Power of the Pen

A photo of June Cleaver, Beaver’s mom, adorns the bulletin board above the coffee-and-doughnut table set up for the cast and crew of “Oz,” the HBO prison series. The photo shows the perfect ‘50s housewife brandishing a spatula in “Leave It to Beaver’s” perfect ‘50s kitchen. The caption declares, “I bake 80 times a week, doesn’t everybody?”

Next to it is another photo, showing the “Oz” version of reality: two cons in a boxing ring, where they normally beat each other up as therapeutic recreation, one secretly cheating (drugs in the opponent’s water bottle) but where they are posed at the moment with a half-clad “ring girl,” another hardened inmate who happens to like prancing about in black lingerie. The caption reads, “We Three Queens of Em City,” that being short for Emerald City, the maximum-security unit in Oswald State Correctional Facility that is the setting for the series, now in its third season.

There’s one other photo on the board: showing the “Oz” logo tattooed on the arm of its 47-year-old creator, Tom Fontana. That’s how he signaled, on his own flesh, his intent to take television drama to new, darker levels after winning acclaim with his work on two cutting-edge, but safer, network series--”St. Elsewhere” and “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

So it is that “Oz,” shot at a former Oreo cookie factory in Chelsea, on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, bears little resemblance to anything else made for the tube, whether in its plots, casting, view of human nature--or coffee break talk.

“This is not a show I’d watch with Mom,” Brad Winters is saying soon after the cameras stop rolling in a scene in which two inmates enter the cell of a third, armed with knives and what Mike Tyson would call “evil intentions.”

Winters is bantering with his brother, Scott, and their sister, Blair--who is visiting the set--about how they kept their mother away from the TV at one family gathering last season, when an episode ended with fair-haired Scott, playing Irish con Cyril O’Reilly, masturbating.

This season? Scott figures Mom may have a tough time with the boxing scene that has him taking an eight-count “covered with blood.”

“The bottom line,” brother Brad agrees, “is this is the most brutal, vulgar show that’s ever been on television.”

Not that they’re complaining. Fontana, after all, has become a one-man employment service for the Winters boys--there are three--since meeting them when they were bartenders at one of his Manhattan haunts. (“Some of the best of my work has come out of leaning over a glass of Wild Turkey,” Fontana says.) Soon Scott and the third brother, Dean, had acting roles on “Homicide” and now here, on “Oz,” as--what else?--brother inmates. And while Fontana usually pens every word, longhand, he let Brad Winters write portions of two episodes.

Fontana has been good to edgy musicians, too, as evidenced by the fellow now swaggering into the break area, looking like a walking tattoo parlor.

“This show is a huge hit in prison,” reports Evan Seinfeld, the squat Brooklynite who heads the heavy-metal band Biohazard, which is a favorite of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head (“These guys kick ass!”). On Oz, Seinfeld plays a con named Jaz Hoyt, while rappers LL Cool J and Treach sometimes grace other cells. Treach, from Naughty by Nature, plays “Snake,” who winds up crucified against the bars, in a bit of jailhouse justice, after he boasts of murdering an infant.

“My friend from L.A.,” Seinfeld continues, “he’s like a Mexican mob guy. He grew up in institutions. He goes, ‘Hey, ‘Homes, I’m state-raised, I’m state-owned.’ And this is his favorite show!

“He did nine years in Pelican Bay. He tells me they don’t even have clothes--every day they give you paper shorts, a tank top and these little slip-on things, nothing these guys can make a weapon of.”

“Oz” suggests, however, that an inmate doesn’t need a conventional weapon. In the first episode this season, one slashed a guard with his razor-sharp fingernails, then clipped the incriminating evidence into a toilet--a detail inspired by Fontana’s two years of research in prisons, where one con boasted he could kill “with three fingers.”

“Some of these guys are so smart, in a way,” the Winters’ sister Blair says, “like how they make tattoos using a guitar string.”

