Over my objection, Showtime and Sony insist on hiring a TV writer named Steve Kronish, who was a writer and showrunner on a series called The Commish. I’m willing to give it a try, as I want to see the show get on the air, and I’m willing to learn to do whatever it takes. But it quickly becomes apparent that Kronish and I are from two different worlds and two opposing creative concepts as to what Street Time should be. Kronish comes out of the Stephen J. Cannell school of formulaic network TV series. In our first meeting, Kronish says to me, “I’m not in this to reinvent TV. I just want to get a paycheck, and hopefully get a show on the air.”
Offsay may say he wants what we did with Slam, but Kronish assures that is not what Offsay really wants. “These executives don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” Kronish says. “And besides, that kind of improvisational, documentary-style filmmaking will never work in a TV series.” He is hired by Showtime to do a pass on my pilot script. Kronish ends up doing a page-one rewrite, changing everything, even the names of all the characters, and recreating their back stories, changing the locations, the plot, virtually rewriting everything I had written so that, in accordance with the rules set down by the Writer’s Guild, he is eligible for a co-creator credit, and will make more money. The executives at Showtime, however, reject Kronish’s script and decide to go with my original version for the two-hour pilot.
Next, we must find a director. I meet with a couple of possible TV directors, but no one works out for different reasons. “What about Marc Levin?” I suggest. “You want the look and feel of Slam, Levin is the man for the job.” But, the executives object, Marc has never directed a TV pilot. And herein lies one of the fundamental problems with TV executives at this early stage in what has now become a renaissance in the world of scripted television drama: if it hasn’t been done before, and often done to death, executives who are interested primarily in keeping their jobs and wary of doing anything original are reluctant to, as Kronish put it, “reinvent TV.” It is TV series lore that all the major networks and cable channels passed on David Chase’s Sopranos pilot until it landed on Chris Albrecht’s desk at HBO. Albrecht, with shows like Oz, The Sopranos, and Six Feet Under, is the visionary TV executive largely responsible for revolutionizing scripted TV drama and ushering in the era of exceptional quality shows we enjoy now.
I hold out and continue to lobby for Marc Levin to direct the Street Time pilot. I maintain that with Marc directing, at least I know we’ll get the show we want. Steve Glick throws his considerable weight behind Levin as well, and Glick is soon given the job of packaging the series through the auspices of the William Morris Agency. Showtime wants to cast Rob Morrow in the lead role as Kevin Hunter, a former marijuana and hashish smuggler coming out of prison on parole in the Special Offenders Unit and doing his utmost to leave his life of crime behind. Rob had a hit with Northern Exposure. Levin and I are both sold on the choice of Scott Cohen from The Gilmore Girls series as the lead parole officer, James Liberti, who is assigned to supervise Kevin Hunter. Scott has a crease between his eyebrows that says to me the man can play conflicted. And I am utterly blown away by a young African American actress, Erika Alexander, whom we cast as the tougher-than-nails, outspoken, sexy parole officer Dee Mulheren. Naturally Marc and I want to shoot the pilot in New York, but at this time the tax credits available in Canada and the exchange rate of US to Canadian dollars favor producing the pilot, and the series if green-lit, in Toronto.
I have another issue with shooting in Canada: the possibility that I will be arrested on a number of dormant criminal drug smuggling charges once I step foot on Canadian soil, or, possibly, that I will not be allowed to enter the country in the first place. My former partner in the marijuana and hashish importation and distribution business is the so-called Hippie Godfather of Canada, Robert “Rosie” Rowbotham, at one time the major wholesaler of cannabis of all North America. Rosie did close to seventeen years in prison on a number of cannabis arrests, all connected to our efforts during the 1970s and 1980s to keep North America high by importing the best quality marijuana from Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica, and Thailand, and premium grade hashish from Lebanon and Afghanistan. I have been assured that the Canadian charges were dropped once I was sentenced to twenty-five years and six months in prison in the United States. But after my success in getting the US sentence reduced to ten years, there was some talk that the Canadians might still demand their pound of flesh. Ivan Fisher makes some inquiries and is informed that there are no outstanding charges in Canada and, with the proper paperwork, I will be allowed to enter our neighboring country to the north with no fear of being arrested.
