Out of Hiding

Douglas Green left Kansas City in 1979, eventually becoming a theater director in Los Angeles. When he decided to apply his craft to film, he did an L.A. kind of thing, placing ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

He was seeking scripts for an “ultra-low budget” project. Still, in a town where parking valets have production deals pending, Green received more than 300. “I got scripts for big action films and one set in Prague. And a lot were awful. One, however, stuck out above all the others.”

That was Mitch Giannunzio’s two-character, one-set play, A Smaller Place, about a man’s dysfunctional relationship with his elderly mother as her mind seems to unravel before him. “I called Mitch to say I was interested if three things could be changed,” he recalls. “We had to have more than one room, they had to dance, and I wanted a different title.”

Now called The Hiding Place and starring Timothy Bottoms and Academy Award-winning actress Kim Hunter, the film makes its world premiere outside the festival circuit this week in Leawood.

Many good plays make stilted films, but that didn’t dissuade Green. “In opening it up, to make it less theatrical, you’re forced to experiment with different things.” He and Giannunzio gave Bottoms’ character a wife (Kim Greist) and a couple of kids. Still, it mostly takes place inside the mother’s California bungalow. “I wanted to keep it claustrophobic,” Green says.

The movie was finished in February 1999, and Green admits it’s been a tough sell. “It would consistently get critical acclaim, like from Leonard Maltin, but distributors would say, ‘This is great — someone else will do well with it.’ We had terrible luck. I mean, it’s not the world of twenty-year-old males. This is for people who’ve seen all the films that were up for Oscars or watch The West Wing. They’re older and educated.”

Kim Hunter, who earned her Oscar playing Marlon Brando’s tough wife, Stella, in Elia Kazan’s classic film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, had played the mother a decade earlier at a small Massachusetts theater. Green and Bottoms say that working with Hunter — a busy actor until her death last September — was monumentally rewarding.

“It’s Kim’s picture,” Bottoms says from Los Angeles, where he’s preparing to play President Bush in a Showtime drama. (Comedy Central fans will recall his lighter spin on George W. in the satiric series That’s My Bush!) But he thinks his work in The Hiding Place ranks among his best performances in a career that includes The Last Picture Show and The Paper Chase.

“Working with [Hunter] was the key to its success,” he says. “She exhausted me, ran circles around me. I’d be plopped in a chair, and she’d still be stomping around.”

The Hiding Place wasn’t Hunter’s last film, Green says, but it was her last leading role — and she hadn’t played a lead since Escape from the Planet of the Apes. “She would say something like, ‘Well, Kazan would do this …’ or ‘Jerome Robbins said this….’ I didn’t always use the suggestions, but they came from the best places.”

How does Green feel about the movie premiering in his hometown? “It’s a mixture of gratitude, excitement and absolute terror.”