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buffynha · 4 years ago

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Naya Rivera: A Film Critic’s Appreciation of a TV Star

https://medium.com/@tomcendejas/naya-rivera-a-film-critics-appreciation-of-a-tv-star-8857ddf4e69

Naya Rivera: A Film Critic’s Appreciation of a TV Star.

I was much older than the target demographic for ‘Glee’, but I watched it semi-faithfully for these reasons: A) the intentionally diverse casting and primetime representation of many marginalized groups B) the clever reinvention and integration of pop songs and C) Naya Rivera.

Truth be told, since the show could be so wildly uneven, Rivera was often the ‘A’ reason I tuned in, always hoping she’d get a scene or a number.

Naya Rivera portrayed Santana, the tart-tongued (to put it mildly) captain of Glee’s cheerleading squad. By casting an Afro-Latina actress in the part, the show’s producers were already trouncing on stereotypes; by the year of the show’s debut, curtly dismissive cheerleaders were a staple of teen-centered entertainment, but they were usually white and hetero. As the show progressed, Santana fell for her teammate Brittany, came out to her family and friends, graduated from high school, tried to make her way in the big city, and eventually married Brittany. As a queer Latinx young woman with entrenched defense mechanisms, the character of Santana had to bear a lot of ‘representation’ duty, like an extended cheerleading ‘shoulder sit.’ But here’s the thing: Naya Rivera made it all seem as if it were as easy as a pony-tail toss.

Re-watching the early episodes, with Santana barely getting a cutaway, it’s easy to believe Ryan Murphy that the producers didn’t realize the size of talent they had on their hands when they first cast her. Rivera didn’t so much fight for more screen time as her talent compelled it, willed it. She’s mostly background in the first few episodes, until Santana and Brittany (Heather Morris) get drafted by Jane Lynch’s villainous cheer coach Sue Sylvester (the show does not lack for antagonists) to infiltrate the new Glee club and destroy it from within. From her earliest numbers and ultra-snippy encounters with the other kids, Rivera’s Santana starts to steal scenes.

This wasn’t just a function of the writing and directing. In fact, as clever, campy, sincere and delectably witty as ‘Glee’ could be (rewatching it this week, I chuckled at lots of throwaway lines) it could also be clumsy and over-reliant on whimsy and parody, sometimes in the same scene. In order to make the repeated point that Santana was caustically tough on the outside because she was hiding deep anxiety on the inside, the writers gave her so many withering and cruel things to say that emotional reality was often sacrificed on the altar of ‘Bitchy Quirkiness’ and frankly, because you imagined the writers were cracking themselves up at the saltiness of their latest insult. (Some were classics; too many of them hung on the lower rungs of humor, including easy body function jokes.)

But here’s the next thing: no matter how ridiculously florid the abuse Santana hurled at a classmate or teacher, Naya Rivera delivered the lines with alacrity and impeccable timing. And that’s what really made me sit up on my sofa and take notice.

Here was an actress who seemed to have the range of the marquee women from Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ of the 30s and 40s. The tumble of words the ‘Glee’ writers gave her didn’t faze her; she could deliver them with the rapid screwball comedy chops of Rosalind Russell or Jean Arthur. In an era of more tentative, introspective actors, Rivera had the steely drive of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. Her larcenous way with a wry line was reminiscent of the great character actress Thelma Ritter; her ‘brassiness’ recalled Joan Blondell; the blaze in her eyes felt like the one emanating from Ida Lupino. (The comparisons had a visual equivalent — Rivera’s red-carpet personal style often favored form-fitting pencil skirts, modern iterations of a forties ‘dame.’)

Probably no greater compliment I can give is to say Rivera reminded me of the legendary Barbara Stanwyck. Able to navigate romantic comedy, drama and detective noir with husky-voiced fervor, Stanwyck could be devastating when she was furious yet hard to resist when she worked her charms. She was slight of figure but imposing of presence. Rivera had those cinematic assets as well. Because she started as a child actor, on ‘The Royal Family’ and especially on the great ‘The Bernie Mac Show’, by the time she got to ‘Glee’ she knew how to work a camera, as self-possessed and confident in her talents as Stanwyck was. Why this is important is that when an actor is too self-critical or tentative, we get uncomfortable or pulled out of the story. Reading testimonials from her cast mates (Chris Colfer says he sometimes was so in awe of her performance he’d forget he was in the scene with her) we see they also marveled at her self-assurance, and Rivera cannily used it to make Santana both poised and poignant.

Where Naya Rivera carved out her own space, different from most of our past silver-screen sirens, is that she could sing, and she was Afro-Latina, multi-racial, far from the whites-only casting of the Warner Brothers and MGM eras. That meant something to me; as a Chicano man of a certain age, I can remember times when I was a kid when my family would count all the ‘Latin’ movie stars we could think of and we often stopped literally with the fingers of one hand.

As someone who studies and loves writing about film, my head was nearly scratched raw from trying to figure out why Naya Rivera wasn’t swooped up from ‘Glee’ by the 2010s studio gatekeepers and given the chance to be a film superstar in vehicles that were worthy of her, bypassing the B-movie stage. She didn’t even get the big-screen ‘best friend’ parts in Hudson or Witherspoon rom-coms, which is what actresses of color with comic chops were often relegated to in the 2000s. Why this oversight happened, and I’m sure there’s a lot of background showbiz politics and personal reasons as to why, the result is we were denied someone who could have been a major screen star and given us the pleasure of an above-the-title, singing-dancing-acting triple-threat. If Rivera had been white, the big-screen star-making machinery would have overcome all obstacles to not just take a risk on her, but bet on her.

It really felt like Naya Rivera could do it all. Stanwyck and Davis had formidable talents, but singing wasn’t considered one of them, so that made Rivera a modern-day extension of their bravura, as though they’d been reincarnated in a child actress who was bristling at the confines of Disney channel and tv screens.

And Rivera had that voice! Some of us have our own version of a sort of ‘opposite ASMR’; we derive pleasure from singers who have a husky rasp in their voice, and rather than whisper, know how to belt. In this regard, Naya Rivera was a godsend. It gave her the ability to tackle songs associated with Tina Turner and Amy Winehouse and Stevie Nicks, no small feat. Yet Rivera could also narrow the grit in her wide voice to just a few flecks of hurt and hope, as in the poignant moment when she confesses her love to Brittany in a plaintive version of Christine McVie and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Songbird.’ (This will sound like sacrilege to other Fleetwood Mac fans — I’ve seen the band in concert many times — but I just never really responded to McVie’s performance of her song except in cool, admiring ways. But I found Rivera’s vulnerable cooing of the song transfixing.)

Rivera’s musical performances on ‘Glee’ traversed many genres, but nothing seemed to catch her off-guard. I enjoyed many of the singers on ‘Glee’ —the show had over 700 musical numbers! — but if Rivera was given the lead, you knew you were about to get a showstopper, complete with signature focus, considerable ebullience and precision as a dancer. These gifts were captured best when ‘Glee’s’ hyper-active camera and editing stood still and just let her perform.

Rivera tackled Turner’s ‘Nutbush City Limits’ with ferocity. It’s too bad that the way she was filmed — with the aforementioned slice-and-dice, even leering editing — forever leaves us with a case of ‘what might have been.’ We get precious snippets of seeing Rivera singing, while the musical filming style of ten years ago, influenced by ‘Moulin Rouge’ and ‘Chicago’, attempts to whip us into an erotic frenzy with close-ups of halter-top abs and pom-pom zooms. This was a shameful miscalculation, because it has the opposite effect. If the camera had just stood planted and simply recorded the performance, Naya Rivera would have delivered the sexual fire and then some.

The best musical numbers with Rivera showcase all her talents — the ability to act out a lyric, the Fosse-flavored choreography, and a singing voice alternately tender and roof-raising. Her performance of Winehouse’s ‘Valerie’, in which she gets to ditch the ‘Cheerios’ uniform and stomp the stage in a party frock stands out as one of ‘Glee’s’ best and most effortless songs overall — it really looks like a romp that captures teenage brio and which would be electric to see live. (Later in the show, when Rivera sings ‘Back to Black’, you even got a glimpse that, as criminal as it might seem to suggest to purists, there’s a helluva Amy Winehouse jukebox Broadway musical waiting in the wings somewhere, and Rivera could have easily been its star.)

As commanding as Naya Rivera could be as a solo singer, her duets were full of a delicious tension. The job in a duet is to share the scene as democratically as possible while still bringing out the best in your partner and elevating the song. These were skills many in the cast had, though they occasionally had to juggle the meta-element that when the show became a phenomenon, the behind-the-scenes who-likes-who, who-hates-who gossip that fascinated early social media audiences could be at odds to the show’s scripted plot (though it seems the show’s creative team also deliberately worked the real-life stuff into the fictional stuff. A notable example of this was when Rivera and Lea Michele, who were rumored and since confirmed to be clashing backstage personalities — and as recent reports show, Rivera wasn’t the only one to find Michele difficult — sing a sweet song called ‘Be Okay’, almost as though they were ordered to by the network. Both are thoroughly professional, and by the end you don’t just think that maybe Santana and Rachel are really friends, but that Rivera and Michele had buried all their hatchets in a Fox studio wall as well.)

The duet partner for Santana I liked best was provided by one of ‘Glee’s’ other volcanic vocalists, Amber Riley. As Riley has since shown in her London West End role as Effie in ‘Dreamgirls’, and in TV productions of ‘The Wiz’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’, she is a formidable talent. Yet watch one of their songs together, ‘The Boy is Mine’, and see if your eyes don’t want to stay just watching Rivera’s performance in its entirety?

To see a more dynamic and perfectly matched dual performance, ‘Glee’ gave us the galvanic gift that is Amber Riley and Naya Rivera alternating and harmonizing into their own ‘wall of sound’ on the Tina Turner classic, ‘River Deep Mountain High.’ Turners vocals on the original are so singular, nothing can touch them. Just the way she crests the first line with a jagged crag in the middle of a note lets you know this is going to be sung from a place of both ache and power.

The ‘Glee’ version leans into the power angle. Santana and Mercedes brim with the ‘girlpower’ term used at the time, the youthful brio of being able to dream of scaling mountains. The choreography then counter-points and really gets it right by giving the singers the dance moves reminiscent of 60s girl-groups, and while it starts out sort of cute and ironic, by the end the choreography becomes mature and electrifying. When Riley sings the first verse, she has gospel runs and exquisite phrasing. She could easily overwhelm anyone. Rivera’s choice is to find her own place to put the appealing but melancholy cracks in her voice, harmonize beautifully, and then release her own blasts of power. The performance says more about ‘empowerment’ than pages of script could. ‘River Deep Mountain High’ is also notable for giving Rivera a chance to be charming in ways she usually didn’t get to be with all her ‘mean girls’ posing; when they get to the part about the ‘rag doll’, both singers mug, but Rivera’s brief clownishness when acting out that rag doll is unexpectedly loose and charming.

Of course, the journey for Santana on the show, and you’ll find many ‘Glee’ fans and pop culture critics who will argue that the show ultimately was about Santana, crucially centers on the classic ‘finding your voice’ view of young adulthood, and central to that, the relationship between Santana and Brittany. Nearly any news or lifestyle site of the past week that had a space for pop culture featured the heartbroken, deeply affected voices of many lesbians and queer people writing about the deep connection they felt towards the relationship and the visibility and identification it gave them.

Of more than passing interest, depending on how transgressive you thought of it, was the pairing between an Afro-Latina character and a white blonde cheerleader who could have stepped out of the background of a Taylor Swift video. Think of where we were in 2009 and that still would have been pushing boundaries. (The show was one of the first to normalize same-gender kisses.)

In Rivera’s scenes with her non-accepting Abuela (the great Ivonne Coll), she is as real as it gets — not only deeply hurt, but uncomprehending in the way so many gay kids can be when they are rejected simply because of their orientation. “But I’m the same person I was a minute ago.” One can imagine these scenes (and the contrapuntal ones between Kurt and his more accepting father) provided a lifeline to young queer people themselves caught up in the process of making decisions about how to come out, and in particular, to Latinx queer people, who found representation and resources hard to come by and certainly not in the media.

And in real life, Rivera, who did not identify as gay, proved to be a significant ally. She responded to queer fans, particularly young women, and she represented by hosting the GLAAD media awards, advocating for The Trevor Project and by speaking responsibly and articulately about what her fans had confessed to her.

The way the show frequently featured LGBTQ imagery was playful and willful. They weren’t representing all queer women; they were representing these two using a particular transgressive iconography. Teen lesbian cheerleaders weren’t invented with ‘Glee’; the queer film ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’ was released in 1999. But by keeping Santana (as well as the other ‘Cheerios’) in their squad outfits 24/7, Rivera started to look like it wasn’t just her cheer attire, it was her superhero uniform. You have your masked and fully-covered marvels; here was a fearless teen titan in sleeveless emblematic mini-skirt cutting through the hallways. Her superpowers? A withering glare that could refreeze the Arctic, an ability to shoot insults like a laser beam, and a pinkie-finger-linking with Britney that could heal your heart. Most of all, a voice that could fill a canyon and fleet feet that could leap over all calamity.

Until she couldn’t. When superheroes die, mere mortals look to the sky and feel, perhaps unreasonably but still undeniably, abandoned. Shocked, stunned, grievous. We look backward, because looking forward has just been removed as an option, and the realization of what will never be is too excruciating.

I couldn’t figure out what happened to Naya Rivera after ‘Glee’, given my hopes and expectations. She released quite a catchy single, ‘Sorry’, and later a memoir, ‘Sorry (Not Sorry.’) I didn’t realize she had joined a new show, the Youtube continuation of the ‘Step Up’ series, but now I do and she’s terrific in it. But to those of us who dropped our eyes from her a bit, I just remember it was because it seemed like there was tabloid stuff, personal tumult, a few seemingly misguided appearances or comments here or there. I was a hopeful, hopeful fan of her talent, not slavish to any TMZ notorieties — but those great female stars of the 30s and 40s? They were no strangers to splashy headlines either.

When I did watch ‘Turner Classics’ or my library of DVDS with some of those ‘Golden Age’ actresses, more than a few times I’d think of Rivera, search IMDB to see if she was getting that Oscar-worthy role yet. Or when there were increasing public discussions that called for better representation of people of color in media, I’d think: Naya Rivera! What’s she doing now? Why isn’t she in a big movie, headed for her superstardom? How did Hollywood’s famously white-screen blindness eclipse even gifts this generous?

So I’d check in the way we do now, with her IG feed or in passing hear about the occasional tweet. There would be a picture of her beauty, sometimes posed in the ‘sexy’ currency that builds and keeps ‘followers’ entranced and ‘promotes content.’

But occasionally Naya would post a picture with her son Josey, who she eventually was raising as a single mom. As many of her followers saw, in those fateful days of early July, I ‘liked’ a beautifully tender picture with Mom and Josey, eyelash close, captioned ‘Just the two of us.’ It seemed so peaceful. This must be what she wants to be doing, I thought. Happy for her. One of the miracles of ‘Glee’ was how they put on hour-long musicals once a week for six years, with 18-hour days. Who could begrudge anyone some rest after that?

But selfishly I also still wanted that album, that movie, that new film directed by her, something more from the force of nature that is, was, Naya Rivera and I gave more than a passing thought that with today’s reckonings, with greater sensitivity to the racism that undergirded so many institutions, the world would finally open up to her in the way it did for so many white actresses before her. It was her time.

Until it wasn’t.

That’s hard to reconcile. We’re supposed to say, as fans from afar, our grief is nothing compared to that of her family, friends, cast mates and of course that’s true. But it’s also true that the grief of a fan is not nothing. Those of us who didn’t know her personally, but were in awe of her talent, shouldn’t shut feelings of loss down. I think it honors Naya Rivera to mourn publicly the way so many fans have, ‘Gleeks’ or not. She was someone who had such hard-won achievement yet still such potential. And for some reason, the power brokers that be didn’t see it or find a place for it in time. We can grieve that mistake, and that which can’t be brought back or won’t be left as a long-career legacy.

That someone with so much soulful presence could suddenly disappear from this earth, at a time when we are all so careful not to lose each other, was wrenching. In consolation, I turned to a lot of Rivera’s performances from the show, though now of course they all carry a melancholy, stinging twinge. (For more on this, just look at the many comments on the pages where the videos are originally posted.)

You hear Naya Rivera sing Winehouse, and it’s hard not to think of how they both died young. You see her love for Brittany acted so convincingly, you think about Heather Morris, the actress who played her and wonder how she will weather this — thoughts that are none of your business, but you still have them. I found myself thinking of Kevin McHale who played ‘Artie’ on the show, and who seems so clear-headed; what would he say? You read Chris Colfer’s tribute to her and shed more than a few tears. You hear her sing ‘If I Die Young’ in tribute to Corey Monteith, and you recall that Rivera’s body was finally found on the day that Monteith died. It’s a lot.

There’s a memorable moment in the early run when Monteith’s Finn stops Santana in the familiar Glee alley of lockers and linoleum. She’s annoyed that he has outed her, and indeed he’s done her wrong. But the character is also written as sincere. Finn’s logic may be that of a teenager’s but he tells Santana that he didn’t ‘out’ her to hurt her, but to help her realize that she would still be accepted. He’d heard of someone who recorded an ‘It Gets Better’ video but later killed himself. He doesn’t want that to happen to her; ‘you mean something to me.’ He tells her that if something ever happened to her and he didn’t do everything in his power to stop it, he could never live with himself. Santana is left speechless at the tenderness, even as she’s furious — Rivera could convey both in a single look.

The context we have now in 2020 makes the brief scene heavy with portent and sadness. In actuality, Rivera was saddened that she couldn’t do more to stop Monteith’s untimely death from a drug overdose. That would be subtext enough. But now, with the timing of her death and the anniversary of his? It’s shattering. But I kept watching, and there was something that reminded me of my own experience teaching high school. A few minutes later, or a few episodes later, the kids are singing and dancing and throwing ‘Big Quenches’ at each other, and seldom has the show’s mission to show the fullness of life seemed so clear. I’ve found that to be true when I’ve gone through difficult times, or my school has, and still had to walk through the classroom door. No matter how sad I’ve been, there’s always a student offering, well, cheer.

Maybe we did get the movie Naya Rivera was on this earth to make after all. Because that scene between Santana and Finn was early in the show’s run. By ‘Glee’s’ end several years later, Santana didn’t hurt herself. She survived high school, she stumbled a little but recovered, she found her way, she was able to get onstage at a Broadway audition and sing ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ and give us a big, big moment of triumph; maybe she’ll get the part, she’s definitely going to get the girl. Just like an old musical.

And that’s why I wrote this: we talk about ‘Glee’ as a TV show, but maybe it was one long film. If you go back and watch ‘Glee’ with a particular focus on Rivera, you’ll see an extraordinary rise-and-fall-and-rise-again achievement; she’s one of the major leads of an epic. Sure it’s a movie full of silliness, toss-aways, occasional meanderings or repetitive plotlines, but it’s also full of heart and compassion. This seasons-long coming-of-age starred this African/Latina/Queer Ally/Queen who reigned with a crackling laugh, a stunning beauty and vivacious spirit.

If that’s all we were fated to get of Naya Rivera, she hit her mark — the line where enough and not enough meet. Maybe the silvery phantoms of Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck, who all knew their own injustices within the Hollywood system, maybe they were all waiting in the wings as she sang the curtain down. “Come on kid,” they might say, in old movie parlance. “You went out there a youngster but you came back: a Star!”

✍️The Couch Tamale✍️

Film, Music, Peak TV, Diversity— Tom Cendejas is sitting on a sofa and unwrapping Pop Culture with a Latino eye, one husk at a time.

#Naya Rivera #Actress #Glee #santana lopez #A Film Critic’s Appreciation of a TV Star #beautiful writing

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leverage-commentary · 6 years ago

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Leverage Season 1, Episode 12, The First David Job, Audio Commentary Transcript

John: Hi, I'm John Rogers, Executive Producer and Writer of this episode.

Dean: I’m Dean Devlin, Executive Producer and Director of this episode.

John: This is the first half of the season finale. This is The First David Job for season one of Leverage. And it’s uh—how did we shoot this? This is an amazing thing we did with the two part finale.

Dean: This we got to shoot like a movie. So we, we shot these last two episodes as one big shoot. And I gotta tell you, this was more fun than you should be allowed to have in this world. I just absolutely loved making this episode. The, the cast was phenomenal in this— And—[laughs]—even though you had to write this script in basically five days—

John: Five days-ish, yes.

Dean: I think it’s one of the best scripts we had the whole season. I love this two-part season finale.

John: It’s a love—it’s a great hot-open, it’s a great Tim completely-out-of-control-Nate, a character out of control that you don’t usually see. Kevin’s great in this. He’s amazingly unctuous.

Dean: [Laughs]

John: Uh, I do like shrimp! And the toss-away, you feel this big drama and then you kind of throw it away. This location is incredible, this is a, um, part-campus, part-church-property up in Pasadena we basically moved to, uh...

Dean: Right. So we could live there.

John: Three days in. Right? We shot out the office...

Dean: If you look at this shot here, I mean this- just seeing this changed everything. When John and I looked at this we thought... because the party was originally supposed to be inside the gallery, and seeing this, it just, it felt so Dorothy Chandler Pavilion-esque, so museum-esque, we thought let’s move the whole thing outside.

John: Actually it kinda looks like, uh, the Lincoln Center. It’s kinda the same layout in New York.

Dean: Yeah, exactly. With the fountain and everything, sure.

John: Yep. So, yeah, we moved it in and then, uh—that was part of the fun of writing it, but also, I mean, we found the location and it made sense financially and we walked through the museum, the interior where we would be shooting the museum, and the entire crime was structured differently.

Dean: Right! [Laughs]

John: And Dean was like, this is here and this’ll move here, and the entire crime was highly dependent on the gallery being a small, contained space.

Dean: Instead—

John: Instead it’s a four-storey, open column with multiple levels and he said, uh, “All right, let’s film here!” and out he goes.

Dean: You know, occasionally, you’ll start with an image and then kind of back your way into it.

John: Yeah.

Dean: And when we saw this location, it was four storeys tall with these windows in the ceiling, all I could think about was somebody rappelling down that thing. So there was no rappelling needed in the heist—

John: [simultaneously] —in the original con—

Dean: -whatsoever, but you backed your way into it.

John: Yeah, you backed your way into it and that was great. That actually showed up in the Second David, that’s like—but we shot this, like I said, in the, uh…

Dean: That’s right, one big piece.

John: And this is the intervention. It’s interesting that the, uh, I was actually reading something—somebody emailed me on the blog saying, you know, if Sophie really cared, she’d have an intervention for him ‘cause he’s going out of control, well this is it!

Dean: Here you go.

John: This is the intervention. Um, and him—I will be the first to admit that the joke about “I’m a functioning alcoholic, let’s really celebrate the ‘functioning’”, is a joke I do in the room fairly often.

Both: [Laugh]

John: Um, Tim really is landing it here. I mean, it’s really tricky. Nate is a high-functioning alcoholic. He’s, as long as he’s got a drink he’s okay. As soon as he stops he spirals out and the whole point of it is, in theory this should have aired after The Rehab Job, where they realize he’s not able to hold it together anymore.

Dean: That’s right.

John: He’s out of control.

Dean: The other thing about this particular scene that I love is that they tell him he doesn’t need rehab, he needs revenge. So what we’re seeing, really, is from the criminal mind’s point of view—

John: Yes—

Dean: This is how you solve the problem.

John: Yeah. And they’re wrong, by the way.

Dean: [Laughs.]

John: That’s what’s fascinating is, if you look at it, you know, when you have a gang of criminals you’re not not-cognizant of the fact that they’re morally dubious.

Dean: Right.

John: And in particular, uh, we often address the seven deadly sins in the show. And this one, you know, sort of wrath, is what brings down the team. When they allow themselves to surrender to wrath before on all the other jobs it was about justice.

Dean: That’s right.

John: And there’s—we gave Chris the tuxedo.

Dean: Yeah, look at that.

John: Gotta give it to him.

Dean: All you Christian fans, you waited all year for this.

John: Yeah, he was, he kept playing waiters and getting very snickety about it, so we gave him this tux.

Dean: And as you said in the other commentary, when we did Homecoming, you know, he says, “Next time I wear the suit.” Well, this time he got to wear the suit.

John: The two-part finale really is where we closed up a lot of—there’s a lot of parallel shots from the opening couple episodes and the pilot. Uh, this is great—this is half Ledger, half Orange Box.

Dean: How did you come up with this whole bit here?