After what I am told by Steve Glick and others in the industry is a remarkably short time from pitch to production, a little over six months, with our cast in place, Marc and I move into production offices in Toronto to prep, then shoot and edit, the two-hour pilot episode of Street Time. Steve Kronish, though still the nominal showrunner, stays in LA, where he will view dailies and coordinate production with the executives at Showtime and Sony.
We may not reinvent TV, but we do manage to bring a lot of the Slam style of documentary filmmaking to a scripted TV series. The actors are encouraged to cover what’s on the page, and then to go off script, which infuriates Kronish back in LA. At one point, in answer to his complaints, Erika Alexander, as parole officer Dee Mulheren, turns to face the camera straight on and tells Kronish to back off with his objections and accept that what the actors are doing and viewers are reacting to favorably is working and is not going to cease no matter how much he resists it.
OVER THE NEXT two and a half years, we produce and Showtime airs a total of thirty-three hours of Street Time. Near the wrap of season one, Steve Kronish takes to his bed in LA, refuses to get up, and suffers what we are told is a nervous breakdown. There is a frantic search in Hollywood for a new showrunner while I take over as the acting showrunner on the set in Toronto. It’s pretty much what I have been doing all along: sitting and talking with the actors to help them understand what their characters are going through and what they are feeling so that they can build on that and give it more commitment and integrity. The lead actors are not asked to recite lines that they either don’t understand or don’t believe given whom they have come to portray until they can talk it over with me. This results in lengthy meetings in my trailer with the lead actors to help them understand my vision for how their character is developing, allow them to give me their input, and make changes accordingly. It’s an extremely collaborative process and most of the actors love it and embrace it. New directors come in with each episode. From the start, I make it clear that I will not tolerate directors abusing actors, and I resolve to fire anyone who screams or throws tantrums on set. The idea is to get everybody on board—from the crew, to the director of photography, to the actors—and have them all become invested in making the series, in fostering the kind of creative energy we found in making Slam, and, to some degree, in reinventing TV. It’s working. The shows just keep getting better. Marc Levin not only directs the pilot; he comes on as an executive producer and directs nine more episodes.
At one point, after Kronish has left the production and the search for a replacement continues, Jeanie Bradley, an executive from Sony who has been a consistent supporter, tells me to just keep doing what we are doing, and that everyone in LA loves what they see in the dailies and the finished episodes. We will prevail, she assures me, and I should not worry about their attempts to replace me as showrunner. They’ll get over it.
DURING THE SECOND season, we manage to do something that is almost unheard of in scripted TV: we move the writer’s room from LA to a space in the former Offline Entertainment offices. The lease for the space is bequeathed to Marc Levin as part of his settlement with Henri Kessler and David Pipers when the company implodes. Marc and I also get the go-ahead to hire a new team of writers who come out of different writing disciplines: playwriting, independent feature film, and even a former parole officer. L
arry Goldman, the federal parole officer from the Eastern District Office who helped me make the test pilot, comes on as our full-time technical consultant with an occasional cameo role.
Steve Glick gets a call from Ron Meyer, a founding partner at Creative Artists Agency and the current head of Universal Studios. Meyer tells Glick that both he and David Geffen are huge fans of Street Time. He asks Glick if they can receive advance videocassettes of each episode as it is finished so they don’t have to wait for the show to air on TV. I receive a letter from David Geffen telling me how much he enjoys Street Time, and he invites me to his home for lunch on my next visit to LA.
