One Foot in Reality, One in Fantasy : Altadena: Town Councilman Michael Murray is also a screenwriter. One minute he’s dealing with a traffic dispute, the other he’s watching his horror film finally make it to television.

When the real Michael Murray stands up, there are two of him--the Altadena town councilman focused sedately on the here and now of small-town affairs and the wildly imaginative screenwriter letting his fancy run free on the occult.

Murray, 35, doesn’t look either part. He isn’t a shirt-and-tie man and he doesn’t sport a ponytail. Thin and intense, with a bottlebrush moustache and a fey air, he might be cast as the guy-next-door in a Hollywood movie.

But it’s doubtful that he could have landed a role as any of the supernaturally possessed characters in his own screenplay, which recently aired on TV.

Last month, Murray’s horror tale, “The Lightning Incident,” was shown three times as a world premiere movie on cable’s USA Network.

“The Lightning Incident” revolves around a young artist, played by Nancy McKeon, whose husband is killed through the supernatural powers of a primitive Central American tribe. The murder happens at the time McKeon gives birth to a son.

As it turns out, McKeon’s mom, played by a distraught Polly Bergen, was a scientist who inadvertently caused the whole tribe to become sterile.

The way out of their predicament, the doomed primatives believe, is to kidnap and sacrifice McKeon’s baby. In the original script, Murray said, Bergen was killed off, too, so the main character would have to get her baby back without any help.

“The fun thing about this kind of writing,” Murray quipped, “is that you can kill off all the characters. But I decided I didn’t want to kill the mother, too. It would have been too depressing.”

Anyone who saw the movie might well wonder if its author could have been the same person who was just then mediating a much more down-to-earth conflict in Altadena over radar speed enforcement.

Unlike his characters, Murray serves as a voice of reason in community affairs. In September, just after “The Lightning Incident” aired, the primary issue before the Town Council was that of a county proposal to use radar to reduce speeding on some local streets. When a traffic engineer explained that speed limits in some areas would actually have to be raised because state law requires unrealistically low speed limits to be raised in line with speeds actually driven, several Town Council members lost their cool, making sarcastic remarks to the county representative--but not Murray.

He proposed that the Town Council support the plan. “I’m not happy about raising speed limits,” he said, “but I felt that the most important thing was to facilitate the proposal in order to get radar.” Murray expressed these views and his motion to support passed.

The critics weren’t as receptive to Murray’s movie, although they did like Bergen. One suggested the movie was trying to be a “Rosemary’s Baby” and failed.

“I was interested in doing a contemporary classic horror story centered in the Southwest--in which something in a modern, high-tech culture is connected to somebody in an ancient pre-Christian culture,” he said. “I thought it would be kind of classy and intelligent, but the critics didn’t agree.”

Nevertheless, USA Network, which is jointly owned by Paramount Pictures Corp. and Universal City Studios Inc., was pleased with the ratings.

“In the field,” Murray said, “the joke is that when the reviews are bad, the rating will be good, and that’s what happened to us.”

Thomas F. Piskura, USA Network’s vice president of promotions for the West Coast, said the rating for the movie’s first run on Sept. 11 was 4.2--”above average for cable TV”--as it was for all three runs.

“Murray worked very hard on this film,” Piskura said. “He’s extremely diligent. And he’s a terrific guy.”

Murray wouldn’t disclose how much he received for the film, but said that, averaged over the length of time he worked, it wouldn’t have differed much from a salary.

Like most scriptwriters, Murray, who was born and raised in Chicago, struggled for years to get started. In 1978, he came to Los Angeles to attend graduate school at USC, where he earned a master’s degree in professional writing. “We used to joke it was a ticket to professional unemployment,” he said.

Afterward, he got work now and then as a free-lance story analyst, reading and summarizing other writers’ scripts and making recommendations to the producer.

“It’s sort of like doing book reports,” he said. “And it’s a good training ground because you read a zillion bad scripts every week.”

Eventually, through contacts he made in a creative writing course at UCLA, Murray landed an agent--his first real break. Then he was able to sell a couple of screenplays. But like most screenplays that are commissioned by studios, he said, they never got produced. “When that happens, we say it ‘disappears into development hell,’ ” Murray said.

“Hollywood is so poorly run as a business,” he said, “that they waste all that money buying scripts they never make. But it’s good for the writer’s pocketbook.”

Meanwhile, to get a steady paycheck, Murray spent 15 years working as an appliance parts and repair clerk for Sears, Roebuck & Co.--”a terrible job.”

Though he wrote “The Lightning Incident” well over four years ago, it didn’t sell until September of last year. “My agent, Marti Blumenthal, really believed in it to have kicked it around for four years,” he said.

Meanwhile, Murray had moved to Altadena in 1989. “I really like the community. It’s so peaceful,” he said, motioning to the San Gabriel Mountains from the living room of his two-story Spanish-style home.

“There are a lot of issues here that need to be addressed, such as keeping the small-town quality of Altadena. I want to have a voice in what goes on.”

Murray ran for the Town Council in April last year, and was elected to the 14-member advisory body with a total of 86 votes. “It was amusing,” he said. “I ran unopposed in my (north central) census tract.”

He was fortunate that no meetings were going on a year later, when USA rushed into production on his script.

The picture was shot on location in Tucson in 20 days during last April and May.

“It was hot and we worked really long hours--like from 5 in the morning until 10 at night,” Murray said. “McKeon found the part fun, and Bergen was overjoyed. It was her first unglamorous role and she’s a really good actress.”

Now, it’s back to life as usual. Most of Murray’s community time is spent organizing Altadena’s annual Old Fashioned Days Parade. He’s also on the Town Council’s Land Use Committee, which reviews development proposals and makes recommendations to the county Regional Planning Commission. And he volunteers for Altadena Heritage, which is seeking to preserve the area’s historic buildings.

But he doesn’t let these sane and sober efforts block his freewheeling imagination as he rewrites more horror scripts.

“I do have to juggle my time and emotions,” he said. “My biggest problem is balancing both.”

He hopes to produce and direct his own script. And on the third Tuesday of every month, Murray intends to continue serving the community he loves.

“It’s perfect here,” he said, “especially for a writer. I think the people of Altadena are out to do great things. I want to have a voice in what goes on.”