Original subtitles

The actual starting point was the worst market -per -hour television in the

history of commercial television.

At that point in time, in 1988 -89, you could not give away an hour's show.

I said, well,

maybe we can come up with something that you could split in half and have two

half -hours.

So I thought of a whole bunch of ideas,

and then Law& Order seemed like a phrase.

It was the height of the Reagan era, the country was going more conservative,

and there had never been a show that had featured the prosecutors.

It had always been Perry Mason, the defenders,

the defense attorneys were the heroes.

The secret of this show was following the cops and the prosecutors who were on

the same side, obviously,

so that you went literally from the crime scene all the way through the

resolution of the trial.

I was probably the first person that Dick Wolf called.

We'd made a movie the year before called No Man's Land.

We became good friends.

He called me and said he was riding a pilot, told me what it was,

and then several months later,

he told me that they got to go ahead and did I want to do it?

And I said, yeah, we went to New York.

We made the pilot in 1988.

Lots of noise.

Plenty of warning.

And in 1990, we called and he said, well, if you want to go to New York,

they picked up 13 episodes.

So it was over a two -year period.

He's a bad man?

Was, if you believe the rumors.

I just really frost my cookies, Max.

You mind telling me why you didn't tell me?

Because you're already leaping to conclusions for Pete's sakes.

I think the only major show or the only surviving show that was bought by three

different networks, I mean,

the original buyer was Barry Diller when he was running Fox,

who ordered 13 episodes of the show in the room and then called back two days

later and he said, you know, this is crazy.

This isn't a Fox show.

I don't want to do this show.

Then we sold it to CBS where we did the pilot,

where it was everybody's favorite pilot and then right up until the night

before the schedule was announced when I was told that no,

they weren't putting it on because there were no breakout stars.

And he picks up the baby and he starts shaking her.

And I said, well, yeah, you're right.

There's not supposed to be breakout stars.

And the truth of that, it's the writing.

This is a show about ideas as much as it is about acting or the characters.

I'm personally against abortion means I can't prosecute a bomber.

What I believe doesn't matter.

I represent the law.

Amazing.

Getting angry.

Most emotional issue that the law has dealt with since suffrage.

Look at us.

Three men.

Talking about what rights women should have over their own bodies.

Doesn't that strike you as a little one -sided?

I wanted it to look extremely documentary -like,

that it was cinema verite as opposed to a very nicely finished show.

So one of the first things we fought for very hard was being able to shoot in

16 millimeters opposed to 35.

And that was finally approved over a lot of kicking and screaming because it

was not the format that shows were shot in.

You the man?

We sure are, honey.

And the first set up on the first day on Madison Avenue,

the 16 millimeter camera broke because nobody was using them.

So the day started off with a two -hour,

the entire process started off with about a two -hour delay while we got

another camera.

It was all very, very carefully planned in the terms of looking like real film,

almost news footage not cleaned up.

As a matter of fact, when the show was sold to NBC,

finally I was called over by Brandon Tarkov who was laughing and we had to go

down to the head of technical services who said that this show was not a

broadcast quality because the negative was terrible and there were scratches.

And I said, yeah, that was all very deliberate.

He said, well, we don't broadcast stuff that looks like this at NBC.

And Brandon was the one who said, no, it looks great.

Run it.

What's the charge?

Salt with a deadly weapon and the attempted murder of Charles Holmgren.

Why are you looking at this?

What moves your history?

The show is hopefully the, you know, it's a procedural.

It is, it's a trompe l 'oeil documentary.

It's not, everybody knows the cops don't catch them in 22 minutes,

the prosecutors don't cook them in 22 minutes,

but the idea is to give people a sense of the reality of the criminal justice

system by not having people crying in their beer or on their sleeves or talking

about their kids.

No possession of a weapon in the third degree.

That's why the title cards are there because the reality is that the title

cards take the place of a lot of the garbage time in most shows of people

driving up to buildings, getting out of cars, walking in,

going up in elevators, walking out of, there is no,

there are no establishing shots, there are no transition shots.

The, again, for the pilot on,

the idea has been that each scene It moves the story forward that when the

scripts are good, they're like dominoes.

The scenes are like dominoes falling.

There is a sense of inexorability about what's going on.

Greg letting loose on her while she's coming down the stairs?

Come on, I just don't see that.

Is this about evidence or instinct?

With what we have now, 80 to 20, we put them away.

Is there something personal here?

Yeah.

I personally don't like to see two innocent kids getting 20 to life.

Well, it was the closest thing to a documentary.

And in 1988, there were no reality shows to speak of.

And so it was a, I called a pseudo -docutrama.

That is, the audience knows that it's fiction,

but the conceit is that it's nonfiction.

Name's Greg Jarman.

We call this brother.

Stay with him, write down anything he says.

I was most responsible for the acting style,

having been an actor and having run a theater for 15 or 20 years.

I created a sort of minimalistic acting.

It started with the leads who had no backstories, who didn't go home.

So it was very important to get people who brought a sense of history with them

without them being able to articulate it.

Well, Farrell's a better politician than I am.

If he wasn't a cop, he'd be president and night crayon.

