Making a Disaster Movie on a Wing and a Prayer : Television: Producer Dorothea G. Petrie had to forge a rescue operation of her own when she started a TV drama based on a jetliner crash landing.

Other than the money, the privileges, the parking spaces, the fame, the pals with famous names, the preferred tables, it’s a wonder anyone wants to be a producer.

Here we are, the year hardly two months old, the Academy Award nominations barely 24 hours ripe, and for producers the skies remain storm-tossed and classically troubled.

Critics and clerics with resurrected production codes are damning them.

Studios aren’t cutting million-dollar deals with golden abandon.

Network license fees are flat and cable lineups are bulging.

Strikes threaten to shut the whole town down.

At the same time, producers are fighting producers over just who should be called producer .

Tough times can be the best of times, though. That’s what Dorothea G. Petrie, a television producer of immaculate credentials, found out when she set out to make a prime-time movie about a disaster and the project itself had to scramble for rescue.

Hers is a case study in the often agonized pleasures of producerhood.

In her words, though, producers have to have faith, imagination, creativity and a concern about people. There really is something out there at the end of the rainbow, so long as your beliefs are strong and optimistic and the storm waters don’t swamp the craft and as long as you have a director like a Lamont Johnson and a veteran writer like a Harve Bennett.

She’ll find out what’s at the end of this particular rainbow Monday night when her latest television movie, this one for ABC, “Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232,” makes it through heavy network traffic.

With Charlton Heston as Capt. Al Haynes at the controls you know Who is the co-pilot in this simulated cockpit.

And with Richard Thomas and James Coburn on guard on land, all has to be secure in the world.

Petrie is one of the quieter treasures of Hollywood.

Her niche is good TV, stories with real beginnings, middles and ends. Her two- and three-hour movies usually capture their time periods. Her mantel runneth over with Emmys, Peabodys and Christopher awards for such movies as “Orphan Train,” “Foxfire,” “Caroline?,” “Love Is Never Silent,” movies often underwritten by the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” or Procter & Gamble folks.

Even after 13 years as a producer and a longer career as an actress, an agent, a casting director and a writer, nothing quite prepared her for this stormy ride: the loss of her major backer, a threatened budget, a shooting schedule away from the comforting heartlands of Hollywood, and finally a network title switch that smacked strongly of rent-a-title by way of reality TV.

A year ago, AT&T; approached Petrie about linking up with producers Bradley Wigor and Joseph Maurer as the executive producer of a television movie the corporate giant would finance, a movie about a disabled United Airlines DC-10 that crash-landed three years ago at Gateway Airport in Sioux City, Iowa, with 296 passengers. One hundred eighty-six survived in a coordinated, quick-paced rescue that could only have been achieved because planners on the ground had insisted that people and teams be ready for rescues of any sort, even a huge jet with a failing hydraulic system.

Petrie’s first reaction: She doesn’t do crash landings.

She liked the title, then called “One Thousand Heroes.” It was positive, it had promise, as did the script, she discovered. This was no “Raging Inferno.” This was the story of rescue, of how safety officials in the Tri-State area called Siouxland--corners of Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota--had insisted that being prepared is what makes the difference between calamity and survival.

With that theme and AT&T; handling the money, Petrie thought she couldn’t lose.

Then as befell many large companies in recent times, AT&T; found it had to hold back on expenses and backed off the TV project. When something like that happens there are no deep-pocket 911s to call. Instead, Petrie’s team itself went into rescue mode.

Foreign rights went to World International Network. ABC came up with a license fee. Still, there wasn’t enough in the bank, and with the plan to shoot the movie where the DC-10 came brutally to earth, Petrie estimated her costs to get cast and crew to Siouxland for the four-week shoot would be a $500,000 additional, but necessary, expense.

So she turned to the real rescuers she had met, some of the people in the Tri-State area, the people who knew more about emergencies, rescues and the region than anyone else. Her message: We all want this movie to be made here, to tell about people coming to help people right where it happened. So help us.

Literally with red lights and sirens, the rescuers came through. The airport was made available. The emergency vehicles were lined up. Hotel operators adjusted their rates. Car agencies did the same. Charities rounded up all the luggage and clothes that became the runway’s moonscape after the first fireball exploded. Individuals from paramedics to photographers to preachers helped out.

The area got something in return. An estimated $1 million was spent there by filmmakers and the curious. For their stories, the region’s rescue committee received sizable contributions from those connected with the filming along with the opportunity to see the retelling of their 3-year-old rescue Monday night on television.

One emergency remained. ABC tested the title, “One Thousand Heroes.” Its focus groups flinched. The network blinked.

Petrie turned to her brother, a retired military pilot in Oklahoma and a stranger to things Hollywood, and wondered what he thought about the new name. His opinion: that in his part of the country “One Thousand Heroes” didn’t mean anything. “Crash Landing” said something.

Such thoughts make the lives of executive producers easier.

Petrie values this type of closeness. Hers is a unique Hollywood family. Her husband is film-TV-theater director Dan Petrie (“the family’s guru,” she says), her four children all are at work or have worked in films and TV either as writers, directors, actors or executives.

Family gatherings are family gatherings, she says, not story conferences as someone suggested.

She has yet to produce a movie with anyone from her family, however. “I’d love to afford Dan Sr.,” she says.

In shopping her first TV project, “Orphan Train,” in 1979, she was asked to write the story from the research she had gathered. She would, she said, if she could enlist the help of her older son who was in college but, who she said, had been writing scripts for years.

She turned to producing for good reason. The first network job she interviewed for required her to be at her desk all day and she insisted she had to be home by 3 p.m. for her children.

Producers could make their own hours, she learned, along with their own movies, even if someone else can change the title.