The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 50

16 Thursday 19 May 1988 'Roots' dug up again in similar quality a RMfliiuDg tiaDeirati When James L. Brooks is not making hit movies like 'Broadcast News', he spends his time packaging one of the most innovative programs on television. HOWARD ROSENBERG in Hollywood talks to Brooks and to the British star of 'The Tracey Ullman Show', seen in Australia on the ABC. By STEPHEN FARBER, Los Angeles HE BLEW in like a cyclone. driven by hope and hyperbole.

A noisy, electrifying, taut, frantic Cockney she was, a F-- OS's, i i ft 13' 4-: it A TIME wben television viewing in North A America is actually declining, producers l)m are searching for sure-fire hits to lure view-axf ers back to the box. To many of them, the safest approach is to find a way to recycle the most successful programs of the past. So, the American ABC Network recently began filming Roots Christmas, a two-hour special that brings back two of the characters from its highly successful 1977 mini-series, Roots. David Wolper, the producer of the original as well as of Roots Christmas, clearly hopes lightning will strike again when the new program is broadcast. Yet Wolper conceded that it could be risky to invite comparisons to one of the most beloved and honored programs in television history.

"Of course, there is a danger that some people will accuse us of trying to cash in on the success of the original," Wolper said. "But if I worried about reactions to my shows, I'd never do anything." (In fact, he almost did not get Roots Christmas off the ground. Less than a month ago, Wolper said the strike by Hollywood scriptwriters was likely to force its cancellation. But now, he seems to have managed to sidestep Hollywood's labor problems.) Louis Gossett Junior, who will be reviving the role of the seasoned plantation slave Fiddler, also admitted to some apprehensions about trying to compete with viewers' memories of a television milestone. "I was worried that we might undo what Roots had done," Gossett said.

"We all discussed whether there might be a danger in doing another Roots story. But there is no danger. This script has the same quality as the original." Wolper said the new program did not actually originate as a Roots sequel. He first got in touch with Alex Haley, the author of Roots, to ask him if he would be interested in writing a black Christmas story to fill a gap he had noticed among the networks' holiday specials. It was Haley who suggested bringing back the characters of Roots for a Christmas story.

"When you work on something as huge as Roots," Haley said, "there are inevitably a hundred postscripts that you aren't able to use. In my research I had come upon the story of a large-scale slave escape effort that took place during the Christmas season. I never used it in Roots, but I've been thinking about it again recently, and I was going to call David about it. He beat me to the punch." Roots Christmas takes place in 1770, which is three years after end of the first episode of Roots. In Haley's story, Kunta Kinte, played by LeVar Burton, and Fiddler, played by Gossett, become involved in aiding a group of slaves who are planning an escape on Christmas Eve.

"That was an ideal time to plan an escape," Haley said, "be- LeVar Burton as Kunte Kinte in the original 1977 'Roots' mini-series. cause everyone is less attentive during the holidays. I had done a lot of reading and studying about the underground railroad, and I intended this incident to be a precursor of that movement" The script for Roots Christmas was written by David Eyre, but Wolper said he had to do the final editing of the script himself because of the writers' strike. It was also difficult to obtain commitments from the actors. Burton was appearing in the syndicated television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, and he had to be assured that his role in Roots Christmas could be completed during his hiatus from the series.

Burton acknowledged some initial ambivalence about returning to his most famous role, noting that he had fought for years to be accepted in other roles. But he said he had made his peace with Kunta Kinte and was looking forward to reviving a character who had had such a strong impact on the culture. Gossett said he welcomed the opportunity to explore new facets of the character he created in the original Roots. "In this film there are some new colors," he said. "You see Fiddler's curiosity about freedom, something that you didn't see in Roots, where he was more simply the steadfast slave who had learned how to survive in the system." Despite the commercial imperatives that underlie a project like Roots Christmas, all of the participants said they were determined to be true to the spirit of the original mini-series.

"There are people all over the world who aren't able to read, but they saw Roots on television," Haley said. "It's humbling to be approached by Indians in Chile who know me because they have seen Roots." New York Times bundle of instincts, nerve endings, hairpin curves and surprises who was going to take TV viewers on the thrilling ride of their lives. It's a few months since The Tracey Ullman Show began as a half-hour of innovative sketches and a little music on Australian TV (Mondays, 9.50 pm, Channel 2). But relatively few viewers have bothered to go along for the ride. The ratings for the show in both the US, where it is packaged for Rupert Murdoch's Fox network, and Australia have been fair to middling.

A brief history: British TV comedy and recording star gets own show on American network. Always interesting, frequently entertaining, more than occasionally brilliant Sings nicely, plays amazing range of characters. High acclaim, low ratings. At 28, rising star. Few movies include Plenty.

Several hit records. A scream on talk shows. Remarkable mimic. Wife of successful British TV producer Allan McKeown, 41. Mother of two-year-old Mabel.

