Keeping Up With ‘Sabrina’ Puts Writer on Fast Track

Speedy screenwriter Dan Berendsen uses a little magic of his own to send America’s favorite witch on her globe-trotting made-for-TV movies. On Sunday, Sabrina is off to Australia in “Sabrina Down Under.”

Last season, Berendsen had only 21 days to write the script for Melissa Joan Hart’s well-received “Sabrina Goes to Rome” on ABC. He handed it in mere weeks before shooting began, and was rewarded with the job of story editor on the prime-time series “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” which begins its new season tonight on ABC.

“I’d only been to Rome once, so I got every book I could, I got eight videotapes--a National Geographic tour--to find locations,” Berendsen said. “We have them shopping in all the famous places, going to the National Museum.”

This year’s vacation destination also seemed to be a last-minute call.

“I’d never been to Australia at all,” he said. “I researched the Great Barrier Reef, picked out a few islands. One of them, Hamilton Island, worked out great. That’s where I put the mermaid lagoon.”

The 35-year-old writer was a reinsurance underwriter in Seattle five years ago. But a dream of Hollywood gnawed at him. It was the classic midlife crisis, he said. He knew he’d always regret not giving it a shot, he said, so “I quit my job, sold my house, moved to L.A., starved for a couple of years and wrote all the time.”

Berendsen survived starvation--and also a stint at Fox 2 1/2 years ago on Pauly Shore’s bomb “Pauly,” which critics blasted with relish. Earlier, he wrote for the WB’s short-lived sitcom “First Time Out,” about a Latina (Jackie Guerra) coping with the L.A. singlelife.

Then came the big break. “Sabrina” executive producer Paula Hart read his screenplay “Up, Up & Away,” about a whole family of superheroes--which is now in production as a Disney Channel original movie. Hart called and asked if he could whip up the Rome junket in three weeks.

In “Down Under,” Sabrina works to save an endangered colony of fishtailed, seaweed-y merpeople created by Oscar-winning makeup artist Robert Short (“Beetlejuice”). Even so, many viewers will quickly identify one of the mermaids as Lindsay Sloane--who also plays Sabrina’s best friend, Valerie, in the prime-time series.

Berendsen chuckles over the casting stunt. “Valerie’s just inexplicably living under the Great Barrier Reef under water--life is funny that way.”