Not Coming to a Set Near You

You can almost picture the TV listings blurb as you sit in the cinema.

“A trio of divorcees bond together to cope with their new lives, and for a little revenge. Tonight on ABC.”

Or “A group of plucky humans, lead by a wise-cracking fighter pilot and a fiery U.S. president, fight to repel an alien invasion. Don’t miss it, on CBS.”

Maybe even, “Five twentysomething friends look for love in hip Los Angeles circles. And NBC’s got them.”

It’s only natural to watch “The First Wives Club,” “Independence Day” and “Swingers” and imagine them on the small screen, given television’s penchant for turning successful movies--from “Peyton Place” to “MASH” to “Dangerous Minds”--into weekly series.

But don’t expect to see many of the current crop of box-office successes coming soon to a television set near you.

“TV producers have definitely checked in with us, but we think we made something special and don’t want to trivialize it by taking it to television,” said Adam Schroeder, a producer on “First Wives Club.” “Television is such a different business from movies. It takes a concept and a title and TV-izes it. It has to take away the edge and make the project very mainstream.”

Schroeder is always reluctant to consider the transition from big screen to small because “things go wrong, since television producers don’t involve the original creators and cast in their show.” The reason he was happy to see “Clueless,” another of his productions, become a series on ABC this season was that the movie’s director, Amy Heckerling, was willing to work on the show.

Much of a movie’s success can also come courtesy of the chemistry between its big-name stars, such as “First Wives’ ” Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton. It would be nearly impossible for a network or producer to entice them into reprising their roles on a weekly basis. “You’d get Kirstie Alley, Shelley Long and Jean Smart in the series version, instead of the actresses you liked in the movie,” Schroeder said.

The networks reluctantly realize this limitation.

“The viewers are often not going to accept another actor in the part,” said ABC Entertainment President Jamie Tarses.

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Even if TV producers are able to come up with the money for movie actors, it’s still difficult to interest the film’s producers in releasing the rights to the project. Blame it on the dreaded movie malady “sequelitis.”

“Sometimes producers don’t want to give up the rights because they’re planning sequels,” Tarses said. “I’ll call up to inquire about a project and will be told they are thinking in terms of multiples, not series.”

In other words, why sell the cow when you can keep selling the milk? A moderately successful sequel can often rake in more money and prestige than a successful series, so there is little incentive to make the risky move.

CBS Entertainment chief Les Moonves recalls that “it was very rare to have features allowed to be sold to television” when he ran the television division of Warner Bros., largely because “if a series bombs, the chances of a sequel bombing are greater.”

And with the exception of “MASH” and “The Odd Couple,” there haven’t been many successful movie-to-TV transitions. (Raise your hand if you remember the TV version of “Casablanca.”)

Of the three network attempts this season, Fox’s “Party Girl” has already been canceled, and ABC’s “Clueless” and “Dangerous Minds” are struggling in the ratings. That leaves the networks, as well as the movie producers, wary of pursuing the television potential of even a blockbuster.

Schroeder figures the problem is that “TV shows have to be high concept, looking for simpler characters than in a lot of movies.”

“They figure they can develop a character over five years instead of two hours,” he said, and TV viewers will lose patience in five minutes if those characters don’t show signs of progression.

Also, what viewers liked in a movie may have much less appeal when it’s repeated on a weekly basis.

“You have to ask yourself if these characters might wear thin eventually,” said film producer David Permut, whose specialty is the reverse, turning shows such as “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Love Boat” into features. “With ‘First Wives Club,’ what happens? They hammer a different husband every week? The mediums are different, and you can have a great concept for a movie that can’t translate to television.”

“You have to reinvent the feature so it can stand on its own,” said Moonves, whose network failed last year with a TV version of “The Client.” “You’ll get an initial tune-in if the movie was big enough, but that will fade away quickly if the show isn’t good.”

That’s why box-office performance is usually a moot point. “The bottom line is, the movie has to be producible as a show,” explains Diane Frolov, co-executive producer of the “Dangerous Minds” series. “For example, you can’t do ‘Cliffhanger’ every week because you don’t have the resources.”

“What you have to have for this to work are characters you can peel back week by week,” adds her partner, Andrew Schneider. “With ‘Dangerous Minds,’ we have a classroom of students who couldn’t all be used in the movie but can be explored in a series.”

That’s why they were able to take a movie like “Alien Nation,” which barely registered at the box office, and turn it into a show and now a series of movies on Fox.

“The movie was marginally successful, but it had this great premise of aliens living among us,” Schneider said. “It’s a great metaphor for race relations, and a way to explore lots of issues.”

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Not surprisingly, then, the features currently being developed as TV series are ones bought more for their concepts and characters than for their titles.

For instance, NBC is working on a version of “Fargo,” while ABC has committed to 22 episodes of “Timecop.”

“It’s got a solid, futuristic concept and the story possibilities are endless,” Tarses said of the latter. “That’s what it takes to make the transition.”

Of course, big hits like “First Wives Club” or “Independence Day” have similar potential, and even if there is little chance they’ll become series, that doesn’t mean you won’t be seeing something awfully familiar next season.

“Anything that works, you can be sure they’ll try it,” Schroeder said of the networks. “They’ll just rip off the trend instead of the title.”

Moonves can still recall the days after “Animal House” was a hit, when he saw three different pilots involving fraternities. After “Mrs. Doubtfire” hit big, ABC briefly aired “On Our Own,” in which a man impersonated his aunt to take care of his family. So far this fall, Moonves said, he has been approached “with a lot of versions of pitches” for shows involving women in the “First Wives Club” demographic.

“A lot of trends happen because of big features,” Moonves admitted. “If you see a genre working, you try it. You take your ideas where you get them. We work in a creative environment, so you can’t help but let your mind wander when you’re watching a movie. You think, ‘I could take this character here and that situation there. . . .’ ”

“I would be surprised if they didn’t do that,” countered Schroeder. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”