One of These Days, Alice ...

When Brad Garrett was a young stand-up comedian working clubs around the country, he could come home around 1 or 2 in the morning, sit in front of the television set with a bag of Chee-tos and watch repeats of the classic 1955-56 Jackie Gleason comedy series, “The Honeymooners.”

Garrett immediately felt a kinship with the Gleason who played the blustery but lovable bus driver Ralph Kramden in the seminal sitcom.

And now, some 20 years later, Garrett, a recent Emmy winner for his role as the hapless Robert on CBS’ “Everybody Loves Raymond,” is playing the Great One in “Gleason,” a CBS movie that premieres Sunday.

“I’m usually pretty hard on myself,” says Garrett, 42, in his dressing room at the “Raymond” set at the Warner Bros. studio. “But people who have seen it, whether they are a fan of ‘Raymond’ or not, they are relatively surprised. I play this character on ‘Raymond’ who is very defined. I love playing Robert, but this is such a great dramatic turn for me. Gleason’s such a wonderful character. There are so many levels to Jackie.”

Garrett says for some reason he always related to Gleason. “I had a much better, healthier childhood than he did,” he explains. “I came from divorce, but my dad and mom remained very close. They were amazingly supportive. I think the similarities are in the characters I play. There is a lot of Gleason in Robert. He’s like the Poor Soul. And he’s Ralph Kramden in a way--all of his schemes don’t work out.”

Early in his stand-up career, Garrett says, “I was always compared to him in terms of the bigger-than-life bravado. I did a lot of characters in my act, and I did best when I worked the crowd. Jackie’s strength was working the crowd.”

However, it took a concerted effort on Garrett’s part to convince the CBS brass he was the right man for the job. And he admits he was devastated when he learned the network had cast British actor Mark Addy, who stars in the new CBS sitcom “Still Standing,” as Gleason.

When Addy dropped out of the project, CBS President Les Moonves called Garrett’s agent and offered him the part. “I cried like a little schoolgirl for about an hour and a half,” says Garrett.

But then he got the script, which he says, quite bluntly, was horrible. “It was a caricature of Gleason. They had him doing things he would never do. I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ ”

He was promised the script would improve, but early rewrites weren’t encouraging. Director Howard Deutch says he and Garrett “cosmically came together. We had no choice. If we were going to do this, we had to do it right.”

Garrett teamed with his writer friend Dave Boone, and they wrote a script with Deutch’s help. “The three of us every night we would get together and do it,” says the director. “We would hammer it out, and it became very personal.”

And very dark. The Gleason depicted in the film is difficult and demanding, a boozer and a philanderer who basically abandons his wife and two young daughters.

“Gleason was a rough guy,” says Deutch. “Like all of these comics, I have never known one who is a sweetheart all the way through. They are usually angry, and this guy, as Brad puts it, was someone who was bleeding badly, and in order to stop the bleeding he would do whatever he had to, whether it be eat, drink or women.”

Because Garrett is 6 feet 8, he says they had to take care of the “giant factor” in production. “If Ralph Kramden is holding a fist up to his wife and says, ‘Do you want to go to the moon?’ and he’s 2 feet taller than her, it’s becomes frightening.”

So all the actors had to wear boots with 7-inch lifts. “Everyone got them two days early to learn how to walk around,” says Garrett. “The doorways were 8 feet instead of 6 feet 9. People were on boxes; furniture was propped up.”

Garrett admits it was surreal to play his idol. “I got a telegram from a guy I was on the road with in 1984, when I was doing stand-up. He said, ‘You used to drive me nuts talking about playing this guy and here you are 18 years later. Congratulations!’ ”

“Gleason” will be shown Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PGD (may not be suitable for young children, with an advisory for suggestive dialogue).

Cover photograph by Takashi Seida