Made-From-Tv Movies

By RICHARD CORLISS

If what you're about to read doesn't make you sick at heart about creativity in Hollywood, then you may as well queue up now for that future film smash, Love Connection: The Movie.

Well, all right, perhaps we are overreacting. Perhaps it is just the seasonal malaise that afflicts film critics, but not moviegoers, as we anticipate the pack mentality of Hollywood that in summer always produces a few hot-weather hits but many more dog-day dogs -- worse, the same breed of dog. This is the season when studio bosses roll out their biggest theories as to what genre the audience will consume in mass quantities. In 1991, action adventure; '92, comedy; '93, kid stuff. And now Naked Trend 4: TV shows turned into movies.

Hollywood's summer officially began last weekend with the box-office sure thing Maverick, starring Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and the lead from the '50s TV version, old Bret (or was it Bart?) Maverick himself, James Garner. This week a live-action take on The Flintstones debuts, with John Goodman and Elizabeth Perkins as Fred and Wilma Flintstone and Rick Moranis and Rosie O'Donnell as Barney and Betty Rubble. Later this summer, Lassie will bark her way back into your heart, and Wyatt Earp will gallop across the wide screen. The Little Rascals, based on the old movie shorts that have become continually rerun TV artifacts, arrives in August. Then summer's end brings It's Pat, a Saturday Night Live spin-off.

And the projects just keep on coming, as studios ransack America's collective subliterate unconscious for new hits from old shows: American Gladiators (with Cliffhanger's Renny Harlin producing); Bewitched (Penny Marshall); The Brady Bunch; F Troop; Gentle Ben; Gilligan's Island; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; The Green Hornet; Hawaii Five-0; Hogan's Heroes (from writer- producer John Hughes); The Invaders; Lost in Space; My Favorite Martian; The Rifleman; The Saint and many, many more.

Some of these projects will surely end up in development hell (or at least development limbo). Others will be made only to receive the who-cares / reception that greeted The Gong Show Movie, The Nude Bomb (from Get Smart), Boris and Natasha (from Rocky and his Friends), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and this year's Car 54, Where Are You? But enough of these tele-visions will emulate the smash status of last year's The Fugitive or at least achieve the same modest earnings as The Beverly Hillbillies to give Hollywood what it wants most: a solid, safe return on its investment. Ask producer Alan Ladd Jr. about his low-budget (about $12 million) version of The Brady Bunch, and he will spell it out in numbers: "The risk factor isn't high. It will get a decent opening weekend, at worst, and do well in home video. Nobody gets hurt, and there is a huge upside if it works."

Other numbers -- North American box-office grosses -- speak for themselves. Six Star Trek movies: $450 million. Three Naked Gun farces from the short- lived '80s series Police Squad: $200 million. Two episodes of Wayne's World spun out of an SNL skit: $170 million. Two of The Addams Family features: $160 million. Toss in a few movie series based on TV shows based on comic books -- two Batman ($410 million), four Superman ($400 million) and three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies ($250 million) -- and you have a portfolio that could make any film studio healthy now and for years to come. "The genre has enormous crossover appeal," says producer David Permut. "You're getting people who fondly remember the show, plus a whole younger generation who may know it through syndicated reruns."

Movies have been filching from television (as they earlier did from radio programs) since the medium's infancy, but for decades the source materials were mainly one-shot plays or marginal TV fare. In 1955, Marty, a faithful rendering of Paddy Chayefsky's drama, was a critical success that won the Oscar for best picture, and Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, a basting of three episodes of a Disney-TV western, was a surprise box-office hit. For a few more years, television's prized anthology series, like Broadway, continued to spawn serious films: The Bachelor Party, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Days of Wine and Roses. A dormant period was broken in the late 1970s when the TV transfers showed a bit of new life with Star Trek: The Motion Picture; The Blues Brothers (first of the SNL films); and The Muppet Movie (from Jim Henson's syndicated menagerie). Despite this activity, though, it still had not really occurred to anyone to make movies based on echt prime- time materials.

