The Slanted Fact

"D'Artagnan! Where the hell is D'Artagnan?" bawled stocky Joseph Lerner in a Roman courtyard last week. D'Artagnan, played by Hollywood's Jeffrey Stone, popped up from among the chaos of generators, cameras, props, actors and Italian technicians crowded before the venerable Palazzo Taverna, and Lerner was able to get on with the shooting of his filmed TV series, The Three Musketeers.

Producer-Director Lerner has 39 half-hour films to go and fears that his voice may not make the course. It has sunk to a whisper in his effort to crash the language barrier; Lerner can no longer operate on the theory that the way to make foreigners understand English is to shout it. He complains: "The trouble with these people is that you can't talk to them. You use a simple word like 'dolly' or 'Mole-Richardson boom,' and the interpreter takes five minutes telling 'em what you said." He also finds that all his Italian workers have a lamentable tendency to talk back at the same time: "I told 'em, 'Look, why don't you guys get a chairman?' They looked at me and finally one guy asks, 'What's a chairman?' "

Demoted Cardinal. A deal with Rome's Thetis Films (makers of TV's Orient Express and International Police) has made it possible for Lerner to film the series in Italy. But the idea is his own and came to him one morning when he remarked to his wife, "Hey, how come there are no swashbucklers on TV?" A year ago, he picked up a copy of Dumas' The Three Musketeers ("It was lying around the house") and decided D'Artagnan was his man. Of course, Lerner, who has produced three B movies and a dozen episodes for TV's Gangbusters, will add his own inventive genius to that of Writer Dumas: "We started out to do a sort of adult Lone Ranger, but how much can you do with four guys with swords?" Lerner is investigating the comic possibilities and has not hesitated to seek advice in other fields. After a Manhattan conference with "someone in Cardinal Spellman's office," he decided not to use Cardinal de Richelieu as his main villain. The leading lady is British Actress Dawn Addams, who will be downgraded to duchess from her real-life position of Princess Massimo. Aramis has been changed from an ex-seminarian to a scholarly type; Porthos has become only a fat man interested in food, and Athos has shifted from the melancholy husband of Madame de Winter to a clothes-conscious wolf. Explains Lerner: "When we slant a fact, we always make sure we got a fact to start with."

Without a Horse. Lerner is more of a stickler for background than for plot. Because some of his finest locales are marred by modern improvements, he has assembled some 500 masking pieces: "You slap a proclamation over a Coca-Cola sign, cover light poles with trees, mask power lines with branches, introduce a coach-and-four and--whammo-- you got a 17th century pastorale."

This week Lerner was hard at work in Sermoneta, a medieval town perched on a mountain 45 miles southeast of Rome. Since Caterpillar tractors were too wide to get through the narrow streets, Lerner is using oxen and sledges to get his six electric generators and three tons of cable up to the stronghold ("Those oxen are going to bring more power into Sermoneta than the whole damn town has used since electricity was invented"). He foresees no trouble in selling his show to U.S. television this fall, because "there have been umpteen versions of The Three Musketeers--including one made in Bronx Park without a single horse--and none of 'em ever lost money."

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