Sleep? Too much to do

At Culver Studios’ Stage Six, Bonnie Hunt, writer-producer-director-star of the ABC family sitcom “Life With Bonnie” is doing what she does best -- everything.

She rearranges chairs at the table and squares of lasagna on the plates in the kitchen set. When she overhears her TV son Charlie Stewart try out a childish joke, she chastises him, “That’s not nice humor.” A few minutes later, in the same no-nonsense voice, she coaches the boy, “Keep it real, sweetheart.”

By the time Hunt calls for action, touches Charlie’s forehead and says, “He’s not feeling well,” it’s not at all clear at what point she switched to acting.

What is clear is that network and studio executives are turning to Hunt, whose sweetly subversive, self-deprecating humor and single-minded drive have led her to the edge of fame many times over the past two decades.

Now it appears she is finally being appreciated not only for her vision and skills but also for what ABC entertainment president Susan Lyne says Hunt is at the core: “a good Catholic girl from Chicago with strong beliefs and a moral code.”

“Life With Bonnie” is Hunt’s fifth sitcom, the third she’s written and the first to be renewed. Last month she earned her second Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of Bonnie Malloy, doctor’s wife, talk show host and mother of two. She also appears with Steve Martin as a Disney-perfect wife, mother and author thriving amid family chaos in 20th Century Fox’s remake of “Cheaper by the Dozen.”

“Life With Bonnie” is a success, Lyne says, because Hunt has made sure it appeals to groups of all ages. Despite modest ratings, it is winning its new time slot on Fridays, a night the network has devoted to inoffensive shows with heartland values.

“Cheaper” producer Bob Simonds also liked Hunt’s hometown appeal, saying that intermingled qualities of “strength and warmth” helped her win the role opposite Steve Martin, who stars as a loving but distracted dad. “That combination made her a believable mother of a multitude,” Simonds says.

Still, at 42, Hunt is more familiar than famous -- a fact she says doesn’t matter.

“My only power is my ability to do something with passion and do it well,” she says. “It’s also something someone cannot take way from me, so it’s very valuable.

“I don’t have the fear of letting someone down. I don’t have the fear of my looks changing. I don’t have the fear I won’t be able to think of something else to write. It’s what I do.”

While many actresses have survived canceled shows, Hunt has had more than her share: “Grand” (CBS 1990), “Davis Rules” (ABC 1991, CBS 1992), “The Building” (CBS 1993) and “The Bonnie Hunt Show” (CBS 1995-96).

The shows’ ratings were not high, former executives say, but the quality always got Hunt more work, including as a popular guest and substitute host on late-night talk shows.

Those who don’t watch a lot of network television might remember her for the chipper, sardonic asides muttered by supporting characters in a string of films: In “Dave” (1993) she played a fanatical White House tour guide (“And we’re walking, and we’re walking, and we’re stopping”). In “Jerry Maguire” (1996) she was Renee Zellwegger’s bitter divorced sister (“Don’t cry at the beginning of a date. Cry at the end, like I do”). In “Life With Bonnie,” her character is a milder rendition of her wise-cracking self. In one episode, she responds to husband Mark’s defensive “You always say we never talk anymore” with “I didn’t say it bothered me.”

Over the years, Hunt has earned a reputation as a multitasker who can write a script for a television episode in a single day (with longtime collaborator Don Lake) and who doesn’t like sleep.

“I’ve never seen anyone so obsessed with the work process,” says David Alan Grier, a regular on “Life With Bonnie.”

Those same qualities have also ruffled feathers as she has broken new ground, piling on writing, directing and producing responsibilities in addition to acting. She has been known to walk away from projects if studio executives wanted to change the story or overrule her choice of actors. Last year, she succeeded in dropping a director and a team of writers from her current show and replacing them herself.

The issue, she likes to say, isn’t her -- it’s the fear-based structure of network television.

