-the-world suspense while reams of complex military, geopolitical and ethical data are discussed.

For Lurie poker pal Pollak (``The Usual Suspects,'' ``A Few Good Men,'' ``The Whole Nine Yards''), there was both confidence and pleasant surprise in the skills his friend brought to the project.

``How many times has Rod told you he shot the movie in just 18 days?'' Pollak says, unable to resist busting his buddy. ``He's a very gifted writer, and I had read his screenplays before and enjoyed them. But I was surprised that he had sort of a natural gift for leadership, which of course, is necessary for this job.''

Seems natural enough. Not only was there that West Point training, but the filmmaker's father, internationally renowned political cartoonist Ranan Lurie, was an Israeli major who was instrumental in capturing the West Bank during the Six Day War.

But if the critic seemed confident to his actors, they should be even more impressed by his acting abilities.

``I didn't know how I was going to do it,'' Lurie admits. ``I'd made a short film before this one, but there was so much I had no clue about - set language, coaxing actors - it was funny, but it was embarrassing. You do pick it up as you go along and I did have everything pre-edited in my head, but I think my crew was very worried about me.''

And Lurie had one thing going for him that a lot of first-time filmmakers don't.

``In no other job (besides film criticism) do you have the money or time to see every movie that comes out,'' Lurie notes. ``And I had the added advantage of being able to meet with every filmmaker. Little did they know that I was going to school whenever I was interviewing Spielberg or someone like him, that I was really dissecting their brains.''

Lurie freely admits that his entertainment journalism career was, from the start, a means toward his filmmaking goal. But it was also his bread-and-butter for many years. The father of two, who now lives in Pasadena with his wife, Gretchen, passed up several well-paying critic gigs in the mid-`90s while fruitlessly striving to get ambitious film projects financed. This led to the house foreclosure, but also to the shrewd, strategic determination to get his film career going on as modest a scale as possible (``Deterrence'' cost well under $1 million).

Now that's really paying off. ``Contender,'' a different kind of political thriller, boasts 53 different locations and the former critic's all-time favorite actress, Joan Allen, in the lead role. Still, Lurie insists that he's made no more than a lateral career move.

``It's not a step up at all; they're two totally separate careers,'' he reckons. ``The level of artistry that Pauline Kael achieved in her field is as high as the level of artistry that Martin Scorsese has achieved in his field. And really, it's not even a lateral move for me, because I had achieved a certain level of influence as a film critic when I went to making a small, independent film. In a way, it was moving into another career by downsizing quite a bit.

``It's simply different. But I'll tell you one thing: If I thought that I was not the equal of my peers as a film critic, you can imagine how I feel as a filmmaker!''

Yeah, but Rod, they don't give any of your beloved Academy Awards for film criticism. As long as all your other dreams have come true, why not hope that, someday, you'll be thanking Mel Gibson instead of the other way around?

``If I got nominated for an Oscar, I would really build an underground shelter because the apocalypse is coming,'' says Lurie, bound and determined to remain his own harshest critic.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) Timothy Hutton, left, Ryan Cutrona, Kevin Pollak, Joe McCracken and Sheryl Lee Ralph star in Rod Lurie's political thriller ``Deterrence.'' Lurie's first feature film opens Friday.

(2) Says writer-director Rod Lurie about filmmaking: ``You do pick it up as you go along ... but I think my crew was very worried ...''