On a dingy small street in the Sunnyside area of Brooklyn, the cast and crew of Rescue Me are finishing up their last day of filming for the fifth season of their critically acclaimed series. Unlike some other film and TV sets, there is an air of ease and comfort, perhaps because the season’s almost done, but most likely because it seems that there is a close and unpretentious bond between everyone here, like a team of old high school friends doing what they’ve been doing, and doing it well, for many years.      When Rescue Me premiered on the FX channel in July of 2004, it was something wholly new and unexpected, and a bit of a revelation for TV. What began as the tale of Leary’s Tommy Gavin and his fire crew dealing with the aftermath of 9/11 has gone on to follow Tommy’s trials and tribulations with his ex-wife, alcoholism, the loss of his child, the loss of good friends, burning buildings, and visitations from the ghosts of his best friend and the people he wasn’t able to save over the years. While the edgy show focuses mainly on Tommy, it’s also an ensemble show, with the tales of his closest friends and family woven through in twisting rollercoaster type plotlines. Many characters have come and gone, some have stayed, but to go any further would be on par with trying to explain all the story arcs in The Sopranos, with which Rescue Me could be closely compared with in terms of its brilliant storytelling that is both controversial and brutal in its realism.  

Denis Leary & John ScurtI take a break

Over the past four seasons, Rescue Me has continued to cross the boundaries of taste and taboo subject matter, eliciting tears, laughter, shock, and anger from its audience all in a single episode. It is this uncanny ability to move between different types of cathartic, emotional moments that the puppet masters behind the show, Peter Tolan and Denis Leary, are known for – first with The Job and now with Rescue Me. 

Down a nearby sidewalk, the co-writer, director, and executive producer of the series, Peter Tolan, strolls with his head bowed in thought and his hands sunk in his pockets. As he is stopped and introduced to me, he immediately cracks the question, what does the h in h magazine stand for? Heroin? Denis and I think it’s a heroin magazine.” He brambles on with  wicked, rapid-fire dry humor that makes it easy to understand how Rescue Me maintains its constant and clever wit.

Andrea Roth and Peter Tolan discuss a scene.

While the crew preps the lights for an exterior night car scene, Peter and I journey into the warmth of a nearby house that they’ve just finished shooting in, plodding over cords and cables and taking seat on a worn couch. With the new season about to begin it’s reign on TV, I ask Peter which of the new episodes he’s had the most fun directing, and without skipping a beat, he replies, “There’s an episode where Tommy’s daughter Katie is making an attempt to escape her parents. So, without Tommy knowing, his ex-wife Janet sends her off to a private school in Connecticut; Katie’s just had enough of this fucking family. So Tommy finds out and he and Janet go up to visit for a weekend, and the whole idea of it is that Janet is saying, ‘We owe it to her to go up there and behave, and not make a scene,’ and of course it turns out that Janet’s the one to fuck it up. She gets drunk because she’s nervous and completely fucks it up. But what’s great about the episode is that it’s really funny because you have the Gavins staying at this bed and breakfast with all these assholes and they end up fucking against a door and breaking the door down, landing out in the hallway and fucking. It’s craziness. But ultimately, it’s really about Katie getting sucked in by her parents, thinking that maybe there’s a chance that she could have a normal thing and it just blows up completely and she’s crushed. It’s really about her accepting this reality and realizing it’s never going to change. It’s really sad…but hilarious at the same time (laughs). I enjoyed that.”  

On the flipside, the show also has its unhappy moments for Peter, “It’s not so much the fires, but I don’t like working with smoke, that I hate, I fucking hate the smoke. I will be so glad when this fucking show is over and I don’t have to breathe the smoke, let alone the second hand smoke from the fucking actors (laughs). The smoke that we use, I’m still completely unconvinced that it’s not some fucking cancerous thing and we’re all going to go down. After six years of shooting the series I asked one of the crew guys about the smoke the other day, ‘This is safe right?’ And he goes, ‘I’ll check.’ What? Fuck you! Pissed me off (laughs).”

The time has come for Peter to head outside into the cold and help prep the upcoming scene. I head up the street and around a whistling windy corner where a honeywagon stands, and inside the door labeled “Janet” is Andrea Roth who plays Tommy Gavin’s ex-wife and on-again off-again love interest. Having just finished her last scene, she’s preparing to head back to L.A., her work on this season complete. 

In the flesh, she’s even more beautiful than she is on screen, and quite possibly the nicest and friendliest creature I’ve met in quite some time. I ask her about a rumor I’ve heard, one concerning a new love interest for Janet. “I do have a new relationship, or I did early on, with a character played by Michael J. Fox. Michael’s a very extraordinary soul, he’s such an inspiration because of all that he’s gone through with Parkinson’s disease, he loves and embraces and grabs on to life. Jumps into it. As he did in one scene, he actually adlibbed this part where he was in a wheelchair – his character’s supposed to be paralyzed, which was also a feat for him because of the shakes he has from Parkinson’s – and he hurled himself out of the wheelchair and was crawling on the ground on all fours, and he made the funniest jokes to where I was off camera pissing myself laughing.” As it has in the past, it would appear that Rescue Me is continuing to push the boundaries of its medium. 

As for other upcoming moments of brilliance, Janet and her opponent in the battle for Tommy’s heart and penis, Sheila, finally have the showdown that we’ve been waiting four seasons for. As it goes, both Janet and Sheila end up at the firehouse at the same time, and when the boys are called out on a fire call, the women are left alone to their own devices. And while it may not rival the Daryl Hannah and Uma Thurman fight scene from Kill Bill, there will definitely be some savagery. “Finally all the tension comes to a head with the two women, it’s pretty spectacular, there’s some big fireworks. We have animal angry women shit (laughs).”

With that, it’s time to let Andrea pack up her belongings, and I enter out into the frigid sunset outside. As luck would have it, Daniel Sunjata happens to be on set, stopping by to say hello though he has no scenes today. On the show he plays the ladies’ favorite firefighter, Franco, and when we left him at the end of season four, his girlfriend had left him and his daughter had been taken from him. He is a jovial and literate man, and I ask him about this season and how much of it will be dealing with the continuing offshoots of 9/11. Daniel offers, “For one thing, you’re going to see some of it through Sean Garrity, Steven Pasquale’s character – he’s going to be a first responder dealing with some health issues, let’s just say – without giving away too much. I have to say, Peter and Denis are so genius in the way that they address these very, very serious topics. They do so in a way that you don’t know if you’re going to laugh during one scene or cry. Sometimes, I think that’s the only way to address such serious topics and issues, otherwise it could just be too much to deal with.” 

“As for how the 9/11 storyline applies to my character, a French journalist comes to the firehouse to interview all of us about our experiences and our respective takes on 9/11. Franco tells her, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by criminal elements within our own government. If you were to Google search the facts that Franco lays out, they happen to be historical facts and they raise some very disturbing questions about what we were told versus what actually happened. What are the implications? What has 9/11 been used to justify? I subscribe to this same view and there’s a lot of people who do and they’re not just celebrities – it’s structural engineers, people from inside the intelligence community, the FBI, the CIA – we need a new, independent investigation into 9/11. Until we have that, we’re not going to know the truth.” And with this, night falls, and I must bid adieu to Daniel. 

Down the street, the crew has finished setting up lights and are fine tuning technicalities. A car sits with stand-ins filling in for Tommy Gavin and Lou, Gavin’s best friend and the lovable bulldog of the firehouse. John Scurti, an old acting chum of Leary’s from Who’s the Man? and The Ref is the man who fills the shoes of Lou, and he stands outside the car going over his script and having a smoke. Oddly, his trademark mustache seems to be missing. I ask him where it went. He chuckles, “It’s kind of a lot of work to keep it up. I decided it was such a long season with 22 episodes rather than 13, and I really didn’t want to deal with it. So, I put the word out that I didn’t want to wear the moustache anymore and it became something that we had to discuss with the powers that be. Then I was told, ‘Grow it, show up with it and we’re going to work the removal of it into the story,’ which they did and I think in a really, really funny way.” I ask John for the skinny on this story point. “I do it for a woman. I do it for a woman who doesn’t like facial hair (laughs).” 

Other than mustaches, this season brought its own challenges to Scurti in the form of some very dramatic scenes. “One of my ex-loves comes back in a big way. She’s writing a book on 9/11 and to some degree it stirs up a lot of feelings on 9/11 that had been kind of dormant until then and it kind of gets away from him one night at dinner with her. When I first read the scene, I thought to myself, ‘Wow!’ — It was one of those red flag scenes where you’re being asked to basically have a complete breakdown. That’s a day’s work for an actor and you immediately start thinking about how you’re going to get there. On the first take, I didn’t get there. But on the second take, I think we nailed it. Peter asked me how I did it, and it was hard, I’m telling you.”

