This was Steve's first attempt at a truly dramatic role.

Filmed largely on location in Dallas and the Texas Panhandle, the movie concerns a charlatan who runs a tent religious healing show, but who finds God in the end.

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On June afternoons around three, the dirt-dry Plainview, Tex., heat flares up above 100 degrees. Sometimes, just to be cruel, it stands off in the distance and ripples like a drink of water. The 50 or so people bunched on the Seventh Street sidewalk are used to it. They arch their hands over their eyes and stare across the street at a run-down diner called the Quick Lunch. There are huge lights aimed at the 7UP sign above its door, and serious trucks are parked in the side alley. By the curb, a young mother in pink sweats drags on a cigarette. The little boy by her feet wrestles with a large bag of Doritos and a bottle of Dr Pepper twice his size.

And then Steve Martin appears. He steps out of a black Lincoln Town Car parked in front of the Quick Lunch, and the crowd shouts his name. He waves. More hollering. Under the 7UP sign, Martin grabs a dark-haired woman in sunglasses by the shoulders and presents her to the masses. "Debra Winger!" he ! shouts. Cheers. The stars disappear inside the cafe, and the crowd is silent again, except for one man's voice, rich with Texas twang: "What the hell's she been in?"

Hollywood has come to Plainview -this clump of 23,000 people on a straight ribbon of Interstate 27 between Lubbock and Amarillo-to turn it into Rustwater, a fictional burg on the plains of Kansas. The film is Leap of Faith, an oddball tearjerker opening Dec. 18, starring Martin as a con man/ revival preacher, Jonas Nightengale, whose caravan breaks down in Rustwater, and Winger as his manager. To the filmmakers' way of thinking, Plainview looks a lot more like Kansas than Kansas. Massive white grain elevators command the landscape, and farmhouses sit among cotton fields, as lonely and lovely as if Edward Hopper had painted them there. Billboards at the highway exit promise "down-home cooking" at the Kettle restaurant and salvation at the First Baptist Church (296-PRAY).

And Hollywood has pulled into Plainview just in time-right after the heaviest spring rains in almost a century devastated the community's cotton crops. During the two months of preproduction and 11 days of actual shooting, Paramount nourished the town with movie star sightings and more than $1 million in Hollywood currency. Merchants filled orders for paint and lumber, the young and able-bodied found work on the crew, hundreds appeared as extras, and local hotels were booked solid. "Rustwater" replaced "Plainview" on the water tower, sales of Evian water at the United Supermarket went from one case a week to 350, and for the first time in Plainview's 105-year history, there was a run on arugula.

Plainview was discovered last January by the film's location manager, Bill Bowling. He spent three weeks searching through Texas for a dried-up place that could stand as a metaphor for Nightengale's parched soul. Throughout the spring, producers Dan Melnick and Michael Manheim (whose wife, Janus Cercone, wrote the script) made a half-dozen pilgrimages to the Texas panhandle, and by April the question of where to shoot was settled. The downtown Rustwater scenes would be shot on Plainview's lumpy brick streets. The Quick Lunch, a greasy spoon that still bears some of its original 1920s grime, would play the diner where Lolita Davidovich-as the local woman Martin takes a shine to- slings hash.

Plainview's ambassador to the studio is Muff London, 36-a thin, blond firecracker with big glasses, a pageboy hairdo, and a quiet but sharp Texas drawl. She manages the city's program to revitalize its downtown, but before the production crew arrives in May, she has to convince merchants not to spruce up their storefronts. "Lots of people want to put up new awnings," she laments, but the studio is adamant about preserving the town's air of dessicated neglect.

London also spearheads efforts to find houses for director Richard Pearce (The Long Walk Home), the producers, and the cast to rent. Winger is assigned to a large two-story house that belongs to a couple who are spending the summer traveling. London is there to welcome Winger on her arrival, but the star's chartered jet is late and London falls asleep on the couch. Around 7:30 p.m., the sound of the front door shakes her awake. In the foyer she greets Winger, her son, Noah, 5, and a nanny.

