Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion (16 page)

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Authors: Susan Green,Randee Dawn

The bigger challenges sometimes are reserved for visiting actors. Perkins recalls. “Brian once had to do Orthodox
payes
(the sideburns worn by Hassidic men),” Perkins recalls. “And in another episode, a guest star had to look like a street urchin.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CLOSE SECONDS
I
’ve gone gray while working on this show,” laments Kent Cassella, who’s been with
SVU
from the beginning.
His
Law & Order
odyssey started with “my first audition for the Mother Ship in 1997 or 1998. David Platt was directing an episode about a toxic terrorist threat. Then, in July 1999, I got a call from (
SVU
) Extras Casting to be a stand-in for Dann Florek. They saw from my head shot that I was also going bald. I’m a little shorter than he is but that didn’t seem to matter. I wear clogs and maybe that made us closer in height.”
Ever since, Cassella has been a temporary Captain Cragen while the crew adjusts lights for the next scene. “The main thing is they know I’ll be there when they need me,” he says. “The show prefers to have people they can count on who know the business. It’s not rocket science.”
Kent Cassella
Except in season ten’s “Lunacy,” that is, the story of an errant astronaut.
Cassella also gets to go before the camera from time to time. “I played a character named Eddie Love in ‘Runaway’ (season two),” he recalls. “That was the big joke on the set: ‘It’s Eddie Love! Eddie Love’s here!’ The next year, I did three episodes as Eddie Palmieri, a detective, but everybody still called me Eddie Love.”
As Mariska Hargitay’s quasi-doppelganger since season four, Ellie Scully appreciates the steady gig but regrets that “we’re always on our feet for what can end up being a sixteen-hour day.”
Rick Johnson, subbing for Richard Belzer since 1999, is glad the show helps him fill in the income gaps of his career as a singer-songwriter.
Storm Chambers, who has been doubling for Ice-T since the second season, periodically does
SVU
extra work as, say, a jury foreperson. Otherwise, the job leaves him time to audition for roles elsewhere, “because you don’t want to be a stand-in for life.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
OUT THERE IN TELEVISIONLAND
A
n objective television news icon like CNN’s Anderson Cooper travels the globe to report on the most important issues of the day, yet in a September 2008 interview with
USA Weekend
he revealed that there’s somehow still time for him to catch one of his three favorite TV programs:
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
.
A more subjective source, identified only as “hazel” on the
specialvictimsunit.org
fan site, observes that “watching (
SVU
) is like going on a roller coaster ride at times.”
This roller coaster may be planetary in its reach. The show has been licensed to more than 200 territories worldwide (though not necessarily airing in all of them right now), including such far-flung lands as Sri Lanka, Fiji, Macau, and Botswana. The Kalahari Desert comprises 70 percent of that African nation, where the wildebeest and the antelope roam, so perhaps
SVU
’s themes can transcend almost any geographic or cultural divide.
Back home, another American enthusiast—“chloethereturner,” posting on the
svufans.net
blog—announced she was writing a college paper about “which psychological aspects are used in the construction of the main characters of the series in the search for identification with the public.”
That academic mouthful, perhaps a topic more appropriate for B.D. Wong’s on-camera shrink to tackle, is offset by less cerebral devotees of the show who periodically chat about their desire for an
SVU
convention. Sans Spock ears or Klingon lingo, what would such a gathering entail? A murder-mystery scenario worthy of dinner theater? A fake mass arrest of attendees?
Nonetheless, the idea caught fire in the
svufans.net
chat room, with one apparent teenager (“Myhumps”) moaning that “I doubt my parents would let me go all the way to New York.”
It’s difficult to reconcile the frivolity of some
SVU
followers, who frequently post giddily detailed messages about meeting the stars, with the wrenching facts of any sex crime depicted on the program. So viewer euphoria is something of a sticky wicket. While those who swoon for Meloni, Hargitay, or other performers are surely aware of the show’s profound nature, it could be that the line is blurred between grit and fluff if the actors are attractive enough.
“It’s a very tricky fine line that we walk—and no one has been able to walk it more successfully than (showrunner) Neal Baer,” suggests
SVU
casting director Jonathan Strauss. “He’s brilliant at blending the two realities, allowing the audience to get a little more attached by giving tidbits of the characters’ personal lives without getting too far away from the procedural essence of the show.”
And luckily, Mariska Hargitay never forgets
SVU
’s sagacity. Ordinary fan adoration is matched, maybe even outpaced, by communications from real-life rape victims, many of whom clearly perceive her as a kindred spirit.
“As the show got more popular, I received so many emails from so many survivors,” she recalls, “They were identifying so much with my character, identifying with this lion, this strong powerful (Olivia Benson). And then I had thirteen-year-olds going, ‘I want to be you; you are my role model.’ Hundreds of emails going, ‘I want to be a cop when I grow up.’ And I thought this character has touched something so deep in women and provided a safe place to go. . . . I felt I had a responsibility.”
Neal Baer sums up
SVU
’s double-edged appeal. “Mariska and Chris are the yin and yang of the audience,” he suggests. “(She) represents the empathy one feels towards the victim . . . She pulls the audience with her, particularly women. And men think she’s hot. So she’s the empathy we feel; Chris is the rage we feel about what’s happened. The audience can identify with both of them in very deep ways, which makes them quite popular in real life . . . They stand in for ourselves, I think, and how we feel about these things.”
One of the
SVU
Valentines by acclaimed California pop artist Brandon Bird, an avowed Law & Order fan.
And how does he, as the showrunner of a serious drama, feel about the roar of the crowd in America’s celebrity-obsessed culture? “I do read all of the fan sites,” Baer concedes. “I even go on(line) once in a while—I won’t say what my handle is . . . It’s interesting to get the gestalt.”
For the man at the top, fan zeal eventually boils down to a hardwired business rationale. According a March 2006 article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, Dick Wolf told some assembled media critics: “You’ve got an actress sitting up here (Mariska Hargitay) who has received two consecutive Emmy nominations for a show (
SVU
) that everybody would describe as mature. I didn’t see that much fuss made about it. You read about who’s hot, who’s not. These shows are never mentioned. We’re not looking to be the hot show. That’s not what the Law & Order brand is about. It’s about longevity and about repeatability and about staying on the air and being a profit center for NBC for years to come.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF AN EPISODE
“A long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull all together.”
—CHARLES DICKENS,
David Copperfield
(1849)
 
