Rubber the Right Way

I can tell you unequivocally,'' Ben Affleck says between drags on one of many Camel Lights, ''that Gwyneth and I are not going out. We're not a couple. We're not an item.''

There, that's it, the end. Now we can just print six pages of pictures.

Oh, if only it were that simple. For those of you who haven't stood in a supermarket checkout line lately, let us explain. Since they were fixed up by friends three years ago, Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow have been hands down Hollywood's most confusing twosome, defying observers to figure out if they're just pals or full-on lovebirds. The time line goes something like this: Fall 1997, they begin dating; March 1998, Affleck wins an Oscar for Good Will Hunting; spring 1998, they shoot Shakespeare in Love; January 1999, they break up; March 1999, Paltrow wins an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.

But then it gets strange. After the alleged split, mounting evidence suggests that perhaps things hadn't exactly cooled down. They seemed more than friendly at this year's Miramax pre-Oscars bash. In late September, photos surfaced of the pair canoodling in Paris. And if that wasn't damning enough, they've gone and made another movie together, a love story no less. With lots of kissing and even a sex scene. Now what are we supposed to think?

We could focus instead on the plot of their new romantic drama, Bounce: Obnoxious advertising exec Buddy (Affleck) gives his plane ticket to a stranger, who dies when the aircraft crashes; a year later, guilt-ridden Buddy checks up on the man's widow, Abby (Paltrow), and they fall in love, though he can't bring himself to tell her that he was responsible for her husband's death. But let's face it: Most of the people who'll line up for Bounce will be there not to see Buddy and Abby, but Ben and Gwyneth -- or, as some of the publicists circling the film refer to them, Benneth. And they'll wonder: Is this what the pair were like in real life? Or what they are like in real life? ''The irony of course is that it's not what our relationship was like at all,'' says Affleck. ''Eventually people, I think, will get sick of [speculating].'' That's fine with us -- just finish reading this story first.

One crisp fall afternoon, the male half of Benneth sits in a hotel lobby near his downtown Manhattan apartment, scarfing down fried calamari and remembering the day in early 1999 when Paltrow surprised him with a phone call. ''We weren't even really talking that much. We had broken up and it was in that phase where it's obviously difficult,'' says Affleck, 28, who had just finished trudging through the snow for Reindeer Games and was looking forward to a little R and R.

Paltrow wasn't calling to say she wanted her favorite sweatshirt back; she'd read a script called Bounce by writer-director Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex) and thought the role of alcoholic Buddy Amaral would be a welcome stretch. ''I've always had this ongoing dialogue with Ben about doing stuff that required more of him,'' she says. ''When I see something like Armageddon and see him just not connecting, I get sort of like, 'Yeah, you're charming...but it's not what you're capable of.''' So, against the advice of her friends and family (''They were like, 'Don't do it, it's going to be a drama'''), Paltrow persuaded her ex-boyfriend to get back together, for make-believe at least.

Accordingly, once on the set in Los Angeles, Roos attended more to Affleck (his Oscar's only for writing, after all) than Paltrow. "I was all about Ben," Roos says. "It was like, 'Yeah, Gwyneth, stand over there and say your lines. Now, Ben, what do you need from me?'" Affleck dug into the role by observing real-life ad guys at TBWA/Chiat/Day and having deep discussions with Roos, himself a recovering alcoholic. "Ben is lying in practically every single scene," Roos says. "That's enormously difficult for an actor.... He asked me early on, 'Do you think I can do it?' And I said, 'I don't know that you can. I think you can.'" The result is what Affleck considers his best performance yet. "I haven't felt this way since Good Will Hunting, where I don't really care what the reception is," he says. "The movie could bomb. I'll always be proud of it."

If nothing else, it helped him smooth things over with Paltrow. "I'm not somebody who's known for having great relationships with their ex-girlfriends," Affleck says with a laugh. "I've never understood those guys. It's usually women, too, who are like, 'Of course I'm friends with all my ex-boyfriends!' How the f--- does that work? I mean, who is friends with all of their exes? Appropriately, all my exes hate me. But I realize that that was largely a mark of my own failings in the past because, though it hasn't been easy, I have been able to continue a relationship with Gwyneth that's really valuable to me."