Further exploring the moment at hand, I ask Scurti how he got to that place as an actor. “It’s kind of hard to describe, either you’re going to do it or you’re not, and hopefully you have enough control over your craft to be able to get there.” Scurti sighs and lets forth, “But as we were getting ready to shoot the scene, I started thinking about the mortgage I had then. I mean, it’s true. That’s how I got there (laughs).” 

And with this secret revealed, Scurti is off to finish prepping his upcoming car scene. Not too far away, near a tent of video equipment, Denis Leary is puffing a cigarette and conferring with Peter as to what needs to happen in the upcoming scene in which Tommy and Lou attempt to kidnap Tommy’s daughter from Janet’s house. Peter points at me and sends Denis over, presumably to do his time with “Heroin” magazine. He approaches, tall and slender and a little larger than life. His eyes measure me, and immediately a snake of intimidation wriggles down my spine. He finds my name interesting, and is convinced it’s French and Irish. I seem to get points for having a good name and being part Irish, so I light up a smoke to further my good standing with the man.

Since his cousin became a firefighter long ago, Leary has been hanging with fire crews, but it was his buddy Terry Quinn (who is now a technical consultant on the show) that introduced him to the real firefighters that would become the basis for the characters of Rescue Me. Leary explains, “A lot of the storylines come from those guys. My character is a combination of two guys who are still working. A lot of the general fire stories come from real firefighters that we hire to play the firefighters on the show, the guys who do the smaller parts in the firehouse and drive the engines, these are all guys that are extended friends and those guys keep us up to date on crazy stories as they come in.” 

Being so close to so many firefighters, Denis lost a lot of friends on 9/11. I ask him about that day. “I was out on the West Side Highway that morning. I was on a late call for The Job and a lot of the guys on the show were playing hockey. So I was there in Chelsea Piers when the buildings got hit. Right away, the West Side Highway was closed down for the fire trucks, they’d come down from both sides. So, we got stuck in the island in the middle, and we were out there for awhile. Then they turned the rink into a temporary morgue. They brought up some of the first bodies and they had to put them there on the ice. As it became more organized, they started lining up ambulances and the other trucks to carry people out there, but it was a long day.” In the wake of that day, Rescue Me was created, confronting the aftermath of 9/11 and how New York firefighters were coping. 

I ask Denis if he’s gotten feedback from actual firefighters about the show, and whether or not it might’ve been therapeutic at all. “I think in the beginning, it was troublesome for some of the older guys because they never wanted the curtain pulled back. It was even intense for some of the younger guys, particularly because we went out of our way to make the fire scenes realistic, as opposed to the way they’re portrayed most of the time, which is very well-lit. We try to make it as murky and scary and dark as they usually are, with Terry’s help. I just did a book tour last fall, and every city I went to, firefighters would come and say, ‘This is our truck, we watch the show,’ and ‘On Tuesday nights, we all get together,’ and ‘Our truck is like your truck. We got the same call you guys had.’ So, I think they kind of identified with it. It’s good to know that it resonates with them.”

Leary first began writing a long time ago in college, and went on to help pen some movies, but it was working with Peter Tolan on The Job that really taught him how to write for TV. Here he explains his take on their partnership. “It just happens organically. Writing is my favorite part. We only write two episodes ahead. We never get beyond that. It keeps us scared, fresh, nervous, on our feet. I don’t find acting that easy, especially with drama. I’ve learned how to do it in certain ways, not the easiest way. But when you’ve got actors that are as good as the ones we have, it just makes it that much easier because they can make you comfortable in front of the camera, to the point where you’re so relaxed as the character you do shit that’s just coming naturally. And with such good actors, good writing can become magnificent in their hands. The actors constantly do stuff that makes us go, ‘We’ve got to extend this story arc. This is just unbelievable.’ And so it is that Rescue Me is a constant birthing process, a living thing that is constantly growing and mutating as it must. It truly does seem to have a life of its own, constantly shining light on the human condition, however ugly, upsetting, enlightening, or amusing it can sometimes be.” 

At this point, an Assistant Director approaches, and it’s time for Denis to film his scene. Denis lights up another cigarette and journeys off to perform the final scene of the night, the car scene with his partner in crime, Scurti. Indeed there is some improv, which oddly enough involves a reference to The Transporter and Jason…Stagram..Stayfoam…Lou can’t seem to remember.

A crisp wind kicks through the neighborhood and I journey back to my own corner of New York, passing several fans on the sidewalk, anxious to have Leary sign a copy of his book, “Why We Suck”.  Though I’ve been told some of what will unfold this season, and it would seem that many presents have been peeked in already, I have to say I’m still ready to sit down with my own crew come Tuesday, April 7, and see where the ride takes us. 

Damages is the tantalizingly brilliant legal thriller starring Glenn Close and Rose Byrne. Created, executive produced, and co-written by an amazing trio consisting of brothers Todd A. Kessler and Glenn Kessler along with Daniel Zelman, each season of the show weaves a cunningly intricate season-long legal case around a cat and mouse mentorship between veteran actress Glenn Close as Patty Hewes, the most feared high-stakes litigator in New York and newcomer Rose Byrne as Ellen Parsons, her initially naïve yet surprisingly resourceful protégé. 

