THE MANN FROM MIAMI HITS THE MEAN STREETS OF CHICAGO

Abel Ferrara, a director who specializes in film and TV violence and whose looks would scare babies, almost jumped out of his socks. For a second he looked scared, there in the darkness of one of this city’s seedier alleyways.

Ferrara had heard the sounds of a violent altercation, maybe somebody killing somebody else.

“What the hell is going on here?” he yelled.

The audio man on the location chuckled softly, then shouted back the answer: “I was just playing back the last scene you shot.”

An audio track that frightens the director who shot it--that gives some idea of why “Crime Story,” a new NBC series, is “the most realistic crime show I’ve ever seen.” That comment comes from a one-time thief (turned actor) John Santucci, who plays a recurring character in the serial drama.

Executive producer Michael Mann is the Mann who gave “Miami Vice” its attitude --the hot pastels, the glistening streets, the day-old-growth machismo of cop-hero Sonny Crockett. On “Crime Story,” Mann is into cars with fins and cops who can shoot first and introduce themselves later.

Starting in the fall, for at least 14 episodes, “Crime Story” will tell the tale of Chicago cop Mike Torello, a lieutenant with the Major Crimes Unit. The continuing story line unfolds in 1963.

Mann is happy to rewrite history. “Take that time period--’57 to ‘63--and appropriate from it what turns you on right now . There’s a whole industrial design of cars in 1961 where we got into this whole Kennedyite, neo-classical period. Like a ’61 Lincoln Continental, very restrained. I’m not interested in those shapes. I’m interested in a ’57 Chrysler, the ’59 Plymouth Furys.”

His characters are likewise rooted in the ‘50s. “The attitude of these guys was outrageous,” Mann went on. “They were out in the streets doing justice. They felt passionate about nailing bad guys.”

The good guys were cops like Chuck Adamson, a sergeant with the Major Crimes Unit in Chicago, and later on, Dennis Farina, a detective who served under Adamson. Adamson left police work a decade ago and co-created the “Crime Story” series, which is based largely on his exploits.

Farina resigned as a detective with the Chicago police force last fall after appearing in two “Miami Vice” segments as well as other episodic TV and some stage work, most notably as Cokes in David Rabe’s “Streamers” at Washington’s Kennedy Center. Farina now stars as Torello.

On the night of the violent audio, Farina could be found throwing Santucci into the alley wall then over a garbage barrel. Spit flew from his mouth as he screamed into Santucci’s face. For emphasis, he thrust his .45 into Santucci’s rib cage--and kept it there until Santucci “beefed” on his “crew” about their next “score.”

Later on, Santucci admitted to being black and blue from the beating.

Farina said, “You gotta remember that this takes place in 1963, and it’s pre-Civil Rights and pre a lot of things.”

Adamson, an 18-year police force veteran who’s built like a house, commented later that maybe the scene wasn’t quite as realistic as it might have been. “The next step would be to put the gun right in his face and let him see you cock it,” he said. The NBC censors nixed that particular detail.

Adamson likes to tell how his friends who are still on the force now tell him, “Chuck, if you were on the streets today doing what you did then, you’d be in the pen.”

Mann and Adamson have been kicking around “Crime Story” for at least seven years, since before they and Farina and Santucci all worked together on Mann’s film, “Thief,” which starred James Caan as a master safecracker.

But the pair first crossed paths in 1962, when Mann was home from college and hanging around for the summer in the middle-class Chicago neighborhood where he had grown up. One afternoon, Mann heard “a major shoot-out down the street.”

Adamson’s team had just captured a band of “home invaders,” psychopath burglars who had invaded about 200 homes, torturing the residents before robbing them.

It was a significant event for Mann. The case became the subject of a book, “The Home Invaders,” which Mann years later adapted as the film “Thief.” The case eventually was re-adapted as “The Home Invaders” episode of “Miami Vice,” which Adamson wrote and Ferrara directed.

Mann denies that he’s obsessed with violence and crime, even though all his work to date seems to suggest that he is. Even his landmark TV movie, “The Jericho Mile,” with Peter Strauss, took place in a prison and had as a main character a convicted murderer. “The Keep,” his 1983 film, dealt with Nazi S.S. men and a hidden, evil power.

