‘Talk’ About Another Direction : Movies: Barnet Kellman tells it straight about his move from TV’s ‘Murphy Brown’ to the Disney feature.

He flowered in Hollywood by instilling the lively pace and hilarious character quirks into TV’s smartest sitcom. Now he’s hoping that his syrupy new feature--half Disney fairy tale, half VH-1 video ode to Dolly Parton’s spike heels--will warm the hearts of enough moviegoers to win him full-time residence in the land of big-time film directing.

If fans of the former are put off by the latter, tough. Barnet Kellman, the director of all but two episodes of “Murphy Brown’s” first three seasons, isn’t offering any apologies for making what fans of that sophisticated CBS comedy might dismiss as a predictable piece of pabulum.

He directed Parton in “Straight Talk” because his much-lauded TV work gave him the opportunity to do it, and making movies is still the Elysian fields for most directors. Television is the domain of writer-producers, and no matter how much acclaim is showered on “Murphy Brown’s” Kellman, “Cheers’ ” James Burrows or “The Cosby Show’s” Jay Sandrich, most TV directors remain highly paid day laborers.

“It’s almost teleological because features are the one place where you get to hold all the cards and exercise a thoroughgoing attention to every detail,” Kellman said. “No matter what you do in television, it’s hard to resist. Like Orson Welles said, it’s like having the greatest Erector set in the world.”

Once the critics get through savaging the result, however, having made “Straight Talk” may feel more like falling off the Eiffel Tower. But Kellman, 44, who started out as a New York theater director with a bent toward the “strange, dark and dramatic,” said he has been able to ignore the barbs because of the noisy laughter he has heard coming from theaters. “Straight Talk” has been anything but a big hit, but for a film that cost less than $20 million and is likely to enjoy a long shelf life on video and television, it has done respectable numbers at the box office in its first three weeks.

“It’s not a home run,” Kellman said, “but it’s a solid single.”

He chose the movie--his second feature after the box-office flop “Key Exchange” in 1985--because the script, about a radio psychologist who offers country-girl advice to her lovelorn big-city listeners, made him smile. He was then charmed by Parton, in whom he recognized “an essential goodness” that is too often neglected by most people in the rush to get ahead. And, he conceded happily, ever since his daughter was born four years ago, his tastes have moved toward the sweet and sentimental.

“For a critic to say this movie is formulaic and predictable is redundant because it announces right from the start that it’s going to be that kind of old-fashioned, roller-coaster ride where you see all the bumps coming,” Kellman said. “The only question is: Do you enjoy the ride? And I think Dolly embodies some fundamental American dream--a pluckiness and perseverance to make something of herself, but without hurting or stepping on other people--that is not something that I talk about much in my life but is something that I found was there deep down. I responded to this film in a very different way than I had responded to my other projects, which is on a much more heady and intellectual level. And I actually started to say that what I hoped to achieve in making this movie was a vacation from sophistication.”

“We all knew we were making this little piece of pastry,” said James Woods, who stars as Parton’s love interest in “Straight Talk.” “We didn’t set out to make ‘Potemkin.’ Not that Barnet can’t do that. My experience has been with the best directors: Oliver Stone, Sydney Pollack, Sergio Leone--and what Barnet has in common with them is that he is very confident in his ability and he doesn’t have the kind of hubris that less confident people have. He’s very open to other ideas and other people.”

This last month Kellman has ventured back into television. After three years and 73 episodes, Kellman had left “Murphy Brown” at the end of last season to make his movie, but he retained a standing date with Diane English, the creator and executive producer of the show, to direct the season finale, airing May 18, in which Murphy gives birth to a baby boy. Kellman also just finished directing the pilot for a CBS series called “Good Advice,” starring Shelley Long and Treat Williams, and he is about to begin work on “19,” another half-hour comedy created by Amy Heckerling, the director of “Look Who’s Talking.”

Since Kellman, as permanent director, was sort of the father to “Murphy Brown,” both Candice Bergen and English--the show’s two mothers--said they thought it appropriate that he return to deliver Murphy’s baby into the world.

Back on the set after a year’s absence, Kellman says it feels good to exercise his four-camera comedy muscles again. He instructs Bergen to pull the sheet of Murphy’s hospital bed over her head as she howls in pain during a contraction. He has her grab Frank (Joe Regalbuto) and Miles (Grant Shaud) by the shirt in each hand and toss them around like rag dolls as she screams in agony again. The crew members roar with laughter, rehearsal after rehearsal after rehearsal.

“I’m really grateful that I had Barnet here for three years,” said Bergen, who won the best actress Emmy in her first two seasons on her first-ever TV series. “It was an unimaginable luxury for a novice like me because he has such a fierce intelligence and wit and truly this animal instinct for comedy. He has this incredible wide field of reference, this sort of Laurel and Hardy or Curly and Moe kind of thing we do as well as his references from the theater. In notes, you’re getting everything from Shakespeare to the Three Stooges. And he keeps refining and refining until he extracts every last drop of juice from all of us.

“And it’s very striking how self-confident he is. He gives actors, he gave me, a great deal of self-confidence, which was what I needed most when I started this.”

English, who will leave “Murphy Brown” after this season to oversee “Love Is Hell,” her new CBS comedy starring Jay Thomas and Susan Dey, also credits Kellman for instilling the confidence in the actors, writers and crew to let the comedy rip.

“What I like about him is that he’s not afraid to be wrong, so he ultimately winds up right because he’ll try everything,” said Danny Jacobson, one of the creators and executive producers of “Good Advice.” “You tell him, ‘We need an underwater sequence,’ and he’ll figure out how to do it. He’s one director who takes your script and just makes it better.”

The first scene of “Good Advice,” for example, contained many references to the lead character’s clumsiness, but it did not specifically show any pratfalls. Jacobson praised Kellman for conceiving a bit in which Long slips off a book-store ladder, her skinny legs flailing and kicking books off the shelves and eliciting a huge squeal of delight from the studio audience.

Kellman, who studied at Colgate University and the Yale School of Drama, started out directing in the theater--everything from Shakespeare to the premiere of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” by John Patrick Shanley. A soap opera producer approached him and for about seven years he directed episodes of “Another World,” learning about cameras and editing while subsidizing his work in the theater.

After directing “Key Exchange” on stage, Kellman also directed the film version, which drew good reviews but bombed financially, slamming the door to more movie jobs. He began directing sitcoms.

Kellman explained that some of his business advisers told him to quit “Murphy Brown” after the pilot because many in the business consider episodic directors nothing more than “traffic cops.” They contend that those who want to move on to features should stick to pilots, where directors can help create the characters, tone and style of a show. But Kellman disdained that advice, he said, because he loved “Murphy Brown” and, during those three years, nothing crossed his desk that matched it.

Today, he said, there are those who advise against going back to even one episode of television after “Straight Talk,” but again Kellman is following the “best script available” adage rather than the arbitrary rules of the Hollywood pecking order. He hopes that “Straight Talk” affords him the opportunity to make the films that Mike Nichols and James L. Brooks get to make, and he says that he is in discussions about several films at several studios but that TV remains a kick and a challenge.

“In a couple of weeks, I’ll take a break and one morning I will wake up and I’ll be in a reflective mood and maybe I’ll be able to stop and assess just where the needle is on the thermometer that measures my career,” Kellman concluded. “All I can tell you is, we talk about a life in the theater, a life in television and movies, a life in this end of the arts, and that’s what I signed up for. I hoped for the opportunity to have a full, creative life in this particular field and so far I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy that.”