John: We wanted an item of art, we needed something—as soon as we settled that it should be a statue, uh, rather than a painting because they just move better, they feel better in your hands—we originally were gonna do some Chinese statues, some little jade lions or something like that. But then we said “Well that’s not really iconic, uh, so what’s the most famous statue?” Well The David’s the most famous statue in the world. But you can’t steal The David: it’s huge, and it’s in Rome.

Dean: Right.

John: And, uh, and then doing research we found out about the maquettes. Michelangelo actually made maquettes of David but they had been destroyed.

Dean: Ahh.

John: So we just fudged history just enough…

Dean: Right.

John: To come up with, um…

Dean: What if someone found them and they weren’t destroyed?

John: Yes, exactly. And that they had been collector’s items and stuff for 400 years. So yeah, there’s about 80% of this is real and the 20% is the fudge. Also, it’s interesting having Sophie do what is usually Nate or Hardison’s job, because this is an art theft. You know, this is her purview, this is her world. And this is the building we’re talking about, this is the campus building that we basically took over, built this secure door, built these wall. This is open, by the way. All these walls, we built.

Dean: Right.

John: Yeah.

Dean: This was an open lobby that we turned into an art gallery.

John: This is The Girl With the Pearl Earring. We just filled it with famous fake art. [Both Laugh] What we kind of subliminally know is famous. No, Lauren Crasco really knocked it out of the park on this. This is insane. Not only did she build walls, she made them look real and artsy.

Dean: And this is the actual basement of that same building. Steam we added.

John: We added steam. Just in case someone is going to that college, be aware there’s not loose steam floating around the bottom. Not gonna be accidentally scalded to death. And this was fun, because this is our, this is our high-tech heist. We hadn’t really done one since the pilot.

Dean: Yeah.

John: And, um, so we kinda kicked up the jams, and really used every electronic device I could find, in this. The thumbprint scanner, that’s what he points to, the infrared scanner, and the lasers—the lasers you added, actually.

Dean: Yeah.

John: And the detectors here. But you added the lasers because of the promos.

Dean: Yeah, it was so cool in the promos, how they had shot these things for TNT where Parker is maneuvering through these blue lasers and we thought, “We gotta put that in here somewhere.”

John: “We never do that.”

Dean: Yeah.

John: And that’s them in the van, on the set. Um, how did you do the lasers? That effect, how did you do that?

Dean: The lasers are all in post. It was all in post. I mean, there was some thought about putting a couple of real lasers, and then mixing it but then you have to use the smoke to see it, and it always felt so weird. And y’know, whenever I see these movies and there’s smoke there that’s conveniently there just so you can see the lasers... so we just thought let’s just do it all in post.

John: Yup.

Dean: And then we’re not married to any kind of onset effect.

John: This is, um, a fast open. This is actually stretching the ability to assume the audience will be able to follow the setup of the heist they’re watching actually go down simultaneously.

Dean: And it’s also a callback to the pilot, because in the pilot, you intercut with them sitting around the table talking about the heist as you see them do it, and here we kind of get to do it again. We’re intercutting with the heist and how they decided to do it.

John: Yeah. Again, it’s sort of an intentional echo. But I really felt we were—it’s tough, it’s a lot of new people in play. The last time we did it, it’s really just Nate in the pipe and then introducing the characters.

Dean: Right.

John: The fact that we have five people in play in both timelines is vaguely insane. [Both laugh] And introducing Kevin.

Dean: Who, by the way, was just terrific.

John: Yeah, it’s pretty cool having an actor like him on our TV set and shooting—one of the things about shooting in L.A. is you can get a guy like that, y’know. I sucked him dry on Emergency! stories.

Dean: [Laughs.]

John: Uh, Nate as cranky-asshole here really is kind of amusing, yeah. It’s, Tim really digs in on the aspect of the character. Oh, and Sophie’s name, di Duccio, is actually, she’s from the Vatican, it’s the name of the first sculptor who was supposed to work on the David and screwed it up.

Dean: Oh, you’re kidding!

John: And he shagged the gig, so they hired Michelangelo because basically they had like a half-carved piece of stone.

Dean: Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s fabulous.

John: So yeah, let’s use the first—that’s a little nod to anyone who knows the Michelangelo story.

Dean: The interesting thing for Tim, acting-wise in this, is we talked about this when we went to do the show, I said, “You need to portray Tim—portray Nate, portraying himself, as he was at the beginning before he met the rest of the team.” So it was a triple-layer acting, he had to act as his character, acting as himself.

John: Yeah. [They laugh.] And then break every now and then when he looked at Sophie.

Dean: Correct.

John: Uh, and this is really, yeah, the whole sort of frustration-anger speech here, and grabbing a drink. Not the smartest move you could have done there, Nate. [Dean laughs.] Um, we knew we’d want to bring in the wife…

Dean: Yes.

John: And we knew we’d want to do it for the season finale, we knew we were gonna bring in Mark Shepard. And that’s a lot of where this show came from, is like, what would his wife have done? And we had worked out the backstory that they were this kind of, you know—how else—Nate does nothing but work, therefore she had to be in the field somehow.

Dean: Mmhm.

John: We played around with different—and really, uh, the whole way this started, this show started was, the end of the first act is “Holy crap my wife is here.”. We had nothing else but that moment, but we knew that was a great moment that would utterly derail the team and derail Nate and Sophie, and he wouldn’t be able to deal with, so.

Dean: And we got the fabulous Kari Matchett to play the part.

John: Exactly.

Dean: Who had worked with Tim before on another series so they had had, all this, this real-life chemistry and history.

John: Yeah.

Dean: That helped fuel this relationship.

John: She’s fantastic. I mean, it’s really lovely and believable, and she’s so sort of brokenhearted over how screwed up he is.

Dean: Before we did this series, John and I did the third Librarian movie together and Kari had actually auditioned for it, and while she wasn’t right for the part she was so brilliant, y’know, all year long we kept thinking, how do we get her on this show? [He laughs.] How do we get her on the show? And then finally this worked out just perfectly.

John: This is great because really… Chris has been, Eliot has been hitting on her—the whole thing is Nate has been listening to him hit on this cute blonde the entire evening through the earpieces, and so there’s, there’s basically four conversations going on here simul—uh, y’know the three that they’re having up here and the one underneath. And it’s a, it’s a—God, this is a brutally difficult bit of blocking.

Dean: That was actually the hardest scene to shoot, believe it or not. Just ‘cause we got so confused on the eyelines there.

John: Yeah. Well yeah, when you’ve got five humans there. Now that’s, there you go, then you’ve broken them off in two and three and then you’re fine. Now how do you shoot a five-hander like that? How do you approach it?

Dean: Well, normally I’ll, I’ll like block it out in advance or I’ll have some kind of storyboards. I had just… not thought that one through. And so literally on the day, I was running around with the script supervisor, making drawings saying “Wait, does this work? Does this work? Does this work?” and about 50% of it worked and 50% didn’t, and then we fixed it in post. [Laughs.]

John: Ehh, that’s what editing is for. And then of course the great thing of their each listening to each other’s conversations simultaneously. It’s good use of the earbuds here.

Dean: But again, this is a thing that you do so well as a writer, that I just adore, is we’re in the middle of a con and yet, we’re getting all this character information. Sophie’s jealous about the ex-wife; the ex-wife being there exposing Tim, I mean Nate; Nate does not want to play that part in front of her because he wants to seem…

John: Yeah, he’s humiliated! Yeah, exactly.

Dean: So, we’ve got so many things happening simultaneously…

John: That’s a big comedy take he does, by the way. I love that “Nooooo” and she goes—and she’s going to help him because she’s sweet. And the trick is, and really when we looked at this, um, and there’s a little beat in the second half, uh, we realized that Sophie not liking the ex-wife was right down the middle, and she starts not liking her because of course she feels awkward. But the trick was the audience had to realize, uh, she’s not the enemy. You actually have to come out of the end of this going, “Wow, I wanna see more of her.”

Dean: Right.

John: “Nate really screwed that up.”

Dean: Yeah. Yeah, I think Gina did an amazing job in how she played the jealousy and then the transition to, “I actually really like this woman.”

John: Yeah. Even, even Sophie can’t not like her.

Dean: Right.

John: And she just—it wasn’t her, it was Nate; Nate was a jerk. She’s just gone out of her way to help him probably do something vaguely illegal.

Dean: Right. Yeah.

John: Uh, yes. And this is the, this is the ad-hoc con. This is really, this was a trick because we have made the group so good at this point that really only by making them do something when they weren’t expecting to can we really challenge the hell out of them. Because—and that’s—we hung a lantern on it when she says the speech earlier.

Dean: Mmhm.

John “Oh, I could do this with our prep and our tech and--”

Dean: Right.

John: Well, not now!

Dean: Boy, and, you know, and again--kudos to both Aldis and to Beth. Y’know, they got--they’re locked in a van with nothing to do and yet, every time we cut to them it’s just delicious. They find ways to come up with, with ways to let their characters be unique in the situation.

John: It’s also one of the ways we had learned by this point to cut up these intercut headbutt scenes to make sure they stood alone and that you didn’t need to do the other voices, that you weren’t eating up, uh, shooting time.

Dean: And again this is one of these “Parker gets challenged to do the impossible”, which makes her very happy.

John: Which, by the way, I had not noticed until right now, because we’re kind of doing these commentaries in a row. That’s the exact same look she gives in Bank Shot when he asks if she’ll break into a bank that’s already been broken into.

Dean: That’s her Achilles’ Heel. If you want her to do something, tell her that no one else has ever been able to do it.

John: And that was Aldis, by the way, turning the David. Just sort of reach back and, uh, turning it away from her. And there’s—boom!

Dean: Yeah, I’m saying--

John: I will say—

Dean: This woman looks good in a dress.

John: So Beth comes in, you know ‘cause we’ve got her dressed like Parker all the time, and y’know she’s like…

Dean: Tomboyish…

John: She’s our sweet little sister.

Dean: Right.

John: I mean, really, that’s how you feel about her. And she showed up in that dress, and she comes in and grabs, I won’t say what writer it was, but she came in kind of self-conscious, like tugging the hair and “How does this look?” and literally all he could say was “Guh—guh—green”.”

Dean: [Laughs.]

John: “It’s green.” And then sort of wandered away like he’d received a head trauma. Yeah. Um, no, it’s great, we got everyone glammed up in this one. I think Aldis is the only one—and Aldis is in the suit later.

Dean: Right.

John: So there you go. Everyone gets to dress up. That’s always the fight, by the way, is um… Aaaand there’s the kiss everyone’s been waiting for all season.

Dean: And I love that look.

John: Because this is great, it’s a joke that not everybody gets it until he delivers the line. They don’t know who she said “We should make out” to.

Dean: Right. And so they’re hoping it’s Sophie.

John: [simultaneously] It’s half and half it’s Sophie. Uh, they’re—oh, the guards did a great job. That guy auditioned for us and we wound up cutting like the part—

Dean: Right.

John: The day-player part two times, and it came back. And this gag actually came about because we almost set off the alarms when we were looking at the building. So we were like “Okay, so we know the door alarms work, all right”. And this, if you look at it, this has got five components to beat this heist. And this really was going into the big bag of heists and figuring out all the new tech and all the different ways you can beat it. And then Macgyvering the techniques.

Dean: And again, character being exposited in the midst of a con again. And showing the nature of their relationship. He’s talking about the kiss, she’s talking about the ex-wife.

John: As far as she’s concerned, she’s moved on. Now, she’s also in a little denial, here. I mean, let’s be fair.

Dean: [Laughs]

John: It’s something we’ll address in second season, exactly the ramifications of that scene, um, love that look.

Dean: She’s so proud of her handywork.

John: Yeah, she’s so proud of her horrible, horrible handywork. And there’s the big “awwwww’ moment.

Dean: And they, again, a great Aldis improv again at the end of the scene.

John: Yeah. “Breath smell funky?” [laughs] Yeeeeah… and by the way, the way we’re beating the infrared is actually based on a Mythbusters episode I saw that discovers that as long as you can defuse the thermal imagery you can fake most of these infrareds out.

Dean: Oh, wow.

John: So yeah, this is the, uh--this was originally meant to work differently, we wound up finding out that uh you know you can’t just cook up a way to fool an infrared with gum and aluminum foil and have it work. We spent like half a day figuring out what shape would actually fool the infrareds. And, there you go. Boom.

Dean: And I love this bit.

John: And that’s a stunt team

Dean: Yeah

John: That the same girl from the pilot who went through the window.

Dean: Right.

John: And then her doing the landing. And this is, you know, me brutally abusing my physics degree.

Both: [Laugh]

John: But it’s fun--it’s fun facts, I did another pilot where we did the whole, glasses of fluid thing, and that was like the highlight of the show was, ‘wow I did not know that’.

Dean: And this is a great example for you young filmmakers out there, of why it’s good to have the writer on set. This was a bit that no one really quite understood correctly, including the actors, including me, including the prop guy, and it was just, “Jooooooohn!”.

John: [Laughs]

Dean: Jon came running in, and he set everything up, and then it was like, “Oh, okay, now we get it.”

John: “Now we get it.” Yes, describing this in text in not the easiest thing in the world. Oh, I love that shot! That’s such a heist film shot. The sort of coming up to the David, and him claiming there’s no way she could have come up with this. That is also a subtle thing by the way, where--not super subtle--we don’t show Parker planning a lot.

Dean: Right.

John: And this is when you realize that - she was terrifying when she was a thief alone. I mean, that’s why he chased her. That’s why she has the reputation. And that’s really, a really big empowering moment where you know, the only reason he can pull this stuff off is because he has this team. You know, this family.

Dean: The best of the best.

John: Yeah. So, ohh--

Dean: Greeeeat- She can’t help herself but be jealous.

John: And especially because all she’s doing is being--all Kari’s doing there is being super sensitive and empathetic

Dean: And of course Christian getting frustrated that Sophie’s about to blow the whole thing because she’s letting her personal feelings get in the way. Anything you can do to get Christian frustrated.

John: Good use of the comms there. And the flip, with the earthquakes… this actually is based on a problem that my alarm guy, when I had an alarm installed in my house, he told me happened all the time.

Dean: Really.

John: Is the fact that after an earthquake, they basically just ignore all of the alarms that happen for like 15 minutes after the earthquake. So…

Dean: Because they figure it just set it off?

John: Yeah, it’s either that or drive to every single house in the region, so…

Dean: Now, by the way, to get all those car alarms to go off, we literally had to go set off all the car alarms.

John: Seriously? Because that’s crew parking.

Dean: Yeah we called the crew, we had them all come over with their keys and my assistant and the ADs were sitting there literally hitting the panic button on all the keys for cars at the same time.

John: The neighbors didn’t mind us there.

Dean: Nooo, no, they loved us. [laughs]

John: So it is amazing, I mean, when we first started writing this show we would complicate these things to an incredible degree and a lot of little twists and turns. We realized that really what you want is - one job with three complete acts.

Dean: Right.

John: That you can show a lot of fun process in, and that fills an act! Really, that’s all you’re really there to hang out--as long as you do character stuff during it, you’re okay. As long as you’re not just off doing heisty stuff and ignoring the characters.

Dean: Again, shout out to Lauren Crasco, and just how those things hanging in the background give such legitimacy to this

John: Oh yeah, the museum banners. That’s incredible. When we got there that day and saw those, we were like… you’re high, this is insane. I can’t believe--and by the way, that’s not expensive, that’s like printing on fabric and hanging it up.

Dean: She just is so clever in coming up with ways to give us production scale when we have no budget.

John: And the two guys basically arguing over, you know I wasn’t flirting with your wife really, and--it’s just--

Dean: And I love her line. “We just stole this on our day off.”

John: And that’s what’s, that was kind of interesting was, moving forward I really had the first act for this thing in my head. And then the heist all the way through, but this is the end of the episode. The end of an episode of Leverage is that thing we just did. We have an entirely separate thing we have to do now.

Dean: Right.

John: And luckily we knew we were bringing Sheppard back, so… Mark Sheppard back, so we then turned it into the second con.

Dean: And the interesting thing here is this is the first time we’re seeing Sophie con the team.

John: Yes.

Dean: And the only person in the room who’s noticing it is Tim.

John: Yeah, see, look how enthusiastic they are and watch her turn there and she realizes he’s on to her. And she’s gonna try to bluff him out. No, it’s really nice--cause you realize, he chased her and this was part of the relationship. He sees through her.

Dean: That’s the reason she loves him. He’s the only one who can see through her. He’s the only man in the world she can’t con.

John: Yes, it’s just right now, really inconvenient because she’s really pissed off at him. And, uh, by the way, rightfully so, because you know what? He’s not been the most pleasant guy in the world over the course of the season. You know, the behavior to the wife is inexplicable until he explains what’s going on here. And he is - he’s putting- Her viewpoint is he’s putting his wife ahead of the group.

Dean: Which, by the way, a lovely twist on this is that, you know, we’ve seen the pilot and... The assumption was - that the wife knew everything. And suddenly in this scene it was the first time we realize that our audience is actually ahead of the wife.

John: Yeah.

Dean: That she--we all know something that she never knew about her own son’s death.

John: I, you know, this… it’s hard. Every relationship is different, but there’s a line coming up here where he says “She pities me.” And that really was one of the things that was born—that gave birth to “the wife doesn’t know”. Because I know in my marriage, the thing that would destroy me is if my wife pitied me rather than hated me.

Dean: Mmhm, interesting.

John: And that was--the idea that he would bury that information rather than lose her--in a futile attempt not to lose her--and then let the guilt of that secret destroy their relationship, is the sort of incredibly bad choice you make when you’re a control freak.

Dean: I have to say, Tim really brought it this day. I mean, his performance in here has a lot of levels going on. One great thing about having an actor the caliber of Tim Hutton, is when you have very difficult scenes like this - on a TV schedule - you know he can bring it.

John: Gina’s making a lovely choice here too, which is, there’s a lot going on in this scene, because she’s decided to try to go after her life’s dream because Nate has pissed her off; Nate has revealed that she shouldn’t be as pissed off as possible, but she’s still going to do it--

Dean: Because she’s still just as much of an addict as he is.

John: As he is, exactly. And she feels, really, that that’s all she’s got. And there’s a lovely, there’s basically the moment here when she says, you know, “You’re still straight, the whole world’s gone crooked,” where she kind of realizes it’s never gonna work.

Dean: Yeah.

John: Yeah, or at least, as they are now. The two of them, their fate is essentially sealed at that point.

Dean: This is a real private airport in Van Nuys; Elite is the real name of the place. And they were so gracious enough to let us shoot there. This is such a difficult kind of location to get for a show, and these guys could not have been more helpful.

John: That was shot by the way at night, we blew out those windows, right.

Dean: That’s right.

John: We just--thank you, Southern California blown out sky, for giving us that light.

Dean: So if you’re in the market for renting jets, call Elite, they did us a solid, we wanna do them one. [laughs].

John: This is--everyone’s very busy here, man. This con just frickin’ moves. And being able to borrow a jet really does make a difference. I have to say, you used to own a jet—

Dean: I owned a jet a while ago until it sucked me dry.

Both: [Laugh]

Dean: But it’s actually where that one but of dialogue that he came up with--when he says all these things he wants to check, I actually threw those lines in because those were all those things I had to do to the jet when I owned it. I had to put in the RBSM, I had to put in the 8211 spacing…

John: Which destroyed your need for a jet.

Dean: Exactly.

John: And, uh, Aldis again, very great. It’s interesting to see what characters you’re gonna throw at him that he can’t do. We have yet to be stumped. We don’t--we give access to Gina, but Aldis is very good--

Dean: Nice little improv from our day player here.

John: Just get--move it, move it!

Dean: He’s a hard-ass.

John: Great day player. And it was interesting shooting here, because this is still a working airport.

Dean: That’s right.

John: So there’d just be jets taking off sometimes when we were trying to do dialogue. And you can’t really interrupt ‘em.

Dean: Again, kudos to our sound people for being able to get the sound at an airport with airplanes taking off. Just outstanding.

John: Look at that, how that one shot picked him up, brought him all the way around till you found Parker. That’s nice, it’s like you planned that.

Dean: Thank you.

John: That by the way is her stewardess outfit from...

Dean: Mile-High.

John: Her flight attendant outfit from Mile-High. With the bow.

Dean: We thought we’d bring that back.

John: I do like the idea, something we toyed with but we never showed, the idea that they’ve got the warehouse full o’ costumes.

Dean: You know, we know they have the hanger full of—the notebook full of badges, but…

John: Uh, and this exchange is actually based on something I was reading about, the sort of dead zone when planes are able to land and refuel as long as you don’t get off they don’t go through customs.

Dean: Right.

John: And I was fascinated by that because that seemed like such a highly abusable thing. And it turns out it’s highly abused.

Dean: Yes, it is.

John: And Dubai, we’re doing the Dubai accent there that’s nice. The idea of a sort of Oxford educated Sheik rather than a traditional horrible, he’s Bandar Bush, there. He’s meant to be kind of the Westernized…

Dean: I’ve always wanted to do a little short film just for the web of what’s going on with those pilots inside during this scene.

John: I know!

Dean: “What’s with him with the head-dress?”

John: Well, that was we were supposed to do the tow around and we realized it wouldn’t work unless we got the pilots back on… uh, we’ll just assumed they’re very puzzled.

Dean: [laughs]

John: And he’s fabricated this headdress from possibly a tablecloth inside the plane.

Dean: Very good, a great location, and the actors really used it well.

John: And the creepy sexual thrill Kevin portrays here when he realizes that it’s real…

Dean: Oh, the applauding is so creepy.

John: Yeah. Uh, he’s actually playing something which might not--you might not spot, he’s actually playing kind of a crush or attraction on Kari.

Dean: That’s right.

John: Because she’d kinda worked with him--and actually, if you notice it, it does add a little something to this show.

Dean: And on some level, he thinks he’s gonna win her over during all this.

John: Yeah. The identical...

Dean: [laughs] I love that moment! It’s so creepy.

John: The identical looks, the identical con… And by the way, it was great, those maquettes were fantastic.

Dean: Yeah

John: Eric Bates, Props, did that.

Dean: Fantastic work. Eric always delivers for us.

John: There was a big argument about how anatomically correct they would be.

Dean: Yeah.

John: Because David is very anatomically correct and, uh, not so much… but then we realized it was a maquette and probably Michelangelo didn’t spend all that time honing up the fine details in that region.

Dean: And who needed the controversy.

John: Exactly.

Dean: This is a great moment between Tim and Christian here, again playing up this whole “He was flirting with the ex-wife” and...

Both: [Laugh]

John: But there’s also a bit when he says “No,” that is, um… you know I always talk about in the writing room because that’s… when you have sort of like Tim Hutton, it’s like, “Oh, I can give him pretty much anything.” He’s signing off on this. He knows he’s irredeemable at this point.

Dean: Mmhm.

John: To a great degree. And he knows he’s never gonna see her again. Um, which is why, y’know, essentially, they become destroyed. That’s not his judgment to make, really, it’s her judgment to make, and he takes that in—onto himself. Uh, this started as separate gag and then we wound up finding out customs didn’t work the way we thought it did. And so we had to sort of work around, and also combined with you wanting to get Parker on top of the truck—

Dean: Yeah. I desperately wanted to do this thing where Parker jumps off of a bridge and lands on the truck.

John: Yeah. Again, backing into an idea. [As Dean laughs throughout] “Hey John, here’s an idea--” “Uuhhh, so, why is she getting in the truck?” “Well that would be your problem wouldn’t it?” “All right…” Typeity typeity typeity, don’t mind me…”

Uh yes, the con actually starts with Parker in the truck in the perfectly shootable, um—we can just shoot inside the truck and ‘we don’t have to drive and make your first AD happy’ version—

Dean: Or--

John: Or, we could actually have stunty jump off a bridge onto a moving truck, uh, on a TV budget.

Dean: Thank God we’ve got Marc Roskin and Charlie Brewer.

John: Yes, exactly. Um…

Dean: Now the song playing in here is actually the song of a friend of mine, it’s—

John: I didn’t know that.

Dean: It’s produced by this guy named Michael Conner, and the artist is Shannon Blythestone, who’d actually been a contestant on American Idol.

John: Cool.

Dean: And she’s terrific and she has some great songs coming out.

John: Great act out there with Clayne, he’s um—y’know, the idea that our guys have screwed up for once, which you’ve never seen them do, we don’t know why they would have screwed up, we don’t know who would’ve tumbled them…

Dean: Talk a little bit about the actor playing the part, and how he came to us.

John: Uh, he’s actually one of Christian’s best friends. And, um, Chris said “You know, if I’m gonna have somebody kick my ass this season, I want it to be Clayne.” because when they were growing up literally they would play-fight in his basement.