DESPITE THE SUCCESS of the show, I earn a reputation in Hollywood for being headstrong and difficult to control. This comes to a head during the filming of the series finale, which I write and direct. Part of the problem is that we get sets of notes from the executives at Showtime that are often in conflict with the notes we get from Sony. The executives, though they may never admit it, have opposing views of where the show needs to go and what it needs to become based on their different business models. Showtime wants a soap opera with ongoing storylines arced out over a number of episodes in the series to attract repeat viewers who become invested in the characters and tune in to see what is going to happen to them. Sony, hoping to sell the show to foreign distributors, wants episodes that are complete in and of themselves with an A story, B story, and C story that are all wrapped up by the end of each episode. As the head writer and executive producer, my goal is to do both: tell a discreet story with a beginning, middle, and end in each episode but also develop storylines that will play out and develop along with the main character’s arcs and plotlines over the entire series. It’s the nineteenth-century novel on TV.
The notes we get on the script for what will become the season and series finale from Showtime and Sony not only contradict each other, but they make no sense when we consider how we intend to wrap up our main characters’ storylines. I am aware that these people have a lot going on in their professional lives; Street Time is only part of a very busy schedule for executives at Sony and Showtime. But I sometimes wonder if they are watching the same show.
When Marc and I read the notes before commencing production on the final episode, we look at each other and shake our heads. The general rule of thumb on network or studio notes tends to be to incorporate those changes that make sense and may even improve the show and to ignore those that do neither. This can be tricky. In my experience, male executives in particular tend to be territorial; they want to claim the material or some part thereof as their own, and they are most offended and angered if their notes are ignored. I get the feeling that the notes have more to do with an executive wanting to piss on our show, mark it as his territory. (Jeanie Bradley at Sony is only one female executive working on Street Time, and she inevitably gives the best notes and seems to be most in sync with what we are trying to do with the show.) What to do? Our characters have come a long way. Parole officer James Liberti, Scott Cohen’s character, is having an affair with his parolee, Kevin Hunter’s wife, Rachel Goldstein, played by Michelle Nolden, a beautiful and talented Canadian actress. Liberti is a degenerate gambler in debt to his bookie, and he’s fixated on locking up Kevin Hunter both for personal and professional reasons. Rob Morrow’s character has a younger brother, Peter Hunter played by an outstanding Canadian actor named Chris Bolton. Bolton embraces the Slam style. He turns in a tour de force performance as the evil twin alter ego to Morrow’s character. Over the course of the series, Bolton has made his character one of the most compelling to watch and wonder where he will go. While Rob’s character was in prison, his brother took over the drug operation and blew all Kevin’s stash of money by building an elaborate nightclub and endeavoring to become a freak crime boss. At one point during the filming of a particularly intense scene, Rob Morrow objects and says to me, “Why are you doing this to me? I feel like you’re cutting my balls off.” I tell him, “Yes, go for it. That’s exactly how your character should feel being on parole and given what he is dealing with and what is happening to him.”
A finale that will bring the series to a satisfying conclusion calls for a tragic, novelistic climax. I embrace my own advice and go for it. The episode, though uneven, has its moments, and it does complete the arcs of the main characters. By any measure, the series is a success. Ratings are consistently high, and critical acclaim is unanimous. The show has attracted a committed fan base and may well have gone on longer were it not for the all-too-frequent TV series and feature film spoiler known as the executive shuffle. Just before we are set to wrap season three, there is a changing of the guard in the executive offices at Showtime. Jerry Offsay steps down, and TV executive Robert Greenblatt, formerly of Fox and the Greenblatt Janolari Studio takes his place. Street Time is the only show Greenblatt carries over into his tenure; but, after a third season when Greenblatt has had time to develop new shows under his auspices, Street Time’s run is ended, and I am out of a steady job.
Chapter Thirteen
ORIGINAL GANGSTER: JOE STASSI REDUX
I HAD OFTEN wondered what happened to Joe Stassi after his parole was violated and they sent him back to the joint at age eighty-nine. I’d lamented never gaining access to what he described as a treasure trove of personal letters, family and criminal cohort photographs, FBI reports, government exhibits, and trial transcripts from his life that would have given me a detailed, unique look at the criminal career of a man whose history spanned the early days of the immigrant experience in New York City, Prohibition, the founding of Cosa Nostra, the expansion of Italian organized crime to include partnerships with powerful Jewish mobsters in what became known as the National Crime Syndicate, the mob’s move to Cuba and their ouster once Castro took over, the building of Las Vegas, and the eventual crackdown on the mob that some speculate resulted in the Kennedy killings. Joe was there and experienced it all. What a missed opportunity!
