Between the Blotter’s Lines

There was a classic Barry Levinson moment on an otherwise banal day of shooting on the pilot of his new cop show “The Beat,” which will join UPN’s schedule March 21. Standing on a set dressed to look like an emergency room, Levinson remarked to executive producer Tom Fontana that nobody wears a uniform anymore--except cops. An hour later, actor Mark Ruffalo, playing a cop, was ad-libbing the same thing to a nurse as the camera rolled. He went on and on and on, bantering, flirting, keeping himself amused. It was funnier and more real than anything that could have been scripted.

“Most New York cops that I know, being a cop is a job,” says Fontana, a writer-producer on such shows as “St. Elsewhere.” He is also the creator/co-executive producer with Levinson of “Homicide: Life on the Street,” which aired for six years on NBC, and HBO’s current hit “Oz.” Fontana, 48, is wearing shorts and an elastic bandage, having torn cartilage in his knee during a drunken shoving match with actor Peter Berg (“Boys will be boys!” he says).

“Eighty percent of the time it’s a boring job,” Fontana continues on the life of cops. “They sit in squad cars. Barry and I were having this conversation, ‘Well, what in the hell do they talk about in the 80%? We’ve seen the 20%. Anybody can do the 20%. It’s the 80% that’s boring that we want to shine a light on.’ And what’s great about Barry is he’s the king of those kinds of scenes.”

When asked about “those kinds of scenes,” Levinson shrugs. At this point it’s second nature to him. He’s been doing it as a feature film screenwriter, director and producer for 30 years, most notably in his directing debut, “Diner,” which featured a bunch of guys yakking, and more recently in the political satire “Wag the Dog,” a title that has entered the American lexicon, and his 1999 film, “Liberty Heights,” which captured a Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore circa 1954.

Levinson, 57, is a fastidious, avuncular presence on the set. He’s wearing charcoal pants, a black shirt and tortoise-shell glasses beneath white hair that’s swept back and thinning on top. Between takes he makes wry observations of the type that might end up in somebody’s dialogue, blasts the Motion Picture Assn. of America for meddling with “Liberty Heights” and tells stories drawn from a treasure trove of projects and personalities he’s been involved with: “Rain Man” (Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise), “Good Morning, Vietnam” (Robin Williams), “Bugsy” (Warren Beatty). He says “stuff” a lot, and “thing.” He thinks nothing of blocking out a scene on the spot, no matter how complicated, or inserting a bit of dialogue. However, he’s not doing this simply because he likes to or he’s good at it.

“I have two things I have to accomplish with a pilot,” Levinson says. “One is that I want to set the tone, and, two, I want to find the zones where the actors are that I could take advantage of. A lot of it’s going to hinge on their personalities, etc. Then the writers can say, ‘Oh, that person can do a little bit of that.’ Even if it’s not going to happen now, we’ll know elements that we could play with.”

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Taking notes on all this is actor Bruno Kirby, who has worked with Levinson before (“Tin Men,” “Good Morning, Vietnam”) and will be directing a future episode. He is sitting quietly in a director’s chair with a fanny pack cinched around his middle. Occasionally he leans over to ask Levinson a question. When asked if he’ll block out scenes on the fly as Levinson does, he grins and shakes his head.

The tone that Kirby and the show’s other directors and writers will be following might be described as “bipolar.” Levinson is not out to make a traditional cop show, even one as untraditionally traditional as “Homicide: Life on the Street,” for which he also did the pilot (and won an Emmy doing so). There is very little violence, rough language or nudity, though there may be some topicality (issues of police brutality, for instance) and lots of action on New York’s streets. Perhaps most surprising, the cops on “The Beat,” Mike Dorigan (Derek Cecil) and Zane Marinelli (Ruffalo), will not be solving crimes.

“Unlike most TV mythology, uniformed cops don’t get involved in most of the stuff that they come across,” Fontana says. “They get to a situation, they either defuse it or pass it off to the guys from homicide, narcotics, robbery, the detectives. They’re only there for the moment, and they don’t carry it around with them.”

“It’s really akin to ‘ER’ in that those physicians and interns are dealing with the medical problem virtually the moment it’s occurred,” says UPN Entertainment President Tom Nunan, who also compares the series to “Diner” and a more recent boy-fest, “Swingers.”

Levinson has devised a formal way of dramatizing the fragmentary nature of a uniformed cop’s existence. Those scenes that involve their work are shot on video; their personal lives are on film. So there might be a scene, shot on film, in which Dorigan and Marinelli are sitting in their squad car discussing the incidence of penile numbness caused by bicycle seats (this is Levinson’s example). The conversation might then be interrupted by a loud argument or squealing tires, which would snap them into cop--and the show into video--mode. A scene could theoretically switch between the two techniques again and again.

Shooting this is not easy. One of Levinson’s other mandates is to get the crew accustomed to what he wants (many of them are from “Oz,” which has wrapped for the season). During a complicated scene in which Dorigan gets into an argument with his internist fiancee, Elizabeth (Poppy Montgomery), the Steadicam operator can’t keep the actors in frame as Elizabeth moves to the bed of a patient, then to the front desk (where Marinelli has been chatting up the nurse), then to an accident victim who’s just been wheeled in.

“Oy,” Levinson says. “All right, try it again.”

Much of the show is about how this back-and-forth between realities takes its toll on Dorigan and Marinelli (rather than on the crew). In addition, there’s a back story involving Marinelli, whose mother was murdered by his father.

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Originally the series was supposed to be about how Marinelli and his sister live with this primal event, but when Fontana assembled a 12-minute presentation, he saw it wasn’t going to work. The murder hung oppressively over the characters and froze them in place. So they pushed it--and the sister--into the background and exploited instead Fontana’s fascination with uniformed cops and Levinson’s flair for “the conversations that people have,” as Fontana puts it. Nunan says this new approach also reflects the network’s very public commitment to “risk taking and the fact that we want to appeal to guys.”

UPN bought 13 episodes, giving Fontana and Levinson all the latitude they needed. In fact, they went with the network, which is struggling, rather than one of the heavyweights for just this reason.

“I’ve known [CEO] Dean Valentine and Tom Nunan [who was an executive at NBC, home to “Homicide”] for a very long time,” says Fontana. “And my attitude is, I don’t care how many people see it. I just want to work in places where I can flex. I didn’t want to have to fight to get on a schedule that was already crammed. . . . I’d rather be the hero of UPN than just another guy at ABC. I’m at a point in my life where I don’t need to make another series. I have the money, I have the trophies, I have all the crap that they give you. That’s not the point anymore.”

“To beat out NBC, which was hotly pursuing them for their next series, was definitely a satisfying moment for me personally,” says Nunan. “I had a great working relationship with Tom when I was at NBC and he was doing ‘Homicide’ there. What we have to do is to live up to our side of the bargain, which is not only to give them the creative freedom that they hunger for but also to market and launch the show successfully.”

In an era of diminished expectations for broadcast TV, Levinson’s own expectations are both modest and--creatively speaking--immodest.

“The reality is that on Fox some of the shows that got attention were never ones that got really huge ratings in comparison to some show that was on NBC, but they found their niche,” he says. “I think if we can do the show we like, if we can find that little niche, that’s all we’re going to go do, period.”