“This skull?” Seinfeld replies, showing one of his own tattoos. “I got this from a jailhouse guy, just got out, in Kansas. People say to me, ‘You got those in the joint?’ I have a big spider on my back.”

The cast does include mainstream faces, such as Rita Moreno, playing nun-psychologist Sister Peter Marie Reimondo; “Ghostbusters’ ” Ernie Hudson, playing nice-guy warden Leo Glynn; and “thirtysomething’s” Terry Kinney, playing the supervisor of the Em City unit as the epitome of good intentions, at least at first.

But now approaching the break area is all-muscles Chuck Zito, former head of New York’s Hells Angels, who ran into Fontana at a book party at Elaine’s, “and he said to me”--Fontana recalling it--” ’Hey, I hear you’re doing a show about prison. I was in prison. Do you have a part for a Hells Angel?’ I said, ‘I’d rather you played one of the Sicilians.’ ”

So Chuck Zito is now Chucky “The Enforcer” Pancamo, and the Mafia dons in this joint sure need a good enforcer, one having had glass put in his food by the blacks--or was it the Irish?--while another was pricked with a needle carrying HIV-infected blood, that deed done by Adebisi, the Nigerian drug dealer, in real life actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who has a law degree and was a London model.

No, this ain’t “Leave It to Beaver,” or the Emerald City of Judy Garland’s Oz. It’s not “Birdman of Alcatraz,” either--who knows what they’d train those birds to do here?

Zito reaches the doughnut table and says, “How ya doin’?”

*

Fontana insists that he “loved everything” on TV when growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., from the earnest courtroom drama “The Defenders” to the slapstick “Green Acres.” “I thought,” he says, “it was a wonderful world.”

He’d stopped watching--except for the likes of “MASH”--by the time he completed Jesuit high school (his sister is a nun) and Buffalo State and started his show-biz career in the “legit” arena, theater. But in 1981, by a fluke, producer Bruce Paltrow had him write an episode of “St. Elsewhere,” the hospital drama. So he “started watching everybody else’s stuff” and realized . . . well, he didn’t like it.

His problem was how shows dumbed down complex problems, compressing life’s struggles into their half-hour, or hour--and resolving them. And for all the talk of too much violence, most of it was sanitized. How could you portray evil if you flinched away from showing what it looked like?

Fontana hardly fit those molds as he wrote “St. Elsewhere”--taking 19 episodes to track a character’s battle with AIDS--or when he and film director Barry Levinson created the gritty “Homicide.” Still, he felt the constraints of network realities. “The constant refrain you hear from the broadcast network executives is, ‘Where are the victories?’ ‘Why is he so unlikable?’ ‘Can’t she fix her hair?’ ”

He understood, but worried that such demands compromised the “ultimate nobility” of characters.

“When it takes a subject matter like alcoholism and in 46 minutes someone says, ‘Well here’s how to not be an alcoholic--OK, I’m never going to be an alcoholic again,’ to me that’s bull----, because it diminishes the struggle. It trivializes it to the extent that someone watches it says, ‘OK, I’m an alcoholic, why can’t I get over it in 46 minutes?’ ”

His idol was risk-taking British screenwriter Dennis Potter, who battled crippling illnesses and the bottle, while turning out such BBC series as “The Singing Detective” and “Pennies From Heaven.” Potter had characters suddenly lip-sync popular tunes of the 1930s and ‘40s, an unsettling metaphor for the false front people put up, but hardly mass appeal--witness the film version of “Pennies From Heaven,” with Steve Martin.

“I’d rather be Dennis Potter,” Fontana says nonetheless, “than Aaron Spelling.”

Has he seen Spelling’s mansion?

“A great house--and Dennis Potter’s dead. You figure it out,” Fontana says. Then he laughs.