Dean: Oh my god.

John: They would choreograph, like, fight scenes, and so it’s like, “Okay, if you’ve ever had the fantasy that you’d eventually make a movie with your best friend, after you’ve choreographed your lightsaber fight, this is what they’re doing basically.

Dean: [Laughs]

John: Yeah, and Clayne’s brutal, interestingly we had originally thought about casting, um, different guy, a bigger guy, and then the idea that it’d be a young, fast punk--

Dean: Right--

John: That really would just -- really fast hands, faster even than Eliot, really became attractive. And that fight laid out beautifully. Um, Alex Carter, I can’t believe we got him for the Busey of this.

Dean: And he’s wonderful.

John: Yeah, he’s fantastic

Dean: We’ve wanted to cast him all year, we just couldn’t find a part. And then, this came along. We were almost afraid to offer it to him-

John: Yeah.

Dean: Because you know we, we hold him in such high regard, but he was so gracious to come on board. There’s my jump!

John: All right, how did you do this?

Dean: So, live cameras. That’s actually the same building, the other side of our set for the museum, and it had this little bridge that was over a garage, and so we were able to intercut that with an actual underpass, and make it feel like it was all one place.

John: And this was a pretty good mix of a stunty wired to the top of the truck, but with a Guy-wire by the way. She’s not, uh--

Dean: Oh yeah, that was dangerous.

John: And then, and then Beth with the green screen--with a great green screen by the way, that was an amazing effect. I gotta say, it really worked.

Dean: And so much of this whole sequence done by Mark Roskin and Charlie Brewer, so again, hats off to those guys.

John: Yeah, this is basically just the ‘everything goes wrong’ fight sequence/stunt sequence. You took this act off.

Dean: [Laughs]

John: You were like ‘you’ve got one master of this’ and you went off and had people talking and actors and stuff. This, I will admit, originally dubious and then holy smokes does it cut together.

Dean: Yeah, and then the interesting thing on this fight scene is, that this is the only fight scene all year where he’s losing almost the entire fight.

John: Yes. Uh, all great--gotta give Aldis one good punch there, he can’t go down like a punk. But I love Alex’s read on this. “That’s enough of that.” Just, you know, he’s not upset or anything-

Dean: Yeah, he’s a pro.

John: How did you do, um, Aldis hitting the ground so hard?

Dean: We did it backwards.

John: Ahhh.

Dean: We actually started with him on the ground and then yanked him up, and then played it backwards.

John: “Gotta keep that left hand up, boy.” Yeah. Just, uh, and the idea that Eliot is just too—basically, too damn tough to fall down is a lovely beat.

Dean: Yeah. A little Jake LaMotta there.

John: It’s like, he’s realized he’s not as fast as this guy.

Dean: Right.

John: And so, and so he’s just gonna wear him out.

Dean: Exactly.

John: And uh, this is my favorite reveal all season because it’s not just a great reveal, it’s a great voice. As soon as you hear the voice--

Dean: You know.

John: You know who it is. [Laughs]

Dean: And Mark, once again, delivers for us.

John: Yes.

Dean: He’s so great.

John: And look at the look on Parker’s face when she turns around. Beth really--we--it’s a pity, because some of the stuff was cut from Two Horse. The sense of dread that Sterling inspires in other criminals...

Dean: Now this moment here, though, I love. ‘Cause Christian starts laughing, and the idea here is Eliot suddenly figured out how to win the fight.

John: Yeah.

Dean: Like, it came to him in his head, “Oh, I know the move.”

John: Yeah, ‘You’re gonna rush me and I’m gonna block that knee because you keep going to that knee, uh, that rib’s broken, yeah and--Boom! Just down. No elegance, no style, no grace, none of the stuff that…

Dean: Just takes him out.

John: And finding the earpod...

Dean: [Chuckles]

John: And that’s the announcement that we’re screwed, for the fifth act. Ahh, no that’s--I gotta tell you, I’m excited doing the commentary, I love that act.

Dean: Yeah. There’s so much going on at the same time.

John: Yep. So many great sequences, and then, uh, then Mark Sheppard just basically taking over the last act of the show. [laughs]

Dean: Yeah.

John: With yeah, and--just basically showing we’re all tied up, we’re all done, there’s a suitcase full of money-- and they’re in their home. Which, really--

Dean: That’s the spookiest part.

John: Yeah.

Dean: Well, we set that up in Two Horse when Mark--Sterling unexpectedly just shows up, at night, in the offices.

John: I love that crane shot, by the way. There’s not a lot of TV shows banging out the crane shot in a hanger full of planes. [Dean laughs] On a seven-day schedule. Nicely done.

Dean: You don’t see that often on other shows.

John: How long did it take you to shoot both of these?

Dean: Uh, in a normal schedule, in fact, in fact we shaved a day off, so between the two episodes we did all the--the whole thing in thirteen days--

John: Thirteen days, that’s right.

Dean: --instead of the tradition fourteen.

John: That’s right, because we didn’t have to move, because we were basically parked at that campus for the entire time.

Dean: Right. And there is efficiencies to putting these things together. This rooftop is in Pasadena.

John: It’s in Pasadena, that’s right. That’s the beautiful Pasadena mountains behind you. There’s an AT&T logo back there I never noticed before. We should have griefed [¯\_(ツ)_/¯] that. What the hell?

Dean: [laughs] Call ‘em up. They owe us some money.

John: Oh that fan was so loud behind them. But here you go, I love--this is, by the way, there was an argument--were they friends or weren’t they friends? And it wasn’t until this scene that I realized - yes. The way Tim and Mark are playing it, they were best friends.

Dean: Yeah.

John: And now it’s all gone horribly wrong. And that--it really adds so much layer to it. And also you see the glass there that he’s got is an image that we started putting together in this, and it also shows up in Twelve-Step—

Dean: Right.

John: The glass of scotch that they hand back and forth to each other as each one takes dominance in the relationship.

Dean: Yeah.

John: And in the second half of the season finale, they mirror this scene. And it was all Tim and Mark coming up with that physicality, by the way. I had it ‘a bottle’ and the two of them come up with ‘it’s exactly the same glass’.

Dean: [simultaneous with John] --the same glass. From the other episode. It was terrific.

John: And this is where I realized she’s screwed it up.

Dean: Yeah, this is a big moment. This is the first time he’s realized he’s been betrayed by someone he trusts.

John. Yeah. And--and again, you know, I sympathize with her. I mean, she’s…they’re... she’s disappointed, you know. This is the point where, she came into this thinking he was one type of guy, he’s not, he’s a jerk, he’s a drunk, he won’t seek help, he’s getting worse--yeah, I think she’s fairly well motivated at this point to do this flip.

Dean: And for Tim’s character, this is the reason why he never wanted to work with thieves.

John: Yes. You know, but it’s his own--

Dean: --his own making.

John: He’s blinded by revenge. And the two of them are blinded by their addiction--and that’s what brings them down.

Dean: And ultimately back together again.

John: Yes. I mean, Na--it’s only when he gives up revenge to a certain degree can he reunite the team.

Dean: Right.

John: Yeah. And that’s one of the things we’re talking about for second season, is--is he’s realized that when he’s opens that door, bad things happen to him. How far will he open it? But he needs that anger in order to drive the team.

Dean: Yeah.

John: You know, when he needs that sense of justice.

Dean: Everybody in this scene just did such a good job, acting wise. Cause there’s so many things going on, we find out about her having another name, Jenny, and we don’t know if she’s really Jenny, if she’s really Sophie. Everybody has so many different levels to play in here, and again, kudos to these actors, they’re so terrific

John: It really is just three people talking on a roof, and it’s a hugely dramatic moment, it’s nice.

Dean: And as you can see, almost no blocking.

John: Yeah

Dean: So they had no crutches, they couldn’t walk around

John: No bits of business, yeah.

Dean: Basically, they were left with just what’s inside their eyes. And that’s kind of- as a director, it’s not a nice thing to do to the actors, but when they’ve got the chops to pull it off, it’s very intense.

John: Yeah. And he’s taking a sip, and it’s just, you know, she doesn’t want to deal with this at this point, well there’s a lot going on in those looks. They’re great, you know.

Dean: And by the way, just as a side note, again shout out to Gary Camp our steadicam operator. We did more steadicam, percentage wise, in these last two shows than we’ve done all year. This show is more than 50% steadicam all the way through.

John: And sorry I’m just a little bit breath-wordless there, because, you know, in the script you type ‘they look at each other’ and then you’ve got Tim and Gina who basically do a three step conversation in looks, where you can track all the emotional arcs. The storage unit of Sophie Deveraux, this was the garage, this is the back half of the other scene of the other storage room, they broke into, with a fake wall up and a bunch of props from your other movies.

Dean: And fans of Leverage might notice that it was the Judas Chalice that she blew smoke on in the background.

John: I’m surprised there wasn’t a Stargate back there, I’m genuinely disappointed that we weren’t able to cram one back there. And this is the justification, and this is, you know...

Dean: Also this was a very interesting scene for us as far as Gina’s character. Because this is the first time she really shows her own vulnerability, and it comes out of her frustration or anger, but really for the first time we see that the essential problem she has in this relationship, which is that the person she cares about will always look at her as a second class citizen.

John: Yup

Dean: And that’s something she feels like she can never ever overcome, that he feels like he’s better than her.

John: And probably never even aware of it, you know? And here’s the thing, you direct the actors, I stay out of the way on that. I’m too busy coming up with insane things that are over budget to shoot. How did you prep them for this? This is the culmination of the entire season here, essentially, this argument. Really in the second half of this, in the second half of the finale they’ve rectified this, but you know, how’d you go into this?

Dean: Well when we talked about it in the scene, we said this is really the heart of why this relationship hasn’t worked this whole season. And it’s the first time we’re gonna kinda say it out loud.

John: And by the way, how frustrating to have a relationship that you realize can’t work after you’ve put them together? You’re like ‘oooohhhhhh’ you want them to, you really want them to, but writer- you know story wise, this is appropriate.

Dean: You can’t, yeah.

John: And when she says ‘you still see me as a second class citizen’ she’s not wrong, and he’s wrong to do it, and there’s no way around it.

Dean: It’s a great Mexican standoff. Which is why there’s really nothing else she can say except for ‘where do we go from here?’

John: And what does he do? He immediately shuts down and goes about rescuing the other people. Because emotionally, he has no idea what to do from here.

Dean: You know it’s a bit of a callback to The 12 Step when she’s calling him on his alcoholism and he says ‘just give me something to do’.

John: Yeah

Dean: The only way for him to handle this moment is for him to be proactive and do something.

John: Yeah. it’s like we think about this.

Dean: [Laughs]

John: I love the fact, by the way, that wall behind her is fake, and our sound mixer is actually crammed in a five foot square back there, we actually had to- remember we had to put up that wall to hide him because the building interfered with the radio mics.

Dean: That’s right.

John: Yeah, it was brutal. Back to the roof, and again there’s parallel scenes to the pilot in this, to when- what you see back in the opening show. With the absence of Mark Sheppard of course.

Dean: And the big twist here in the script, and maybe talk about how you came up with it, was the idea that Sterling can read them as well as Nate, so the only chance they had was to not think like themselves. Now, how did that come about?

John: It came about because I was thinking about how there’s two guys that play chess, and essentially as long as they knew what pieces they had in play, they could always beat each other. It was gonna be a tie at best. And what Nate realized is- and this was that ‘alright what I have to do to change the way the pieces move.’ And what this is really the payoff to is, when you’ve met them in the pilot, we actually said their jobs in the subtitles, like what all their jobs was. And that was all their jobs. And over the course of the season, they’ve become enough of a family that they can switch off if they need to if each other’s at risk. They couldn’t have done this in the first episode, and the crucial part, to me, of building a season arc, is that the people in episode 12 or 13 cannot be the same people that were in the pilot. At the same time the key to television is they’re the same people every week that you want to watch and see. The change has to be very incremental.

Dean: So really the emotional payoff here is they are, through their deeds, showing how much of a family they’ve become.

John: Yes. even though emotionally they’re not able to say it. And we specifically chose these roles. Sophie’s the last person you expect to see jumping off of a roof, and if you look at the pilot she and Parker rappel together and Parker makes her jump.

Dean: Right.

John: And the same thing here is- this is a callback to the fight sequence in the pilot where Hardison’s doing the hacking and Eliot’s doing the fighting. In this Eliot does the fighting and Hardison throws the first punch. So yeah it’s really- you know it’s fun- that’s why I like to do TV. You feel like you’ve gone on a journey and you feel like you’ve really completed something, you know? More than you can do in two hours.

Dean: It’s just a fun- it’s such a fun reversal. This whole idea is they have to think like someone else on their team to confuse-

John: I love that look by Chris, like ‘Yeah, I could take six guys on a good day. Don’t insult me.’

Dean: Just cause my ribs broken doesn’t mean anything. And then she reveals she’s got the rig.

John: The rig. I love that look, the little shit eating grin there. That wound up in the promos; that’s a really iconic shot for the show. And then him doing exactly the thing that Hardison did in literally the same format, in the van earlier in the show. And usually slow mo is your enemy, but this is nicely done. You know my hatred of slow mo, but this is actually the right place to do it.

Dean: And by the way, a little spooky running full speed on a rooftop, so kudos to our actors.

John: That drop- that drop killed me. We didn’t pop out to the master for that drop. When that- when they- the first time they did that in rehearsal, my heart stopped. Cause there’s a second roof underneath them but when people go off the roof like that in a deadfall? Not good.

Dean: It’s always spooky. I love this little pointing to each other. [Laughs]

John: Yeah, and that was improv’d. That was totally the actors - who, to tell you the truth, were actually kind of proud of the fact that they managed to pull that fight scene off.

Dean: Well that- the nice thing on that fight scene was, we shot that with seven cameras.

John: Really?

Dean: Yeah, so instead of breaking it down and shooting this part then this part. We literally just let them go do it. And we had all the cameras rolling simultaneously.

John: I didn’t know that. So that’s it, you know, a three way fight with that many stunties, that is a tough fight. They did a great job on that.

Dean: They really did.

John: That may just have been a ‘we didn’t fuck up that take’ finger so we just used it as an emotional payoff. Oh and I love-

Dean: And this is a great thing.

John: That painting will stay in the series for as long as we’re on air. I don’t know how we’re gonna use it, but I love that improv.

Dean: I like this shot, too

John: Yes. And you know what I love about Mark’s choices here - he doesn’t get mad, he assess his situation.

Dean: He finds someway to see a win in it.

John: Exactly. Alright you took my bishop, I’ll take your rook. He really has a plan.

Dean: It’s not a total loss.

John: He just doesn’t expect Hardison to flip the board off the table.

Both: [Laugh]

John: Oh that’s Pat Banta doing that dialogue.

Dean: That’s right.

John: He did a bunch of the fighting in the first couple episodes, he was in Indiana Jones - the last movie.

Dean: And is our other stunt supervisor when Charlie’s not around.

John: Exactly. And the big countdown of getting the hell out of there.

Dean: So this was a thing- we had the idea that we wanted to blow up the offices at the end of the season. But how do you go about blowing up offices on a television budget? So what we’ve done here is, we’ve actually taken a real building and put a model of the building on top of it, we blew up the model and composited it in with the actual building.

John: So that’s a tiny 1/8th scale model or something like that.

Dean: Just the top floor.

John: Of the top floor, blown up and then digitally dropped on top of this real building-

Dean: That we’ve seen all season long.

John: That we’ve been looking at all season long in downtown LA.

Dean: And then, of course, digital debris.

John: Boom. Digital debris. Sometimes a chair just falls out of the sky.

Dean: I would’ve liked to have done that for real, but the people of Pasadena were not keen on me throwing-

John: [Laughs] Strangely they don’t allow you to throw flaming couches out of ten story windows.

Dean: I don’t know why.

John: You know what, we paid the permit fee, they’re just being dicks about it.

Dean: And this is my second favorite ending of all the episodes this season.

John: What’s your first favorite?

Dean: The following episode.

John: Yeah. The same roundy-round we’ve done before.

Dean: This time from the inside looking out.

John: The roundy-round of despair.

Dean: The roundy-round of despair, yup.

John: They’ve rescued each other but they’ve realized- and it’s interesting because this is the point I realized that Mark Sheppard is doing nothing but talking for the last three minutes of the show. But when you have this speech? Give it to Mark Sheppard.

Dean: And we do a callback to the overhead shot from the pilot, but this time the team is breaking up because they have to.

John: Yeah, just great- oh and by the way, those flowers were literally just from the trees around, what a lucky bit of business.

Dean: Well it was our DP, Dave Connell, running to those trees and grabbing handfuls of leaves and then throwing them on the ground so we had something interesting to look at

John: That was really great. Man that’s a great episode, I gotta say, incredibly complicated, and I will say that of all the episodes, that’s the one the show looks like in my head.

Dean: Yeah.

John: You know. When we pitched Leverage, that’s the one you know..

Dean: And for me as a director, I feel like this is the one where you and I really teamed up all the way through. I mean, you sat by my side through the entire shooting of this. I mean, in many ways we co-directed this.

John: Oh. no no no.

Dean: And it was a great experience for me and thank you so much.

John: Oh it was my pleasure, now let’s do the second one.

Both: [Laugh]

#Leverage #Leverage TNT #Leverage Audio Commentary Transcripts #Audio Commentary #Transcripts #Parker #Alec Hardison #Elliot Spencer #Nate Ford #Sophie Deveraux #Season 1 #Episode 12 #Season 1 Episode 12 #The First David Job

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unexpectedreylo · 7 years ago

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Spoilerific Thoughts On “Solo”

Rosé All Day In The GFFA!

As of writing, I’ve seen the movie twice and I really enjoyed it both times. Forget those tales of a troubled production; Ron Howard made a solidly entertaining, fun film with lots of goodies and surprises for fans of most stripes.

“Solo” is basically a heist movie and a Marvel-esque origin story at the same time. When we meet Everyone’s Favorite Smuggler, he’s a runaway living in Corellia’s dark and filthy underworld hoping for the big score to get him and his girlfriend Qi’ra away from their Fagin-like “master.” We march through Han’s escape from Corellia, how he ended up with his last name, his abrupt and necessary decision to go to the Imperial Academy, his time as an Imperial officer, his first meeting with Chewbacca, and his re-entry into the galaxy’s underworld with his mentor, Tobias Beckett. We witness his first meeting with Lando Calrissian and finding the love of his life, at least the one that isn’t a breathing person, the Millennium Falcon. The famous sabacc game? It’s there. So’s the legendary Kessel Run. All of the while, Han’s penchant for trouble and not listening to anyone but himself puts him in danger over and over. It’s all great character development and enjoyable to watch. But there’s more! In “Solo,” we see the gray and topsy-turvy world of the galaxy’s criminal class. Sometimes it appears glamorous and beautiful, sometimes it looks just like what it is: dirty and awful. The good turns out to be bad and the bad turns out to be good. All of the while, Beckett reminds Han never to trust anyone.

So, you might ask, what did you think of Alden Ehrenreich? Alden was in the same crappy position that Chris Pine was in while playing Captain Kirk in the more recent Star Trek films; it’s very difficult to step into a very famous role played by a very famous actor. Ewan McGregor had a similar problem but because he played Obi-Wan decades younger, it gave him a lot more wiggle room to define the character himself while making it credible he and Alec Guinness were playing the same guy. Ehrenreich and Pine were playing their respective roles less than 20 years younger than their more legendary incarnations. That’s tough. I’m certain some people are blowing off this film simply because they can’t accept someone else playing Han Solo. The other side of that coin is it’s precarious in HOW you play the character. Take on too much of Ford’s affectations, it looks like an impersonation, one that could descend into parody fast. Completely ignore them and people won’t connect that it’s Han Solo at all. Now, Ehrenreich doesn’t really look much like Ford. He’s shorter, his nose is smaller, the whole shape of his face is different. There’s only a bit of resemblance around the eyes and the makeup people thoughtfully added Ford’s chin scar. It’s a little jarring when you realize that eventual son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) really does look related to Ford while Ehrenreich looks like neither one of them. My mom the movie critic, who saw the movie with me and my brother the first time, thought Ehrenreich is actually better-looking than Ford. But (and there’s always a but) attitude can make up for a lack of resemblance. More on that in a second. For what it’s worth, Ehrenreich does have the right attitude. It’s like seeing a more boyish Han, one who gets by on b.s. and bluster, who’s a tiny bit full of himself, and who hasn’t experienced a decade’s worth of betrayals yet to come and other things that made him far more world-weary in ANH. This Han is charming and self-assured, a cinnamon roll whose circumstances define him but won’t defeat him and turn him into well, Qi’ra. From this movie, it’s easy to see why he was drawn to Rey in TFA. He saw a lot of himself in her.

Everyone does a pretty bang up job in the film performance-wise. I have to say Donald Glover absolutely kills it as Lando. Glover doesn’t really look like Billy Dee Williams but he’s got the Lando-ness down perfectly: the smoothness, the vague sleaziness, the flair for fashion, and all around cool. He even nailed Williams’s way of speaking without making it an impersonation. Glover has so much charisma in the part, I really wouldn’t mind seeing him again in his own adventure. Woody Harrelson was an excellent fit as Beckett. Harrelson brings his own charisma and worldliness as the father figure who initiates Han into the life that as prophesized, he never got out of. Casting him was a great idea. Also worthy of mention is Phoebe Waller-Bridge as L3-37, or simply “L3.” Funny and sassy, you’ll be touched by her short time onscreen. And the mysterious Enfys Nest (Erin Kellyman) who turns out to be not quite what we thought.

The surprise in this turned out to be Emilia Clarke as Qi’ra. Of all the new characters, she’s easily the most fascinating. She’s beautiful, smart, resourceful, and tough but also a bit of a femme fatale. She has a heart but she’s also hungry and hell bent on not ending up a Corellian street rat again. She is what Han could have been with a few degrees of difference in his personality or more time spent a virtual slave on Corellia, what Rey could have been had she decided to trade on her looks and feminine wiles for material security from crime bosses. The interesting thing about her is she clearly cares about Han. I don’t know if she loves him per se but she does care about him enough to know she has to protect him from her. She’s sort of like that old Amy Winehouse song, “You Know I’m No Good.” Paul Bettany’s character and Beckett both warn Han that he doesn’t know her as well as he thinks he does and that she’s done some pretty bad things. We know for sure she allied herself with a crime syndicate that has committed atrocities and well, we find out toward the end how far her darkness extends. She accepts Han’s affections but to a point. Why? She knows they can’t get attached. At the end, when she splits in the mobile Crimson Dawn HQ, it seems to parallel the last Force bond seen in TLJ. In TLJ, Rey has to do it for her own sake as well as Kylo’s. In this movie, Qi’ra does it for Han’s own good. The more he’s kept away from this stuff the better, not so much IMO she fears that lifestyle would destroy him as she realizes at some point her knife has to go between Han’s shoulder blades if he keeps hanging around.

Poor Han. Not only can the guy never escape trouble, he’s constantly faced with betrayal throughout his life, which it is easy to see why he leans so much on Chewie. Say what you will about Chewbacca, but he’s the one of the very few beings who never lets Han down. Sadder yet are the implications of Han’s upbringing and his relationships with authority/father figures. In one conversation with Lando, Han mentions his blue collar dad that he wasn’t close to. Who knows what THAT relationship was like? Han tells his Imperial recruitment officer that he “has no people,” so the officer christens him Solo. (For all we know, Han’s real last name is Wallbanger or Horowitz or Seymour-Butts.) Why Han was on the streets is still a mystery. Did Han simply run away from home? Was it disagreement and butting heads or was there severe dysfunction, i.e. addiction, abuse, neglect? Did Han do something to the old man? We don’t know and it’s not like Han to tell. Han takes to Beckett as a surrogate father figure who of course betrays him. Another fascinating and tragic parallel takes place near the end of the movie. Most people pay attention more to the “Han shot first” aspect of it rather than how this scene predicts Han’s eventual fate in TFA. Han kills his father figure just as his own son will eventually kill him. Han of course was acting in self-defense but it’s tragic all the same. Han’s family situation also predicts the struggles he has in his relationship with Ben Solo. In this context it makes sense that a man who had no idea what a dad is like would struggle to be one himself, especially since he’s almost or at middle age when it finally happens.

Another thing to love about “Solo” is its careful attention to the mythos. The film has the style and feel of Brian Daley’s novels from back in the day, while much of Han’s backstory, known to Star Wars lore fans for decades, is in here. Moreover, elements from the expanded universe, video games, The Clone Wars, and the prequels are brought in to great effect. Teras Kasi? Glee Anselm? The Maw? Carrida? Aurra Sing’s fate? Colo claw fish roe as an appetizer? It’s all in here!

