LOOK, MA, NO TABOOS

By Belinda Luscombe

IT'S NOT UNCOMMON FOR FILMMAKers to have problems with their stars, but writer-director David O. Russell had an unusual conflict while shooting his second feature film last year: Should he or should he not tell Alan Alda he had been a waiter at Alda's daughter's wedding just a few years earlier? "Every time I was about to, I thought, 'Don't tell him. He's not going to take your direction the same way if he knows that.'"

That dilemma is an indication of how sharp a climb Russell, 37, has made since his first film, Spanking the Monkey, two years ago. An alternately droll and disturbing work about mother-son incest, it became a cult hit. His new film, Flirting with Disaster, establishes Russell as a unique comic voice. The movie boasts a name cast that includes Alda, Lily Tomlin and Mary Tyler Moore, as well as such Gen-X faves as Patricia Arquette and Ben Stiller. Oh, and dyed-in-the-wool George Segal fans will have a reason to go to the movies again.

How did Russell land such big names after only one art-house success? "I had written a script that made agents sit up and pay attention," says the scruffily handsome director, whose flaws do not include false modesty. "I begged him for the part," agrees Stiller, who plays the lead character, a young entomologist who goes off in search of his biological parents. Moore wanted to play against type as a neurotic, sexually aggressive mother. "What I'm hoping," she says, "is that people in the business will consider me for a new type of work."

Russell's only film education came from a high school girlfriend who got into movies free through a relative, there wasn't much to do in suburban Larchmont, New York. "I saw Shampoo, Chinatown and Taxi Driver about five times," he recalls. After studying literature and government at Amherst, he toiled at various jobs while making short films. The director admits he mines material from a vein pretty close to home, and Flirting is based in part on his adopted sister's search for her biological parents. But when asked why his films treat parents with such disrespect, to put it sweetly, Russell balks at personal revelation. His own folks? "They're colorful," is as far as he will go.

"I wouldn't want to make a movie with so much autobiographical material again," he confesses. "I'm taking the most embarrassing aspects of myself and inflating them for the world to see." But agonizing over every decision is Russell's modus operandus. After rewriting the script 15 times, he had the actors rehearse for weeks in his home--then fretted about a star like Moore using his bathroom. After Spanking, he wanted to make a funny movie. When Flirting was in the can, "I wondered why I hadn't made Leaving Las Vegas." He must have driven his parents nuts.

--By Belinda Luscombe