Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion (5 page)

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Authors: Susan Green,Randee Dawn

Many Rivers to Cross
“There were no traditional studio spaces available in New York,” says
SVU
producer David DeClerque, referring to the challenge of securing an appropriate edifice for the new show. “In Manhattan, we looked at a number of places but it was getting really expensive. Real estate was as hot as a pistol and most wanted five- to ten-year leases. We literally scoured two dozen possibilities. They’d be dirty or in noisy areas or there wouldn’t be enough bathrooms. By late winter, we knew that when spring came we needed to have a home.”
And, then, voila! North Bergen, New Jersey, glimmered like an unpolished gem. “Here, all the logistical things fell into place: an air-conditioning system; enough parking; 53,000 square feet, about two-thirds of it stage area. I told Dick, ‘It looks like we’re crossing the river.’ He asked, ‘A Law & Order show that’s not in Manhattan?’ I said, ‘Just the internal sets would be here. We’ll still think of this as a New York show.’”
The Garden State facility made sense. “It had been sitting empty for a while,” DeClerque recalls. “We got a one-year lease and the owner thought it might be fun to have a TV show in one of his properties.”
David DeClerque
Dick Wolf agrees that New Jersey has proved to be a blessing in disguise. ”It was tough to find a full production facility in Manhattan that gave us the room and the resources that we needed,” he says, adding that the arrangement “has worked out beautifully.”
SVU
started filming while construction of the sets continued at the East Coast headquarters, situated on what were once wetlands; cast and crew concentrated on location shoots until the work was completed.
As time went on, however, the accommodations got at least one negative review. ”I wish they weren’t based in North Bergen,” says Stephanie March, who signed on in season two as the show’s ADA Alexandra Cabot. “That is a pain in the neck to get to. (And) how depressing is that place? You’re floating in the middle of Secaucus.”
She saw a stark contrast between the Jersey Swamp Thing and the Mother Ship anchored at Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers. “Every time we would shoot at the
Law & Order
stages—and we shot there a lot because we didn’t have (our own) courtroom—I would think to myself, ‘Why can’t we shoot at the pier? It’s six blocks from where I live. It’s in the middle of Manhattan. Why not? Why not?’ Nope, I have to get my sorry self through the (Lincoln) tunnel.”
After reaching the other bank of the Hudson, March felt stranded in a gloomy building surrounded by an industrial wasteland. “That place is an energy sucker,” she contends. “I remember when my mom came to see it, she said, ‘Do you think they’ll change the lighting? ’ I said, ‘I don’t think so, no.’ . . . You’re totally trapped out there, because you can’t pop out and do anything else.”
March disliked the marsh but others involved with
SVU
were less bothered by the bleak North Bergen ambiance as long as the faux squad room was correct. Writer Amanda Green, then a law-enforcement employee in real life, encountered a little bit of déjà vu all over again when she first visited the soundstage.
“My biggest concern was that the set looked right,” she says. “I walked around that day and saw real wanted posters for cases that I’d worked on and I’ll never forget going, ‘Gosh, that guy looks familiar. Why does he look familiar? Right! Because I worked that case. I was there in the lineup and I was there when he got convicted at trial.’”
For Green, verisimilitude soon kicked in. “Looking at details in the squad room that the scenic designers had just copied from what they’d seen, I knew what everything meant and it was right. They don’t even know why they’ve done it but they’ve done it right. So I was really impressed.”
While inspecting the set, Green had also spent three hours with Dick Wolf, telling him what she thought about the show. “The next day my phone rang and it was Dick’s assistant saying, ‘Come out to L. A. and meet the writers.’ I asked, ‘When?’ and she said, ‘Tomorrow. ’ I told her, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m on trial.’ So that was that.”
Not exactly. “Couple hours later the phone rang and they asked, ‘So, when would you be available to come to L. A.?’” Green recalls. “And that started what became the next three years of my life—which was not telling a soul what I was doing because I was afraid it would undermine my credibility professionally.”
Way Out West
Compared with the mammoth New Jersey soundstage, there’s a smaller, tidier operation on the Universal Studios lot in Los Angeles, where the writing and editing of
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
unfolds. It’s nestled next to the gift shop and down the street from the commissary. (Recommended to visitors: try the peanut-butter cookies.)
All three L&O shows are housed in adjacent structures.
SVU
has set up shop in a one-story gray bungalow that’s named—appropriately—in honor of Jack Webb, the creator and star of
Dragnet.
The legendary NBC crime show ran from 1952 to 1970, before being all-too-briefly resurrected by Dick Wolf in 2003 on CBS.
But the
L&O
empire now rules the roost, where just outside select parking spaces are available for the
SVU
personnel inside: executive producer and showrunner Neal Baer; co-executive producers Jonathan Greene, Dawn DeNoon, and Amanda Green; and some novices, supervising producer Daniel Truly and story editor Mick Betancourt.
The
SVU
quarters are little more than a long hallway with offices branching out to each side; depending on staff seniority, the capacity increases mightily. Truly and Betancourt seem lucky to have a window, desk, and whiteboard, while DeNoon, Greene, and Green enjoy enough space to make many a New York studio apartment dweller drool with envy.
