FORGET CLIFFS NOTES

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

The Meru region of central Kenya isn't the sort of place most TV producers might find themselves making a movie-of-the-week, but then Robert Halmi Sr., 73, isn't the kind of guy who keeps busy churning out projects with names like Abduction of Innocence: A Moment of Truth Movie. While overseeing the production of an upcoming ABC movie on the explorers Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone near Mount Kenya recently, Halmi hired a group of Masai tribesmen as extras. Just as the scene in which they were to participate had begun shooting, a busload of American tourists stopped to ogle and photograph the tribesmen, angering the actors-for-a-day and delaying production. Rather than deploy a minion to settle the matter, Halmi approached the bus in his Hummer, "to make like Arnold Schwarzenegger," he gleefully explains, and proceeded to bluff the sightseers into thinking they were courting unspeakable peril if they didn't make peace with the natives. Goodwill could be rendered quickly, Halmi decreed, if the group could scare up some cash. Within a few moments, the tourists turned over to the Masai the $150 amalgam of their pocket money.

It is, in essence, this kind of beguiling imperiousness that has made the Hungarian-born Halmi, who speaks in an endearingly imperfect English, one of the most prolific and risk-embracing producers in television. Through his former production company RHI and now as chairman of Hallmark Entertainment, Halmi has made nearly 200 TV movies and mini-series during the past two decades. Soon to arrive: what might be considered one of television's most audacious ventures to date, Halmi's four-hour production of The Odyssey (beginning May 18, 9 p.m. E.T., NBC), which at $32 million is, minute for minute, the most expensive mini-series ever made.

For a decade, arrogantly convinced that Jonathan Swift's 18th century political satire Gulliver's Travels was just waiting to be made into a mini-series starring Ted Danson, Halmi tirelessly pitched the idea to skeptical network executives until NBC succumbed two years ago. Improbably enough, Gulliver drew critical raves and wound up as last season's highest-rated mini-series. Motivated by that triumph, Halmi, whose curriculum vitae is not entirely without a smattering of titles like Ivana Trump's For Love Alone, has now made it a mission to devote himself almost exclusively to reinterpreting the classics for television.

Scheduled to air within the next year or so: TV-movie versions of Moby Dick and David Copperfield for the USA and Turner networks respectively, not to mention a sweeping Crime and Punishment mini-series for NBC. Meanwhile, Halmi is also working to bring versions of Animal Farm, The Raven and Dante's Inferno to the small screen.

"I just had to convince the networks that I could do BBC-like programming but with entertainment," says Halmi, apparently a man whose idea of a good time does not include sitting down to six hours of that network's well-received version of Pride and Prejudice. "This is what the medium was invented for." He continues, "What television did to American young families is, it stopped them to read," he says in his broken second tongue. "It took the books out of kids' hands. I think we can make kids curious and get them to read again. I know I'm right because after Gulliver Simon & Schuster said the books were selling like crazy."

As do many of Halmi's productions, his latest, The Odyssey, seesaws--often uncomfortably--between earnestness and camp in an effort to reach the broadest possible audience. As he did in Gulliver's Travels, Halmi, who makes all the major casting decisions in his productions, has again married a middle-market star to some otherwise TV-unfriendly material. Armand Assante is our Odysseus here. (Conversely, Halmi has a penchant for pairing unnecessarily qualified talent to schlock product. In his 1983 TV movie Svengali, a young Jodie Foster played an aspiring pop star in love with her aging vocal coach, a part that found Peter O'Toole forced to say things like, "When I make love to a woman, I unwrap her!")

In what seems like an effort to compensate for the fact their star isn't, say, Daniel Day-Lewis, the creators of The Odyssey limn an even more brooding, contemplative hero than exists in Homer's epic. The original Odysseus is a heavyweight to be sure, but he is also a fast-talking, spirited wheeler-dealer, famous for his cunning. The creators might have had fun with that aspect of his character. Instead, they have conjured up a guy who seems to be on a very long journey to find his missing Prozac, even when he is rolling around in the sand sweating and staring lustfully at the goddess Calypso (Vanessa Williams) as if this were an episode of Baywatch: The B.C. Years.

But then, Halmi isn't aiming to see his productions deconstructed in Western Civ classes. In an era when TV is steeped in realism, Halmi's intent is to create lavish spectacles. Like his endlessly hyped 1994 mini-series Scarlett, the non-Margaret Mitchell-written sequel to Gone With the Wind, for which he conducted a $1 million worldwide search to find a star (ultimately actress Joanne Whalley-Kilmer), The Odyssey has been promoted with endless TV ads, a tie-in book and a Website game. The movie's budget went largely to transporting hundreds of cast and crew members to remote, often roadless locales in Turkey and Malta and manufacturing special effects like the rendering of the god Poseidon as a talking tidal wave.

"The secret to Halmi's success," notes producer Judd Parkin, former head of movies and mini-series at ABC, "is that he is so doggedly contrarian. So much of TV is the same, but when Halmi comes into the room, you know you are not going to get pitched another date-rape movie." Moreover, Parkin says, "he's a great raconteur, very passionate. He gets right to the heart of the matter. He's very un-L.A."

Indeed, Halmi, who runs his company out of Manhattan and divides his time between his town house there, his estate in Kenya and a home in Marbella, rarely even spends the night in Los Angeles when he has business in that city. "I don't want to have breakfast and everybody is talking about deals," he says.

Halmi may not relish talking about show business, but he can't escape the fact that he is show business. His life is even something of a mini-series. Born in Budapest and married five times, he fought in the Hungarian resistance before moving in the 1950s to the U.S., where he worked as a LIFE magazine photographer and dabbled in race-car driving before turning to TV as a producer of wildlife documentaries.

Like so many larger-than-life figures, Halmi is prone to hyperbole, inflating his production tabs in talks to the press. (He quoted The Odyssey's bill at $43 million.) "All his numbers are false," jokes Halmi's son, Robert Jr., the CEO of Hallmark Entertainment. "He likes to tell people things cost a lot more money than they really do."

Says David Picker, former head of United Artists and a friend of Halmi's: "He's a throwback to the kind of creative producer--Sam Spiegel, David O. Selznick--the cultured, romantic, passionate kind, who won't let go of an idea until it happens." And who wants things the way he wants things. When Assante tried to back out of The Odyssey at one point during the production because he was unhappy about the script, Halmi slapped him with a lawsuit for the entire budget of the film. Assante came back, and Halmi conceded to a reworking of the teleplay. It is a testimony to the producer's wily charm that Assante harbors no ill will. "The experience," he reasons, "was very good for me. I thank him for what he did." Whether America thanks Halmi for The Odyssey, or decides that it prefers its literary-inspired mini-series confined to the novels of Jackie Collins, remains to be seen.