Hey, wanna see a panel come to a screeching halt before it even gets rolling? Just ask Ira Steven Behr to step up to the mike.
I’m a big fan of Behr’s work, particularly on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and “The 4400,” but, holy cow, Starz main man Bill Hamm has got to still be kicking himself over his decision to say, “Before we open it up for questions, I want to ask Ira to give us some details about the direction of the second season and some of our exciting additions to the cast.” There’s no way I’m going to offer up everything Behr had to say, but I’ll tell you that, having copied and pasted the text of his comments into a Word document, it totals out at over 600 words, and his halting delivery made it seem as though it lasted forever. I’d actually been excited about the panel, which was to provide details about the upcoming second season of “Crash,” but I quickly found myself within an inch of standing up and yelling, “Geez louise, Ira, wrap it up, wouldja?”
Eventually, of course, Ira did wrap it up, and things moved onto the most obvious new development about the new season of “Crash”: the addition of Eric Roberts to the cast.
This isn’t the first time that Eric Roberts and Dennis Hopper have worked together, but it’s the only time that Roberts is interested in talking about, even if Hopper seemed to enjoy needling his new co-star about it.
Dennis Hopper: We did a movie together, too.
Eric Roberts: We don’t want to talk about that, Dennis.
Dennis Hopper: Okay. It was the first…
Eric Roberts: We don’t talk about that, Dennis. Terrible movie. (Shrugs) I made a couple.
Dennis Hopper: I made more than a couple!
Actually, Roberts tried his best not to say anything at all during the panel, as was further evidenced when a writer asked him and Hopper about the differences between working on television versus working in motion pictures.
Dennis Hopper: Well, you don’t have as much time, but I’ve worked in a lot of independent films through the years, so it doesn’t get that much different. I’ve had a lot of dialogue in this series, so that’s been the most difficult part for me. Beyond that, we work 15, sometimes 17 hours, but we have a great crew. Never heard anyone complain, except me. But nobody listens to me, so it’s okay. But the crew and the cast are just wonderful. Yeah, I’m having a joyous time, even though it’s difficult. But since we’re shooting other episodes, we have our three days off and four days off, you know, every two weeks, whatever. So it’s a nice schedule.
Eric Roberts: What he said.
Now, here’s the big question: how many of you even watched “Crash”?
I always had good intentions, but I just never got around to it. I think the same could be said of others as well, given the combination of the lowly ratings and the fact that most people I asked didn’t even know there was a series based on the movie “Crash.”
You don’t really want to come right out and ask, “Why did you renew the series?” Instead, let’s ask how the show fits into the Starz landscape as it begins its second season?
“Well, we’re just getting into originals,” explained Bill Hamm. “We’re in the crawling stage right now. So, I think, if anything, we need to demonstrate patience with our shows, especially at pay cable. It’s not like we have to study the ratings based on the ad revenue that’s coming in. So we always thought ‘Crash’ had great potential. We loved the movie. We thought we did a lot of things right in the first season, and we did some things that were wrong. Just to give you specifics, I think that maybe going with more of the police side of things didn’t differentiate it enough from what you can get on network or cable shows. And frankly, for me, I think we had a little too many storylines. Six or seven storylines is a lot to keep track of. And so what’s great about what Ira’s doing this year is we’re down to three or four storylines, much richer, deeper storytelling. The feeling was ‘Crash’ is something special. You have your cop show, your doctor show, your lawyer shows out there, but you really don’t have the tales from the city. And there’s something really unique and special about that concept, and you just have to give it a chance to find itself.”
Will you give “Crash” a chance when it returns to Starz on September 18th?
