Unsafe sex: can the controversial sultan of sexy cinema finally come in from the Hollywood cold?

WHEN ZALMAN KING'S Wild Orchid opened a few years ago, the steamy--and to many, shockingly explicit--sexual drama, starring Mickey Rourke as a lady-killing businessman caught up in an obsessive relationship with neophyte lawyer Carre Otis, drew a lot of flak in the States. But that was nothing compared with the near riot it prompted in Rome.

"People started throwing chairs," says the producer-writer-director's wife and partner, Patricia Louisianna Knop. "Half the audience loved the film, and half hated it. But the next day it was playing 16 theaters, and all of them were packed."

And back in 1986, their 9 1/2 Weeks, the steamer with Rourke and Kim Basinger, directed by Fatal Attraction's Adrian Lyne, was so hot all but "about a tenth" of the sex scenes had to be cut to get past the ratings board.

King's other films have drawn similar reactions, including the scorcher Siesta, starring Ellen Barkin, Jodie Foster and Gabriel Byrne; and Two Moon Junction, with Twin Peaks' Sherilyn Fenn in her film debut as a rich girl who, about to be married, falls into a lusty affair with a carnival barker.

No wonder he's been called everything from "the world's leading purveyor of the art sex film," as Premiere magazine put it, to a soft-core pornographer who "gives sex a bad name." This despite the fact that his films have made millions and garnered almost cult status in Europe--Wild Orchid and 9 1/2 Weeks, which played on the Champs Elysees for five years, have each racked up more than $100 million in sales worldwide.

Even though they move in the same circles as heavyweights like Barbra Streisand, Peter Bogdanovich and Madonna, King and Knop remain the quintessential outsiders. "We never tell people what we're doing," says Knop, "and nobody ever asks. I think our friends are even embarrassed to talk about our films."

All that finally may be changing. The commercial success of Basic Instinct, a vivid saga of sex and violence that makes King's gauzily photographed sexual fantasies look like Harlequin romances, has abruptly blurred the line that once separated the mainstream from the on-the-edge, such as that purveyed by David Lynch and the Coen Brothers. And now, King and Knop are primed to come in from the heat.

And into your living room.

Fittingly, King's production company, 10DB, is removed from the establishment dream factories, in the far reaches of the San Fernando Valley. It's hard to find, tucked away in a drab, single-story concrete warehouse in an industrial area of Canoga Park--between the Home Club and Sandy's Pool Service. There are no fancy signs or guards--not even a receptionist. Here, King has set up his own frugal film factory, dressing his Spartan sets with his wife's artwork and furnishings from their home. A large mosaic-topped table serves as a desk.

Knop looks less a creature of Hollywood than an eccentric professor of literature at a progressive East Coast women's college, with a pyramid of tight reddish curls overwhelming her face and a comfortably upholstered body encased in a wardrobe that is early Annie--part Hall, part Orphan.

Thin, with tousled dark hair and a long nose that stayed defiantly unfixed even during his acting days, King looks like a graduate student dressed against the cold Boston winds. He wears a black T-shirt, heavy cords, black cowboy boots and a dark jacket with a multicolored wool muffler.

Two projects are prime in his mind. First is Wild Orchid II, due out this month. Originally titled Blue Movie Blue, the film, though it has nothing to do with its eponymous predecessor, was redubbed Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue when research showed that the original Wild Orchid had an 85 to 90 percent awareness factor. Set in 1950s Sacramento, it's a $4 million spicy coming-of-age story about a young woman (Nina Siemaszko) who, upon the death of her heroine-addicted musician father (Tom Skerritt), falls victim to a life of prostitution. Not exactly for the kiddies.

But what King really wants to talk about is the couple's Red Shoe Diaries, a new late-night anthology for Showtime, set to premiere this month. It will be the first test of whether they can finally make it into the mainstream big time. A kind of "Twilight Zone Meets The Hitcher," the series centers on an architect whose fiancee commits suicide just before their wedding, leaving behind a diary packed with steamy sexual revelations. One reading, and the architect is left with a lifelong yen to hear other people's sexual fantasies, becoming a Dear Abby for the overheated set.

In one episode a man and woman working late in adjacent office buildings exchange passionate looks and actions and erotic memos by fax. In another, a policewoman unable to make any romantic headway with an attractive man she knows from her gym pulls him over for a minor traffic violation and abducts him to an abandoned airplane hangar, where she ties him up and has sex with him. It's the breast-baring, heavy-breathing stuff of which late-night hits are made, but compared with Basic Instinct and other recent orgies, it's, if not good clean fun, at least harmless titillation.

Still, says Knop, "Red Shoe Diaries is much more daring than what we usually see on TV. It's much more passionate and doesn't follow conventional story lines."

As if recalling past problems with the American sexual psyche, she adds, "It's a big step, but we might find that people are going to be outraged."

