Show Business: View From Prospero's Island

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Fortune began to smile in the late '70s, when Merchant-Ivory started picking literary subjects: Henry James' The Europeans and The Bostonians, Jean Rhys' Quartet and two Forster novels. Critics occasionally complained that their adaptations were too literal -- "reverential" was the word casually tossed their way -- but with A Room with a View they seem to have satisfied nearly everybody. "It is successful in every country in the world!" exults Merchant.

Through good times and bad, the team has remained together, forming a cinematic family that now includes many of their performers and craftsmen. On the set of A Room with a View, recalls Actor Denholm Elliott, both cast and crew ate together. Every Sunday Merchant, an accomplished chef and cookbook writer, would cook such delicacies as dahi-walla jhingha (yogurt shrimp), tez tamatar shorba (hot tomato soup) and qeema aloo tikki (spicy beef potato cakes). "Indian food is not one of my favorites," Elliott admits, "but Ismail does it well."

Merchant and Ivory share a London flat and a Manhattan apartment one floor below Jhabvala's. On weekends the extended family moves to Ivory's 40-acre country place in the Hudson River Valley, where the male partners are restoring a large 1805 Greek Revival house. "It's like Prospero's island, like Tara," marvels Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who collaborated with Ivory on the Maurice script. "It casts a complete magic over you. You work like blazes and then at night you go down, bathe in the lake and come up anointed. It is an intensely familial situation, and you get adopted."

When she discovered there was no part for her in Maurice, a tale of a homosexual awakening in pre-World War I England, Bonham Carter felt the family had abandoned her and said so. Determined to be involved, she ended up working on the set as a hairdresser. Laughs Hesketh-Harvey: "You could see the stars of Maurice thinking that if you do one Merchant-Ivory film, you end up doing the hair on the next!"

Merchant raises money and opens doors. "I never take no for an answer," he declares. "It simply doesn't exist as an option." Ivory does the rest. "Relaxation is the answer to everything," says Elliott. "There's a gentle attitude on the set, none of that frenetic carrying on that you sometimes get with lesser people. Ismail occasionally comes by, yelling for James to shoot, but he doesn't interfere, because he knows that James is capable of being quite strong and firm."

Where will the trio turn next in their stately march through the Penguin classics? Jhabvala would like to do James' Portrait of a Lady or perhaps Howard's End, another Forster novel. Merchant wants to do George Eliot's Middlemarch. One thing is certain. They will not take the offer of a Hollywood studio and make A Room with a View, Part II. "We'll only do it," Merchant replied, "if you can resurrect Forster to write the book."