The defining moment for the made-from-TV movie -- a secular equivalent of Saul struck blind on the road to Damascus -- came one night in the mid-1980s. Producer Permut was channel surfing. "I saw an old rerun of Dragnet," he recalls, "and two stations away, a rerun of Saturday Night Live with Dan Aykroyd." Permut's Dragnet, with Aykroyd and Tom Hanks, became a hit in the summer of 1987 (another moneymaker that season was The Untouchables, with Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness). "Since then," Permut says, "I've been brought just about every TV show imaginable. Last week somebody came into my office pitching the Baldwin brothers as My Three Sons." Permut helped set up The Beverly Hillbillies, and is now preparing Green Acres, National Lampoon's Love Boat and Gilligan's Island -- films with simple aims and B-list directors. "I'm not going to be talking with Marty Scorsese about Love Boat," Permut says.

Justifications for the genre range from nostalgia to mythmaking. "Why do 40-year-old guys buy '66 Corvettes?" asks producer John Davis, who is developing Gentle Ben and The Rifleman. "Because they always loved the car but couldn't afford one when they were teenagers. They're reliving their childhood. It's the same thing with these films." Producer Paula Wagner, who is developing a big-budget update of Mission: Impossible with Tom Cruise, goes further. "Television has become our contemporary mythology," she says. Making her case for Mission: Impossible, Wagner notes that Shakespeare based his plays on Plutarch's Lives. "The source material may add depth and richness, but ultimately the source is irrelevant. What matters is the quality of the film."

No one, you'll notice, mentions the quality of the original show. A TV series that made its mark with daring subject matter, top ensemble acting or brilliant writing offers little to the TV-to-movie grave robbers. Their motto might be "Why the best?" So from the '60s, the moguls choose The Fugitive over East Side, West Side; from the '70s, The Brady Bunch, not Mary Tyler Moore; from the '80s, Police Squad instead of Hill Street Blues; and from the '90s, Beavis and Butt-head rather than The Simpsons.

Can a TV show be too good for movie adaptation? Maverick director Richard Donner, who has had his share of series stuff (including Gilligan's Island) before graduating to feature films, thinks not. "There are no sacred cows in television," he says. "The medium is too young." Still, it's hard not to wince in anticipation of three projects based on '50s TV classics: Sgt. Bilko, from the Phil Silvers sitcom You'll Never Get Rich, Father Knows Best and The Honeymooners. These series, pretty perfect in their original incarnations, would seem hard to improve on and all too easy to debase. Yet Ron Howard's Imagine Films believes that casting Steve Martin as Silvers' wheeler-dealer sergeant at a Stateside Army camp provides a fresh approach and a possible franchise.

As for Father Knows Best, which starred Robert Young as that sitcom rarity, a patriarch who wasn't a buffoon, co-producer Jim Jacks has high hopes for the script by novelist Larry McMurtry (Terms of Endearment). "We'll take on real life as it is today," Jacks promises -- or threatens. "It won't be sensational; they're not going to catch Bud at school with an Uzi. But we'll be looking at very serious problems that must be resolved. It won't be as simple as Princess worrying who's going to take her to the prom."

Catching the wave of a profitable gimcrack trend -- that explains why people make these movies. But why do people pay to see them? Are filmgoers, like conscientious environmentalists, determined to recycle everything, including the detritus from the glowing box in their living room? Are they so afraid of the present that they take refuge in the airiest, least threatening artifacts of their past? Even so-called contemporary movies, like Reality Bites, make iconic references to '70s TV shows. Even so-called original movies have the relentless closeups, the pummeling pace, the insistent underscoring and the audience-prodding reaction shots of old sitcoms.

Those mediocre programs taught a generation how to look at moving pictures and how to avoid social reality. The new big-screen sitcoms simply recognize TV's triumph of the banal. A few good movies (The Fugitive, The Addams Family, Wayne's World) may emerge from Naked Trend 4. But the lemming rush to televidiocy reveals a movie industry close to creative exhaustion.

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles