It took more than 25 years-and Martin Scorsese-for Waterfront to be surpassed. But since Raging Bull's release in 1980, there's been a raging drought of notable boxing films. (More about Raging Bull later.) And in the past 10 years, only three excellent fight films have been released- two of which were first shown on television: HBO's Sonny Liston: The Mysterious Life and Death of a Champion; When We Were Kings, the documentary about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman championship fight in Zaire; and HBO's Don King: Only in America. The other attempts have ranged from lame (The Great White Hype) to feeble (The Mouse) to tepid (The Boxer) to decent (TwentyFourSeven) to indie (The Destiny of Marty Fine). The lack of quality fight films contrasts with Hollywood's long and distinguished history in the ring: from The Champ to Champion to Requiem for a Heavyweight to Fat City to Rocky (the FIRST one).

Several other bio-pics await greenlighting, including one about heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali (tentatively starring Will Smith, to be directed by Barry Sonnenfeld); two about heavyweight champ Sonny Liston, (one of which is slated to star Ving Rhames and be directed by William Friedkin); and a feature about Jim Braddock, the unlikeliest heavyweight champ this side of Buster Douglas (to be directed by Penny Marshall).

Two fiction films are also in the works. Early this year Showtime will release a remake of Body and Soul, starring former lightweight champ Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, while Tony Kaye will wrestle One Arm, Tennessee Williams' unproduced screenplay about a fighter who loses an arm.

The spate of such films raises the following questions: Why are filmmakers lining up to do boxing films-and especially films about real-life boxers? And, perhaps more importantly, will any of these projects have enough juice to KO Raging Bull, the reigning heavyweight champ?

No matter who you ask-movie critics, Joe Six-Pack fans, academic types -every comprehensive survey of sports films begins with the sport of boxing. Indeed, the history of film begins with boxing: One of Thomas Edison's first kinetoscope productions, filmed at his Orange, New Jersey, laboratory on September 8, 1894, featured a six-round bout between heavyweight champ Jim Corbett and Peter Courtney. Later, silent-era stars Charlie Chaplin (The Champion, City Lights) and Buster Keaton (Battling Butler) used the sweet science as their foil.

The sport comes attached with drama-ready elements: Victory. Defeat. Mano a mano action. The leading-man hunk gets to show off his pecs, kick some ass and get the babe. So it's not surprising that these projects attract top talent. The long list of fight directors includes Scorsese, Hitchcock (The Ring), Kazan (Waterfront), Huston (Fat City), Carl Foreman (Champion), Bruce Weber (Broken Noses) and Jim Sheridan (The Boxer). Actors, of course, line up to play boxers primarily because it gives them yet another excuse to go to the gym, work-out and preen. The veritable who's-who of actors as boxers includes Brando, De Niro, Stallone, Wallace Beery (The Champ), Jimmy Cagney (City for Conquest), William Holden (Golden Boy), Kirk Douglas (Champion), Ricardo Montalban (Right Cross), Paul Newman (Somebody Up There), James Earl Jones (The Great White Hope), Daniel Day-Lewis (The Boxer), Ving Rhames (Don King: Only in America).

"Boxing is the ultimate confrontational sport," says director John Herzfeld, who directed Don King. "It goes back to the days of the gladiators, with a clear winner and loser. It's blood, it's sweat, it's tears, it's reaching down inside to absorb punishment that is astonishing."

"Boxing is the one totally honest art form," says sportswriter W.C. Heinz. "It's the most fundamental form of competition and the most completely expressive of the arts."

Perhaps Leon Gast, who directed When We Were Kings, best summed up Hollywood's boxing fixation, placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of, natch, the writers. "I asked several writers what was the attraction about boxing and they gave similar responses," he said. "To them, writing was like boxing-it's a one-on-one challenge, and their opponent is a piece of paper."

Be they fact or fiction, boxing films present two sets of challenges for moviemakers. The first is to capture the action in the ring in a fresh, knowledgeable way. Because there've been so many boxing films-and because actors cannot easily learn the nuances of the sweet science-this is no easy feat.

"The challenge is to film fight scenes differently than you've seen them before, and not to copy another filmmaker," says Herzfeld. "In Don King, I was desperate to capture the fury of [heavyweight champ] Larry Holmes when he first came on the scene. I talked to Bill Butler, my cameraman, and we built a box camera where the Holmes character pulverized the lens. He literally beat it to shit. You're completely in a subjective point of view."

Herzfeld's inspiration was a gladiator movie. "My favorite fight film is Spartacus," he says. "It's not a boxing film, but it's a fight film-especially the sparring scenes between Kirk Douglas and Woody Strode. With King, we went in real tight-right in the ring-with a lot of hand-held stuff. We held the master shot for a long time."

Charles Winkler, the director of Showtime's Marciano (and the son of Irwin Winkler, who exec-produced the Rocky films and Raging Bull), took a different approach. "We came up with our own style for the boxing scenes. We took a little from Rocky, Raging Bull, Requiem for a Heavyweight and Champion and created our own 10-headed beast."

