DEITCH’S HEARTENING SUCCESS

Wearing a pink cotton jump suit and a sunny smile, the producer-director--and consummate saleswoman--of “Desert Hearts” breezes into the conference room at the Samuel Goldwyn Co. and sits on the edge of her chair.

“We’re almost at break-even now,” says Donna Deitch of her first feature film. She means, of course, that the movie’s backers are close to making money on their investment. “We’ve opened in about 34 cities across the country currently. We’re still opening for the summer, and it’s doing real well. . . . In fact, we broke the house record in Atlanta the opening weekend.”

Not only is the movie a benchmark for the 40-year-old producer who brought it in on time (in 31 days) and a bit under budget (at a lean $1.5 million), “Desert Hearts” is also being billed as a kind of first for the gay movement. Or as one mainstream newspaper headlined recently, “Lesbian love without hang-ups. . . . “

Set in Reno, Nev., in 1959, the movie, based on the novel “Desert of the Heart” by Jane Rule, tells the story of an English professor (played by Helen Shaver) who comes to Nevada for a quickie six-week divorce, meets a younger woman (Patricia Charbonneau) and falls in love.

“I felt it was a timely story and one that hadn’t been told before in the American commercial cinema,” says Deitch. “All the (movie) stories about women in intimate relationships had ended in either one or two suicides, or in bisexual triangles. I wanted to tell a love story that happened to be between two women. I wanted to tell it with a certain amount of truth and a sense of humor. . . .

“It has a central metaphor that I thought was very strong, that would translate very well to the screen. The risk inherent in the relationship between the two women is in the context of the risk in gambling.”

She speaks that way, in chunks of hefty paragraphs, barely pausing for breath. Only later, well into the interview and after the photographer has finished her work, does Deitch lean back into the chair and relax. “After 29, you sort of have to sit up a little bit,” she explains with a broad grin, “because everything is not in its proper place. Otherwise you get this,” and she poses for effect, “lumpiness.”

She is a woman who understands the camera, after all.

Deitch, who grew up in San Francisco, the only daughter and middle child of a dress-designer mother and a dentist-turned-dress salesman father, came to movie-making in stages. Her progression wasn’t linear, but rather a blending of interests.

She began as a painter majoring in art at UC Berkeley, became interested in photography, then turned to live images as events overtook campus life.

“The first film that really inspired me to make films,” says Deitch, “was by Luis Bunuel that I saw when I was 17. ‘Los Olvidados,’ (‘The Young and the Damned’). It was a very sort of like raw, realistic-type film, and the very intense milieu, I guess, was like the photographs I used to take.

“Originally, I wanted to be a painter, then I wanted to be a still photographer and then I wanted to be a film maker. When I was in painting, I used to be really interested in instantaneous images . . . and somewhere in there as I became real active in photography, and my photographs began to be in sequence, all the stuff started happening with the Free Speech Movement and I wanted to document it in some way other than the still photographs. So I got a little Super-8 (millimeter) camera and started making films about the Free Speech Movement.

“They’re still around, little documentaries,” she adds. “There was so much going on at the time it was sort of my impulse to capture it.”

After earning a master’s degree in film at UCLA in 1975, Deitch and a friend formed a special-effects company called Latent Images. “We used to do consultation for the small films, industrial films, student films. And I used to make those kinds of films. And then I started making more documentaries.”

Two of those documentaries are listed in her bio. The first, which became her thesis and received funding from such organizations as the American Film Institute, is “Woman to Woman.” It’s an hour long, “about hookers, housewives and other mothers. It begins with a history of women’s work and roles from the turn of the century through the ‘50s by decade, with the music of the time behind it.”

She also filmed “The Great Wall of Los Angeles,” about the painting “of the longest mural in the world” in Tujunga. Her subjects, aside from the art, are the summer youth employees who worked on the project for the Social and Public Art Resource Center, the nonprofit organization she helped found in Venice.

