Cinderella Puts On a Show

By Richard Stengel

Witty and stylish, Faerie Tale Theatre scores on cable TV

Once upon a time in a glittery kingdom called Tinseltown, a fey and clever actress dreamed of producing her very own fairy tales. She would get all of her famous friends to appear and pay them beans, though not magical ones. But the mighty wizards and warlocks of Tinseltown scoffed. "Ha!" they cackled, "She'll be eaten alive!"

Well, with a bit of sorcery and even more business acumen, Shelley Duvall, 34, has turned her fantasy into video reality. She is executive producer and guiding spirit of Faerie Tale Theatre, a series of hour-long classics featuring marquee names, which has become a popular and critical success on Showtime, the nation's second-largest pay-television service. Showtime, with 4 million-plus subscribers, is currently airing the sixth of her fanciful tales, The Sleeping Beauty, and plans to show three more by the end of the year. So far, Duvall has enticed Joan Collins, Elliott Gould, Maureen Stapleton and Mick Jagger into such unlikely vehicles as Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Beanstalk.

In Sleeping Beauty, Christopher (Superman) Reeve is a goody-goody prince, a sort of prissy Cary Grant in a mail doublet. Bernadette Peters casts her spell as the princess who responds a mite too ardently to his wake-up kiss. The two also play their evil doppelgaengers, giving a psychological twist to the old notion that fairy-tale characters are either all good or all bad. In this case, they are both. A gruff woodsman (George Dzundza) narrates the tale with the accent of a Borscht Belt comedian. "I gotta great princess for you," he tells the prince. "A dowry you wouldn't believe." Jeremy Kagan's fluid, floaty direction pays visual homage to the sensuous style of Book Illustrator Kay Nielsen. Like all of Duvall's slightly fractured tales, Sleeping Beauty gives a slightly campy twist to a classic without demeaning it.

Duvall's own career has been a Cinderella story of sorts. At the age of 20, she was plucked out of Houston by Director Robert Altman, who was on location for the movie Brewster McCloud. Duvall, all lollipop eyes and stringbean legs, was recognized by Altman as a strong, but flighty American original whom he could fashion to his needs. He cast her in a variety of roles in seven of his films, including Three Women, Nashville and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Yet long before Altman woke her from her pre-Hollywood slumber, Duvall had been collecting antique illustrated fairy-tale books. She was charmed by the stories, but bewitched by the pictures: dreamy Maxfield Parrish landscapes, bold N.C. Wyeth seascapes, puckish Arthur Rackham characters. While in Malta in 1980, playing Olive Oyl opposite Robin Williams in Altman's film Popeye, a vision of the rubbery Williams as a vain and manic frog prince leaped into her head, and the notion of Faerie Tale Theatre was born. Each tale would have different players and be colored by the visual style of one of her favorite illustrators.

She tried out the idea first with Walt Disney Productions, which would not agree to give her the artistic control she wanted. She skipped the networks, knowing she would have to hack her way through brambles of bureaucracy, and decided to go to pay cable. Showtime agreed to let her reign over the project and put up half of the money. The other half is footed by Gaylord Productions, a Los Angeles firm that will handle syndication and videocassette rights.

The average cost for each tale is a spare $400,000. To keep expenses down, Duvall pays everyone at or near scale. For actors, that has meant between $2,000 and $7,000 a week. Says Production Designer Mike Erler: "We have a champagne appetite and a beer budget."

Duvall's choice of actors is an alchemy of pragmatism and intuition. "Producing," she says, "is just chemistry plus some financing." Her form of creative control is to give everyone virtual free rein. An upcoming production of The Beauty and the Beast, for example, has been filmed by Director Roger Vadim in the surrealistic style of Jean Cocteau. Duvall encourages the actors to take chances, even allowing Carol Kane to portray a good fairy as an insecure and pixieish Valley Girl.

The actors revel in this atmosphere. Says Beverly D'Angelo, who plays a shrieking witch in Sleeping Beauty: "Every actor is a child, and what Shelley has basically done is build a playpen where we can go in and use words and just play." For Reeve, the experience was liberating: "You get back the sense of fun in acting, the feeling you had doing a school play like The Skin of Our Teeth, when you stayed afterward painting scenery."

Like most fairy tales, this one will have a blithe ending. Duvall plans to expand the series to a total of at least 26 shows. Then they will live on happily ever after in syndication.

--By Richard Stengel. Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Denise Worrell This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.