In its first season, in addition to garnering high ratings, the show was universally acclaimed for its richly complex writing, innovative narrative techniques, stylish production values and most importantly, the brilliance of its acting ensemble. Both Glenn Close and Zeljko Ivanek (who played Close’s legal nemesis Ray Fiske in the first season and may return this season) won Emmys for their dazzling performances, with Ted Danson earning an Emmy nomination for his zestfully unbridled take on Arthur Frobisher, the billionaire target of the first season’s legal maneuverings. An accomplished supporting cast of newcomers, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, and Timothy Olyphant, enter the fray this season.  Luckily for everyone involved (who are sick of the brutal weather), the first scene on tap for this new location is in the lobby of the Soho condo posing as the interior of Ellen Parson’s fancy new hotel digs. It’s a relatively simple scene featuring Byrne and the sister of her dead ex-fiancé, Katie Connor (series regular Anastasia Griffith) walking and talking into Ellen’s hotel lobby, with a tense phone interruption from a new character, Wes Krulik (Timothy Olyphant). Olyphant’s part of the conversation is provided by an off-camera script supervisor. The scene is simple, and the director, who in this case happens to be co-creator/exec producer Todd A. Kessler, puts the girls through a few simple takes before he is satisfied.  The show is known for the brilliant histrionics of its illustrious and distinguished cast, but it is the reactive acting performed by Griffith, and particularly in this scene, by Byrne, that is the foundation of the show’s intricate drama. Rose Byrne’s masterful reactions to the maelstrom of machinations swirling around her provide the emotional core of the series.  Glenn Kessler, who has shown up on-set to perform in the next scene in his recurring role as FBI agent L.J. Werner, chimes in on the subject of Miss Byrne: “It’s a very difficult part because it requires a lot of things that aren’t necessarily obvious to begin with. There is a vulnerability and a kind of naïveté where the series starts with Rose, and she has to make a pretty huge transformation over the course of the first season and then become a viable adversary for Patty (Glenn Close) moving forward into this season. We needed someone who could portray that kind of naïveté and idealism. She’s entered the workplace to do a great job with a woman that she finds to be heroic. But for awhile the character was behind the eight ball. Patty was manipulating her and the audience knew it (and she didn’t know it), and I think that frustrated a lot of people because they wanted more from her. But slowly there’s a turn in the first season and all the sudden Rose’s character gets in front of the audience and she dupes them the same way Patty had duped her. Rose Byrne has an incredible ability to observe as an actress. Her silences are powerful and strong. You believe she can go up against Patty.”  Todd chimes in on Rose’s reactive acting: “Rose is involved in a very complicated tapestry because people are lying to each other. Someone blogged on a website, ‘I don’t understand the first season. I don’t understand. Everyone is lying to each other on this show. I don’t know anyone that lies to me in my life.’ Right. (Laughs) That’s what you think. Rose’s character’s mind is always trying to think a few steps ahead and trying to read tales. Rose’s ability to communicate non-verbally is pretty spectacular. She has a great teacher in Glenn Close.”  Close, whose riveting portrayal of Patty Hewes is the centerpiece of the show, is not on-set today because she is 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles receiving a much deserved Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Although not present on set, Glenn Close is never far from the thoughts of the people who create Damages.  In fact as Kessler relays to me, she was virtually involved in the project from the very beginning. “When we pitched the idea of the show, at the very first meeting we spoke for an hour to FX head John Landgraf, and after the pitch he says, ‘You know this is terrific, we would like to move forward with this as a script, and have you ever thought about Glenn Close?’ So the very first meeting, the very first time we ever talked to anybody about the show her name came up. FX wanted to be in business with her again after she had done a run on The Shield. They loved her and had a terrific experience with her, so we flew to New York and had a three hour meeting with Glenn Close before the script even existed. And then we wrote the script and gave it to her. And that was it. So I would say she was really onboard since the first day that the network heard about it. She was a perfect fit.”  Having a star of Glenn Close’s caliber is also a prime way to attract the talent of other marquee names such as Ted Danson, and he agrees: “Absolutely. The fact that Glenn was attached to it made me want to meet these three guys. Glenn Close being involved appealed to me because she has a great track record for picking material.”  Nightfall is rapidly approaching right outside the hotel on Greenwich Street as a clandestine meeting in a car between Ellen Parsons and Kessler’s FBI agent. Rose Byrne and Glenn Kessler expertly perform the scene. The actors and crew are troupers as daylight fades and the temperature drops rapidly. They manage to zip through the scene expertly with few takes; they’re old pros at this kind of scene since conversations in parked cars are such a staple in the Damages milieu.  Byrne, who as one of the show’s two leads, bears the weight of appearing in almost every scene today. She comes in from the cold to discuss, among other things, her character’s relationship with the mercurial Patty Hewes. She is actually Australian, and maintains her flawless American accent during our interview, “I keep my accent on when I’m on-set.”  At the start of our interview, Byrne can barely conceal her enthusiasm over director Danny Boyle’s wins for Slumdog Millionaire at the previous night’s Golden Globes. she acted in two of director’s productions. Byrne has had key supporting parts in studio features like Marie Antoinette and Troy, but the lead opposite Glenn Close in a hit TV show was a big break for her. I compliment Rose on the brilliance of her one-on-ones with the masterful Glenn Close and she responds, “Glenn is amazing. The network did tests with viewers about what they liked best about the first season. The number one thing was the relationship between Patty and Ellen, their dynamic. What’s going to happen? They are really committed to exploring that relationship.”  Todd A. Kessler reaffirms how important their relationship is to the show: “Glenn Close and Rose Byrne bring so much to the show. Their friendship off the set has emerged and in a way their mentor/protégé relationship is mirrored in reality, because of who Glenn is and her stature and who Rose is, and her incredible coming-into-her-own as an actor on this series. So that dynamic of mentor and protégé is something that is at work not only in the show, but with the characters off the set.”  The underlying psychological minefield Byrne engages in every time she shares a scene with the formidable Close is a key component of what makes the storytelling so thrilling. Watching Close’s cat toy with Byrne’s mouse provides the viewer with a fascinating study of the dynamics of power in the workplace and keeps the viewer on edge and hoping Byrne escapes with her life and learns the rules of duplicity. There is so much dishonesty going on at any given time between Patty and Ellen that I ask Byrne if she ever has to mentally take note of what levels of deceit are going on in any given scene?  “It’s a complicated relationship that they have. There are a lot of layers which I have to remind myself of - I have a checklist. What’s the given circumstances? What are my given circumstances?”  Anastasia Griffith, who has had her share of intense tête-à-têtes with Patty Hewes and Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), agrees. “A lot of what is going on is under the surface. You’ve got to let the audience see the journey without words. Everyone has ulterior motives and secrets. We often have conversations before the scene going, ‘Okay so I know this piece of information. You don’t know this piece of information?’ There’s a lot of piecing together of what’s happened up to this point.”  Bryne elaborates on the dynamics of her scenes with the legendary Close. “A lot of my stuff with Glenn is in the office. And it can be very exposition-y. That is difficult, and within those parameters you have to make it more than that. Glenn obviously has that quality. You don’t know what she’s doing. You don’t know if she’s genuinely looking out for this young girl or if she’s going to turn around and feed her to the wolves. Glenn has such power – who she is, and her performance, and what she brings to it with her history in film.”  Todd agrees that the scenes between Patty and her employee Ellen constitute the heart or heartlessness of the show, for himself, his brother and Zelman. “In terms of writing, a lot of that is the most personal stuff for us – the dynamics and interactions that we had with our bosses. The universality of the show is that everyone has had a boss. Not everyone has been a boss BUT everyone has had a boss, starting in high school working at fast food restaurants.”  Kessler continues: “We wanted to explore the step into the professional world. So the character of Ellen Parsons graduates from law school and steps into the professional world, where she thinks if she’s a good lawyer, stays late and does her work – that will be the path to success. Whereas, in our experience that’s maybe 40% of it.  Learning how to be ruthless and working for bosses who are egomaniacal, powerful people is a bigger percentage. So for us it was mostly based in the entertainment industry – coming into our own as professionals, but really in any industry there is paranoia and people who are ambitious. How do you deal with that and who can you trust? Often times the person who extends their hand in friendship the first day at work is the person you realize will be the first one to stab you in the back.”  Byrne chimes in with her own take on the perils of navigating a high-powered career. “It’s like any prestigious job that we get in our lives. You reach a point where you think, ‘I can’t believe I’m here. I’m working for this person, or for this actor, or this magazine.’ It’s that feeling. You wanna do the best job you can and try to navigate that corporate world. I’ve spoken to a lot of female friends of mine who are in a similar situation. It’s fascinating. A lot of the guys’ experiences working for people, they drew on that.”  The crew moves outagain on the now dark street to shoot another car scene, this one involving the mysterious and murderous character known as “The Bearded Man” played by the Kesslers’ buddy David Costable. The character’s ever-present cigarette brings to mind The X-Files’ “Smoking Man”, and I wonder if this character will achieve a similar cult status. There is much hush-hushedness surrounding this scene and there is a strict “No Press” policy.  As I am happily exiled back into the warmth of the condo lobby, I have a chance to talk to production designer Edward Pisoni, the man responsible for designing the posh interiors and tony world of Patty Hewes & Associates. I ask him if there will be any design changes this season. “Visually we are headed in the same direction. I tend to minimalize everything. We picked up on a plot point that Patty doesn’t like personal effects in the office. We try to keep things clean and slick throughout. Once in awhile there is a basement location or a set like Uncle Pete’s home where we can get a little fussy.”  I spot lovely cast member Anastasia Griffith whose work is done for the day. Griffith turned in a memorable performance in the first season as the prospective sister-in-law to Ellen Parsons and the key witness to the Frobisher case is British. Like Bryne, she sports a flawless American accent in character. “This is really my first job in the States. My character has had quite a journey. I loved the script when I auditioned; originally I was only supposed to be in three episodes. They see how successful a character is and write around that. This year I got signed on as a series regular.”  I ask Griffith what we can expect from her character this year: “The death of her brother has profoundly affected her. She takes a lot of that on. She is involved in a very different capacity this season. She is a supporting mechanism for Ellen.”  When I compliment Griffith’s performance in her first on-screen encounter with Ted Danson from last season, she gushes, “That scene is my favorite scene that I did. I love that scene with him. There’s two things about that scene: The day that we shot that was the first time I’d met him and I’ve had a crush on Sam Malone since I was about 10-years-old. He is genuinely one of the nicest and most supportive men around, such a decent man that it felt really easy to go there with him.”  Danson, Sam Malone himself, was cast against type as criminal billionaire Arthur Frobisher and responded with a career-changing performance brimming with joie de vivre. Ted describes his take on the character. “What I enjoyed about him and what made him kind of funny to me is that he is a narcissist who was way over his head. He lived in ‘Arthur World’ and yet he didn’t realize he was really living in ‘Glenn Close World.’ From beginning to end he was outmatched. And to me that’s kind of funny, which made him an interesting character to play.”  I ask Danson if Frobisher, who had a pretty rough first season, will rise phoenix-like from the ashes. “I think, without giving anything away, he definitely feels as though he’s been given a second chance and in his convoluted way wants to take advantage of that. But once again, just because a narcissist finds religion doesn’t mean he’s no longer a narcissist.” Ted then chortles, “I love that this season Arthur has become a crier. Tears flow easily for him now.” Danson is unabashedly enthusiastic about his involvement with Damages and especially its talented creators. “It all begins and ends with the writing. These guys are so talented and so quirky that its just fun to show up knowing you are in these amazing hands.”  The company has moved inside the lobby again and is now filming a short scene with Byrne walking back into her hotel lobby and meeting up with Timothy Olyphant’s character – a pseudo love interest Ellen meets in grief counseling. But to quote Glenn Close’s character, “Trust no one.”  Olyphant is an established feature actor and is representative of the caliber of talent this show is able to attract. The show is cast-centric, a real character-driven show in a field of procedurals. It is also a show that is so heightened it could easily veer into melodrama without actors who possess the right amount of gravitas, something that Glenn Kessler is very aware of. “The actors have a lot to do with the tone. Because the words on the page could be played a lot of different ways. We’ve been very lucky to have Glenn Close and Rose Byrne and Ted Danson. And this year we have William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden. And it’s a fine line. We understand it’s a heightened world. It’s a legal show that never goes into the courtroom. The first season is about the behind-the-scenes power maneuvering, power brokering, and manipulation; there’s a lot of treachery. There’s very little authenticity in terms of procedure in the courtroom. We wanted to bring a legal thriller element to television. And in order to do that we have to boost certain elements, kind of bring the audience along for the ride. Its entertainment first and foremost and it’s rooted in our actors’ ability to ride the line.”  Todd A. Kessler also realizes the risk they have taken in their unorthodox approach to the legal genre.“It rides a thin line. We want it to be entertaining, full of extreme actions. There has been so much great work in the legal genre, in films and television, almost always centered around the great closing argument and the impassioned plea to the jury. All things you can quote lines from, ‘You can’t handle the truth’ or ‘This whole courtroom’s out of order.’ The courtroom is a heightened reality unto itself. Our first season we had half of one scene in a courtroom. We are not relying on the heightened reality of those grand courtroom scenes. We’ve hopefully gotten the entertainment out of exploring what happens in these characters’ lives outside the courtroom. All the things you never see on law shows like people meeting in dog parks as in the first season when Glenn Close’s character meets with Zeljko Ivanek’s character Ray Fiske. And a lot of their dealings happen there on the streets. The streets of New York City are a great equalizer. You can be in a dog park with Patty Hewes and a homeless guy and everything in between. And the actions that happen there are extreme but they’re really no more extreme than if we were going into courtrooms and living in that heightened world. We hope that it’s entertaining.”  If you examine the credits of Damages you might notice that the Kesslers along with Zelman (who is not on set today) wear a lot of creative hats and there are not the usual platoon of producers clogging up the credits. Glenn Kessler describes their creative process, “Everything goes through the filter of the three of us. So we all write, we all produce, we all edit. I’m acting. Todd actually acted in the first season. He was Glenn Close’s doorman, her creepy doorman. Todd directed the finale last year and he’s directing the finale this year. And we have a great team of writers, and Mark A. Baker, who is our line producer, does a spectacular job of being on the ground and making sure everything functions smoothly. But it’s the three of us that head it up and we have a terrific team working with us.”  Despite all the exciting and sometimes sensational trappings, the core of the show is the relationship between Close’s Patty Hewes and Byrne’s Ellen Parsons and it is unique examination of a power relationship amongst women, something you don’t always see on television. This was Todd A. Kessler’s intention from the beginning. “Obviously, we’re three men creating a show, but we felt like there had never been a look at women in power. There are characters like Tony Soprano, and I had written and produced The Sopranos for a couple of seasons, but there aren’t women in the mafia in the same way. Vic Mackey on The Shield, there aren’t women like that necessarily in police departments that are as aggressive and can be physically as imposing. Where would a woman be able to obtain as much power?”  As another simple scene flawlessly performed by Rose Byrne and Timothy Olyphant is completed, I ponder how Rose Byrne handles holding half of this show on her delicate shoulders. Ellen Parsons had quite a journey in the first season, going from naïve young recruit to embittered victim in a short span of time. I ask Rose about what we can expect of Ellen’s journey this season. “A very interesting one. She’s out for blood. She’s out for revenge. I think that’s what is keeping her going. She’s burying her grief and her trauma and she’s just going for Patty. That’s her main focus and the FBI is just a means to get her. But it gets complicated and the FBI is not what it seems. And she realizes she has to take matters into her own hands yet again. But it also sheds light on Patty and what she does in a way that she really didn’t realize before and she learns from that. She’s gone through the biggest changes of her life. She started working at this job that completely changed everything and she kind of sold her soul to this woman to try to do the right thing. In the meantime she lost her fiancée. It’s kind of Shakespearean. Now she’s in the depths of despair and going for blood, going for revenge.  So Season Two of Damages is beginning to come into focus as the shooting comes to a close, but what of the already guaranteed Season Three? No worries. Todd A. Kessler, like his fictional creation Patty Hewes, has figured out all the angles. “The show itself from season to season is about the relationship between this mentor and protégé, between Patty and Ellen. So the first season we looked at it as Ellen’s birth into the professional world. She took her knocks. In the second season it’s almost like her adolescence and so she’s revolting against the authority and she’s working as an informant for the feds to bring down the parental figure. And in the third season it’s going to be more of an adult relationship. So it’s the progression that each season will be a look at one’s journey through the professional world.”  As I leave the set of Damages passing under the chic “Sullivan Grand Hotel” awning put up by Edward Pisoni’s crew, my mind drifts to Patty Hewes’ mantra, “Trust no one.” In the case of the cast and crew of Damages ability to deliver a show full of intelligence, intrigue, and smashing entertainment value, “Trust everyone.” 

