Show Business: John Huston Raises The Dead

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At first glance the symbolism is painfully apparent. On the set of his 37th feature film, in a makeshift studio 35 miles north of Los Angeles and a world away from Hollywood, the 80-year-old director sits in a chair, watching the action on a closed-circuit television monitor and rumbling orders into a microphone. The jauntiness of his warm-up suit is belied by the clear plastic tube that runs from his nose, behind his ears, down his chest and along his leg to an oxygen tank, a last-ditch defense against the emphysema that has plagued him for decades.

Hand-painted tiles, stained-glass windows and brass samovars have transformed a drab warehouse in Valencia into a Dublin interior, circa 1904. Actors and actresses in long gowns, high collars and tails move about a realistic drawing room replete with chandelier and an old-fashioned square piano; in another room a dining table is set for 16 people. Outside, plastic snow falls steadily. In failing health, near the end of his career, John Huston is filming James Joyce's great short story The Dead.

Even though Huston nearly died several times last year, no one connected with the film is calling it a valedictory. "I spent every moment of my childhood thinking he was going to drop dead any minute," says his daughter Anjelica Huston, 35, who plays the heroine, Gretta Conroy. "He's been brought to his knees in the past four years, but he won't lie down. This project is certainly close to his heart, but not because of any imminent decay."

Indeed, the production has been an affirmation of the family Huston, a confluence of circumstances that sums up two generations of experience. "This picture is very significant to me," says Huston, a Joyce aficionado who lived in Ireland for 25 years and still holds an Irish passport. "It's based on Joyce, it takes place in Ireland, it stars my daughter and is written by my son." The man who directed his father Walter in the 1948 classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (for which both won Academy Awards) and guided Anjelica to last year's supporting-actress Oscar in Prizzi's Honor has now added Tony, 36, the author of the screenplay, to the family business.

The project began, however, with the movie's two German-born producers, Wieland Schulz-Keil and Chris Sievernich, who decided to film The Dead three years ago. "There was never any doubt that we'd do it with John and no one else," says Schulz-Keil. "His way of making movies meshes perfectly with the subject matter. Both he and Joyce tell a story by giving everyday objects allegorical meaning, turning the everyday into the sublime." The decision to hire Anjelica and Tony, the producers insist, was theirs.