NEW CHIEF AT FOX--A PRAGMATIC VISIONARY

What can we expect from a studio head who, as a producer, had his name on “Family” and “Charlie’s Angels”? Whose feature films included “California Split” and “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training”? Whose TV movies included “Something About Amelia” and “The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped”?

Will the real Leonard Goldberg please stand up? Which sensibility is really you--the one responsible for “Little Ladies of the Night” or the one responsible for “Brian’s Song”? As the new president and chief operating officer of 20th Century Fox, will you put the accent on the fox or on the 20th Century?

The answer that emerges from a philosophical discussion with the one-time network programmer is that the accent will be on quality, whether the films have hearts and minds or just great legs.

“I don’t think that, in accepting this job, I could just limit myself to those few projects a year that touch you emotionally,” Goldberg said in his first interview since taking over Jan. 1 as head of television and film production at Fox.

“As a business person, when you accept this responsibility of making 12 to 15 films a year, you can’t just wait for those few projects to come by. You could never do 12 to 15 of them.

“You have to do a variety of films, but . . . each one should be done as well as it can be done.”

Goldberg, 52, who shared the Midas touch with partner Aaron Spelling for 16 years of hit TV series, is the third production chief at Fox under Barry Diller since Diller took over as chairman and chief executive officer a little more than two years ago.

Lawrence Gordon had the job when Diller arrived and was replaced shortly thereafter by Alan Horn. Diller apparently exercised more hands-on supervision than Horn could bear. Horn quit last August, to be replaced six months later by Goldberg.

The latest Fox president has an advantage when it comes to getting along with the chairman. The two have been close friends since Goldberg--as head of programming for ABC-TV in the late 1960s--hired Diller away from the William Morris Agency and brought him to New York as his assistant.

Goldberg and Diller then hired Michael Eisner, and the three of them--mining Hollywood for scripts, producers and talent--developed the made-for-TV movie into a lucrative staple of network programming.

Diller took over as head of ABC’s prime-time programming after Goldberg moved to Hollywood to become a producer, and in 1970 gave his former boss the green light on “Brian’s Song,” one of the best TV movies ever made and one of the few that could be mistaken for a theatrical movie.

Flash forward to 1987. The roles have been reversed. Diller is on the top rung and Goldberg one below.

“Barry and I always had a very easy relationship; I’m very comfortable with this,” said the soft-spoken, gray-bearded Goldberg.

“I recognized early on how talented he was. . . . I don’t have to prove anything to him and he doesn’t have to prove anything to me. We don’t have any of that stuff between us.”

Goldberg turned down the top programming job at his old network, ABC, last year. He said there were certain things he wanted (reportedly, profit participation) that he thought would cause resentment.

“I didn’t want to go into a situation where I would be arguing from Day 1,” he said.

It is easy to understand why ABC wanted Goldberg. In partnership with Spelling, he launched some of television’s hottest and most profitable series. Besides “Charlie’s Angels,” the bellwether of jigglevision, there were “Starsky and Hutch,” “Fantasy Island,” “Hart to Hart” and “T. J. Hooker.” And nearly three dozen TV movies, including “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” which gave John Travolta his dramatic start.

When you hear Goldberg talk about the projects that have mattered to him, it is also easy to understand why Fox would have more appeal than ABC. With the film and television divisions reporting to him, he will have far greater creative range and the opportunity to keep his hands--or, at least, his eyes--on a multitude of productions at one time.

The question is, what kind of productions will they be?

Goldberg’s credits are weighted heavily toward commercial, slickly produced but exploitative material. “WarGames,” his most successful movie, took a darkly nagging premise--a teen-age computer whiz taps into the Pentagon’s electronics and sets a thermonuclear war in motion--and became sort of a living Pac-Man chase film.

Commercial and intellectual instincts undoubtedly clash in all film and TV producers, but inside Goldberg, a graduate of Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, commerce has more often prevailed. And even when the intellectual won, the results were commercial.

“Something About Amelia,” a TV social drama that dealt intelligently and directly with incest, scored big with the Nielsen ratings and the Emmys.

For Fox, a studio with few film hits in recent years, Goldberg may strike just the right balance. No one expects him to put his imprimatur on all of Fox’s films, which is the sort of pressure being put on Columbia Pictures’ new chairman, David Puttnam, another producer-turned-studio chief.

Goldberg said he intends to put out a balanced slate of movies at Fox, with the common denominator being quality.