Showtime programming chief Steve Hewitt, who developed Red Shoe, admits he was nervous at first. "I was worried we'd end up with an erotic film trying to pose as a drama. We didn't know how King would deal with the sex scenes--he's pretty good at pulling those strings. We asked him to remove one scene I thought was gratuitous. I definitely thought I was in for the fight of my life, but he took it out without a word."

Not to mention the problems over casting. Canadian actress Brigitte Bako (One Good Cop and TV's Equal Justice) vividly recalls the reaction from friends when she told them she was up for a part in Red Shoe Diaries: "'Omigod ... are you crazy?' they said. 'Don't let him get you alone--don't even have dinner with that man.' I thought he was going to be this crazed, dirty old sex maniac. But he wasn't lecherous. He's insane on the set--he's really intense and completely passionate about what he does, but he's actually very fatherly in terms of dealing with sexuality."

King admits it's always a struggle when it comes to casting. "It's a hardwon battle," he says. "Agency by agency, agent by agent. Yet we're very, very honest about what our intentions are. Before an actor ever signs a contract, we go over the screenplay, how hard I intend to push them and what nudity is involved.

"While I know there are a lot of advisers who feel doing one of my films might not be the best thing for someone's career, they're wrong. There is no stigma whatsoever. Kim |Basinger~ was in the middle of a stagnant career when she did 9 1/2 Weeks. Sherilyn was a brand-new young girl. I don't know what Siesta did for Ellen Barkin's career, but it certainly cemented in a lot of people's minds that this woman was ferocious."

King came to directing via acting. The son of a New Jersey surgeon, he starred in such '60s movies as The Ski Bum, You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It and as a renegade Jesus in The Passover Plot in 1976. He was long-haired attorney Aaron Silverman opposite Lee J. Cobb in the short-lived 1971 series The Young Lawyers and went on to produce Alan Rudolph's comedy Roadie (1980) and Endangered Species (1982).

He met Knop in 1961, when she ran away to sea from a conventional midwestern upbringing to work as a crew member and wound up on the same schooner on which he was working as a scuba instructor. He asked her to unzip his wet suit, and they've been together ever since. They live in Venice in a house that was once a brothel and today stands packed from floor to ceiling with Knop's larger-than-life sculptures of men, women, children and mythological creatures--half-female half-bird, some painted in parrot hues, some pale and ghostlike.

In the early '80s, Knop--who had previously written the screenplay for the Ellen Burstyn film Silence of the North--and King bought the film rights to the 1978 novella 9 1/2 Weeks and cowrote the screenplay. Their first project together wasn't an easy one, taking producer King several years to secure financing and a director. When the film was finally finished, King says, he was surprised by the initial audience reaction. "We'd go to previews, and there would be a thousand people watching, and then all of a sudden, we'd look up and there would be 100 people leaving--just getting up and leaving the theater.

"And I always thought I was in the mainstream," he says with a laugh. "No one goes out to do a film thinking they're not going to be accepted by the general public. Our intention has always been to reach the widest audience. When you sell over 300,000 videos in America alone, there has to be someone who wants to see the film. But we have no marketing for our films. At most, we might have $2 million for prints and advertising--compared with a film like Basic Instinct, which has $30 million."

The couple's main obstacle, they believe, has been the reluctance of U.S. moviegoers to have their erotic fantasies served up to them in public. "It makes people uncomfortable," Knop says. "Yet it's okay for a guy to blow the heads off of 10 people in the first 10 minutes of The Last Boy Scout--that excites audiences. On TV, they'll blow a woman's head off--and that's okay, even though our kids are watching."

On 9 1/2 Weeks, MGM-UA ordered so many cuts, King says, that the final version was barely recognizable. Knop recalls: "They put out pieces of paper asking people, 'Did you enjoy the movie?' And then they took out everything people found offensive."

As for Wild Orchid II, King isn't polishing any Oscar acceptance speeches, though he expects the film to do the same thing for Siemaszko that his previous efforts did for Basinger, Barkin and Fenn, who used their parts as stepping-stones to stardom.

"Pat and I work very hard," he says, "and we ask people to wait and judge our body of work. We don't take the criticism to heart. If we did, we would have stopped a long time ago."

"I read articles about Zalman the sultan of sleaze, the soft-core pornographer," says Knop. "But if I thought that's what we were doing, it's the one thing that would really shut me up."

"I don't mean to put Pat in the same breath as Tennessee Williams," King adds, "but if you look at Sweet Bird of Youth and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams was attacking a lot of the same thematic material that we are. Maybe we've pushed it a bit farther, so we've slipped out of the mainstream."

King, in fact, believes he'd have gone farther faster if, like Lynch, he'd been a bit more cynical. "I love David's films," he says. "He's much smarter than we are. He allows the cynicism to penetrate a little more. His films are distanced; he removes the audience one step. It's a wonderful device. Pat and I don't do that. A lot of times, we go, boom--the chin is right out there. So we take a punch. But we're not masochists . . . we don't want to be hit in the face."