Show Business: View From Prospero's Island

"Shoot, Jim! Shoot!" For 25 years that insistent cry--half command, half appeal--has been heard around the world, or wherever cameras have been set up for a Merchant-Ivory production. From India (Heat and Dust) to Boston (The Bostonians) to Florence (A Room with a View), Ismail Merchant, the producer part of the team, has been pleading with James Ivory, his directing partner, please, please to hurry up: time is short and money is shorter. So constant was the refrain on the English sets of their newest picture, Maurice, that when filming ended last month the cast set it to music and sang it at the wrap party, Shoot, Jim! Shoot!

The huge and unexpected triumph of A Room with a View has brought in lavish Hollywood offers but has failed to alter Merchant's pinchpenny philosophy. Made for a mere $3 million -- one-fourth the cost of the average Hollywood movie -- it is expected to gross $50 million and is a strong contender for Oscar nominations. Maurice, which is also an adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel, will cost even less, $2.5 million, and feature two relatively unknown actors, James Wilby as Maurice and Hugh Grant as Clive, his first romance. "Ismail has tremendous charm and substitutes it for the lack of money," explains Helena Bonham Carter, 20, one of the stars of A Room with a View. "You might not get paid very much, but you tend to believe in what you're making. And he feeds you very well."

Those uncomplicated ingredients have at last brought them commercial success, and neither Merchant nor Ivory seems eager to tamper with the recipe. Merchant, 50, is a hustler who grew up in Bombay, India's film capital. Coming to the U.S. in 1958, he studied business at New York University and made a short, which won an Academy Award nomination. Ivory, 58, is a shy Oregonian who attended film school at the University of Southern California and made a short about Indian miniature paintings. Merchant liked it; they talked, became partners and headed for India.

Their diverse backgrounds led them to their natural subject, the often amusing conflict of cultures. Their limited budgets forced them to work on canvases that were, by Hollywood standards, miniature. A Room with a View, their best picture so far, is an exquisite, almost delicious comedy of manners about Edwardian conventions being routed by the warming sun of Italy.

Arriving in 1961 in India, they persuaded Novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to write their scripts, and Jhabvala, 59, an English-educated German married to an Indian, has worked on almost all their pictures, Maurice being a rare exception. The team's reputation was established with their second film, Shakespeare Wallah. The story of a troupe of English actors traveling across India, the film was made on a budget of $80,000, small even by Indian standards. The modest renown established by that film was nearly lost by a subsequent series of almost perversely maladroit efforts, including The Guru, Bombay Talkie and Savages.