Screenwriter’s Search for the Best Director Starts at Home : Movies: Steve Zaillian is known for turning difficult books into films. Now, he’ll also be known for directing ‘Bobby Fischer.’

To crack the uncrackable book . . . . To tame the untamable tome . . . .

As a screenwriter, Steve Zaillian seems to rather casually approach and conquer quests that others find downright quixotic. His reputation has been built on a series of big-screen adaptations of difficult nonfiction books, including Oliver Sacks’ “Awakenings” and Robert Lindsay’s “The Falcon and the Snowman.” Steven Spielberg has said for years he feared he’d never find anybody capable of turning Thomas Keneally’s “Schindler’s List” into a filmable script till he got a happy gander at Zaillian’s problem-solving first draft.

This week’s potential sleeper picture, “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” marks the successful screenwriter’s own directing debut and, however well it performs in the crowded summer marketplace, looks to leapfrog Zaillian onto the short list of desirable Hollywood hyphenates. If he wants it, that is; Zaillian’s on the daddy track and actually reluctant, he claims, to ever direct again.

The “Searching” script fits squarely in his ouevre : a strong, crowd-pleasing narrative culled out of a non-linear, true-life tale. Chalk up another one on the minor miracle board.

“I don’t think of these books as uncrackable,” Zaillian figures. “My agent does, and I guess other people do. But a more obscure book like this that’s not written in a linear fashion is actually, to me, easier to adapt. Maybe it’s not that it’s easier, but it’s certainly more interesting. There are certain books that get turned into movies that are written with that intention, it seems, and so it’s just not that interesting to do it. You’re more of a transcriber and editor than writer in those cases.”

If you hadn’t already read that “Searching for Bobby Fischer” is based on a true story, you might not know it watching the film itself. Zaillian deliberately avoided trumpeting its factual basis in ads or giving the movie a preamble to that effect, feeling that such claims usually serve as advance apologies in case viewers discover truth isn’t stranger than fiction after all.

“When you announce that in big letters when the film starts, it’s kind of annoying to me, like it should be more important because it really happened. A lot of times something like this is called a docudrama, which is generally kind of an awful term, because to me it’s kind of a license to not be dramatic,” says Zaillian. “ This , I couldn’t care less if it happened or not. It’s a good enough story that it doesn’t require that it be real.”

The movie ended up being “real” in some ways that transcend the original story itself. It’s in general terms the drama of the gifted child but specifically the saga of Josh Waitzkin, a 7-year-old whose prodigious gift for trouncing all comers at chess might threaten his chances of leading a normal kid’s life. And many of the scenes and lines of dialogue in the script are taken directly from the 1988 book by Josh’s father, Fred, a collection of essays about the chess world that dealt only partially with the blooming of the boy’s talent.

“I would have to say the character of Josh in my script is closer to one of my sons than the real Josh, probably,” Zaillian admits. “There are lots of details in the story that are all him, from the toys he plays with to certain figures of speech. I don’t think that I could have written that character without having somebody in the house that was that age that I could borrow from.”

When the movie Josh tells his dad he’d rather go visit a car dealership than play chess, that’s Zaillian’s kid. And dad has the drawings to prove it: One wall in the filmmaker’s office on the Paramount lot is covered with crayon sketches of cars, made by his son during a phase in which he insisted on field trips to auto showrooms every weekend.

It’s no coincidence that Zaillian’s son just turned 8 last week and that he just finished making a movie centering on the relationship between a father and his 7-year-old, played by Joe Mantegna and Max Pomeranc. The seeming serendipity was set up by co-producer Scott Rudin (“The Addams Family,” “Sister Act”), who convinced his longtime friend Zaillian that this was the project with which to make his directing bow.

“Steve is known for being able to adapt the unadaptable,” says Rudin. “But I think what he’s known for so far and what he’ll be known for next week are two very different things. What he’s about to be known for is the kind of sensitivity exhibited in this movie and his insight into behavior. Knowing what Steve is like with his own kids, I thought he would make this story of fathering a very personal and intimate-scaled movie and wouldn’t fall into the kind of obvious ‘Karate Kid’-ness which was a trap in the story.”