I will say this: DARTH MAUL’S SHOCK CAMEO GIVES ME LIFE!!!

I blurted out, “What the hell?!” when he turned up at the end of the film. (I also had to explain to my brother, who had never seen The Clone Wars or Rebels, why Maul was still alive.) A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one. That Qi’ra is working for him has a whole host of implications for her and possibilities for Maul to return in other Star Wars canon. And yes, that’s Ray Park reprising his role and Sam Witwer voicing him.

“Solo”’s score is pretty good, a mix of original and unique music and John Williams’s classic scores. Listen for some fun callbacks like “Asteroid Chase” from TESB.

Like “Rogue One,” “Solo” is a smaller movie than the bigger, sweeping main saga flicks. It doesn’t have TLJ’s artistic ambitions or haunting quality. But there’s room for a movie that’s pure fun with a few more layers than expected.

#solo han solo ben solo star wars solo: a star wars story

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aaronafgash · 7 years ago

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Best Songs Under One Minute: A Top 10 List

A majority of songs released throughout history have followed similar structural patterns: most, in some order, utilize a verse, chorus, bridge, hook, and refrain. To fit all of these sections, songs tend to be around three to six minutes in length, depending on factors such as tempo and repetitions of individual structures. Things start to get interesting, though, when artists start to shrink down songs under the traditional three minute mark. Which sections will be cut out? Will there only be a single verse or hook? How will an artist tell a story or capture an emotion in such a limited amount of time? I became fascinated with these sorts of questions, and it led me to paying more and more attention to the best “short” songs. Here is my top 10 list of songs under one minute.

10. Sometimes (Mix #9) - Erykah Badu (0:44)

R&B music was being redefined in the late ‘90s, with songwriters like D’Angelo and Maxwell leading the pack of new-age soul artists. These artists paid homage to greats who came before them in the genre, but added more current hip-hop elements to spice up their songs; “Sometimes (Mix #9)” perfectly exemplifies that sentiment. The song begins with a light bongo drum pattern and distant background vocals, but soon, the mood changes: a harder hitting drum pattern overtakes the previously heard bongos, and in comes Erykah with a smooth, laid back verse. Badu rides the beat like an MC, with lyrics like “I’ve got the paper stacked, and a pimped out track,” but she does so while singing in her unique tone. It’s hard not to believe that artists like Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott were influenced by previous Badu songs like this one.

9. Demons - Sampha (0:54)

Before the Drake and Kanye features, before “(No One Knows Me) Like The Piano,” before touring with the xx, Sampha was a lesser-known songwriter from South London. “Demons”, the first track off of his 2013 EP Dual, gave us a taste of what was to come with the artist we know now. The track begins with Sampha leaving a voicemail, quietly stating “I rang you earlier but you didn’t pick up.” Immediately, the track begins, driven by a repetitive, dragging bass drum, and distinctive piano chords. Sampha chimes in, singing “I guess I don’t believe you / And I think you don’t believe, too / So take all these demons and go.” It’s a short ballad that introduces us to Sampha; he may now be a world-renowned artist, but he’s still battling his demons just like the rest of us.

8. Her Majesty - The Beatles (0:23)

Written in jest about Queen Elizabeth II, “Her Majesty” is the Beatles shortest song in their spanning discography, yet in 23 seconds, it captures everything that makes the group so undeniably excellent. The subject matter is, of course, silly; Paul McCartney is singing about loving the Queen as if she’s a normal, everyday woman that he’s trying to court at a bar. But when he sings “I wanna tell her that I love her a lot / But I gotta get a bellyful of wine,” he’s still

able to make what is clearly a joke a relatable topic of conversation -- only the Beatles could make a song like this one

7. Track 14 (Chix) - Jai Paul (0:51)

Jai Paul is a mysterious artist. Since 2011, he has only (officially) released two songs. The lack of material left fans yearning for more music, but in 2013, an unidentified Bandcamp user uploaded what looked like Jai Paul’s 16-track debut album to the site. A day later, Paul tweeted out that what was uploaded was a collection of demos that had been previously stolen from one of his laptops. Regardless of how or why the music got out, it undeniably exists, and it is an outstanding piece of work. On “Track 14”, which fans nicknamed “Chix”, Jai Paul shows off his eclectic sonic pallette; in just 51 seconds, we hear a beautiful stringed orchestra, glittering electronic synthesizers, and poetic lyrics of frustration and devotion: he sings “I don’t know what you mean / I’m always on the scene / Your time and your company / Let me get you home with me.” If Paul’s unreleased demos are of this quality, I can’t imagine what an official studio album would sound like. But even if that project doesn’t see the light of day, at least we have this.

6. Fertilizer - Frank Ocean (0:39)

Acting as an interlude on the critically acclaimed Channel Orange, “Fertilizer” sonically comes off as a fun little pop track, but in one poetic lyric, we quickly discover that Frank is not singing a happy song. When he sings “Fertilizer / I’ll take bullshit if that’s all you’ve got,” he’s attempting to elicit any sort of response from a person who he loves and cares about; even if they aren’t going to tell him what he wants to hear, he’ll take it. In a 2012 Esquire article, Gavin Matthew’s affirms this, stating that “Ocean begs for his love not to treat him like the titular bullshit. But the sorrow in his voice and the painful laugh track tell us he’s not having much luck.” Frank’s unparalleled writing abilities allow for him to pack a surprising amount of meaning into shorter tracks; he may or may not appear later on this list.

5. Parachutes - Coldplay (0:46)

Most people today know Coldplay as one of the biggest bands in the world, with pop hits like “A Sky Full of Stars” and “Something Just Like This”, but at their best, Coldplay gave us well- produced albums of interesting, unique alternative music. Their debut album, Parachutes, balanced bright, upbeat tracks with calmer, acoustic songs to create a near-perfect alternative masterpiece. The project peaks, though, on the title track “Parachutes”: here, Chris Martin, backed by only an acoustic guitar, sings quietly of fidelity and commitment, with lyrics like “ Here I am and I’ll take my time / Here I am and I’ll wait in line, always / Always.” The gentle nature of the song allows listeners to feel like Martin is personally telling them his story, and that quality makes for a captivating track.

4. Intro - Brandy (0:49)

Brandy burst onto the scene in 1994; at 15 years old (!!!), she had just released her self-titled debut Brandy, and soon, the album was receiving critical acclaim. Eventually, Brandy went on to go 4x platinum, allowing Brandy to establish herself as a successful R&B solo artist. While Brandy was an excellent project , the topics of her songs were (understandably) a bit childish considering her age. So when Brandy released her next album, Never Say Never four years later in ‘98, she knew she had to prove that she could be a grown up. Any doubts that critics might have had immediately went out the window when Never Say Never dropped, and “Intro” perfectly set the tone for Brandy’s newfound maturity. The production of the track is tighter and darker, and Brandy sounds like a totally different artist; while she may just be singing “Never say, never say, never say never” repeatedly, her tone is now provocative and seductive. Her experiences with love and life have given her a new outlook on relationships; in an interview around time the album was released, she stated “I’m not the little girl I was when I made my first record.” Brandy grew up, and “Intro” sets the tone perfectly for her transition into adulthood.

3. Commes des Garcons - Frank Ocean (0:53)

On “Commes des Garcons”, a track off of the criminally underrated visual album Endless, Frank Ocean weaves together a complex love story over playful, tropically-infused production. Frank cleverley sings of infidelities (“We was dating on the side / He was seeing double”) and makes witty sexual references related to items you’d find at a local hardware store (“All this drillin’ got this dick feelin’ like a power tool”). To close out the song, he repeats the phrase “Commes des Garcons”, which means “like boys” -- in doing so, Ocean is referencing his coming out letter in which he brings up the first time he fell in love with a man. Just as he did in “Fertilizer”, Frank makes efficient use of his limited time on “Commes des Garcons”, but this time, he’s telling a sophisticated story.

2. Beach is Better - Jay-Z (0:55)

No one expected 44-year-old Jay-Z to include a Mike-Will-Made-It produced trap anthem on his 2013 album Magna Carter Holy Grail, but he did just that with “Beach is Better”. For all the album’s flaws, “Beach is Better” immediately became one of the best Jay-Z songs we’ve heard in the last decade. The beat is slithering and metallic at first, but suddenly, monstrous 808- drums kick in with mesmerizing synth blips that give the production more melody and a plethora of different high-hat patterns to give the beat a sense of chaos. Jay-Z is at his absolute best, rapping about what he loves flaunting the most: his wife, his money, and his dominance in the rap game. Lyrics like “Girl, why you never ready? / For as long as you took you better look like Halle Berry / Or Beyoncé...shit, then we gettin’ married!” exemplify peak Jay-Z boasts. In an interview with MTV, producer Mike-Will was quoted saying “[Jay] was like, ‘Man, let’s do something so effortless,’ and that just stuck with me when he said ‘effortless.’” This idea of effortlessness for both Jay-Z and Mike-Will resulted in a track where they’re both in their comfort zones, and the combination allowed for a perfect rap interlude.

1. Elephant Parade - Jon Brion (0:28)

In composer Jon Brion’s “Elephant Parade” off of the soundtrack to the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there are no sophisticated lyrics to analyze. There are no complicated allegories or connections to make. There is simply a piano and an acoustic guitar, softly playing together for 28 seconds to construct a short song. But those 28 seconds provide some of the purest, most blissful musical moments you could ever capture. Brion’s ability to create so much out of so little is remarkable; “Elephant Parade” is everything you could ask for in a sub-minute song, and it does so using two of the most basic, universally-known instruments known to man. To this day, it strikes a certain emotional chord with me that I have a hard time putting into words. The ability to leave a listener speechless is nearly an impossible task, but “Elephant Parade” manages to do that to me. For that reason, it’s my favorite song under one minute.

#music #minute #song #sampha #frank ocean #jay z #brandy #jai paul #coldplay #badu #hiphop #r&b #pop

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elenatria · 7 years ago

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Who is your favorite and least favorite Chris in Marvel and why?

Now that’s a great question.

My most and least favourite Chris or Thor? Because Chris is good at whatever he does, even if he’s asked to be Tony Stark’s furniture.

Well. Naturally my most favourite Thor is in “Thor: Ragnarok” for obvious reasons. He’s funny as hell during all 2h 10m of the film. You can tell Chris was having fun, plus he’s not afraid to ridicule himself.

Also you can almost see which parts he improvised - not just the “snake” bit or the “get help” part but also the “Why do you dress like a witch?” scene (COMPLETELY random piece of dialogue imho, and I’m sure Tom was improvising too).

Also this I’m sure was improvised.

Taika himself said life is random, so why not use random dialogues in the film?

This part was totally improvised as well because there’s an alternate version in a Jeff/Taika interview where Thor says instead “I mean we don’t have to have a name. We have no name.”

I also happen to like Thor’s look in “Ragnarok” a lot. Not that I don’t miss his hair but I think he’s gorgeous no matter what he does.

However, if I have to pick the one movie (and looks) that had me sold on him that was “The Dark World”. Thor as a sexy prince with a much better hairdo (and natural colour on his facial hair) than the two previous films.

As for my least favourite Thor… I’m not sure I can pick one. I sure didn’t like his moments in “The Avengers” when he was being mocked by Loki (”I’m listening…?”) and beaten up by the Hulk. They were funny, just not my kind of funny.

But the one film where Thor was criminally underused was “The Avengers: Age of Ultron”. He was a plot device, a glorified extra, and whether he was there or not made no difference.

Finally the Thor parts that I truly didn’t like were his scenes with Jane in both “Thor” and “The Dark World”. I don’t know if it was dueto the fact that they had no chemistry whatsoever or the bad script which gave Jane no character at all.

#chris hemsworth #thor #thor ragnarok #the dark world #the avengers #age of ultron #long post

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creativitytoexplore · 4 years ago

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Who To Call In Case Of Emergency by Marina Rubin https://ift.tt/35BZ5iG Tulip's mundane work environment is brightened by her adventurous, bubbly and promiscuous co-worker; by Marina Rubin.

You can learn a lot about other people's lives when you ask for their emergency contact number. A daunting task Tulip undertook with a mix of idealistic dedication and administrative weariness, when one of her colleagues, a senior underwriter, Didi Estefanos, fainted at work. Everyone ran around the office, scrambling to find a number for her next of kin as she lay on the floor unconscious, her feet in thick brown stockings protruding from the partition of her cubicle. As the crowd swayed above her, spewing water on her face and wailing Didi, Didi, someone found her profile on Facebook, tracked down her son and sent him an SOS message. By the time two masculine paramedics rolled in and strapped Didi onto a stretcher, someone was already on the phone with her frantic son, Nicholas, instructing him to meet his mother at Mount Sinai Hospital. "Would you look at that man?" Senna, the new girl from marketing, whispered into Tulip's ear, smiling at a tall paramedic with a sleeve tattoo. "It's true what they say - New York has the best looking men!" Senna had recently relocated from Florida so most of her sentences began with "It's true what they say" and were awe-inspired declarations about her new city. Tulip had seen the tall paramedic before. Twice. Once, when the Operations Manager collapsed with a stroke and, of course, the staff struggled to find his emergency contact number since the one on file in HR was from twenty years ago - his father who had long been gone; and the second time, when one of the salespeople had a seizure while closing a deal on the phone. "What kind of business is this?" the paramedic sneered, shoving consent papers into his EMS bag. "Everybody gets rolled out on a stretcher! What do you people do here?" "Healthcare insurance." Tulip shrugged, failing to see what he was implying. Then she watched Senna, in a surprising display of concern, chase Didi's stretcher down the hall and plunge into the elevator, like a puma, behind the handsome paramedic. Tulip returned to her desk and, as if on a mission, composed a fervent email to the entire department letting them know she was collecting emergency contact numbers, "so we can avoid another Didi situation". In the coming days, emails floated from every direction, from benefit clerks to C-level executives, offering up names and numbers of loved ones: "...My wife Susan... my husband Edward... my brother Boris... my mother Beverly..." hoping they would never be used, the urgent phone calls that would never have to be made. Tulip included her husband George, although he was impossible to reach, a criminal attorney who spent most of his day in court. Tulip's boss, McNally, a devout Catholic and a perpetually angry ex-alcoholic barked, "If I drop dead, I don't want you calling anybody. Let them throw me to the dogs!" As the spreadsheet expanded into several pages and circulated around the office like some kind of a death list, there was still no news of Didi. Some speculated she was in a hospital undergoing observation, while others joked she was already on the beach in Barbados, collecting disability. One morning Senna appeared in Tulip's cubicle and, pressing her body against the grey fabric panel, said enigmatically, "I know you are collecting emergency contact numbers, I'm going to give you my children's father's number." "Sure, that's fine," Tulip replied, not looking up from her computer. "Well, he's my ex-husband, actually," Senna clarified, hanging her face on the divider and staring at Tulip with oval eyes full of longing. "But we are not together; the children are with him though... well, they're in boarding school." An attractive woman in her late 30s with long bleached hair and large breasts, Senna told everyone she had always wanted to live in New York, it had been her life-long dream. She was renting a basement apartment in Brooklyn that she called a dungeon. "It has the allure of a dungeon," she once said at a staff meeting, with tenacity and pride. "I didn't know a dungeon could have allure!" McNally jeered behind her back. But Tulip liked Senna. There was a certain endearing quality to her, she was like one of those porcelain dolls, one minute beautiful in a box in a pastel ballerina skirt and the next ashen and warped, left outside in the rain with one eye broken and a dirty dress. "Actually let me think about it, maybe I will give you someone other than my ex-husband," Senna said broodingly and walked away, bumping into McNally. "What did she want?" McNally asked, dropping off a report on Tulip's desk. "She was giving me her emergency contact number." "Weirdo," McNally hissed and disappeared. Next day Senna told Tulip by the water cooler, "I'll give you my Daddy's number." "Great. Is your father here or in Florida?" "No, he's not my father," Senna laughed. "He's my Daddy... you know, like my master." "You have a master?" "I'm in an S&M relationship," Senna said, beaming. "It's true what they say - you can be and do anything you want in New York!" At home during dinner, Tulip told her husband George about the new girl Senna who apparently had a master. George nodded and yawned, "to each his own." That night in bed, he rolled on top of her and, nuzzling her ear, teased that he was now her master and she better obey him. On Friday, McNally announced that Didi Estefanos was not coming back to work any time soon, she was officially on long-term disability, and no, he didn't know what was wrong with her. The team filed out of the conference room with an intense sense of envy and resentment towards their sick, stay-at-home colleague. Senna came over to Tulip's desk and declared, "I'll give you a different emergency contact number. It's my neighbor..." "What happened to Daddy?" "We had a fight." "I'm sorry to hear that." "He's such an inconsiderate jerk!" Senna confessed, biting her nails. "He set up a date with this girl and forgot to tell me so I could schedule a date for myself too. Who does that?" Tulip shook her head. "I hear you. Men are the worst. My husband won't even put his plate in the dishwasher after he finishes eating." Then she leaned in closer. "So it's kind of like... an open relationship? Sorry, I don't know much about these things." "Open but very committed. We do play dates together and separate, with couples, and singles. It keeps our love fresh and exciting... It's just that he should have given me a heads-up so we could sync our calendars, you know what I mean?" "Right... right," Tulip nodded. "You think it's ok if I give you my neighbor's number?" Senna asked, still agonizing. "Senna, it's just a list! A formality. In case of emergency. If anything should happen to you in the office. Hopefully nothing will happen to you in the office and they won't have to carry you out on a stretcher. Your neighbor's number is just fine! Don't worry." "Of course. Nothing will happen." Senna smiled, holding up tightly crossed fingers. In time, Senna and Tulip became chatty confidantes. When they met in the elevator on Monday mornings, they inquired about each other's weekend. Senna was always eager to share her stories, no matter who was around to hear them - here she was making a guest star appearance at some elite orgy, or dressing up as a bumblebee in a simple threesome. Tulip's weekends lacked the same kind of luster and sensationalism, but still, she kept up conversation by recalling her two days of cooking, cleaning and driving her ten-year old daughter, Abby, to ballet classes and gymnastics. When the two women bumped into each other in the hall, they shared a giggling hi-five. When they met in the kitchen for a snack, they always took a minute to whisper what an insufferable prick their boss, McNally, was and couldn't someone just put him out of his misery. Eventually they discovered they both liked foreign films - naïve romantic comedies starring unattractive yet lovable French men with big noses. They also enjoyed the same kind of music - brooding guitar ballads by Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. They started having lunch at a little Indian place down the street called Ms. Bombay, where they always ordered the same appetizer, aloo papri chat - chickpeas in tangy sauce - and shared chicken tikka masala, wrapping chunks of meat in Peshwari naan. "Can you believe this naan?" Senna gushed every time. "It has raisins and nuts! Only in New York!" Senna told Tulip about her life back in Sarasota, how she married her high school sweetheart and gave birth in succession to two boys, Chris and Kyle. How she came to be interested in the underground S&M scene; at first her husband joined her at parties at the swingers' club, and when it escalated to dark cellars, chains and fetishes, he opted out, said he was concerned for her safety, but by that time they had nothing in common, and he couldn't stop her. She was still a young, attractive woman and didn't want to live in a matrimonial tomb. So she moved to New York. She met Daddy on-line. "There are websites and user groups for this kind of thing," Senna explained to Tulip, who listened, wide-eyed, her cheeks pudgy from Indian bread infused with nuts. She even told her how she once had sex in suspension, "You haven't had sex until you've done it suspended in the air!" "Ok, stop, please!" Tulip yelled, covering her ears, "I don't think I want to hear any more."

