A Theatrical Doctor Sees a New Drama in Real Emergencies

It was 1 a.m., just halfway through a 12-hour shift, and already emergency room doctor Thomas Barnes had observed two heart attacks in progress, diagnosed a life-threatening abdominal aneurysm, comforted a 13-year-old boy who had broken his wrist in a skateboard fall and attended a man shot in a domestic quarrel.

For six years, in the hours while most of the city slept, Barnes has been a player in these dramas enacted in the “ER” of Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, where he is a staff physician.

At 38, with a board-certified speciality in internal medicine, he has yet to be tempted by the rewards he might reap from private practice--more money, better hours. He likes the “intensity” of emergency room medicine, he says, adding, “I see so much of life in there beyond medicine.”

Often, at home after his shift, he writes about what he has seen. He wants to remember the love in the eyes of a 90-year-old man as he bent to kiss the forehead of his ailing wife. He wants to remember the druggie who faked a perfect limp to get a codeine fix, then limped out the door and sprinted down the street.

And he wants to remember the young man in a wheelchair, waiting anxiously in the anteroom for news of a white-haired woman admitted complaining of dizziness and disorientation. They were friends and housemates, the young man had explained: “She lifts me in and out of bed, and I help her keep things straight.”

Through the emergency room come the rich and poor, sociopaths, killers (a diagnostic chest X-ray once revealed a semiautomatic weapon tucked in a patient’s waistband), belligerent drunks and frightened children. In short, the cast of a long-running nationally syndicated TV doctor show.

And that is precisely what Thomas W. Barnes MD--actor, writer, musician--has in mind. He recently was signed by the William Morris talent agency to be medical consultant and co-host (with one or two high-profile personalities to be named) for a pilot soon to be filmed.

Robert Unkel, executive vice president of Saban Productions, creator and developer of “Emergency Room,” describes it as “a reality-based medical series that will give daytime audiences an opportunity to meet with patients who have been in and out of the emergency room and have an interesting story to tell.”

The format is a reenactment of a medical crisis, followed by a discussion with the studio audience about the resolution of the case and topical issues relating to it.

‘Positive Feedback’

The show now is being marketed for first-run syndication, and, Unkel says, “We’ve had nothing but positive feedback.” Saban plans to take a pilot to the National Assn. of Television Program Executives syndication convention early next year; if it sells to enough stations, the series will be launched in fall, 1989. “We’re riding a wave of reality-based programs coming into the syndication marketplace,” Unkel says. “We’re very optimistic.”

Meanwhile, Barnes is writing and starring in “Doctor Is In,” a new series of mini-dramas on public access American Cablesystems (Channel 37) at 6 p.m. Fridays, and repeated at 6:30 p.m. Saturdays. The format, conceived by Barnes, is similar: re-enactment of emergency room crises (filmed at Brotman with actors), followed by interviews with those who were actual patients.

The first episode told the story of Leslie Richards, a lawyer who survived a near-fatal stabbing by an intruder. Richards, now fully recovered and again practicing law, talks about finding the inner strength to struggle on and about her refusal to live as a victim.

“The response has been very good,” says American Cablesystems’ production coordinator, Marcelo Cruz, who plans to air the episodes as long as Barnes develops new ones.

The initial episode also impressed the people at William Morris, where Barnes’ agent, Dick Howard, is enthusiastic about the new venture with Saban. “If he gets on the tube and has a winning personality, and an authoritative personality, it could spin off from there--books, home video. . . . I’ve gotta believe that he will have the believability and the talent to make that impact.”

Hearing this assessment, Barnes responds, “I can keep people alive. Now we’ll see if I can entertain them.”

Thom Barnes (he added the H when he was 14) proffers two resumes. His curriculum vitae includes graduation, magna cum laude, from USC and at the top of his class from USC School of Medicine, 1979. His performing arts resume identifies him as a writer prepared to deliver treatments for movies-of-the-week “on request” and as a performer (lyricist, vocalist, bassist and guitarist). Under “special skills,” he lists fluency in Spanish and expertise in skiing, scuba diving, gymnastics, surfing, martial arts and other athletic endeavors ranging from roller skating to weight lifting.

