THE OBSESSION

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She said: "Don't be surprised if you're in love with me by the end of this film." He said: "You'll be lucky if I don't murder you." She said: "I'd never had any experience of having anybody really go after me.... It was very hurtful." He said: "I don't want this to be a circus. I just want this person to leave us alone."

Between the meet-cute banter and the lawyered-up rue lies one of Hollywood's nastiest little love affairs gone wrong, the on-set infatuation between the brainy beast and the batty beauty-James Woods and Sean Young. Both volatile, both flamboyant, both articulate, both Rather High-Strung, shall we say. In September 1987 they began working together on The Boost, playing a coked-up husband and wife. At the time, Woods was involved with the equestrian Sarah Owen, the woman he would wed in 1989 (the marriage lasted five months). While filming, Woods and Young became so intensely close, the crew assumed they were making it in bed. No, both would insist. Young has said it was an emotional, not physical, relationship. Whatever it was, the intensity went cold (neither has really said why). So far, old story. But soon Woods said he was receiving "photographs and graphic representations of violent acts, deceased persons, dead animals, gore, mutilation and other images specifically designed to cause Woods and Owen ... great emotional distress." A voodoo-ized plastic doll was even left on Woods and Owen's doorstep. Weirdly, the spurned-lover-turned-stalker film Fatal Attraction was released in the month that Woods and Young began filming.

Woods sued Young for $2 million. She denied the harassment and was never charged with anything. The case settled. And life goes on.

LAURA JACOBS