10th Kingdom Makes Time For Fantasy
By MATT WOLF
.c The Associated Press
``The 10th Kingdom'' starts Sunday at 9 p.m. EST on NBC. The remaining four two-hour segments will be aired Monday (Feb. 28), next Wednesday (March 1), & March 5 and 6.
LONDON (AP) - On a sound stage west of London, John Larroquette is battling a troll.
Colleague Kimberly Williams, in the meantime, is battling the homesickness that comes from having spent six days a week for six months filming a 10-hour TV epic.
When it comes to TV, it's fair to say they don't make 'em like Hallmark Entertainment's ``The 10th Kingdom'' anymore. ``It's been a battle. Everyone's exhausted. I haven't been home,'' Williams moans cheerfully to a reporter, much as an island castaway might be pleased to encounter a stranger. The young American co-star of ``Father of the Bride'' and the current ``Simpatico'' has spent the shoot in Europe, where filming traveled from the Austrian Alps to eight sound stages and more than 150 sets at suburban London's Pinewood Studios. Boasting two directors (David Carson and Herbert Wise) because of its size and costing $40 million, ``The 10th Kingdom'' starts Sunday at 9 p.m. EST on NBC. The remaining four two-hour segments will be aired Monday (Feb. 28), next Wednesday (March 1), and March 5 and 6. Network TV hasn't seen anything on a comparable scale since ABC's ``War and Remembrance'' more than a decade ago. In 1978, NBC aired ``Centennial,'' which lasted a hefty 26 hours. But it takes time to work through an elaborate scenario that casts Larroquette and Williams as ordinary father-and-daughter New Yorkers who are transported via a magical doorway to the Land of the Nine Kingdoms. Their odyssey brings them up against some familiar characters in unfamiliar guise - Camryn Manheim's Snow White and Ann-Margret's Cinderella, among them. In this alternative world, it seems, some beloved fairy tale characters haven't disappeared; they've merely grown older or gone underground, alongside a handsome prince-turned-dog (played by Daniel Lapaine) and a half-man half-wolf suitor of sorts (Scott Cohen) for Williams' waitress, Virginia. Reminting herself, after a fashion, is two-time Oscar-winner Dianne Wiest. The usually benign actress here makes a rare foray into flat-out villainy as an evil queen. ``Someone said, `You'll have the courage to do what you need to do,'' recalls Williams of the relentless schedule, ``and it's true. I feel like Virginia in a lot of ways.'' ``I have this big, like, Greek-tragedy kind of confrontation with my mom, trying to get her to see me and to mother me and to remember that she's my mom.'' Without revealing the ending, Williams says ``it's dark; it's dark.'' Much of the time, ``The 10th Kingdom'' aims to be fun and tongue-in-cheek, not least when Larroquette's Everyman-style janitor, Tony, ends up dueling Blabberwort, Blue Bell and Burly - three alliteratively named trolls. ``We're three big idiots, basically - dangerous idiots, but that's where the comedy comes from,'' says Jeremiah W. Birkett, the 35-year-old New Yorker cast as the prosthetically challenged Blue Bell. Out of costume, Birkett is lithe and wiry and amiable. In full troll garb, he's trouble in bulked-up and toothsome form. ``I look a lot more formidable than I am,'' Birkett grins, then points to the set. ``You can't have a little lanky troll in there.'' For executive producer Robert Halmi Sr., troll size is the least of his concerns. Now 76, he is pondering a project that dwarfs even such past successes as ``Gulliver's Travels'' in 1996, which won an Emmy for ``The 10th Kingdom's'' English writer and co-producer, Simon Moore. At four hours, that was a mere lark. ``There's a Hungarian proverb that says `the brave have all the luck,'' says the Hungarian-born Halmi. ``You don't just imitate other people. That's stupid.'' Moore simply sounds happy to be getting onto the screen something he first developed 11 years ago as a two-hour feature, and which has since mushroomed into a ``maxi-series.'' ``There are not that many chances in life to do something of this length,'' says Moore, 42, of the project he says ``has the length and substance of a novel.'' ``I wanted to write an adventure series where the two central characters were completely ill-equipped to have an adventure,'' says Moore. He was prompted by ``the image of people lost in a forest that I kept coming back to when I reread the fairy stories.'' Moore cites a German antecedent for his work, at least as far as length is concerned: the 1984 film ``Heimat,'' which ran nearly 16 hours in length.