And then one day in 2001 I am sitting in my office at the Street Time writer’s room, formerly the Offline Entertainment office space, when I am introduced to a woman, a doctor from California who specializes in treating rare immune system disorders. She has come to New York to consult with Offline’s financial backer, David Piepers, who has been diagnosed with Lyme disease. She mentions in passing that she was met at the airport and delivered to our offices by two men, whose names she mentions. I recognize them as organized crime figures, one of whom I met and became friendly with while we were both doing time at the federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia.
I’m intrigued. Her mentioning their names strikes me as odd. I can’t resist asking why she would be met at the airport and chauffeured to our offices by men who are associated with the Mafia. Well, she says, she doesn’t usually tell people this, it’s not something she wants known to the general public, but, given my history, she feels comfortable telling me that she and her brother are the illegitimate children of Charles “Charlie Lucky” Luciano, as the founder of organized crime in America is referred to by his close friends.
Now I’m beginning to think this is all some kind of setup, though what kind I have no idea. Really, I say, you’re Lucky Luciano’s daughter. How did that happen? Yes, she says, her mother, who was also a doctor living in Westchester, a married woman when she met Luciano, had a long affair with him, and gave birth to a daughter and son fathered by the father of the mob in America. My initial response is to disbelieve her. Surely, she is trying to sell me some phony bill of goods. There is a vague resemblance to Luciano. She’s got the dark Sicilian looks, the full lips, and sensuous mouth of Charlie Lucky but—really? Could she be telling the truth? It seems too farfetched and contrived.
“Then you must know my friend, Joe Stassi,” I say as a test.
Joe and Luciano were very close, childhood pals who remained best friends all their lives. If this supposed daughter of Luciano has never heard of Joe, or if she doesn’t really know Joe and of his relationship with Luciano, my gue
ss is she’s a fraud.
“Oh, yes,” she says, “I know Joe. I spoke to him just the other day.”
“Where is he?” I ask. “Last I heard they locked him back up.”
“He’s out. He’s living with his son’s wife in Miami.”
Now I am beginning to believe her. I give her my cell phone number and ask her to please give it to Joe. The next day, as I am driving upstate for the weekend, my cell phone rings. It’s Joe Stassi.
“Richie,” Joe says, “I thought I was never gonna hear from you again.”
He tells me that he lost my contact numbers when they locked him back up and seized his property. When I ask him about the lady doctor and her claim to be Luciano’s daughter, Joe says, “She’s the real deal, her and her brother. I know them both from when they were little kids.”
Unbelievable. This is even more amazing than running into Joe on the subway. The illegitimate daughter of Charles Luciano—who knew? And that she would walk into our offices and not only know Joe but be in touch with him; it’s a clear message that I must act upon. I make plans to fly down to Miami and visit Joe to rekindle our friendship, and hopefully pick up where we left off with our agreement for me to tell his story. When I tell Marc Levin, he is equally intrigued and suggests that, if Joe is willing, we should film the meeting and see if we can make a documentary based on Joe’s life. I take a video camera along with me to Florida to shoot a sample interview.
When I arrive in Miami, however, and call for Joe at his daughter-in-law’s home in North Miami—a single-story tract home that looks like the house where the Hyman Roth character based on Meyer Lansky was living in The Godfather Part II—she tells me that Joe had a fall, and though he was not badly injured, he had heart palpitations, and he was taken to the hospital and admitted. She gives me the name and address of the hospital. I find Joe laid up, held against his will in a double-occupancy room. When I take out the camera and start to shoot a bedside interview, Joe’s not having it.
In the World Page 20