Reclaiming the vast wasteland.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Made-from-television movies

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 33 1/3, 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...