Bookshelves line the walls, packed with thick ring-binders, one for each episode. Others have been devoted to source material, such as all those headlines that are ripped and now ready for the plundering. Desks, side tables, walls, and computer screens display personal photos posed with cast and crew, or awards earned for particular scripts.
There is no specific common space or coffee area; with the commissary so close, food can be easily foraged. But Baer’s assistant, Ryan Spencer, has an office with a wide selection of snacks, should the urge come over anyone. In aggregate, the
L&O
workers potentially mean a lot of hunger.
“We have 50 to 100 people in three buildings close to each other,” explains Peter Jankowski, president of Wolf Films.
A handful of those folks are astonishingly industrious writers.
CHAPTER TWO
GRAPPLING WITH UNCERTAINTY
W
hile shooting the
SVU
pilot on New York’s Upper East Side in the autumn of 1999, the show’s two lead actors coasted on the thrill of a wonderful new opportunity, epitomized by an evening meal with their boss. “Dick invited Mariska and me to dinner at a very fancy steak restaurant,” Christopher Meloni (Det. Elliot Stabler) told
The Hollywood Reporter
in 2007. “For some reason, we had a boom box. After a little wine, we were feeling really good. As we were leaving, we flipped on the boom box and started dancing to a late ’70s head-banger, ‘I-like-to-rock’ type song. We were so happy to be employed by Dick Wolf—and he didn’t fire us the next day for our outrageous public display.”
But it didn’t take long for the crucible of episodic television to emerge. “It was tough in the beginning. I felt as if we were being pulled in many directions at once,” says producer David DeClerque. “We had growing pains.”
Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni
Arguably, few felt more anguish in that situation than the stars.
“I was not prepared for the weather; shooting exteriors, working fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-hour days in the beginning and all of a sudden this was my life and I had no other life,” Hargitay (Det. Olivia Benson) laments. “It was all
SVU
all the time and dark and depressing and sexual assaults and rape, and the show hadn’t found its voice.”
The trial-by-fire was extraordinarily difficult for Meloni, as well. “You’re prepared because you want it so badly, but the first four months or so, because I was so mentally and emotionally drawn and crispy from the hours and the subject matter and pouring all my heart and soul into it, I woke up two mornings shaking and couldn’t get out of bed,” he admits.
To this day, Meloni wonders if the stress nearly did him in: “I was sitting on the edge of the bed and I was shaking, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my God, this is an emotional breakdown. And I’m not that (kind of) guy, so whatever, it’s an anxiety attack, but I’ve never had one.’ But I still think it was a mini-collapse. But—nothing a shower couldn’t fix!”
The giddy notion of being employed by Wolf no longer prompted Meloni and Hargitay to dance with joy: “I was so sad, alone, and all of that,” she acknowledges. “Even my work was suffering, I just wasn’t happy. . . . I wasn’t flying at the material.”
After three or four episodes Wolf asked for an assessment from Kotcheff, who remembers the conversation that ensued:
Ted: “I’m not used to wall-to-wall verbiage.”
Dick: “Yeah, (TV) is a writer’s medium.”
Ted: “In the 1960s I helped Michelangelo Antonioni edit
Blow Up
. His approach was, ‘We think of dialogue as sound effects; we tell a story in terms of pictures.’”
In this regard, Kotcheff was the polar opposite of venerable wordsmith Robert Nathan, on the Mother Ship during the early 1990s and with
SVU
as co-executive producer in the fifth, sixth, and seventh seasons. “
Law & Order
is a writer’s dream,” he suggested during a 1997 interview for a book about the original show, “because it’s all about words.”
Words can be fickle, however. “I know you’re a creative person,” Wolf told Kotcheff early in
SVU
’s season one. “But in a season of twenty-two shows, we’ll do four great episodes, four terrible ones, and the rest lie somewhere in between.”
The East Coast executive producer’s response: “I can’t approach a season in that frame of mind.”
Somehow, the two frames of mind merged enough to impress the studio and the network.
“I thought for a while we would never get to episode thirteen, that it would turn into rape-of-the-week, child-molester-of-the-week, and I’d be out looking for work again,” Kotcheff notes. “But we were asked to do nine more episodes, a full season. Then, we were invited back for another year.”
The network’s pat on the back eased any worries Wolf might have been having. “I don’t think we had many growing pains,” he says. “But there (was) some re-evaluation of stories and characters, which is normal.”
Although Dann Florek had three seasons on the Mother Ship under his belt, he found
SVU
to be an entirely different experience. “There was definitely a sense of feeling our way,” he notes. “And I also think if you go back and look, probably a handful of our weakest episodes were in that first year, when we were still figuring things out and getting the right writers for the style of the show, and where could we go, you didn’t want to just be grisly.”
Yet, grisly was almost the mantra in those early days with episodes that never seemed to stray from the horrific crime into the relative calm and, well, order of a courtroom. The victims were varied—a teenage model, a prostitute, a male travel writer, a college student, a Wall Street financier, a TV news reporter—but the somber caseload was unrelenting.

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