Macy and Schachter tugging at us again

The adaptation of the 1962 film 'Gigot' premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday on TNT.
By JANICE RHOSHALLE LITTLEJOHN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES -- William H. Macy and director Steven Schachter have officially joined their production companies. And they've got the T-shirts to prove it.
"See, we've started many organizations," says Macy, "and the first thing you do is you get the T-shirt. You gotta have the T-shirt."
The gray cotton shirt T is emblazoned with the logo for Dog Pond Syndyk Works and the silhouettes of two men in hard hats and sledgehammers.
And Macy wants to see the emblem on a whole wardrobe: "Shorts! We could get boxer shorts or something. Yoga pants."
"Where would you put the logo?" Schachter asks.
Emmy winners
The last time we saw these two yucking it up like this was at the 2003 Emmys, where they won awards for TNT's "Door to Door." (The story of a man with cerebral palsy determined to become a salesman won six altogether.)
They had written a joke acceptance speech because they didn't expect to win, then delivered it anyway, dispassionately thanking various networks that had passed on the film and all the agents they had left.
The morning after, TNT wanted them to do something else. But, Schachter says laughing: "We won't go into the sordid details, but it was not a slam dunk to find a project."
"It was brutal," says Michael Wright, senior vice president of original programming of TNT. "No matter what you do, let's face it, is likely impossible to match in terms of its awards and its ratings."
New project
The key, Wright continued, was to find a project "that interested them and us the most" and that film is "The Wool Cap," premiering at 8 p.m. Sunday on TNT.
An adaptation of the 1962 film "Gigot" -- which Jackie Gleason starred in and co-wrote -- Macy plays a mute building superintendent with a checkered past who befriends an agile 9-year-old girl (Lauren "KeKe" Palmer) abandoned by her drug-addicted mother. Don Rickles, Ned Beatty and Catherine O'Hara also star.
"I had seen this movie as a kid," Schachter says.
"But everyone has the same memory as Steven," adds Macy. "They all say, 'Ah it's so sweet. I saw that when I was 12. I loved it."'
"Then we screened it and went, 'Oh my god, it did not hold up,'" Schachter says. "It was pretty much one note and then the story died. But the essence of the piece was wonderful ... so we pitched that [but] we wanted to make it a really urban, gritty Christmas story."
With so much of the film centering on Macy's character, who has absolutely no dialogue, writing it proved to be another big hurdle.
"Since it's all mime, I just wanted to make sure that I could do it," Macy says. "It was a curve ball in every single scene because we had to figure how we were going to have a dialogue scene with only one person talking. Steven's answer to everything was, 'You're very clever. I know you'll figure it out. You won an Emmy for God's sake!"'
Macy and Schachter, both credited as writer-producers on "The Wool Cap," have been best friends since they met in 1971 at Goddard College, where they studied with David Mamet.
As a director, Schachter has cast Macy in several projects, including Mamet's "The Water Engine," both on Broadway and in the screen adaptation for TNT. As writers, they've collaborated on several TV scripts, including the TNT film "A Slight Case of Murder."
"But we didn't come to the table as writers," Macy says. "We started writing after my career was in the toilet so that I could act and so that Steven could direct. Now there's a possibility that we'll write [films] that we don't direct or star in."
"Write for the art of it," Schachter says, laughing. "Somebody else can screw 'em up."
But based on her experience, "The Wool Cap" co-star Palmer doesn't foresee the two ever letting anyone give less than their best.
"They really try to help you," she says. "I can remember in one scene, Steven would tell me something, and I didn't get it, it was like he was speaking in Spanish, and William would help me, like he would translate."
Next
So what's next for the Dog Pond Syndyk Works?
There's a based-on-true-life story for CBS and a project for Showtime tentatively titled "The Accountant and the Stripper."
"Now that we have the T-shirts, we have to do something," says Schachter.