TELEVISION : Fox TV borrows an idea from movie mogul Irving Thalberg--performing shows in front of live audiences before letting the cameras roll. The network hopes the strategy will reduce the cost of producing a series and improve the quality. : Lights, Action--but No Camera

In the spring of 1935, MGM production head Irving Thalberg sent the Marx Brothers off on a road tour. First stop: Utah. It wasn’t exactly the capital of vaudeville, but then this was no ordinary junket.

Harpo, Groucho and Chico--along with fellow players Allan Jones, Kitty Carlisle, Margaret Dumont and a gaggle of writers and secretaries--were sent to crack the jokes and try out the gags that would eventually become “A Night at the Opera.”

They left with the admonition that if the material didn’t pull together on tour, there’d be no movie. Eight weeks later, when Thalberg caught the show in San Francisco, it needed only minor rewrites and a movie classic was all but in the can.

Now, more than 55 years since the famous brothers were sent schlepping to Salt Lake, television has decided to give Thalberg’s idea a try--using stage performances in front of live audiences to nurture sitcoms, long before the cameras begin to roll.

Pressured by a tight economy--and a pilot system with long odds and a lot of waste--Fox Broadcasting is experimenting with two shows currently in rehearsal-production as mid-season replacements: “Down the Shore” and “Culture Clash.” The process, in varied forms, has also come under consideration for other shows, although no others are using it at the moment.

If the gambit works, it could change the way episodic TV gets made--and maybe even improve the quality of what you see on the small screen. If not, the powers that spend have saved a chunk of change on the two shows.

“We can revolutionize the business this way,” says HBO Independent Productions President Chris Albrecht, whose company is producing “Down the Shore” for Fox. “We’re not only finding a way to choose shows more efficiently, but also to hedge our bets by making them the best they can be when they go on the air. You go into production with a tremendous leg up in terms of how far along you are creatively. It’s a good example of how this business can make changes.”

“Down the Shore,” an ensemble comedy about three guys and three gals who share a rental beach house on the Jersey Shore, never shot a pilot. Instead, HBO sold the Fox folks on the idea by inviting them to a one-shot performance. And instead of going immediately into taping, “Down the Shore” then began a month of rehearsals and weekly live performances on a sound stage, shooting to follow down the line.

“Culture Clash,” featuring the trio of Latino satirists by the same name, also has a show in the works, produced by Fox for its network, although it’s working under somewhat different conditions than “Down the Shore.” While a “Culture Clash” pilot was shot, the producers are also presenting weekly performances, though at a small theater rather than on a sound stage.

“We were spending a lot of time (asking) ‘Are there different ways?’ ” says Fox Entertainment Group President Peter Chernin, describing his company’s attempts to build a better pilot assembly line. “Shows don’t have enough rehearsal and the pilot process seems crazy.”

“The advantages are palpable,” says “Down the Shore” executive producer Erwin Stoff. “Anybody who is sane would want to do it this way. As problems arise, you are not already committed to film, not in panic mode if something has to be reconceived.”

“We have an opportunity,” Chernin adds. “If it continues to go well, other producers will welcome it.”

It’s late on a Friday afternoon, nearing curtain time, and the bus full of high school students hasn’t arrived. Still, the rows of bleachers set up on Soundstage One on the Warner Hollywood lot are nearly full. The guests are friends and associates of the folks involved with the show, and some are strangers, attending through one of the many house-papering services that cater to TV and theater.

A bevy of executives and crew members hover on the floor, in the no-man’s land between the bleachers and the set. Behind them, there’s a realistic living room full of artfully placed clutter, with a cushy blue-and-white striped couch, wicker furniture and a seascape above the fireplace mantle. Through the windows, past the staircase, there are vistas of lawn swings, suburban greenery and trim hedges.

After introductory remarks, the invisible curtain rises. “And counting five, four, three, two, one,” the director says, a la TV talk. There are lights, action--but no camera.

Between scenes, black partitions are pulled in and out to mask portions of the set, substituting for blackouts or cuts. And in 20-some minutes, a cast of six appealing twentysomething actors leads its audience through the story of two groups of three friends who end up renting a house.

Is it theater or live TV? It’s a little of both for the audience, and the best of both for the writers, actors and producers on the job this afternoon.