"Hi, I'm Muff London," she says.

"Hi," says Winger flatly. "I always wondered what someone named Muff would look like."

All spring, the rains keep coming. And though dry weather returns for the June shooting dates, Plainview has lost the look the producers need: drought- ridden, desperate enough to welcome a crooked faith healer who might bring rain. "The panhandle is as green as it has ever been," says Oscar-winning production designer (Amadeus) Patrizia Von Brandenstein. Her solution: a clay and detergent concoction that turns the town-square foliage brown. Instant drought.

Martin and Liam Neeson, cast as the sheriff who falls for Winger, are housemates. They live next door to Winger, in a mansion rented from Mike and Suzy Hutcherson (he owns a local aircraft service business; she's a clothing designer with her own label, Abbi-Taylor). Taylor Hutcherson, 6, worries that Neeson is playing with his toys. Abbi, 8, worries that Martin misses his wife, Victoria Tennant, so she gives him a stuffed panda bear to sleep with. The Hutchersons' housekeeper, Nora Martinez, prepares enchiladas and instructs neighbors to leave dinner invitations and baskets of fruit with the security guard across the street. One day she comes home to find a stranger with a beard and big hat in the living room. It's Martin, disguised to go shopping in nearby Lubbock.

Just before shooting begins, an assistant calls London to say Winger's legs need waxing. London's first thought is, "Why can't she shave her own legs?" but she summons Betty Gonzalez, owner of the Galleria Beauty College. Gonzalez calls her friend, Nicki Logan, a columnist for the Daily Herald.

"What movies has this Debra Ringer been in?" Gonzalez asks.

"First of all, it's Winger," says Logan. But she can't think of the names of any Debra Winger movies, and has to look them up.

"How long is this going to take?" snaps Winger, when Gonzalez arrives on her housecall that afternoon.

Says Gonzalez: "That depends how hairy your legs are."

Despite this bad start, the two women become friends. "She's just a normal person," says Gonzalez, "except she makes more money."

During breaks from rehearsals at the elementary school, they often invite Martin over for hair and manicure sessions. At their first meeting, Gonzalez surveys the top of his head and says, "Your hair is kind of thin up here." Martin walks out. Gonzalez remains haunted by his hair, which seems so luxuriously white and silky on screen. "His hair is blue!" she says.

Shooting finally begins on Sunday, June 21. Every evening, as the afternoon heat crawls back into the sunset, crowds linger around the Quick Lunch long after the crew has shut down for the night. By now Martin's hair has been dyed a dingy yellow color that changes shade according to the sunlight. "I was excited because I hadn't seen Steve Martin yet," says 13-year-old Plainview resident Ryan Wortham one night after staking out the star's trailer. "I was a little surprised," he adds, "because he had kind of red hair."

Cars stream through the stars' neighborhood after work. Martin likes to stroll in the morning, so walking becomes Plainview's favorite pastime. In lieu of autographs, he hands out cards reading "This certifies that you have had a personal encounter with me and that you found me warm, polite, intelligent, and funny."

People don't seem to like Winger as much. She doesn't wave the way Martin does. The story about Gonzalez calling her "Ringer" has become folklore, and the nickname sticks.

London and Vic Heutschy, the production's high-strung publicist, aren't getting along either. He tattles to London's boss that she's making people nervous by carrying her camera around the tightly guarded set. Then, when Heutschy yells at her for cooperating with an unwelcome writer from Entertainment Weekly (a writer who, it should be noted, grew up in the area and has relatives in town), she shouts back.

"I got pretty rude," she says later. "That's really not like me at all."

Some folks are worried about the content of the movie. This is a town with 47 Protestant churches, and the sale of liquor has been prohibited since 1888. Someone calls the Daily Herald news hotline to ask, "What is it about the movie Leap of Faith that would cause it to be rated PG?" (Actually, it's rated PG-13, and the first two words of dialogue are "s---" and "s---.")

