WITH OSCAR BUZZ, BILLY BOB HITS THE BIG TIME.

Byline: Terry Lawson Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

A few weeks ago, Billy Bob Thornton, the director, writer and Oscar-nominated star of the acclaimed new drama ``Sling Blade,'' needed career advice of the sort you can't really get from a manager, an agent or even a fellow actor.

Should he follow up his award-winning performance as the mentally retarded ex-convict Karl Childers in ``Sling Blade'' with the much-coveted role of the snaky, James Carville-like campaign manager in the film version of ``Primary Colors''? That, of course, is the best seller in which a Bill Clinton-like character has Clinton-like misadventures on the campaign trail.

``So I just called him,'' says Thornton. ``Him'' would be the president of the United States, with whom Thornton shares a home state, Arkansas, and some mutual friends, Harry and Susan Thomason, producers of the ``Hearts Afire'' TV series in which Thornton co-starred.

According to Hollywood gossip, Tom Hanks bowed out of the lead role out of respect for the president - John Travolta is currently set to play the part - but Thornton says Clinton gave him the presidential seal of approval.

``He told me to to go for it,'' says Thornton. ``Said it sounded like a real good opportunity.''

In his Arkansas drawl, Thornton makes both the opportunity to star in a Mike Nichols movie and the conversation with the chief executive sound like something everyday. (``I figured I better take advantage 'cause I might not be that good of friends with the next president,'' he jokes.) But Thornton understands that what is happening to him is something way out of the ordinary.

``I am overwhelmed,'' he says. ``Never, ever thought it would have happened like this.''

Thornton has been nominated as best actor by both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Screen Actors Guild for his performance in ``Sling Blade,'' and the entire primary cast has been nominated by the latter as best ensemble. This is especially gratifying, because Thornton wrote most of the characters, including the gay Dollar Store manager played by John Ritter and the abusive, alcoholic good ol' boy played by Dwight Yoakam.

If his uncanny portrayal of Karl, the thick-voiced child-man who returns to the little Arkansas town where he killed his mother and her lover two decades earlier, does get honored, says Thornton, it will be only ``because I've had plenty of time to work on it.''

He first came up with Karl's distinctively dopey look and throat-clearer of a voice 15 years ago after becoming frustrated on the set of a TV remake of ``I Was a Fugitive on a Chain Gang,'' in which he had about four lines. Thornton thought the director was asking him to overact. Dressed in an itchy, old-fashioned railroad conductor's outfit, he was disgusted that he had placed himself in such a demeaning position.

A real character

``So I was back in my dressing room, making faces at myself in the mirror, my collar all buttoned up, and I just looked like such an idiot. And all of a sudden, this voice came out, and I just did that whole opening monologue, just like you hear it in the movie. I didn't really write it; it just came out of me. I swear it did.''

The monologue has Karl, head bowed, eyes on the floor, matter-of-factly telling a high school newspaper reporter how he came to find his mama and the neighborhood bully all tangled up in each other, and knowing from the Bible reading his daddy gave him how wrong that was, how he took this old knife, a sling blade, and killed them. And how he's been in this institution for 20 years now and isn't unhappy with that, but how he reckons he has to leave and go somewhere else on account of the doctors saying he's fine.

It's a shattering introduction to a character out of the most gothic of Southern gothic legends, delivered with the deliberate cadence of the croaked conversations Thornton heard hundreds of times growing up in Malvern, Ark. After testing its effectiveness on friends and peers, Thorton turned it into one act of a one-man play he periodically presented for casting directors and other interested parties as a kind of informal audition.

One person who saw Thornton become Karl was Fred Roos, a producer and former partner of Francis Ford Coppola, who cast him in the short-lived TV series ``The Outsiders.'' About the same time, another Arkansas buddy, Tom Epperson, moved to Los Angeles and convinced Thornton to collaborate with him on a screenplay called ``One False Move.'' The company that financed it planned to send the tense little thriller about a drug deal gone sour straight to video until it was embraced by film festival audiences and critics who turned the film, in which Thornton played a very scary dealer, into a bona fide cult attraction.

The film jump-started Thornton's career as both an actor and a writer. He not only snagged the best role, a slow-talking but quick-witted congressional aide on the otherwise middling ``Hearts Afire,'' but he also had decent-sized parts in movies such as ``Tombstone'' and ``Indecent Proposal.''

``Those are the kind of movies you got noticed in even if you were playing the hatcheck girl,'' says Thornton.

Still, he continued to write, teaming with Epperson again for last year's ``A Family Thing'' and finally coming up with an idea for a movie ``that deserved to have Karl in it.''

``I'm not your ordinary writer,'' he says. ``What I'm most interested in, I guess, is character, so I tend to come up with these people that I write a story around. With `Sling Blade,' I'd usually think of who I wanted in the movie first, people like John (Ritter) and Bobby (Robert Duvall, who plays his decayed old daddy), Dwight and all those other boys in that horrible band (an unforgettable assembly including wheelchair-using composer-oddity Vic Chestnutt; drummer Mickey Jones, who played drums on Bob Dylan's infamous 1966 tour; and the estimable and uncategorical retired Col. Bruce Hampton, often referred to as the redneck Zappa). Then I wrote parts that suited them.''

``Sling Blade'' has suited early audiences almost as well. It impressed distributor Miramax enough to mount the Academy Award campaign for Thornton and give a green light to his next film, an autobiographical story of a young white musician who plays with African-American musicians ``who could have owned the world if they could ever have gotten out of town.''

Thornton did get out of town, but he says one of the great things about growing up in Arkansas is that no one ever lets you ever forget it, even if you get nominated for big-shot awards.

``I may still end up having to go back for good, too, but I'm having a fine time in the meantime. The other day, I was on this radio show out here, and one of the other guests was (rockabilly legend) Carl Perkins. He brought his guitar, and they had this drum set in the studio. So they sit up this snare and cymbal, and I played with Carl Perkins. Can you believe that? Carl and Karl, together again.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) `I'm not your ordinary writer. What I'm most interested in, I guess, is character, so I tend to come up with these people that I write a story around.

Billy Bob Thornton

director, writer and star of ``Sling Blade''

(2) Award nominations for ``Sling Blade'' from both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Screen Actors Guild have made writer-actor-director Billy Bob Thornton a hot Hollywood commodity.

Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service