Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion (10 page)

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Authors: Susan Green,Randee Dawn

The same can probably be said of Forney’s long history with Dick Wolf, having survived
New York Undercover
(Fox, 1994-98),
The Wright Verdicts
(CBS, 1995),
Feds
(CBS, 1997), and
Players
(NBC, 1997), among many others.
Forney started out as an editor and now supervises all Wolf Films post-production, editing, dubbing, and music “with the right part of my brain,” he says. “With the left part, I direct episodes. Of course, once I look at my own work in the editing stage I want to shoot myself. What was I thinking?”
Perhaps the answer is an urge to yell “Action!” and “Cut!” His first directing assignment on the Mother Ship came in 1994, after which he did ten to fifteen episodes for the next three seasons. On
SVU
, Forney has been at the helm periodically since 2001.
“There’s a great benefit coming from a
Law & Order
background,” he says. “You know what style Dick wants.”
Despite that foreknowledge, there’s a routine he must follow. “I spend seven or eight days being with the script, to get it into my system,” Forney says. “We have ‘tone meetings’ with the writers in New York. We do the casting. We scout locations. I block out the scenes. When do they walk over there and get coffee? When do they look at a computer? By the time we start shooting, I have a shot list. But we can always make changes when actors have ideas.”
David Platt
His experience doesn’t necessarily mean it gets any easier, Forney admits. “Every day as a director, you’re always nervous, your stomach is growling.”
Thank goodness for the support system. Two teams each of first and second assistant directors invariably are at the ready. Ken Brown and Howard McMaster were in the former category during season nine.
“I’m always with the same team—I work with Peter Leto, my producer,” explains McMaster, who hitched his wagon to
SVU
in season three after working on features and a succession of TV series for about ten years. “My biggest responsibility here is the schedule. I break down each scene into its elements: sets, locations or (sound) stage, actors, stunts, costumes.”
He must constantly consider “the overview of an episode” in collaboration with the location manager, the producer, and the production designer. “Where are we going? What sets do we need? We have to come up with answers pretty quickly. We break down the number of extras needed and what kinds per day,” McMaster says. “I’m responsible for logistically managing it all.”
When an episode is shooting, he’s required to be in the fray. McMaster conveys the director’s commands—“Cut!” and “Roll!”—and issues what’s known as a “will-notify call” that summons actors to the set.
“A lot of my work is instinctual,” he theorizes. “I’m like a stage manager in the theater. We do six to eight pages a day, so the pace is fast. In TV, it’s very important to keep a rhythm going.”
All the more reason for artistic precision, presumably honed in his early years as a New York actor. McMaster feels flattered that a costume designer once told him, “You schedule like a poet.”
CHAPTER TEN
ESTABLISHING THE VISUALS
E
xecutive producer Ted Kotcheff was concerned with how
SVU
could distinguish itself. “I wanted more cinematic storytelling,” he says. “The (Mother Ship’s) jiggly camera is documentary.”
Episode director Peter Leto, now
SVU
supervising producer, agrees. “We started to move away from the tried-and-true
Law & Order
style. We’re not really hand-held. I like to think we’re a bit more cinematic. Ted was always pushing us in that direction.”
Creator Dick Wolf embraces all his broadcast babies as equal yet different. “I think each of the individual Law & Order-branded series has its own unique feel,” he says. “But they are cousins, so you can see the family resemblance. Any documentary-like comparisons are not really germane.”
SVU
’s emphasis on less “jiggly camera” ushered in a big difference in terms of storytelling. “This show has very graceful shots,” Producer/episode director David Platt says of an approach that enhances the ability “to get into the character’s heads.”
The Kotcheff-inspired shift toward Steadicam and dolly work evokes wistfulness in some
L&O
loyalists. “I’ve always loved the 16mm, gritty stories about this city,” producer David DeClerque explains. “But for
SVU
, Dick (Wolf) says, ‘I want to show the city as it really is. The colors. People on their way to work. But our subject matter is dark enough, we don’t need a bleak look. Bad things can happen to good people in a nice environment.’”
The responsibility for conveying that nice environment was inherited by George Pattison after the departure of
SVU
’s original director of photography, Geoffrey Erb, during season eight. “We use a Panavision camera, same as in features,” he notes. “We shoot a 35mm negative. A lot of shows are moving toward digital, but I still feel 35mm is the most reliable, best-looking, and fastest way to go. Ours is one of the last programs doing that. . . . Despite pressure from above to save money, Dick Wolf and our creative producers insist on sticking with a proven formula. Whether it’s 100 or 0 degrees outside, these cameras work. And they give beautiful latitude compared with digital.”
For Kotcheff, beauty comes across most powerfully in “a whole gallery of distinctive, colorful places. Every second should be entertaining. I tell our directors, ‘Make it new.’ If a producer says, ‘That’s not a very important scene,’ I ask them: ‘Oh, you want to do it badly and have the audience lose interest?’”
