Television doesn’t get enough respect.
In the Hollywood pecking order, it has always ranked below movies. Way below.
So here’s a question for all the big-screen snobs out there: Happen to notice that three of this year’s best-picture Oscar nominees have connections to people who cut their teeth in – sorry – television?
First, there is Paul Haggis, nominated for director and screenplay for his superb “Crash.” Canadian-born Haggis, previously nominated for adapting the screenplay to last year’s best-picture winner, “Million Dollar Baby,” spent more than three decades writing for network television. His many credits include “Due South” and “EZ Streets.” And anyone who missed the latter missed something terrific.
There’s also George Clooney, nominated for his directing and co-writing (with fellow actor and producing partner Grant Heslov) of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” another best-picture nominee, in which Clooney played Edward R. Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly. (Clooney also received a supporting-actor nod for his role as a CIA operative in “Syriana.”)
Clooney, of course, spent a decade and a half in television before leaping to the big screen in 1996, three years before he left “ER.” In fact, his TV career and Haggis’ actually intersected in the mid-’80s, when Haggis was a writer on “The Facts of Life” and Clooney played handyman George Burnett.
And then there’s Dan Futterman, who’s perhaps best known as Judge Amy Gray’s brother Vincent on the late series “Judging Amy.” He received an Oscar nod for adapted screenplay for the lavishly praised “Capote,” another best-picture nominee.
Beyond the academy’s recognition of these television-bred talents, their Oscar-nominated films are tighter – and arguably better paced – than the remaining two best-picture nominees, Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” and Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain.”
“Capote” plays like an epic, at only 115 minutes. “Crash” is a taut 100 minutes; “Good Night …” an even svelter 90 minutes. By comparison, “Munich” runs 164 minutes, “Brokeback Mountain” 134 minutes – and for all the praise, some critics suggested that their big-name directors should have made a few trims.
In television, there’s a finite amount of time to tell a story, and no captive audience. Writers and producers try not to waste a single precious second or give viewers an excuse to change channels. TV people seem to bring along this mindset to their films.
Evan Shapiro, executive vice president and general manager of Independent Film Channel, believes television can be a great training ground, especially for actors who’d like to direct, because of the large sums of money spent on network series, and the fact that episodic series rotate directors.
“On film, you work three months with one director, then you don’t work for a while. Then you work with another director for three months. … But television actors on episodic series get to work with several different directors over 22 episodes,” Shapiro says. “When you’re talking about an hour-long film every week, which is what the best television is, you can definitely see it as a master’s program for filmmaking that you’re not going to get at any university.”
Other illustrious television alumni include Oscar-winning directors Ron Howard and Woody Allen and Academy Award nominee Michael Mann (“The Aviator”; “The Insider”), whose “Miami Vice” movie version of his ’80s series is due this summer.
Howard, who won two Oscars (best picture and best director) for “A Beautiful Mind,” said in a 1997 interview that he first became “intrigued by what the director did” while playing little Opie on “The Andy Griffith Show”: “The actors, they were a blast. … But I also really enjoyed spending time with the crew. They’d let me sit up there and work the camera or learn a little something about sound, how the microphone worked, and placement, and lighting, and things like that. … I realized that the director was the one person who, moment to moment, day in and day out, really got to play with everybody. And the job just started to look very, very good to me.”
Richard Brown, noted New York University film professor and host of AMC’s “Movies 101 With Professor Richard Brown,” says he once asked Clooney if he was inspired by the top-notch TV directors he’d worked with, especially on NBC’s “ER.”
Says Brown, “He said, ‘I was watching to see what they did. I wasn’t, “Wow, I’d like to do that.” I wanted to see how it worked. I almost unconsciously wanted to absorb it. But my main focus was acting, because acting was what I was being paid for.’ ”
This may explain why, during his five seasons on “ER,” Clooney never directed an episode, as other cast members did. Anthony Edwards, Paul McCrane and Laura Innes all directed episodes of the hospital drama.
“Scrubs” star Zach Braff, who won praise for his 2004 movie “Garden State,” has directed two episodes of his NBC comedy. Haggis also directed episodes of series he worked on, including “thirtysomething.”
The drama “EZ Streets,” quirky and humorous, was about cops and mobsters and was thick with moral ambiguity.
Haggis said, “I show you the white hat and the black hat, and when you’re real comfortable with that, I keep switching it back and switching it back.” He also does that in “Crash.” “If you look at how Haggis did ‘EZ Streets,’ you could definitely see the beginning of his filmmaking style in that show,” Shapiro says.
Brown says this year’s Oscar nominations are further proof of a sea change that has taken place in Hollywood.
“For years, the transition from television to film was all but impossible,” Brown says. “There was a line you couldn’t cross. Like a brick boundary.
“The feeling was that if they were identified with television, they didn’t have scale or range.”
Brown thinks that Clooney, who’d spent “not only years, but decades working in the vineyard,” played a part in breaking down that wall.