"So you're now friends with the dominatrix?" Tulip's husband George snickered one night, brushing his teeth before bed. "I hope she doesn't recruit you into the world of bondage." "You don't need to worry about that," Tulip laughed. "It's the last thing I would want to try! She is sweet, you know, and amusing. I'm not even sure if what she says is true... But she has this touching enthusiasm for life, New York, sex, even naan! Plus, she is not a dominatrix, honey, she must be a submissive, right? She has a Daddy." George, gurgling mouthwash, muttered something along the lines of you know better, and went into the bedroom tugging at his pajama pants. "Did I tell you I had a date with the paramedic?" Senna broadcasted one day in the kitchen. There were other people around, stirring oatmeal, making coffee, slicing grapefruit. Senna did not care what anyone thought. Tulip often wondered if she did it on purpose, shocked people. "How was it?" Tulip whispered, signaling for Senna to keep it down. "We met for a drink, then went back to his place. It was very vanilla." "Vanilla," Tulip repeated, nervously looking around. That word, the flavor of ice cream she never ordered, came back to her on the train going home to Glen Rock... Vanilla... Was Tulip's life in suburban New Jersey vanilla? As in plain, dull, without flavor or spark? Her job, her marriage, her sex life? Not that she wanted to have sex in suspension, or wear leather in a room full of strangers, hell no, but the thought, as small as a sliver of an almond in a Peshwari naan, nestled between her teeth and would not budge. She was happily married, she loved her husband; when they met in college he was applying to law school and they were such a team, so committed to getting him through it that by the time he graduated and got a job at a prestigious law firm, yes the spark was gone and so was the passion, but this was their joint achievement, a real triumph, plus they already had a beautiful daughter, and Tulip was all gratitude, but that word - vanilla, that sliver of an almond... For their office summer outing the company organized a scavenger hunt. Everyone ran around the Meatpacking district, agonizing over trick questions and looking for clues in the bricks of the buildings and inside the elevators of the overpriced Chelsea Market. "Which structure used to be a church, a nightclub, a shopping mall and now a sports club?" Insurance adjusters and claim processors struggled to answer on a sweltering day in Manhattan. Senna was wearing a pair of tiny jean shorts and high heels as she leaped over cobblestones, solving demanding brainteasers, winking at construction workers and tossing excited exaltations about the history and beauty of the city. "Look at her," McNally grumbled as he trudged alone, behind all the teams, smoking a cigar and scratching his rotund stomach, "the only thing she's missing is a balloon cluster!" Senna's team won. Wearing medals around their necks that looked like chocolate wrapped in gold foil, they celebrated in a seedy bar in Union Square. Tulip had to leave early to attend Abby's ballet recital, so Senna stayed with the analysts from Logistics. Later on she was joined by a petite, dark-haired woman with a wedding ring and a briefcase. "This is my neighbor and lover Francesca," Senna introduced her to a few remaining, intoxicated co-workers. They reported that the two women were fondling each other at the bar until a glistening Mercedes came to pick them up and whisked them to an unknown destination. Next morning Senna told Tulip how sorry she was she missed Francesca, her neighbor and her lover, the one she was telling her about, the one who would be her emergency contact. "It's alright," Tulip insisted, "I don't need to meet your emergency contact." The following week, on Friday, Senna was all pins and needles, awaiting a FedEx delivery. "Have you seen the postman?" she asked every executive assistant, madly dashing towards the reception area to see if anything had arrived. She and Daddy were leaving for the long weekend at an exclusive S&M retreat in the Catskills and she had bought a lamp on Amazon to decorate their tent. "It's a beautiful white lotus lantern with twenty leaf string lights," she told Tulip, almost in tears, showing her photos on the Internet. "I was going to hang it around our tent like a garland, so it's festive and inviting, and more people will come to visit us." "Don't worry," Tulip comforted her. "It's still early, I'm sure it'll arrive." Oh, how Senna screamed when the FedEx man appeared on the floor. A week later, the building security office was conducting a fire drill and forced everyone to leave their desks and assemble in the hall by the elevators. As the fire warden droned on about what to do in case of an emergency, Tulip noticed how three women from Payroll with strangely similar hair bobs were whispering to each other and pointing in Senna's direction. "I need two volunteers to be Floor Searchers," the warden announced, looking at the gloomy faces in the crowded hallway. "One male and one female. The role of a Searcher is very important. In case of fire, you must search the restrooms, offices, conference rooms and instruct all the floor occupants to evacuate. Do I have any volunteers?" There was an ear-piercing silence and everyone looked at each other. "Alright, I'll do it," Greg, the HR Manager, like a white angel, descended onto the floor. "I guess I could be the female Searcher," Senna raised her hand. "Great! Please come up to me and give me your names. This concludes our fire drill, thank you," the warden said in a raspy voice, as everyone trailed back to the office. "Knowing her, she'll be checking the men's room first and we'll never see her again," McNally snorted under his breath, loud enough for the interns from Group Benefits to exchange glances and burst out laughing. The word about Senna was spreading around the firm, and Tulip felt bad for her friend. "You know, you don't have to tell everyone about your life," she said to Senna in one of the little nooks of the office. "No one needs to know about your lesbian affair with the neighbor, or the hot date with the paramedic, or Daddy and the orgies you attend every weekend. Really, it's no one's business. It's your private life!" "But my life is not a secret," Senna insisted. "I married young and lived like a nun for years until I realized I deserve better. I have nothing to hide. I'm proud. I'm finally living!" For her birthday, a pair of shiny thigh-high boots in black patent leather with laces up the back was delivered to the office. Senna hiked up her skirt and tried them on at her desk. "Daddy sent them!" she exclaimed excitedly. "He's taking me to the opera! We're seeing Aida at the Met!" "You're not wearing those to the opera, are you?" Tulip asked in a thin, shocked voice. "Oh no, of course not. These are for the party we are going to on Saturday." "What do you wear them with?" Tulip asked, feeling the pleather with her fingertips. "Anything you want, really, or nothing at all! You can always dress them up with a pair of long gloves, or a classic headband." "Well, have a great time at the opera!" Tulip wished her friend, just as she noticed, from the corner of her eye, McNally standing in the middle of the office, shaking his head back and forth and staring at the black sleek boots, as if they were the cadaver of an animal. A month later, completely by accident, Tulip met Daddy. On some idle Tuesday when Tulip's husband was working late and her daughter was at a sleep-away camp, Tulip and Senna were having a drink after work. A man in a grey suit and tie surprised Senna from behind by covering her eyes and commanding her to smell his fingers. Bald, stocky, in thick dark-rimmed glasses, the man whom Senna introduced as her Daddy, her master, her lover who fulfilled every one of her fantasies, literally looked like her father, a severe man with a humorless expression, someone the IRS would send to conduct an audit at an automotive company in Detroit. Senna and Daddy insisted on driving Tulip home. Tulip sat in the backseat, watching Senna weave her arms around Daddy like a willow tree, as he drove in silence with the tempo and precision of a German tankman. Tulip wondered why they were driving her to New Jersey, so completely out of their way. Did they know no one would be home, was this a ploy to get her into bed, did they want her for a threesome, was she being recruited into the world of bondage? They dropped her off in front of her house just as George was pulling down the curtains on the bay window. Tulip breathed a sigh of relief. Daddy stepped out of the car and gallantly opened the door for her. "Who was that?" George asked when Tulip walked in. "You are not going to believe it. That was Daddy!" "Daddy? You mean, your crazy co-worker's S&M master? He looked more like a Certified Public Accountant from KPMG... Do we have anything to eat?" Sometime in November, it suddenly became bone chilling and viciously windy. "It's true what they say - New York is a toothless witch of a winter," Senna announced. Having moved from Florida, she did not have any warm clothes, so she layered her summer shirts and wore the company sweatshirt advertising their new PPO plan on top. Tulip hated watching her shiver in the revolving doors of the building. Daddy should have bought the poor girl a coat, instead of those hideous knock-me-down-and-fuck-me boots, Tulip thought to herself, fuming. Instead of saying anything, she opened her closets. With care and dedication, she picked a few warm sweaters, a scarf, a hat, woolen socks, even mittens. Then she added a Burberry double-breasted cashmere coat she had snatched up on sale at Neiman Marcus. Something every lawyer's wife should own, she wore it once to a holiday party at George's law firm, now it adorned her closet like a mistletoe, something pretty but useless. She took it off the hanger and threw it in the bag. "You can have these for the winter," she handed the bag to Senna on Monday. "Oh my God, you shouldn't have. Thank you so much. That is so sweet," the Florida ex-pat jumped up and hugged her friend. Then she tried on the coat and even though she was taller and bigger in the bust than Tulip, the coat fit her perfectly. And then the morning arrived when Senna was circling Tulip's cubicle, fidgeting and fretting about something, until she finally came out with it and asked Tulip to be her emergency contact. There was something so heartrending and pitiful about the way she asked, smiling, standing by Tulip's desk, still wearing the coat, holding out banana bread she had made over the weekend in a plastic container like some kind of sacrilegious offering, that Tulip had to look away. "What happened to Daddy?" "I don't think he wants to be my Daddy anymore," Senna said, biting her chipped nails. "He found someone younger, and prettier." "I am sorry. What about your lesbian lover, that neighbor Francesca, or something?" "Her husband found out and threatened to divorce her if she didn't stop seeing me." Tulip sighed. "Look, Senna, I can't be your emergency contact, it's ridiculous. We work in the same office. It has to be someone from outside, you know, like a family member or a friend." "Why?" Senna objected. "Well, for starters..." Tulip tried to elaborate, until she realized she couldn't come up with anything reasonable, and that's when she folded, "You know what - okay, you got me!" "Really?" Senna lit up. "Great! Can you put it down in the spreadsheet?" At night, Tulip was having dinner with her husband and her daughter, a new crock-pot roast beef recipe she was trying with red-skinned potatoes, when her phone rang. It was Senna. "I'm just calling to activate my emergency contact number," she said, laughing like a gloriously happy child.

Sometime around Thanksgiving, rumors, like pocket-sized mice, were scurrying across the office and making squeaking noises in the walls. Employees congregated by the water cooler, in the hallways, in the kitchen, whispering, shaking heads, weighing in on the latest news. Didi Estefanos was not coming back to work, in fact, she had slapped the company with a massive lawsuit, claiming everything from emotional abuse to sexual harassment, ageism, racism, and all kinds of atrocities that had caused her to collapse in the office and get rolled out on a stretcher. What was wrong with her exactly, what particular ailment she was inflicted with, no one knew. Since all the tests came back negative, the doctors assumed it was stress. She hired a high-powered attorney who specialized in harassment in the workplace. The company executives from around the country flew into the New York office and spent long days in glass conference rooms, behind closed doors, talking into round speakerphones that lay in the middle of the table like UFO plates. They walked out, exasperated, wheezing, loosening their ties, pooh-poohing the process, and hurried along to lunches and dinners at the lavish New York restaurants they enjoyed on their expense accounts. Greg, a highly respected HR Manager and a proud gay man since the 80s, was seen standing outside the building, wiping his face with a paper towel. McNally was in and out of meetings, giving testimony, defending himself. "Sexual harassment my ass," he was heard screaming, "that old hag was a hundred years old!" Meanwhile, a Thanksgiving sale was in full swing at Bloomingdale's down the street. All the girls from the office were shopping in the intimates department. Tulip always joked how their check was directly deposited into the iconic department store. "I need your honest opinion." Senna came up to Tulip one day with a shopping bag. "I bought this corset for a party on Friday. But I'm not sure if it fits me right. Could you please take a look and tell me the truth, please!" "Sure." Tulip nodded. "Let me just finish this report." "Great, meet me in the bathroom in ten minutes." When Tulip walked into the bathroom, the small vestibule with a full-length mirror and a few armchairs, was empty. She proceeded into the lavatory, it was empty as well, except for the one stall at the end where Senna was fiddling with zippers, swooshing fabric. Someone had left the water running in the sink, Tulip turned off the faucet and waited. Finally, the stall door opened and Senna appeared, wearing just a corset and a pair of a high heels. "Oh wow!" Tulip squealed, veering her face to the side as if someone had just punched her. "Wow," she repeated, violently, "wow." "What do you think?" Senna asked, standing in the middle of the bathroom, anxious, alert, her breasts bulging from a see-through corset, her shaved pale vagina on display. "Looks great," Tulip said, her hand raised to her temple, partially blocking the view. "Does it make me look fat?" "No, it looks fine, not fat at all," Tulip stuttered, looking away, focusing on a crack in a tile. She did not expect to see her friend wearing nothing but high heels and a corset. She reasoned there was no real necessity to take off her pants or the skirt that she was wearing, let alone her underwear, to demonstrate a corset, especially one that went only to her belly button. And why the high heels? For the full dramatic effect, the big picture? "Do you think it's tight in the back?" Senna turned around, flexing her muscular buttocks. "No... Not tight at all." "You don't think it's too small in the breasts?" "No, it's great," Tulip repeated, making an effort to hide her embarrassment. "Are you sure? You're not just saying it?" "Definitely! You'll be a huge hit at the party on Saturday," Tulip assured her, as she hurried out the door, blaming an urgent report she forgot to do. She ran out of the bathroom and walked down the hall, shell-shocked, frazzled, smoothing wisps of hair on top of her head, grinning to herself, imagining her husband's face when she told him tonight what had just happened, how he would fall off his chair, laughing. "What's so funny?" Tulip bumped into McNally, who was always stalking the hallways and had an uncanny talent for appearing at the most opportune place at the most opportune time. "What is it?" he demanded, studying Tulip's face. "You look strange... Is everything alright?" "Yes, fine," Tulip, taken off guard, giggled in a surge of nervousness. "I was in the bathroom with Senna, she asked me to look at this corset she bought at Bloomingdale's, but... she was wearing nothing but a corset, you know..." Tulip laughed uncontrollably. "Oh, and high heels too," she added, slowly gaining composure and realizing her mistake. McNally stood quietly, his arms folded on his stomach, listening. That night, when Tulip told her husband about the encounter in the office bathroom, he did not fall off his chair laughing, as she expected. He turned surprisingly serious and asked her all kinds of questions, as if she was a witness on a stand, or a victim, or maybe even a co-conspirator. "And what did you do?" "Nothing, I ran out of the bathroom..." "Why did she do that?" "I don't know, she's probably an exhibitionist..." "What is the nature of your relationship?" "You can't be serious, honey... That's it. I am going to bed." A few days later, Tulip was in the office kitchen, draping almond butter onto a Granny Smith apple, when Greg, the HR Manager, approached her and invited her in for a chat. In a corner office crammed with ceramic bowls and teacups that Greg made in the pottery class his partner Rob bought him for his birthday, the tired HR Manager offered Tulip a chair and asked if she wanted anything to drink. She looked at the large pitcher of water sitting on the side of the table, a testament to the many people who came through this office in the last few days, and immediately said, "Greg, I don't know much about Didi, or whatever her claims are... She seemed like a nice lady, very erudite, but other than that I have nothing to add." "Tulip, I didn't ask you here to talk about Didi," Greg said in a serious tone. "Okay..." she looked at him, waiting. "I want you to know this is a safe place and everything you say here is confidential." "O-kay..." "Tell me what happened with Senna," he said compassionately. "We have zero tolerance for sexual harassment and abuse in this company, and you did the right thing by reporting her." "What?" Tulip jumped up. "What do you mean what happened with Senna? What do you mean, reported her?" "McNally came into HR and filed a complaint on your behalf. He said that your colleague, Senna Andrews, has created a sexually abusive environment for you... Tulip, if Senna has sexually abused you, or harassed you in any way, you need to tell me right now." "Sexually abused me?" "Look, we received a complaint... It went all the way to the CEO. Of course, the big wigs upstairs are worried about you suing the company, but I care about your well-being." "Suing the company? Is this some kind of a joke?" "There is nothing funny about sexually unwanted advances, especially in the workplace, especially now - with the MeToo situation, we take these matters very seriously." "This is not a MeToo situation!" she burst out, enraged. "No one harassed me! Not me! This is a NotMe situation!" "Okay," Greg looked at her keenly. "Then why did you report her?" "I didn't," she covered her face with her hands. "Well, you communicated the entire bathroom incident to your manager, Eric McNally. To tell you the truth, I was surprised. I thought you and Senna were friends." "We are friends," Tulip sighed, a tear rolling down her cheek. "Then I don't understand what happened. Why did you report her?" "I did not report her... McNally snuck up on me. That's what he does - he stalks the hallways like a creeper, and he just caught me off guard..." "I don't know if you realize it, but your accusations could get Senna fired." "No!" Tulip exclaimed. "It was a mistake, a misunderstanding. I don't want her fired. It was a mistake. Nothing happened. Greg, you have to help me. Don't let her get fired!" She rushed out of the office and took the elevator down to the lobby. She ran across the street, sat down on a fire hydrant in front of her building and dialed her husband George. He didn't pick up. It was late afternoon and he was usually in court at this time. She kept dialing his number frantically and it kept going into voicemail. She looked at the gnarled trees around her and it suddenly occurred to her that if this was an emergency, if she was sprawled out in the middle of the street unconscious, or taken out on a stretcher from the office, no one would be able to reach George, and she finally understood what Senna had been agonizing over all this time. Tulip looked up at their building. Senna was somewhere on the 24th floor, and so was McNally, and HR, and the big wigs; what was happening up there, she wondered, what were they doing to Senna now? At night when Tulip finally saw her husband and told him about her surprise meeting with HR, he put down his fork and somberly expressed his disappointment - she had played it all wrong, she should have consulted him first. "You can't be serious, George." "When your HR rep said they were worried about you suing the company, he was right. They should be worried, because this was an open and shut case. And if you had teamed up with this Didi woman and joined her lawsuit this would have been a winning case. But instead you chose to defend your little girlfriend." "I can't believe you're saying this nonsense," she hissed. "I would never accuse a friend of such wrongdoing and get her into trouble like this." "What are you defending?" George scoffed. "Your lusty little encounter in the fitting room?" "It wasn't lusty!" Tulip shrieked, slamming the door. "And it wasn't a fitting room, it was a bathroom!" she corrected him, slamming the door again. There were many slammed doors that night which ignited a bit of spark in Tulip's otherwise vanilla life.

When she came to work the next day, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Every one of her colleagues was sitting at their desks, in their cubicles, in front of their computers, doing what they were paid to do. Greg was in his office with his door closed. McNally was on the phone with his back towards the exit. Tulip looked across the floor, studied the layout of the office, and for the first time noticed the precise division of the cubicles, the symmetrical way in which the partitions were mapped out, like prison cells, or a closed mouse maze. Senna did not get fired. Whether it was Greg's humanitarian efforts or McNally's endless maneuvering, she was transferred to another group, the only division that did not report to McNally. Was she ever called into HR, reprimanded, given a warning? Did she ever find out who reported her, Tulip often wondered with trepidation. But after the bathroom incident, she started avoiding Senna. When Senna asked if she was free for lunch at their favorite, Ms. Bombay, Tulip told her she brought lunch from home, or had an important client meeting, or was running to a spin class at the gym. When Senna invited her for drinks after work, Tulip lied again and blamed PTA meetings, ballet recitals, and date nights with the hubby. One day Senna came over to Tulip's desk and asked her if she would look at a necklace she bought downstairs. "You would tell me the truth if it was gaudy, right?" "Sure, let me see it." Tulip nodded with an old familiar smile. But when Senna told her to meet her in the bathroom, Tulip looked at her for a long time and finally said, "We don't really need to go to the bathroom to try on a necklace. You can just put it on right here in this cubicle." Senna went to get the necklace and never came back.

#FICTION on the WEB short stories

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daniel--berry · 7 years ago

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Worst to Best Superhero Movies I’ve Seen

31) The Amazing Spider-Man

I hate this movie. I laughed throughout the entire film. “The lizard” could not have been a worse super-villain. I sort of liked the yellow Spidey-eyes, I guess. Emma Stone gave a nice performance. Can’t write anything else about it.

30) Doctor Strange

This is one of the only movies on the list I fell asleep during. Some of the visuals were pretty original, but the storyline was like a terrible version of Kung Fu Panda. Maybe if they casted Jack Black instead of super-boring Benedict Cumberbatch (I loved you in Sherlock baby, don’t be offended), Doctor Strange could have had a little charisma. I think this is the only movie on this list that made me upset after watching it.

29) Suicide Squad

What is this movie, some kind of Suicide Squad? Maaaan, what a great cast in such a forgettable movie. Here’s the thing though, I liked it more than most people did. I think whatever-her-name-is was a charismatic (though definitely not funny) Harley Quinn. Jared Leto wasn’t super offensive as the Joker, I looked forward to his scenes, but he looked like an idiot, like a twenty year old with temporary tattoos. What is this guy, some kind of Joker?

28) Thor

I can’t remember this movie. It was probably better than Suicide Squad though. Oh yeah, there’s that part where he throws his coffee on the ground and yells “Another!”. Haha, that was pretty funny.

27) Deadpool

Haha, he uses bad words! But it’s a superhero movie! This movie will serve best as the first R-rated movie a 12 year old sees behind his parent’s back. This is the other one I fell asleep during.

26) Thor: The Dark World

This one’s interesting. I actually like this movie a lot, in theory. Visually, it’s one of my favorite Marvel movies. You could even say that if I made a MCU movie, it would look a lot like this one. Again, in theory, this is cool. It made Loki an anti-hero after the Avengers, which I think is a great choice. Unfortunately, this is a big piece of shit. And it will make you (unjustly) dislike Natalie Portman.

25) Wonder Woman

Wow, I thought I’d love this movie. I’ve always thought Wonder Woman was a great character. Gal Gadot is almost perfect for the role. But man, what a boring story. Way too much time is spent on an ugly island, and the rest of the movie is a fish-out-of-water Crocodile Dundee rip-off, with Tumblr-friendly British humor. Haha, that English woman’s accent is sooo British! No thank you. A DAMN boring movie!

24) The Amazing Spider-Man 2

We’re starting to get to superhero movies that I actually sort-of enjoy. This is my second favorite Spider-Man movie, but that’s out of the three ones on this list. I think this movie ruined Jamie Foxx’s career. Spider-Man has never looked better, though. Definitely the best Spidey-suit. I’m a sucker for those huge eyes. I walked out of the movie wanting to see a sequel, to be honest.

23) Ant-Man

I don’t remember this one, but I remember laughing a lot. Doesn’t Ant-Man work at Baskin Robbins or something in this? Oh yeah, and Michael Douglas is in this. I love that guy!

22) Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice

What a STUPID title for a movie. Nothing felt natural here. Did I mention that I hate the title? Here’s the thing, some of the elements of this movie work great. People made fun of the “Martha” twist, but I liked it, as well as Ben Affleck’s portrayal of Batman. But again, nothing was natural about this story. The tone shift is so dramatic from Man of Steel, and yet it’s supposed to be a direct sequel. Henry Cavill’s Superman isn’t memorable. Jesse Eisenberg’s lines were badly written and he never seemed like a real human being. Still, I didn’t hate it.

21) Thor: Ragnarok

Such great ideas here. Pairing Hulk and Thor for a comedy? Wonderful. Jeff Goldblum as a charismatic (gay) planet emperor is my favorite new MCU character. More of him, please! Why so low on this list? Hela sucked, as all Thor villains do. But man, she sucked the worst. The goddess of death? She just looks kind of goth, and never does anything too death-y. I like how the fire monster destroys the Thor world (what’s it called again?), and to the movie’s credit, it doesn’t treat this like an earth-shattering moment. Because let’s be honest, we never gave a fuck about that place.

20) Avengers: Age of Ultron

Ok, yes. This movie has aged pretty badly. But there’s a lot to like! Vision is a graceful, hot, AI legend right out of the gate. Lots of nice seeds are sown here, but it’s too bad that Ultron was a big dumbass who didn’t know how to execute any of his angsty plans. His “age” lasted about a day? Day of Ultron. Still, Tony Stark deserves to be put in prison by now.

19) Guardians of the Galaxy

As far as nailing a tone down, this movie did it best. You can call this movie airtight in its execution. The only negative is that every following Marvel movie felt like it had to be just as funny as this one.

18) Man of Steel

I love me a serious superhero film. I think this movie is best described in pros and cons. Pros: Henry Cavill is the best onscreen Superman yet, Michael Shannon made an otherwise goofy role kind of believable, the special effects are the best I’ve ever seen in a superhero film. Cons: None of this matters, because you’ve just never seen a more boring plot to a film in your life.

17) Batman

There will be no disrespect for the classics here. Every good superhero movie owes it all to Batman. This movie nailed it in every category. Jack Nicholson’s weirdo Joker was all-too-perfect, and the goth-horror scenery was inspired. Best of all, Michael Keaton made the idea of a gay orphan dressing up as a bat pretty relatable.

16) Superman

They haven’t quite gotten it right until 2006, but more on that up the list. This is the best Superman will ever be, because the character really just doesn’t work in the modern day. Christopher Reeve gives a romantic, gosh-golly version of the comic character, and it’s pretty damn good. Also, Marlon Brando’s Jor-El is haunting and gorgeous when he speaks. Another classic.

15) Batman Begins

Blah blah blah, gritty, dark, blah blah blah. Reinvented superhero movies, blah blah blah realistic.

14) Captain America: The First Avenger

This is the heart and soul of the MCU, and one of the most unique out of the series. Still feels important even in the third phase, and has a lot of great messages that I am too lazy to write. Great movie, and Chris Evans as Captain America was the best casting choice since Robert Downey Jr. Nothing but greatness here.

13) Iron Man 2

Do people really think this is the worst of the MCU? Not by a long-shot. But oh my god, Tony Stark is just such a war criminal. And Mickey Rourke is delightful! I love that part where Iron Man empties his bladder into his own Iron Man suit. Did Superman ever do that shit? Fuck Superman!

12) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

My ass has seen a lot of superhero movies, but I don’t think my ass has smiled more watching one of them. Ummmm, what a fucking great movie? With a fucking great plot? And, like, a great villain for fucking once? A truly lovely film.

11) The Dark Knight Rises

A marxist superhero film? No wonder it’s not the fan favorite. But I love it just the same. The funeral scene at the end is beautifully acted by all involved. Yes, Bruce Wayne died, but it didn’t feel cheap. Catwoman driving the batpod? An icon of cinema. A great ending to a great blah blah blah, not as good as The Dark Blah blah blah.

10) Marvel’s The Avengers

What a moment for a little thirteen year old nerdfuck like me. It leans on the immature side of the MCU, yes. But it’s damn near perfect filmmaking, and by far the most accessible superhero movie to date. Hulk Smash!

9) Iron Man 3

We’re getting into real personal-favorite territory here. Shane Black’s Christmas superhero film is hated by a lot of people, but don’t worry, they’re all just sweaty ugly nerds with untouched genitals who don’t realize that Fu-Manchu proto-Asian wizard stereotypes aren’t exactly the best material for a 2013 film. Man, I adore this movie. It’s a perfect blend of comedy (not too much) and drama (not too much), with an infusion of self awareness that appeals to a cynical guy like me.

8) Superman Returns

This movie really understands Superman. It’s too bad it was overshadowed by Batman Begins, because this movie has a lot to offer. No, it isn’t action-packed, and yes it does star Kevin Spacey (gross) as Lex Luther, but the romanticism and themes of a post-superhero world are rich with wonderful dialogue and the best onscreen Lois Lane yet. Forget the Kryptonite iceberg at the end, Superman’s journey of finding himself is surprisingly great material for a film, delicately directed by Bryan Singer. Wait, is that TWO pedophile boy rapists in one film? Yikes, you know what.......never mind.

7) Captain America: Civil War

The re-watchability here is astonishing. It’s not even an Avengers film, and it’s still easily the best Avengers film. And yet, it stays its course as a personal story of loyalty and sacrifice for the titular character. It’s totally a Captain America movie. Also, can Tony Stark just get fucking imprisoned already?

6) Iron Man

Easily the “coolest” superhero movie ever made. I can watch terrorists get blown up by lasers all day! A true classic, and still feels just a little more legitimate than all the other MCU films.

5) Spider-Man: Homecoming

A relatable protagonist? A relatable villain? An evil psycopath? (Tony Stark). What’s not to love? It might not have “amazing” in the title like those other fuck-your-mom Spidey movies, but it most certainly is. (Amazing, I mean).

4) The Dark Knight

Blah blah blah joker, blah blah blah Heath Ledger, Christopher Nolan. Blahblahblahblah dark, reinvented the genre, blah blah blah.

3) Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Yes I’ll say it. Here we have the best story in a superhero film to date. And to disguise all the intellectual themes of post-terrorist society, individuality, corruption, the pointlessness of patriotism, and homoeroticism, we have just enough kick-ass action scenes for your average brain-dead male to get a kick out of it too.

2) X-Men: Days of Future Past

I’m a sucker for time travel, and fuck me if this didn’t deliver 100%. This was my first X-Men movie experience, and I still think about it about once every couple of weeks. I don’t even want to write about it because I get embarrassed by my love for this movie.

1) Logan

The world’s changed. All the mutants are dead. Patrick Stewart is a senile fuck. Wolverine’s claws hurt when he tries to bring them out. Jesus Christ, there’s so much here that I can’t believe it’s a real movie. There’s just something about seeing a grizzly Hugh Jackman in a bloody t-shirt that really grinds my gears. It’s tragic, it’s beautiful, it’s expansive, and it feels like the last superhero movie that ever needs to be made.

