The Great Leap: Some Make It . . . Some Don’t : Acting: The crossover from being a hot TV actor to a big-screen presence is difficult at best. David Caruso seems to be the latest in a long line who can’t transfer their stardom.

In the summer of 1994, Paramount Pictures paid a reported $2 million to David Caruso--then one of TV’s hottest actors in the ABC police series “NYPD Blue”--to star in a glossy, high-budget film called “Jade.”

It was a risky decision for Paramount, but by the time Caruso exited the Emmy Award-winning series, he had gained an avid following as Detective John Kelly.

By the time “Jade” came out last month, however, Paramount’s print ads were not showcasing Caruso--or co-stars Linda Fiorentino and Chazz Palminteri. The studio had decided to sell the steamy murder mystery as a concept, rather than rely on the drawing power of the actors.

Today, Caruso’s attempt at movie stardom has stalled after the $50-million film opened poorly, grossing only $9 million in its first 17 days of release. Indeed, “Kiss of Death,” which Caruso made before leaving the series, has made only $15 million for 20th Century Fox.

Caruso thus joins a long and storied list of talented actors who have stumbled making the leap from TV to the big screen.

Indeed, over the decades, one of the enduring puzzles of Hollywood has been why some of the biggest stars in TV found it so difficult to cross over to films.

Why did Tom Hanks, who appeared in the ABC guys-in-drag sitcom “Bosom Buddies,” and Jim Carrey, the rubber-faced comedian of Fox TV’s “In Living Color,” soar to stardom in films, while men with bigger Nielsen ratings like Bill Cosby (“The Cosby Show”) and Don Johnson (“Miami Vice”) didn’t?

Why did Tim Allen of ABC’s current hit sitcom “Home Improvement” become an overnight movie star, in Disney’s “The Santa Clause” last year, while Ted Danson and Shelley Long, who were huge stars on NBC’s “Cheers,” never did the same in movies? But Woody Harrelson, the naive bartender in the series, seems to have made the transition in the films “White Men Can’t Jump” and “Indecent Proposal.”

“Beverly Hills, 90210” brought legions of fans to Luke Perry and Jason Priestley, but Perry flamed out in “Buffy the Vampire Killer” and “8 Seconds,” while Priestley flopped in “Calendar Girl” and the recent independent film “Coldblooded.”

Even being touted as People magazine’s “sexiest man alive” in 1986 didn’t parlay into a feature film career for Mark Harmon.

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Harmon had generated heat after leaving NBC’s “St. Elsewhere.” But his crossover films, “The Presidio” (with Sean Connery), “Stealing Home,” “Worth Winning” and this summer’s “Magic in the Water” all bombed. He has since returned to series TV.

For studios, the risk of green-lighting movies with a hot TV star can be enormous. By the time the film comes out a year or more later, the actor’s popularity could have cooled or audiences may simply reject them in another role.

“Anybody who casts based on current heat is making a mistake,” one top studio executive said. “You should cast a movie based on the actor’s ability to play the role, not based on how good their ratings are in the series itself.”

“The Monkees,” for example, were an enormous hit when the TV show made its debut in 1966, but by the time a movie starring the singing group was released in 1968 (the film was called “Head” and Jack Nicholson was the co-writer), the series had been canceled and the movie bombed.

And, onetime teen idol and pop singer Rick Springfield was similarly hot on the daytime soap opera “General Hospital,” but his 1984 film “Hard to Hold” was deemed “hard to watch” by critics and his career in features ended abruptly.

Some argue that actors who have successfully crossed over are those who have established a distinct persona on television and, at least in their maiden film, expanded on that persona.

“If you are a strong, silent action star, the best thing to do in crossing over to movies is be a strong, silent movie star,” said one studio executive, who cited Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen as examples.

“If you are a wild and wacky comedian like Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy, the best thing to do is something wild and wacky in movies. Jim Carrey would not be where he is today if his maiden voyage had not been in ‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,’ which expanded on his persona in ‘In Living Color.’ ”

Some contend that actors should try different kinds of characters when making the transition from TV to movies.

“Audiences become used to seeing an actor in a certain type of role,” said casting director Bonnie Timmerman (“Miami Vice,” “Crime Story”). “ . . . I believe in taking chances in your career. Doing something completely different.”

Sally Field, she noted, went against the grain and became a film star in “Norma Rae,” overcoming the stereotypes she spawned in her TV sitcoms “Gidget” and “The Flying Nun.”

Eastwood has said he went from “Rawhide” to starring in movies simply because he was “in the right place at the right time.”

“At the time I [crossed over], there were not too many actors who had been doing it,” Eastwood recently told The Times. “There were a couple: Steve McQueen and James Garner. . . . A lot of people seemed to look down on television as a poor, younger brother of films. But it actually was a great training ground.”

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He said he went to Italy “on a lark to do a little, low-budget film [“A Fistful of Dollars”] with a director I had never heard of with other people I had never heard of.”

If there is one consensus about why some actors make the transition while others don’t, it is because they choose bad scripts.

Bill Cosby couldn’t save “Leonard Part 6” and “Ghost Dad.” Don Johnson couldn’t rise above “Sweethearts’ Dance,” “Dead Bang” and “Harley Davidson & the Marlboro Man.”

Meanwhile, Farrah Fawcett may have been America’s favorite calendar girl when she was on “Charlie’s Angels,” but her film career sputtered and crashed with “Somebody Killed Her Husband,” “Sunburn” and “Saturn 3.”

“Farrah Fawcett was a sexpot,” one studio executive said. “She was a pin-up girl. How do you translate that to a movie? It wasn’t until later in television that she could prove she could act [in “The Burning Bed”], but by then she was in her late 30s. Hollywood chews up actresses in their 20s and spits them out in their 30s.”

But lest you think television audiences are less judgmental than moviegoers, think again. Some famous movie stars floundered in network television.

Henry Fonda, for example, stumbled as a big-city cop in the 1971-72 ABC series “The Smith Family.” James Stewart had two TV flops, first as an anthropology professor with a complicated home life in the 1971-72 NBC sitcom “The Jimmy Stewart Show” and again in the 1973-74 CBS drama “Hawkins,” in which he played a savvy but homespun lawyer.

Television also was no answer for Anthony Quinn (“The Man and the City”), Ellen Burstyn (“The Ellen Burstyn Show”) or Shirley MacLaine, who played a reporter-photographer on “Shirley’s World” on ABC in 1971-72.

In recent years, TV has been ratings quicksand for veteran movie stars such as Faye Dunaway in “It Had to Be You,” Gene Wilder in “Something Wilder” and Dudley Moore in “Daddy’s Girls” and “Dudley.”

Last month, Elizabeth McGovern, who received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress in the 1981 film “Ragtime,” saw her new TV series “If Not for You” yanked by CBS.

The next group of TV stars who will try to make the leap include “Friends’ ” Jennifer Aniston (“Til There Was You”) and David Schwimmer (“The Pallbearer”), “ER’s” George Clooney (“From Dusk Till Dawn”), “Ellen’s” Ellen DeGeneres (“Mr. Wrong”) and “Frasier’s” Kelsey Grammer (“Down Periscope”).

The reason Caruso may have been hot on TV and not movies, some point out, is because he came from a series (“NYPD Blue”) in which Steven Bochco and his writing team are the real stars of the show--not the actors.

“Caruso wasn’t a star when he came out [of the series],” one studio executive said. “He was a good actor in an ensemble piece. ‘NYPD Blue’ is a writers’ show, not an actors’ show.”