Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin and Rintels : Television: The acclaimed writer-producer has never aimed higher than his drama about the Yalta Conference.

“Whatever television has become,” says David W. Rintels, “this ain’t it.”

Ain’t even close. What he refers to is almost paleolithically antique, an homage to an earlier, better, more rewarding network TV age when fear was not the message and Angst the outcome of so many prime-time movies and miniseries.

It started with Rintels having a dream. The result--heaps of research, 8,500 index cards and 20 years later--is “World War II . . . Then There Were Giants.”

As a gifted and respected television auteur inevitably drawn to challenging projects that honor the medium and smarten viewers, Rintels has always aimed high. As high as “Sakharov,” “The Execution of Raymond Graham” and “Day One,” for example. Yet he has never aimed higher, arguably, than as writer-producer of this yet-unfinished NBC drama whose stunningly unconventional script--suggesting lots of freeze-frames and split screens--relates the war almost exclusively through the behind-the-scenes musings and machinations of Roosevelt (John Lithgow), Churchill (Bob Hoskins) and Stalin (Michael Caine).

Like “Schindler’s List,” such television can be a wake-up call, a reminder that history ripples across generations. Or it can educate those poor babies, the informationally challenged. Do some Americans need this refresher course? Judge for yourself.

Lithgow says an actor friend in his 30s visited him in his dressing room recently, asking about a photo of the real Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin on the wall: “Which one is which?”

On Saturday, Rintels, director Joseph Sargent and their company of blue-chippers will fly to Prague, Czechoslovakia, for a month of filming (on sets replicating the Kremlin, the British House of Commons and the Tehran and Yalta conference sites) after spending the preceding 30 days on a soundstage at CBS Television City in Los Angeles.

More than merely portraying history, Rintels’ four-hour work in progress is making it, too. NBC says “Then There Were Giants” will be the first U.S. miniseries with the capacity for viewing (at an unspecified date well after the tentatively scheduled April premiere) in high-definition television (HDTV), a process that vastly improves picture clarity.

Better pictures don’t necessarily equal better television. It’s historical clarity, and entertainment, too, that Rintels hopes to achieve by focusing not on the battles but on the revealing personal interaction among the trio of leaders who somehow held their alliance together despite having mutual mistrust, disagreements and separate agendas. Stalin wants a “second front,” Churchill prods Roosevelt on post-war politics and so on and so on.

Rintels’ impressive script speaks for itself. Just how it transfers to the screen--with the able Sargent having to compose multiple-purpose shots that can double as both regular and wider-format HDTV--remains to be seen. As does its acceptance by sticklers for historical accuracy.

The much-tainted “D” word--docudrama--rears its hybrid head here.

*

“It’s a very ugly word,” says Rintels. Ugly? “Well, it’s an artificial word. This is not a documentary we’re making. It’s a drama about the relationships of three amazing people. It just happens to be true, or as true as I can make it.”

Plus as watchable as he and Sargent can make it. That includes rearranging time and space so that separate repartees appear to merge and principal characters appear to address and react to each other even when separated by thousands of miles.

“Everything overlaps,” says Sargent. “This is a very stylized production that jumps time and jumps miles, with these men responding to each other as if what they say was written for dialogue.”

Beyond this bit of storytelling license, the author says his script is factual.

When asked to validate a chunk of dialogue, Rintels the walking archive immediately slaps down a worn red book and thumbs through it. In this case his source was an English translation of a Soviet publication, “Stalin’s Correspondence With Churchill and Attlee, 1941-45.”

“I’ve got hundreds of books, and all the accounts are remarkably faithful to each other,” he says. “Look, I don’t want to stand on a soapbox, but you don’t mess around with a subject like this. You can’t fake it. It’s too important to trick up.”

The seeds of “Then There Were Giants” were sown in 1973 at a party Rintels was attending in Washington, where the schmoozing turned to the Cold War and who was responsible. Rintels: “Someone argued that old line about Roosevelt selling out the country. I didn’t think it was true, but I didn’t have anything to back up my opinion. So I went out and got a couple of books on Yalta.” That was the site in the Crimea where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met in early 1945, negotiating the shape of Europe for years to come.

*

“It occurred to me that Yalta would make this very interesting stage play about how these three giants made decisions on what would happen after the war,” Rintels says. “But all the questions that came up in Yalta had been discussed for several years, and you couldn’t pick it up in mid-stream.” Then the epiphany. “I woke up one night thinking that I should do the whole war in terms of the relationships of these three men.”

So he did, poring over scores of books on the topic before writing a 500-page play that would have consumed 12 hours. But no takers. Rintels put his dream aside, then a few years ago reduced and reworked the script for television. Again, no takers. “You’d go to a pitch meeting, and they wouldn’t even want to read the script,” Rintels recalls. “They were worried that it would be talking heads. And there were no women. They didn’t think it was dramatic. I thought it was more dramatic than anything I’d ever been involved in.”

It was only when Rintels approached NBC bearing a package--financial backing from AT&T; and General Motors, Lithgow in hand as Roosevelt and Sargent as director--that he got a commitment from Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC, West Coast. Rintels says that Hoskins and Caine were brought to the project by Creative Artists Agency, which represents him too. The five-man cast was completed when Ed Begley Jr. was hired to play Roosevelt’s confidant, Harry Hopkins, and Czech actor Jan Triska to play Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov.

Now Rintels seems happy. “Bob Hoskins came to me last week and said next year I want to do this on the stage in London. John Lithgow wants to do it, too. I haven’t talked to Michael Caine. Just think, I wrote it for theater and it’s going on television, and because it’s on television it may go to theater.”

Perhaps there they’ll know which one is which.