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davidmann95 · 7 years ago

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Since you've listed the preferences of the Superman actors, and also have done a FrankenBatman, can you do a similar worst to best list of the Batman actors in your opinion?

Skipping over Lewis Wilson and Robert Lowrey, as I haven’t seen the Batman film serials:

9. Dick Gautier

youtube

Adam West’s fill-in for a 1974 Equal Pay PSA, his impression is far from up to snuff, with not an iota of West’s hilariously sincere conviction.

8. Val Kilmer

I’m what might be called a Batman Forever apologist - as opposed to Batman and Robin, which requires no apologies - but Val Kilmer’s flat, passionless performance is certainly not one of the aspects I would leap to the defense of. I suppose he deserves some credit for being the last to wear an acceptable big-screen Batman costume for 21 years, but bleak as 1995-2016 was in that regard, no cowl is enough to cover up that he just wasn’t a very good Batman.

7. Bruce Thomas

The Onstar Batman may not have had a chance to make much of an impression in his 6 commercials - nor did he give any kind of impression that there was some kind of grand take on the character just waiting to show itself - but he did pretty well with what time he had, with some decent comic timing and a straight-faced attitude to fighting the Joker, Penguin, and Riddler that managed the tricky balancing act of showing a serious version of Batman who regardless still clearly enjoyed his job.

6. Michael Keaton

I’m not totally certain I ever fully bought Keaton as Batman - his greatest performance in superhero movies wouldn’t come until, of all things, his time as the Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming - but I still most certainly bought him as an unhinged trust fund millionaire who would beat the snot out of sword-wielding street punks and a sewer-dwelling Danny DeVito, and that goes a long way. Plus he casually backhanded that one guy so fantastically it’s been a cultural shorthand for how awesome Batman is ever since.

5. George Clooney

While he delivered maybe the 5th-best performance of the thoroughly amazing Batman and Robin, it was regardless a seriously underrated one. His Batman may not have quite found the line overall between serious and camp it seemed to be aiming for, but he still had a number of great individual moments under the cowl, he was a smooth as hell Bruce Wayne, and his work bouncing off Michael Gough’s Alfred and Chris O’Donnell as Robin was A+ all the way. If nothing else, his delivery of “She wants to kill you, Dick” was Oscar-worthy.

4. David Mazouz

From what fairly little I’ve seen, Gotham is an utterly bonkers and entertaining Batman show at its heart, but one utterly and irrevocably crippled by a delusional self-image of actually being about Jim Gordon and generic cop show bullshit, rather than baby Batman hanging out with baby Catwoman under the world’s crankiest babysitter in Alfred as supervillains ham it up at each other. Insomuch as there’s a soul to the thing though, it has to be Mazouz, who pulls off a solid performance of a Bruce Wayne who deep down is already very much Batman, but in spite of his willpower and conviction simply doesn’t yet have the skill, maturity or perspective as to how to apply himself yet, with all the frustration that brings as he figures it out a bit at a time. Seeing him confront his parents’ killer or hold strong in the face of Cameron Monaghan’s proto-Joker, it’s honestly difficult to believe he’s even operating in the same genre as most of his co-stars, much less the same actual program.

3. Ben Affleck

Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice has a boatload of sins to be held accountable for, but the casting of Affleck as the caped crusader to fill Bale’s considerable shoes was not one of them. His Bruce Wayne is simultaneously genuinely charming while having *just* enough of an air of sleaze that he’d be believably overlooked, while his Batman…well, feels like Batman in a way no one else has quite matched, with the kind of visceral, focused intensity and righteous hate you’d expect from a guy who’s spent almost of a quarter of a century trying to fist-fight crime into submission, with an entire unseen history of allies lost and ground wars against brilliant, sociopathic crimelord-artists, while still showing the kind of sympathy in his rescue of Martha Kent and encounter with Deadshot in Suicide Squad to make clear there’s a soul underneath. While he hasn’t gotten a proper opportunity to strut his stuff yet - even the most generous interpretations of this version up to this point hold that he was *intentionally* being written entirely out of his character in his debut - if Matt Reeves and Chris Terrio bring it for The Batman, I could absolutely see him topping this list down the line (especially if they don’t try and fix what’s broken with that suit, the first palatable modern take on his uniform that only makes him look all the more like he stepped off the page).

2. Christian Bale

If Christian Bale committed a single sin in his tenure as Batman, it was that when he screamed “SWEAR TO ME!!!!!!” in that one crooked cops’ face before dropping him 10 stories, stopping him right above the ground, and then having him fall on his face, he was fully conscious that it was the hypest shit of all time, and mistakenly believed his Batman voice should be at that level of intensity all the time rather than the lighter degree of raspiness he went with in Begins. The voice aside though - I think it largely worked given it was meant to scare the shit out of muggers, though I’ll admit it really did get to be a bit much in Rises - he was tremendously better as both Bruce Wayne and especially Batman than he was ever really given credit for at the time. It’s not entirely surprising; he was surrounded by bold, charismatic figures being pushed to their limits and capital-A Acting, while the very nature of what he was doing meant keeping it a bit more emotionally reserved. But his Bruce Wayne was almost immaculate in his grand douchebaggery, his sparring with Alfred gave us some of those characters’ best scenes in their almost 75 year relationship, and his Batman was haunting, enraged, and unstoppable. I suspect he could have been pushed a bit farther though; while I entirely disagree with the notion of Christopher Nolan’s films being cold and emotionless, I feel like a lot of the time he was played a note or two low in terms of intensity when taking it further could have made him stand out much more, and made clearer his actions under the cowl were as much an extension of his personal rage as an act to frighten the superstitious and cowardly. Regardless, he can absolutely hold his head high as the definitive modern interpretation of the character to the world at large.

1. Adam West

With every Batman up above, there’s always at least one ‘but’. They were great except; he’d be perfect if not; so on and so forth. That is not the case with Adam West. The superheroes’ superhero, he was the ultimate straight man to a world of camp madness, whether refusing to throw a bomb in a lake when it’d endanger a group of ducklings, making leaps of deduction that held more in common with dadaist poetry than criminal psychology with a 100% success rate, or somehow summoning up the willpower to not stop Batmaning to go run off into the sunset with Julie Newmar’s impossibly gorgeous Catwoman. The epitome of Batman as father-figure, dedicated keeper of public order, and crimefighting savant - as well as a damn smooth Bruce Wayne - he leapt off the pages of the New Look-era titles and defined a platonic ideal of decent-hearted superheroism that carries weight to this day. More than any to succeed him to date, he was a perfect, hilarious embodiment of his time’s vision of Batman, taking it to a level that can truly be said to have redefined the character to an extent no one else to wear the cape has come close to matching.

#Batman #Batman '66 #The Dark Knight #DCEU #Adam West #Christian Bale #Ben Affleck #David Mazouz #George Clooney #Michael Keaton #Bruce Thomas #Val Kilmer #Dick Gautier #Opinion

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ethanalter · 7 years ago

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HBO Oz 20th Anniversary Oral History

(GIF: HBO)

In today’s Peak TV landscape, television creators have a multitude of content-hungry outlets eager to attract an audience for their wares: Streaming services and premium cable compete alongside basic cable and network television, while viral video-generating Internet hot spots like YouTube and Funny or Die are cranking out original programming as well.

It’s a brave new world, one that began to take shape 20 years ago on July 12, 1997. That’s the date that Tom Fontana’s sprawling prison drama, Oz, premiered on HBO, setting a channel best known for replaying movies and the occasional cult comedy series like The Larry Sanders Show on a course to becoming a dramatic powerhouse that lived up to its famous tagline: “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO.”

And Oz was the kind of bold, provocative experiment that only could have aired on a restrictions-free cable network looking to shake up its image. Set in Emerald City, an experimental incarceration unit inside the fictional Oswald State Correctional Facility, the show offered an addictive fusion of gritty prison drama, dark comedy, graphic violence, and even a touch of soap opera romance. Oz‘s serialized storytelling and ensemble cast — J.K. Simmons, Eamonn Walker and Dean Winters were just some of the future stars who passed through Emerald City’s glass cells — attracted the attention of critics, as well as those within the industry. Two years after Oz premiered, HBO debuted a new show from David Chase called The Sopranos, and the rest is Peak TV history.

To commemorate the prison drama’s milestone anniversary, Yahoo TV talked with 13 key players in Oz‘s groundbreaking premiere and eight-episode first season. (Sorry, Keller and Beecher ‘shippers, that means no Chris Meloni, who joined in Season 2.) Read on to discover which famous hip-hop star played the role of narrator Augustus Hill before Harold Perrineau, how Simon Adebisi acquired his name (and famous hat) and the unsung heroine behind both Oz and the premium cable boom.

The Participants (In Alphabetical Order) Kirk Acevedo (Miguel Alvarez) Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Simon Adebisi) Chris Albrecht (CEO of Starz; Former CEO of HBO) Jean de Segonzac (Director of Photography; Director) Tom Fontana (Creator/Showrunner) Ernie Hudson (Warden Leo Glynn) Terry Kinney (Tim McManus) Darnell Martin (Director) Tim McAdams (Johnny Post) Jon Seda (Dino Ortolani) Lee Tergesen (Tobias Beecher) Dean Winters (Ryan O’Reily) Luna Lauren Velez (Gloria Nathan)

‘Oz’ creator Tom Fontana (Photo: Getty Images)

Chapter One: The Wonderful Wizards of Oz Tom Fontana never set out to be a premium cable pioneer. The Buffalo-born writer was a creature of network television, getting his start as a writer and producer on the beloved NBC medical drama St. Elsewhere, before collaborating with Barry Levinson and Paul Attanasio on NBC’s acclaimed police series Homicide: Life on the Street. It was during the making of Homicide that Fontana found himself contemplating what happens to criminals after they entered the penal system. That germ of an idea eventually grew into Oz, which he developed in collaboration with Levinson. As Fontana quickly discovered, his show never stood a chance at making it onto a broadcast network.

Tom Fontana: I grew up watching cop shows where at end of the episode the bad guy traditionally got arrested and went to prison while the cops sat around in the last scene and did a funny little joke. Then we all went to bed feeling [satisfied]. While I was doing Homicide — where the bad guy didn’t always get arrested — I thought, “Maybe the more interesting story is what happens to these people when they go to prison.” In David Simon’s non-fiction book [that inspired Homicide] there’s a section about a prison riot in Baltimore, and I decided to expand on it for an episode, [Season 5’s “Prison Riot”] and bring back some of the murderers we had seen in previous seasons. That was my first swing at seeing what writing a prison show might be like.

While developing Oz, I spent about two years going to prisons all over the country, and I saw that there were two kinds — these old Gothic horror chambers, and new, experimental prisons. But there was never a place where the two were together, and it was important to me that you had the old and the new butting up against each other. When I talked to prisoners who were in places like Emerald City, they were very clear that it was worse for them because they had no privacy. I found that very moving, and so that’s where Emerald City came from, and the idea of glass so that everybody could see everybody else at any given moment.

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Back then there were only four networks, and none of them were the least bit interested in my version of a prison show. I sort of pathetically adapted it as I got each rejection. I can’t remember which network I pitched which version to, but one of them was set in a juvenile detention center, and another was a Club Fed, where it was rich white collar guys who been sent up the river. Once I really started to examine what I wanted to do, I went back to the idea of that Homicide episode, which was a down-and-dirty prison with all sorts of crazy characters.

I was lucky that Chris Albrecht at HBO was looking to start doing original material. At that time, HBO had a comedy side — they had Dream On and a few other comedy shows — but they hadn’t really had a drama side yet. Chris had the vision to say, “We need to expand the reach of our network.” He told me that the [network] had had success with prison documentaries, so he had an instinct that a prison show might appeal to his subscribers. He said, “I’ll give you a little bit of money to shoot a presentation, about 15 to 20 minutes, and let’s see what it looks like.”

Chris Albrecht: The show had been in development for quite a while before we were really even contemplating doing a lot of original programming. There was a change in management, and we wanted to ramp up our originals. We hadn’t ever done an hour-long drama before. I went to Tom and said, “Look, we’ve put you and Barry [Levinson] through the ringer here. I’m not going to ask you to make any more changes, but we need to shoot something, so, here’s a million dollars. Shoot as much of this as you can.”

Fontana: I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will — it wasn’t enough money! We shot it in Baltimore while we were shooting Homicide, so we would book a location and I would say, “Okay, we’ll shoot the Homicide scene here, and then we’ll shoot the Oz scene.” So, in a way, NBC paid for it a little bit, if you know what I’m saying.

Darnell Martin: I had directed a feature, [1994’s I Like it Like That], but Homicide was my first television experience. They gave me the script for “Sniper: Part 2,” and it was written like a film, with helicopter shots and blockaded streets. I kept trying to figure out how to do that for the budget and time that we had. Maybe that was a seller for Tom. He asked me to direct the Oz presentation.

Fontana: The cast of [the presentation] was different. Jon Seda and Terry Kinney were in it, but the part that Lauren Velez [now Luna Lauren Velez] played, Dr. Gloria Nathan, was played by Jennifer Grey. The reason I later made the change was I really felt like the cast was [too] white, and I also liked the idea of a Latina woman in the midst of all these men. And there was a different guy playing Augustus Hill than Harold Perrineau.

Martin: I cast Mos Def as Augustus. He was amazing. Amazing. He was recast. It was crazy! I begged and I fought — not with Tom. It was above Tom; Tom couldn’t change it. Harold is wonderful, but you know, Mos Def had something really special.

Harold Perrineau as Augustus Hill ‘Oz.’ The role was played by Mos Def in the original presentation (Credit: HBO)

Terry Kinney: Tom had cast me in a Homicide episode, [Season 4’s “Map of the Heart”] and he said that he’d always wanted to make up for that, because it was an indecipherable episode. I played an NSA mapping guy, and to this day don’t know what it was about! I remember meeting Tom and Darnell for the Oz presentation, and they were talking about a character that was a die-hard liberal in a way that seemed extremely naïve. I basically played the warden, whose name was still McManus.

Jon Seda: I worked with Darnell on I Like It Like That, and she raised the bar for me. I told her that anything she ever does, I’m going to say yes to it. Sure enough, they said, “Hey, listen, there’s a script that’s called Oz. It’s a presentation. Darnell Martin’s directing.” I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” I didn’t even know what the role was. What a lot of people don’t know is that at the same time that I was shooting that, I was also shooting the movie Selena. So when I met with Darnell, I said, “You’re going to have to help me, because I’ve been living as this sweet guy Chris Pérez for a couple months already, and now I have to play this ruthless Dino Ortolani.” I didn’t know how I could do it, but she said, “Just trust me. Put everything in my hands and it’s going to be great.”

Jon Seda in ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Tim McAdams: I had built a pretty strong relationship with Pat Moran, who was the local casting agent for Homicide. When they decided to do the presentation for Oz, I auditioned and got cast. Nobody knew what Oz was or really thought anything of it; I just knew it was a show I got hired for and I was a young actor trying to work. We shot this presentation, and Mos Def and Jennifer Grey were in it, so I was like, “Wow! We got some names in this thing, and maybe it’s gonna get some traction!” I was honored to work with Jennifer Grey; I remember how excited I was and how friendly she was. And growing up in that era, having a chance to spend time around Mos Def and watch him transition to becoming an actor was really exciting. Sometime later I got a phone call about the show being picked up by HBO, and they said, “They’re gonna be doing a lot of recasting, but they’re going to allow you to play Johnny Post.”

Fontana: That initial presentation was more tonal; it was a real attempt to say, “This is the kind of subject matter we’re going to cover, and these are the kinds of characters we’re going to see.” You have to remember, this was before we built the Emerald City set, so it was all hallways and rooms, but it wasn’t what the show eventually looked like. Though, if you watch the first episode of Oz, there are a couple scenes that are from the original presentation, like the shower scene where Seda gets the s**t beat out of him by the COs. And I think the hospital scenes are from the original presentation.

Ernie Hudson as Warden Leo Glynn and Terry Kinney as Tim McManus on ‘Oz.’ In the pilot presentation, Kinney played the warden. (Credit: HBO)

Kinney: Jon Seda and I were two of the survivors of that 15-minute presentation. I didn’t think that I was going to make it to the series. I remember that I was in Los Angeles doing something else, and I called Tom and he said, “You know what, you’re my guy. Let me work this out.” What I think they’d done is they wanted the warden to be African-American. They wanted Ernie [Hudson], and they had a relationship with him. So Tom made me the keeper of the Emerald City section of the prison. I was grateful [for] his loyalty.

Albrecht: At the end of the presentation, the lead guy, Dino, gets killed in his cell. I said to Tom, “He comes back next episode, right?” And they said, “No, he’s dead.” I go, “What do you mean, he’s dead? He’s the lead in the show!” They go, “That’s what’s happening here.” That’s when I realized that they were gonna change the rules.

Seda: What’s funny is that I remember that the death scene wasn’t supposed to carry over [to the pilot]. I was expected to come on and be a regular on the show. I think what happened was that HBO just really loved the idea of the lead guy actually dying. That kind of set off the trend on Oz.

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Fontana: We got an eight-episode order. I was literally yelled at by friends of mine and peers of mine on the drama side of television. They said to me, “Why are you going to work over at HBO? It’s a movie channel. Nobody watches it.” And I said, “Well, who cares if nobody watches it? They’re going to let me make the show I want to make.” Literally people thought it would kill my career, that I made the wrong tactical move and that I should be doing Touched by an Angel! I’d like to tell you that I’m the visionary who had this incredible sense that cable would someday dominate the television world, but it wasn’t that. It was simply that there was an open door and I went through it.

Chapter Two: Populating Emerald City Having walked through that open door, Fontana’s next task was assembling his prison population. At the time, and still today, Oz stands as a model og diverse casting; it’s large ensemble encompasses a multitude of races, religions and sexual orientations. And shooting in New York, Fontana tapped into a deep reservoir of veteran actors and fresh faces.

Fontana: Our feeling about the penal system in America is very cyclical; you go through periods of “[Prison] should be about redemption” and then “[Prison] should be about retribution.” At that time, it was about retribution and there was this sense that prisoners were bad people, and there were no heroes in those stories. The truth is, I wasn’t interested in writing heroes per se. And that was the great thing about Chris. I’ve often quoted him as saying, “I don’t care if the characters are likable as long as they’re interesting.” That was what I needed to hear because I wasn’t planning to make likable characters — I was planning to make interesting characters.

J.K. Simmons in ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Throughout the life of the series, we were able to get some wonderful, brilliant New York theater actors. We’d used J.K. Simmons in an episode of Homicide, so I gave him the part of Vern Schillinger because I knew he could do it. Dean Winters had done Homicide episodes, and was my favorite bartender before that, so I wrote Ryan O’Reilly specifically for him.

Dean Winters: Tom had come up with the idea of Ryan O’Reily by watching me bartend. When I was a bartender, I was a real hustler. My motto was, “If you leave my bar with cab fare, then I failed.” I would try and drain you of every dollar you had. I quit my bartending job and was in Los Angeles doing my first movie, Conspiracy Theory. It was a real leap of faith. Tom came out to visit, and we had a long talk. I told him, “You know, I really don’t think this acting thing is for me, it doesn’t feel right.” And he goes, “Listen: I was doing a little presentation for HBO about a prison, and I think it might turn out well for all of us.”

Dean Winters as Ryan O’Reily on ‘Oz.’ (Credit: HBO)

Ernie Hudson: The first time I heard of Oz was when I got a call from Tom. I did a six-episode arc on St. Elsewhere [in 1984], where Tom was a writer and producer. I got to know him a little bit on set, and when he called me about Oz he said, “Do you remember we talked about working together on a project?” I didn’t remember that conversation, but I pretended that I did. I based Leo loosely on Robert Matthews, the first black warden of Leavenworth prison in Kansas. I read a book where he talked about how father was a minister, and wanted him to go into the ministry. Later on, he said to his father, “This is my ministry.” I thought of it that way. He was a guy who finished college, but probably started at junior college, and went to night school. He’s worked his way up. He’s the guy who loaned money to the friend and never got paid back.

Luna Lauren Velez as Dr. Gloria Nathan on ‘Oz.’ (Credit: HBO)

Luna Lauren Velez: My first film was I Like It Like That, directed by Darnell Martin. She called me and said, “Do you want to do this show, Oz?” And I said, “Well, I’m doing this other show, [the Fox drama New York Undercover].” She said, “It might be a one off, I’m not even sure what’s going to happen with the character,” and then she said, “Jon Seda is doing it.” Jon and I had done I Like It Like That together, so I came onboard and they just kept asking me to come back. My understanding was that Jennifer Grey played Dr. Nathan in the [presentation]; everyone had glowing things to say about her, but said, “We decided to go a different direction.”

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje: I went in and read for the casting director [Alexa L. Fogel]; there were only two lines and I read them in a British accent, an American accent, an African accent and a Jamaican accent just to show what I could do with it. She told me to wait, auditioned a few other people and then closed up shop and took me over to Tom’s office. He was in the middle of writing, and she told me, “Okay, he’s going to give you two minutes.” He didn’t even look up; I performed the lines in those various accents, and he said, “All right, stop. That’s enough.” That was it! He didn’t say I got the part — he didn’t say anything.

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje in ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Alexa called me the next day and said, “Tom liked the African character, the Nigerian one. He doesn’t have one of those in the show, and he’d like you to play that.” I was a little bummed, because I wanted to play an American. Then she said, “What he wants to do is he’s going to write it as an American and he wants you to be able to translate it into the African character,” which was freaking great. When I met Tom again, he told me that he had a Nigerian friend he went to college with whose name was Bisi. So he said he would use part of my name and part of his friend’s name: that’s how Adebisi was born.

Fontana: Eamonn Walker was someone I didn’t know until he came into audition, but he was so incredible that it was a foregone conclusion he’d be part of the cast. I was obsessed with getting that character of Kareem Said right. And Eamonn was equally obsessive about getting it right. Some of the extras in his Muslim Brotherhood prisoner group were actual Muslims, so he would go once a week to the mosque, and pray and experience the whole religious side of what it is to be an Imam.

Eamonn Walker as Kareem Said on ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Kirk Acevedo: Originally Tom wrote Miguel Alvarez for someone else, and then I came in and I got the gig. I remember the exact audition: there were five actors ahead of me, and the scene was an emotional scene where you had to go in and scream and yell about some s**t. Every actor who went in before me screamed and yelled, and I was like, “Well, I can’t scream and yell, because no matter how good I can do it you’re gonna get tired of seeing the same fucking thing.” So I played it just the total opposite, and I stood out and got the gig.

Lee Tergesen: I had been doing a show for USA called Weird Science, which had just finished up, and I was working on Homicide for a couple of episodes. I was down in Baltimore and Tom said, “When you’re done, can you come up to New York? I want to talk to you about something that I have in the works.” So I went up and he and I started talking about something that ended up being Oz. We talked about a couple of different ideas he had for parts, one being a guard and the other one being this guy who ends up being in jail as sort of a fish out of water. I was like, “That sounds more interesting than a guard.”

Fontana: Initially HBO didn’t want me to cast Lee as Beecher. I was like, “Well, what’s wrong with him?” And they go, “Oh no, he’s a brilliant actor. It’s just not who we had in our head.” I said, “Well, he’s who I had in my head, because I wrote the part for him. So you’re stuck with him.” And then, of course, they were [ultimately] thrilled with him. But at first they were a little nervous, because he didn’t look like who they thought Beecher should look like. I never understood what that meant.

Albrecht: I do remember talking about that, because Lee was such a prominent character in the beginning. We were kind of new to it all. I had worked pretty closely with Garry Shandling on The Larry Sanders Show and Marta Kaufman and David Crane on Dream On, but this was really the first time that we had this size of a show, and this kind of serialized drama. So I think we were just babbling at Tom and Barry, who obviously had a lot more television experience than we did.

Lee Tergesen as Tobias Beecher on ‘OZ.’ (Credit: HBO)

Tergesen: In retrospect, I know that happened, but Tom didn’t make me aware of it at all in the beginning. But yeah, my understanding now is they [thought]: “This character is so important, and this guy has just being doing Weird Science.” And Tom was like, “Well, don’t worry — you’ll see, you’ll see.” I wonder what they think now!

