MOVIES : Don’t Worry About Educating This Rita

BARNET, England — “There’s no natural bridge for female stand-up comics to go into movies,” Rita Rudner is complaining. “Hollywood’s a sexist place. Movie executives are not staying up nights wondering where the next funny woman’s coming from. The next gorgeous woman--perhaps.”

She sinks down into the folds of a heavy, thick coat that affords protection against a chilly English day in a large mansion with no heat.

But Rudner is warming--to her theme. “Male comics, certainly they can go into movies. Look at most big American movie stars, that’s exactly what they were. Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd. There’s a bridge that’s accepted. But I knew I was going to have to build my own bridge. And it’s a big one.”

Which explains why Rudner is huddled against the cold in an icy stone basement 15 miles north of London. Two floors above, a scene is being shot from the movie “Peter’s Friends,” which Rudner co-wrote with her husband, Martin Bergman, and in which she co-stars. British filmmaker Kenneth Branagh (“Henry V,” “Dead Again”) is starring in, producing and directing.

But “Peter’s Friends” is only one indication that Rudner is moving on up. Viking has just published her first book, a collection of short humorous pieces called “Naked Beneath My Clothes.”

To date, Rudner is best known as a stand-up comedian, thanks to live appearances and specials on cable channels A&E; and HBO (one of them memorably titled “Born to Be Mild”). In the crowded field of competitive stand-up, she has carved out a distinct niche for herself. Her material is sly, witty, literate and delivered with precise diction in an innocent voice that contrasts with the knowingness of her patter.

Unlike many female stand-ups, she is neither raucous nor bawdy, neither foul-mouthed nor obsessed with matters gynecological. Her appearance belies her comedy’s sharp edge; she may take the stage in an expensive cocktail dress, and her well-groomed look and porcelain skin could lead one to mistake her for a wealthy socialite. For much of her act, she will hang on to the mike stand, as if for comfort, as if to convey the message that comedy is something she has not yet quite mastered. In reality, of course, she is expert at working and manipulating audiences.

At this stage of her career, though, Rudner badly wants to extend her range. But she has attached her own conditions to her ambition. She also wants to stay firmly in control of her career as it evolves; indeed, the word control is the one that most frequently springs from her lips.

This desire for control has diverted her attention from the aim of landing a network sitcom. “I did want a sitcom,” she admits, “but that was, oh, four years ago, and I’ve lived in Hollywood now, and I’ve seen what goes in sitcoms. It’s hard for a writer-performer to exist in a sitcom format and have any control. It can be done, but it’s a fight. Networks are set up to work with writer-producers, who then cast somebody. But I don’t want to be cast.”

At this point, she is joined by Bergman, an amiable Englishman who guides Rudner’s career and is a successful theatrical producer. Developing the topic, they point to the problems encountered by Roseanne Arnold in sustaining a sitcom along the lines she wants. “Roseanne is still an outsider in Hollywood,” notes Bergman. “It’s middle America that really likes her.”

So is Rudner an outsider too? “Perhaps,” she concedes. “I think it takes longer to (develop a career) this way, but it’s a lot more fun. I’m being careful to control what I do. That’s one of the reasons I love stand-up. I was a Broadway singer, dancer and actress for 10 years, and back then, I enjoyed being told what to do, what to think and what to say. Now I really like taking control over my career.”

Bergman agrees, adding it would be absurd for Rudner to commit to a sitcom that was someone else’s brainchild: “She’s one of the funnier women in the world, and one of the better writers of comedy. Yet it never fails to amaze me that (networks) will say, we want to do a show with you, and here’s who we want to write it. And they bring in someone who’s written three or four failed pilots.”

Rudner also complains that network executives don’t get her: “They all think I’m stupid because my voice sounds the way it sounds. In fact, I’m saying things which are really intelligent.” Bergman also fears Rudner would fall foul of network stereotyping: “In sitcoms, women are either dumb or shrewish.”

The bottom line, then, is that Rudner will do a TV series if it corresponds to what she and Bergman want. “I don’t think either of us would be happy colluding with an idea that didn’t spring from Rita,” says Bergman. “Unfortunately for the networks, she’s too rich and too well-known to care if they say she can’t do it.”