“Down the Shore” began when writer Alan Kirschenbaum, a New York native who’d worked at racetracks all his life before segueing into the life of the pen, pitched a story idea to HBO. Fox then made a pilot commitment, but not the usual deal.

Fox, it seems, was looking for a way to put the show on its feet. HBO had the set for the series “Roc” in place, a setting that could easily be redecorated to suit “Down the Shore.” That combination of resources got the ball rolling. Then all that had to be done was to find the talent, create the scripts and forge some new ways of doing business.

“We’re kind of inventing the process,” Albrecht says. “We had to create a scenario where you didn’t have to spend a tremendous amount of money to find out whether the network wanted to order a series or not.”

Kirschenbaum, who is also co-executive producer with Stoff, wrote a new script, one that would be a later episode rather than an expository pilot. Then, on May 9, before an audience of Fox honchos, friends of those involved and others, “Down the Shore” put its live pilot up on the block.

They won the audition, and it was, by Albrecht’s estimation, “about $1 million to $1.1 million cheaper” than it would have been to go the usual pilot route.

“It worked because we were able to put it up as a little play,” Albrecht says. “We played to our strengths. They had to respond to the moment, make decisions based on what they saw. They couldn’t research it to death.”

“If there are 20 people in a room and 19 like it and one doesn’t, and they start showing a tape over and over, eventually nobody will like it,” adds Kirschenbaum, noting the perils of letting TV executives mull over a decision.

While the live setup seems designed to avoid second-guessing, Fox’s Chernin maintains that using such a strategy is unnecessary. “Ninety percent of the time you make the same decision,” he says, referring to executives’ re-viewing pilot tapes. “You don’t have to see it on tape.”

Not everyone, of course, was initially thrilled with the decision to stage a live pilot. “Emotionally, there was a downside,” Albrecht admits. “Alan (Kirschenbaum) felt, ‘They don’t believe in it enough to spend a lot of money on it.’ ”

“There were two parts to my experience: the live presentation instead of a pilot and Fox giving us the opportunity to workshop the material,” Kirschenbaum says. “The live presentation is the part where it’s not really about the work, it’s about money. Rather than sink a million into a pilot, they could sink a small fraction of that.

“It was scary as hell. You knew you were going to get one shot in front of (Fox Inc. Chairman and CEO) Barry Diller,” Kirschenbaum continues. “At the same time, there could be no revisionist history, no nit-picking.”

The “Culture Clash” camp also had its share of doubters. “At first, we were very skeptical,” admits Stuart Sheslow, Twentieth Television executive vice president of creative affairs.

And then there are practical risks. For instance, if the top brass get stuck in traffic while the curtain goes up, there’s no tape to replay. But that hasn’t happened--so far.

Part two of the experiment--after the live pilot--is the rehearsal process. Normally, the industry standard is to have a show rehearse for several days, and tape at the end of the week. With “Down the Shore” and “Culture Clash,” however, the rehearsals each week build toward live performances before invited audiences. Taping will happen only after a number of scripts have been test-driven this way.

Here again, the initial reception from the supplier side was less than enthusiastic. “Both producers (of ‘Culture Clash’ and ‘Down the Shore’) were initially resistant,” Chernin says. “People resist anything that seems different. They were concerned that it represented a lesser commitment on our part, and that we were looking at it as an opportunity to test.”

The extended creative time could also prove a liability--at least from the creators’ point of view. Although most of the players are loath to discuss such scenarios, the same increases in time that allow for improvements could also add to the opportunities for network second-guessing, tinkering or censorship--especially in the case of “Culture Clash,” where issues of racial and cultural politics are prominent.

“I have not found (Fox) to have (its) own separate agenda,” Sheslow says.

“As long as the network keeps its word, there are no disadvantages,” Stoff says. “The only disadvantage imaginable is if the network uses this process to become intrusive in terms of trying to shape the show.

“We have had some disagreements--nothing drastic--and they have been respectful, never forced a situation onto us. Nobody can make you do a show you don’t like. A network is always aware that if they force your hand--and you’re a valued talent--you’ll never work there again.”

At its best, however, it is the workshop period that offers the clearest potential for creative largess--for the executives, the writers and the cast. “It’s an opportunity to give the producers time to work on the series as a whole,” Chernin says.