Fontana’s invitation to let loose came from HBO, at a time the pay channel was flying high from its success going beyond movies with “The Larry Sanders Show” and other comedy series. Fontana and Levinson were to create its first dramatic series. “I did feel a tremendous responsibility,” Fontana says. “I felt like I owed it to them to not fall into traditional broadcast television patterns [and] make as much noise as we could . . . you know, so that people are talking about it--that water cooler conversation we all lust after.”

The result was “Oz,” a penal soap opera set in an undisclosed location, though the prison’s name is a wry memorial to Russell Oswald, the head of New York’s prison system in 1971, when a hard-line approach at Attica, right in Fontana’s old Buffalo turf, contributed to 39 deaths in a riot and raid.

The first season of “Oz” culminated in a similar riot. The look of the prison, however, was not the dungeon-like milieu common in the jailhouse genre: Two floors of the old National Biscuit Co. factory were transformed into glass-walled cells clustered around a high-ceilinged common area, where inmates play cards, watch TV (especially a kids’ puppet show, with a buxom hostess) and plot. It’s all brightly lit--the cameras can just set up and shoot.

“Tom’s idea, his directive to me, was this should feel a little like a fishbowl,” explains Gary Weist, the production designer, walking through the 55,000-square-foot set, which includes--in addition to the main cellblock--a traditional “gen pop” area, a death row, a “hole,” a cafeteria and nooks and crannies where characters venture at risk of having a body part bitten off (guess which?) or--in the case of a guard--their eyes poked out. The cells have homey touches, though: a crocheted pillow cover on a bed, or nail polish remover--and pretty-boy pictures--by a mirror.

“The same stuff goes on here as in the general population,” Weist says, “but everybody sees it. The idea was to have it be claustrophobic.”

The jarring mood is accentuated by percussive, tribal theme music that leaves nothing to whistle.

When “Oz” debuted two years ago, The Times’ Howard Rosenberg praised the “uniqueness and arresting style.” But the story lines, he noted, made “NYPD Blue” “look and sound like dancing Barney.”

It wasn’t just the warring cliques--the Muslims and Aryans and Latinos and Irish and so on. To him (and many viewers, no doubt) the stories were “absolute downers--there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, nor even a tunnel . . . no central characters to like or pull for.”

The Washington Post’s critic, Tom Shales, cited the “harrowing primal power” of scenes but wondered whether the “artsy” touches went too far, particularly the use of wheelchaired inmate Augustus Hill as a Greek chorus, talking directly to the audience from a revolving set known as “the box.”

The surrealistic box scenes are one way Fontana lets his directors have wide freedom--this season he used eight, one for each episode, including three making TV debuts: Chazz Palminteri, Steve Buscemi and Matt Dillon.

In one episode, Hill is in ancient Egyptian garb, rattling on about Moses, the Pharaoh and those plagues set upon the enslavers of his people, “the dust of Egypt turning to gnat and flies . . . and bug spray won’t be invented for 4,000 years yet.”

It’s risky stuff, this balancing of heaviness and hip--a postmodernist leap from when Robin Williams, as Mork, sent those reports on Mindy back to his home planet. It’s risky, too, when characters in “Oz,” driven most of the time by animalistic instinct, find the articulateness to remind us “there’s a thin line between love and hate,” as does Snake, who videotaped his slaughter of a child. Or you get neo-Nazi Vern Schillinger, who heads the Aryan Brotherhood, not quite confessing to stabbing another inmate in the back, but saying “metaphorically it fits.”

Fontana is always trying to surprise, and confuse, with characters like that. You hate Schillinger, of course, when--in the first season--he makes a sex slave of a lawyer sent here for drunk-driving manslaughter, tattooing a swastika on the weakling’s butt. But, with time, you almost like the Aryan leader, played by J.K. Simmons, for he is clever--and he survives. He understands--as does the Muslim leader, Kareem Said--that it takes the worldview of a Henry Kissinger to make it in Fontana’s prison. You endure not by expecting goodwill from others, or shared ideology (except perhaps that of revenge), but by expecting betrayal, and crafting delicate balances of power, alliances written in shifting sands. And every once in a while, your fellow man, even here, surprises you.

