On View : A Dear Tale : CBS MOVIE STICKS TO THE RAW EMOTION IN KINNAN RAWLINGS’ ‘THE YEARLING’

Most producers would be too intimidated to remake classic movies for TV. Not Robert Halmi Sr.

In the past year his RHI Productions has reincarnated “Gypsy” and “Call of the Wild.” And he’s currently in production on ‘Scarlett,” the eight-hour CBS miniseries based on the sequel to one of the most beloved films ever made, “Gone With the Wind.”

“I’m very arrogant,” he states matter-of-factly. “I think I can do better. It doesn’t deter me that a picture was done whenever and by whom. The biggest arrogance in my life is to do ‘Scarlett.’ I can do it better, I think, not because I am smarter, but with today’s technologies I can do things that the movie makers 30 years ago didn’t have the tools to do.”

Halmi believes his latest production, “The Yearling,” premiering Sunday on CBS, surpasses the 1946 Oscar-winning picture that starred Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman and Claude Jarman Jr. Halmi also is executive producer of Monday night’s ABC movie “Getting Out.”

“It’s incredible, physically, what you can do,” says Halmi, who is in pre-production on Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Rudyard Kipling’s “Captains Courageous.”

“The film (stock) is better, the colors are better. We can do things today that make (movies) a little bit more watchable and more exciting.”

“The Yearling” is based on Majorie Kinnan Rawlings’ 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning coming-of-age novel about a boy and his pet deer, Flag. Wil Horneff (“The Sandlot”) stars as young Jody Baxter, who lives with his loving father Penny (Peter Strauss) and his bitter mother, Ora (Jean Smart), on a farm on the edge of the northern Florida swamps.

Life is hard for the Baxters, who barely can make ends meet among the oak moss. Because Jody’s older brothers and sisters all died in infancy, Ora is afraid to love her surviving son and her husband. Without friends his own age, Jody and his father form a powerful bond, and it’s Penny who allows Jody to have an orphaned fawn as a pet. Ultimately, the relationship between Jody and Flag brings the boy into adulthood.

The film was shot last winter in Charleston, N.C. “We found just the right swamp and the right look,” says Halmi, who also produced “The Josephine Baker Story,” “The Incident” and “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.” He also insisted the actors speak the original dialect used in the book. “It just gives it another richness to it. The movies that were done in the past, they never used these things. They were adaptations.

“We are doing the book,” Halmi explains. “That’s the major difference between the movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s and today. Take ‘Gypsy.’ Not one word, not one moment was different than the original Broadway show. It’s important that you don’t change it. In the past, you read the book, it stirred you and then you redid the book. You took this incredible liberty of arrogance and changed the words. Those words are the real treasures. To ignore that is not only ignorance, but stupidity. All of a sudden you stop becoming a literate person and you become a fake.”

The Emmy Award-winning Strauss also wanted to be true to the book. When he agreed to play Penny, the actor reread “The Yearling,” which, he says, “stunned” him.

“That book is read like ‘King Lear’ and ‘Great Expectations,’ when we are too young to really understand them,” he says. “It was one the most magnificent books I had ever read in terms of language, in terms of dealing with the father’s loneliness and the mother’s fear of loving. (I thought) it would be wonderful to make this film in a manner that a family can sit down and see big values brought to life.”

The original movie, Strauss believes, doesn’t work today “because it’s overly sentimental. For it to be vibrant and alive and rich for an audience today, it has to be a little tougher.”

Strauss wanted to emphasize the loneliness Penny suffered. “It’s very interesting that Marjorie Rawlings writes Penny Baxter’s childhood in one line, saying that he had a dreadful childhood and he had come to this place to heal. I said to myself, ‘Wow.’ He was the son of a preacher and he talks throughout the book about loneliness and when this boy finally comes into his life, he is just so attached to him. He wants the love of this woman and she has just shut down.”

“The Yearling” was a very tough shoot, Strauss says. “It was very complicated to work with animals. We had complicated weather conditions. The film, like most films, is ‘Gee, we want to make this movie and we want it tomorrow.’ ”

Even one of the most poignant moments, Strauss says, was a nightmare to film. Pay close attention to the sequence where Penny, recovering from a rattlesnake bite, is lying in bed next to the fawn and petting him.

“Let me tell you about that scene,” Strauss says, laughing. “First of all, I was covered in banana puree because the deer didn’t want to stay in bed. Deer know they don’t belong in bed. Then they tried putting an apple inside my armpit so that the deer would stay there. Deer butt their heads when they nurse, and I was getting nursed. I had three hoof marks across my chest when the deer wanted to get up. After 30 minutes, this deer was more exhausted than the rest of us and it started to go to sleep. I had been a human salt block. This deer licked my face raw because of the banana puree!”

“The Yearling” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.