The Tireless Tipster to Tabloid Television : Research: Tom Colbert is building his Hollywood dream by supplying news tips to TV’s reality shows.

Macabre headlines rip through the air like shots from a machine gun at the daily staff meeting of Industry R&D--a; television research company that scours the back roads of the country in search of the brutal, the bizarre and, occasionally, the uplifting.

A man who murdered his parents when he was 13 kills his wife and children many years later. An HIV-positive transsexual is accused of attempting to kill others through sex. A 9-year-old genius is denied entrance to college. A man who raped and killed a 12-year-old girl escapes from prison. An ex-football player catches three babies tossed from the third-story of a burning building. A doctor makes a prosthesis for a bald eagle that lost its leg in a fishing net. A police officer’s badge stops a bullet headed directly for his heart. A man who was conceived at a sperm bank goes in search of his biological father after unknowingly romancing a woman who was also conceived at the sperm bank with the same donor’s deposit.

Such is the stuff on which Tom Colbert, a former KCBS-TV Channel 2 news researcher and story department director for “Hard Copy,” is building his Hollywood dream. He supplies news tips to TV’s tabloid and reality shows and hopes soon to add TV-movie producers to his client list.

Industry R&D;, which Colbert launched in August, does nothing but “chase the story.” Working a long list of “sources” that includes hundreds of police and fire department employees, newspaper court reporters, TV news editors, private detective agencies and free-lance video crews--many of whom eventually receive a fee for their tips--Colbert and his small staff of researchers try to get the jump on dozens of stories each day before they become headlines.

His clients include “A Current Affair,” “America’s Most Wanted” and “Rescue 911,” all of which pay him a monthly subscription rate in hopes of being put onto good stories ahead of their competitors.

Initially, Colbert had intended to function as a research service for any show or producer out there--a kind of video Associated Press. But the competition among these shows is so fierce that Colbert decided to cut exclusive deals with one program in each genre--tabloid, rescue, police--in exchange for a higher subscription rate.

The base cost to subscribe to his service is $500 a month, Colbert said, but if a show wants exclusivity, it must also pay what he could have collected from each of its rivals.

Jim Milio, producer and director of CBS’ “Rescue 911,” which has its own 15-person research staff, said that his show contracted with Colbert to gain access to a wider variety of stories as it entered its fourth season. He added that “Rescue 911,” which often re-creates rescues, also relishes footage shot by semi-professional videographers and believes that Colbert is patched into a nice network of such stringers.

“And now that there is so much competition among the reality shows, it is important to be able to get on a story as quickly as possible,” Milio said.

Colbert also has deals with a German television producer and several law enforcement, medical and fire training television networks. He said that he is negotiating with five Hollywood production companies that make based-on-reality TV movies; his hope is that they would pay him enough to cover all of his overhead costs and an additional “finders fee” for any movie idea that actually gets produced.

“Movie-of-the-week producers had been knocking on my door at ‘Hard Copy’ asking, ‘How do I reach those people and what else do you have coming up?’ ” Colbert said. “I realized that there was a need for someone to sift through all this stuff and find the really compelling dramas out there. We tip (them), but, most importantly, we sort of grease the wheels for the producers by introducing them to the victims, the witnesses, the cops, and then, once they are introduced, we step back and they make their own deal.”

To demonstrate the kind of material he could provide the movie companies, Colbert recently faxed them the synopsis of a story he was tipped to by a newspaper reporter in Houston. Four adult children, she told him, had decided to figure out what had happened to their mother, who had disappeared in 1968 when they were kids. Through detective work, they discovered that their mother had been found dead in a Houston field, was identified only as a Jane Doe and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Further investigation determined that she’d been murdered by their father, who was finally convicted of the crime last month.

Along with the story, Colbert provided the companies with phone numbers of the principles. A bidding war ensued for the children’s rights. Longbow Prods., one of the companies tipped by Colbert, won and is now trying to sell a movie deal to the networks.

Ronnie Clemmer, a partner in Longbow Prods., said that while all production companies have their own contacts and subscribe to hundreds of magazines and newspapers, Colbert is invaluable both for the shear breadth of territory and types of stories he taps into and for the speed with which he disseminates the information.

“He told us to put a fax in our bedroom, because if it’s 2 a.m., you’re getting the story,” said Clemmer, who anticipates finalizing a deal with Industry R&D; within a month. “It’s terrific because it gives you just a little jump start on the furious race for rights that occur around the country, and it provides access to events that are in smaller towns or in smaller press circles that you might have overlooked. And because of his personal contacts with police and dispatch organizations and the introductions he can offer, you come in--not with an invitation exactly--but as if you had a connection to the whole story, rather than as just another ambulance chaser running in to converge on these poor people in Middle America.”

Though he can’t deny that he deals mostly in the dirty laundry and tragic wreckage of once private lives, Colbert denies that he is a sleaze-merchant or ambulance chaser. He contends that he searches mostly for stories that people can learn from--stories with strong characters and messages about justice.

“We have fun and do some tabloid stories that are more titillating than educational. We’re always going to gawk,” Colbert said. “But no one under 30 is reading hard news. This is where they get their information, and if I can find stories that explore the motivations of the main character, then it is not a waste of time.”