As I walk around the campus of Roosevelt Elementary School in Santa Monica on this bright and sunny Friday, I notice a smattering of kids enjoying recess and my mind turns to the many more inside their respective classrooms – all of these innocent children are most certainly oblivious to the madness that is transpiring in their own gymnasium. 

That’s because FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, entering its fourth season this September, has invaded the campus of these unsuspecting tots and transformed their gymnasium stage into the setting of a musical operetta sequence, its main theme being the delicate subject of pedophilia.
Oh, the irony. 

Welcome to the no holds barred, demented world of this scathingly irreverent show, most oft-described as “Seinfeld on crack”. For those of you who don’t know, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia follows the demented adventures of four young miscreants and their dubious father figure (Danny DeVito), who run an Irish pub in Philadelphia. The show subscribes to the Seinfeld credo of “no lessons, no hugs” but one-ups them with its own apparent motto, “no fear of being too outrageously offensive.” The show is a gleeful, hilarious punch-in-the-face to any sacred cow you might want to hold dear, from mental retardation to Nazism, and the gang takes on all subjects with equal-opportunity offensiveness. The brilliance of the show is that it does not set out to shock for pure shock value and its one criteria is to make you laugh, which it does – nastily, frequently, and out loud. 

Sunny is the brainchild of Philadelphia native Rob McElhenney, who also stars in the show, along with Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day. The trio are executive producers on the show and also write many of the episodes, in addition to providing craft service on set (just kidding). The beautiful and funny Kaitlin Olson is the lone female of the group, Sweet Dee, and after a brilliant but ratings-wobbly first season, DeVito joined the proceedings to provide a little star wattage. Today’s filming features an operetta sequence performed by the entire cast, a culmination of a musical dream hatched by Charlie (Charlie Day) in the 3rd season. The sequence is a hilariously perverse take on bargain basement Community Theater, featuring the show’s recurring musical creations Day Man and Night Man, as well as the pedophilia theme. In typical Sunny fashion the gang from Paddy’s Pub is performing this shameful spectacle for a group of senior citizens. It adds to the dementia of the proceedings to see all the senior citizen extras milling about and sometimes having to be led around by attentive PA’s. Just another crazy day on the set of this wickedly subversive show. 

Director Matt Shakman (best remembered as a child actor on the Growing Pains spinoff Just the Ten of Us) has decided to shoot the operetta in its entirety by covering the action with multiple cameras, privileging everyone to see the cast perform an actual musical in continuity right before our eyes. 

Since most film and TV is shot in short bits and pieces, it is shocking to see the cast enact the entire thing in real time. Danny DeVito, in full troll regalia, musically and sexually propositions Glenn Howerton, resplendent in kiddie pajamas, on an imaginative set that looks like Dr. Seuss done cheap. Glenn Howerton is Julliard trained and DeVito can do anything, but it is still surprising to see how well they sing and how brilliantly they perform in long, uninterrupted takes, never stumbling over a line or missing a musical cue. 