I think Michael Moriarty was really the heart of the soul of the show for the

first four years.

He was brilliant.

You may hear the arguments that the ends justify the means.

Michael was the one that was the consistency in those first years.

And he is an enormously talented actor.

There was a kind of a inner morality and inner, strangely enough at that point,

almost an inner peace about what was right, what was wrong.

There was no question in my mind that he...

is one of the great actors of his generation.

So according to you two, we now have no suspects.

In the early 50s was always Stephen Hill, Marlon Brando, Stephen Hill,

Marlon Brando.

He knows something.

I don't think so.

He looks guilty.

Shake the trees, see what falls out.

Oh, he's the ultimate actor's actor.

A lot of people think that he was definitely the greatest American actor of his

generation.

Since when's a ham sandwich?

275 pesos.

Since last Friday.

And George Zunza was an old friend of mine.

He had been in the movie that Dick and I had done together.

No Man's Land.

I made another movie that George was in.

So I knew them.

Think a lot of cops again?

No way, man.

Department's got a special test.

They're looking in the eye.

If your left eye blinks before your right eye, they know you're gay.

The story of Noth,

probably the only one who knows it would remember would be me,

was really a fluke.

It was almost like a horse race, and he was not the favorite to get it.

And then he just stayed steady, consistent.

He also had good chemistry with Zunza.

And that's how he got the part.

And he was not a kid.

He was probably about 35.

He didn't have a lot of work, and it was one of those fortunate things.

Angel Suarez!

You can't fake New York.

It's the seventh character in the show.

But that's because New York is New York, and the other advantage, I mean,

not every case that we've ripped from the headlines has been ripped from the

headlines in New York.

But anything that happens anywhere on the planet can happen in New York.

It's completely believable.

It doesn't matter if it's from Bangladesh.

You can put a bunch of Bangladeshi refugees in Manhattan and have a murder go

on in that subset, and nobody's surprised.

My husband says tell you, America's a great country.

Anybody can get rich.

Except cops.

What upset critics and the network and advertisers was what the shows were

about.

The bobbing of an abortion clinic.

The right of assisted suicide for AIDS victims.

Things that were just...

No, no, no.

That's not what entertainment television is about.

Who pulled the trigger?

I held the gun.

Bobby wrapped his hand around mine.

He said he wanted to die.

I helped Bobby do what he wanted.

The first season that it was on NBC,

the show was the highest advertiser pullout show in the history of the network.

In other words, more advertisers pulled their spots out of the show.

and wanted the show canceled.

All the programming executives, except for Brandon Tardikoff,

wanted the show canceled.

If it hadn't been for Brandon, the show would never have survived.

People with AIDS do not go gently into that good night.

But you also know that some gay men out of embarrassment might not seek

treatment and commit suicide instead.

Are you in favor of that?

I'm in favor of gay men taking power over their lives.

The network certainly didn't believe in the show.

They moved us four times in the first two years.

They dared us to succeed.

They didn't pick us up till the next to last episode.

They're after a good cop.

We're all good cops, even the dirty ones.

We were crossing the line in terms of an intelligent discussion of adult

problems in a contemporary society.

And what the major aim, I've said this for years.

Everybody knows this, who's worked on the show as a writer,

that the paradigm episode of Law and Order is still yet to be written.

And that's.

A show where all six of the regular characters have different points of view on

the same question, and they're all right.

Because the world is not black and white, it's shades of gray.

And that's what the show is really about, is the shades of gray.

The shows were dialectics,

and that is that the characters would often have different positions on issues.

They would talk about them, the cops particularly,

and then often they would reverse their positions.

I've heard of playing both sides of the fence, but this is ridiculous.

It comes from the complexity of the subject matter,

and that was the greatness of the first couple of years.

My favorite law and order episode of all 280 is still Life Choice,

which was the abortion clinic bombing,

which up until last year was the only episode that had never been rebroadcast

on NBC.

I don't care what you believe,

trying to prevent abortions by bombing goes way too far.

I don't even know how you can even sit here and defend it.

You and I both know that it didn't mean to hurt anybody.

No, I don't know that, okay?

It was a feeling.

It was an extraordinary event.

We knew that we were making television history.

There was a very strong sense of identity and the mark that we were making

right from the beginning.

You talked to the neighbors?

I think the other thing that the show did before anybody did,

and it had its finger, a certain pulse that you see in all of television today,

it created a certain sensibility in the 90s.

It was before NYPD Blue, before Homicide.

People forget this show was the originator.

I'm sure you don't want to recuse yourself.

That's insulting.

It's the writing.

It's always the writing.

The actors are brilliant,

but even Lawrence Olivier didn't come out and make up the words.

If the writing is not compelling and the storytelling isn't tight,

the show will fail.

So a 17 -year -old should just louse up her whole life by having a kid.

A 17 -year -old shouldn't be doing what makes babies.

And crooks shouldn't have guns.

Get real.

Crime is a constantly renewable resource.

That's why there are newspapers.

And people are going to continue to kill each other in new and interesting ways

for as long as there are people.

It's really a question of editing the material that comes out on a daily basis

in this country.

There are 280 million people here.

We're not going to run out of stories.