It's also landed him in the gossip pages with alarming frequency. "Look, it's part of the deal," he says. "When I was a kid, I was reading about Sean Penn and Madonna's marriage. So I don't get too worked up." Okay, then, so how about those European snapshots that recently crossed the Atlantic? "I didn't even know that," he says. Well, whaddaya know, we just happen to have one with us!

"Not the best picture," he says, examining a photo of the pair cuddling on the Champs-Elysees. He takes a deep breath. "I was in England shooting Pearl Harbor and Gwyneth is over there doing Possession. I called her up and said, 'Let's go to Paris and you can show me around.' I saw all these French photographers hiding behind trees and stuff. She was like, 'Oh God, there's all these paparazzi people.' I just thought: Either we're going to scurry back to the hotel, or just live our lives and not worry about what people say. I do love her very much and I care about her enormously, as that picture indicates. But I hug a lot of people this way. Whether or not people believe that is up to them. I don't even know where she is right now or what she's doing." We do.

This is Leela," says Gwyneth Paltrow, introducing a lanky brunet who's just entered her trailer on the set of Neil LaBute's time-travel romance Possession at Shepperton Studios, an hour outside London. "Leela's my yoga teacher and she makes me organic, macrobiotic lunches that are delicious."

"Although today we're having pasta," Leela says.

"Not wheat, right?"

"No, spelt."

What?

"Spelt," Paltrow says. "It's a much more easily digestible grain than wheat. Wheat's very hard on your immune system. But I promise you, you practice Ashtanga every day and you eat like this, nothing can stop you."

Well, somebody pass the spelt, because even underneath a pair of light blue men's pajamas (she's about to film a bedtime scene with Aaron Eckhart), Paltrow may have the hardest showbiz body since Angela Bassett. "We were doing some looping recently and she was doing all these yoga positions," says Roos. "It was very Cirque du Soleil."

"She does yoga for an hour and a half a day," Affleck says. "She speaks French, she speaks fluent Spanish, and she speaks passable conversational Italian. She knows about art history, architecture, culture, style, and wine, even though she doesn't drink wine anymore. And she knows all about football, too. It really makes you feel inadequate."

For Bounce, Paltrow, 28, had to shed her tony pedigree: Her Abby Janello is a Valley housewife with frizzy hair and not a stitch of Prada in her closet. "She was very interested in dropping her whole princess persona," says Roos. "She was eager not to be perceived as this English-accent-speaking fancy pants. Sometimes she would say 'EYE-ther' and I would say, 'Gwyneth, say EE-ther!'"

Filming the role presented more serious challenges, particularly when Abby learns of her husband's death. The scene reminded Paltrow of the moment when, as a teenager, she found out that former boyfriend Harrison Kravis had been killed in a car accident. What added to the pain, she says, was that the scene was shot on "my birthday. I'll never forget that.... Also, my grandfather had just died. So I was all raw." She cringes. "And then they brought me a birthday cake at lunch."

Though Paltrow will soon return to the States, where she plans to make three films back-to-back (Bruno Barreto's A View From the Top, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, and the Farrelly brothers' Shallow Hal), she seems to have found a second home in London. In fact, Possession is being filmed on the same soundstage that Shakespeare in Love and Sliding Doors were. "It's taken me a long time to feel really comfortable here, but now I do," she says. "Though, as my best friend Mary says, I never get a real sense of what things are really like, being me."

And being Gwyneth apparently includes being dogged by the occasional paparazzo. "I don't understand people's fascination," she says of her relationship with Affleck. "If we're in the same city, we go out. We're close. Sometimes when I'm in L.A., I stay in his house. But it's not what people think it is. We are not together. I swear on my life. We're not. I would not sit here and lie to you. I would not."

She does acknowledge that their history deepened their on-screen dynamic. "It's really art imitating life," she muses. "Only without the happy ending in our case. But we have another kind of happy ending, which is that we have a friendship. I love his family, even more than I love him. So that's a good thing."

Entertaining is stressful enough. But what do you do when your guests are two Academy Award winners? "You apply and reapply your antiperspirant, you change shirts several times," says Don Roos, who met Affleck and Paltrow for the first time by hosting them at his L.A. home while they were considering signing on to Bounce. "My boyfriend and I ran out to the market and got a fruit plate. Naturally they don't eat anything.... They arrived together. They didn't have their Oscars with them, but I detected an Oscar glow around both of them." Within minutes, Roos stopped sweating. Affleck lobbed questions about The Opposite of Sex; Paltrow quizzed Roos on how he intended to shoot certain scenes. "They stayed for, like, three hours," Roos says. "I was finally like, 'You know, I'm going to start vacuuming, 'cause I need to get on with my day, guys.'"