The particular series that were singled out to do live workshops were ones that Fox felt could most easily benefit: “Culture Clash” because the trio’s Herbert Siguenza, Richard Montoya and Ric Salinas are theater artists taking their first stab at a new medium, and “Down the Shore” because it’s an ensemble show heavily dependent on cast chemistry.

“We had six actors who needed to get to know each other and six characters who needed to be individuated,” Sasha Emerson, HBO Independent Productions’ senior vice president creative affairs, says of the young cast of “Down the Shore.” “Part of the process is honing the script and finding out who the characters are.”

Another essential is the cultivation of a rapport between the actors. “Most TV you do is like Tang--instant, just add water and go,” says “Down the Shore” actress Pamela Segall. “If we were just doing a pilot, it’d be wham-bam. But we still have three weeks to go before we shoot a show.”

“The cast is getting to know each other,” Tom McGowan says, who was nominated for a Tony for his performance in “La Bete.” “It’s funny to see the characters’ traits coming out over coffee.

“The writers are starting to find different tones for the actors they have,” adds McGowan, who is making his first appearance before cameras. “If they could get the interaction of the characters going by the time we start (taping), that would be a great accomplishment.”

“The greatest opportunity is to see what the actors are good at,” Kirschenbaum says. “Tom is so inventive. You realize what you should be writing for him are not hard jokes, but things he can fiddle with.”

“The key to most successful sitcoms is a chemistry, not just between the actors, but between the actors and the writers,” Stoff says. “That’s something you don’t get to take advantage of until the sixth or seventh episode. From the first day we shoot, we’ll have an unusual familiarity, allowing the writers to write toward the strengths we have in the cast.”

Broader assumptions about the content of the scripts have also changed during the rehearsal-performance period. One episode, in which a character loses his virginity, was initially thought to be too racy to hit the air anytime soon. “Everybody said this will be the 18th episode,” Emerson recalls. “But when we actually saw how it played, we saw that it could be episode six or seven. We learned that our show could be more dangerous than we had assumed.”

Over on the “Culture Clash” set--where cast rapport is not an issue since the artists have been a team for years--some script trouble-shooting has taken place.

“It enabled us to see that one of our characters really needed focus,” Sheslow says of the rehearsal and performance experience. “We could actually workshop it, give (the actor) three or four times to say it and not rewrite the entire character. If we didn’t have this experience, we’d be sitting there in episode five (asking), ‘Why isn’t this working?’ ”

There is some feedback solicited from the audiences at the performances--surveys at “Culture Clash” and an audience discussion at “Down the Shore”--but in neither case is it intended for network consumption. “It’s not a tool for ‘plus’ or ‘minus,’ not like when they test a pilot,” says Sheslow. “It’s written and controlled by the producers.

“Doing the workshop takes heat off and lets the artists play,” he continues. “In the old days, even when I was doing ‘Different Strokes’ at NBC, we would have had time (for that). Today, because of money, we don’t.”

Kirschenbaum has a packet of snapshots of his bay mare and her foal on his desk in the “Down the Shore” office on the Warner lot. A lifelong track worker, he now owns and breeds trotters--a step up the track ladder that goes hand in hand with a quick rise to hot TV writer status.

But then a certain amount of gambling moxie is at work on “Down the Shore.” The process is both time-consuming and, at least on this end, costly, in terms of keeping a large staff employed for a longer than usual period of time.

Yet if the show coheres, it will be time and money well spent, and the extra couple of hundred thousand upfront will amortize. “Ultimately, when you make this kind of creative and financial investment upfront, by the time you get to taping, you should have an advantage,” says HBO’s Emerson. “You’re energy efficient.”

More than money accounts for this turn back toward Thalberg-esque innovation, though. “This whole thing came from the feeling that (Fox) hasn’t had any luck with this sort of ensemble comedy,” says Kirschenbaum. “If the cast has no chemistry, a lot of shows don’t hit their stride until somewhere down the line, and most shows have no stride to hit.

“There is a significant portion of shows that could get there given time, mostly ensemble shows,” he adds.

The danger, if there is one, is that the innovations will get in the way of the basics of making TV. “We’ve had a lot of discussions about not letting the tail wag the dog, about not letting the presentations become the focal point,” Kirschenbaum says. “We’re doing this for us. We’re going to show a run-through. At the same time, it’s not the be all and end all. If people don’t stand up and throw themselves at us about how great it is, that’s OK. It will all lead to a better show.”