“Nah, not really, I don’t really like the violence,” he said as his mobile home carried him to the next set-up. Some “Crime Story” episodes “are strictly domestic conflicts. When things aren’t going great on the job for Torello, he creates side dramas for himself. He falls in love with a woman other than the one he’s married to.

“The next movie I’m doing is about a guy who races cars and has nothing to do with cops. I wanted to do a financial thriller about the grain trade. . . .” But drama is nothing without conflict, he noted, and “if you’re in society and you like strong conflict, you usually wind up in this .”

He gestured around him to make it clear what this is: A police car being rigged to have its rear window shot out during a chase scene; the sprawling truck docks of Chicago’s Southwater produce market, eerily quiet at 1 a.m.; a garbage-strewn underpass frequented by rats the size of puppies, where one of “Crime Story’s” young hoods is about to get “whacked.”

“You get hooked on certain stories and you want to tell them,” Mann said. “I’ve been wanting to tell this one for a long time. . . .”

“Crime Story” almost didn’t get told. Though NBC had committed to airing 13 episodes of any new show from Mann, Universal Pictures, producer of “Miami Vice,” backed out as producer of “Crime Story” after deciding it was too costly.

New World Pictures stepped in as “Crime Story’s” new backer and the show’s serial concept became a marketing tool. In Europe, it will not be a weekly series, but a 14-hour miniseries, perhaps to be followed by a separate nine-hour miniseries. New World co-chairman Harry Evans Sloan expects to “garner 50% higher prices than a regular television series” overseas.

If ratings of the weekly U.S. series are strong and NBC renews it for the remaining nine episodes in the 1986-87 season, the story line will have criminals played by Santucci and Tony Denison as his boss, Ray Luca, move to Las Vegas. Torello will move there, too, as Adamson did in real life.

Mann’s attention to detail is legendary. “That’s not to say he’s not a pain in the rear sometimes,” said Chuck Adamson, “but we all recognize that we benefit from his expertise.”

During an interview, Mann was interrupted on three separate occasions by an assistant who dutifully marched actor David Caruso to Mann’s mobile home. The assistant wanted Mann to approve Caruso’s wardrobe for the next scene, in which Denison would point a 9mm handgun at Caruso’s head and pull the trigger.

Mann checked out Caruso’s outfit three times and once thumbed through a handful of ties. But he sloughed off the notion that his attention to detail was constant, perhaps unrelenting.

“Nah. There are a lot of variations of looks to his (Caruso’s) character, but in this case I want him to be wearing something so that . . . just to feel something for the guy. I don’t want him in black with a white tie, y’know, because that kinda takes the sympathy away that I want the audience to feel.”

When the scene was finally shot, Caruso wore a turquoise sport shirt, no tie, a dark jacket and stylish black-on-white wing-tip shoes.

Similar interruptions came from assistants working on “Red Dragon,” the movie that Mann scripted (from the Thomas Harris chiller book) and directed for an August release. (That one is about--you guessed it--crime. Farina is an FBI agent who coaxes criminologist William Peterson out of retirement to provide the motive for a serial killer. They wanted to verify a specific still photo that Mann wanted. Mann describes the exact shot, the composition, how it should be cropped and how to tint it to his specifications “by adding magenta.”

He acts casually, trading cigarettes and Chicago-isms with his stars. But he also knows the power his artistic tastes have on the American public--as when he advises a photographer to buy a ’62 Ford Thunderbird “now, because when this show goes on, they’ll go up in price.”

And he knows that, if his tastes indeed are on the mark again, he could have the next “Miami Vice” on his hands, maybe even the next Don Johnson in the person of the strong-but-sensitive ex-cop, Dennis Farina.

Mann laughed at the last suggestion--a big Chicago-style laugh that made his eyes become slits and his mouth widen as cigarette smoke came out of his nose. “I’ll tell you something. I don’t believe it because he’s so damn ugly, but women go for him. A number of women have told me that Dennis is a very appealing guy. . . .”