Getting personal

When David Hoberman was a boy, he told his mother he wanted to see a psychiatrist.

“She said, ‘You’re crazy,’ ” recalls Hoberman, a successful movie and television producer whose credits include “Bringing Down the House,” although here he sounds more like a borscht belt comic. “And I said, ‘That’s the point.’ ”

He still doesn’t know if he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder or was just extremely superstitious, but either way, he admits he wouldn’t walk on cracks. “I had to touch poles three times. On my bed stand, I had to line up 50 items like marbles, stones and little sticks. They had to be in the same order. In case a burglar came in, I would throw them in order.”

If that sounds like a notable television character, it’s because Hoberman is creator and executive producer of the lighthearted detective series “Monk,” which begins its third season tonight on USA. Second-season episodes of the hourlong series kick off Saturday on ABC.

Tony Shalhoub stars in his Golden Globe- and Emmy Award-winning role as Adrian Monk, a once-rising star with the San Francisco Police Department who leaves his job after the tragic murder of his wife, Trudy, triggers his obsessive-compulsive disorder. Thanks to the help of his nurse, Sharona (Bitty Schram), Monk has gotten out of his apartment and is using his brilliant mind to help the local cops solve crimes. But he’s still afraid of everything, including germs, heights, crowds and milk.

Unlike his fictional counterpart, Hoberman managed to break free from most of his ritualistic behavior when he was about 14. “In my prayers, I had to add someone every night. My prayers got so long, I couldn’t get to sleep, so I went cold turkey on everything.”

Sitting cross-legged on a chair in his rambling ranch house in Brentwood -- once owned by Richard Widmark, it was the house Lucy tried to visit in a famous “I Love Lucy” episode -- Hoberman doesn’t seem to have any lasting effects from his childhood rituals. He’s happily married with children and owns an aging German wire-haired pointer named Buster who is snoring nearby.

Hoberman is just now starting to talk about how his own experience influenced the Adrian Monk character.

“What the show is really about at its heart is a man who has an illness and struggles to get through life, and we can laugh with him,” Hoberman says. “When he was married to Trudy, he was neurotic but she was his ballast. When she died he became agoraphobic and couldn’t leave the house for a few years. We are picking him up after he’s gone through therapy and worked with Sharona.”

Hoberman says he was never paralyzed with the same type of fears as Monk. “But I think in some way we all stand in our own way sometimes. If we get out of our way, we would be better people.”

He admits he’s still not above standing in his own way. For instance, he is petrified of elevators.

“I will take the stairs if I can,” Hoberman says. “I had a shrink in Century City and I had to walk up 14 flights of stairs to [the office]. I can’t lock public restrooms. I feel that I will get locked in [if I do]. I think I am afraid of being stuck with my own mind.”

In a twist that could’ve come from a “Monk” episode, there’s a twist to ABC picking up repeats of last season’s shows, as it did two years ago when it aired repeats from the first season. ABC is where Hoberman originally pitched the concept. ABC bought the idea and then the search was on to find the perfect Monk. “ABC wanted Michael Richards,” says Hoberman. “He was suppose to meet with us and then he canceled out. We spent two years trying to cast it and couldn’t come up with someone they liked and we liked.”

Casting sessions, Hoberman says, were relentlessly depressing because the actors had decided to physically manifest Monk’s problems. “They would come in with twitches,” he says.

Eventually, ABC let the series go. As fate would have it, Hoberman soon received a call from a former ABC executive and a champion of “Monk” who had moved over to USA. “I never watched USA in my life, so I didn’t even know what they did,” Hoberman confesses. “It wasn’t on my radar.”

Casting continued to be a challenge. Shalhoub finally got the role after his manager read the pilot and called Hoberman. After some initial trepidation, Shalhoub signed on.

Executive producer and writer Andy Breckman wrote comedy scripts for Hoberman when the latter was president of the Motion Picture Group of Walt Disney Pictures in the early ‘90s. Hoberman, says Breckman, “had a development deal at ABC and was trying to think of TV ideas. We were having lunch and among the subjects he brought up was this idea about a cop with OCD. I know a good idea when I hear one.”

Hoberman, he says, is “obviously smart. You know he’s obviously committed. He’s passionate and I love him as a partner because he respects me enough to know when to shut up and let me make my own mistakes. It is everything you would want in a partner and a wife.”

People with OCD, says Hoberman, have embraced the quirky series. “The one thing you find out is OCD is like having a bad back. Once you have a bad back and you start talking to people about it, everybody has a bad back. And everybody has some kind of ritualistic behavior, some perfectionist behavior.”

Hoberman is soon to go into production on a remake of “The Shaggy Dog” with Tim Allen and has several feature films due for release this year including a remake of “Walking Tall” with the Rock and “The Last Shot” with Alec Baldwin and Matthew Broderick.

Despite his track record, Hoberman confesses it was a “horrible” transition to go from a movie executive to independent producer. “Once you are running a studio there is a lure, a comfort and a power thing,” he says. “There are a lot of attractive aspects to it. I don’t think people ever want to leave that job.”

When Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney and producer-director Joe Roth came in to replace him, Hoberman’s power was diminished. “Joe didn’t have the job that Jeffrey had going in, so the ceiling lowered on everybody,” he says.

“You would go from greenlighting movies to needing someone else to greenlight movies. It’s a big thing taken away from you. Joe was very generous and very kind, but there are few experiences where one day you are king of the hill and the next day you are climbing up the hill. It’s a tough emotional transition.”

Unlike in TV, where network heads often have producing experience, Hoberman notes that most movie studio executives have little or no background as producers.

And yet, he adds with a smile, “producing is not a goal, it is an inevitability. If you are at the best of what you do, you’ll end up producing, and if you can’t get a job, you’ll end up producing.”