The charming Olson appears in a pink fairy/princess-type outfit and in a sing-songy aside to the audience, disassociates herself from the subject matter of the play while trawling for a date. Finally the Night Man himself, Rob McElhenney, appears in his Karate Kid-inspired outfit and after a musical number and some weird martial arts moves, and attempts to rape Howerton. Howerton finds his strength and unzips his pajamas to reveal a tight, glam-rock satiny number (He wore this outfit in the Season 3 predecessor to this episode) and the musical battle between Day Man and Night Man begins. 

Shakman puts the cast through this sequence a number of times and their enthusiasm and professionalism never breaks. Watching the deranged shenanigans of these brilliantly funny people got me to thinking: 

What makes people funny? And why are so many people NOT funny? 

Everyone claims that humor is subjective, but lets face it, humor is one of the more objective qualities a person possesses. If you are funny people laugh at you. If you are not, they don’t. I’ve had to endure far too many humorless jackasses and bad improv nights to think otherwise. So I posed my hard-hitting two-part question to some of the cast members and got
some pretty interesting responses. 

Kaitlin Olson seems to enjoy the question and offers an initially emotional response, “This question makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Well, my own personal feeling is that people who aren’t funny are trying too hard. I think humor has to come from playing around. You have to be playing around and loving it. And when people are trying to be funny, for me, that’s what I don’t find funny.” 

Glenn Howerton offered a more analytical response, “I think there is a certain cynicism that a lot of people who are funny have. And that’s not to say that people who are funny are totally cynical. But I think there has gotta be a reason why a lot of stand up comedians, when you actually meet them, are cynical people. They’re not very happy.” 

I offer: “They’re angry, alcoholics sometimes?” 

“Yeah! Or there’s a lot of anger, and I think the reason is because, to be funny, I think there has to be a different part of you that sees the world as being fucked up and ridiculous and just insane. And you can either cope with it or not, but I think you have a certain ability to look at things from the outsiders’ point of view that there are a lot of things in this world and a lot of people who are ridiculous and crazy and stupid. Which sounds very judgmental, and it is, but I think you can have a cynical point of view and be a positive person. I do think thatyou have to have a certain amount of cynicism in order to be a funny person, to recognize irony.” 

Charlie Day’s response was both self-deprecating and ahem, funny. “What makes people funny? That is a good question. A lifetime of petty misery, I think. Yeah, and maybe a sense of humility. And the ability to laugh at themselves…and especially at others. But if you can’t poke fun at yourself then you start to become unfunny.” – I chime in to say that I know a lot of people who proclaim themselves as funny and they are not funny. – “Well, you know, it’s subjective I think. I’m sure there’s a lot of people that don’t find me funny at all.” I have to say Charlie, they are wrong! Yes, he agrees, “They are just wrong!” 

The show has been building from cult item to full-fledged hit, and is on its way to becoming a comedy classic in the pantheon with Seinfeld, Friends, etc. Rob McElhenney, the creator of the show, who is a native of Philadelphia, shared with me his true source of inspiration for the show, “I think initially we were pretty influenced by, certainly Seinfeld, but at the specific time we made the original show we were inspired by the British version of The Office.” 

Certainly the addition of comic great Danny DeVito in the second season boosted the show’s exposure. Charlie Day explains how the busy actor-director-producer decided to come play with the Sunny kids on a regular basis, “Danny’s kids were fans of the show and Danny was a fan through them. We were at a point after the first season that FX President John Landgraf wanted to see if we could get a little more attention to the show by getting a famous person. Danny was at the top of the list and so Rob went and sat down with Danny and pitched him on the show and then must have threatened him or something because he took it.” 

DeVito has his own reasons for taking time from his busy feature schedule to be a series regular again, “I had fun doing Taxi. It was five years with a cast that was like a family and it was more fun than anyone can imagine. The Sunny boys and girls, coupled with the story of Frank being joined at the hip with these young talented actors, as well as the endless possibilities for depravity was too much fun to pass up. I mean fun-loving colleagues who care, who are always there for you, writing that’s delivering for the characters, and for the audience…what greater thing can a humble fun-loving thespian desire?”  

After lunch, the second half of Charlie’s musical is being shot, also straight through, culminating with Day, who is dressed as a cross between Willy Wonka and a pimp, descending from the stage on his sun dais and making the musical cast complete. Day displays a surprisingly good and wide-ranging voice –- he does a great rock and roll solo. 

It is a uniquely pleasurable treat to see all five members of this great cast dancing and belting out songs and just being plain silly on-stage together during this musical finale. However inconclusive my poll on the nature of being funny might be, it is an empirical fact that what the cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is doing right in front of my eyes is funny. It’s actually more than just funny. It’s a comic bliss-out.   

words by Devoe Yates, photos by Robert Todd Williamson

Amidst the hustle and bustle of the legendary Sunset and Gower lot, where such movies as Dr. Strangelove, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were created, the cast and crew of Dexter sit huddled up in the cool innards of Stage 8, a stage that once housed the sets of Michael C. Hall’s former television series, the HBO classic, Six Feet Under.

For those unfortunate souls out there who have yet to experience Dexter, now in the midst of taping its eagerly awaited third season, it’s the tale of a stoic forensics blood expert named Dexter Morgan who works as a vigilante serial killer on the side, carving unpunished criminals into tiny pieces and dumping their remains into the depths of the ocean shelf just off the shores of Miami. The interiors of the show are shot here in Hollywood and most of the exteriors are shot just south of Long Beach, where there are no mountains to give away the California coast.

It’s hard to describe the joy of walking through the imaginary world of one of television’s finest shows, which is a clever and macabre mix of humor, drama and mystery, all held together by the mesmerizing acting force that is Michael C. Hall.  Today they’re shooting an office scene and a crime scene on the same stage.  A friendly Jimmy Smits and a very focused Michael C. Hall are rehearsing on the office set, listening to the wise guidance of this episode’s director, Keith Gordon, the actor (Christine, Back to School) turned director (A Midnight Clear, The Chocolate War, Waking the Dead).  While the lighting crew comes in for final adjustments, an exuberant Gordon stops by to give us the haps.

First off, he gives us a bit of backstory on what the devil Jimmy Smits is doing here.  When we last left Dexter, all seemed well with his world, the man on his trail, Sgt. Doakes, had been vanquished, as had been his oddly insane girl toy, Liza.  Dexter ended up back together with his trusting girlfriend, Rita, but there was no sign of a Smits-ing anywhere on the horizon.  But as with any good tale, Dexter’s character evolves this season, finding his first true buddy-buddy male friendship with Smits’ character, a DEA agent in town to help solve some nasty crimes.

Keith Gordon isn’t allowed to reveal too much, he himself has only seen the scripts for the three episodes he’s directing.  “I love the show as a viewer, I love watching it unfold.  I don’t even know what happens this whole season. I did the final episode and I still don’t even know how it all works out (laughs)!  I have some theories about some things, and then there are rumors on the set, which is always funny, you’ll hear from one of the electricians, ‘Well, I heard that so-and-so killed so-and-so,’ and you’re like, Really?”

I ask Gordon how the Dexter set is different from the sets of other TV shows he’s directed, House and Homicide: Life on the Streets among them.  “It’s an easy show in the sense that everyone’s great to work with, the cast and crew are full of really nice people.  I’ve been on TV shows where you’ve got diva actors, crews that aren’t very good, producers that are screaming lunatics, and then it becomes a nearly impossible job.  In a case like this, you’re really dealing with terrific people all around, and the cast is not just incredibly talented, they’re incredibly proficient working at this pace.  There are some great feature actors that you’d throw into this situation and they’d have a nervous breakdown.”

I want to ask more, but Gordon is summoned back to his directing duties. Extras mill about in police uniforms and I wander over to the abutting crime scene set where the special FX crew is busy getting the blood splatter correctly placed on the walls of a fake foyer.  They have a custom-made power sprayer throwing dots of blood on the walls and a blow dryer at work to keep the blood from running.  FX technician Steve King confides, “Man, sometimes the simplest gag is the hardest.  Sometimes you’re trying to get a mist like this, but it can’t have any drips.”  His difficult task soon completed, he invites me back to the FX trailer to meet his boss and check out the tools of their trade.  