MONDAY, JULY 14
9 A.M.
“The stage is in an industrial area on a swamp,” explains Teamster Mario Berritto, driving a
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
van from Manhattan’s West Side to the set in New Jersey. “They’re always pulling bodies out of the swamp.”
Hopefully not those of the authors, about to begin our first day of observing the initial episode shooting for season ten.
Also riding to the Garden State are a few actors joining the cast of “Lunacy,” about the murder of a female astronaut.
“I’m a lesbian,” says Therese Plummer, referring to the character she’ll play in her TV debut. “I’m the girlfriend of a victim named Marga. Friends ask me if I’m the dead body and I tell them, ‘I’m the lover of the dead body.’ I’ve got a two-page scene in the morgue with Benson and Stabler.”
Briana Marin will appear as “an uber-feminist making anti-Muslim rape porn videos. I’m supposed to be a Dominican girl pretending to be Middle Eastern.”
Both women agree that a L&O appearance is a stepping stone for New York thespians. “It’s a rite-of-passage,” notes Marin.
In a sense, so is this chronicle by two outside observers given an opportunity to peek behind the curtain of a popular NBC series in the ubiquitous Law & Order universe.
9:30 A.M.
“Get ready to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of New Jersey,” announces Mario, as the van draws closer to the show’s North Bergen headquarters. “We’ve got a sewage plant coming up on the right.”
Inside the sprawling, one-story, nondescript
L&O
structure, some corridor walls are posted with real and fake memorabilia: A genuine snapshot of Mariska Hargitay (Det. Olivia Benson) with Robert Redford. Others with every member of the crew individually posing with her 2005 Golden Globe award. A note to her from co-star Christopher Meloni (Det. Elliot Stabler): “Congratulations from your fellow sex detective . . . Love, hugs, and handcuffs, Chris.”
10:25 A.M.
A production meeting gets under way around a long conference table.
Howard McMaster, “Lunacy” first assistant director: “Scene one, Exterior. Battery Park. As a young man pops the question, his girlfriend sees a woman’s body floating in the water.”
Tina Nigro, costume designer: “Is she wearing clothes?”
The answer is yes.
Peter Leto, supervising producer/“Lunacy” director: “But we’ll try to expose as much skin as we can.”
SVU
never flashes too much flesh or reveals the truly grisly visual aspects of a grisly crime. An NBC Universal Program Standards and Compliance Script Report for “Lunacy” cautions: “Please exercise your usual taste and discretion when showing corpse bobbing in water and on examining table.”
McMaster: “Scene twelve. We’re in the morgue . . . One of Marga’s eyes is not so good. How do we do that?”
Leto: “Marine organisms and feeder fish and eels have gotten at her eyeballs.”
McMaster: “How are we doing on the eels?”
Anthony Munafo, prop master: “Five made it through the weekend.”
Later, in the production office . . .
Munafo says he spent “eight man hours” hunting for the slimy creatures: “I contacted the only eel farm in the United States, in North Carolina. But they don’t grow them until May. I tried pet stores and Internet sites.”
Dann Florek (Capt. Don Cragen): “You didn’t go to Eels ‘R’ Us down the street?”

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