Have voices, will travel. Some predict epic future. She can be the next decade's major star, the producer of her first British TV show, Paul Jackson, says. She's "the sound you don't know you're missing until you've heard it," her present TV producer, James L. Brooks, asserts.

Brooks is regarded in the industry as the ideal mentor for a performer as unconventional as Ullman. The Fox Network surely was eyeing Brooks's glittering pedigree (his credits include Broadcast News and the Oscar-honored Terms Of Endearment and he was instrumental in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Taxi and Lou Grant on TV) when it followed its original 26-epi-sode commitment with an order for another 30 last October. And there could be more. ON A recent Saturday afternoon after taping her show, the star of The Tracey Ullman Show arrived at a trendy Los Angeles restaurant in her blue Range Rover. Inside, Ullman is at a corner table in a red-and-black outfit Someone in the crowd recognises her.

"Gal, come here. Can we just take your picture?" That's all part of being a star. Another part of it is being sought out by the press. But Ullman is wary of it all. "I don't like being fawned over and all that, but that was all part of it in London," Ullman says.

"The tabloids want to build you up in a year and knock you down. They were a nightmare. They did stuff like say I was at cocaine parties with Duran Duran (she wasn't) or that I was having Rod Stewart's baby (she wasn't) or ask old boyfriends to talk about me (they did)." Now her cherished privacy in America has vanished, too. The last thing her producers want for Ullman, however, is anonymity. Despite its brave talk, the new Fox Network is desperate for ratings.

TV is about fame. Fox wants Ullman drawing crowds the way the Pope and Michael Jackson draw crowds, to be so adored and instantly recognised that she can't sneak from her hillside home without being crushed by squealing fans and paparazzi. It wants all Americans begging Tracey Ullman, "Gal, come here. Can we just take your picture?" But it's Ullman who takes the pictures mental ones. Her gift of mimicry is astounding.

She's part invention, and just which part is sometimes undetectable. There's her Cockney, for example. Not genuine. She acquired it at age 18 "for career to set her apart from the suburban girls she grew up with. The mimicry began as a child and went on and on.

"She's just brilliant a bloodsucker of personalities," says Ruby Wax, an American with a TV talk show in England. "You walk away, and she's taken a little bit of your brain." Tracey Ullman: one of a kind. Ullman communicates in her own brand of tongues. "You could put her in a room with almost anyone alive, and she would be able to give you a representation of that person after, a while," says producer Brooks. "It's different than it is with comedians.

It's not like she's on. She just starts to talk in voices, and suddenly she's creating." GIVEN her early fascination for creating characters, Ullman must have seemed a curious child in the middle-class London suburb of Hackbridge where her family lived. Her Polish emigre father died when she was six, leaving only her mother to co-star in her fantasies. "My mum and I would put on plays together. We were always singing and dancing.

We'd have games where we'd get a pistol and shoot each other and see who could die the best." Her earliest heroines were not movie stars but bag ladies and burdened women in TV documentaries who talked about their babies with colic and the 'usband in Ullman won a scholarship to a stage school when she was 12, dropping out four years later and spending four months with "a strange group of very gay dancers" in Berlin. A year later, she had her first TV job, in a Heinz soup commercial, and at 21 won a London Theatre Critics award for her work in an improvisa-tional play, Four In A Million. It was 1981, and Tracey Ullman was on her way. Her performance was so devastating that TV producer Jackson was simply "knocked out" and quickly cast her in the BBC sitcom Three Of A Kind. She was still living at home with her mother then, but that would soon change.

When Three Of A Kind went off the air three years later, Ullman was recognised in England as one of a kind, and she was eyeing America as her next challenge. It was Briton Lou Coulson, then Ullman's agent who made initial overtures in the US on her behalf, circulating a tape with excerpts of her British TV work in sketches, videos and talk shows. The road to Jim Brooks and Fox was curvy and bumpy. One idea for a show, I Love New York, which was to have been produced for Universal by her husband, never quite got there. Ullman is said to have ruffled a lot of feathers at Universal studios as she tried to do things her way.

She was too reclusive, too obstinate. A short time later, Ullman's new agent Martha Luttrell, sent Ullman's tape to Brooks, who was under contract to Fox, and, like everyone else, he was wiped out "I saw original talent and how often does that happen to you?" says Brooks. Brooks had no immediate plans for doing another series, but Ullman provided a strong incentive. During the next year, he acquired a creative staff and supporting cast and on 12 April last year. The Tracey Ullman Show premiered on Fox in a series that has been labelled everything from a variety show to a She's been called a social satirist.

"It sounds really intelligent" she says, "so I'm going to say that's what I am, because I can't bear being called a wacky, zany comedienne. I'm not a comedienne. I'm a character actress. I couldn't get up and tell a joke to save my life." Lo Angele Time jj 87-89 Riversdale Hawthorn 818 5585 LQ500 Superb 24 pin dot matrix. 180 cps draft60 cps LQ.

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