“They just keep trying to make it like everything else. It’s not about your story, your creativity or your humor. It’s about, ‘Nobody else does that, so don’t do it ...’

“Nobody wants to be the executive who says go for it and it doesn’t work. I say always go for it, because you could be the one that’s right.”

Early afternoon on editing day, Hunt sits posture perfect at the white tablecloth section of the commissary, where she picks at her lunch: tiny squares of chocolate cake.

She talks earnestly about her being sixth of seven children and how her parents taught her the value of collaboration and the art of light, sarcastic repartee. She talks about how a five-year career as a nurse in both cancer wards and emergency rooms helps her put Hollywood setbacks in perspective.

She talks proudly about winning control in a comedy-by-committee network environment, and how, when playing mothers, she makes sure the characters are operating “at the top of their intelligence” because she knows girls in the audience rely on her for that.

She does not talk about why she and her husband, John Murphy, do not have children.

“I don’t really talk about that, about the personal side of my life,” she says in her head nurse voice.

She does offer that, despite her financial success, her husband of 15 years continues to work as an investment banker. “I wouldn’t like him if he didn’t work,” she says. “He knows that.”

With thick, flippy blond hair, Hunt looks like a with-it version of Doris Day, hip enough in tiny jeans and boots and younger than her years (reports of her age have varied within a 10-year range, but according to voter registration she’s 42).

When she came to Hollywood in her mid-20s, she says she had less interest in red-carpet glamour and go-along-to-get-along politics than the one-person job of storytelling.

Still, it’s clear that bumps with the Hollywood power structure left some bruises. When she started getting work, she says, “I wanted the storytelling to be protected, sacred, important. And for the most part, it’s not.”

Working with networks

In network television, she says, “The politics are served before the storytelling. If an executive producer has written a certain line, and an actress says it, and it’s not very funny, you don’t dare go to them and say, ‘I don’t like this,’ because it will make your life miserable.”

As Hunt tells it, when she showed the script for her first series, “The Building,” to Jeff Sagansky, then president of entertainment for CBS, he told her “There’s not a joke in the script.... You gotta have two jokes per page. Take it back and give me two jokes per page.” Hunt says she replied, “ ‘I don’t write like that.’ So right there, I stopped the system.”

Sagansky, now a New York businessman, denies the anecdote and says: “I would never talk to anybody that way. We did ‘The Building’ and gave her creative freedom.... I don’t remember reading the script in the beginning. I would never have a rule of two jokes per page.”

This time with ABC, she says, “I just basically said, with respect, they were about to make a big investment in me. And they shouldn’t make that investment unless they believed in it. Why spend the money on someone, their perspective and their humor and their storytelling ability, only to surround it with more people that are going to do something else?”

Nevertheless, the network insisted on hiring a director and the usual team of writers. “It wasn’t about me,” Hunt says, “it was about the way television was done ...

“Women have always had men next to them: Lucille Ball had Desi Arnaz, Mary Tyler Moore had Grant Tinker, Carol Burnett had Joe Hamilton, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason had her husband.

“I sold my shows by myself in a room and it made people very scared -- a girl sitting there alone.”

Hunt estimates the network paid the writers hundreds of thousands of dollars and a director $45,000 an episode before she persuaded them she should do it all herself.

“It caused me so much anxiety, I called the network ... [and said] ‘Now you’re paying 12 people to write things I can’t use, and I’m rewriting it. I’m going to a director and saying exactly what I would do. Tell me how it makes sense for me to have all these people?’ It made the day twice as long.”

ABC’s Lyne says it took executives a while to realize it really was easier for Hunt to do things herself and that she needed people who could keep up with her. Hunt is never late with a script, nor a rough cut. “She has an enormous amount of control over her product. Very simply -- she’s earned it.”

If some people see her as arrogant, Hunt sees herself as a simple “worker bee” who loves what she does -- creating sanctuaries in Hollywood built on respect, responsibility, teamwork and a “certain level of honesty.”