One can see why this is so. Rudner is one of the top dozen stand-up attractions in the United States, and she is on the road doing big-money live appearances for a couple of weeks each month. She also has a lucrative contract in Las Vegas at Bally’s for six weeks annually. Viking has committed to an initial hardback press run of 150,000 copies for “Naked Beneath My Clothes,” which suggests a healthy advance. “I can do stand-up in three countries, I can do another cable special,” says Rudner. “It’s a hard thing to want to put myself through, say, a sitcom I don’t like, because I have the luxury of working whenever I want.”

For the moment, though, she and Bergman are intent on breaking into films. To date, her acting career in movies has been less than distinguished: “One movie I did, ‘The Wrong Guys,’ was the only film to get bad word of mouth from the poster. It was terrible, it didn’t hang together. I had a small part and played somebody’s mother in a film called ‘Gleaming the Cube.’ And there was a third movie I don’t even want to mention. So I think you’d say, a . . . modest film career.”

“Peter’s Friends” is the third screenplay she and Bergman have attempted. “From the day we got together, about five years ago, we started writing,” she recalled. But money fell through for a project they had written that was set in Australia; another comedy about a mismatched couple stalled when Rudner’s leading man, the late Sam Kinison, pulled out.

“But we didn’t give up,” she recalled. “Peter’s Friends” grew from a parallel in Bergman’s own life; at Cambridge University, he was a member of a formidable clique that included Branagh and his wife, Emma Thompson; Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, who are known to public TV audiences as Jeeves and Wooster; and Tony Slattery, now one of Britain’s best-known stand-up comics. While at Cambridge, Bergman was also president of Footlights, the university’s theater and revue group, and cast many members of the group in productions.

As it happens, “Peter’s Friends” is a comedy about half-a-dozen old friends who reunite one New Year’s Eve in a large country house. They were last all together 10 years earlier, in a revue troupe not unlike Footlights. The reunion, as in Lawrence Kasdan’s “The Big Chill,” is a catalyst that encourages them to evaluate their lives as thirtysomethings. Apart from Branagh, the cast includes Thompson, Fry, Laurie and Slattery.

“Because we knew so many talented people in England, we always wanted to make a film here,” says Rudner. “Martin always visits these old friends when he comes back. But the characters in the film are not the real people.”

Still, parallels abound. Branagh plays a Martin Bergman-like character, an Englishman who is prospering in the movies in Hollywood. Rudner plays his wife, who, tellingly, given her views on TV networks, is the star of a network sitcom known to the public as “The Kitchen Lady.” Fry, who has talked publicly of his celibate lifestyle, is similarly chaste in the title role of Peter.

Rudner, who quit school at 15, says she was undaunted in the company of the former Cambridge group, despite their sharp, exclusive humor and intellectual muscle. “I wrote myself a part which is so far within my range,” she noted. “In the film, I’m an outsider. I don’t fit in at all. So that worked.”

She has been accepted readily by the group, even to the point of being, like the others, the target of a joke on the film’s daily production sheets. Fry became Dame Stephen Fry, Branagh and Thompson were Kevin Brannegan and Emily Thomas, Laurie was nicknamed Hugh Janus. Rudner was listed as “Mrs. Martin Bergman.”

“We wanted to write a comedy that came out as adult entertainment,” added Rudner. “The enemies are insecurity, illness, jealousy. Because life’s like that. It’s funny, and it stinks.”

That also seems to be the underlying message of “Naked Beneath My Clothes,” which can be seen as a prose version of Rudner’s droll stand-up routines. In its short essays, the tone of which recall Jean Kerr from three decades ago, she covers familiar territory: tipping, diets, shopping, frequent-flyer miles.

Many of her perceptions work as well on the printed page as they might in her comedy act. On pregnancy: “To me, life is tough enough without having someone kick you from the inside.” On taxes: “With a visit from the same lucky fairy who visits teen-agers who get pregnant the first time they have sex, I got audited the first time I ever filed.” On people who talk in theaters: “I’ll never understand why. Going to the movies to talk is like going to a restaurant to cook. The idea is that you have paid your money to have someone do something better than you can do it yourself.”