Martin and four elderly women are sitting on a shady front porch. The women are extras for a short scene in which Nightengale interrupts a quilting bee and rips off his shirt for use in the quilt. "Now, what all of this means, I don't know if I'll ever know," says widow Lucille Walker, 93, a Plainview resident since 1925 and a cousin to Lyndon Baines Johnson. Nor does she have any notion who the man with the shirt is.

"I heard one of the men call you Steve," she says when he sits down next to her. "Is that your name?"

"Yes," he says.

"What's your last name?"

"Martin."

"Well, that's a nice name. Steve Martin. Are you the director?"

"No ma'am," he says. "The assistant director."

By July 4, the movie people have gone. Nicki Logan writes a farewell in the Daily Herald: "So...Movie People, thanks for the memories. We're glad we knew you. "Bill Cagle, president of the chamber of commerce says, "Now we're thinking about the cotton crop again." London has moved on to planning the Christmas parade. "Life goes on in Plainview," she says.

THE preacher is a charlatan, a cheat preying on the naivety of his followers. Yet there is no denying his charisma, or the danger implicit in his personal magnetism.  As he roars forth his fire and brimstone oratory, the congregation stirs into a frenzy: women scream, men applaud, cripples struggle to throw off their crutches.

'Philosophy gave me a sense of the absurd ... Disney, of course, gave me a sense of fun'

THE trademark steel grey hair that stands out like a beckoning universal beacon for celebrity hungry crowds, has become strangely corncoloured.

Underneath there is no mistaking Steve Martin who, unlike his usual manic movie personae, emerges as polite, intelligent, articulate, and overburdened by the demands of being required to be perpetually funny.

"The biggest problem is when you say a perfectly straight line such as 'What time is it?' or 'Can I have a glass of water' and the whole room falls about in hysterics," he says.

And to prove the point his audience of selected journalists titter on cue.

There is something about Martin that invites laughter even when he is trying to restrain himself.

When he started out, he claims to have made "intentionally very silly movies" (his Academy Award nominated short, The Absent Minded Waiter, The Jerk and the scifi wheeze, The Man with Two Brains among them) but recently his roles have been more characterbased, and dare he say it, "serious", such as the cameo of a bullying producer in Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon and his selfpenned, LA Story.

"Early in a career, it is easy to surprise people because they do not know what to expect. Then you realise as you mature that it is still easy to surprise and upset people precisely because they do have expectatio ns of you as a 'star'. So, you turn the tables on yourself, which is what I hope the next film will do."

In Leap of Faith, directed by Richard Pearce, he plays an evangelistic preacher who tries to con the inhabitants of a small Kansas town, assisted by his business partner Debra Winger and a hot gospel choir, Angels of Mercy.

He comes into conflict with Liam Neeson as the sheriff who tries to protect the locals from parting with their cash.

"It's a flashy part with a lot of Bible thumping preaching, music, dance, and all kinds of things. My hair was died blonde for the part usually in America it is a dead giveaway, and I am always mobbed. And you know who mobs me most? Michael Jackson's body guards," says Martin, slipping back into funny mode.

He believes audiences will be astonished by the new role.

"He is a bad guy, sexually dubious, and he heals people with his hands. It's all about the hypocrisy of religion, and similar in some ways to Elmer Gantry from Sinclair Lewis's novel."

Gantry gave Burt Lancaster an Oscar as the salesman with the gift of the gab from God.

Martin has no truck with awards which is just as well as early reviews in the States have not been overly enthusiastic about the film, although his performance has its admirers.

"Usually the best actor award goes to someone who played a handicapped person who cried, not that I'm disparaging any of the performances. I have never been nominated, that is why I am bitter," he says.

Leap of Faith was filmed in his home state Texas last year.

He was born in Waco, although he grew up in Orange County, southern California.

His mother was a housewife, his father sold real estate and the family were strict Baptists.

He recalls "always trying to be funny, even in grade school", which may have helped to make up for what friends describe as a fairly miserable childhood.

He declines to talk about it.

His inspirational spark came from American TV comedians in the 1950s and from Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin to John Cleese and the Pythons.