Most directors choose to present fight scenes in rococo, spectacularly violent bursts. As Jeff Lieberman, the director of the HBO documentary Sonny Liston: The Mysterious Life and Death of a Champion, put it, "I've never seen a realistic fight in a movie. In a real fight, it's normal for there to be some down time-the fighters clinch and hang on the ropes. In a movie, it's all rock 'em, sock 'em. Every punch lands and they land with sound like you're being hit by a truck."

Ray Mancini, who stars in Showtime's upcoming remake of Body and Soul, has one advantage over the other actors: he's a real-life ex-champ. The film crew staged four days worth of sparring sessions in Reno, with Mancini taking on local fighters, and then used that footage.

"The boxing has never been believable in films -it's way over the top," says Mancini. "The difference is it's actors playing fighters. Whether I'm an actor or not is questionable, but I'm the real deal as a fighter. I don't have to convince the audience that I can fight. The question is, can I convince them that I'm Charlie Davis."

Which brings us to the second-and most basic-challenge filmmakers face with boxing movies: the story outside the ring has to be as good or better than the action inside. Whether the film examines a boxer's relationship with his mother (Body and Soul) or offers up an unlikely relationship between a Mexican fighter and his Anglo female manager (Right Cross), the best ones succeed on the merits of the story.

Built within this challenge is the two-headed specter of Scorsese and De Niro. Raging Bull was their homage to Jake LaMotta, a champ-chump who won and lost the middleweight title in the 1950s. The violent scenes in and out of the ring underscored how LaMotta's fistic prowess allowed him to succeed in one arena but destroyed his life in another.

Of course, the fight scenes in Raging Bull were anything but realistic. "Scorsese raised it to the level of ballet," says Don King's Herzfeld. But the super slow-motion sequences of noses being busted open and blood flying served to highlight LaMotta's ultra-violent tendencies. Boxing was more than just metaphor in Raging Bull. It consumed life itself. Because of its breadth, Raging Bull has defied filmmakers since its 1980 release. Its heavyweight credentials are formidable. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won two (and many thought it deserved at least six). It's often called the best film of the 1980s. It ranks as the No. 24 contender on AFI's recently released Top 100 list.

Filmmakers don't like to admit they're intimated by another film. As Marciano's Winkler put it: "My favorite boxing film is Raging Bull, Raging Bull, Raging Bull-above and beyond all others. But I wasn't intimidated by it once we figured out our approach."

The fact remains that no moviemaker has remotely approached Raging Bull's firm hold on the title. Longtime HBO boxing analyst Larry Merchant believes that, "People hesitated to make boxing films after Raging Bull. They said, `How can you top that?'"

So let's look at the new crop of contenders. Taken as a whole, the flurry of current projects is part of a larger pattern in the industry. Bio-pics are the trend du jour, on TV and in movie theaters, as the lives of everyone from Larry Flynt to Malcolm X to Andy Kaufman are up for cinematic grabs. "The hot ticket in Hollywood is the real-life story," wrote Patrick Goldstein in September in the Los Angeles Times. "By Hollywood standards, this revival is an especially curious phenomenon since there's no discernible commercial model for biopic success."

"The public has this craving for celebrity profiles -the kind that A&E is so successful at," Gast says. "Those films are little more than a compilation of existing archival footage and expert talking-heads, but people love them."

As mentioned above, boxing bio-pics have been around forever. They feature automatic name recognition and the inherent drama surrounding athletic competition. And while the scripts haven't been finalized for several of the upcoming bio-pics, they're sure to reflect one theme: the boxer-heroes must overcome an obstacle, either in or out of the ring. Rubin Carter, wrongly convicted of murder in the 1960s, must battle the legal system to overcome the trumped-up charge. Rocky Marciano must defeat his long-time idol, Joe Louis, to win respect and earn a shot at the heavyweight title. Sonny Liston must battle his demons even as The Mob controls his every move. Ali must believe in his ability (and his religion) even as critics scoff at his rhetoric. Jim Braddock, an ugly duckling fighter with a mediocre record, must endure to become the "Cinderella Man" heavyweight champ.

Interestingly, the Liston, Carter and Ali films won't just have Raging Bull as their target. With the exception of the Liston and Ali documentaries, there hasn't been a great feature film made about an African-American fighter. The Great White Hope, a fictionalized version of the life of former heavyweight champ Jack Johnson (starring James Earl Jones), tried, but didn't quite pull it off.

The Carter project will probably be the first of the three to be released. It offers star power in Washington, along with a dramatic story that many are familiar, but not overly familiar, with. The danger is that it could turn into just another hum-drum legal drama. The Ali project features star power, too, with Will Smith. In this case, the problem may be Ali himself: he was so charismatic and mythic that perhaps nobody can effectively portray him. (Shades of John Goodman as Babe Ruth.) The Liston project, starring Rhames, may be the one to watch for. It'll be a period piece-perhaps shot in black-and-white- and if Rhames can effectively demonstrate the menace and mystery of Sonny Liston, it could be captivating.

Contenders or pretenders? We'll soon see which of these boxing projects are worthy of championship status. MM