To Open in Oshkosh

Paul Scofield and Katharine Hepburn playing Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance in Oshkosh, Wis.? Sir Laurence Olivier doing Chekhov's Three Sisters in Totowa, N.J.? Fredric March, Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh in Mobile, Ala.? In one of the most unusual and ambitious movie ventures in decades, the American Film Theater has packed up an unprecedented trunkful of talents --among them Directors John Frankenheimer, Tony Richardson and Peter Hall, Actors Alan Bates, Stacy Keach and Zero Mostel--and this fall will hit the road bringing classics of modern drama to audiences in more than 500 theaters across the U.S. and Canada--on film.

The A.F.T. was conceived by Movie and Television Producer Ely Landau (The Pawnbroker, Long Day's Journey into Night), who refers to the project as "legitimate film." Landau put together his distribution system in a series of conferences with theater owners in which he appealed "both to their consciences and their half-empty houses on Mondays and Tuesdays." Once a month, one of A.F.T.'s eight first-season productions will be shown in each participating theater, for four performances only. The films will rotate, so that Findlay, Ohio, might see lonesco's Rhinoceros on the same two days that Tyler, Texas, sees John Osborne's Luther. At subscription rates of $30 for evening performances (about $3.75 a film) and $24 for matinees, A.F.T. can break even, Landau estimates, by filling only 44% of the 1,500,000 theater seats he has corralled.

The budget for all eight films, including Three Sisters, which was bought from Olivier as a finished film, was $6.6 million, less than the cost of many a single Hollywood extravaganza. The films --shot mainly in London and New York on tight, four-week schedules--were in effect subsidized by the artists. Directors were paid from $15,000 to $30,000 each, plus percentages from the future grosses of their productions. Hepburn and Marvin, who normally command six-figure salaries, worked for a token $25,-000 plus percentages; others worked for even less, lured by high-caliber colleagues, juicy roles and the chance to permanently record their performances in those roles on film. When Landau approached Marvin to play Hickey in Iceman, Marvin's answer was to quote at length Rickey's fourth-act soliloquy.

Says Iceman's Director John Frankenheimer: "It's the chance of a lifetime.

There's not going to be a remake of this --this is it."

No Adaptation. Scrupulous efforts were made to transfer the plays to film intact. "My function is to see that there is not an adaptation," says Edward Albee, credited as "screenwriter" for his own A Delicate Balance. "I'm the screen non-writer." Nevertheless, directors and actors all insist that they have produced not static "filmed plays" but new cinematic interpretations. "A three-dimensional object seen from different vantage points" is the way Peter Hall describes Pinter's The Homecoming in its A.F.T. incarnation. "We've not so much opened up the play as closed in on details."

In the past 20 years, notes Landau, movie attendance has plummeted from 80 million a week to 14 million. Many of the absent 66 million are simply staying home to watch TV, but some others, Landau argues, constitute a "special audience who were not getting what they wanted" at the movies. "There is an enormous thinking public that wants something else," says the enthusiastic Katharine Hepburn, "and this is what we hope to capture."

Subscriptions have been offered since July through direct mail, newspaper ads and American Express, but it is too early to tell how much of that audience will respond. Nevertheless, the optimistic Landau has already begun selecting plays for next year, and for a Saturday-morning children's series to boot.

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