Post by boxman on May 3, 2009 18:52:07 GMT -5
www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20090503_Jonathan_Storm__That_Philly_feel.html
Posted on Sun, May. 3, 2009
Photo Gallery
Jonathan Storm: That Philly feel
CBS's "Cold Case" films here twice a year to inject the city's history and life and legend into the show about Philadelphia cops.
By Jonathan Storm
Inquirer Television Critic
What a birthday celebration!
Reuben R. Shelly turned 171 on March 21, and along came TV stars from CBS's Cold Case - Kathryn Morris, John Finn, Thom Barry, Danny Pino - and vanloads of extras and TV crew, poking around in a big hole just yards from where Reuben has lain since he died more than 100 years ago.
It's a family plot in Leverington Cemetery in Roxborough, and the ghosts - Reuben and his wife, Fannie, and their three children, especially little Laura, who made it through the Blizzard of 1888, but then died that fall when she was only 13 - must certainly have been more mystified than the living people who lined up outside the fence to gawk. At least they knew what a television was.
"It's cool to see what really happens," said John Madrak, 17, a Central High School student.
"I didn't know they had so many people," said Carly Brooke, 15, who goes to Plymouth-Whitemarsh.
The production set up a camera track parallel to where the Shellys' bodies lay buried, shooting the Cold Case detectives as they fictionally uncovered the remains of a military academy cadet who disappeared in 2005, for a two-episode season finale that begins tonight at 9 on CBS3.
Actors and show executives had all come east on one of their periodic pilgrimages to inject a little Philadelphia life into the show.
And a little death.
The Shellys may have unprepossessing flat marble markers, but plenty of monuments and tombstones break up the landscape between the TV grave (freshly dug by cemetery personnel in one of the cemetery's few empty areas) and the imposing Leverington Presbyterian Church up on the horizon.
"You can see history here in Philadelphia. And you can feel history," says John Finn, who plays Lt. John Stillman, boss of the detective unit that examines cases from yesteryear when new clues or once-reluctant witnesses show up.
"We've always lobbied to have more of this," Finn says, "because we come alive when we're here. There's a certain - I can't spell it or say it - verisimilitude that you get here, that you can't get in Los Angeles, being on the streets, hearing, smelling, talking to people. That adds an element to what we do in front of the camera that I think is very valuable."
"We get Philly-fied," says Danny Pino, Det. Scotty Valens on the show, who finds more youses and addytoods slipping into his voice the more he hangs around town.
Cold Case has sat comfortably on CBS Sundays since it premiered in 2003, ably battling NBC's football, ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Desperate Housewives, and Fox's cartoons.
It centers on Lily Rush, a female detective who was a lonely TV presence at the outset, before The Closer and Saving Grace and who-knows-what-all lady-cop shows started flooding cable. But it has evolved into an ensemble show as well, in which the police solve murders from days of yore - if not all the way back to Reuben Shelly's time.
The cutoff is generally World War II, though some cases have gone back to the 1920s, but the show tends to focus from the '60s forward. Different actors, or the same ones made up differently for cases from the not-so-long-ago, play the same characters at the time of the murder and today.
The ease with which they turn up at the police station as modern witnesses leaves some real Philly police shaking their heads. "That's the stuff I get ribbed about the most at work," says Det. Tim Bass, the show's local police consultant. "They've been silent for 20 years, and now they come in and give it up in two minutes."
But Bass, a member of the Philadelphia P.D. for 22 years, five of them with the Special Investigations Unit (which is the real name for the Cold Case squad), has come to understand what the show's about.
"In the beginning," he says, "I had some frustrations because of what they called cheats, but now I realize that they do a good job and a fair job with their cheats. They're selling a product to Middle America, not to homicide detectives in Philadelphia who know what the real world is like.
"Cold-case work is very hard and tedious work. The writing staff really tries to get it right, but they have told me if they did it my way, it would be boring stuff."
Bouncing from now to then, the show is hardly boring. Viewers, who have kept it among TV's 20 most popular series since its first season, enjoy the mysteries and the trips down memory lane, enhanced by popular music, usually a mix, from the era of the murders. The season-ending two-parter will feature Pearl Jam exclusively. Previous single-artist episodes have had Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, U2, Johnny Cash, and others warbling in the background.
"We used to come to Philadelphia four times a year," says Kathryn Morris, who plays Rush. "Now, it's only two. We do a guerrilla weekend and just try to make the most of our time, shooting about six scenes that are stretched over several episodes."
Morris, who attended Northeastern Christian Junior College in Villanova and then Temple, doesn't need as much Philly-fication as some of the rest of the cast. "I can pronounce Schuylkill," she said. "There were times after the subway closed that I had to walk all the way back from the pier [she worked as a singing-dancing waitress on the Spirit of Philadelphia dinner-dance cruises] to the room I rented in a rowhouse near the Art Museum."
Speaking of rowhouses, the ones on Conarroe Street, next to the cemetery, provide some super local color. "One of the reasons we came to this cemetery is to get these rowhouses," says executive producer Greg Plageman. "These types of old cemeteries, this architecture, we just don't have these in Los Angeles."
You also don't have eight zillion gapers in the city where moviemaking is a ho-hum experience. Roxann Dawson, the director March 21, had to take pains to keep the onlookers invisible. And an assistant director had to try to maintain a semblance of order when the cameras rolled.
"I just love how people are very honest here," actor Pino observes, recalling an incident early in the shoot. "There was a car that kind of slowed up, and the guy hangs out and screams, 'I love this show!'
"We're in the middle of a take, and the A.D. says, 'You've got to keep moving on, buddy.'
" 'What do you mean?' he asks. 'I love this show! I want to watch this.'
" 'No, you got to keep moving on. We're in the middle of a take.'
"And the guy yells, 'This show sucks!' And he goes driving off."
Welcome to Philadelphia, Cold Case.
Contact television critic Jonathan Storm at 215-854-5618 or jstorm@phillynews.com.
Read his recent work at go.philly.com/jonathanstorm.
Posted on Sun, May. 3, 2009
Photo Gallery
Jonathan Storm: That Philly feel
CBS's "Cold Case" films here twice a year to inject the city's history and life and legend into the show about Philadelphia cops.
By Jonathan Storm
Inquirer Television Critic
What a birthday celebration!
Reuben R. Shelly turned 171 on March 21, and along came TV stars from CBS's Cold Case - Kathryn Morris, John Finn, Thom Barry, Danny Pino - and vanloads of extras and TV crew, poking around in a big hole just yards from where Reuben has lain since he died more than 100 years ago.
It's a family plot in Leverington Cemetery in Roxborough, and the ghosts - Reuben and his wife, Fannie, and their three children, especially little Laura, who made it through the Blizzard of 1888, but then died that fall when she was only 13 - must certainly have been more mystified than the living people who lined up outside the fence to gawk. At least they knew what a television was.
"It's cool to see what really happens," said John Madrak, 17, a Central High School student.
"I didn't know they had so many people," said Carly Brooke, 15, who goes to Plymouth-Whitemarsh.
The production set up a camera track parallel to where the Shellys' bodies lay buried, shooting the Cold Case detectives as they fictionally uncovered the remains of a military academy cadet who disappeared in 2005, for a two-episode season finale that begins tonight at 9 on CBS3.
Actors and show executives had all come east on one of their periodic pilgrimages to inject a little Philadelphia life into the show.
And a little death.
The Shellys may have unprepossessing flat marble markers, but plenty of monuments and tombstones break up the landscape between the TV grave (freshly dug by cemetery personnel in one of the cemetery's few empty areas) and the imposing Leverington Presbyterian Church up on the horizon.
"You can see history here in Philadelphia. And you can feel history," says John Finn, who plays Lt. John Stillman, boss of the detective unit that examines cases from yesteryear when new clues or once-reluctant witnesses show up.