“I have to believe very strongly that if you make good quality films, finally you will succeed,” he said. “I don’t mean necessarily that every film has to be a work of art. You can make teen-age films, films for adults, action films, comedy films, wonderful dramas. You can run the gamut. . . .

“As long as they are true to themselves and they are the best that you can make them, they will find an audience.”

Goldberg said he is planning to blend his television and film experiences in his management style at Fox. He said production budgets for features will be more realistic, and script development--the studio mulch bin where promising projects go to ferment and, frequently, rot--will be made more productive.

“My feeling about development has always been that less is more,” he said, “that if you concentrate on fewer projects, you will have better projects. In television, there were producers who did 10 pilots a year. I was interested in developing one good pilot a year. After four years, you’ve got four shows on the air.”

When Goldberg arrived at Fox, there were 127 scripts in development. Some had moss on them.

The first order of business for most new studio chiefs is to clean the mulch bin, and Goldberg said he began immediately. He wants to settle on about 50 projects that hold promise, and he aims to get each one made.

“I want us to be working on projects that we really care about,” Goldberg said. “It will be better for us and for the creative person. He knows that if he has a project at Fox, and we’re only making 50 development deals, we’re pretty damn serious about it.”

Goldberg said that before he actually started at the new job, he asked Fox’s production executives to cull through the 127 projects for those that held the most promise for going into immediate production. Fox had been depending on such outside production companies as Lorimar Telepictures and Gladden Entertainment for its film product, and the production schedule he inherited is thin.

Just before the Christmas holiday, Goldberg said, a box arrived from Fox. It contained 23 scripts. A couple of weeks later, at a production meeting on his first day on the job, he plopped the box down on the conference table and said, “OK, I’m ready.”

The first project Goldberg green-lighted was a sequel to the 1984 teen comedy “Revenge of the Nerds.” Goldberg called the decision a “no-brainer.” The original film was a financial success and the sequel can be made inexpensively at little risk.

Goldberg has since given the go-ahead to “Saigon,” a drama being written and directed by Christopher Crowe, and to projects to be directed by James Brooks (“Terms of Endearment”) and Penny Marshall (“Jumpin’ Jack Flash”). Fox is also tentatively set to finance “Wall Street,” which would be Oliver Stone’s first film after “Platoon.”

Goldberg said he has total autonomy on production decisions, with no budget cap.

“I suppose if I came up with eight projects that cost $25 million each and I felt I had to do them, Rupert Murdoch might say, ‘Wait a minute, Len.’ But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

As for holding budgets down, Goldberg said he will simply inject some reality into the budgeting process. The line that creative people will hear a lot in Goldberg’s office is this: “Fellows, I can do this beautifully for television for $2 million. Why don’t you go back and rethink it?”

Goldberg said Fox will continue to make big-budget films when the style of the film dictates it. You can’t compare the budget on a sequel to “Aliens” to that of a TV movie because it couldn’t be made for TV. But where there are no extraordinary special effects, set and location requirements, he said, there’s no reason for $18-million budgets.

“The problem with our business is that there are many films made for $18 million that should have been made for $10 million or less,” he said.

“There are talents . . . who are worth their price, people who have proved themselves time and again through their work and the commercial success their work has attracted. On the other hand, there is a body of people who have proved neither, but just because they have made (a few movies), they have escalated their prices out of all reason.”

Goldberg is not declaring war on the power agents who package their clients in ways that drive up production budgets and occasionally saddle film makers with unwanted supporting talent. He said the studio just has to consider the price tag and decide whether the premium is worth the additional risk.

“When you begin with a certain project, you have in mind what it is ultimately going to cost,” he said. “If we can attract a top director, if we can attract top stars, it’s going to cost this much more. . . .

“If you think the project is that much more valuable, you should do it. If you don’t think so, you shouldn’t. . . . If you do, you do it with your eyes open. Don’t be surprised if it turns out to be a debacle.”

Goldberg said he will be hoping to take up two or three spaces on the annual production schedule with pet projects, those that will interest him emotionally. The businessman in him gets excited by the high Nielsen ratings and the big box-office grosses, but he said that’s not where the greatest satisfaction comes.

“The numbers are all fine and the grosses and ratings and the distribution, but you’ve got to have that personal reaction from people,” he said.

“When I first came out here, I lived in an apartment house where I didn’t know any of my neighbors. The doorbell rang about 11 o’clock the night ‘Brian’s Song’ aired. A man was standing there. He said, ‘I live on the sixth floor. I just want to say thank you for “Brian’s Song.” ’ He brought me a bottle of champagne.

“That’s worthwhile. Those are the moments that make it all worthwhile.”