I’m very much out of my element when it comes to discussing “Big Love.” Not that I’m not interested in the show, but I simply haven’t watched it. I know, however, that another fine member of our editorial staff – one J. Codding – is a regular viewer, so I wouldn’t dare miss the opportunity to cover the upcoming third season of the show. Plus, really, whether you’ve watched the show or not, who in their right mind wouldn’t want to sit in on a panel that includes Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny, and Ginnifer Goodwin?
If you haven’t followed the behind-the-scenes activity on the show, it’s been kind of a weird time for “Big Love” since it left the airwaves back in August 2007. The writer’s strike led to a delay in production for the show’s third season, and when the strike was concluded, executive producers Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer made the decision to throw out the ideas they’d come up with for Season 3 and basically start fresh.
“It’s always good to have more time and more time and more time to digest story and to reconsider choices made,” said Scheffer. “It makes the show stronger, deeper, better, you know, to have a couple of goes at initial assumptions. And so it was a blessing in that way, a mixed blessing because we were late coming on back to our fans, but, you know, I think that that little interim period where we weren’t writing when we were just sort of protesting and showering and such that we could have this time to breathe into the characters and the stories even more than we would have if we had just gone on our straight route. You know, I think the show would have been great, but I think what we have now is like beyond great.”
If you’ve seen the commercial promoting William Petersen’s final episode of “C.S.I.” (and if you’ve had a TV tuned in to CBS at any point in the last few weeks, you can’t possibly have missed it), then you know that the character of lab tech David Hodges earns an emotional moment with Gil Grissom, proclaiming, “The bad guys will win more if we don’t have you.”
Having seen Grissom’s farewell in its entirety, I can tell you that the entire scene between Grissom and Hodges is so great that you’ll find yourself wondering who Wallace Langham had to bribe to get such a wonderful moment in such a momentous episode.
“Every day’s a gift here at ‘C.S.I.,’ I’m telling you,” says Langham, with a grin.
In all seriousness, the show’s writers came up with the idea of Hodges’ emotional farewell to Grissom, and they couldn’t wait to tell Langham about it. “The character that they thought would be the most devastated about Grissom leaving would be Hodges, so they let me play that out,” said Langham. “And I tried to be as human as I possibly could in the context of Hodges, because he doesn’t always get those opportunities. He never gets within ten feet of an emotion. That part wasn’t necessarily that hard to play, but it was still weird for me, just because, as Hodges, I don’t really get to play it that often!”
As it happens, however, the shoot turned out to be a rough one for Langham for reasons beyond those of Petersen’s departure.
“It was a really tough day to shoot for all the usual reasons,” said Langham, “but, sadly, my father was passing away…and, actually, after we had finished filming, I got the call that he had died. It wasn’t a surprise, but…you know, I knew that would be the day, oddly enough. Once I got the call where they said, ‘Okay, you’re going to be shooting on the 10th,’ I just had a feeling. I thought, ‘Okay, the irony of life has always served me well,’ and true to form, it was a very heavy day on all levels.”
The good news: “In Treatment” is returning to HBO for a second season. The bad news: after the network provided us with several great photos of Gabriel Byrne to utilize along with his quotes during the panel, we were given the bad news that Mr. Byrne had come down with a nasty case of the flu and would not be in attendance after all. In a word: d’oh!
Still, we must rise above our difficulties. Though the panel contained 100% less Gabriel than originally advertised, we were at least graced by the presence of Executive Producer Steve Levinson and Executive Producer and show runner Warren Leight. But, dammit, we got these photos and we’re damned well going to use them anyway! And, besides, it’s not like Dr. Paul Weston isn’t going to be a major topic of discussion.
As you may or may not know, Dr. Weston’s marriage has failed, resulting in a new setting for the series; possibly not coincidentally, the series itself is now being produced in New York, which is exactly where Dr. Weston is moving. Now he’s practicing in a Brooklyn brownstone, baby!
“I think once we knew we were doing it there, we thought we would embrace the city and embrace the location and certainly make reference to it,” said Levinson.
New York also happens to be where Gabriel Byrne himself lives. This is definitely not a coincidence.
Kevin Bacon’s a really underrated actor. We so often hear people refer to the whole “six degrees” thing that I think we sometimes forget just how talented a thespian he is…which is a little odd, really, given how often he offers us proof of his abilities. If you should happen to need another reminder, however, HBO’s “Taking Chance” fits the bill nicely. The film is based on the first-person narrative of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, USMC (Ret.), and chronicles Strobl’s journey as the volunteer military escort officer assigned to accompany the body of 19-year-old Lance Corporal Chance Phelps, USMC, who was killed in action in Iraq, across America to his hometown of Dubois, Wyoming.
Given that American forces remain in Iraq even as the film makes its network debut, it will certainly hit home to a great number of viewers, particularly as you experience the sad reminder that the soldiers dying over there are people’s friends and relatives. At the same time, however, it’s also a testament to how we can loathe the war but still respect those who are forced to fight it.
“One of the things that’s really interesting to me about the film,” said Bacon, “is that you really get back to the fact that…you can of read an article, and you can say a certain amount of Marines were killed in this city, when you see a body count coming up, but it doesn’t really hit home in the same kind of way as it does if you actually see what happens to the actual remains. You see the preparation, you see the respect, and you see the tradition and the honor that is involved with actually returning them to their final resting place. And the story is really a very, very simple one in that it’s really just the story of this man and this person, Chance, that he’s returning. And it’s almost completely unembellished with anything to make it more cinematic or dramatic or to somehow force us to feel one way or another based on what our preconceived notions are about Iraq and whether or not we should have been in there or whatever. It’s just the simple telling of what this process is like and, in its simplicity, I think, becomes an extremely profound kind of comment on the casualties of war.”
This is the third time Bacon’s played a Marine in his career, the other two occasions being in “Frost/Nixon” and “A Few Good Men,” but we shouldn’t infer any sort of military aptitude from these repeat performances. “There is no part of me that ever considered being a Marine or could make it in the Marine Corps,” he said, with a laugh. “I am definitely not that guy. I’m not the guy to throw myself in harm’s way. I would never make it through boot camp. It’s all acting.”
The actual Lt. Col. Strobl was on the panel as well, and he was asked if he thought it was a disservice to the memory of American servicemen that we rarely see their final farewells and are so often forced to remember them as numbers rather than names.
“Perhaps it might be good if we saw or thought more about them than just a line in the newspaper and went on with our day,” said Lt. Col. Strobl. “Hopefully, this movie will make people realize…I know we all know, but that there have been 3,400 combat deaths so far, and there’s a risk that they all run together. This movie will remind us all that they all have families that love them. They all had vibrant lives up to that point. So, yes, I suppose there is a risk, but maybe this movie will address some of that.”
“Taking Chance” premieres on HBO in February 2009.
Tell a film buff that HBO is getting ready to air a new movie called “Grey Gardens,” and watch their smug expression as they try to one-up you and say, “That’s not new! That came out back in 1975!” Well, they’re half-right, anyway. There was a movie that came out in ’75 called “Grey Gardens.” That, however, was a documentary about Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. This “Grey Gardens” tackles much of the same material but offers up a fuller picture of their lives, and this time the parts of Little Edie and Big Edie are being played by Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.
It’s funny how differently the two actresses reacted to the challenge of playing their characters. Lange was rather casual with her description of the experience; although she referred to it as “the most difficult role I’ve had in a long time,” she also said that it was good for her, describing it as “a fascinating exercise.” When listening to Barrymore talk about it, however, her desire to come through with nothing short of the performance of a lifetime was palpable.
