Charles "Chuck" Evered watches actor Ethan Peck run through a final rehearsal for filming onboard the USS Wasp. "That looks great ... looks real good," he tells Peck, uniformed in Navy summer whites on the carrier's hangar deck.

The ship, which anchored in New York Harbor for Fleet Week, is a backdrop for Evered's directing debut in the low-budget film "Adopt a Sailor," starring the 21-year-old grandson of Gregory Peck.

"It's so strange being a director, because I'm a playwright and used to having no power whatsoever," said Evered, 42, who was raised in Rutherford and wrote the film's story in 2002 as a short, three-character play. It was inspired in part by his own decision several years earlier to join the Naval Reserves, in which he's a lieutenant.

"This is a necessary movie to make," he added. "This is a story about human beings. ... It's about people who put their lives on the line for 17 grand a year and that we don't even notice."

A young seaman from Arkansas (Peck) arrives in New York for the first time during Fleet Week, and an Upper West Side couple "adopt" the sailor for dinner one night. Their worlds could not be more opposite, yet they discover common bonds. "Adopt a Sailor" is based on an actual program of the same name.

Evered premiered "Adopt a Sailor" in short-play form in 2002 at Town Hall in New York City with a rotating cast that included Sam Waterston, Amy Irving, Anne Jackson, Eli Wallach, Neil Patrick Harris, Bebe Neuwirth and Liev Schreiber.

Peck said Evered is keeping him on his toes. "When the writer-director is the same guy, you really want to get the lines correct," Peck said. Evered said Peck beat out hundreds of contenders with his audition. "What we saw in him was a natural innocence," Evered said.

Evered enlisted in the reserves after a 1999 trip to a San Diego shipyard to research a project for Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks studio "I was in awe of the sacrifices these kids in their teens were making, and it really made me reevaluate my station in life,'' Evered said.

"Joining was the best thing I ever did for myself as a person, as a writer, as a human being in general," Evered said. "It got me out of the usual narcissistic world of showbiz; I've met an amazing array of people; I feel for the first time I was serving something greater than my own self-interest.

"My father was a World War II veteran with the Army Air Corps, and my grandfather was a fire chief in Rutherford, so there is a history of service that I wanted to keep going."

The Fisher House Foundation, which builds homes for families of servicemen and -women who are killed or injured in combat, will be the recipient of 1 percent of revenues from the film, said the movie's producer, Kim Waltrip. "It's a great organization -- we're proud to do at least a little bit toward helping those families," Evered said.