CINEMA: Made-From-Tv Movies

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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.