Universal’s ‘Diamond’ in the Rough : Movies: Tom Selleck’s baseball comedy set in Japan and planned for release by MCA’s Universal Pictures may test the bonds between the studio and its new Japanese owner, Matsushita Electric.

An aging, arrogant slob of an American ballplayer decides to cash out his foundering major league career by playing in Japan.

Barely off the plane in Tokyo, he runs smack into the unpleasantness of Japanese baseball: relentless group-think, brutal workouts and a nasty bias against foreigners, the gaijin .

After learning a few lessons from his hosts, however, our hero prevails--and wins the heart of a beautiful Japanese woman, lingering social taboos against mixed-race love affairs notwithstanding.

Such is the story of “Tokyo Diamond,” a romantic comedy planned for release by MCA’s Universal Pictures early next year.

The film is supposed to tickle funny bones, but it is also sure to touch some raw nerves on both sides of the Pacific. And it is likely to test the new relationship between MCA and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which acquired the entertainment conglomerate in a $6.59-billion deal completed earlier this year.

“What they want is for us to make successful movies. . . . Will they interfere in our process? I don’t think so, but we’ve only been together for a few weeks,” Universal Chairman Thomas Pollock said of his mandate from MCA’s new owners.

Just hours after the MCA acquisition was announced last year, Matsushita President Akio Tanii told a press conference that “Japan bashing” films should “not emerge” from Universal or anywhere else.

The remark caused a furor inside Hollywood’s creative community, and Tanii quickly explained, through his American public relations firm, that he had been badly translated and didn’t intend to interfere at Universal.

But the Japanese take their besuboru seriously. And more than a few Matsushita executives are bound to have opinions about a film in which the foul-mouthed American protagonist, portrayed by Tom Selleck, is paid big yen to play for the mythical Miyori Seals--a team owned by a giant electronics firm, according to at least one version of the script.

Director Peter Markle (“Youngblood”) shot opening scenes of “Tokyo Diamond” with the New York Yankees at the end of last year’s baseball season. Filming initially was set to resume immediately in Nagoya, with an August release date. Several weeks ago, however, studio executives pulled the movie from their schedule and assigned Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman (“Who Framed Roger Rabbit”) to rewrite a script originally written by Monte Merrick (“Memphis Belle”), then rewritten by Gary Ross (“Big”).

Merrick said his first drafts, penned about three years ago, were sensitive to the Japanese perspective, based on his own experience as a student in Japan. Ross reportedly was brought in to broaden the baseball angle and strengthen the story structurally.

One Universal insider privately said the latest rewrite was intended to enhance the film’s appeal in the two biggest markets for any baseball picture, the United States and Japan. “Obviously, you don’t want to make a movie that will be offensive to one of its major markets. It has to be a crowd pleaser in Japan, and it has to be a crowd pleaser in the U.S.,” that person noted.

But several individuals who have worked with the film--which will resume production in September, after Japan’s baseball season ends--said it had proved unexpectedly difficult to create a female lead character who would seem both credible and appealing to cross-cultural audiences.

In early versions of the script, Selleck’s character fell in love with a decidedly non-traditional Japanese fashion designer who had an illegitimate son and was engaged to marry the overbearing owner of a rival team. In one draft by Merrick, Hiroko, as she was called, could deal with just about anything except the time-honored cliches of Japanese womanhood. “I think I stuck the pin in my head,” she wailed, while wrestling with a kimono.

In other versions, Hiroko was a newspaper reporter and a jazz musician--and she still isn’t quite in focus. “This is the only thing we’re still struggling with,” acknowledged Robert Newmyer, who is one of the film’s producers and is best known for producing “sex, lies and videotape.”

Newmyer said he and a former partner, John Kao, initially conceived of “Tokyo Diamond” in 1988 after visiting Japan in search of funding for their independent company, Outlaw Productions.

They financed the early versions of “Tokyo Diamond” with some backing from a small Japanese securities firm. Universal had simultaneously developed a similar Japanese-American baseball comedy, but late last summer decided to drop its own project to purchase “Diamond.”

At the same time, Matsushita executives were secretly negotiating to buy MCA, suddenly turning the baseball comedy into what Markle calls a “sensitive issue.”

Yet Newmyer and others say the studio has actually hardened the edges on its characters, both Japanese and American, and has heightened the sense of conflict among them, since Matsushita came into the picture.

Under Pollock, in fact, Universal has had a reputation for risking controversy--and waded into plenty of it with films such as Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” and Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” and “Mo’ Better Blues.”

Selleck, moreover, said in an interview that he would resist any effort to “sanitize” the script.

“It’s humor on both sides,” said Selleck, whose contract gives him final script approval. “It basically shows how fallible human beings are. It’s about two cultures colliding, but each side learns something. I don’t think it’s offensive to American or Japanese audiences. If someone said we want to play it safe so as not to offend Japan, I wouldn’t want to make the picture.”

References to cultural differences have changed with each script revision. In one of its early versions, the script dramatizes claims that Japanese teams would intentionally walk a gaijin batter rather than risk him breaking the home run record set by a native. But it also takes aim at the oafish violence of a group of imported players, who proudly tag their hard-drinking fraternity “The Ugly Americans.”

One tough issue the script won’t address, however, is a claim by some American expatriates that Japanese culture maintains a particularly strong bias against blacks.

Warren Cromartie, a former Montreal Expo who played for the Tokyo Giants in the 1980s, provides considerable detail in his forthcoming book, “Slugging It Out in Japan,” about Japanese fans chanting racial epithets from the bleachers and other encounters.

Newmyer says the film--which auditioned Cromartie for a role he didn’t ultimately get--will portray black players but won’t dwell on complaints about racism. At the same time, though, he says “Tokyo Diamond’s” screenwriters are taking unusual pains to avoid the stereotypical treatment of Asians that many Japanese claimed to find in Paramount’s “Black Rain.”

That film, a Mob thriller released in 1989, ran into severe production problems with Japanese officials and met a hostile reaction among many Japanese viewers. “I almost got sick of the film telling us that Americans can make decisions and take action on their own and that Japanese are totally lost in group-oriented standards of behavior,” one Japanese filmgoer told the Asahi News Service when “Black Rain” was released.

Issues aside, of course, “Tokyo Diamond” faces the challenge of getting Japanese and Americans to laugh at the same jokes. That was once considered impossible, but it may be getting easier.

Despite the conventional wisdom that American romantic comedies don’t “play” in Japan, Castle Rock’s “When Harry Met Sally . . . “ became a major Japanese hit last year. And “Pretty Woman” has brought Walt Disney Co. an extraordinary $16 million in rentals since it was released in Japan on Dec. 7, according to figures compiled by Movie & TV Marketing, a Japanese film magazine.

“People in Japan are so keyed into what’s happening on the American movie scene, tastes have changed quite a bit,” notes Asia Ireton, the magazine’s editor-in-chief.