Zaillian’s credentials as a family man seem well in order, then. Not that he’s exactly itching to have his ability to transfer that onto the screen get him pegged as the next John Hughes or anything.

“I had no idea that this was a ‘family’ film, which is kind of what it’s being interpreted as,” insists Zaillian (whose other office wall carries a Phil Ochs poster, belying his boomer background). “Somebody called me about an article they were writing on this very subject and said there were 19 films coming out this summer that focus on a kid. I swear to God, I had no idea. I probably wouldn’t have done it if I had known that.

“I thought it was a very adult story. The fact that kids would come, I never really imagined that, but apparently the kids that have seen it that are about 8 and up enjoy it.”

It’s inevitable in the rush of kid-flicks that a film centered around a child would be seen as being for children, although “Searching” is more akin to another picture Rudin produced, “Little Man Tate,” in really addressing parenting issues. (Zaillian says he talked to Rudin about his concern that the two films’ themes might overlap and that he deliberately never saw “Tate” for that reason.)

Mantegna, who plays Fred Waitzkin, was impressed that the parenting ideals in the film weren’t just lip service on Zaillian’s part.

“He’s got two boys of his own, and I saw the care and time he was spending with Max,” Mantegna offers. “He’s a very sensitive guy; I saw (that) in the way he conducted the set and the kind of patience he needed to work with a little 8-year-old boy who had never acted before. That was a rare thing, and he took that very seriously.

“He spent a lot of time with Max beforehand, and a lot of it paralleled what happens later on in the movie where Josh and I go fishing instead of working on our chess. There was a good deal of that with Max even on the set, of spending time taking him places, going to baseball games. . . .”

Zaillian avoided the easy road, not only in hiring a first-time child actor to be the protagonist in his directorial debut but in facing the challenge of making chess “cinematic,” something that might stymie an experienced filmmaker.

“I think the fact I didn’t know anything about chess going in helped,” says Zaillian, “because I couldn’t really write anything that was so complicated from a chess standpoint that your average person couldn’t understand it, because I couldn’t understand anything more complicated than what’s in the film. And these guys--the real Bruce Pandolfini and the real Josh Waitzkin--play at a level that I don’t know what they’re doing.

“It’s really funny--I knew from the beginning that the story could have been about anything, that chess was really a backdrop. So I didn’t really worry about it. What I didn’t realize until we started shooting was that there was a chess board in almost every scene. I had written it, but even then I hadn’t really realized it. And when Bruce Pandolfini, who was the technical adviser on the film, started working out the games, he counted up 45 scenes that involved a chess board and a position that he had to work out.”

Scripts are now pouring into Zaillian’s office for his consideration, in spite of his professed refusal to consider directing anything he hasn’t written himself. And he’s somewhat bemused by how far his industry standing has risen just because he’s directed one movie, much more even than after he got an Oscar nomination for writing “Awakenings.”

“I never aspired to being a director,” says Zaillian, who grew up in Los Angeles and studied film at San Francisco State, working as an editor before he “accidentally” stumbled into scriptwriting in the late ‘70s.

“I think of myself as a writer and I think always will, and this directing was merely a way of getting that script onto the screen the way I had intended it. Now that I’ve done that, I don’t feel compelled to do it again, and may not.”

Could Zaillian be just about the first screenwriter ever to “graduate” to directing without catching that bug for good?

“The endurance of it all was a big surprise to me,” he explains. “I always thought the director looked like they were doing the least amount of work of anybody on a set--seriously. But when you’ve directed something, it’s 14 or 16 hours a day for over a year--plus add the writing time onto that--and you’re so focused on it that you’re sacrificing other things in your life. Here you are making a movie about parenting, and it’s taken so much time away from your own family that who knows what’s happened while you’ve been away.

“I mean, for what? So that it comes out and people say, ‘I have to wait till it comes out on videotape’? That kind of reaction to something you’ve spent two years of your life doing--I don’t know, actually, how directors keep doing it.”