"Battlefield Earth," in its second week, plummeted a whopping 67 percent; even the mega-hit "Gladiator," in its third week, dropped 23 percent. By contrast, "Frequency," in its fourth week, fell off a mere 13 percent. Watching the film with a nearly full house late on a Friday afternoon, I only wondered that it hadn't gained even more. I think Bruce Diones of the New Yorker hit on the film's appeal when he wrote, "Hoblit's camera lingers on the actor's faces, and the aggressively emotional performances feel authentic; the film's blatant heart-tugging is earned."

What grips even skeptics about "Frequency" is its combination of sincerity and dexterity. Hoblit and his screenwiter, Toby Emmerich, survey the same landscape as "Field of Dreams." But Hoblit keeps the textures edgy, and Emmerich keeps the action unpredictable, entwining sci-fi motifs about time warps and "string theory" with a race to find a serial killer and a nostalgic look at the 1969 Mets. Quaid, with his wounded brand of regular guy-ness, and Caviezel, quivering yet still manly, have a father-son chemistry that's all the more intriguing for being slightly off, while Andre Braugher anchors the supporting cast in both the 1969 and 1999 stories with a sage turn that's an about-face from his firebrand role on "Homicide."

As he did in his 1996 debut movie, "Primal Fear" -- the murder mystery that made Edward Norton an overnight sensation -- Hoblit shows the savvy and the instincts of a true popular entertainer. (In between came the Denzel Washington misfire "Fallen," an attempt to drop a demonic horror plot into a copland milieu.) Why should we be surprised at Hoblit's deftness? After all, he honed his talents in years of supple work on "Hill Street Blues," "L.A. Law" and "NYPD Blue": TV series that kept moviegoers out of the theater and glued to the small screen. What I didn't realize until I spoke to Hoblit on the phone two weeks ago is that he was uniquely qualified to depict public servants on screen. His father was a paramedic in the Army Medical Corps during World War II and later joined the FBI, in which he served for 26 years. Born in Abilene, Texas, when his father was stationed with the Army there, Hoblit grew up in Berkeley, Calif. He attended public schools and UC-Berkeley -- before joining the merchant marine and switching to UCLA.

Growing up in Berkeley, did moviemaking seem like an real career to you?

We were surrounded with people teaching at the university or somehow involved in it; it was natural that one would have the notion of becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a professor. And my dad was in the FBI until 1970. I grew up with FBI men and cops; I was comfortable in that world. But I loved the movies. My father would give me 25 cents to rake the leaves or mow the lawn every Saturday, and I would take it and go to the movies, usually alone, since none of my friends were really interested.

When did you leave UC-Berkeley and move to UCLA?

It was around 1966. Because I was very politically active, and my father was a big gun in the FBI, it was difficult for me to be at UC-Berkeley, and difficult for my father. J. Edgar Hoover, who was running the FBI at the time, was rather quick to transfer people, if it suited his whims. While me and my dad didn't agree on anything politically, he was a really good guy who had worked hard and honestly throughout his life to keep doing what he was doing. I didn't feel it was my journey in life to disrupt his life any worse than I already had, or that it was his responsibility to pay for me to act on my own ideas and agendas.

In order to make enough money to go to school away from home I joined the merchant marine. That was the beginning of three-and-a-half years of sailing during summers and different vacations, on freighters and on tankers. Jeez, I could get on a ship and walk off three months later with $3000 cash in my hand. I was honoring a lifelong fantasy -- from having read "Billy Budd," "Moby Dick," and a lot of Joseph Conrad -- of going to sea. I grabbed a couple of ships and went to sea -- went to Japan and China and the Philippines and around South America. I cabled my parents from Japan, I think it was, to see if I could get transferred to UCLA. They cabled back that it was possible.

I have a story in my head that I'm close to organizing about my life in the merchant marine; it has pirates and all the other adventures you encounter when you're out there. It's an amazing world. And when I was a 20-year-old banging around in it, it changed my life in a profound way.

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