Stern's New Shtick -- Star Of `Diner,' `Home Alone' Calls His Own Shots Now

Two prize-winning youth movies, "Breaking Away" (1979) and "Diner" (1982), established Daniel Stern as an actor to watch. So did his work in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters," Robert Redford's "The Milagro Beanfield War" and Tim Burton's "Frankenweenie."

But Stern's big-screen career skidded in the late 1980s, as he appeared in such forgettables as "Little Monsters" and "Friends, Lovers and Lunatics." At the same time, he was narrating the ABC series, "The Wonder Years," and directing several episodes.

Just when he was becoming a television fixture, however, John Hughes and Chris Columbus tapped him to play Joe Pesci's inept burglar partner in the hugely popular "Home Alone." They repeated their broadly comic shtick in "Home Alone 2," and Stern followed that up by doing what looked like a Jim Varney impersonation in the 1993 summer hit, "Rookie of the Year" - which he also directed.

In "Bushwhacked," which opens tomorrow, he again plays a bug-eyed clown: a reluctant scout leader who chain-smokes, litters, hides from the police and orchestrates a urinating contest among a group of duped Ranger Scouts. It's first in a series of Stern projects to be released by Twentieth Century Fox, which was pleased enough with "Rookie's" $40 million gross to offer him a first-look deal.

"That means I seek out scripts and ask the studio if they want to make them," said Stern during a Seattle visit. "This is one they found, and they'd given it to me to direct.

"I didn't like it that much, but the idea of it, of a guy on the lam who became a scout leader, that stayed with me. I thought if we added some scope to it, that would make a good movie. I wanted to play comedy against that setting, so I started developing the script."

Declined director's job

He added scenes in which the Scouts cross a rickety rope bridge and nearly get swept away in a waterfall.

The kids are played by a mixture of young professionals and children making their feature debuts. "Tenderfoots" was the original title.

"Then it was `The Tenderfoot,' referring to my character," he said. "Then late in the game we realized that younger people weren't familiar with the term. It was confusing, so somebody came up with `Bushwhacked.' "

In the end, he chose not to direct.

"I waffled awhile," he said. "I knew it would be physically challenging, and that I probably couldn't do both jobs. In `Rookie,' the role was a much more manageable size."

Instead, he's listed as executive producer: "Producers can be a thousand things, and I don't know how to produce a film. But being the executive producer is a way to keep control in a certain way."

The directing chores went to Greg Beeman, a Honolulu native who won a nationwide student-film contest at 17, then went on to direct "License to Drive" and "Mom and Dad Save the World."

"I've never picked a director before," he said. "Greg seemed very boyish and enthusiastic, and I liked his visual sense. He's good with a camera, and he knows how to use the technical side.

"I wanted as big a look as we could get. The movie looks like `Cliffhanger' or `River Wild,' but it's just me and the kids. It's really `Cliffhanger Junior.' "

He even used some crew members and stunt experts from those films. He insists the scariest scenes were "incredibly safe." For the rope-bridge scene, wires and cables were hidden inside the actors' clothes.

"We also cheated with the lens to make it look more dangerous. It depends on where you put the camera. There are lots of tricks that keep you from realizing it's false."

Looking more like the young husband in "Diner" than the star of the latest variation on "Ernest Goes to Camp," Stern conducted interviews in a Four Seasons suite but stayed with his sister, who lives here.

Nearly filmed near Wenatchee

He scouted Washington state locations and almost shot "Bushwhacked" near Wenatchee, but the timing was off so he decided on Lake Tahoe. "It was such a late start that we were a little worried about the weather," he said. "We ended up shooting between September and December around Lake Tahoe, and got snowed out in December. We were two days from finishing, so we had to reconstruct the mountain cabin (where the story ends) on a set in L.A. It cost a fortune."

In January, he will be directing "The Bee," a Disney comedy written and produced by Hughes. Next month, he will co-star with Dan Aykroyd and Damon Wayans in another Disney picture, "Celtic Pride," about a couple of rabid Boston Celtic fans.

"I'm working on five or six movies for Fox," he said. "It's strange being on the business side. You have to convince the studio that you're ready and they should part with their money. The politics of it is not my style."