Ego as a motivator

She admits she’s as driven by ego as any performer in town. “I want to be loved,” she says. “I want to be liked. I want to make people feel and laugh. I want to connect with an audience. I want them to think I’m wonderful. I do.”

Just as it starts to appear her subversive side might be hard to locate, she mentions “Aging in Dog Years,” one of a number of scripts she continues to write on the side. “It’s what I believe women do in Hollywood,” she says. “The dog year equals seven human years. So if you take a man who is 60, you put him with a woman who’s 35, because she’s equal to him in age in Hollywood.”

But taking on matriarchal roles doesn’t mean she’s given up her edge, Hunt says. “I think of every story having a family at the core, whether it’s biological or not,” she says.

“If there’s a familiar feeling to the work I do, it’s probably because I’m like that with my friends. I work with the same people over and over again,” she says, referring to longtime collaborators who include Holly Wortell, Chris Barnes and Lake, all involved with “Life With Bonnie.” “I really am re-creating the process of my childhood,” she says.

“We all have our functions and we are all there to support one another and we all respect one another,” Lake says. “There’s nobody out for any ulterior motive or anything like that, and believe me, it’s really refreshing and fun to be around that. People thrive in that.”

The writing aims to emulate classic television comedies such as “I Love Lucy” and Hunt’s father’s favorite, “The Andy Griffith Show,” shows without mean humor or put-down jokes. “We don’t want to put that out there,” Lake says. “You can still have craziness in it. We all know how much humor there is in normal, everyday living.”

Wortell, a longtime friend from Chicago, says Hunt doesn’t always have to be squeaky clean. “There’s a time and place for everything.... It’s easier to go down the other road and get laughs,” Wortell says. “It’s harder to get laughs and be smart, clever and funny.”

Hunt is particularly proud of a Pixar film, “Cars,” she’s finishing in which she voices the lead. “I play a Porsche. Sally. She lives on Route 66. Owen Wilson is a race car that gets off-track and ends up in my neighborhood. Paul Newman is the old judge, a retired race car. It’s so good. It’s so beautiful.” The movie will come out in 2004.

Whenever anyone asks how she manages to perform so many tasks at the same time, Hunt points to her mother as a model. “A month in my life running the show is almost equal to one day in the life of my mother raising seven children. The older I get, the more in awe of her I am.”

Hunt works on films during summers, in television’s off-season. Rest and vacation aren’t attractive options. Even the thought of sleep makes her anxious. “It feels like I should be doing something instead,” she says.

Other people have pointed out to her that she often does three or four things at a time. “If I’m reading a book, I will have Home and Garden on TV, and maybe have a Walkman on, listening to the radio. I am able to comprehend the book better that way than if I were sitting in quiet. If I were sitting in quiet, I’d probably have to read the same sentence two or three times.”

Friends say she could earn a nice living with scriptwriting alone. In fact, Hunt says she and Lake wrote the first script for “Cheaper by the Dozen,” originally a book based on the Gilbreth family. They wanted the story to reflect the real family who inspired the book. “The studio was not interested in that,” she says. “We went through many rewrites by the time it turned out to be what it was.”

The result was a “fantasy,” she says. “It’s not what I pictured, because I was thinking of real people.”

She shrugs off the disappointment. “Not everything has to be Tolstoy. The audience comes to escape and have a good time. I’m very proud to have been a part of it.”

As a writer, Hunt prefers films because she doesn’t have to write around commercials. As a storyteller, she wants “Life With Bonnie” to grow, not just for ratings, but as a television classic.

She says, “The shows that have made their mark, that are still on 30 years later on ‘Nick at Night,’ are the ones that kind of sneaked through.

“ ‘Cheers’ was on for two seasons and nobody was watching it. ‘Seinfeld’ was sitting on the shelf with six episodes at NBC.

“They’re accidents. I’m hoping to be one of those accidents.”