THE BIG PICTURE

“Geronimo” is the first film in what might be the most ambitious television project ever undertaken, Turner Broadcasting’s “Multi-Media Native American” initiative.

Visionary mogul Ted Turner is happy to be doing things in a big way.

“The Native Americans: Behind the Legends, Beyond the Myths” is a 14-month-long collection of projects that began with Turner Publishing’s “definitive” history of Native Americans in November and continues this month with “Geronimo” and “The Broken Chain,” the first two of six made-for-television films.

TNT is airing “Geronimo” five days before screenwriter John Milius’ version, directed by Walter Hill and starring Jason Patric, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman and Wes Studi (“Last of the Mohicans”) as Geronimo, opens in theaters nationwide.

Chris Cook, executive producer of the TNT version, doesn’t regard the screen version as competitive. “In Columbia’s version, they made certain choices to have it be about the white man’s story and their pursuit of Geronimo, but we made a conscious choice to go from Geronimo’s point of view.”

The entire TNT film series, which features Studi in “Broken Chain,” is budgeted at more than $30 million--a lot for TV ventures, but modest compared to theatrical films (the budget for the big-screen “Geronimo” is an estimated $35 million).

TNT’s figures do not include Superstation TBS’ three-part, six-hour documentary on Native American history scheduled for October, 1994. It plans to tell the entire history of the North American Indian nations from their own perspective. And CNN Special Reports will present a 20-part series in the winter of 1994 entitled “The Invisible People.” It will examine contemporary issues of Native American life in detail.

Hanay Geogamah, the Kiowa who is co-producer for the film project, puts it in perspective: “This is like a firelighting for us. Mr. Turner made sure we had first-class people working with him on this-Norman Jewison (“Fiddler on the Roof,” “In the Heat of the Night”) for ‘Geronimo,’ David Lynch (“Eraserhead,” “Elephant Man,” “Twin Peaks”) is going to do ‘Crazy Horse.’ Francis Ford Coppola’s (“The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now”) company is going to do ‘Tecumsah.’ Jane Fonda, of course, is doing ‘Lakota Woman.’ It’s great for us to be able to work with these people and to have the chance to tell the American public some aspect of the truth about people like Geronimo. We are here taking part as equals. We are not here as just ‘Indians.’

“This is it. This is the golden hour for us, and I’m so happy that our talent pool is there, that we can seize this opportunity. You see two generations of Indian actors here. You see the young kids like Kimberly and the people like Joseph Runningfox and August who have experience.

“It’s giving us confidence and it’s giving us hope and strength. That’s part of what’s going on here too. And all of that will be coming out on the tube--maybe without being obvious or even perceptible, but it will be happening.”