‘Space’ Team Shooting for the Moon : Producers, CBS Hook Up for Big-Budget Sci-Fi Series

After striking gold in the summer of 1991 with two big-budget blockbusters--”Backdraft” and “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”--the three writer-producers who make up Trilogy Entertainment Group are leveraging their new-found power to test conventional Hollywood wisdom.

Science-fiction series have largely become alien to the cost-cutting television networks in recent years because of their high budgets. In addition, the predominantly young male viewers in search of sci-fi simply don’t watch the networks much.

But while Trilogy now has 30 feature films in development, including one at every major studio, an ambitious science-fiction TV series called “Space Rangers” is exactly what partners Pen Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson chose as their next project.

Densham, who wrote “Robin Hood” with Watson, created a renegade rock ‘n’ roll team of futuristic peacekeepers patterned after the Flying Tigers, a group of American eccentrics and misfits who fought the Japanese on the frontier outskirts of China prior to the outbreak of World War II.

These galactic gunslingers will help keep order in the uncharted regions of space early next year on CBS in a one-hour prime-time series. “Space Rangers,” budgeted well over most network series at an estimated $1.3 million-$1.4 million an episode, recently finished filming in a small rented complex of sound stages in Van Nuys.

There, sitting on the set floor of an alien space outpost fashioned after Winston Churchill’s command center, two of the Trilogy partners, Densham and Lewis, discussed their decision to pursue television.

“I’ve wanted to do something like this for years,” said Densham, 45, a documentary filmmaker from England who, with Watson, used to shoot subject matter and then freeze the film footage until they could afford to process it.

“When I was growing up, I used to read science fiction--Robert Heinlein, Robert Sheckley, Isaac Asimov,” Densham said. “There were no boundaries. You could read a book and travel a million miles and a thousand years in a few pages. And there’s nothing like that on TV, where you can journey like that.”

When CBS Entertainment President Jeff Sagansky was head of production at TriStar Pictures, he had worked with Trilogy on its only previous feature, a 1988 thriller called “The Kiss,” which turned a $7-million profit despite being one of TriStar’s lowest-budget movies ever.

After witnessing the success of “Backdraft” and “Robin Hood” last year--the two films grossed more than $500 million in theaters worldwide--Sagansky called the Trilogy partners into CBS for a meeting. They trotted out four series ideas--including “Space Rangers” and “Taking Liberty,” a James Bond-type espionage drama set during the American Revolution with Ben Franklin acting as the M character, assigning missions against the British to a young rebel spy.

“I think it’s safe to say that everything we brought Jeff were ‘event’ shows,” said Lewis, 38, a UCLA film school graduate who received his start in public television. “They’re not subtle melodramas. They are going to be very action-oriented, irreverent, uplifting and larger-than-life. That’s what we do.”

Sagansky liked Trilogy’s pitches and signed the production company to a multiyear deal to develop their ideas. He ordered six episodes of “Space Rangers,” starring Academy Award winner Linda Hunt (“The Year of Living Dangerously”), and agreed to a steep license fee estimated at $1 million per episode. The producers used extensive matte paintings and computer-generated special effects to squeeze the most out of their budget.

The real trick, however, was finding money for the portion of the budget not covered by the network license fee. Ordinarily, a TV studio assumes the burden for that deficit and recoups the cost years later if the program becomes successful and sells in syndicated reruns. Because that success ratio is so low and the cost of production today so high, big-budget series are rarely found on network television anymore.

Increasingly, costly one-hour programs are moving into first-run syndication, where studios bypass the networks and sell their shows directly to TV stations. Paramount Television blazed that trail with “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which costs nearly $2 million an episode.

The networks desperately want to find a way to bring that lavish form of programming back to their schedules. NBC recently committed to an unusual order of 22 episodes of Steven Spielberg’s futuristic series “Sea Quest” for next fall, easing the burden on that production by allowing the producers to amortize their costs over a longer period of time.

In the case of “Space Rangers,” Sagansky hooked up the independent Trilogy--a small company with no overhead and just a handful of employees--with RHI Entertainment, a company that produces strictly movies and miniseries. RHI’s projects include a $15-million miniseries about global warming called “Fire Next Time,” the $20-million sequel to “Lonesome Dove” and the $30-million miniseries “Scarlett,” the sequel to “Gone With the Wind.”

RHI frequently has the money for its costly productions before the cameras ever roll by selling them overseas, where the market is booming. Last year, $16 billion was spent on TV advertising in Europe, according to the media buying company Carat Espace, compared to $10 billion in the United States.

“The market internationally has grown tremendously, but only for the right kind of programming,” said Robert Halmi Jr. of RHI. “If you continue to do run-of-the-mill, disease-of-the-week, issue-oriented American programming, you get very little for that in the international marketplace. But if you do this bigger event programming, that translates easier across the world.”

Most of all, foreign markets love action, and RHI used its strong overseas connections to pre-sell “Space Rangers.” “Before we start shooting a project, we actually will have pre-sales that will cover the cost of the show, and we’re usually in profit when we deliver it,” Halmi said.

Consequently, the Trilogy partners, whose salaries are structured into the budget, say their only risk in producing “Space Rangers” is their reputations.

“There’s a risk of credibility,” Lewis said. “If we did a show that was substantially below the quality standards that people expect from us, that would be punishing.”

Trilogy is nonetheless eager to move into television. Although “Backdraft” spawned a theme-park ride and “Robin Hood” sold millions of record albums and toys, Trilogy did not receive the lion’s share of those profits. In order to get those movies made, the young production company had to work with more established partners--Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment and Morgan Creek Productions, respectively.

“That’s not something we have a great deal of chagrin about,” said Densham, who contacted a major toy company to discuss merchandising potential before he even wrote the pilot for “Space Rangers.” “I mean, when you go into the feature business, it’s all built on a staircase. You get a deal, you cut your teeth, then you escalate. Those movies were like tickets. We were quite willing to give up those earning opportunities as a learning curve.”

“What we got out of those films was the ability to prove that we knew what we’re doing,” Lewis added simply.

Television also provides the Trilogy trio with a different pace from movie making.

“There’s a tremendous paper treadmill in features,” Densham said. “You work on a script, you polish it, you put it out, it doesn’t go. So you clean it up and put it back out, and you put it back out. TV is results-oriented. What we’ve found, in the time period we normally would have completed one single movie script we have completed six episodes of a TV series. That’s extremely gratifying.”