DICK WOLF by Graham Flashner W Olf Fi Lms Co U Rtesy P Hotos
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DICK WOLF by GRAHAM FLASHNER LMS FI OLF W rtesy U CO hotos P GROWING UP IN NEW YORK CITY IN name will forever be synonymous with Law the 1950s and ‘60s, Dick Wolf was smitten & Order and its iconic two-note, “chung- with cop and legal shows, especially gritty chung” musical sting. More than just a dramas like Naked City, N.Y.P.D. and The groundbreaking police procedural, L&O Defenders. As Wolf explains: “Drama is became a stunningly lucrative brand name. conflict, and the good thing about police At its peak, the franchise generated sales of shows is, the stakes are death — they usually more than a billion dollars a year, and was start out with a murder, and hopefully, at viewed by 100 million viewers a month, not the end of the episode, you get a satisfying just on NBC, but via syndication on A&E, conclusion.” TNT and USA Network. For more than twenty years, Wolf has “He’s kind of this meta-producer,” says been satisfying TV viewers with one of Neal Baer, who was an executive producer the most celebrated and popular shows in on SVU for eleven seasons. “Dick had a real television history, Law & Order, as well as sense of how to market these shows, better its equally addictive spin-offs Law & Order: than anyone I know.” Special Victims Unit (SVU) and Law & Wolf Films has become a cottage industry Order: Criminal Intent. And like the shows in television, with production offices in New Gthat influenced him, Wolf prefers telling York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and some stories the old-school way, sans time-altering 400 employees servicing several shows in gimmicks and moral ambiguity. production, including this season’s freshman “I am a linear storyteller,” he says. “I series, the NBC drama Chicago Fire. In a don’t like flashbacks or cross-cutting; l like town where turnover is rampant, Wolf prizes telling stories in an understandable, falling- longevity and loyalty. Producer Rene Balcer dominoes kind of way, and that’s never has been with Wolf since L&O began twenty- changed. two years ago; postproduction supervisor “The reason we’ve kept audiences for Arthur W. Forney has worked on every single years and years is one very simple phrase,” episode of L&O, and Wolf says that, “Peter Wolf adds. “It’s the writing, stupid. It’s Jankowski [president of Wolf Films] and always the writing.” I have probably spoken 355 days a year for It’s a phrase that’s also inscribed on a the past twenty-three years.” Proudly, Wolf plaque that sits on Wolf’s desk. notes that he’s had the same office and phone Writing and producing have won Wolf number at Universal for twenty-seven years. two Primetime Emmy Awards (one in 1997, Actor Sam Waterston, who played District for outstanding drama for Law & Order, the Attorney Jack McCoy for sixteen seasons on second in 2007, for outstanding television L&O, says that “Dick was a master delegator movie, for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee) of authority, but he was also very smart and and a Grammy (his company produced the perceptive… his genius was in signing me to documentary When You’re Strange, about one-year deals, because I wasn’t even sure the life of The Doors, for the PBS series I wanted to do series television. I thought American Masters). His Wolf Films also maybe a season or two… he never tugged produced the post-9/11 documentary short, the rope; never pulled on the reins, I never Twin Towers, which won an Oscar. But his felt trapped.” 43 The premiere of Dick Wolf’s newest series for NBC, Chicago Fire, was celebrated at the Chicago History Museum, with the cast arriving on a ladder truck. “There’s two great lessons I learned from Hill Street Blues, Wolf was nonplussed. He Dick,” says Balcer. “Never take no for an liked the freedom of the screenwriter’s life, answer, and never let your ego get in the way of working out of his home office. “You don’t a better idea, no matter where it comes from.” understand,” Wolf recalls his agent saying, Though his father worked in television, Wolf “They’re going to pay you five thousand originally wanted to be a novelist. He attended dollars a week and then they’ll pay you on the exclusive prep school Phillips Andover, top of that to write scripts.” where George W. Bush was a classmate — Unfamiliar with how the TV business which would later serve as an inspiration for worked, Wolf was still hesitant, until his his 1992 film School Ties, starring Brendan agent pointed out Hill Street’s constant Fraser (“A film that took eleven years to get cycle of residuals. “My wife at the time was made,” Wolf notes, “and made eleven cents.”) holding a one-year-old baby and listening on After attending college