Last season, when the grandson of an aging inmate became fatally ill, the cons chipped in $3,000 to send the kid to Walt Disney World. To be sure, a pal taunts Adebisi, the Nigerian thug, “let’s steal the money.” But Adebisi says, “No, no. Sometimes it’s good to be human.”

“My job,” says Fontana, “is to keep flipping it so the audience can never relax in their own assumption. Like the violence in ‘Oz’ happens when you least expect it--and the violence you expect doesn’t happen. Or you’re suddenly revealing a more sympathetic side that’s not expected.

“If you depict the world as honestly as you can, when something positive happens, it’s almost celebrated more, in an odd kind of way.”

The idea of inmates raising money for a grandchild’s last wish was taken from a real incident, Fontana notes, at a women’s prison. Then he laughs and says, “Granted, a women’s prison may be a kinder, gentler place.”

But there’s no danger he’s getting mushy, letting that flower bloom in the middle of this human desert. It’s just a brief respite, “then everyone goes on.”

“It’s not like a lot of TV shows, where it would be, ‘Now we’ve learned our lesson about love and we’ve turned a corner here.’ Nobody turned a corner. They just had a moment of humanity.

“I suppose if that had changed them all,” he concludes, “then it probably would have been bad television.”

*

At the old factory-turned-prison, the cast is finishing the last episode of the season, set on New Year’s Eve, “at the dawn o’ this new millennium,” as the inmate-narrator reminds us--with Oz, not surprisingly, “on the precipice.”

Documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple is directing the scene in which two inmates sneak in the second-tier cell of another, who has enough sense to have a shank waiting in his palm.

Soon two guards are rushing in, amid blood, shouting, “ ‘Drop it!’ I said, ‘Drop it!’ ”

Then they yell below, to the rest of the cellblock, “Lockdown! Come on! Move it!” Kopple instructs one of the inmates, whose ally lays dead, to “look up for a beat before you go. You didn’t expect this to happen--you’re sort of shocked.”

There will be other twists before midnight--someone thrown in the hole, someone else slipped a gun--as these flawed human souls play out what Fontana sees as an endless battle between cynicism and hope.

Halfway through its summer run, “Oz” airs Wednesday nights with three other HBO series, the sports comedy “Arli$$,” risque “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos,” which has transplanted the Mafia soap opera to suburbia--and garnered 16 Emmy nominations. “Oz” got two, for casting (Alexa Fogel) and guest actor (Charles S. Dutton).

“I think our show scares as many people as it pleases,” Fontana reasons. “I feel badly about the fact that the cast hasn’t been recognized. But there’s not much I can do about it, and I’m not going to change [the show] to please the Emmy voters.

“I’ve got enough Emmy Awards, I’ve got enough money. I’ve got enough of the stuff that you think you want at the end of the tally sheet,” he says. “At this point in my career . . . my whole goal is to keep having fun and keep making as much trouble as I can.”

Sometime before the real New Year’s, he expects to hear from Chris Albrecht, HBO’s president of original programming, about whether the network will order up a fourth season.

Meanwhile--just as “Homicide” has finished its long tenure--he and Levinson are preparing a midseason series for UPN, “The Beat,” about two uniformed cops. Though they can’t take the liberties he does on HBO (“It’s not going to have anal sex”) Fontana swears these cops will not stop men from beating their wives in an episode--or get overly involved in the lives of the strangers they meet.

“This depiction of uniformed cops, it goes back to broadcast television, their need for heroes, for triumph, their need for tidiness in everyone’s life,” he says. “New York cops I know think that’s a great lie. It’s a job. They’re not here to save the world. They do the job they’re supposed to do . . . and then they move on”

Not that he’s ready to move on from “Oz.” The prison set is staying up at the old cookie factory in hopes of another season taking viewers to the depths.

“I love making the show,” Fontana says. “It’s so bizarre to say that it’s a joy to make it. But it is.”