Deitch first read “Desert of the Heart” in 1979 and knew immediately she wanted to do the movie. “Somebody gave me the book at a party; I read it seven times. . . . “

The project became a multifaceted effort--from writing the first screen version, which she tossed out, to raising $1 million via limited partnerships, hosting a slew of investor parties and persuading such people as Gloria Steinem, Judy Collins and Lily Tomlin to lend their names to the invitations.

First, though, Deitch had to persuade Rule to sell her the rights to the novel, which she did one afternoon when the author came down from her home in Vancouver to the California desert for a vacation. Lastly, Deitch had to do what she set out to do: Direct.

Do women directors speak in a different voice?

“I think that women have a certain perspective, a certain P.O.V.--point of view--that is specific to being a woman,” Deitch replies, “that has to do with all the things women have experienced--sociologically, psychologically, biologically. . . .

“Take any example. When you leave here, or you leave your office tonight, there are so many things a woman experiences. On the street, for instance--if you walk outside, your experience would be completely different from a man if you left this building at 10 o’clock and you were out there by yourself. So if a man took that same walk and he were a film maker or writer, his description would be totally different.”

She declines, however, to use as an example a scene filmed by a man and how she would do it differently. “I want to be careful about other people’s movies,” she says softly. “I don’t want to take somebody’s movie apart. That’s the job of a critic, and I’m not a critic.”

She brushes aside a question as to whether gay women and gay men have a different voice. And she declines to discuss sexual preference. “I never answer that question. I always find it bizarre when people ask that, because it doesn’t have anything to do with me as a film maker, and this movie.”

When it’s suggested the question might be logical, considering the theme of her movie, she responds:

“But the thing about it is that it takes away from the movie. Because the focus is the movie, how it was made, how one works with actors, how the production designer and I and the DP (director of photography) all work together, how I worked with Natalie Cooper, the screenwriter, how we developed this novel. . . . “

And, how she selected the cast--simultaneous with hiring the crew.

She first found Charbonneau, who plays Cay, the younger woman seen on the billboards, lounging against a ‘50s-vintage car in cut-off jeans.

“I had read about 100 young women here for that part, didn’t find anybody. I went to New York to have a look around, and at that time I saw a photograph of Patricia. You know agents and managers send you hundreds of these shots, resume on the back. And I saw that photograph and went to it like a laser beam.

“It was exactly as I imagined that character--that kind of energy. To me she has that kind of streetwise, rough and ready kind of look about her. Kind of wild. And great eyes--super, super dark eyes, dark hair.

“I called her in and she did a fantastic reading. So I called her in again and it was equally good. We went out to lunch together, spent some time together, and I hired her. No screen test.” She chose Shaver, who plays the professor, because after paring the list down to three, something “clicked” in her reading with Charbonneau. “I needed to know the chemistry was there.”

During the first week of rehearsal, Deitch notes, Charbonneau learned she was pregnant. “I thought she’s going to be sick and all that sort of stuff. What it meant was that she was too skinny before and she really filled out--right for the part. It never hampered her performance. She was very disciplined.”

Later Charbonneau took some flak because wherever she showed up on promotional efforts, she brought her new daughter. Does Deitch think that was a statement on Charbonneau’s part?

Deitch bristles: “Patricia was broke. Some of the festivals we went to--they didn’t provide a baby sitter, so she had the baby with her. It’s not a statement, it’s just the reality of her life.”

Much of directing, Deitch says she has learned, is intuitive--following impulse. And while she has some small regrets here and there--not heeding initial judgment and instead repeating a line that the critics jumped all over (“He reached in and put a string of lights around my heart”)--overall, she’s rather elated about “Desert Hearts.”

“I had the best time in my life making it, with the actors on location. I had the most stimulating, creative experience I ever had. I didn’t have any problems on the set. And anybody who didn’t work out, I fired before we went out there. I ended up selling my house in Topanga Canyon to get the rest of the money to finish my film. Now I’m going to get my money back.”

And her next project?

It’s about a woman rock singer, with no gay-straight issues involved, she says. “It’s also about three generations of women--her daughter and her, and her mother.” Deitch has someone in mind for the lead role. She smiles. “I can’t tell you before I tell her, can I?”