UPDATING OF A COURTSHIP TALE; O'DONNELL, ZELLWEGER REMAKE 1925 KEATON CLASSIC.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

The difference between classic cinema and modern movies doesn't get much more evident than it does with ``The Bachelor.''

Opening Friday, the romantic comedy starring Chris O'Donnell and Renee Zellweger is definitely a creature of the '90s, full of talk about how women and men don't understand each other but long for a perfect union anyway. The story revolves around the efforts of Jimmy Shannon (O'Donnell's character) to secure a bride in a 24-hour period after fumbling several attempted proposals to his true love, Anne (Zellweger). If he doesn't wed in time, he'll forfeit a $10 million inheritance.

Compare that to its source material, Buster Keaton's 1925 comedy ``Seven Chances.'' Though it has virtually the same plot, the silent classic - actually, one of Keaton's second-rung works, but, considering his genius, a classic compared to most other comedies - is pretty much about setting up an outlandish series of sight gags as Keaton is chased through town and country by hundreds of eager would-be brides.

A thousand brides inhabit the climax of ``Bachelor,'' too. But the new movie is more about feelings than slapstick free-for-alls.

``I hadn't seen `Seven Chances' until I read (Steve Cohen's) script for `The Bachelor,' '' admits O'Donnell, whose company George Street Pictures developed and co-produced the new film. ``It's a neat movie; the silent films had to be so creative with visual gags to make people laugh. And the chase sequence! They had a lot of brides, lots of extras, boulders coming down the hill . . .

``But we wanted to emphasize the romance in our film,'' adds O'Donnell, 29. ``It's a tough thing to balance the romance and the comedy of it. So much of `Seven Chances' is the chase sequence. We actually had more footage of our chase that we cut out, just because the film really didn't need it.''

British director Gary Sinyor, who makes his Hollywood debut with ``Bachelor,'' was equally unfamiliar with the Keaton original.

``The script was really very good, it had Chris attached and, in that final act, it had something I'd never seen before on film, which was the brides,'' Sinyor admits. ``It seemed to me a very original take on romantic comedy.''

The director was eventually set straight. But after viewing ``Seven Chances,'' he had no trepidation about remaking the work of one of cinema's greatest filmmakers.

``While the set-piece bridal sequences were fantastic, they were sort of written out of this movie,'' Sinyor confirms. ``What I hope we have here is a film that people get more involved in, involved in the characters and the romance and the tension between the two of them. Test audiences' reactions seemed to be that they wanted to see Chris and Renee get together, and not me showing off how many brides I could get chasing through tunnels and stuff like that.''

The leading lady rounded out the class of film appreciation flunkers.

``I didn't even know about the Buster Keaton movie; we never talked about it,'' Zellweger confesses. ``I'm ignorant when it comes to films. I haven't even seen it yet, but I'm trying to. I can never remember the title; everybody just says, `Have you seen the Buster Keaton thing?'

``This script just made me laugh,'' Zellweger adds. ``And you know what? It fit my life at the time. I mean, I had just spent three years playing really dark and emotionally challenging roles (in `Deceiver,' `A Price Above Rubies' and `One True Thing'). I loved it, and I read a lot of interesting material that had a little more subtext or commentary to it, but this just felt right. I wanted to laugh at work instead of doing intensive research and concentration - and wear pretty clothes.''

For both O'Donnell and Sinyor, ``The Bachelor'' definitely had a strong thematic subtext. Both men had recently married and could thoroughly relate to Jimmy's conjugal jitters.

``It's not like this film is `Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,' '' Sinyor explains. ``What this film maybe does is highlight the idea of commitment as something that one needs to address before you contemplate proposing. Every time I watch it, by the end I just feel closer to my wife.''

Jimmy's utterly inept proposal - the words ``you win'' are involved - certainly doesn't reflect O'Donnell's question popping to his longtime fiancee Caroline Fentress. Not that the heroic star of ``The Three Musketeers'' and ``Batman and Robin'' had a stress-free courtship of his lady.

``She was on full alert because she knew it was coming,'' O'Donnell recalls. ``So the key thing was to surprise her. She was teaching in D.C. at the time. I'd bought the ring and they were going to set it or mount it or whatever they do, in New York. I asked if they could get the ring down to Washington on the day I wanted to propose, they said sure, no problem, but they called the day before and said they couldn't get it there.

``That morning, Caroline went to work and I told her I was just going to hang out in Washington. Then I flew up to New York, got the ring, flew back, showed up at her dad's office, talked to him, got permission, picked her up at school, got home and said, `Let's sit on the couch.' I'd had the ring in my possession for, like, two hours, and I just couldn't contain myself,'' said O'Donnell, who has now been married for two years.

Guys just may find the whole proposal process a bigger deal than women do.

``I've never thought about being proposed to in my whole life,'' Zellweger says in a sweet Texas drawl. ``I don't care. How about that? The thing hasn't presented itself at all, not yet. I don't know; too many other gifts, I guess.''

The guys making ``The Bachelor'' had more to think about than engagement traumas. For one, an essentially retrograde concept had to be made palatable for the '90s. This included the portrayals of old girlfriends Jimmy turns to in desperation, two of whom are played by Mariah Carey and a chain-smoking Brooke Shields. It also meant trying to make a generally sexist concept both benign and sharp enough to generate laughter.

``There will definitely be women who are turned off by it, think it stereotypes them,'' O'Donnell acknowledges. ``But you know what? It's just a movie, we're not making any statement about anything. But blunting the misogyny was one of many things we worked on, just trying to get the script right.''

And of course, there was a bit of a logistic challenge. ``The Bachelor'' may not be Buster Keaton at his elaborately engineered best, but a lot goes into getting 1,000 extras into wedding gowns and then moved about en masse.

``There were budgetary constraints,'' Sinyor says of the relatively cheap, $26 million production. ``So, at one point, we thought we were going to have to computerize a lot of the brides. I was very set against it; I wanted to have real people because the reactions you get from them are more interesting.''

The director got lucky when costume designer Terry Dresbach got in touch with Phyllis Kelley, a Connecticut consignment store owner who just happened to have more than 800 wedding gowns cluttering up her home. Anxious to sell the lot for a reasonable price, Kelley and her husband drove the dresses to California themselves.

Outfitting was one thing; wrangling all those brides around San Francisco was another.

``The costume designers were up at 3 o'clock every morning, dressing them and making them up,'' Sinyor recalls. ``You got rather blase about that, but once you tried to do a shot, it was complete chaos. There was a shot where they converge on Chris from three different directions, and it took half-an-hour just to get them all back to their starting points for each take. Luckily, we got that on the third take, since I was just guessing on the timing of the whole thing.''

All in all, O'Donnell, who became a father for the first time in September, feels that he's made a movie for our time - or, at least, for the time in life he's at right now.

``To me, it seems like the whole world's getting married,'' he says. ``I got invited to 13 weddings this year; you'd have to look at statistical records for the real story, but it feels like all of my friends are getting married. I'm just at that age. And I love being married, I really do.''

CAPTION(S):

5 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Isn't it romantic?

Chris O'Donnell becomes the reluctant groom in `The Bachelor'

(2--3) ``I love being married, I really do,'' says ``The Bachelor'' star Chris O'Donnell, on the run with a thousand would-be brides, above. He portrays inept suitor Jimmy Shannon in the film, opening Friday.

(4) Renee Zellweger, director Gay Sinyor, center, and Chris O'Donnell on the set of ``The Bachelor.''

(5) Zellweger and O'Donnell share a romantic pas de deux.