Producers Shop Around for a Home for ‘Beauty and the Beast’

Despite receiving hundreds of telephone calls from “Beauty and the Beast” fans besieging them to pick up the canceled CBS series, Fox Broadcasting officials said Wednesday they weren’t interested.

Producers and distributors of the romantic series said they would continue to find a new home for the show, which was dropped by CBS last week because of lackluster ratings.

“We’re talking to everyone,” said Paul Witt, one of the show’s executive producers. “The last thing we want to do is to let this thing get away. The core audience is very loyal.”

Indeed, just a day after the CBS cancellation, flyers were circulating at a science-fiction convention in Anaheim last weekend asking fans to contact Fox officials to persuade them to pick up the program. A Fox spokesman said this week that the switchboard had been jammed with “hundreds of calls.”

But Fox spokesman Brad Turell said Wednesday that although “we have a high regard for the project, there’s no room on our schedule for it and we have no plans to pick it up.”

Russell Goldsmith, chairman of Republic Pictures, which is distributing the series on behalf of Witt-Thomas, expressed confidence that “Beauty and the Beast” “will be licensed on cable or in syndication and that hopefully it will be back on the air by fall, at least in re-runs.”

Goldsmith said it was too early to say whether new episodes would be made, but he indicated that Witt/Thomas and series creator Ron Koslow also would be interested in making occasional two-hour “Beauty and the Beast” movies.

Lifetime spokeswoman Meredith Wagner said that her cable service has “talked to people regarding picking up ‘Beauty and the Beast’ as an acquisition. But we talk to lots of people regarding lots of shows. The possibility of continuing the production has not been discussed.”

“Beauty and the Beast” will be available for syndication at next week’s National Association of Television Program Executives convention in New Orleans. “We’ll see what the response is,” Witt said. “We feel we can be another ‘Star Trek.’ ”

Witt added that if the show isn’t picked up in syndication, the three episodes that aren’t going to be shown on CBS because of the cancellation will somehow be made available “to the faithful.” According to the scripts for the three unaired episodes, Vincent’s baby boy gets named (Jacob), Father (Roy Dotrice) has a romantic interlude with an old flame and the bond between Diana (Jo Anderson) and Vincent becomes stronger.