Past Imperfect -- Not One To Look Back, Actor Skerritt Finds `There's A Lot Of Hope In Seattle'

LOS ANGELES - For Tom Skerritt, the thrill is gone. And the memory is fading fast.

Quizzed about some of his earliest acting jobs on television, including appearances in episodes of "The F.B.I." and "The Fugitive," he grins and draws a blank.

"Don't ask me. All I can remember is having done several `Gunsmokes,' " says the 59-year-old Skerritt, taking a break from filming "Picket Fences," the new series that has lured him into his first ongoing TV role (Fridays at 10 p.m. on Channel 7).

With a jazz tape playing on the stereo in his trailer on the Fox Studios lot, Skerritt tells a story about watching TV one afternoon. He remembers flipping around the dial to find the 5 o'clock news and suddenly coming across a black-and-white face that looked strangely familiar.

"I thought, `That must be one of those guys in the '60s who was kinda hot in television and probably got into dope or somehow got lost in the mill.' Then they went to a master shot and I realized it was an old `F.B.I.' that I did. I didn't recognize myself."

Skerritt - another in the growing number of entertainment industry commuters who call Seattle home - hopes "Picket Fences" will leave a more indelible impression than his earliest TV roles. Skerritt stars as the sheriff of tiny Rome, Wis., a town where the whitewashed surface is peeling away, revealing deposits of kink, crime and even some comedy.

Skerritt's grizzled good looks should be familiar to magazine

browsers (he appears in a long-running series of Guess? jeans ads) and moviegoers. He acted in "M # A # S # H," "Top Gun," "Alien," "Steel Magnolias," "Poison Ivy," and a passel of lesser movies which the best reason to rent would be to watch him.

He also plays the mayor of Seattle in a cameo in "Singles" (a recent role, but one so brief Skerritt looked surprised when reminded of it), and co-stars in "A River Runs Through It" (to be released Oct. 9).

Projects like that - pleasurable to make and reflect on - have been few.

"Acting," he concludes, "the joy of that is gone, pretty much." His voice is soft and hollow, like the sound the breeze would make blowing over the mouth of a big pop bottle.

"By joy I mean the pleasure of creative challenge. They say: `He plays bad guys' or `He plays good guys' or `He's a good father role.' They keep casting you in the same kind of stuff over and over again. It becomes a job, what we do for a living."

His trailer contains fewer personal touches than the typical office cubicle. On the table, a recent copy of The New York Times Book Review, with a piece about Norman Maclean, the author of the novel "A River Runs Through It" on which the movie is based. Over there on the floor, the tenor saxophone that Skerritt is learning to play.

Punching the clock in Los Angeles, on an hour-long TV series, Skerritt says, "was unimaginable to me six months ago."

He said no to an audition for the role of sheriff Jimmy Brock. No to a meeting with the show's creator. He even said no when, after those other refusals, a money offer was put on the table.

"I guess they kept thinking `no' meant I wanted a little something else. They were right, as it turned out," Skerritt says. "The more they kept coming back and being persistent about it, the more appealing it became."

He likes the offbeat style of the show. He likes Kathy Baker, the actress chosen to play his wife, the town doctor. He likes the sheriff's part as straight man in this cockeyed hamlet, where the police dispatcher is a busybody, the defense attorney recalls a Catskills comic, and the coroner is a borderline necrophiliac.

Mostly, though, Skerritt likes the promise of freedom and influence that a starring role in a successful network series could bring. If "Picket Fences" builds a solid enough viewership to last several seasons, he could afford to become more finicky picking and choosing film roles. Also, the money and influence could help groom some of his pet projects - including education for poor children, and a home-grown Northwest movie industry.

"Celebrity doesn't mean diddly-squat if you don't give back," Skerritt says.

The actor says he's working to "pull together" a fund for private schools "that could best serve impoverished children." He turned over his fee for "Singles" to a local charity aimed at improving poor families' nutrition. He also helped make possible a benefit screening of "A River Runs Through It" in Seattle Oct. 4, with proceeds to go to two environmental groups and The Northwest School.

Skerritt also imagines an indigenous, independent film industry taking root in Seattle, where successful features could be financed, written, acted, directed and shot using local talent.

"I don't know that I'd want to spearhead it. I would love to participate in it," says Skerritt, who relocated to Seattle about five years ago. His wife now owns and manages a newly constructed Victorian-style bed-and-breakfast on Lopez Island. His brother, Richard, who's older by 11 years and owns a Tacoma building supply company, first introduced Skerritt to the area.

"I think Seattle by the turn of the century will be the cultural center of the West Coast if not this country," Skerritt says. It has "intelligence, good taste, great creative energy. It's an issue-oriented city instead of politically oriented. There's a lot of hope in Seattle."

Skerritt prefers looking forward to looking back. He adds no details to the sketchy facts of his childhood in Detroit, or his decision to study directing in college.

His father invented unglamorous industrial doodads: clips for automobile grille covers, valves for humidifiers. Richard Skerritt remembers his brother's quiet-talking style started early. "My wife always said, `Tom, you're a mumbler.' That's back when he was 16, 17 years old."

Skerritt softly admits he hasn't seen several of the movies he's appeared in, including the creepy "Poison Ivy," where he played an aging TV station manager seduced by his teenage daughter's calculating new friend (Drew Barrymore).

"Sometimes you read a script and it isn't a picture you'd pay seven bucks to see," Skerritt says. "But then you think, `Well, the character's OK.' Or the film is being shot someplace really interesting. Or sometimes it's neither one but they're paying a hell of a lot of money."

His role in "A River Runs Through It" took him to Montana for filming, and paired him with director Robert Redford. Redford, coincidentally, appeared in the same movie that gave Skerritt his first screen role, 1964's "War Hunt."

Skerritt landed that part after moving to Los Angeles and appearing in some play. "It might have been `The Rainmaker,' " Skerritt says. "I don't remember. It was a long time ago."