Outside the stage, we enter the back of a semi-trailer which is full of workbenches and drawers and cupboards filled with odd mechanical items.  “This is kind of our rolling machine shop,” Steve motions about. There’s jugs of blood, a welder, a generator, rainmakers, a compressor, nearly every power tool known to man, and even the special scalpels and syringes that Dexter uses on his murderous escapades. Fixing a bad blood sprayer nearby is a bubbly British man in his late 50’s, the head of FX for the show, David H. Watkins. You might not be terribly familiar with his name, but you are most likely a fan of his FX work for The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Forrest Gump, and Alien.  What amazes me most is that this is the very man responsible for the legendary blood-flowing-from-the-elevators scene in The Shining.  He remarks they did that scene four times as Kubrick was very particular about the color of the blood.  Who better to be in charge of the FX for a show about a blood spatter specialist?

It is soon time to journey through Dexter’s laboratory (sorry about that) and the police station on a nearby stage.  There’s no one there, though the computer screens glow and the lights above hum, illuminating the strange details decorating the walls and desks.  There’s trophies, framed pictures of cops fraternizing at odd locales, and even a wall of blood splatter samples.  Within the offices is Dexter’s workroom where he re-creates the splatter of crime scenes on white walls with the help of a specially-created mannequin head.  The head is often full of eggs that have been bled of yolk and filled with fake blood so as to get some gushy and gory blood explosions.

Not too far away, attached to the same stage, is the prop department, where Propmaster Joshua Meltzer greets us.  He’s in the midst of cleaning Dexter’s signature knives that have been dulled down so as not to cause any unfortunate accidents on the set.  These knives are usually kept under lock and key, but today, they are enjoying some fresh air in the prop department.  “Any of the iconic Dexter props, the blood slides, the knives, we don’t let them out of our eyesight.”  In a nearby room, three seasons of Dexter props sit, waiting patiently for their time in the limelight to return.   Among their ranks are the body parts from the long ago corpse-in-the-empty-pool scene, the Dexter parade signs from the final episode of season one, and a dummy named Larry.  I ask Joshua if he’s been presented with any new challenges of late.  “Wow (laughs). Well, we just had the roasted pig on the spit, a real pig.  There’s an episode coming up where we’re doing some stuff with some large game fish and I’m doing the research right now to find out what kind of game fish are in the Florida waters, and what kind of fish I can get here.  I’m also finding out what it would cost if I wanted to get rubber fish made that could be puppeted and actually have some movement.  When you’re working with fish, which I’ve done plenty of times over the years, there’s a stink factor.  You put real fish on a moving boat in the hot sun, and well…I’ve had actors actually get sick working with the fish (laughs).  So if I can put a fake fish out there for the actors’ comfort and have it look real, I’d personally prefer that.  But it’s more expensive and sometimes the producers don’t prefer that.”

The bell to Stage 8 rings, signaling that more shooting is about to begin and it’s time to run back for one last visit with the cast of Dexter as they prepare to have their way with the aforementioned crime scene set.  Smits stands nearby, as does Dexter’s sister on the show, Jennifer Carpenter.   As the crew finishes up some last moment art department fixes, Michael C. Hall readies his prop camera.  Though he is deeply focused on the scene about to happen, he does offer up some assorted bits of info. I ask him if this season of Dexter is different than the two before and he offers this, “We have that much more history with the characters and the world. There’s more water flowing under the show’s bridge at this point.”  And it is a bridge into new territories obviously.  I wonder what it’s like building such a strong on camera bond with Jimmy Smits, a newbie to the set. “Jimmy is a wonderful and generous actor. We just jumped right in and started telling the story of these two guys. The context of their relationship is loaded to say the least.”  I venture further and wonder if this season presents any new challenges to Dexter’s twisted psyche, “Absolutely. Unanticipated developments force Dexter to face and experience himself in foreign ways. Life happens. And death, of course.”  

As Michael prepares to enter the fake door to a fake house in a distant Miami, I make my way from the set and into the blistering heat outside.  On the way out, I stop to ask Keith Gordon one last question, very curious as to how the voice over in the show is handled. “Michael is one of the most remarkably precise actors I’ve ever worked with, so, we do a timing of it so we know how long a shot has to last, and we shoot it.  Generally, what I assume he’s doing as an actor, and I see it on his face, is that he’s saying it to himself in his head.  So you’re watching his face sort of act the voice over without saying the words aloud. And so then he just goes off and records it himself.  It’s kind of remarkable, as far as I understand it, he goes alone in his trailer with a recorder, the sound crew doesn’t even go in there with him. They give him the tape recorder and he goes in there and he does it, often only one take of each thing, and it’s spot on. It’s creepy.”

In the cavernous confines of a high-end nightclub, a sea of hot sweaty extras are pumping and gyrating to the thundering metal of Rammstein.  A bevy of stunt performers have infiltrated their ranks with sharpened fangs and glowing neon blue eyes, ready to open up some juicy arteries.  The Vampire Lord, Cain, brought to snarling life by British baddie, Vinnie Jones (Snatch, Midnight Meat Train), walks through the club with trademark flowing vampire hair, shiny leathers, and a long mean trench coat.  There is a crashing noise and the pounding of gunfire as he looks up hissing, disgruntled to see his arch nemesis, the freshly birthed action star Michael Matthias, drop 40 feet from the ceiling and into Vinnie’s horde with Mac 10s ablazing with holy bullets.  Wire cables send bodies flying and squibs explode blood on the suspecting crowd.

Seemingly, this is just the tip of the action iceberg for this horror thunderbolt as the wild stunts have only just begun.  Much of the dialogue scenes have been filmed and soon it will be time for the climactic highway chase involving deadly fights atop tractor trailers, complete with flipping cars and motorcycles.  It is this scene where the film found its origins, as the bearded and chuckling rock n’roll screenwriter Lance Lane confides, “I was driving on the freeway into Manhattan and I had this idea for a crazy chase scene, and from there I worked backwards and ended up taking the Cain and Abel story, making one of them a vampire and the other a slayer.” 

A tale of warring brothers, the film begins with Matthias’ character, Shawn Black, awakening from a coma, searching for the man who killed his family — only to find out with the help of Father  (Michael Madsen) and a knowledgeable tattoo artist, TAGG (DMX), that the assailant is none other than his missing brother who was sadly turned vampire in the mountains of far away Afghanistan while fighting George Bush’s war on terror.  And although the climactic highway showdown between the brothers seems rather exciting, what Lance seems most excited about presently is next week’s shoot inside the Killing Room.  “In it, there’s an Orc Vampire and these girls are all chained up and he’s cutting up body parts. He really digs grinding people up, taking huge body parts and throwing them into this grinder, making juice and ground meat out of ‘em.  We’ve got guys working ‘round the clock on body parts. Arms, legs, anything. It’s cool, bro (laughs).  Our production designer, Steven Legler (The Howling, Jeepers Creepers) is even sicker than I am.  Our hero has to come through a tube and land in a pool of this mess and climb his way out of it to save his girl, Lena. I didn’t know this but North Carolina is one of the biggest pork producing places, so we’re getting tons of meat we can throw in there.  It’s going to be bloody.”

In terms of the massive amount of stunts in the film, Lance offers up this, “It’s action horror, so we’re just blowing the shit out of everything.  It’s been a blast.  They’re putting bombs in here and we’re going to blow out the whole front of the place and cars are going to go flying in the air.  I’m waiting to see that.  I just do these screenplays to watch this stuff happen (laughs).   The director, Charlie, is a one of the best stunt guys, I’ve seen some of the stuff so far and it looks freaking amazing, he’s going crazy, just nuts, anything you can blow up or shoot, you got it.”

The helmer in question is Charles Picerni, the legendary stunt coordinator who started off doing the stunts for Starsky and Hutch and doubling for Paul Michael Glaser on the show.  From there he’s gone on to direct the action TV classics T.J. Hooker and the A-Team and supervise stunts on the first two Diehard films and the complete run of Lethal Weapon films. “The action will be far and above what you would normally see for this kind of movie, for this kind of budget, I always have a way of making it bigger. I know what I want and I know how to get it.  I coordinate it all myself, though I got my son here helping me.”  His son, Steven, is on the set assisting his pops.  Like his father, he’s one of the biggest names in the stunt business, having supervised stunts and action on Bad Boys 1 & 2, and The Rock. In between takes it’s rather sweet to watch them joke around, giving fake face punches to each other complete with their own handmade sound FX.  As Charlie walks back to resume his directing duties I ask him if there’s any stunts in this film that he’s never done before and he laughs, “After 40 years of this I’ve done just about everything, the only stunt I haven’t done before is getting this thing done in 25 days.”As the crew sets up wire rigging for the next camera set-up, I meander about the set, ducking in and out of heavy rain, finding Kat Von D holed up in her trailer.  She’s working on her soon to be released book, an outline of her career as an artist complete with illustrations and photographs and old kid art from her youth that her mom’s saved over the years.   In the film, she plays The Vampire Lord’s right hand vixen, a seductress by the name of Vanya.  This, in fact, is Kat’s first bona fide film.  I ask her if she’s worried about the critics out to sample her jugular. “I’ve read some things people have written so far about me, ‘Well, can she act?’  For me, it’s like yeah, sure.  I act all the time on my show.  When we miss a shot, we have to redo things.  I think people are expecting me to fail for sure.  But I think that’s been the story of my life.  I’ve been tattooing since I was 14 and everybody’s always expected me to fail. I think this is just one more thing to prove people wrong about.”  Wisely, she decided to play a character a bit close to home. “I figured for a first movie I should do something that wasn’t too out of my normal element.  I’m playing a mutant vampire, and I’m kind of like that in real life, so it’s not too far from reality (laughs).  But it’s a different world, the world of acting, and I’m in no way trying to mock the jobs of people that have dedicated their entire lives to it, but at the same time I don’t think it’s rocket surgery either.” 