After the fringe indie success of The Opposite of Sex, Roos' second directorial effort didn't turn out to be mainstream by accident. Bounce, he admits, was something of a calculated career move. "I had just written The Opposite of Sex and thought: Oh my God, this couldn't be gayer," says the 45-year-old, who got his start writing spec scripts like Boys on the Side and Love Field, but had his biggest success with Single White Female. "I felt like I had taken all my clothes off and walked down Main Street. I was like, 'I have to write something commercial, something straight, something that will not ghettoize me.'"

Once it was completed, he sold the Bounce script to producer Steve Golin, then at Propaganda Films, for $1.25 million. By the time Propaganda's feature-film unit dissolved, Universal had control of the project. But Roos' agent, Steve Rabineau, managed to sneak the script to Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein, who instantly envisioned Paltrow, a veteran of six Miramax films, as Abby. Weinstein then summoned Roos, who was in London for the premiere of The Opposite of Sex, back to New York on the Concorde. "I stole everything I could," Roos remembers. "Leatherette pouches, pens, earphones. I would have ripped up the carpeting if I could have." Within a month, Miramax had bought Bounce from Universal.

But according to Bounce's director and stars, the studio's instincts wouldn't always be so dead-on. Initially, Bounce was scheduled to arrive in theaters July 7, just one week after The Perfect Storm and The Patriot. "I'm too dumb to know what that meant," says Roos. "I told Ben and Gwyneth, 'And the good news is it'll be out in the summer!' And they went white. They were like, 'Are you serious?' I said, 'Yes, it's gonna be a big fat summer movie!' They said, 'Finish your meal. We'll take care of this.'" In addition to airing his beef with the powers that be, Affleck posted a March 12 rant against the release date on his website, which read in part, "It appears that the burgeoning enthusiasm for the 'commercial' prospects for Bounce have grabbed the hearts and minds of the folks at Miramax, grabbed the better part of valor by the throat and throttled him within an inch of his life."

Miramax wasn't amused. "They were like, 'Listen! Take that thing off your website, we're not going to release it in the summer!'" says Affleck. ("He can express his opinion," Miramax production co-president Meryl Poster says of his tactics, "but he doesn't need to express it to the whole world.") And voila--Bounce was moved to the fall. "I wonder why," says Roos.

But the real battles came in postproduction. "People said, 'Dealing with Harvey is going to be really hard,'" says Roos. "I thought: What can happen? He can't eat me." True, but he can put a director through six test screenings and numerous disagreements over studio-suggested edits. "It's a lot of people and personalities and processes I don't completely understand," sighs Roos, who says he fought strenuously for Bounce's "sad notes and grace notes--scenes that aren't necessary in terms of plot but are necessary to me in terms of subtext."

"Everybody wanted to get to [Buddy and Abby's] relationship, and they didn't want to live with them longer individually," says Poster, explaining how the film was cut from 135 minutes to 102. "There was lots of, Should we try this, should we try that?" says Roos, who was forced to excise some favorite scenes with supporting actors like Johnny Galecki and Jennifer Grey. "I'm like, 'F--- you. It's my movie and this is how it should be.' That was very onerous."

On Nov. 17, Roos will learn how audiences will respond to Bounce's sometimes tough material. "It's not exactly You've Got Mail," he concedes. "But when I've been in love, it hasn't always been a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan thing where it's funny and quirky. A lot of it is very painful.... If we take a sad situation and spin it happy, that's where we'll alienate people. We'll see if they show up for it or not. I would."

If only to witness Bounce's main attraction: Benneth in the flesh. Hey, now that we've mentioned it... "As far as I know--and I know them both very well--they are not together," Roos says. "On the week that they die, Ben and Gwyneth will have talked to each other, I'm sure. It's going to be that kind of 70-year friendship. But they're not together." Roos pauses a moment. "Am I supposed to say that? Am I allowed to comment on their relationship?" Absolutely, Don--everyone else does.

-QUOTE-

"I'm not known for having great relationships with ex-girlfriends," Affleck says. "But I've been able to continue one with Gwyneth that's really valuable."

"If we're in the same city, we go out. We're close," says Paltrow. "But it's not what people think."