COMPANY TOWN : THE BIZ : Industry Doors Open for Decidedly Un-Hollywood Movie

The beauty of “American Beauty”--which debuts Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles and will roll out slowly across the country--is that it fits none of the usual Hollywood molds.

It was scripted by a TV comedy writer, directed by a Broadway veteran and produced by a duo who had never before worked together.

It’s a dark, quirky drama about a suburban family and is far from the kind of high-concept mainstream fare that fits neatly on the comedy, drama or thriller shelf at your local Blockbuster.

It’s one of those small off-beat films that one would expect to be marketed and released by Miramax Films or another specialty film distributor.

Yet the $15-million film was backed by DreamWorks SKG, a company usually associated with studio-sized movies that have recognizable marketing hooks.

“It’s one of the hardest movies I’ve ever had to market,” said Terry Press, DreamWorks marketing chief. “It’s definitely a ‘movie god’ movie,” meaning its commercial success will heavily depend on strong word of mouth and great reviews.

While its box-office prospects are murky (though it needs to gross only about $20 million domestically to break even), the film is generating good buzz from its provocative trailers and print campaign. DreamWorks is hoping it will be the talk of the Toronto and Boston film festivals where it screens this weekend.

Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening star in the comically dark tale about an upper-class suburban couple trapped in a loveless marriage who have a troubled relationship with their angry teenage daughter, played by Thora Birch.

“For a studio movie, it touches on issues you don’t normally see,” said Dan Jinks, who produced the movie with partner Bruce Cohen. “It looks at marriage in a more real way than we’ve seen in a mainstream Hollywood movie in a long time.”

And, as Jinks pointed out, while “studios like movies that are very obviously promotable, this is not something that is very obviously promotable.”

Written by Alan Ball, who has worked exclusively in TV on such shows as “Grace Under Fire” and “Cybill” and who created the upcoming ABC series “Oh Grow Up,” the film also marks the feature debut of noted theater director Sam Mendes, best known for his acclaimed revival of “Cabaret” in London and on Broadway and Broadway’s “The Blue Room,” with Nicole Kidman.

The 33-year-old British director credits Jinks and Cohen with giving birth to “American Beauty” and for “fighting very good battles” to assure the project was treated as independently made rather than the usual studio film.

*

In May 1998, the newly partnered producers had a meeting at Hugo’s in West Hollywood with Mendes and Ball. There, Cohen said, they made a pact that “come hell or high water we’d come through this on the same creative page and fight for the movie that all four of us believed in.”

The four hope to reunite soon at Hugo’s to bookend that experience, Jinks said, adding, “We really did it. We made the movie we believed in.”

Where it can often take 18 months or more to get a movie off the ground, Jinks and Cohen were in production on this project for less than a year after they decided to join forces.

“We opened the doors to our company in January of 1998 and were in production by the second week of December,” said Jinks, who, like Mendes, began his career in theater working on various Broadway and off-Broadway plays and was recently a top executive at Martin Bregman Productions, producing such films as the Martin Lawrence-Tim Robbins comedy “Nothing to Lose.”

“We thought the first year was going to be about finding material and putting things into development, and if we were really, really lucky, the second year we would try to make a movie,” Jinks added.

Just three months after hanging out their shingle, the Los Angeles-based producers landed Ball’s spec script and got DreamWorks to fork out $400,000 to buy it.

The producers had been sent the spec script by Ball’s agent, Andrew Cannava at United Talent Agency, but before they or anyone could make an offer, Ball insisted on meeting the potential bidders.

“Alan’s criteria wasn’t just who was going to give him the most money for the script. It was who gets the material, who’s going to make the movie, and who’s not going to put another writer on it,” said Cohen, who had worked on a number of Steven Spielberg films at Amblin Entertainment--the predecessor company to DreamWorks--and most recently produced DreamWorks’ comedy “Mouse Hunt.”

It helped that just after the producers had ended their initial meeting with Ball and were standing outside DreamWorks, Spielberg suddenly appeared.

“Steven Spielberg went on for 20 minutes about his script, Alan’s career as a writer . . . the kind of thing any writer would dream of happened in a very impromptu way,” recalled Jinks.

Jinks said as soon as the script went out to actors and directors, it became a must-read in Hollywood. “People were passing it around the way you passed around a copy of ‘Catcher in the Rye’ in high school.”

*

While the producers said several “name directors” showed interest, Mendes’ agent, Creative Artists Agency’s Beth Swofford, was aggressively pushing her client for his first film.

“It was right at the height of ‘Cabaret’ mania,” recalled Cohen, who along with Jinks and DreamWorks executive Glen Williamson flew to New York to see the play, which Mendes had originally mounted in London.

“We all sat there during the performance and said, ‘This guy should be directing our movie.’ ”

Mendes said he was drawn to Ball’s script because it was so different and fit no mold.

“It’s so rare that you read something original,” he said, noting he had toyed with the idea of directing a movie for years but was never “bowled over,” as he was by Ball’s script.

“It was written to be filmed. . . . It was full of images, full of visual expressions of loneliness,” said Mendes, describing the tone as at once “comic, tragic and hauntingly poetic.”

In addition to being a love story between two young people (Birch’s character and the next-door neighbor played by Ricky Fitts), Mendes said, “the film is a wildly funny, kaleidoscopic journey through America at the end of the 20th century, it’s a story of imprisonment where everyone gets out . . . and it’s a mystery story.”

“Hollywood is a better place to work when you can make an independent-style film within the studio system,” said Mendes, noting how maverick filmmakers such as Peter Weir, Milos Forman and the late Stanley Kubrick have been doing so for years.

Mendes says he agrees with DreamWorks’ low-key approach to selling the film.

“We have to let the movie do the talking,” Mendes said. “It’s easier to sell a high-concept movie with nothing to say than a non-concept movie with lots to say.”