Fontana: I had met Rita Moreno at a party at Elaine’s that was marking the end of The Cosby Mysteries, which she had been a regular on. I went up to her and said, “It’s such an honor to meet you — I’m such a big fan of your work.” And she went, “Well, if you’re such a big f***ing fan of my work, why didn’t you f***ing write me a part?” I went, “Okay, I will!” So years later, I took her and her husband to dinner and was talking about Oz. She goes, “It all sounds fantastic. What would I play?” And I went: “You would play the nun.” Well, she laughed for about a half hour and then said, “Tom, I’ve played hookers, I’ve played bandits, but no one’s ever had the balls to ask me to be a nun.” I also talked to her about my sister, who is from a very liberal order of nuns. In the summers, she would run the hospitality house at a prison near Buffalo. I always thought it was so incredibly ironic that my sweet sister was scheduling conjugal visits for prisoners. I told Rita all that, and she said, “Okay, just as long as I’m not going to be in one of those habits.”

Martin: Tom was fabulous in the way that I could say, “Tom, check this guy out. Is there a place for him?” And he’d say, “Yes, I’m going to write him into it.” There were some people that were just out there in the world, and not necessarily actors yet. He was really open to bringing people in, looking at them and trying to find the place for people who had this very specific New York vibe. With a network, you try to get someone hired and it takes so long. With HBO, it was fabulous: if Tom and I liked an actor, we would go to the one person over there and it turned around real quick.

Rita Moreno as Sister Peter Marie Reimondo on ‘OZ.’ (Credit: HBO)

Fontana: I was very clear in the auditions, and when people signed the contract that they might be asked to be nude, and that there would be violence. I didn’t want people who were going to be skittish.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: Tom made it clear that this was going to be groundbreaking, and that he was really targeting authenticity, so that meant that it required certain actors and certain characters to go in places that may be uncomfortable personally. There were rape scenes and all kinds of complications that weren’t going to be comfortable. He made it clear that if you don’t want to do that, then you’re not the actor for the part.

Acevedo: No, he never warned us! I think there was a nudity waiver because there might be nudity. But every week it was like, “Alright, Kirk, today you’re gonna eat s**t out of the toilet.” Every week we were just like, “Dude, as long as I don’t get raped, I’m alright.” It wasn’t a scary thing, it was kind of titillating. It wasn’t like we were all nervous about it, because we would do it. It was more of like, “What’s he gonna have us do?” I don’t ever remember him warning me, but then I’m pretty sure there were people he didn’t have to warn because we were all game to do it.

Kirk Acevedo as Miguel Alvarez on ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Winters: I was there from the inception of the show, and I told Tom, “Look, I’ll do anything you want.” And I did. The smart actors knew that we were doing a show about a prison, not a show about a prep school, and it’s cable television. If you had half a brain you knew that this was not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and it was not going to be a walk through the daisies. So that’s the way that I approached it, and obviously there were people who had a hard time with it. Some guys didn’t want to do this, some guys didn’t want to do that, but that’s the nature of the beast, I guess.

Kinney: I remember in the first episode that Edie Falco [who played a correctional officer] and I were supposed to have a love scene during an execution. As someone was being electrocuted, we were supposed to be having sex in a cell. As much as everybody took their clothes off on the show, both Edie and I felt it wasn’t the right choice, and asked if we could do it in a way that was less graphic. From that point on, that’s how my character was treated. I wasn’t one of the people who had to do [anything graphic].

Edie Falco as Officer Diane Wittlesey on ‘Oz.’ She later was cast on ‘The Sopranos’ but made occasional appearances on ‘Oz.’ (Credit: HBO)

Fontana: I have to say, over the course of the series, there was only really one actor who lied to me and said he would do whatever I asked him, and then when it came time he said, “No, I’m not going to do it.” But he wasn’t a regular and I was able to kill him off fairly quick. Let them guess who that was!

Chapter 3: Getting Into ‘The Routine’ Some TV shows take a little while to find themselves, but Oz‘s series premiere lays down the law about what viewers could expect from their time inside Emerald City. Written by Tom Fontana and directed by Darnell Martin, “The Routine,” swiftly establishes all the elements Oz would become infamous for, including densely-intertwined narratives, a parade of compelling characters, shocking acts of violence and a pervasive sense that nobody is safe within Oswald’s walls. Especially not the person you think is the main character…

Fontana: In terms of the writing of the first episode, Augustus was the first voice I heard in my head. In terms of the design of the show, Beecher was the first character that I came up with, and then McManus. One is there as a prisoner, and one is there as a warden. It just seemed like, for the audience, Beecher’s our Dante coming into the Inferno. He’s the one who’s guiding us into this world where we’re going to be exposed to these different cycles of violence.

Jean de Segonzac: The very first scene we did was in McManus’ office where he tries to put the glass on top of the cockroach. That was the very first shot on the very first day.

Kinney: I hated that scene. It was a trained cockroach; there was a cockroach handler, and back-up cockroaches. That’s a delicate area for me, cockroaches. We did endless angles on it, because Darnell did a lot of angles.

Winters: I knew no one on my first day besides Lee Tergesen. So it was like the first day of school at a juvenile delinquent reformatory. Everyone’s kind of looking around going, “Oh yeah, so you’re Alvarez, alright. I got to keep my eye on you.” Or “You’re Adebisi, alright, you’re big and scary, okay.” Or “You’re playing Said; okay, you’re kind of cool, but what’s up with the English accent?” In the first couple of days, it was just like, “What the fuck have I gotten myself in to here?” But in a good way, obviously.

Tergesen: Nobody really talked to me in the beginning. In the first four or five episodes, the extras would not talk to me. But once Beecher went crazy and attacked Schillinger [Episode 7, “Plan B”], all of a sudden everybody was like, “Hey Beecher, Beecher, Beecher, oh hey Beech!” It was so weird. It was like high school.

Fontana: This is a little piece of backstage history: we shot the pilot and the first season in Manhattan at what is now Chelsea Market, and what used to be the old Oreo cookie factory. The cafeteria had really high ceilings because the stoves had to go up to those windows to let out the smoke from baking the Oreos. We always had to cut if somebody left the cafeteria, because there was no way they could walk to the next set. It was all a bunch of different rooms.

McAdams: I’ll never forget the first time I arrived on set. You’d get off the elevator, and it would be like a normal office with people going about their duties. Then you’d turn the corner, walk down a little bit and you’re in prison.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: We were about five floors up; the first four floors were offices, and then when you got to the fifth floor, it was literally Emerald City. At any given time, there were 300 or 400 extras in there. The cells were real cells, with the right size and proximity. It was hot, sticky and you felt claustrophobic, like you were in prison. In between takes, there were waiting room areas where we could go, but I chose to stay my cell for the whole time.

Seda: It was scary when the reality hit you that this is the life for so many; at least we were actors and able to walk away at the end of the day. All the details were incredible, and it just really added to making it just so authentic. The set itself was probably the biggest character of the show.

Hudson: It was like being transported to another world. I’d walk to work from the Upper West Side down to where we were shooting, and the contrast of being on the streets of New York and then going in and being on the set of Oz was cool.

Winters: People used to ask: “How did you prepare for the role?” It was very easy. You just got off the elevator, and walked down to the set. It was a f***ing prison! With the glass cells, you realized that everyone was being watched all day long. It was very unnerving. I remember Vincent Gallo came by the set one day, and he was looking around and goes, “Man, this set’s the f***ing cream.” Meaning, they really nailed that set. And my brother [Scott William Winters, who joined the cast in Season 2 as O’Reily’s brother, Cyril] actually spent the weekend on the set by himself, just to get that feeling of incarceration.

Adebisi and Beecher get to know each other in ‘The Routine’ (Credit: HBO)

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: For my scene with Beecher in the first episode, Lee and I were meeting for the first time as actors. It was kind of organic because his character was entering the prison, and it was a new world for him, whereas I’m a lifer. The thing for me was to establish that I own him. I own his life, I own his physical body; he was going to be my bitch and do exactly what I told him to do. I had the luxury of sleeping in my cell, and I would not wash. I became one with my own odor to stake my territory [despite] the complaints of the DP and the crew. Quite often they said, “Perhaps you should shower.” But I told them I was going to stake my claim. Whatever feeling I would evoke in the crew was exactly the feelings that were intended when the actors would come in my cell: repulsion, fear and disgust. It was lovely!

Tergesen: I don’t remember that! I do remember Adewale being ridiculous. He was so f***ing good in that part. I used to say that being in that cell with Adebisi was like being on a date from hell that lasted a month. I mean, he literally grabbed my penis more than women I had dated for a month.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: I had two scenes in the first episode, and was meant to die in the second episode. But Tom liked what he saw [in the premiere], and kept liking what he saw. I’ve lived a life that gave me an insight as to what it was like to be in a gang in my teenage years, so I just brought that rawness to it. I wore my hat in the way that I used to wear when I was a teenager on the street myself. I knew that the tilt of the hat represented defiance. The costume and production were very much against me wearing the hat initially, because they wanted everybody in prison to be uniformed. I had to respect that, but I just knew that I needed to put my stamp on the character. That scene with Beecher was the first scene I shot, and when they said “Action,” I pulled the hat out of my pocket and put it on. When we wrapped and moved onto my next scene, the director said, “Wait a minute — he had the hat on. Now we have to keep it.”

Tergesen: I was so happy to get out of [Adebisi’s cell], but then I go to Schillinger’s cell. We didn’t rehearse at all on that show, so J.K. and I just met when we started shooting. The funny thing about him is when we’re playing those initial scenes, it’s like he’s the nicest guy on the planet. You know, he’s always smiling. It’s like, “I can trust this guy!” And then it just devolves. The branding thing ends up looking like I’m getting f***ed in the ass, which I didn’t realize was going to happen. Not that I minded, but when he was burning my ass it was causing me to like buck like I was getting f***ed. That was my ass, bro! No stunt ass.

De Segonzac: One image I have, which I can’t get out of my head, is Tergesen’s ass two inches from my face while Simmons is branding him. I’m just going, “This is the weirdest way of making a living that I can ever think of.”

Fontana: When it came to shooting the first episode, moments like the swastika on the ass were defining moments for the show. And the moment when Dino is naked and getting beat up in the shower was, at the time, as brutal, a scene I’d ever seen on television. Those are, to me the moments that said to people this isn’t your father’s [TV show].

Seda: The shower scene was wild. It showed how quick things can happen in prison. Dino wasn’t afraid of anyone, and I was so into being that guy that I carried that with me. I literally walked onto set butt-naked. I walked right up, and stood there talking to Darnell as if I had clothes on. I said, “Okay, let’s go. Let’s shoot this scene. What do you want me to do? You want me to do this? Want me to be here? Want me to do this? Okay. Great, let’s do it.”

Velez: The storyline with Dino and Emilio [a prisoner dying of AIDS] really resonated with me because I have friends and a family member who are HIV positive. I also loved working with Jon. There’s one scene where I could barely keep a straight face because we had done that movie together, so there was something delicious about watching him play this wise-ass character. It’s really one of the few times in the pilot that you see Gloria engaging with one of the inmates in a fun, slightly flirtatious way.

Seda: Jose Soto did such a fabulous job as Emilio. What I love about that scene was how well it was written. It wasn’t that Dino just didn’t like Emilio because he had AIDS; Dino actually found compassion for him. The fact that he honored his request to take him out was done from compassion. That was a way for Dino to be in touch with his heart. It was just brilliant.

Fontana: When I talked with Chris Albrecht, he said, “What’s the one thing you’re absolutely not allowed to do on a broadcast television?” And I said, “Kill the lead in the pilot.” And he said, “Well, then go ahead and do it.” So I hired Jon and told him this is what’s going to happen. He was cool with it, and then I hired him on Homicide, to sort of compensate for the fact that he was killed off.

Seda: For Dino, there’s a point where what was keeping him afloat was the fact that he still has his family out there. There’s a scene where his wife comes to visit him and the kids are there playing and that’s when he makes the decision that it’s never going to happen. The reality of the fact that he’s here for life really hits him. Darnell and I added a moment where Dino taps the glass, kind of like he’s touching her for the last time as a family. I don’t know if a lot of people realize or catch it, but that tap on the glass to her is basically saying that’s the last time she’s ever going to see him. From that point on, it’s just a matter of time for Dino.

Winters: I remember reading the script and going, “Oh, Dino’s a badass!” And by the way, Tom named the character after me, because my nickname is Dino. Then all of a sudden he’s dead, and I’m the one who has him lit on fire. My first thought was, “I feel pretty f***ing good, because I’m not the one dying!” But I was also blown away that this was what Tom was going to do.

McAdams: To say I was excited [to kill Dino] would be an understatement. At that point, I didn’t realize that I would be the first inmate to kill somebody on Oz. That didn’t connect until way later, what I realized the show had a reputation for killing people off. The idea that I was going to be killing someone was just a thrill, and I knew that it was going to be memorable. The fact that they were killing Jon off in the first episode told me how edgy the show was going to be. No one’s safe, and episode to episode, you don’t know what’s going to happen, who’s going to die, and how it’s going to happen. You just don’t know. You have to tune in and watch.

Seda: Talk about going out in a blaze of glory, right? That’s what he did. It was pretty wild how it was shot. I remember seeing the dummy that they had made up in the makeup trailer, and I said, “Oh my gosh, that dummy looks just like me!” When we were shooting it, I remember just looking up and telling Tim, “Hey, hey, hey, don’t actually light it.” A couple times, he kept forgetting and actually lit it. I’m like, “Wait! You’re going to drop this on my face, dummy!”

McAdams: Dropping that match under the camera and watching those flames come up was the most exciting and invigorating feeling. To this day when I see it, I still get excited. Because that wasn’t CGI, it was a glass plate. Also, being given the creative autonomy again to just go in there and have fun with it. Johnny Post wasn’t wired right, so just dropping the match would’ve been one thing. But dropping the match like, “Boom, you’re gone,” was so fun as an actor, because we were so deep in the character at that point.

Fontana: I wanted to do a show in which the audience never relaxed, because I these men who are in prison don’t get a chance to relax. So if I’m really going to try to convey what they’re going through, then the audience should never be able to kick back.

Winters: I’ve never seen this before or since: the scripts would come out, and people would take one and rush to their dressing room, a corner of the set or go in a jail cell, and read the script and see if they’re still alive at the end. It was nerve-wracking.

Seda: I don’t remember any [farewell] party. I think it was just, “All right, you’re dead. Goodbye.” But Fontana came to me and said, “Don’t worry. I’m going to bring you on Homicide.” So that worked out great! [Seda played Detective Paul Falsone on the final two seasons of Homicide.]

‘OZ’ director Darnell Martin (Photo: Getty Images)

Chapter 4: The Future was Female When the histories of cable’s rise have been written, they tend to dwell on the accomplishments of male showrunners like David Chase, Alan Ball and Shawn Ryan. While Tom Fontana is certainly part of that group, both he and Oz‘s cast are quick to note that one of the show’s key creative architects was a woman. As the director of the original pilot presentation, and then the series premiere, Darnell Martin established the innovative visual language that distinguished OZ from anything else on TV at that point. Having gotten her start as an independent filmmaker before landing television gigs, she sought to infuse the series with some of the same spontaneity and energy that defined that era of indie movies. Martin continues to alternate the occasional feature film, like 2008’s Cadillac Records, with a diverse slate of TV credits that includes such series as Grey’s Anatomy, Grimm and Blindspot. If Tom Fontana is among the founding fathers of the premium cable boom, than Darnell Martin is its founding mother.

Fontana: I’m not a director. I never aspired to be a director, and I have no real interest in it. So I rely very heavily on directors to create a visual style that goes with the storytelling, and I trust directors that I hire to bring their best game to the playing field. Darnell was there from the beginning. She and I had worked on Homicide together, and I thought, “Oh, she’s really got some stuff going on here.” I suppose back then the idea of a woman directing a male prison show didn’t make sense to some people, but it made sense to me because of Darnell.

Martin: The funny thing is, I didn’t want to do it at first! I had brought another project to Tom, and we brought it to ABC and ABC ended up not making it. I really didn’t want to do this show. Not because I didn’t like it, it was just because I had a thing about people in jail. I grew up in a very rough place, and I know a lot of people that really needed to go to prison because the neighborhood was a lot safer with them not there. I had my own very real and personal reasons not to want to glorify that. Then I said, “Let me go visit some [prisoners].” So I visited prisons, and said, “You know what? People in jail are human beings, and there but the grace of God go I.” I didn’t want to do it if they were going to be other than me. [But when I] saw people in prison and how they were living, that helped me emotionally get around dealing with the show and made me want to do it.

Albrecht: Darnell was such a critical part of setting the tone and the style; she worked with Tom on the production design and how to shoot this. I think we all set out to do something different visually. Drama has been a staple of network television obviously, and the fact that we [at HBO] were now entering that arena, the one thing that everybody felt was we really needed to differentiate ourselves. I don’t think if any of us on the HBO side had any idea that Tom and Darnell were gonna take that so literally, and just make something that startlingly different.

Winters: Darnell Martin is no joke. She came in with a vision, and her vision just happened to match Tom’s. I think she’s kind of left out of the conversation a lot of times when it comes to Oz, and she should really be part of the conversation, because she came in there as a woman, in a hyper-male environment and she laid down the law in this jail. She really did; and people took notice.

De Segonzac: She’s someone with a real vision. Tom was always telling me, “Just do your thing.” And I, of course, was trying to do Darnell’s thing. The [visual] theme was us being in these tight quarters, just participating. Basically, we just did whatever we felt like within the moment. As you’ll see, some scenes are all on a dolly and laid out, and others are completely handheld. For one shot, I remember being on a foot dolly, and going around the edge, while Jon Seda is trying to force feed a guy who’s dying of AIDS.

Jose Soto as Emilio and Seda as Dino (Credit: HBO)

Martin: There’s an idea in television that I don’t think makes the best television, and that is you have a plan before you get there. If you’re new at doing this, that’s probably helpful. The bad thing about it is that you can have a plan, and then all of a sudden the light is over here so you have to deal with shadows or maybe an actor has to go to the hospital. There’s always some kind of issue in this business. What you need to do, and what I like to do, is go to a place, sit in that place and come up with all the ways I could shoot it. I think shot lists are so reductive, because you can go through every scene [ahead of time], but in reality, you didn’t even work with the actor. You have an idea of blocking, but it’s only you know that knows exactly how you’re going to block it, and then you’re going to make that actor a puppet. That’s a big problem. These actors were very passionate about their characters, and had very strong ideas about their characters, and they all had their homework done when they came in. They were all willing to rehearse and find it and they were generous to one another.

De Segonzac: We had to go fast, fast, fast because there was so much to do. I remember that the dolly guys would just be sitting on the dolly [between takes], and I was like, “What the f**k are you doing? There’s not sitting around here.” At 7 a.m. all the cameras were built, the sound cart was ready and the actors were on set in costume. There was one time where we were running out of time, and Tom happened to be visiting the set. Normally, he wouldn’t be there, but he showed up and he was angry that we were going to go late. So I’m saying [to Darnell], “We’ve got to go fast, so if I do this and this, will you be happy?” And she was angry at me. Tom pulled me by the arm and said, “Why are you talking to her? Just do your thing. Just do whatever you always do.” 15 minutes later the scene was done.

Kinney: Sometimes somebody would be late, and that was a bad thing, because we had to start at 7am and finish at 7pm. If somebody showed up for the first scene late, then that person had sole responsibility for killing our day. We all understood that. For the most part, there was never a hitch in any of it. Darnell had a very specific shooting style; it was a lot of pushing in. The camera was its own character. It was cool to be a part of, but at the same time, you had to hit marks a lot in terms of your acting with that style. You had to turn at exactly the moment the camera arrived. She did a lot of things as one-offs, and that saves some time, but it also makes for very complicated shots. We used to get into little dust-ups about it, but it wasn’t anything that was bad. I would just say, “I’m trying.”

One of Martin’s signature push-ins (GIF: HBO)

Tergesen: She was a very strong personality, but I got along with her pretty well. Every once in awhile there would be something camera-wise [that was tough]. I remember I had a scene with Terry Kinney, and I thought, “Why would I stand right here in a place where he can look at me?” And she’s not letting up or even letting me have an idea about what I wanted to do. She’s rolling the crane across the big main room, and I’m like, “Is this about a crane shot?” She said, “No,” and of course it was about a crane shot. It was a cool shot! Sometimes you have to give up to the people who know what they’re doing.

Hudson: I like Darnell. I did not like the fact that she really liked Eamonn Walker more than me. That really annoyed the hell out of me. She kept praising him, and didn’t have a damn thing to say to me. Since then I’ve gotten to know her. In fact I did a series called APB for Fox, and she directed one of the episodes. I really like her a lot.

Velez: I can put any episode on, and say, “Darnell shot this.” She’s got a great eye; it’s the specific way that she’ll shoot something. Or those unexpected, beautiful tracking shots that Darnell does. It’s almost like a dance with her, and theatrical as well, because it has to be seamless.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: Darnell would do these sweeping moving shots where she would literally introduce about 10 characters at the same time. There was a lot of movement, and you just had to do all your dialogue on the move, and interacting with other characters. It was very fluid style, which was tricky because as an actor you just have to be very ready, and very much engaged in your character so that you don’t miss a beat. You had to be in rhythm with the flow of the camera, because it moved a lot with Darnell. It was alive, and I think that’s what it was meant to capture.

De Segonzac: We shot everything on 16mm; there was never any question of going 35mm. Back then, the 35mm cameras were immensely huge, and very heavy. For the spaces we were crunching ourselves into, it never would have worked. We were just constantly doing stuff you could never do with a big camera or a huge dolly. At one point, I got enamored with the Dutch tilt [a canted camera angle], so I’d start my shot at a Dutch and then move back and straighten it out, or maybe even Dutch it the other way. I wanted to have fun. After a week of doing that, somebody tapped me on the shoulder and gave me a phone message from Tom, and it said, “Enough of the f***ing Dutch tilt.”

An ‘Oz’ Dutch tilt (Credit: HBO)

Fontana: The cube that Augusts is in was her idea. I kept saying to her, “We’ve got to find some place where he’s isolated, but I don’t want him to be in front of black curtains or something.” She was at some museum, and there was some kind of cube there. She told me, “You’ve got to see it, because that’s what I think we should use for Augustus.” Every director after her hated that cube! But I insisted that they had to use it in some way, shape or form because it was so expensive to build that I wanted to amortize it over the course of the series.

Martin: I was at the Whitney Biennial, and I saw this box in a room that was tilted on its side. I wanted to utilize something like that, and I brought that to the production designer [Gary Weist] who was phenomenal. From there, we started to riff; we riffed about 2001: A Space Odyssey, the way they’re kind of under this glass. We started talking the tricks we could do with the box and really show this idea of isolation, and no longer having any privacy. You can’t even go to the bathroom without the world videotaping you and watching you.

De Segonzac: I saw the same show at the Biennial. The box just looked like a silver box with windows; some kind of construction art. I was not impressed by this thing at all, and it didn’t occur to me to think twice about it. But she came while we were building the set, and she was talking all about this box that she saw. Perrineau’s character was supposed to be in a wheelchair, so he had to be able to get into so that his wheelchair would be latched down and the whole box would turn and move. We built a box that had a crank and a motor on it, and we could put Harold in there, strap him down, and send him upside down.

Seda: I got a chance to be in the box in one of the episodes where Dino comes back as a ghost. [Season 6, “A Day in the Death”] It was pretty wild. Harold had so much dialogue, and [I loved] the way he made it flow in that setting. I’m sure Harold would say he loved it because it made him become one with the character. That cube just became his M.O.

Tergesen: The crank made so much noise that you couldn’t shoot sound with it. So Harold had a lot of looping to do. I did a few things in the box, and, of course, J.K. and I did that Barry Manilow song, “The Last Duet.” [Season 5, “Variety.”] That was a song I was gonna do in the 10th grade with my girlfriend, but we never did it. As soon as I thought of it [for the episode], I knew Tom was going to love it. And then two years ago, I was sitting next to one of the guys who wrote the lyrics for that song. He said, “You used one of my songs in your show.” And I was like, “No s**t. I picked it!”

Kinney: I really liked the cube. In the two episodes I directed, [Season 3, “Cruel and Unusual Punishments” and Season 4, “Wheel of Fortune”], I did some very fun stuff with it. In my first episode, I remember making Harold be in smaller and smaller boxes, until he was inside a little dark thing. I didn’t find it an entirely successful exercise; I would have needed production values that we just didn’t have at the time. For the second one, I made the cube a big lottery thing. We spun it around with all the balls inside. I strapped myself in and tested it out before I put Harold in there to see if he was going to be able to talk and hang upside down a lot. He was amazing, that guy. He’s an acting machine. Every time he gets to the cube, he’s not only super-prepared with those monologues, but ready to take on any challenge to get it done.

Fontana: Where I get nervous is when a director creates a visual style that isn’t telling the story, because then I think they’re just showing off. But if you have a director who stages a shot like that great shot that Darnell does in the first episode where we see Emerald City for the first time, and the camera moves wide? That to me is excellent visual storytelling.

