ACTOR ‘TURNS’ CORNER : HERRERA WRITES, DIRECTS ‘PLAYHOUSE’

Conventional wisdom holds that an actor who lands a prominent role on one of television’s daytime dramas runs the risk of becoming stuck on the soaps. Anthony Herrera is intent on breaking with that convention in a big way: He wants to write and direct feature films.

Herrera, who plays villainous industrialist James Stenbeck on CBS’ “As the World Turns,” has taken a giant leap in this direction as the writer and director of “The Wide Net,” a one-hour drama on “American Playhouse” tonight that marks the first television adaptation of a work of fiction by Eudora Welty.

It airs at 8 p.m. on Channel 50 and at 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15.

What’s he doing back on a soap opera after making a film for PBS?

“The transition from acting to writing and directing isn’t going to happen overnight,” Herrera said in an interview here the other day. “On Feb. 3, it’s unlikely that Lorimar is going to be calling to offer me a three-picture deal. So if I can do both during the transition, I may not have to compromise the way I would if I had nothing to do but look for work. And, besides, the soaps stretch your muscles as a writer and director.”

Herrera, 43, has established himself in what he calls “the daytime club” of serials with a succession of leading roles in various soaps, starting in 1971 on CBS’ “Where the Heart Is.”

But the actor, who, like Welty, is a native Mississippian, in recent years has expanded his horizons by writing screenplays, financing and directing a documentary film and, now, adapting and directing Welty’s short story.

Herrera said he landed the prestigious assignment because producer Rachel McPherson was a fellow Mississippian, knew he would have the right “sense of time and place” and had read a sampling of his five unproduced screenplays. She also had seen his half-hour documentary, “Mississippi Delta Blues,” which has been shown at film festivals and on public television.

Herrera said he saw immediately that the Welty short story--a simple, straightforward narrative about a newly married couple (played by Barry Tubb and Kyra Sedgwick) trying to come to terms with “balance and control” in their relationship--could be made into a film.

“There was no need to do much to it, because it’s so beautiful the way it is,” he said, pointing out that some added characterization needed to be established visually, and that some minor cuts needed to be made to adapt to time and cost limitations.

The one-hour film was shot last summer on a $700,000 budget along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, not far from the small town of Wiggins (population 1,600) where Herrera was born and first fantasized about the movies at the “picture show” where his grandmother played the piano.

“The idea remained a fantasy until I was a premed student at the University of Mississippi and, after acting in a play, decided I did not want to be a doctor after all,” he recalled.

Herrera moved, first to New Orleans, where he landed a job as a stand-in for actor Charlton Heston in a film being shot there; then to Los Angeles, where he started studying acting under Stella Adler; then to New York, where he said he engaged in the “usual struggle” to find a job as an actor, which led to the soaps.

Herrera said that a five-year stint in Los Angeles (1975-1980), where he appeared in yet another soap, “The Young and the Restless,” and in TV movies, brought him to the realization that he could do more than act.

“It takes a while, but you come to realize that producing and directing and writing is a combination of hard work and common sense, and, of course, talent, which I think you either have or don’t have,” he said.

Returning to New York, he landed the Stenbeck role on “As the World Turns” but continued to write and to make his documentary film. Then, after being written out of the soap in 1983, he took the leading role of another villain, Dane Hammond, in ABC’s soap “Loving.”

Last year, he left “Loving” to study cinematography in Los Angeles, in preparation for directing “The Wide Net.”

The PBS project completed, he returned three months ago to “As the World Turns” as Stenbeck; in a familiar tactic, his character was said to have been away from the fictional town of Oakdale with a “memory loss.”

He acknowledged that he and his character face an uncertain future on “As the World Turns,” since he is determined to bring to the screen an eight-year-old screenplay about family conflicts in Mississippi in the 1950s.

But, he said, “James Stenbeck definitely has unfinished business in Oakdale.”