"We've always lobbied to have more of this," Finn says, "because we come alive when we're here. There's a certain - I can't spell it or say it - verisimilitude that you get here, that you can't get in Los Angeles, being on the streets, hearing, smelling, talking to people. That adds an element to what we do in front of the camera that I think is very valuable."
"We get Philly-fied," says Danny Pino, Det. Scotty Valens on the show, who finds more youses and addytoods slipping into his voice the more he hangs around town.
Cold Case has sat comfortably on CBS Sundays since it premiered in 2003, ably battling NBC's football, ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Desperate Housewives, and Fox's cartoons.
It centers on Lily Rush, a female detective who was a lonely TV presence at the outset, before The Closer and Saving Grace and who-knows-what-all lady-cop shows started flooding cable. But it has evolved into an ensemble show as well, in which the police solve murders from days of yore - if not all the way back to Reuben Shelly's time.
The cutoff is generally World War II, though some cases have gone back to the 1920s, but the show tends to focus from the '60s forward. Different actors, or the same ones made up differently for cases from the not-so-long-ago, play the same characters at the time of the murder and today.
The ease with which they turn up at the police station as modern witnesses leaves some real Philly police shaking their heads. "That's the stuff I get ribbed about the most at work," says Det. Tim Bass, the show's local police consultant. "They've been silent for 20 years, and now they come in and give it up in two minutes."
But Bass, a member of the Philadelphia P.D. for 22 years, five of them with the Special Investigations Unit (which is the real name for the Cold Case squad), has come to understand what the show's about.
"In the beginning," he says, "I had some frustrations because of what they called cheats, but now I realize that they do a good job and a fair job with their cheats. They're selling a product to Middle America, not to homicide detectives in Philadelphia who know what the real world is like.
"Cold-case work is very hard and tedious work. The writing staff really tries to get it right, but they have told me if they did it my way, it would be boring stuff."
Bouncing from now to then, the show is hardly boring. Viewers, who have kept it among TV's 20 most popular series since its first season, enjoy the mysteries and the trips down memory lane, enhanced by popular music, usually a mix, from the era of the murders. The season-ending two-parter will feature Pearl Jam exclusively. Previous single-artist episodes have had Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, U2, Johnny Cash, and others warbling in the background.
"We used to come to Philadelphia four times a year," says Kathryn Morris, who plays Rush. "Now, it's only two. We do a guerrilla weekend and just try to make the most of our time, shooting about six scenes that are stretched over several episodes."
Morris, who attended Northeastern Christian Junior College in Villanova and then Temple, doesn't need as much Philly-fication as some of the rest of the cast. "I can pronounce Schuylkill," she said. "There were times after the subway closed that I had to walk all the way back from the pier [she worked as a singing-dancing waitress on the Spirit of Philadelphia dinner-dance cruises] to the room I rented in a rowhouse near the Art Museum."
Speaking of rowhouses, the ones on Conarroe Street, next to the cemetery, provide some super local color. "One of the reasons we came to this cemetery is to get these rowhouses," says executive producer Greg Plageman. "These types of old cemeteries, this architecture, we just don't have these in Los Angeles."
You also don't have eight zillion gapers in the city where moviemaking is a ho-hum experience. Roxann Dawson, the director March 21, had to take pains to keep the onlookers invisible. And an assistant director had to try to maintain a semblance of order when the cameras rolled.
"I just love how people are very honest here," actor Pino observes, recalling an incident early in the shoot. "There was a car that kind of slowed up, and the guy hangs out and screams, 'I love this show!'
"We're in the middle of a take, and the A.D. says, 'You've got to keep moving on, buddy.'
" 'What do you mean?' he asks. 'I love this show! I want to watch this.'
" 'No, you got to keep moving on. We're in the middle of a take.'
"And the guy yells, 'This show sucks!' And he goes driving off."
Welcome to Philadelphia, Cold Case.
Contact television critic Jonathan Storm at 215-854-5618 or jstorm@phillynews.com.
Read his recent work at go.philly.com/jonathanstorm.
