N.Y. Studios Help Out by Redirecting Resources

Television and film production here--a more than $2.5-billion-a-year industry--simply shut down within hours of the terrorist attacks last week.

But within 24 hours, the industry had mobilized in a different way.

Companies that own generator trucks and massive movie lights volunteered their equipment to illuminate the disaster scene. Now, movie grips and electricians are pulling 14-hour shifts operating the lights so that rescue teams can dig through the rubble around the clock.

Chelsea Piers, one of New York’s main studios, was taken over by emergency operations officials who turned the facility, including sound stages used for the NBC program “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” into a staging area. Officers in the New York Police Department’s 31-member “movie unit” were promptly redeployed.

The union members who usually drive trucks, run cameras and build sets have become the unlikely staff for emergency operations crews in need of generators, blowtorches and walkie-talkies.

“We have access to a lot of strange stuff that the average Joe wouldn’t know how to get,” John Ford, secretary-treasurer of the stage workers union local, said Wednesday. Ford has been coordinating the efforts of New York’s stage workers since the morning after the attack.

Because equipment is in short supply at New York’s fire stations, a city firefighter borrowed props--firefighter coats, axes and bars used to break down doors--from the set of ABC’s new cop show “The Job.” The firefighter had stopped by the show’s set Monday night for a scheduled guest shot and left with armloads of gear.

Several of New York’s most prominent shows, “Law & Order,” and the HBO shows “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos,” were on hiatus. Shooting for the fall season of “Law & Order” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” had wrapped up earlier in the summer, because producers were worried about potential strikes by writers and actors. The strikes were averted. Still, fewer motion pictures and television programs than usual were being shot this month in New York because so many movies and shows had been completed, said Patricia Reed Scott, commissioner of the mayor’s office of film, theater and broadcasting.

Scott’s office issues permits for 50,000 location shots a year, and she estimates that 85% are for Manhattan. She expects the office to resume issuing permits as early as next week, when some of the city’s police officers can be made available.

‘Show Your Defiance: Shoot in New York’

“This is a good industry,” Scott said. “People are used to coping with complicated and time-pressured situations. And right now, everyone wants to do what they can to be useful.”

Pat Kaufman, commissioner of the New York state film office, said, “This isn’t going to stop us. We’re not down, we’re not out. We’re back in gear. . . . I’m hoping that people will view it as a patriotic gesture to return to New York. Show your defiance: Shoot in New York.”

Television producers all over New York are trying to do just that, shuffling their shooting schedules.

Shooting is expected to resume Monday for the Manhattan-based police and firefighter drama “Third Watch” for NBC. Production stopped Sept. 11. Some of the show’s technical advisors, real-life firefighters and paramedics, are among the missing at the World Trade Center.

On the show “The Job,” about 60 cast and crew members were re-creating a Miami scene at a hotel in Garden City on Long Island on Wednesday. Scenes that call for city streets have been pushed back a week or two, the show’s producers said. And Hoboken, across the Hudson River in New Jersey, could eventually serve as a stand-in for some Manhattan streets.

There’s more to the coping than logistics.

Several childhood friends of the show’s star and executive producer, Denis Leary, are firefighters, and he lost one friend and a cousin two years ago in a major fire in Worcester, Mass.

The Manhattan police detective on whom his character is based lost many colleagues at the World Trade Center, he said. Because of the mental turmoil, writing scripts for the show has been “impossible,” Leary said. “Thank God we’ve stuff we can shoot.”

Since last week, producers for the new CBS show “The Education of Max Bickford,” with Richard Dreyfuss, have been holed up in their sound stages in Queens. They resumed shooting Monday. They were planning to return to the sets Friday, but all of the electricians were busy lighting the World Trade Center site, executive producer Joe Cacaci said.

And the city hasn’t issued any film permits to shoot anywhere in New York for more than a week. Also, a chapel the show planned to use next week is needed for a memorial service. They can’t use a Staten Island municipal building, as planned, for a jail.

“We can’t get ahold of the people in charge of the building,” Cacaci said. “They all have their offices in lower Manhattan, and their phone lines are still not working.”

“Everyone is emotionally drained and physically drained but, really, that’s a small price to pay,” he added. “ . . . But when you look at the big picture, it’s just a TV show.”

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Times staff writer Corie Brown contributed to this story.