Noth Takes On ‘Judge’s Case,’ as Producer

Chris Noth pushes through the door of an abandoned building near Toronto’s waterfront, glares stone-faced into the camera, then breaks into an unintended smile.

“My mustache is going to come off,” he says, holding a finger to his upper lip. “Is it all right, or is it embarrassing?” A crew member assures him that, in fact, it’s pretty embarrassing.

It’s a loose set here in Toronto, breezy and informal, where Noth and co-stars Edward James Olmos, Lolita Davidovitch and Sonia Braga are piecing together “Steve Martini’s The Judge,” a miniseries based on Martini’s pulpy bestseller of the same name.

The fact that Noth, best known for his work on “Law & Order” and, more recently, as Mr. Big on “Sex and the City,” can smile here--or is here at all, really--took some doing.

At the outset, “The Judge” was a standard whodunit murder mystery gilded with the complications of a crooked police force. The original script and its straightforward potboiler-style plot didn’t appeal to Noth.

“I was the first person approached on this, so I saw the original draft, and it just wasn’t going to happen for me,” he said.

Enter executive producer Howard Braunstein, who was so intent on having Noth in the lead role that he made Noth a deal: Come on board as a producer, work through rewrites to coax depth out of the cliched script, have a hand in the casting and make “The Judge” into something to be proud of.

Noth took on the role with relish. He knew, he says, that with actors who could introduce depth of character, “The Judge” had a chance to be a more complex, interesting piece.

“If I could help bring in people that I knew . . . if I could get a core group of actors, then we could play with this material,” he said. “We needed to keep the skeleton of the plot, but the relationships needed to be filled. . . . But it’s always about trying to bring as much character as possible.”

It was the central relationship that needed the most attention. The story hinges on an unlikely alliance between Noth’s character, a lawyer named Paul Madriani, and Judge Armando Acosta, played by Olmos. To say the two men don’t enjoy a healthy relationship is putting it mildly: Acosta, a straight-shooting judge, and Madriani, a maverick attorney, have clashed routinely over the course of their careers. Acosta once jailed Madriani for contempt.

Then, though, facing a trumped-up murder charge and the full weight of a corrupt police force determined to take him down, Acosta finds that the only lawyer willing to take on his case is Madriani. Noth was convinced that he and Olmos could, given the right environment, infuse the linchpin relationship with believability.

But Noth wanted the project fully fleshed out. To that end, he recruited some dramatic heavyweights to complete the picture. Charles Durning, with whom Noth had recently appeared on Broadway, agreed to play a supporting role as the judge hearing Acosta’s case, as did Braga, who played Acosta’s wife.

Olmos, who often accepts or rejects roles based on his personal politics, brought his own set of convictions to the project.

“[The movie] deals with a sense of prejudice, discrimination. It deals with a story of simple corruption on behalf of people we trust,” Olmos said. “It’s a story that has to be understood. And we don’t see enough of them in the States. We’ve never seen one that involves a judge of Latin ancestry. That’s another reason to move forward and do it.”

With Davidovitch and Mark Blum, who also has appeared on Broadway with Noth, in key supporting roles, Noth had the cast he wanted. Then it was a matter of working over the script, and Noth found things he hadn’t expected on a big network production: flexibility and freedom.

Director Mick Garris, who has given the show a dark, atmospheric feel, was open to letting his actors improvise, to allowing things to happen organically, Noth said. “I knew that once Mick Garris was on board, we’d be all right. It’s kind of like getting a cabinet together, really, you want to surround yourself with the best people you can.”

So why all the effort to remake something that the network had already green-lighted? In part, Garris believes, it’s a result of marketplace competition: With cable channels such as HBO, Showtime and TNT producing their own high-quality original features, the bar has been raised.

“Dramatic series and movies of the week have to look like movies now,” Garris said. “Not all of them do, but they still look better than they ever did.”

Even in this environment, Noth is confident that he’s made the best of the opportunity he was presented with.

“I knew there was a lot we could do,” he says. “I think we’ve taken it and enriched it, and I think it’ll fly.”