To every Schroder, movie is a project dear to their 'Hearts'

* OUR WILD HEARTS. 8 p.m. Saturday, Hallmark Movie Channel.

WHEN Ricky Schroder makes a movie for the whole family, he doesn't mess around.

"Our Wild Hearts," a film about a rancher and the teenage daughter he never knew he had, comes to the Hallmark Movie Channel on Saturday with Schroder, his wife, Andrea, and each of the couple's four children represented.

Their daughter Cambrie is making her movie debut as the Malibu-reared Willow, who decides to track down the man whom her mother (Angela Lindvall) met and fell for at a dude ranch 15 years earlier.

There Willow will fall in love, too - with a wild horse named Bravo - while encountering a couple of characters whose family resemblance (they're played by her older brothers, Holden and Luke) we're apparently meant not to notice. Andrea Schroder, a former contestant on Bravo's "Top Design" and a partner in her husband's production company, also plays a small part. And if you look closely, you might even spot the couple's youngest child, Faith, among the extras.

"Our Wild Hearts," though, should probably be considered a Sweet 16 present for Cambrie, a high-school sophomore who's been itching to follow in her father's footsteps.

"It was actually . . . Cambrie's idea and my wife's idea to come up with a story where the whole family could work together," Schroder said during a Hallmark Channel party in Pasadena, Calif., in January.

"They pitched me, and I said, 'I like it. I'll write the script,' " he said. He also directed.

Cambrie, who bears a striking resemblance to her father, especially when she smiles, "had opportunities earlier and I just kind of held her back," said the actor, whose TV career took him from "Silver Spoons" to "Lonesome Dove" and "NYPD Blue."

"She was a racehorse, wanting to go, from a kid. Like me. Out of all the children, she's the most like me."

But the 42-year-old Schroder, who started his career at 5, would first like to see her go somewhere he didn't - college.

"This is just the beginning for her and she has a long future and there's no reason to rush it," he said, noting that Cambrie's also a varsity swimmer and a star student. "She wants to go to Stanford."

And, like her character, she's been riding her whole life.

Playing someone who breaks horses for a living might not sound like much of a fatherly sacrifice for the New York-born Schroder, who fell so deeply for the West while making "Lonesome Dove" that he bought a ranch in Colorado and lived there with his family for seven years before moving to Arizona and, eventually, to another ranch outside Los Angeles.

Except that Schroder's allergic to horses.

"I've done Westerns my whole life. I just don't rub my eyes or nose" around the horses, he said. "I did 'Lonesome Dove,' and I rode horses for three months. And sneezed and wheezed my way through it."

He's also not quite as no-nonsense as his character, who clashes with his daughter over the practicalities of ranch life.

"We have three mini-donkeys right now that we're having a kick with" (and that don't give him hives), Schroder said.

And the point of mini-donkeys?

"They are very friendly, very smart, very social," he said. "Bottle-raised, so they want to always get in your lap, practically. They're just tender creatures. They're cute. They're pure pets. Just put them in the pasture and let them mow the grass."

Maybe they'll make it into the sequel.