Horton’s Shaggy Director Story

Four years ago, before they created “thirtysomething,” Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz wrote a TV movie in which home-video footage was used to tell the story of an adolescent filmmaker trying to make sense of his mother’s fatal bout with manic depression. But they couldn’t agree on which of them would direct it.

When they finally sold it to NBC, still arguing over who should direct, they struck a compromise and gave the job to Peter Horton.

Peter Horton? The shaggy-maned actor who plays Gary, the I’ll-never-grow-up English professor on “thirtysomething”? The blond guy who looked perfect for his part in that forgettable beach volleyball movie “Side Out”? The man who used to be married to Michelle Pfeiffer?

Yep. And, according to Zwick and Herskovitz, who had hired Horton to direct six episodes of “thirtysomething” before handing him the reins of “Extreme Close-Up” (airing at 9 tonight), he’s a formidable one.

“I don’t feel quite old enough to be a mentor,” said Zwick, now 38 and the director of last year’s feature film “Glory.” “But I know there is a great pride in having devoted real time and collaboration with someone and to see their mastery just bubble up.”

It’s not unusual for actors to move behind the camera. But Horton’s ambition was to direct even before his acting role on “thirty-something” made his feathery long hair and scruffy beard famous among women aged 18 to thirty-something. In fact, he turned down the part three times before finally signing up on the condition that he be allowed to direct episodes as well as act in them.

“I really didn’t love acting anymore,” explained Horton, who before “thirtysomething” had appeared in such TV and feature films as “Freedom,” “Children of the Corn” and “The Men’s Club.” “The roles I was getting weren’t very good. I was fed up with it. I was really ready to be a director, and the notion of being commited to a series as an actor seemed like it would obviate that.”

But taking the part not only rekindled his interest in acting, Horton said, it bolstered his directing career--maybe even saved it before it began. Unlike most other series, “thirtysomething” permits the director of each episode to experiment, to risk, to strut his or her stuff.

“Because Ed and Marshall are directors themselves, they really encourage other directors to come on the show and really direct,” Horton said. “They don’t try to put the show in a straitjacket by saying, ‘This is how we shoot. This is our lighting, this is how we cut. Now do it.’ It’s an incredibly unique laboratory in which to learn the craft.”

Horton, who gives his age only as thirtysomething, actually had directed before, a 1984 “Afterschool Special” for ABC called “One Too Many” that starred Pfeiffer, Mare Winningham and Val Kilmer. He persuaded the network to give him that chance on the strength of a home video he’d made of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, which starred friends from his acting class. He shot it in his living room with ‘40s period props left over from the movie “Swing Shift.”

“Initially I had a college degree in music and I wanted someday to become a conductor,” Horton said. “So I had that leaning to begin with--that need for control and that need to be the boss, not an employee.”

“Extreme Close-Up,” starring Blair Brown, Craig T. Nelson and Morgan Weisser, is Horton’s first chance to deploy some of the directorial expertise he’s picked up on “thirtysomething” in a full-length film. Made for about $3 million, it depicts the deterioration of a family of five as the mother’s mental illness sinks them all into despair and alienation from one another.

“Peter’s real gift is that he knows exactly what he wants, but you really have the feeling that you have a great deal of latitude to try things in your job, whatever it is,” said Brown, the amiable star of TV’s “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” and the manic-depressive catalyst for the emotional wallop of Horton’s TV film.

Brown, who directed the final two episodes of “Molly Dodd” that will air on the Lifetime cable channel next year, said that what lures actors to directing is simply that “you get tired of being the thing. The hair and makeup and all that other stuff is important, but it’s not very interesting. And finally you are so limited by your own package--who you are, what you look like, how you appear to other people. As a director you are limited only by your own imagination. You’re freed to create and imagine, and you truly do feel more solidly yourself than you ever do as an actor.”

What Horton imagines now is moving into the Wonderland of feature film directing, where the production lasts three months instead of three weeks and the budgets are routinely six times more than what he had for “Extreme Close-Up.” The problem, as he sees it, is that unless the director is someone like Martin Scorsese or Milos Forman, Hollywood is rarely open to serious, personal films like “Extreme Close-Up” or his “thirtysome-thing” episodes. Whatever their merits, such seriocomic movies as “When Harry Met Sally . . .” or “Ghost” are, Horton says, “a little too safe for me.

“I’m really hoping they give me a shot at ‘Die Hard 3,’ ” he jokes. “But no, the key for me is finding something that really hits you, that is more than entertainment. Like in (Forman’s) ‘Loves of a Blonde,’ there’s a whole texture of feeling in there that gives you a whole new perspective on things. I’d love to do something like that.”

Isn’t that a bit pretentious coming from someone who still has a long way to go before anyone compares him to Leonard Nimoy, let alone Forman?

“Of course I can be pretentious,” Horton answers, tugging at a strand of his hair. “I still have this beach thing to overcome.”