She was approached by Viking Penguin and remembers: “I thought to myself: If I did write a book, what kind of book would I want to write? And it just evolved.” It took her two months to complete, while she was touring: “I’m a disciplined person. Once I decide to do something, I do it. So I got up every day and wrote. I wrote each day and performed at night.

“None of the essays was changed at all, though Martin corrected the spelling and punctuation to protect my reputation.”

Already four magazines have bought excerpts from the book: Ladies’ Home Journal, Modern Maturity, Glamour and New Woman. “That covers a fair range,” Rudner notes. “There was also an offer to excerpt the book which came from Penthouse on the same day as the offer from Modern Maturity. I turned it down--I don’t approve of Penthouse--but at least it made me think I must be doing something right.”

Rudner was raised in Coconut Grove, Fla., but, obsessed with dancing, left home at 15 and headed for Broadway. She appeared in such productions as Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies,” and “Mack and Mabel” with Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters. After a decade she found herself a featured performer in “Annie,” but by this time, she was looking to get out.

She decided that stand-up would be a viable field to try. Though she insists her move into comedy was not calculated, she has also admitted taking to heart a book about marketing that outlined two strategies for entering a market--doing what everyone else does only better, or coming in with a new product. Rudner decided on the latter course--she would become a female stand-up who was not loud or brassy, like Joan Rivers or Phyllis Diller.

After a performance of “Annie” one night, she went to a New York comedy club, and, scared to the point of shaking, tried her hand at stand-up for the first time. She became obsessed with the theory of what made people laugh. She would walk each morning from her apartment in the West 60s to the library at Lincoln Center, where she voraciously read books about humor. At the Museum of Broadcasting, she watched old videotapes of Woody Allen, Jack Benny, Bob Newhart and George Burns, then went home and played their comedy albums.

“You have to avoid cliches,” says Rudner, who never starts routines with the words “Did you ever notice that . . .” or “You know what I hate?” “I think being a distinctive comic means developing your own rhythm. That became one of my aims.

“Burns and Benny and Allen all impressed me. They all have little poetic rhythms in their speech patterns. I used to sit down and think--what makes a laugh? What makes people go ha-ha? I made definitions, I examined the miniature explosions in your mind that creates a ha!”

She illustrated with a specific joke. Rudner tells quite a few that are structured in this way--she gives the joke’s premise, delivers a mildly amusing punch line, and pauses while the audience laughs, a little nervously. Then she tops it with the joke’s real punch line.

“Men are afraid of commitment. When I want to end a relationship, I never say, ‘It’s over.’ I say: ‘I love you. I want to marry you. I want to have your children.’ ” (Pause.) “Sometimes they leave skidmarks.”

“In that joke, I like for people to get a little nervous,” says Rudner. “They think--that was the end? What they get the real punch line, they’re relieved. And relief is another thing that makes you laugh, another little explosion that’s created.”

She had the usual experiences of an inexperienced comic performing to audiences characterized by their drunkenness or their apathy. But she ruthlessly pruned her material, analyzed which jokes worked and why, and eventually landed comedy gigs in New Jersey and Long Island. Within two years of embarking on her new career, she started earning enough money to quit “Annie.” An appearance on David Letterman’s show enabled her to start headlining New York comedy clubs; her career has been in a smooth upward trajectory ever since, though since her marriage to Bergman, her shtick revolving round her persona as a single career girl dealing with relationships has been updated.

Bergman recalls first seeing her at Catch a Rising Star in New York. “This was in the days when there weren’t many women on the bill. But the standard was very high. She was so quiet, and there was no air in any of the jokes, no room for the audience to get restless. The jokes just kept coming. I thought to myself, hmmm, a female Woody Allen.” He spent the next week trying to track her down and then persuaded her to appear at the Edinburgh Festival. She agreed, and later joined Bergman in Australia, where he was then living.

Now the pair are playing their career cards carefully. Rudner notes that Carol, her character in “Peter’s Friends,” “may be fictitious, but she’s also about Hollywood, about what it does to you after you make a lot of money.”

For her part, she is undecided about what to do next. “It could be something in England or Australia, it could be a low-budget movie,” she mused. “There’s lots of ways to go. We might fit into a studio system, I don’t know. But our goal will always be to maintain as much control as we can. Because we do a pretty good job of what we do.”