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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