Producer Spencer Scares Up a Sitcom

The network’s first response was not encouraging.

“An executive at ABC called me and said, point-blank: ‘I don’t get this,’ ” recalled a cheerful Alan Spencer.

The 28-year-old producer was talking about “The Ghost Writer,” a series he created starring Anthony Perkins as a writer of horror novels. Despite the initial reservations on the part of the network and the production company, New World, the show is slated as a mid-season replacement for the 1988-89 TV season.

“The Ghost Writer” is TV’s first “scarecom”--a term coined for this half-hour blend of comedy and horror by Stu Bloomberg, vice president of comedy and variety development at ABC.

The genre--which so far includes only “The Ghost Writer”--should not be confused with horror spoofs such as old “Munsters” or “Addams Family” series, Spencer said. “The horror is real,” he said.

In a recent interview at his office at New World Television headquarters in West Los Angeles, Spencer offered few details on “The Ghost Writer” except to say that the horror stems from the fact that everything the Perkins character writes about “turns out to be true, not fiction.” When questioned about the cast, he asked cryptically: “You mean, the living characters?”

Even from these few details, one might expect “The Ghost Writer” to be as offbeat as Spencer’s other TV series, ABC’s “Sledge Hammer!,” canceled following a season opposite the top-rated “Cosby Show” on NBC. “Sledge Hammer!” was the satirical story of a hot-tempered detective who slept with his gun. ABC Entertainment President Brandon Stoddard once described the show as attracting “a slow but steady following of kids, teen-agers and disturbed young men.”

Spencer said the idea of lacing a sitcom with horror came from Perkins. The two are members of a mutual admiration society: Perkins watched “Sledge Hammer!,” and Spencer has been a Perkins fan since seeing him as Norman Bates in “Psycho.”

“He’s always been a role model for me; he did what I always wanted to do,” Spencer said of the Bates character. “He ran a motel and he met nice ladies. I thought he was great.”

“Ghost Writer” will be taped in front of a studio audience. The show’s horrific special effects, Spencer said, will be performed live as in a stage show such as Broadway’s popular “Phantom of the Opera” or a magic act, rather than through camera tricks.

“We’re going to treat the performances like a play, and do the effects one time only. We want to make people faint,” he said. “Instead of a laugh track, we’ll have a scream track.”

The reason no one has tried to create special effects for a live comedy audience before, Spencer added, is that there hasn’t been much call for it. “There’s not a lot of demand for severed heads on ‘The Cosby Show,’ ” he said.

At first, the network and studio research people found the idea of a horror comedy very scary, Spencer said. They worried whether people would like Anthony Perkins after his antisocial antics in “Pyscho.”

“There was a lot of talk about likability and accessibility,” he said. “When I initially turned (the concept) in, they thought it was too dark, too scary. Dark was the killer word. Their idea of scary is ‘The Florence Henderson Halloween Special.’ ”

Spencer added that one executive at New World also wanted him to come up with some way to have the characters who were ghosts become ghosts without dying first; they felt that death was, well, sort of a downer.

Nor did the scarecom idea fit in with ABC’s current push for shows designed to attract the young, upscale viewer, such as the network’s “thirtysomething,” “The Wonder Years” or “China Beach.”

“At the networks, they used to say, ‘Put in a dog or a kitten.’ Now they say, ‘Put in a yuppie,’ ” Spencer grumbled. “I told ABC I’d put in a dead yuppie; I’d put in a yuppie ghost. Not everything on TV can revolve around yuppie values, or be revisionist Vietnam.”

(“I wanted to be the first on the air with a series about the living dead,” he later quipped, “but ‘thirtysomething’ beat me to it.”)

The network became more enthusiastic about the scarecom, however, following the success of the feature film comedy “Beetlejuice,” which starred Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin as a couple of yuppie ghosts who died in a Volvo crash and found their home taken over by a pretentiously artsy New York couple and their suicidal teen-age daughter.

“After seeing the kind of money ‘Beetlejuice’ was making, that same executive who ‘didn’t get it’ said to one of our production people: ‘I get it now,’ ” Spencer said.

Spencer is used to raising network eyebrows, however. “I’m not a mainstream person,” he said.

The Whittier native (“I’m always embarrassed to admit that--Nixon came from Whittier”) has been writing for television since he was 15, and encountered more than a little suspicion when his agents began sending him to studios to pitch ideas while he still had acne.

“They say I began writing when I was a fetus,” he said morosely. “I had a Social Security number when I was 6. I grew up in the business with people who were three times my age. It alienated me from the other kids--they were talking about toys and I was talking about my residual checks.”

Spencer broke into the business writing jokes for comedians. “I told Rodney Dangerfield when I met him years later that I had sent him jokes when I was 15,” he said. “And Dangerfield said, ‘Oh yeah, I remember those jokes--they read like they were written by a 15-year-old.’ ”

With “The Ghost Writer,” Spencer still feels like an outsider--but he likes it that way. “This is my obsession--I almost feel like I’m in the freak show. With a show like this, I feel like I’m pulling an epic prank,” he said happily.

“I’ve had opportunities to make a lucrative traditional television deal, but I just couldn’t do that. When I create a show, I want a storm--I want to be asked to leave. It’s tough to do television, but it seems to me that at its best, television should reach out to people; it should break down barriers.”