Martin: What’s great about Tom is that he understands filmmakers; he’s not trying to prove anything, and he’s really open to being collaborative. The problem now is that that we’ve dumbed down the idea of directing episodic TV. On a lot of these shows, anybody can walk in and do it. Directors like working for Tom, because Tom doesn’t consider them idiots. He created these wonderful stories, he had a great vision, and then he put it in the hands of other artists who gently put it through themselves and added new colors to it. I think he set a tone because he was not a dictator or micromanager. No one knows I directed the premiere. It started with a female director, and that was only possible because it was a forward-thinking man who thought that was important.

Chapter 5: Life in the Big House As Oz’s first season unfolded, the cast and crew became comfortable inside this prison of their own making. Largely left to their own devices by HBO, a familial atmosphere flourished on set that was nourished and encouraged by Warden Fontana. As with all families, tensions occasionally arose, but nothing like the prison riot that closes out the first season.

Fontana: What was important for me, and what I always worked very hard to do, was take a character who was despicable and turn him into a sympathetic person. And then, just when the audience was rooting for that person, have them do something despicable again. So if you watch the series over all the seasons, you’ll see character like O’Reily who do the worst possible thing and then have this incredible moment of vulnerability. And then as a reaction to that, he does something worse! The other thing I promised to myself was that every character in Emerald City belonged there. I didn’t want to do the wrongfully convicted story. Not that that isn’t valuable; it’s just that I met so many men in prison who told me they were innocent that it felt like almost like a joke. It would also feel more mainstream to suddenly have a character in there that was innocent.

Kinney: In the first episode, Darnell saw McManus as one of those misguided, but well-intentioned educated white guys. He thinks everybody can be rehabilitated, and put back out onto the streets. But the prison system itself teaches you otherwise. Given that conundrum, this character was an anomaly in the prison. In the first episode, I was campaigning with Tom to change that. I said, “We’ve seen that guy, and he’s going to wear out. You’re going to lose interest. Let me change. Let the prison system seep into me. Let me become more and more one with it.” Slowly but surely, Tom agreed to start shaving my head a little more, to grow the beard, and to start to look a little more like a prisoner.

Hudson as Leo Glynn in ‘Oz’ (Credit: HBO)

Hudson: I thought Leo was as balanced a guy as you can get under those circumstances, but I’ve heard people say, “He was the worst. He was an awful guy.” I’m like “Really?” There was a website in the late ’90s where fans could give their comments, and I remember going online and some guy had said, “Leo seems to have a stick up his ass. That actually broke me of the habit. Even now, 20 years later, I don’t go online to find out what people think. The thing I take away from my character is — and I’m sure Tom would hate me saying it — but he was the dumbest warden! He was a well-intentioned warden, and he could be stern, but he never got to the bottom of anything. He had a murder a week and he never figured anything out. I’m like, “Can I just solve one of these frigging cases?”

De Segonzac: During the first season, there was only one accident, which I was the fault of. We were doing the riot scene in the Season 1 finale [which De Segonzac directed], and with 150 guys running around, you had to find someone each of them could do. Tergesen had the fire extinguisher and was spraying it all over the place. He was like, “Really?” and I said, “Yeah, it’ll be great, you’ll see.” There was this one young guy — who I think in real life was a violinist and he somehow got a part on the show — the guards beat him up, and they put the cuffs on him behind his back. The scene felt like it was about to lose energy, so he screams at the guards, “Get them off!” They grab him by the arms, but he’s handcuffed and that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Now the guy is squealing, and I thought, “Wow, that’s pretty f***ing good.” But it turned out that the cuffs had cut him to the bone! I was very embarrassed.

Velez: I wasn’t in the riot episode at the end of Season 1, and that’s because Tom said, “I don’t want you to be in that episode.” Because the prisoners talked about Dr. Nathan a lot, and would be like, “Oh, Nathan’s hot.” He said, “I’m afraid it would have to get graphic. They’d wind up raping Gloria, and I don’t want that.” Which I thought was very interesting. In some ways, it would have been predictable; you would expect that to happen to the character. But then she could never go back there and I think there were all those considerations as well. We’d have to lose her, because there’s no way she would come back to work in this prison. No way at all. Tom had the wherewithal to think about the totality of the show, and being able to see it going beyond what we saw.

Velez in ‘The Routine’ (Credit: HBO)

Acevedo: At the end of every season, what Tom would do is sit down with you and say, “How’d you feel about your arc? Where do you feel that you could’ve gone or that you maybe want to go next season?” I’ve worked with everybody, and no showrunner has ever done what Tom Fontana has done. The whole storyline in the third season about Miguel being too white, and not Latino enough was something I brought up with Tom, because it was a big issue for me growing up in the South Bronx. He put all of that into the show.

McAdams: I just remember not wanting Johnny Post to go out like a punk. So I loved reading my death scene, and realizing they set him to go out in all his glory, cussing and fussing and telling people to kiss his ass. The fact that they decided they were going to chop his penis off and deliver it back as their message meant that I knew I’d spend the rest of my life being laughed at. My only request was that it was delivered in a big box, not a small box.

Velez: Tom was always really great about discussing where he thought something was going to go, and it was always in a very off-handed manner. At one point, we hung out and had steak and whiskey, and he said, “I’ve got something I’m thinking about, and tell me if it’s crazy. Would this woman ever fall in love with a prisoner?” And I said, “Absolutely.” He said, “I’ve spoken to other women and they said no.” I replied, “When you fall in love with somebody, sometimes you can’t help who that is. The more complicated the better. Please make that happen!” So she fell in love with Ryan O’Reily. I’ve never had a woman tell me that they didn’t buy it or that they thought it was inappropriate.

Fontana: Initially, we had a consultant who had been in prison, but he wanted to be a writer and he just would have preferred if I had just handed him the pen and said, “You can write everything.” So that was very short lived. All I can say is I that did two years of research, and I continued to read and talk to COs and ex-cons, so I kept having conversations about what was going on in prisons. The thing about prison is that no two prisons are the same, so I had a lot of room to make up s**t. But I also took my responsibility very seriously; I didn’t want anything to be salacious or sensationalistic just purely for that. Anything that happened had to come out of character. On the other hand, you also find out stuff that really happened, like a guy who worked in the prison cafeteria hated this other guy so he fed him broken glass. My attitude was if something was real, then it was fair game. Oddly enough, as the series went, I would get yelled at for something I didn’t make up, but people assumed that I had made it up.

Albrecht: We were certainly put back on our heels a few times [by the content], and I don’t remember if we ever actually asked Tom to change something or just voiced our concerns about things. We really were charting new territory here. We had no idea what was possible to do, and the content of Oz was certainly beyond any of the content of the movies that were on HBO.

Winters as O’Reily in ‘The Routine’ (Credit: HBO)

Winters: I’ll tell you one thing: I had two friends in prison during Oz, and they were like, “You motherf***ers got that s**t right.” Prison is a microcosm of our society, and a lot of bad s**t happens in our society every day. I’ve been on panels where I’ve heard this question from some white guy whose face is melting into his khaki pants, blue blazer and red tie: “Oh, is this really [accurate]?” It’s like, go f**k yourself. Have you ever been in prison? Have you ever even visited a prison? Because I’ve visited prison, and it is not a cute place. There is some horrific s**t that happens there. I don’t think Tom went deep enough. He could have gone so much darker, because the stories that we heard while we were making this show, would never even pass the HBO censors. So, you know, suck on that.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: In terms of the sexuality and sensationalism, there were occasions where I felt it was not always necessary. But then there are occasions where it would go there because it was written from an authentic place. I think there’s a wonderful balance, and Tom was always open to that collaborative dance. We all trusted Tom. We didn’t necessarily like him, and I mean that in the best possible way. He’d done meticulous research so you knew it was not just some flippant, sensational kind of thing.

Martin: There’s a scene with Schillinger after he’s branded Beecher where he’s just talking to him. I said, “You know what I want you to do? I would like you to have your shoes off and your foot in his lap, and you’re making him give you a foot rub.” For some reason, that just seemed right. The branding had nothing to do with sex; it was about power. There’s such an intimacy to the foot rub, and J.K. just ate it up; he was tickling Lee with his toe. That scene explains to me, in a weird way, how I handled [the sexuality]. Sex, in general, is not an empty thing to me, and sex scenes are not about, “Lay on top of this person and bounce harder, and then it’s over.” It has to be about something. Beecher probably massaged his wife’s feet, you know what I mean? So that scene is about something other than power, because we just played that beat with Schillinger tattooing the swastika on his ass.

Kinney: When the romance between Beecher and Keller started [in Season 2], here were two straight guys that were being asked to engage in a graphic depiction of a gay prison couple. They were a little bit shy going into it; one of the things that happened was that everything was out in the open. Everything was shot in a wide open space, so there was no sense of, “Hey, this is a private set.” We would all stand at the monitors and watch this stuff. And they went for it. The whole dynamic in that building was “Go for it,” and that’s what those guys did. What was surprising was how it caught fire. That was one of the first things that became a really popular element of the show. There were a lot of viewing parties for those two.

Chris Meloni joined ‘Oz’ as Chris Keller in Season 2 (Credit: HBO)

Tergesen: I loved the part of the show. In my opinion, it was never about them being gay, it was just about them being in love. If you can find love in a place like that, you’re lucky. My first memory of Chris is that he came to set for a costume fitting, and he was wearing a Tool shirt. And I was like, “This guy seems like a tool.” I told him, “Listen man, let’s go have dinner.” So we went out to dinner, and I said, “You’ve seen the first season, so you know we’re trying to push the envelope. I know the tendency is for two guys who are not gay to try and skirt around it, but I have a feeling we’re going to be doing a lot of this and I think we should try and make it sexy.” Chris looked at me for 10 seconds and then said, “Wow.” But I feel like we did that; there were some amazing moments of tenderness [between them], and I love that it was just about the love. The funny thing is, just as an aside, he and I went to a Tool concert the other night!

Acevedo: We worked together twelve hours a day, and then we would go out four to five nights a week with each other. We were all in our twenties, and we saw each other at work and after work. We all hung out with each other in general, but there was a devious mentality with the inmates. Adewale would get these scenes where it would be like “Adebisi rapes this guy,” and we would be like, “What you going to do?” He would say, “I don’t know,” so we would give him [advice]. Like, “I think you should grab him by the hair or rip his pants.” That was the best part, because the material was so heavy and emotional. You can’t walk on set and be like that the whole day; you’d be so burnt out. It was easier to joke around during those moments.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: There were several times when we had extras on the set where altercations would break out. They would! They were quickly broken up, but it was just the nature of the beast. When you’re being pushed to be as defensive as you can without actually being the actual prisoner, there were times when it would spill over. I know for myself, certainly with the guards or the warden, I wouldn’t mix with them. Because they were guards, you know what I mean? Many times there were blurred lines, and in the heated scenes you’d go overboard sometimes. That’s why you got such great chemistry and great work coming out of it.

Hudson: I knew Adewale [before Oz]. We shot the movie Congo in Costa Rica together and we became, I thought, really good friends. When I first got the show and found out he was going to be on it, I was like, “Great!” Then he became Adebisi and suddenly I go, “Who the hell is this guy?” He maintained that character for years. Towards the end, in the last couple of seasons, we went, “Okay, we can let our characters go. We do know each other.” There was about four years there where I don’t think I could even speak to him.

Velez: I remember the first time I met Adewale on set, he literally almost skipped towards me! He took my hand, and with the most incredible smile said, “I’ve been wanting to meet you.” I was like, “What?” We just walked hand-in-hand across the stage just gushing about each other, and this is this guy who plays Adebisi! Take your pick between him and Schillinger about which is more reprehensible. I had the same experience with J.K. when he was in the infirmary. At one point, he was sitting there and he had the most beautiful, glowing smile. It was interesting. Sometimes in the beginning I couldn’t put two and two together between the actors and the characters.

Kinney: I went out with Adewale all the time. People would recognize him immediately because of that little hat and everything else. He’s a beautiful man. We’d go to bars, and he was quite popular. I hung out with everybody, especially Tom and his posse — Lee and the Winters brothers.

Adebisi abiding in his cell in ‘The Routine’ (Credit: HBO)

Winters: At the end of the day, we were all just a bunch of kids, even the guards. Most of us were new to this. You would want to think that there was animosity on the set between the guards and the prisoners, and there might of been a little tension off set here and there. But the truth of the matter was that we were just a bunch of golden retriever puppies in a storm box going bananas. In between scenes and during down time, there were guys break dancing, having a push-up contests, working on their one-man shows and reading poetry. It was really like the Royal Fontana Company, a kind of theatrical experience during the day. Tom and his crazy roving company of just insane bandits, just going, “What the f**k just happened?”

Chapter 6: What Oz Hath Wrought By the time Oz ended its six season run in 2003, HBO’s ranks of original programs had swelled to include such era-defining shows as, The Sopranos, The Wire, and Sex and the City. The larger cable landscape had changed as well: Showtime had ramped up its originals slate with Soul Food and Queer as Folk, and in 2002, FX premiered The Shield. In several cases, these descendants overshadowed their ancestor in terms of ratings and awards. Still, 20 years later Oz remains a singular TV series, and a foundational experience for everyone involved in its making.

Fontana: HBO didn’t bother us with ratings. If they did marketing or demographic research, they didn’t share it with me. The thing that Chris said to me was, “I don’t care if this show is talked about in the TV section of the newspaper. I want it on the op-ed page.” So anytime somebody on an op-ed page made a reference to the show, he considered that a 40 share of a Nielsen rating. He wanted HBO and the show in places where people who don’t watch television are looking. I had no idea what the ratings were; all I knew is that he said, “Let’s make more of them,” and I said “Yippee.”

Albrecht: I got a lot of comments [about Oz] from people who were my peers in the entertainment business, so I knew that people were paying attention to it. I think that was the first step towards having it be an impact. I don’t know how many subscribers we had at that time — 15 or 17 million maybe — but the fact that we were getting that kind that kind of attention for something that we had done for our programming strategies [told us] we were in uncharted territory. There was a bridge here we could continue to widen and build as long as we were prepared to make the investment.

Winters: Back in 1997, who had HBO? I didn’t. Did you? And given the content of the show, we were going to work thinking, “Are these people f***ing crazy? No one’s going to watch this.”

Tergesen: Right before it started to air, a bunch of us had this thought, like, “Oh my God, what the f**k are people gonna say when they see this thing?” And there were definitely some people like that. One of my favorite reviews was a review that said, “This show offends God and it offends me.” But then it came on, and it was such a great show. And it was a great show to be in New York doing, because people were so verbal. When the show was on, there was always a bunch of stuff happening with people on the street. People who had been to jail would be like, “Yo man, I love that show you’re doing, but I just gotta tell you — the sex stuff, it’s not like that.” Like really bro? You need to tell me this on the street? I wasn’t thinking about whether or not you had sex in prison until you just brought it up now.

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Hudson: I got a call on to be on some talk show on MSNBC; the Monica Lewinsky thing was going on, and the wanted me to come on a panel to discuss Bill Clinton. I didn’t know why they asked me, but I go on the show and I say, “Well, you know, we all make mistakes.” The commentator said, “That is not what you said on the show.” Then it occurred to me that they actually thought I was a warden! They were dealing with it like I was this authority having worked in prison. I don’t know who did their homework, but I’m like, “I’m an actor. What I say on the show comes from Tom Fontana and the writers. It’s nothing to do with me.”

Velez: There was some strange fan mail about outfits they wanted Gloria to wear. I was like, “Wow, this is just a little bit too much.”

Acevedo: All of us would get mail from prisoners. I would get mail constantly. “You remind me of me. You remind me of my brother.” Or, “Hey, can I get a job? Because I was really in prison and I know what’s up.” Stuff like that. The one complaint that people did say was, “Goddamn, everybody’s so handsome in prison!” All of us were too good-looking to be in prison. We’re actors, though. I think probably none of us would survive in prison.

Fontana: I took the responsibility of doing the first drama series for HBO very seriously. Because when you’re given unlimited freedom in terms of language, sexuality, and visual storytelling, it’s very easy to go, “I’m free at last! I can do anything I want!” It was a real lesson for me to try to truly use the violence and the sex when I felt it was necessary for character stuff, and not just to put it in because I could. Not knowing who the next people at HBO doing drama series would be, I felt a responsibility to them. If I f***ed up, Chris would say to them, “I trusted Fontana and he f***ed it up, so I’m not trusting anyone after that.” Fortunately, I didn’t f**k it up too much, and David Chase was the next guy in the door.

Albrecht: First and foremost, OZ was an “Open for Business” sign for HBO. But it wasn’t like all of a sudden the floodgates opened; it was still a growing process. Even The Sopranos was brought to us through Brillstein-Grey, because Brad Grey had been a dear friend of HBO for a long time. The idea that he was going to pitch a show to us was not unusual, but what was unusual was that it was an hour-long drama instead of Fraggle Rock or a comedy special.

Winters: When HBO got wind that hour-long programming could work, they greenlit The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and then Oz kind of got lost in the conversation a little bit. I’ve always looked at that as a little unfair to Tom, because Tom really needs to be credited as the guy who literally broke down the walls of late night [original] programming for cable television. It’s not sour grapes at all, because those shows were amazing. All I’m saying is that Oz was the guinea pig, and guinea pigs usually get left out of the equation. But you’d have to be really academically bankrupt or just stupid to watch OZ and not see the bigger picture. In mean, in 1997, one of our lead characters was a Muslim. People are talking about Muslims on TV now, and we did it 20 years ago. Tom was so ahead of the game that it frightened people, and they’re just figuring it out now.

Kareem Said talking to his Muslim brothers. (Credit: HBO)

Kinney: All of us were resentful; that’s just the truth. The Sopranos came on, and we loved that show. I still do, obviously. We just really felt like the bastard cousin. We kept wanting recognition; we kept wanting marketing and publicity to put us out there more. We kept wanting to be put into at least the mainstream of cable, since we were the first cable drama ever. We were all working under the radar, and we were all wanting the radar to find us a little bit.

McAdams: Twenty years is a long time with multiple generation gaps, so there are a lot of people who just don’t really know the value of what this show meant to cable television. They don’t know how it set the foundation for all these other shows that came on HBO that everybody loved. Not just The Sopranos; I’m talking about shows like The Corner and The Wire. I was blessed to work on The Wire for a number of seasons, and people get more excited about me mentioning that then they do when I mention Oz. That’s because they don’t remember Oz

Albrecht: I think maybe from the subject matter point of view, Oz was a tougher show to watch than a lot of the others, even though the others were groundbreaking in their own way. Oz was more violent, and that’s saying a lot compared to The Sopranos. Even in The Sopranos, you didn’t see people get killed a lot; they god killed off-camera. In OZ, the violence and stuff like that happened right in front of your face. The other shows were maybe easier on the stomach for people.

Tergesen: You now, whether Oz gets included in a list [of influential shows] or not, it doesn’t matter. I know what it was, and to this day, I find people are always stopping me and talking about it. So was The Sopranos a major hit? Yes. But it was part of a process. There wouldn’t have been a Sopranos if there wasn’t an Oz.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: I think the very reason that we’re talking about it today shows that it’s not overshadowed. We were first, and Oz was probably an uncompromising show that was always going to be a hard pill to swallow. But what it has become as a result is a cult phenomenon. The Sopranos was slightly more commercial, and a little bit more palatable but Oz was uncompromising.

Martin: I think Oz was so far ahead its time, because it didn’t have a Tony Soprano. That was deliberate on Tom’s part, because he really wanted an ensemble piece and he loved this idea of the guy you love might die. In a weird way, Oz shot itself in the foot, because there’s nobody for you to hold onto. Tom would kill them off so quickly. You watch for the performances, but not for any one performance. That couldn’t work for a very long time, and now where do we see it working? Game of Thrones also has no Tony Soprano. Oz is the one that started that. It’s a very forward way of thinking, and now everyone’s thinking that way.

Fontana: Even though they were both about criminals, The Sopranos was so different from Oz that it wasn’t like it a copy of something we did. It existed in its own universe. I’m glad Oz worked for HBO, and gave them the courage to keep pushing the boundaries that it did with The Sopranos and Six Feet Under and all the shows that have come since.

Albrecht: I learned a tremendous amount by doing Oz Tom was a consummate showrunner and supportive friend. There’s a real bond that’s made when you go through something like that. I’m incredibly proud of the show, and I always talk about it like Tom and Barry were a little like Lewis and Clark, looking down at the Pacific going “Holy crap, we made it.”

De Segonzac: What I like about the show is that it’s completely timeless. Re-watching the first episode, it could be happening today. It’s also just a great memory of what filmmaking can be about, and the kind of feeling that happens if the people involved are given free rein.

Tergesen: Oz changed me in a lot of ways, and most of the time work doesn’t, you know? I learned a lot about myself as an actor, and I have a career that’s largely based on the fact that I did this show 20 years ago. I’m so happy that I got that chance, and the relationships that I still have to this day. When J.K. won the Oscar for Whiplash, I texted him, “Wow, I just realized I licked the boots of an Oscar winner.” And his return text was, “If memory serves you also shit in the face of an Oscar winner.”

Future Oscar winner J.K Simmons as Vern Schillinger on ‘Oz.’ (Credit: HBO)

Akinnuoye-Agbaje: No matter where I go in the world, people will always call me Adebisi, and that’s cool with me because it’s been the foundation of my success. Whatever role I play is a result of writers, directors and producers watching Oz. And I think it made people aware of what goes on behind those bars. I was invited to Rikers to speak to some of the younger offenders in there, because the prisoners were some of the most popular viewers of the show, and felt that it was an authentic voice as far as it could be.

Seda: Every now and then, someone will be like, “Hey! I love Dino, man. It was the best character. Why’d they kill you?” I’m like, “Aw, thanks.” It’s great to be a part of something that when you pour so much into and you get so much passion in your heart. It was just a great project to be a part of.

Acevedo: This is gonna sound so mushy, but Oz was the truest sense of an artistic family that I could ever, ever have. I was in New York two months ago, and I had drinks at Tom’s house. I still talk to most of the guys. So there’s that sense of family, and other actors looking out for you. This whole business is really not forgiving, so for that to be one of my first jobs spoiled me. When I go on any other show, and I see a guest star come on the set, I think about how nervous I was [on Oz]. So I try to be as welcoming as possible. I go, “If you want to ad lib, throw it at me.” I make them feel that it’s okay to f**k up.

Velez: This truly was a family. You hear people say that, but I just remember hanging out watching people’s scenes, and I remember the level of commitment to the work and to the collaborative spirit. You don’t get that often in your career. It made me a better actor and gave me something that I’m proud of to be a part of. And I met some great people that I love.

McAdams: Oz set the foundation for what my career is today, working as a professional stuntman. That only happened because of the exposure I had to the stuntpeople that I met on Oz. It changed my family’s life, too, because when I left New York and went back to Maryland, the dream was real at that point. Oz showed me what was possible in life, and the belief system and faith that I gathered built my confidence for everything else I’ve been able to accomplish.

Hudson: For me, Oz brought a certain integrity and honesty that touches you on a deeper level. It was the most amazing cast I think I’ve ever worked with.

Winters: I’ve been on a lot of great shows, but Oz is the biggest, baddest motherf***er I could ever have been a part of. That was a period of time that will never be repeated, and for that I’m eternally grateful. Plus it was where I got my chops: I learned how to fail, and I learned how to succeed. Nothing will ever come close to it, ever.

Kinney: I have two personal legacies that really shaped my entire being as an artist. One is my theater company, Steppenwolf, which shaped the way I see the world through art. The second thing is Oz. Tom gave me the language for filmmaking and that side of things, and the idea of having one person be the captain of the shop. Tom was the great decider for all of us, and that really shaped so much of how I treated everything after that as an artist. I don’t do anything unless I think it has that kind of vision now. Because of Tom, my standards were raised, and I think all of ours were.

Fontana: As a writer, Oz liberated me in a way that I didn’t know that I needed to be liberated, in terms of how to tell stories and how to develop characters. On a personal level, being friends with the cast has enhanced my life. I get asked every couple of weeks when I’m bringing the show back. But the sets are gone and the actors are all too expensive, so there’s no chance of it. I couldn’t afford Dean Winters or J.K. Simmons anymore! So I can’t say that I sat up night cursing the darkness that we didn’t get the recognition [at the time]. What’s funny is that it’s taken 20 years, but now everybody’s saying that. You know what I mean? I lived long enough to hear it.

Oz can be streamed on Amazon Prime and HBO Go.

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