Kat also makes her first foray into the world of stunts in the film, and I wondered if she was at all nervous about it.  “No, not really.  I did a thing for MadTV recently, it was a funny little skit where this chick pisses me off and I end up punching her in the face a bunch of times, and I think that was the hardest thing to do. I had to punch this girl and look angry and I felt so bad holding her throat.  I think people just assume because of my image that I’m some tough bad-ass chick, but in reality I would never ever beat anybody up (laughs).”  But truth be told, Kat did have one rare encounter with fisticuffs involved. “I was in a fight when I was in 7th grade, because I looked like a vampire actually (laughs).  Some big bad 8th grader girl told me it wasn’t Halloween.  And then I kicked her ass.  My mom had to pick me up from school and that was probably the first time I saw my mom cry.  But that was the extent of my fighting. I hate violence, as a tattoo artist, I don’t do anything that risks the chance of being able to tattoo.  That’s a no-no.  I don’t skateboard on ramps and I don’t snowboard or get into fights.  I don’t thumb wrestle very often (laughs).”

Kat has brought her tattoo tools to set and it would seem many of the cast members are excited to have her talented paws make their mark on their celebrity skin.  But some, it would seem, already have proud work to display.  “Vinnie seems pretty cool.  I met him for the first time today, he’s got a bunch of cool tattoos; Mark Mahoney did a bunch of them so they’re good tattoos, which is refreshing because most celebrities get fucking whack-ass tattoos.”  I ask her if Vinnie Jones is as intimidating in real life as he is on the big screen.  “No, he’s really sweet. But, it’ s pretty hard to crack this cookie.  I don’t get intimidated that often, it doesn’t matter if you’re a celebrity or whatever, when you’re an intellectual person or an artist, that’s more intimidating to me.”  I set off to find out if such words are true about Vinnie Jones.

In a nearby palatial trailer sits the one and only Vinnie Jones.  He has his own trailer to himself, and sits in his recliner stretching his legs a bit.  Even sitting down, he is massive and imposing, and though he comes across as a very sweet fellow with a wry sense of humor, he actually does a pretty silly impression of Clive Barker whom he just worked with on the upcoming Midnight Meat Train. The impression itself seems like a broken robot meandering about whose voice is scratchy gibberish that sounds like a car trying to start.  “He lives in a horror world.  I picture him living in a castle up on the hill with the crows and ravens flying round it.  Weird chap that one.”  Even as riotous as this is, there is the tingling feeling that the slightest offensive question posed might make him tear my arm from my socket and beat me with it. 

His teenage son has just exited the trailer with a chum and I ask him if his son is excited to be here on a film set, and Vinnie laughs, “No, right now he’s just interested in girls and beer.”  The long hair, honestly, seems a bit odd on the tough man and I ask him if he’s enjoying it, “It’s irritating more than anything, it’s like being botoxed with glue, all your skin’s stretched.”  I’ve already seen him fly in on a wire and leap down to join his vampire cronies in the club, and it would seem that he’s rather excited about performing his own stunts on the film, “I will do stunts, yeah.  Tarantino produced this film I was in last year, Hellride, and they set me on fire twice.  It was a fucking rush, they usually count up to 10 seconds but I made it to 12 or 14, but it started getting fucking warm (laughs).”  Beyond the stunts, there is of course the acting at hand, to which Vinnie lets me in on a little secret: “I try and keep away from the other actors in this sort of situation, just to give you that edge.  I’m staying away from Michael Matthias as much as possible.  It’s a little trick that Patrick Bergin told me when he’d done Sleeping With the Enemy. Julia Roberts said to him, ‘Hi Patrick, blah blah blah, now I’m going to stay away from you now ‘til the end of the movie.  I see a lot in that, you know?  If you’re going to get the real stuff out, if you’re really a 100% comfortable with someone, I think the performance doesn’t sell.  So I sorta keep out of the way a little bit.”

With this, I wonder off in search of Michael Matthias, the movie’s action hero.  Michael is an old pal of Vin Diesel, with whom he shares a raspy tough guy voice and a massive and muscular form.  Michael has his own weird story about getting his first bona fide movie role here. “I go to the Hamptons in the summer and Big Mike Tadross (Executive Producer, Die Hard with a Vengeance, I Am Legend) as I like to call him, he has a great restaurant and bar that I go to.  They don’t have sugar free energy drinks, so I bring my own sugar free there and put them behind the bar and grab them throughout the night.  One day we were there and it was really crowded and the bartenders weren’t paying attention to me, so I jump over the bar and serve myself.  And they were so crowded, I was like, ‘I’m kinda having fun back here,’ I got room to move around.  And the bartenders were like, ‘You can’t do that, there’s a camera right there!’ and I’m like, ‘Who’s looking at the camera (shrugs)?’  So I stayed there for awhile, just hanging out behind the bar, serving myself, other people.  Girls were giving me tips and my wife was giving me bad looks though (laughs).”

“So, I went back the next week and the manager came up to me and told me I’d gotten him into a heap of trouble, ‘The owner’s here, he saw you behind the bar, he’s pretty sore.’  So I went over and introduced myself to Mike, told him ‘I’m so sorry, that was crazy. I love it here, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble, they all told me not to do it.’  And we started talking, and we talked for over an hour.  The film came up and I said I’d love to take a shot at it.  So, I did a reading and he liked it and here I am.”

Even so, there are the perils of being a first time action star. “They stay on top of me.  They’ll rough me up a little bit if they see me eating a donut.  They follow me around with dumbbells before some scenes, and I’m like, ‘I’m not doing that!  I look good, leave me alone!’  Every time I get ready to do a scene, I look around and I see ‘em, those dumbbells.  They follow me everywhere!  I actually hid them, and they found them, one of the prop guys.  Bastard.”  On top of all this nonsense, Mike pumps iron every night after shooting for 15 or 16 hour days. 

As we all know, action movies aren’t just about muscles, but some clever one- liners and menacing acting as well.  Prompted to tell me his favorite acting scene so far, he takes me back to several days earlier, “My favorite scene was working with Father Roy (Michael Madsen, Reservoir Dogs, Thelma and Louise) in his cemetery hide-out, where he kinda explains to me what’s going on and I don’t want to accept it. He’s the best. He taught me to trust my own instincts. At the beginning I was nervous, ‘cause I’m new.  Now I’m real comfortable, and I kinda wish I could go back and do over some of the beginning stuff.  A couple of scenes, I lost it with Mike Madsen, ‘cause I’m looking at him, going, ‘There’s Mike Madsen. What am I doing standing next to Mike Madsen?’ He was doing such a great job acting I was just standing there watching him act like I was watching a movie.  I did that a few times, it was bad.  But I got my head on after that.  But, he’s amazing, they’re rolling cameras and he’s sitting there telling you a story and then as soon as they say ‘Action!’ he transforms in a second, and I gotta catch up to him.”

