After years of not registering on mainstream Hollywood's moviemaking radar, `The Evil Dead' director SAM RAIMI finally gets a chance to prove himself in a big-league `Game'

His voice is as understanding and as patient as a saint's. In fact, maybe a bit too patient for a guy who's just had to spell his name four times to the clipboard-wielding rent-a-cop guarding the entrance to the Universal Studios lot.

"Raaay-meeee... Sam Raimi."

Nevermind that Raimi's production company has been headquartered behind these gates for years. Forget that his wildly popular syndicated TV shows Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess have pumped obscene amounts of cash into Universal's coffers. And so what if he's directed three movies for the studio, including its splashy upcoming Kevin Costner baseball romance, For Love of the Game. The sad fact is that even at his own studio, Sam Raimi is an invisible man.

"R-A-I..."

The irony is that despite the 39-year-old director's virtual anonymity to Hollywood's power brokers and security guards, in other circles -- namely, the halls and aisles of your gamier-smelling film schools and video stores -- Raimi is regarded with the same sort of awe that struggling guitarists reserve for Hendrix or Clapton: He's a god. And his trilogy of camera-crazy Evil Dead horror movies is treated like celluloid gospel, meticulously studied and parsed by his disciples.

In other words, Sam Raimi is a man caught between two worlds. In one, he's a celebrity because of horror films he made more than a decade ago. In the other, well, let's just say he wouldn't mind upping his profile enough to get past the studio guard. And at this very moment -- in the wake of his critically hailed 1998 thriller, A Simple Plan, and on the eve of For Love of the Game -- he's a director on the verge of finally being accepted by the Hollywood establishment. Not that it's been an easy transition. Working in the big time means working with big-time egos, and now his iron-willed leading man is lashing out at the studio over the final version of Raimi's film. Welcome to the major leagues.

But if Raimi's nervous, he's not letting on. Dressed like an impish kid in a blue polo shirt, faded jeans, and sorry looking, once-white sneakers, Raimi is exceedingly polite. He calls you "sir" and has an aw-shucks demeanor that Billy Bob Thorton says reminds him of a "Methodist youth preacher." Sitting in the corner office of his production company's three-story bungalow, Raimi weighs the idea of segueing from obscure working-class director to the A-list mainstream with his new film. After all, what could be more mainstream than a Kevin Costner baseball movie? "I'd never really wanted to make a Hollywood movie," says Raimi, who went after Game because he loved the script and saw the project as an opportunity to prove himself. "To be honest, I'm still not [the big studio's] guy and I don't think they think of me that way... I don't know what their perception of me is."

But Thorton says he knows: "When Sam's name comes up, studio heads may wonder, How do we know what he'll do? They're afraid that suddenly the whole baseball team will turn into zombies and their eyes will fall out. They're afraid he's going to do something offbeat -- which it could probably stand. I think he's probably the most underrated director there is."

Raised in Franklin, Mich., Raimi received his first Super-8 camera from his father, who ran a furniture store, at 13. And when he went off to Michigan State, Raimi, his brother Ivan, and their roommate Rob Tapert (who's now Raimi's producing partner) started cranking out movies instead of term papers. The fist was an $800 cheapie about a student driven mad called The Happy Valley Kid. It made $5,000. But his follow-up flopped. "When that movie bombed, I thought, I'm going to punish the audience for what they did," says Raimi, cackling mischievously like an Old Testament God. "They weren't even aware of their own crimes against us. It was my own failure, but it was much easier to think they had done it to me. So when we made Evil Dead, I wanted them to jump and scream and feel my wrath!"

Made for a piddling $385,000 after Raimi dropped out of school, The Evil Dead has become more than a cult classic since 1983. Yes, it looks cheap. But it's also so fast and furious that it visually pistol-whips you. Even if you don't like horror movies, Raimi's groundbreaking camera work grabs you by the collar and shakes you into giddy submission -- it zigs, zags, and zips around like the product of a junkie tweaking on a three-day crystal-meth bender. It's crowning achievement was Raimi's "Shaky Cam" -- a camera mounted on a two-by-four with operators on either side who both ran like Pamplona bulls at the word Action! Says Tapert, "Sam's goal with The Evil Dead was real simple -- he wanted to make the audience hurt."

But to some degree, The Evil Dead and its two sequels (1987's Evil Dead II and 1993's Army of Darkness) have hurt Raimi right back. "I've never really been a horror-movie guy in my heart," he says. "I just got kind of stuck there for a while." It's not a unique dilemma. Many directors get their chops on scary movies (take James Cameron's Piranha II: The Spawning). It's just that Raimi's Evil Dead movies were so distinctive that he became synonymous with them. "Sure, I absolutely wish I had made Citizen Kane and not The Evil Dead, but I didn't. I'm proud of those movies and ashamed of them at the same time."

Raimi's first chance to claw his way out of the genre-flick ghetto came when Sharon Stone tapped him to direct her (along with Leonardo DiCaprio and Gene Hackman) in the 1995 she-Western The Quick and the Dead. It was an opportunity that Raimi now admits he blew. He regrets jamming the film with cool shots for coolness' sake. "It was like overcoming a drug addiction," he says of his inability to leave his Evil Dead camera work behind. "I was very confused after I made that movie. For a number of years I thought, I'm like a dinosaur. I couldn't change with the material." In fact, Raimi was so devastated he took a three-year breather from directing and concentrated on the start-ups of his syndicated guilty-pleasure TV hits, Xena and Hercules, for which he still serves as an executive producer. "I never expected the shows to be so big," he says, "but now you gotta dig a hole in the backyard, they make so much money."

Still, Raimi's acutely aware that he's never had a big hit on the big screen. When he read Game's screenplay, about an aging pitcher who replays a love affair in his head while on the mound, Raimi knew he'd have to lobby hard just to be considered. The problem was, A Simple Plan -- the movie that proved his talent was bigger than genre films -- hadn't been released when he met with Game producer Armyan Bernstein. In fact, Bernstein saw him only because he was interested in Raimi for his $100 million Arnold Schwarzenegger horror thriller End of Days. But, says Raimi, "For me, For Love of the Game was the much greater challenge, although this is probably the kind of movie Hollywood makes all the time. For me, it was like Greek."

But Raimi still needed Costner's okay, since the star had director approval. Costner flew him to the set of Message in a Bottle on his private plane, and Raimi delivered his pitch. "Sam wasn't the conventional choice for this movie," Costner told EW last month. "But he has so much humility, an I'm so attracted to that." However, now that the film's about to hit theaters, Costner's throwing a wicked curve. The actor says he's incensed at the studio for editing the film's length and tailoring it to a PG-13 rating. "If he truly is unhappy, then I wouldn't feel good," says Raimi, "[but] we both signed contracts saying we'd deliver a PG-13 picture."

But regardless of his stars last-minute dustup, Game may still end up being the box office hit that's eluded Raimi -- and that may trouble all those video-store acolytes. After all, Raimi's gone from punishing the audience to uplifting them. Could he possibly be going soft? "You bet I have, sir," he laughs. "Believe it or not, for me to make a movie that's similar to Hollywood is a challenge. And even if my next picture seems like Melrose Place, for me that would be a new challenge ... and beware, because I might."

Article from Entertainment Weekly