HALMIS' LEGACY A HALLMARK OF CHANGING TIMES FOR TV FILMS.

Byline: Geraldine Fabrikant The New York Times

Robert Halmi Sr. and his son, arguably the biggest producers of television movies in the world, are discovering that the growth of the medium around the globe, which once fed the audience for their films, is creating aggressive new nationalist competitors.

``Business has gotten far tougher,'' said the 73-year-old Halmi, chairman of Hallmark Entertainment, a division of Hallmark Cards Inc. His 40-year-old son, Robert Halmi Jr., who oversees the business side of Hallmark Entertainment, concurs.

``In 1996 we released 86 made-for-TV movies,'' Halmi Jr. explained. ``This year we are down to 59 films and next year we plan to release 40.''

Hallmark's credits range from the acclaimed ``Lonesome Dove'' to mundane fare such as ``Terror in the Family.'' But today the Halmis, like other TV producers, are responding to a marketplace where movies with provincial American themes, which once found audiences around the globe, have less appeal for foreign buyers. Instead, Halmi Sr. has tried to turn to films with international appeal.

This fall, for example, the Family Channel showed Hallmark's ``Mother Teresa,'' a two-hour movie that is expected to run in more than 30 countries by the end of the year. ``Stanley and Livingstone,'' a two-hour production scheduled on ABC in December, already has been sold in that many markets. ``The Odyssey,'' released last year, won several Emmy awards.

Transfer of skills

This is not the first shift in focus for Halmi Sr., whose colorful career in this country began in 1950. After being arrested by the Soviet occupation forces in his native Hungary while working as a photographer for the U.S. Information Agency in 1949, he escaped and fled first to Austria and then to the United States. Initially he worked as a photographer for Life Magazine. When its heyday was past in the early to mid-1960s, he transferred his visual skills to documentary making and then segued into television movies.

His first credit was ``My Old Man'' with Kristy McNichol. But far better known are two eight-hour miniseries, ``Scarlett'' and ``Lonesome Dove.'' Not only did the latter gain strong ratings, but its cast - including Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, Danny Glover and Anjelica Houston - would have been impressive even for a feature film.

The inventory also included a wide range of more pedestrian fare. The company's strategy was to sell the United States rights to American networks and the foreign rights to stations and networks around the world. That was easier a decade ago, when government-owned stations overseas gobbled up American products without much thought to ratings. Today, however, with the privatization of many foreign networks and with local production companies springing up, governments are protecting the fledgling businesses with quota systems aimed at limiting the number of foreign shows.

And networks in individual markets are far more competitive with each other. Forced to generate the kinds of ratings that will lure advertisers, foreign networks and stations are getting ``far pickier about what they want,'' Halmi Jr. said. ``They have gone from government-owned stations to privately owned companies. They have to make money, so they need ratings. They won't buy just anything, and local programming is popular.''

What's translatable

``The trick now is to come up with `Gulliver's Travels' or `The Odyssey' that every country can claim as its own,'' Halmi Sr. said recently. ``There is a whole genre of American programming that cannot work overseas. It is too headline-oriented: the sickness of the month, the murder of the month. That is simply not translatable.'' And Russell Kagan, a packager and distributor of international productions, says his company's theme is: ``No more average vanilla television movies. We want big casts and programs that get ratings and reruns.''

Despite the decision to produce fewer films, the more international ``event'' movies on which the company now focuses have helped lift revenues and profits, the Halmis say. In 1994, they sold the television production company to Hallmark for $365 million. That year, it reported operating profits of $20 million on sales of $120 million. This year it expects revenues of $400 million and operating profits of about $60 million, Halmi Jr. said.

Even the Hallmark board was surprised that its television division could make more money with fewer films, Halmi Jr. recalled. ``Event programming is more profitable,'' he explained.

What foreign television companies want most, of course, are the TV rights to very successful feature films. So, overseas, the Halmis operate with a handicap against major entertainment companies such as Warner Bros., which can offer foreign networks packages that include successful theatrical features as well as television movies and series.

Increased difficulty

Still, even some of these companies said they had faced increased difficulty in foreign markets.

``Local production has increased, matured and become very popular,'' Jeffrey Schlesinger, president of Warner Bros. International, said. ``It is harder to get a program on the air overseas, though we have had some recent successes in opening up slots for `ER' and `Lois and Clark.' ''

Hallmark, which does not make feature films, cannot lure buyers with packages of movie hits. Nor can it afford to make television movies with the biggest stars. ``A feature film can be much bolder,'' Halmi Sr. said. ``There are no restrictions.''

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