Keeping Up With James Earl Jones

James Earl Jones is--as one would expect--a formidable presence in person. Sitting in the den of his rented Santa Monica house, he is larger than life--a big and burly man with a firm, expansive handshake. His jade eyes are piercing. And there’s that Darth Vader voice.

Jones, 60, is going just a bit crazy this afternoon; he is hot under the collar. The actor is trying to do interviews for “Last Flight Out”--his new NBC movie--before taking a flight to Africa to shoot another movie, this time for TNT. The phones are ringing off the hook, his secretary keeps interrupting him and outside, the gardener is mowing the lawn.

“ Someone should be here from the network,” he says forcefully to his secretary. ‘ ‘Someone should be here to coordinate everything.”

Jones shuts the den door. “Sorry about the noise,” he says, closing the window. “The woman who owns the house is fixing it up.” Regaining his composure, he settles down to talk about his movie career, which has been very busy of late, even busier than after receiving a best actor Oscar nomination for 1970’s “The Great White Hope.”

In films, he was the reclusive writer in 1989’s “Field of Dreams,” and he is currently on view as a government official in the blockbuster, “The Hunt for Red October.” Throughout this month, TV viewers can catch Jones in the HBO action-thriller, “By Dawn’s Early Light,” and this Tuesday at 9 p.m. on NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39), he stars with Richard Crenna in “Last Flight Out.”

Jones plays Al Topping, who, from 1972-75, was director in charge of operations in South Vietnam for Pan Am. On April 25, 1975, Topping orchestrated the last civilian evacuation from Saigon. The movie dramatizes the evacuation.

“I avoided meeting Al Topping partly because I was afraid I’d meet him and say I want to do the Al Topping story,” Jones says. “When you agree to do the script, that’s the Bible, whether you agree or disagree with it. In this case, I didn’t want to make him the main character.”

Though Jones has been jumping from one film project to the next, he points out that most of his roles are small. “I can go into a cameo role and be done in a week or two and go on and do something else,” he says. “Alec Baldwin was involved for many months in ‘Hunt for Red October,’ and Kevin Costner, he’s involved in a project for many months.”

Jones himself was involved for more than a year in August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning drama “Fences.” He won a Tony (he also received one for “Hope”) as Troy Maxson, an embittered, illiterate man who cheats on his wife and drives his son away. The actor discovered much to his chagrin that audiences would frequently laugh at the intense dramatic moments.

“Do you know what laughter is?” Jones asks. “For American audiences, laughter is rejection. The same for a German audience. If you sat a person in a seat by themselves without a group, they would deal with a play. But in a group, their instinct is to reject it with derisive laughter.”

Such laughter was devastating for Jones. “It means you lost them,” he says. “You might as well go home. There is a sound that happens at athletic events--women indulge in it more than men--it’s the sound ‘whoop.’ That is someone saying, ‘I want to let everyone know who is sitting around me and those on stage that I like this.’ ”

Jones’ green eyes begin to blaze. “Bull,” he booms. “Give me a genuine response and I can absorb that. I can incorporate that in my performance. I want to say to them, ‘OK, I’ll take a break, and you can make your sounds, and when you’re finished, I’ll resume the play.’ ”

If Jones has his druthers, audiences will be whooping it up for him on the small screen. The actor, who previously starred in the short-lived CBS detective series “Paris” in 1979, is developing a TV series with Lorimar.

“There was a sitcom that was wonderful,” he says of his choices, “and there was this hour drama that was wonderful. For the sake of employment and agility, I would have chosen the sitcom, but Lorimar chose the one hour. I’m grateful because it would have been a hard decision. I have to be a realist.”

He also is a realist when it comes to his future on the Broadway stage. “I waited 20 years after ‘The Great White Hope’ to get ‘Fences,’ ” Jones says. “I can’t wait another 20 years. I don’t have the same energy. I have got to measure myself much more carefully in the future about stage and do special things for very limited engagements.

“I will always be a stage actor,” says Jones, “but I have got to invest more time in the film medium for the sake of making a living and sustaining my family (wife, actress Cecilia Hart, and 6-year-old son, Flynn). The theater is not lucrative for anyone. “