Reclaiming the Vast Wasteland

Made-from-TV movies aren't always cinematic eyesores.

Nick Gillespie from the October 1994 issue

In an age of corporate downsizing and diminished expectations, it somehow seems appropriate for the big screen to turn to the small screen for inspiration. That happened in a huge way this past summer, as three of the season's most-anticipated movies, Maverick, The Flintstones, and Wyatt Earp, reprised old TV shows. Two other films, Lassie and The Little Rascals, were inspired by TV series that were themselves inspired by movies, and the late-summer entry It's Pat! grew out of a skit on Saturday Night Live. These pictures join other recent releases such as Dennis the Menace, The Fugitive, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Coneheads, The Naked Gun 331/3, Addams Family Values, and Wayne's World II in what has emerged as the number-one growth trend in Hollywood: movies based on TV material.

The wave of made-from-TV movies isn't going to crash any time soon. In fact, it's swelling into a cinematic tsunami that big-time Hollywood players are rushing to surf. Renny Harlin, the director of Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2, is producing an American Gladiators-based film and Penny Marshall, who herself rose to stardom on the tube's Laverne & Shirley, is working on a big-screen Bewitched. Steve Martin is set to remake Phil Silvers's Sgt. Bilko and Tom Cruise will undertake Mission: Impossible. Home Alone auteur John Hughes is tackling a post-Schindler's List Hogan's Heroes and writer Larry McMurtry, whose films include The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment, is penning a script for a new Father Knows Best.

A partial list of other TV-based projects under development includes The Brady Bunch; F Troop; Gentle Ben; Gilligan's Island; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; Hawaii Five-O; Lost in Space; My Favorite Martian; and The Rifleman.

What are we to make of this sudden indebtedness to TV? Some critics view it as the final moral and artistic bankruptcy of a movie industry whose stupendous lack of imagination is matched only by its gargantuan appetite for big bucks. Time's Richard Corliss, for instance, derides the phenomenon as "Naked Trend 4" and sneers that the TV-based movies "give Hollywood what it wants most: a solid, safe return on its investment." Concludes Corliss, "The lemming rush to televidiocy reveals a movie industry close to creative exhaustion."

On a superficial level, the anti-TV critique hits the bull's-eye and blows away the whole target with the same shot. Moviemaking is, after all, a moneymaking enterprise, and TV- based films have a built-in recognition factor that minimizes investment risk. In fact, Brian D. Johnson of Maclean's quotes The Flintstones's director, Brian Levant, precisely to this effect: "We're in a big money business," says Levant. "If you can find something with a presold audience, then you have a better chance of realizing a profit." And, as the number of projects in development indicates, Hollywood moguls are actively picking at TV's corpus with Jeffrey Dahmer-like intensity. While such behavior may not constitute cannibalism per se, the idea of viewing a big-screen Gentle Ben or Brady Bunch movie in Dolby Stereo SR is only a slightly less gruesome possibility.

In a more fundamental way, however, the contempt for what Time's Corliss dismisses out of hand as "tele-visions" misrepresents the motion-picture industry, ignores its basic creative mechanism, and precludes a nuanced discussion of the growing list of films based on TV shows. Yes, last year's big-screen version of Car 54, Where Are You? was as terrible a movie as Hollywood puts out (I'm sure any of the 50 or so paying customers who saw it in its original theatrical release will back me up on this), but it was no worse than any number of non-TV-related flicks, either (Malice, The Pelican Brief, anyone?). To categorically sniff at TV-based movies is, ironically, to indulge in the same sort of snobbery that theater buffs once directed at film.

When critics stress the profit-motive angle, they indict the entire entertainment industry, not merely a current trend. They also haul out by implication the moldy argument that popular success necessarily comes at the cost of artistic integrity, a formula Hollywood refutes as often as it embraces. Long before the current slew of TV-inspired films, studio heads wanted to do two things: make movies and make money--not necessarily in that order. Hollywood has always been dedicated to the proposition that artists need not starve. Hence, producers are always looking for a product with a presold audience. That's why the rights to bestsellers get snapped up and why bankable stars get big money.

In any case, a TV-based movie, name recognition notwithstanding, is no more a sure smash than a Chevy Chase film is a sure bomb (actually, the odds are much, much longer on the former). Last year's Coneheads and Car 54 were certifiable flops and The Beverly Hillbillies, although based on one of the most popular series of all times (both in prime- time and reruns), did only mediocre business. The demand for nostalgia, it seems, is extremely elastic and depends less on the product's track record than its present performance.

If impugning TV-based movies as especially sullied by greed is myopic, then excoriating them as a sign of Hollywood's creative exhaustion borders on total blindness. Throughout its history, film has always been a hugely plagiaristic art form, exhibiting a longstanding penchant for appropriating materials from other genres. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Most movies--whether good or bad, popular or not--are based on something else.

Novels have probably been the most fertile source, but stage dramas and musicals have of course inspired countless films. Film makers also utilize non-fiction sources (All the President's Men), short stories (2001: A Space Odyssey), and even pop songs (Alice's Restaurant) occasionally, as the parenthetical examples illustrate, with excellent results. If anything, movies made from wholly original screenplays may be a distinct minority.

Since the movie industry is always borrowing anyway, it is worth puzzling over the contempt for TV in particular. A large part of the answer lies in the fact that the boob tube continues to be seen as, well, the boob tube--a younger, dumber cousin to film. Despite the occasional Marty or Requiem for a Heavyweight, the big screen has more often served as source material for the small, as with shows such as The Odd Couple, The Courtship of Eddie's Father, and M*A*S*H. It is telling that the annual broadcast of the Academy Awards ceremony is almost always nominated for a number of special-event Emmys. TV itself defers to the movies.

So, in terms of relative prestige, TV was and still is generally viewed (albeit less harshly) as a vast wasteland to which has-been or never-were movie stars are banished. Ronald Reagan's career was hardly going gangbusters when he moseyed onto Death Valley Days. The same could be said of Candice Bergen and Burt Reynolds, who restarted stalled careers via sitcoms.

The film industry's recent use of TV shows, then, is a reversal of the traditional hierarchy of big and small screens, a turnabout which no doubt bothers film mavens. For the cinema to turn to TV for ideas is an aesthetic double-cross, akin to finding out that the camera angles in Citizen Kane were stolen from comic books.

Beyond selectively seizing on economics and overlooking the motion-picture industry's relentless use of other media, the peremptory dismissal of TV-based movies shrugs off an even more elemental truth regarding any film adaptation, whether the source is TV or Tolstoy: The quality of a movie's source is ultimately unrelated to how it turns out on the screen.

In 1987, for instance, Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities was a huge critical and commercial success as a novel. For the much-ballyhooed movie version, Hollywood packed the production with hot stars of the moment (Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, Bruce Willis) and a hot director (Brian DePalma, flush with success from his remake of TV's The Untouchables). The final result was a neutron bomb of a movie that cleared the theaters of people and the studio of its top management. But if an outstanding original source can give rise to an utterly failed movie, it's also true that mediocre material sometimes culminates in great cinema. Casablanca was based on a thoroughly forgettable play titled Everybody Comes to Rick's.

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