It used to be Hollywood’s top movie directors would no more slum in TV than wear Dockers–network series were the boot camp through which you had to pass to reach the promised land of studio features. Now the equation has been turned on its head. In the just-launched season, established film directors are either producing or directing episodes in three new series. Blockbuster maven Jerry Bruckheimer (“Pearl Harbor”) is producing no fewer than four shows. In addition to Avnet, Michael Mann (“Ali,” “The Insider”) is the executive producer on CBS’s “Robbery Homicide Division,” and McG (“Charlie’s Angels”) made the pilot of Fox’s “Fastlane.” The reverse migration was sparked by two coinciding events. Moviemaking has turned increasingly corporate, governed by multimillion-dollar superhero franchises and extravagant McDonald’s marketing campaigns. At the same time TV has grown much smarter, from HBO’s “Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under” to NBC’s “The West Wing.” Mann, who launched his career making “Miami Vice” but hasn’t worked in TV for more than a decade, says: “TV has really changed in the last 10 years. The writing is much, much better. And there’s definitely a kick to it.”
Part of the kick for these directors is getting to make a little movie every week, rather than plodding through years of frame-by-frame nitpicking on just one feature. “It’s so much faster, it’s blinding,” says “Boomtown” creator and executive producer Graham Yost, whose movie-screenwriting credits include “Speed” and “Broken Arrow.” What’s more, networks still may have their own crazy rules–like continuing to employ Jim Belushi–but its executives know better than to second-guess Hollywood’s top filmmaking talent. “You just get to do more on TV,” Yost says. “In features, all the eggs are in one basket, and it’s not your basket. You get more control in TV.”
In bringing their cinematic sensibilities to prime time, these Hollywood interlopers are expanding the look and feel of network fare. “Fastlane” is a high-octane undercover-cop story with slick camera moves and editing like “The Fast and the Furious.” The sophisticated “Boomtown” features multiple–and sometimes conflicting–storytelling perspectives, imitating a device made famous by Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 cinema classic “Rashomon.” “I’ve always liked the multiple point-of-view structure, but I’ve never been able to do it to this degree in a feature,” Avnet says. The stylish police drama “Robbery Homicide” delivers a gritty visual tone reminiscent of Mann’s heist movie “Heat,” in part because the episodes are shot on state-of-the-art digital cameras. The show ignores many TV conventions, even going several minutes without any dialogue. Though he’s obviously biased, NBC Entertainment president Jeff Zucker is not far off the mark when he says “This is the golden age of the one-hour drama.”
As TV moves away from its middling “MacGyver” era, actors who wouldn’t have gone near the networks are joining the fold, from Blythe Danner (“Presidio Med”) to Gretchen Mol (“Girls Club”). “We got Anthony LaPaglia to do ‘Without a Trace’ because he saw the quality of ‘C.S.I.’,” Bruckheimer says. Starring in “Robbery Homicide” as tough guy Det. Sam Cole is Tom Sizemore, who’s made movies with Steven Spielberg (“Saving Private Ryan”) and Ridley Scott (“Black Hawk Down”). “Robbery Homicide” is his first TV lead role. “Most movies aren’t any good,” Sizemore says. “And because I am not one of the top seven guys, there are not a lot of good scripts that come my way. TV today is like movies in the 1970s, when you had a lot of different, experimental voices.”
The small screen is also attractive to moviemakers because it requires less attention to time-consuming minutiae: you can cut some corners when your audience is watching a 25-inch Trinitron rather than a barn-size screen at the stadium theater. One day on the “Boomtown” police-station set, the cinematographer couldn’t get his cameras to synchronize with the squad room’s computer monitors, yielding an annoying, rolling garble. On a movie set, technicians would spend however long it took to fix the problem. Not Avnet. “Let’s just turn the computers off,” he tells a camera operator. “It’s supposed to be late at night in here anyway, so they don’t have to be on.” Two minutes later he’s filming the scene. “One of the reasons movies take so long is that kind of detail, but the other reason is habit,” Avnet says. In fact, NBC was initially worried that Avnet couldn’t turn out a TV show on a weekly deadline. “John told everybody he could shoot fast and the network said ‘Oh, sure’,” says Yost, “but now he’s wrapping after only eight hours every day.”
Despite its new creative freedom, TV still has its disadvantages, most of which involve money. A TV drama can cost about $2 million an episode, while a studio feature can run $80 million. NBC nixed Avnet’s request to hire acclaimed composer Thomas Newman for “Boomtown’s” theme, and the network was reluctant to pay for a flashback sequence set in the Persian Gulf. Although they hardly qualify for food stamps, movie directors take significant pay cuts to work in TV. Avnet plans to leave “Boomtown” in midseason to direct another feature because he and his production company’s staff need the income. But the smaller budgets can also be the mother of creative inventions. At another downtown Los Angeles hotel on another recent night, Mann’s production team has taken over the rooftop of the swank Standard hotel, populating its trendy outdoor bar with nearly 100 extras for a shoot-out sequence. Where a movie director might do 30 takes of a single scene, “Robbery Homicide” director Rod Hardy moves on to new setups after just a couple of takes, as writer Carter Harris hurriedly overhauls dialogue for guest star Mario Van Peebles. Mann then dispatches one of his digital cameras to the roof of another nearby high-rise, capturing the shoot-out from a distant, out-of-the-ordinary perspective. The cumulative effect is an immediacy missing from many features. “It’s all more interactive, more personal,” Mann says. What’s more, you don’t have to shell out $8 for a movie ticket to see it. Mann’s little movies are free every Friday night.