When he is not performing publicly or for the media, he withdraws into a world of crossword puzzles, cats and computers.

As a teenager his first job was at Disneyland.

"I performed magic tricks at Merlin's Magic Shop in Fantasyland, and was self taught by practising in front of a mirror. I got the job at 14, and by working there over the next three years I beame pretty adept. And I can still do a few tricks," he says.

At college he became interested in the writings of Wittgenstein and Kant to the extent he thought about becoming a philosophy professor.

"Philosophy affected me in a way that is hard to describe but it gave me a sense of the absurd, a sense of the relative value of things, and a sense that the things we take so seriously maybe aren't. Disney, of course, gave me a sense of fun and when you combine the two, you might have something."

Instead he followed his natural comic bent ("it's sort of genetic, you have to have a knack or inclination in the first place").

By the late 1960s he was performing his own material in the clubs and on television.

He recalls being on the circuit as "tough" but claims he was young enough not to feel it.

"Going from town to town, it was kinda romantic," he says.

At the time he was at the cutting edge of comedy, hosting the innovative Saturday Night Live while winning Grammy awards for his first two comedy albums Let's Get Small and Wild and Crazy Guy.

The series catapulted him from 500 seat halls to giant 20,000 seat concert arenas including a reputation building series of concerts at the Universal Amphitheatre in LA with the Blues Brothers and attended by all the studio execs.

"When you are in your twenties you can do things you cannot do in your forties," says the 46yearold.

"In your forties you are more aware of the kind of damage you can do to people. You tend to target people less, and think more about what you are saying, whereas in your twenties you are out there to be confrontational, and iconoclastic. That kind of comedy is for young people; dramas that explode myths are more for adults and that's what Leap of Faith is all about."

Comedy, he stresses, is harder because there are more choices to distil down to one.

In a drama the story is told "in the most truthful way you can."

He has stretched his talents on stage as Vladimir with Robin Williams as the other tramp clown in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

"It must be performed with a sense of fun. If you play it seriously and invest it with importance then it is boring. It has to be played with lightness, speed and freedom. That is what I learnt, to contrast the seriousness of the words against the lightness of the character. I came away from the experience thinking that it must be one of the greatest plays ever written," he says.

Martin believes that the secret to good comedy is to play it like a drama and to let your mind go off in any direction.

The more absurd an issue appears, the straighter and more earnest it should be played.

When his comedies occasionally fail to hit home, he takes it personally "because that is what I do."

"Some scenes we will shoot in two ways because we never know exactly if it is going to be funny until we see how an audience reacts. If it is a downer we can substitute the other version and hope for the best."

He was deeply disappointed when Herbert Ross's film of Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven failed to make the grade.

"I felt an intense emotional involvement because I was there to serve this brilliant script. Anyway I don't consider it was a failure it was simply a box office flop. Luckily, I haven't had any of those for a while and fortunately I'm still bankable."

He has a coterie of directors with whom he likes to work.

One of them is a former standup, Carl Reiner (Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid) who remains a close friend.

Martin recently was asked to do a crazy comedy, and he turned him down.

"I felt I had moved on both emotionally and physically. I'm now into characters where you think this guy is a bad guy but there is something sort of likeable there. I like playing characters that are all mixed up, rather than all good or all bad."

He points to the progression from such nonsense as The Man with Two Brains in 1983 to Roxanne, his version of Cyrano, and Ron Howard's Parenthood in 1989, although his most recent offering, Housesitter this year marked a regression to screwball.

Before we part Martin proffers his card which he has just taken to distributing instead of laboriously signing his autograph.

"Well, it makes sense because they get the signature and dash back to show it to their friends who always ask: 'What was he like?' and invariably from the two and a half seconds in my presence they have no idea. The card gives the answer."

It says: This certifies that you have had a personal encounter with me and that you found me warm, polite, intelligent and funny."

Joking apart, that just about sums him up.

Richard Mowe interviewed Steve Martin at the Deauville Film Festival.