CINEMA: Made-From-Tv Movies

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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.