Starweek article 1989

Transcription by Elaine Davenport

by Jim Bawden

"I'm hoping it's a case of three times I get lucky," says Scott Bakula, the engaging star of Quantum Leap. "I thought I had it made when Gung Ho got on, but nobody seems to have watched it. After it was cancelled, I wasn't sure I wanted to try again, but Eisenhower and Lutz came along and I took it. Another major disaster. I didn't think it could happen again with last season's Quantum Leap, but we were in 52^nd place in the ratings."
To Bakula's great surprise, Quantum Leap survived the NBC cut above such higher-rated series as sexy Nightingales. "I was told it was NBC president Brandon Tartikoff's favorite new show. So we've got a second chance. The critics loved us, but the public was busy watching other series."

Critics impressed
TV critics have taken to calling it the best hour on American TV this season.
Bakula pauses to sip his Perrier in a Century City coffee shop. He's spent his summer vacation enjoying "a few weeks in Hawaii and then the rest promoting the show."
Production was to start in a few days, but Bakula still had interviews to get through.
"I thought the theatre would be my life," he says. "I really like the live audience feeling and the chance to bounce energy off them. I was stymied at first by the coldness of a TV studio. But I learned that acting on TV means giving less. An arched eyebrow acquires significance in a close shot."
Bakula has so far been little affected by being a near-star on TV. "People only think they recognize me so far. I'm not a household face. And the way the series works, I play different people every week."
The series playful premise has Bakula as a physicist named Sam who gets trapped in a time-travel experiment. Every week he's forced to travel backward and forward within the exact period of his own lifetime. "That means no period stuff from 1066. Everywhere I go I displace another person, becoming that person. The audience always sees me as me, but other characters see me as the person of the week."
So far he's been a 70-year-old black man ("what a trip that was"), a Mafia don, a baseball player in the minor leagues ("I was a good athlete in high school") and—gulp—a woman.
"Wardrobe department had a difficult time getting me size 11 pumps. Can you imagine going into a department store and asking for size 11, triple E? And pantyhose for a 6-foot, 3-inch guy? How do women survive shaving their legs, armpits, wearing greasy lipstick? But when it all came together I was quite a sight. We were filming on location and I got some wolf whistles. Very unnerving."
Co-star Dean Stockwell plays a colleague who's trying to get Bakula back to the present. He appears as a mere hologram, visible and audible only to viewers and Bakula.
"Yeah, that's what I wanted," Stockwell told me a few evenings earlier at an all-star NBC party. "A TV series. After I got my Oscar nomination (for playing a Mafia boss in 1988's Married To The Mob), the network was a bit nervous. Would I want to continue as second lead on TV? I said hell yes! Every actor's trying to get into a series. It's steady work and the exposure's great."
And steady it is. Bakula says he works 16-hour days "every day. I'm rarely off and there's always next week's script where I'll play somebody completely different."

Went too far
Producer Don Bellisario was preparing the pilot and thought of Bakula based on his standout performance in the Broadway play Romance, Romance. Bakula won a Tony nomination but was looking for work when the TV script arrived in the mail. "I never thought I was the leading man type," Bakula says. "Even on stage, I drifted to character parts. I think my features are out of whack. Love scenes make me giggle."
Although he studied pre-law at the University of Kansas, Bakula says he "had to try acting. I did as much local theatre as possible, then spent 10 years in New York, mostly working on the off-Broadway circuit. I was scared to death of coming out here because I knew New York, and the business really depends on who you're friends with."
Bakula believes Quantum Leap confuses many viewers because every episode is set at a different time with constantly changing characters. "The core of me has to be the same. The audience has to recognize me somewhere under the makeup. I think we went too far out the first year. We became terribly outrageous just to be outrageous. I want some more cerebral stories."
Still, Bakula believes the series is going to make it because viewers are intrigued, wondering what it must be like to be a number of different people. "The grass is always greener. For all of us."