at the University of speakerphone,” Wolf recalls with a laugh. Pennsylvania, Wolf abandoned his literary “She walked across the room and said, ‘He’ll dreams and spent a decade working on Madison be there Monday.’” Avenue as a copywriter. Wolf spent a year at Hill Street, then All the while, he wrote screenplays on the jumped at the chance to be the supervising side; by the time he turned thirty, “I decided I producer on the hottest show of the mid- didn’t want to sell toothpaste for the rest of my ‘80s, Miami Vice. Wolf’s first episode starred life,” he says. Instead, he bolted for Los Angeles, Liam Neeson, as an IRA terrorist who comes and spent the next eight years in the movie to Miami to shoot down an airliner with a business, writing indie films likeSkateboard and Stinger missile. the aforementioned School Ties. Hill Street Blues had re-energized the When Wolf’s agent called with an offer police procedural with hand-held cameras from David Milch, to join the writing staff at and ensemble storytelling. In 1990, Wolf 44 ACADEMY OF TELEVISION ARTS & SCIENCES “The reason we’ve kept audiences for years and years is one very simple Wolf, an executive producer on HBO’s acclaimed Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, conferred on the telefilm’s Canadian set with August Schellenberg, who played Sitting Bull. phrase. It’s the writing, stupid. dramatically expanded the genre’s horizons with catch ‘em in twenty-two minutes, and the a format that combined his early love of cop and prosecutors don’t hook them in twenty- It’s always the legal shows: the first half followed detectives two minutes,” he says. “It’s a compressed investigating a crime (usually a murder), while reality, but you take all the color and writing.” the second half shifted the point of view to desaturate things, and with very fluid camera prosecutors trying to win a conviction. The movements, it makes it look more realistic.” show, of course, was Law & Order. For hundreds of stage actors in New Wolf sold thirteen episodes to Barry York’s vibrant theater community, L&O also Diller at Fox based on his concept, only to became a dependable side gig between roles. have Diller phone him the very next day and (Wolf once famously said, “If you’re going tell him it wasn’t a Fox show. CBS ordered to the theater and the actor does not have a a pilot, but then passed on the show. Then– Law & Order credit on the Playbill, it means Universal TV president Kerry McCluggage that he either just got off the bus or he’s shopped it to NBC’s head honcho, Brandon really a bad actor.”) Tartikoff. “Brandon said, ‘How are you Wolf never imagined that L&O would going to do this every week?’” Wolf recalls. become a franchise, but after the success “’Where are the stories going to come from?’ of the 1998 TV movie starring original And I told him that the bible for the show cast member Chris Noth, Exiled: A Law & was the front page of the New York Post. Order Movie, he realized the time was right ‘Give me six episodes to write. And when for a new series, and turned his focus to you read them, you’ll order the show.’” the Sex Crimes unit. “Dick has an uncanny Law & Order debuted on NBC on sense of the zeitgeist,” says Baer. “SVU September 13, 1990. At the time, Wolf was an area that hadn’t been explored... I recalls, “I just wanted to get past the first always said it was the most political show thirteen.” More than 450 episodes and on TV, because we took on such complex twenty seasons later, Law & Order had tied social issues: I did shows on abortion, gun Gunsmoke as television’s longest running violence, euthanasia.” scripted series. SVU debuted in 1999; Law & Order: The show was justifiably famous for Criminal Intent, starring Vincent D’Onofrio, its ripped-from-the-headlines stories and followed two years later, and suddenly, one fast-paced realism, which Wolf dubbed could turn on the television and find an trompe l’oeil cinéma vérité. “The cops don’t episode of some version of L&O playing 45 Wolf and colleagues Yves Simoneau, Tom Thayer and Clara George celebrated the Primetime Emmy success of Wounded Knee in 2007; the production was nominated for seventeen Emmys and won six. at almost any time of night. (Not that every he did joke that on his tombstone, he wants spinoff had the Midas touch: two subsequent the word “canceled.” efforts, Law & Order: Trial By Jury and Law These days he’s more excited about & Order: LA each only lasted one season.) a sitcom pilot he’s producing for NBC, Once the series were up and running in the Girlfriend in a Coma, written by Liz Brixius, hands of his capable showrunners, Wolf was about a young woman who awakens from always on to the next project, often juggling a coma only to discover that she has a five or six at a time.