Is he searching or sampling? Barnes fields the question, smiles and says, “I think it’s both. Maybe the kid’s got a problem with commitment.”

When he was a fifth-grader, he recalls, he was given a see-through plastic model of a male with anatomically correct internal organs. “I started washing my hands all the time because I thought that’s what doctors do,” he says, then laughs and asks, “Compulsive obsessive behavior?”

By the time he was a junior in college, he had committed to medicine, rejecting the life of a writer for fear “I’d never be able to feed myself.” And, he says, “I love medicine,” but not to the exclusion of everything else.

He still wants to be a writer and reasons that “being a doctor gives me that book” he hopes to write someday. It also gives him the time, and the resources, to live on the water in Hermosa Beach, drive a Porsche Targa, ski in Europe, scuba dive in Fiji.

Barnes doesn’t hesitate to acknowledge that some among his colleagues perceive him as “Dr. Hollywood,” and are less than thrilled with his high visibility as sort of an unofficial spokesman for Brotman’s emergency room.

But he shrugs and says, “People don’t know how to respond to someone who’s breaking out of the ranks.”

After all, he asks, wasn’t Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a doctor as well as creator of Sherlock Holmes? Wasn’t Armand Hammer a doctor before he became an oil tycoon?

“Look at the landmark people,” says Thom Barnes, history buff. “Every one of them did about six things in their lives.” Among those he admires, he mentions Sir Richard Burton, the 19th-Century English explorer and man of letters.

Yes, Barnes admits, he sometimes comes close to what he calls the “the red zone,” the point at which he would be stretched too thin. An eight-year marriage did not survive his Renaissance man vision of himself, his unwillingness to focus on a single goal.

He seems to see life both as a candy store and a ticking clock. After six years in ER, he says, “I understand my own mortality a lot more than I did at 26. Every week people who are younger than my parents come in and die.”

Someday, he muses, he may return to the student-idealist’s dream of being a small town general practictioner. But before that, he hopes to make his mark as kind of a white-coated Phil Donahue.

If some kid with a see-through model plastic model sees him and decides to become a doctor, good. Barnes wouldn’t mind contributing to a shake-up of societal values that dictate that “becoming a rock star is more important than going to medical school.”

He is not out to demystify medicine through the medium of television--after all, he reasons, the profession has spent 2,000 years mystifying it--but rather “to elevate people to the point where they can take better care of themselves” and to do this within a format that will also entertain.

Dr. Thom Barnes, actor, is a notion he likes. He “got the bug,” he figures, as a result of fallout from an incident that happened when he was 16. Playing hooky from school, he thwarted a pair of burglars who broke into his parents’ Pasadena home by jumping from a second-story window, grabbing the keys from the ignition of their getaway car and running next door to call police.

From the neighbor’s house, he remembers, “I watched them fill up the car” with his parents’ possessions and then try futilely to push the car down the street before police arrived. His teen-age heroics landed him a story in The Times--and a television appearance with Art Linkletter.

About three years ago, bitten again by the acting bug, he plunged into acting classes: improvisation, character interpretation. He auditioned for TV shows and public service commercials that called for a doctor character. He was never chosen--too young to be believable, he’d be told, or too good looking.

He recalls being rejected by one casting director who explained, “You just don’t look like a doctor,” and suggested he read for a spot needing a forest ranger. “I went out and bought a Pendleton shirt,” he says, but apparently he wasn’t a believable ranger, either.

While awaiting filming of the “Emergency Room” pilot, Barnes, who also has a literary agent, is tinkering with a TV movie script. The working title is “Embryo.” It’s a sci-fi story about genetic engineering that poses the question, “Should we really open Pandora’s box?”

And, with another writer, he’s working on an idea for a sitcom “about a John Candy-like character, a totally ordinary man, who aspires to be known for something significant.” Barnes pauses, grins and mentions that there are those who might see this one as autobiographical.