TRIALS OF `THE CRUCIBLE' : WINDING ROAD TO THE SCREEN FOR MILLER HIT.

Byline: Amy Dawes Daily News Staff Writer

``The Crucible'' already is a hit in New York, where the movie opened two weeks ago and grossed $100,000 during its first sold-out weekend in a single theater.

Tales of the on-location exploits of its starry cast began almost as soon as the filming did in late 1995 in a Massachusetts nature preserve. As if the movie version of Arthur Miller's revered 1953 play, which won a Tony Award for Best Play, needed more advance notice, star Daniel Day-Lewis married Rebecca Miller, the playwright's daughter, last month.

And critics have been buzzing about Oscar nominations ever since the picture, featured in the recent New York Film Festival, first was presented.

The story about the Salem witch hunts, which was notorious during the Joseph McCarthy-led anti-Communist hysteria that inspired it, has become a cause celebre in a crowded movie season more than 40 years after its theatrical heyday.

How did that happen? By all accounts, it almost didn't.

For years, the rights to the play had been tied up at HBO and CBS. When they returned to the market in 1990, Robert Miller convinced his playwright father to write a script for a big-screen version. Twentieth Century Fox bought it in 1991, but spent four years trying to match it to the right director, with Norman Jewison and Kenneth Branagh among those who were considered.

When former Samuel Goldwyn Co. executive Tom Rothman became president of Fox Searchlight, a film division of 20th Century Fox, and found Miller's script, he sent it to British director Nicholas Hytner.

``As soon as I saw the title page - `The Crucible' by Arthur Miller - I said to myself, `Someone has to make this,' '' said Hytner, the 40-year-old who directed the musical ``Miss Saigon.''

Hytner had acquired a golden glow in Hollywood after his 1994 screen adaptation of ``The Madness of King George,'' which also had theatrical roots, brought home four Oscar nominations for its distributor, the Samuel Goldwyn Co.

``I went to New York to see Arthur Miller, which was very nerve-wracking for me at first,'' said Hytner, speaking by telephone from London, where he's directing a play at the National Theater.

``I asked him whether he wanted a beautifully photographed record of the play, or whether he wanted a movie, and he looked at me like I was mad. He wanted a movie, of course, and after that it became very easy because he was eager to work on transforming it as far as he could. He could not have been more flexible.''

With the screenwriter and the director of the would-be movie in agreement, 20th Century Fox provided a $25 million budget, and the production was under way. First to sign on was Day-Lewis (``The Last of the Mohicans,'' ``In the Name of the Father,'' ``My Left Foot'') who would inevitably play a more erotically appealing John Proctor than had Arthur Kennedy, who originated the role on the New York stage.

For Hytner, the play is about sex. ``It's about the consequences of sexual betrayal and ... what happens to a community that cannot cope with the burgeoning sexuality of its adolescents,'' he said.

For the role of Abigail Williams, the teen-ager who sets out to avenge her scorn by her lover, John Proctor, by accusing others, including his wife, of witchcraft, the filmmakers chose Winona Ryder (``The Age of Innocence'').

Other key roles went to Joan Allen (``Nixon''), as Proctor's wife, Elizabeth; and to Paul Scofield, as the magistrate who comes to mete out hysterical justice. Also featured are Bruce Davison, Rob Campbell and Jeffery Jones.

``It seemed like every actor in the English-speaking world wanted to be in this production, which made it very easy to cast,'' Hytner said. ``It wasn't a matter of haggling over salaries; just a matter of saying, `You're in.' ''

The movie begins, spellbindingly, with a scene, not in the play, of teen-age girls whirling around a fire they've built in a forest at midnight, chanting the names of boys they hope to seduce.

``They're merely teen-agers playing at witchcraft and letting go of sexual steam because they live in a community where that sort of thing has no place to go,'' Hytner said. ``But when they're accused, the fear that they are made to feel translates into a series of murderous lies.''

That new scene was in Miller's original screenplay, Hytner said, as were the movie's courtroom scenes and other logical extensions of the action of the play. The playwright and the director continued to revise the script during filming, Hytner said, when ``I could ask him for rewrites, and 24 hours later they would come by fax.

``People always talk about `opening out' a play, as if by filming some scenes that take place outdoors you've done the job of turning it into a movie,'' Hytner said. ``But it's really more a matter of telling the story in a cinematic way, of getting the energy of cutting from one thing to the next.''

For example, Hytner said he chose to cut from an intense close-up of a panicked teen-ager straight to the chaos that panic has caused to show how they relate and ``feed'' each other.

``There seems to be something very cinematic about the way this story works, the juxtaposition of the personal paranoia and the public paranoia,'' Hytner said.

``It wasn't just about going wider to show the whole society that the stage play was alluding to. It was about focusing on this hysteria as a kind of virus that sweeps through the community.''

Filming began in September 1995 on Hog Island, Mass., a nature preserve off the coast near Boston. Uninhabited and untouched by the 20th century, it lay a mere seven miles from Salem, the historical site of the witch hunts.

``We were able to lay a 17th-century village onto a landscape that was totally pristine, which seemed important in capturing the spirit of the time,'' Hytner said.

Local people hired to play villagers included some who told stories passed down by their ancestors, who had lived in Salem in 1692, when 19 villagers were accused of witchcraft and hanged in the episode that inspired the play.

Day-Lewis found himself walking the same roads Proctor was reputed to have walked while attending a wedding on Hog Island in the late 1600s.

Day-Lewis, who is known to immerse himself in his characters, arrived on the island six weeks early to prepare for his role and even helped build the house that Proctor would live in. Still, Hytner said Day-Lewis is ``a regular guy.

``Yeah, he likes to take a job seriously, and he's an expert carpenter who helped us build the set, and he tends to be very quiet and concentrated during a production,'' Hytner said.

Hytner said that while the authentic surroundings helped provide the actors with a more natural environment in which to deliver their Puritan dialogue, they didn't provide much insight into the causes of the hysteria.

``There's nothing particular to that landscape that suggests witch hunts,'' Hytner said. ``They are sadly universal to the human experience, something that we don't seem to be able to shake off. ...

``You could think of any number of synonyms for witch. When Miller wrote the play, it was Communist. But it could just as well be Jew, immigrant, liberal, homosexual, feminist or politically incorrect.''

But Hytner said the filming wasn't about making those intellectual connections. ``What we did was tell a very specific story about a community in Salem in 1692 who for a very particular set of reasons get involved in an outbreak of lethal panic.

``You make it as specific as possible, and that way, perhaps, you make it universal.''

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Winona Ryder and Daniel Day-Lewis star in ``The Crucible.''

(2) Tales of the on-location exploits of ``The Crucible's'' starry cast, including Daniel Day-Lewis and Joan Allen, began almost as soon as the filming did.

(3) Bruce Davison co-stars with Winona Ryder, right, who plays Abigail Williams, the teen-ager who sets out to avenge her scorn by her lover by accusing others of witchcraft.

(4) ``It seemed like every actor in the English-speaking world wanted to be in this production, which made it very easy to cast,'' says director Nicholas Hytner, center. ``It wasn't a matter of haggling over salaries ...''