It is here that I must leave Mike as he sets off to prepare for a shot where he severs a head from its body and I’m left to discuss the movie’s details with the film’s two female leads that assist Mike’s character in his cinematic conquests, Rachelle Lee, a UFC gal, and her buddy in the film, Madison Weidberg, a recently discovered local.  Rachelle is first to offer up a tender morsel about her time on the film as Lena, Michael’s love interest that fights by his side.  “I had my fight scene with Johnny the Perv and it was awesome.  I had to learn the whole sequence and practice it in the gym with Johnny and we got it down. It’s so fun though!  He put on this belt thing which is padded so I can kick him in his man parts.  And I just kicked him with everything I had and it felt so good – it was like all the aggression in my life when I ever wanted to kick a guy there finally unleashed (laughs).”
But of all these chaps, it would seem that her sidekick Jenny, played by Madison Weidberg, a local actress made big, seems to have the most interesting tale of her acting origins in the film.  “I moved here in October to pursue acting.  I was doing a musical down here, “Debbie Does Dallas, The Porno Musical” (no nudity by the way).  And Charlie and Lance found me on the poster for the show, ‘That’s who we want for Jenny!’  Of course I thought, ‘Who calls someone off of a picture?’ but they told me to come to Screen Gems to audition, so then I knew it was real.  My character is so bubbly and exciting — she’s kind of the comic relief.  She’s a bimbo, a good character to play, and I’m happy to be the bright one, not bright smart, but happy-go-lucky.  Nothing bothers her even though someone’s just died next to her.   When everything seems scary and down, she always like, ‘Let’s go to a party and have a good time!  And I have to pee!’ When she’s running from things, she’s got four-inch heels on.”

The cast apparently enjoy going out together to dip into the night life of this small community.  Of recent, she and Father Roy’s assistant, played by the famed rapper, Pittsburgh Slim, went out on the town. “All of us went out to a bar together and he sang his hit, ‘Girls Kissing Girls’ while girls were stripping on the bar. I don’t know why girls do that down here.  I don’t do that and I would never do that.”

Her being so conservative, one speculates as to her love of horror films.  “I don’t believe in vampires.  I don’t think that there’s any of them out there, so they don’t scare me.  But I love scary movies, the real ones about rapists or ghosts, things like that.  They scare the crap out of me.”

And it is here that my tale must end.  The actors are herded in to finish off the final action spectacular of the night, and I am off to return to L.A., with this collection of words that I have just shared with you. I know it doesn’t seem like a film on par with the terror of The Shining or the psychological complexity of The Tenant,
but for you chaps out there ready for a straight up popcorn extravaganza, this gory present will soon be visiting you in theaters this fall, reportedly the first part in a trilogy of sorts. It seems the world never gets tired of vampire films. Everyone seems endlessly fascinated with the possibility of eternal life and flying about and sucking the blood from their tender love. Prepare yourself for some fancy action packed bleeding.

It is close to midnight when I pull up outside the Figueroa Plaza in downtown L.A. Stepping out into the light of the full moon and the stillness of the night, I find the setting fitting for what will take place tonight inside the building in front of me. I enter a large open room that is being used as a make shift sound stage in what I’m told used to be a bank. Crew members and actors are buzzing about readying the set and themselves for what will be a long night of filming on the indie horror film, Dead Air, directed by film and television actor Corbin Bernsen. 

Dead Air tells the horrifying story of what happens when a biological terrorist attack strikes a major American metropolitan area, and the victims are turned into raving “maniacs”. The story centers around Logan Bernhardt (Bill Moseley), a controversial radio talk show host, his producer Lucy (Patricia Tallman), and Logan’s sidekick Gil (David Moscow) who insists on staying on the air during the resulting chaos. 

Bernsen’s publicist meets me inside. To my left is the façade of a news studio that is still having the finishing touches placed on it for the first scene of the night. The crew is setting up lights and tinkering with the set. Snacks are appearing on the craft services table nearby, actors are getting into makeup only several yards away from that, and Corbin is speaking with producer Chris Aronoff, making sure that all the small details are being taken care of. Although this is all happening at once with dozens of conversations bouncing off the high concrete ceilings, there is a sense of calmness in the room. 

While I’m waiting to talk with Corbin, producer Jesse Lawler comes by to make sure all is well with us. Jesse is very welcoming and is genuinely excited to be working on Dead Air with Bernsen for the third time. “We have a pretty great little cast in this one. One of the challenging things has been coordinating all the actors’ schedules.” Although there will be around 25 shooting days on Dead Air, principal photography began almost a year ago. Corbin later explains that while they were working on their previous film, Donna on Demand, he felt it would be great to get another film in production while they had access to the sets and sound stage. They shot most of the interiors and over 80 pages of the script in ten days last March. Jessie informs me that because of the hiatus, several of the actors are currently working on other projects. They will be using body doubles until the actors are available. 

We are then politely interrupted by Corbin who wants to know if one of the doubles is in fact here, so that they can get some confusing shots worked out for the second set up of the night. 

With that matter cleared up, Jessie pulls out his laptop and treats me to the trailer for Dead Air. I am now excited to see the “maniacs” in action. Later tonight some 150 bloodied extras will be rolling in and I’m looking forward that that! 

It appears that the crew is almost ready for Corbin, but before he gets settled into his directing chair he sits down with us to share some thoughts on
the project. 

Whether from his tenure on the Emmy Award winning LA Law, his plethora of movie roles or his current work on the TV series, Psych, it is almost certain that you have invited Corbin Bernson, the actor, into your home many times over the past 20 years. 

In Dead Air however, Corbin’s primary focus is directing. This is Bernson’s third project as a director and although he admits directing is hard, he finds it very rewarding when it all comes together. “I enjoy the challenge of pushing the envelope. Making a unique horror film on a small budget is like saying, ‘let’s go to the moon on a ten-year-old’s allowance.’” 

Not only is Corbin helming the film, but he also has built parts of the newsroom set for tonight’s shoot. He is in fact also the production designer on the film. He shares with me that he has a background in carpentry and even used to build homes. I see his attention wander to the set and I sense that he is eager to start filming. But before he flees I ask him what has been the most fun for him on the project. “Getting to determine what’s scary,” he tells me, “and coming up with stuff that I find to be inventive.” When I ask him for an example he begins to describe the way a character is going to be killed off later in the night. It is definitely an imaginative way to have someone die, but before he finishes all the bloody details he asks me not to write about it so that it can remain a surprise. Sorry, I guess you will just have to wait and see for yourself. 

Corbin heads over to the set and I follow, finding a place behind him and amongst the crew where I can see the action in the monitor. I watch as Bernsen directs the two actors playing news anchors through various news reports. 

Bill Moseley

When there is a break in the filming, I give up my prime location to get a few moments with lead actor Bill Moseley. I recognize him, but – and I know this may be blasphemy for all you horror fanatics – I learn that he has starred in many of the most memorable horror films over the past 20 years only after consulting my notes. Bill is well known for his role as Chop Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and more recently for playing sadistic serial killer Otis B. Driftwood in Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. 

The character of Logan in Dead Air is a bit of a departure for Bill. This time he gets to play the good guy. We step outside to make sure we don’t get in anybody’s way, and he tells me he is happy to be back working on the film. We chat about his work on Dead Air and he confides, “At first the intense shooting schedule was kind of a shock to the system. I’m used to a slightly more relaxed shooting schedule. I’m more of an organic actor and like to feel my way through stuff.” Tonight is his last night of filming on this project, but he has been keeping busy lately. Since the initial filming of Dead Air last year, Bill has worked on six other productions including a horror opera. He excuses himself and heads over to makeup, and I introduce myself to actress Patricia Tallman. 

Pat is smiling and looks quite awake for two in the morning. She too is glad to be back. “You never know if a project will get finished. This has been a fun project and everyone is so great to work with.” Pat is playing Lucy, the radio show’s producer, and lets on that her character is a bit of a girly-girl. “I’m a stunt woman and I kicked ass in the last film. I cry a lot in this one. It can be frustrating.” Some of her previous work includes Babylon 5, and the remake of Night of the Living Dead. We are talking about the business of acting when her thirteen-year-old son wanders over. He’s on spring break and came to hang out on set for the night. He has his cell phone out and is in mid-text. Pat is very curious about who he is texting at such a late hour, but like a smart teenager he dodges the question well. I am curious to find out how the filming is coming along, so I make my way back to the set. 

Back in the mock newsroom they have swapped the original backdrop with one representing a news studio in another city and have added a couple of infectious “maniacs” to the scene. On my way over I stop to make myself a quick peanut butter and jelly sandwich – my compliments to craft services. Over the next half hour they proceed to shoot various versions of the scene in which the newsroom is being overrun. The night and corresponding shoot starts to wind down and I need to pack up my things, but they’re stuck on the other side of the set and I’m afraid I’ll make too much noise. When they finally yell “cut”,  I’m able to quickly grab my stuff and escape into the quiet of the night. The wee light of dawn is not far off as I find my car on the almost empty street. I take my keys out and approach my car while I nervously glance over my shoulder. I figure it’s best to make sure that before I go home there are no “maniacs” following me. One can’t be too cautious with them lurking about.