‘FRANK’S PLACE’: A DASH OF CREOLE ON CBS’ MENU

Austin Leslie, 53, owner of New Orleans’ Chez Helene restaurant, complained that the people “up north” in California just don’t know beans about Creole cooking.

“They don’t use the seasoning properly,” he fretted in a recent telephone conversation. “They don’t know how to use it, and they don’t have the confidence to use it. We use a lot of spices; that’s what creates the unique taste.”

Despite their base “up north” in California, producer Hugh Wilson, actor Tim Reid and CBS executives here hope to bring a little of the uniquely spicy taste of New Orleans to prime-time television next month with “Frank’s Place,” a half-hour, laugh-track-less comedy series loosely based on life at a Creole restaurant--modeled after Chez Helene--in a predominantly black New Orleans neighborhood.

Wilson, who also produced the late-’70s comedy series “WKRP in Cincinnati,” wants the show to capture the spirit of New Orleans that haunted him following an exploratory visit to the city: “That town is all about food, music, whiskey and death,” he mused during an interview at his Universal City office. “In the black neighborhoods there, the major power centers are the pulpit and the funeral home.”

Reid also found that in New Orleans’ French Quarter, a funeral could be the highlight of the day. “In New Orleans, a funeral is party time,” he said.

Although the series, which premieres Sept. 14 but normally will be seen Saturdays at 8 p.m., has yet to be sampled by the American public, it was a favorite among representatives of CBS-affiliated stations who met in Los Angeles in June, and again among national television critics who saw it during the annual CBS press tour in Redondo Beach earlier this month.

Even Brandon Tartikoff, entertainment president of rival network NBC, gave “Frank’s Place” a plug in a recent news conference by citing it--along with ABC’s “Hooperman” from “L.A. Law” creators Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher and NBC’s family drama series “A Year in the Life”--as one of several new quality shows for fall.

Wilson wrote the pilot episode of “Frank’s Place” and will serve as executive producer and a writer on the series for Viacom Productions; Max Tash is series producer. Although the show will be produced in Los Angeles, the main titles were filmed in New Orleans, and Wilson, a Florida native who spent 10 years in Atlanta before moving to Los Angeles, plans periodic visits. “I don’t think I can write this one from Brentwood,” he said.

Both Wilson and Reid were fascinated by the ethnic mix of Chez Helene’s clientele, which they will preserve in the series--and, they hope, in the audience. “It’s not targeted at black audiences, because you can’t succeed that way, but I want it to seem authentic to black audiences,” Wilson said. “We hope it will attract a lot of different kinds of people.”

Said Leslie: “In New Orleans, blacks and whites always did eat the same food.”

Wilson brought Leslie to Los Angeles to cook the steaming mountains of food that appear in the pilot episode; he will be the show’s long-distance food adviser. Creole cooking, Leslie emphatically pointed out, is not to be confused with Cajun food, the country-French diet of the New Orleans poor.

Reid, best known for his role as the colorful Venus Flytrap on “WKRP” and a longtime associate of Wilson, stars as Frank Parrish, a Boston college professor who comes to New Orleans upon the death of his estranged father, who left him the restaurant in his will. Fully intending to sell the establishment, Frank is seduced by the food, the atmosphere, the quirky employees and a mysterious voodoo spell to give up his life in Boston in favor of staying to run the restaurant.

Among the regulars at Frank’s Place are wheelchair-bound matriarch Bertha Griffin-Lamour (Virginia Capers), owner of the local funeral home, and her daughter Hannah, the embalmer, played by Reid’s wife, Daphne Maxwell-Reid. The embalmer was originally slated as a male character until Reid and Wilson met a young woman embalmer at a New Orleans funeral home.

The young woman’s complaint that her dates always expected her to have cold hands inspired a scene in the pilot in which Hannah dips her hands in a bucket of ice before shaking hands with Frank.

The rest of the cast includes Tony Burton, Frances E. Williams, William Thomas, Robert Harper, Francesca P. Roberts, Lincoln Kirkpatrick, Charles Lampkin and Don Yesso, a man Wilson happened to meet on an airplane who just happened to have an authentic Louisiana accent. “He had that accent down cold, and I hired him,” Wilson said.

Unlike most TV series ideas, which are pitched to the network by the producers, the notion for a series set in New Orleans came from CBS entertainment executives Kim LeMasters and Gregg Maday. Maday, LeMasters said, wanted a show that highlighted music he described as “a different kind of blues, a Bo Diddley, highly energized, upbeat blues, not the moody blues.”

And “we wanted to do an exploration of (black) people who were not just the Cosby family--who are doctors and lawyers with thousands of dollars--but really hard-working people,” LeMasters said.

LeMasters, CBS’ vice president of programs, said the show landed on Saturday nights at 8 by the process of elimination--to sidestep competition with certain shows and to avoid the jarring effect of placing a half-hour show without a laugh track in the middle of a lineup of more traditional sitcoms on a weeknight.

“It’s got unique and different faces; who would have thought of locking the lead character into a situation by using voodoo at the end?” LeMasters continued. “I really applaud those guys (Wilson and Reid) and the boldness that they have.

“And if it’s stumbling in the ratings, we won’t pick up the phone and say, ‘You have to add a laugh track.’ It may fail, but we’re certainly not going to tamper with it.”