‘Birdland’ Pair Unruffled by It All : Entertainment: Executives Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald are getting ready to take over at Spielberg’s Amblin, but say, ‘We can’t afford to get ahead of ourselves.’

In the new ABC series “Birdland,” beleaguered doctors and staff members at a hospital psychiatric ward have their hands full dealing with patients whose lives have tipped off-center.

Judging from the full hands of two of the show’s executive producers--Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald--one might suspect that they may be going a bit cuckoo themselves.

In addition to the heavy workload of overseeing “Birdland,” which airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m., Parkes and MacDonald are also rushing to complete several movie projects for their production company before they head off in May to face perhaps the most heady challenge of all: becoming president and executive vice president, respectively, of Amblin Entertainment, Steven Spielberg’s production company and one of the most prestigious entities in the movie industry.

Since the announcement of the appointment by Spielberg last November, Parkes’ and MacDonald’s phones have been ringing off the hook with calls from stars, producers and writers, about either “Birdland” or various Amblin projects.

But “Birdland” and all the phone calls had to take a back seat one recent Friday evening as Parkes and MacDonald, who are married, settled into their Santa Monica home for the weekend. More important matters were at hand: Their 5-year-old daughter, Jane, was preparing for her first ballet lesson, and it was unclear whether MacDonald or the housekeeper was going to take her.

“I’ll take her,” MacDonald finally decided. “She’s been looking forward to me doing it.”

“See, these are the really important things,” Parkes said to a visitor, smiling.

Despite the overflowing schedules and the crunching deadlines, Parkes and MacDonald said, they are managing to keep their heads above water, taking it one day at a time.

“It’s a real exciting time, but we can’t afford to get ahead of ourselves,” MacDonald said. “Right now, our focus is really on ‘Birdland.’ We can’t afford to think about too much else right now. We had no idea how much work a television series would be. Working in movies pales to the rigors of this.”

“Birdland,” which Parkes created with Scott Frank, also an executive producer, is the first foray into television for the couple, who are motion picture veterans. Among the films Parkes has helped write or produce are “WarGames,” “Awakenings,” “Sneakers,” “Project X” and “True Believer.” MacDonald is a former vice president of production for Columbia Pictures. At their own company, Aeriel Pictures, they are working on several movies.

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“We had been warned that working on a television series would be all-encompassing,” Parkes said. “We didn’t believe those folks. We thought we would be the one exception--that we would be able to handle the series and everything else. But it has not worked out that way. There’s a tremendous amount of work to do with writing and post-production, and the series has just swallowed us.”

The one-hour drama, which made its debut Jan. 5, stars Brian Dennehy as a psychiatrist who’s much more adept at treating his troubled patients than he is in dealing with his personal life. The series has more than a few similarities to “Awakenings,” which revolved around a shy research doctor and his involvement with patients in a chronic-care psychiatric hospital ward.

ABC picked up the show for seven episodes as a midseason replacement. Should “Birdland” be renewed for next season, Parkes and MacDonald will work on the show as “non-executive producers,” they said jokingly.

“Running a show like this and dealing with the strong personal responsibility was a real good experience for us to have before going to Amblin,” MacDonald said.

Peter Horton, who directed the first two episodes of “Birdland,” said: “Walter and Laurie were surprisingly devoted to the show. After the Amblin announcement, I had assumed that would be the last we’d see of them. But they wound up carrying the ball.”

Some eyebrows in the industry were raised when Spielberg chose Parkes and MacDonald to take over the reins at Amblin. Producer Mark Johnson had been mentioned most often as the top candidate for the position. In addition, Parkes and MacDonald are known mainly for their creative output, not for running a large entertainment entity.

Parkes and MacDonald said they see the appointment as a natural extension of their personal and professional relationship with Spielberg, who will remain at Amblin as chief executive officer and owner.

“We’ve known him for years,” Parkes said. “We share the same sensibility. There’s a great comfort level between him and us. We have the same orientation toward scripts and writing.”

Parkes said he and Spielberg had talked about the difficulty of running a large company. “Laurie and I are creative people, and I said that if this is just about administration over Amblin, there are better people for that job. But he was for the idea of bringing our creative engine on board. There will be the same room for the continuation of our creative passion.”

Although they are getting ready for their move to Amblin, they are not yet involved with specific projects. The future may be unknown, but Parkes said Spielberg “has been taking Amblin in another direction. There’s obviously the identification with broad-based family entertainment that will still be the basis for Amblin. But the success has earned us the right to do other sorts of pictures, such as ‘Schindler’s List.’ ”

But all that will come later. Right now, Parkes and MacDonald said they’re flying high on “Birdland”--and, of course, the excitement of the ballet lessons.