“will ferrell will play fictional author eric jonrosh in 'the spoils of babylon,' a sendup of 1980s

Will Ferrell will play fictional author Eric Jonrosh in 'The Spoils of Babylon,' a sendup of 1980s soaps

Leave it to Will Ferrell to channel Orson Welles at his very worst.

While it wasn’t exactly a remake of “Citizen Kane” that producers had hoped to lure the comic genius in for, their offer to have Ferrell do a sendup of Welles’ cheesy early-’80s commercials in which the legendary thespian was swilling and shilling wine for Paul Masson, was more then enough.

It was for those classic spots that Welles can be seen today drunk and slurring his lines in outtakes posted on YouTube. And they would serve as inspiration and model for Ferrell’s Eric Jonrosh, the fictional actor turned narrator for IFC’s six-part “The Spoils of Babylon” miniseries, which debuts on the network on Jan. 9.

Katrina Marcinowski/ IFC Devon Morehouse (Tobey Maguire) & Lady Anne (voiced by Carey Mulligan) in “The Spoils of Babylon” “Matt Piedmont, who directs it, just sent me the YouTube links to the Paul Masson version of Orson Welles,” Ferrell told The News, about the fateful email from his former “Saturday Night Live” collaborator. “The ones where he’s really drunk, and [Piedmont] wrote, ‘I think Eric Jonrosh is that type of guy’ and ‘you’re going to have to wear a fat suit.’ “‘Done.’”

By the time Piedmont was done, the cast was set for the sendup of the melodramatic prime-time soaps of the late ’70s and early ’80s like “The Thorn Birds, “Winds of War” and “Dynasty,” and was padded out as thick as Ferrell’s fat suit.

Katrina Marcinowski/ IFC Haley Joel Osment plays Winston in “The Spoils of Babylon.”

“Spoils of Babylon,” based on the greatest of the Jonrosh’s 40 fake novels, stars Tobey Maguire as Devon, the adopted heir of oil baron Jonas Morehouse (Tim Robbins), who battles his feelings for his sister Cynthia (Kristen Wiig) by first volunteering to fight in World War II and then by marrying a Lady Anne (a mannequin voiced by Carey Mulligan).

Over the course of the decades-spanning epic, even relatively minor parts are played by the likes of Val Kilmer, Jessica Alba and Michael Sheen.

“I’ve got dirt on every one of these actors, that’s why they did it,” says Piedmont, who co-wrote the script with another “SNL” vet, Andrew Steele. “You’ll have to ask them why they chose to end their careers on this note, but I’m happy that they did.”

SABO, ROBERT A. Will Ferrell plays the fictional author Eric Jonrosh in “The Spoils of Babylon.”

Haley Joel Osment — who plays Cynthia’s illegitimate son Winston, a schemer who the actor describes as the “Shakespearean bastard” — was so excited after reading the script that he grew out a beard for four months to look the part.

“Then on the first day [Piedmont’s] like I’m sorry, the way this continuity is going to work we have to shoot all this 15-year-old stuff first, so I had to shave,” laments Osment.

But that just made Winston’s tears the more realistic when Piedmont busted out old Panavision and Cinescope camera lenses — the products of another age to make the look of “Spoils of Babylon” timeless.

Katrina Marcinowski/ IFC Cynthia Morehouse (Kristen Wiig) and Chet Halner (Michael Sheen) in “The Spoils of Babylon” “He got all these bizarre lenses that are strong stylistically that you wouldn’t really have a place for them in a movie,” says Osment. “So Matt’s using like these big focus lenses so somebody’s eyeball is like right up to the camera and someone else is like hundred feet away and you have both of them in focus.

“You’d have these incredible melodramatic arrangements while we are having big emotional arcs. It was so ridiculous.”

Of course, all those lenses and feeding the cast left little money to make the World War II scenes as realistic as, say, “Saving Private Ryan.”

“We had two full Boeing 747s to get the cast and crew over to the Pacific Theater,” swears Piedmont, though it was really shot in stunt double Southern California.

But if the audience falls for “Spoils of Babylon” next week, Piedmont and Steele have

grandiose plans that would put Winston to shame.

“Mr. Jonrosh has written 40 books and we have the rights to 22 of them,” deadpans Piedmont. “The sky’s the limit on where we can go with it. If Eric wrote a biker novel in 1969 under a pseudonym Carl Bulge...”

And Piedmont adds that Ferrell is locked into the project: “He can’t do anything else until we finish this out.”