DreamWorks’ New Dreamer : Studio: Gary David Goldberg, best known for creating ‘Family Ties’ and ‘Brooklyn Bridge,’ is working on a TV series that will be the celebrated company’s first product.

Exactly what is DreamWorks SKG? To the entertainment industry, the celebrated new company formed by Steven Spielberg, former Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and music mogul David Geffen involves strategic alliances, executive hires and business plans, backed by truckloads of money. More than 75% of the start-up goal of $2 billion has already been raised.

But to the public, DreamWorks will only be as good as the feature films, TV projects, music albums and interactive software that are eventually produced. And when it comes down to it, the first DreamWorks product to roll off the line this fall will be created by one man: Gary David Goldberg.

“At first I was very nervous about that,” said Goldberg, 51, best known for his success in the 1980s with NBC’s “Family Ties” and his struggles in the early 1990s with CBS’ “Brooklyn Bridge.” “I was afraid the desire to succeed and make everybody look good would push me into creative decisions that were safer than they should be or not as daring. Because you don’t want the first production to be a failure.”

Goldberg was the first creative talent signed by the troika in January to develop TV shows and feature films. He’s working on 13 episodes of an ABC fall comedy he created called “Champs,” starring Timothy Busfield, Ed Marinaro and Kevin Nealon as former teammates, now in their 40s, from a championship high school basketball team.

“Ultimately, I believe these (DreamWorks) guys, who have been friends, will love me in success and they’ll love me in failure,” said Goldberg, sitting in his corner office at DreamWorks’ headquarters in Universal City. “ ‘We’re here for a long time.’ That’s what Jeffrey kept saying. ‘We’re here for a long time.’ You know, this isn’t going to be the only show we do.”

For a while, Goldberg was not sure he would return to television at all. He felt defeated after “Brooklyn Bridge.” Despite strong critical support and a grass-roots letter-writing campaign from loyal viewers, CBS canceled the show early in 1992 due to low ratings. Only 35 episodes were made of Goldberg’s gentle, semi-autobiographical look at a middle-class Jewish family.

Afterward, Goldberg retreated with his family to his second home in Vermont, where he licked his wounds, rocked and read on the porch, picked up basketball games and played in a local softball league. But Goldberg soon began writing a movie script with former “Saturday Night Live” player Brad Hall, a close friend with whom he had produced “Brooklyn Bridge.”

“I had this idea, and (Brad and I) really needed something else to focus on because we were so unhappy,” Goldberg said. “We were really feeling sorry for ourselves, whining all over the place and getting on the nerves of everyone in our lives. And the best way out of that is to bring other characters to life.”

Their romantic comedy, “Bye Bye, Love,” starring Paul Reiser, Matthew Modine and Randy Quaid as three divorced dads, was released last month. Goldberg, who produced the film for 20th Century Fox, said he has not paid attention to the mixed reviews or moderate box-office returns.

“I saw it with an audience several times, and they laughed at almost exactly the same places every time,” he said. “And that’s it. That’s all I can do. It’s all I can control, and it’s all I wanted. You know, the other stuff is really someone else’s business--how it was marketed, whether it was marketed right, whether people come.”

One of the most enthusiastic responses Goldberg received for “Bye Bye, Love” was from Spielberg, who slipped into a theater on opening weekend to see it with an audience. Spielberg has been a fan of Goldberg since 1980, when the young director hired him to write a movie, which never got made. At the time, Spielberg was impressed with an episode of “MASH” that Goldberg had written about a shipment of women’s shoes arriving at the compound during a big frost instead of Army boots.

After that, Goldberg would always send his scripts to Spielberg for advice and, in 1989, Spielberg produced Goldberg’s directorial debut, “Dad.” So it made sense for Goldberg to move his UBU Productions to DreamWorks.

“When I came here, I said, ‘You know, I may not be a perfect partner for you guys,’ ” Goldberg said, “because I would always rather have 35 ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ episodes than 3,500 episodes of a hit show that I didn’t feel that way about. And Steven said, ‘Well, we would have been very honored to have ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ as our first show.’ ”

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Goldberg is developing a second series for DreamWorks, a CBS sitcom for 1996 about a girls’ basketball team called “The Girls of Sumner,” and he’s co-writing another film with Hall.

Goldberg compares his experiences at DreamWorks to those at MTM Enterprises in the 1970s under the guidance of Grant Tinker, who was behind “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Lou Grant” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” the latter two on which Goldberg worked.

“There’s never been a place like MTM before or since,” Goldberg said. “Where the man cared about what the company put out. It wasn’t only about profits and success--although that was obviously a part of it--but there was another dimension to it. And I think there’s another dimension to what these guys want to achieve.”

Goldberg says that behind the DreamWorks hype is a human story that has been missed in an industry run by corporate ladder-climbers.

“These three guys can’t be in any other business. They’ll die. The human story is that you have three of the most successful people of all time in our business saying, ‘We want to restore the joy and the dreams to a business that has grown very cold.’ This is their life. This is their oxygen. This is their love, and that has an impact on how you feel when you walk in here in the morning.”

Success for any producer is elusive, and not even an alignment with DreamWorks will boost Goldberg’s chance to duplicate the success of “Family Ties,” for which he pocketed tens of millions of dollars when the show was sold into syndicated reruns. But Goldberg believes his work will flourish creatively as a result of his association with the DreamWorks principals.

“Whatever flower I’m gonna be, I’m gonna bloom more fully here,” he said. “This is a time in the culture when we need people to look at what’s going on and come at it in a specific, personal way. You know, I don’t think it’s written in the Testaments that every comic has to have his or her own TV show.”

Like most of Goldberg’s ideas, the inspiration for “Champs” came from his own life. Busfield’s character is overwhelmed by feminist research from his wife, played by Annette O’Toole. In September, Goldberg and his own wife, Diana Meehan, a former educator at USC, will open a private middle school for girls in Pacific Palisades, because her research indicates that single-sex education is healthiest for a girl coming of age, such as their own 11-year-old daughter.

In addition, Goldberg was a star guard on his Lafayette high school team, which played in the city semifinals at Madison Square Garden during his senior year. Only on the hardwood can guys express affection and make order out of their personal chaos, he believes. The rules in sports are clearly stated, unlike the rules in life.

Goldberg remembers that semifinal game when a buddy of his committed a foul at the buzzer, giving the opposing team a free throw and the victory.

“Twenty years later, I’m at this guy’s house in Long Island--he’s a very successful coach out there now,” said Goldberg, who still plays hoops twice a week.

“There’s a soft rain on the window, it’s misting up and he’s poking through the fireplace. And out of nowhere he goes, ‘I didn’t foul that guy. You know I didn’t foul him, right?’ The crazy thing was I knew exactly what he was talking about.”