Failure is not an option in showrunner Neal Baer’s purview. “Last year (season nine), we were too dark; we want better lighting (in future episodes),” he points out. “I’m looking for ways scripts can push our visual style and I believe nothing is verboten if it serves the story.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE CORRIDORS OF KA-CHUNG
I
n the summer of 1999 Karen Stern was about to apply for an editing job at another Dick Wolf show,
DC
, when a friend told her a
Law & Order
spin-off in the pipeline would be “crewing up, as well.”
The choice was easy. “I’d never missed an episode,” she says of her viewing habits. “So I went for that interview instead.”
A decade later, Stern and her fellow editors, Nancy Forner and Steve Polivka, work in a rotation; she covers every third show. Amoung them, they may be working on nine episodes in various stages at once.
Like the others, Stern is holed up in an
SVU
“cutting room” at the Verna Fields Building, which encompasses editors for all programs in the NBC Universal realm.
Peter Jankowski and Charlie Engel
“There are three editors and two assistants for each Law & Order show,” explains Wolf Films president Peter Jankowski. “You walk down the hallway and hear that ‘ka-chung’ all day long.”
The indelible electronic sound, originally created by Mike Post for the Mother Ship, also now demarcates scenes on
SVU
and
Criminal Intent
. He calls it “the clang”; at least one TV critic (
Entertainment Weekly
’s Ken Tucker) has referred to “an ominous chung CHUNG.”
Post’s ubiquitous “time/location signature” between scenes has prompted Wolf to playfully taunt him ever since: “Isn’t it great that you worked all these years to become a serious composer and after you’re gone they’ll remember you for two notes?”
Stern keeps a copy of those two notes in a bin with other sound effects and musical interludes to insert into her initial edit. It’s part of a system that requires bouncing episodes-in-progress across the country and back again.
Every night, the “dailies”—representing what the director decides to print from his twenty-four hours’ worth of footage—are shipped from New York to Los Angeles, where a lab processes them. (The ratio of raw footage to each show’s actual length of forty-two or forty-three minutes is approximately ten to one.)
The negative of the processed material is then transferred to digital video. Stern, who has by then read every successive draft of the script, begins to assemble her cut, which takes about three weeks. “My job is to give the director the best blueprint possible,” she notes.
Executive producer Arthur Forney, who oversees post-production, says the next step is when “the editor’s cut is sent to the director, who has four days to make his own (cut). We leave him alone to do his thing.”
A first screening is then attended by Forney, showrunner Neal Baer, supervising producer Randy Roberts, the writer, and the editor, who together do the fine-tuning. “Most directors work on different types of shows, whereas the producers are there for all twenty-four episodes a season,” Forney says. “We know the arc of the series.”
At this juncture, they collaboratively determine “if it needs tightening, the story is too confusing, if we’re giving away too much information, if the episode needs a little more suspense,” Stern says. “We have to build performances that are absolutely true. I think our shows are quite seamless and very naturalistic in tone. So much of what we do is from gut feelings.”
A final look from Wolf, Jankowski, and NBC Universal seals the deal. Associate producer Sheyna Kathleen Smith is in charge of all the finishing touches, such as sound mixing and color correcting. Stern enjoys mastery of the “locale cards,” which indicate places where the detectives are going in their investigations.
“We tell the audience where we are without an establishing shot,” she explains. “They situate the characters and give the viewer a chance to breathe. The script doesn’t tell us where to put them. We pretty much know when they’re necessary. I love locale cards.”
Each address has already been vetted by
SVU
researchers so as not to portray any existing spot. But do the West Coast personnel really know the city where every
Law & Order
is set?
Although mistakes apparently are rare, Stern often is amused by the make-believe. “I’m from New York. I laugh when a locale card identifies, say, 706 West 45
th
Street: ‘Oh, that’s in the river!’ But the audience generally will go with us wherever we take them.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE TWAIN SHALL MEET
N
ot quite a Hydra, the two-headed body that is
SVU
somehow functions with about six thousand miles in between each noggin. Is this bicoastalism ever a problem?
“Not at all,” insists showrunner Neal Baer. “Ted (Kotcheff) and I talk five times a day. Mariska, three times a day. Chris, once a day.”
East Coast-based executive producer Kotcheff says the dual nature of the series—like that of all Law & Order shows—can present a challenge. “Sometimes there are geographic mistakes,” executive producer Kotcheff acknowledges. “I try to bring the writers here. I’ve lived in L.A., so I’ve got both an outsider’s and insider’s perspective. I see what’s idiosyncratic about New York.”
Otherwise, the arrangement is copasetic. “During Uncle Ted’s Story Hour (the brainstorming session for each episode), I weed out things from a script that I think are incorrect,” he says. “Then I speak with Neal and he speaks with the writers. We’re like partners.”

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