Take a left at the strip club, drive past several low, dreary, nondescript buildings where, for the most part, dreary, nondescript things happen. On the left, there’s one building with no particular indicator that it’s any different from its neighbors, except for the NYPD squad cars interspersed with SUVs and sub-compacts parked along the side. Inside, no one seems nondescript or particularly dreary. In the outer offices, women with tool belts and baseball caps rush past women in black pants and pashminas, all on the way to some obviously-important business. Behind a few sets of closed doors, if you follow a trail of cables snaked on the floor through matte paintings of various Manhattan landmarks – the flatiron building, for one – is the crux of the operation. Two salt-and-pepper, goateed, bespectacled guys gaze into a small monitor, which shows that 15 feet away, Richard Belzer has spilled his coffee. This, hidden in the no man’s land of wetlands and warehouses that always seemed more like Secaucus than North Bergen, is the beginning of Hudson’s foray into the moving pictures business. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the new cop show from producer Dick Wolf, is filmed here. Like Law & Order, the show from which Special Victims was spun, this production is in some ways maverick. Wolf, known for his willingness to replace employees he deems problematic – even if they are the stars of top-rated television shows – also bucked the television establishment 10 years ago by setting up production for Law & Order on the East Coast rather than in Hollywood. Other productions followed, including Fox’s NY Undercover. Then, when it came time to set up shop for the Law & Order spin-off, he was the first to take the plunge and jump the river. The first, that is, for a non-news production. NBC, which airs both Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit but does not produce them, first came to Fort Lee with their then-fledgling cable station CNBC, and liked the Garden State so much they rolled out their cable gem MSNBC from extensive studios in Secaucus. Though there’s been a lot of talk about the west bank of the Hudson – or more accurately, the less valuable real estate just beyond the Palisades – becoming a Burbank East, most of it came from developers, not producers. Sure, there have been rumors about Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks opening a big back lot in Harrison or a Jersey City Headquarters for the Shooting Gallery, an up-and-coming movie production company, but Wolf’s the first to commit. Special Victims Unit has the order without the law. While Law & Order follows a case from police investigation to final court verdict, SVU just details the investigation. It takes place in a New York police squad that deals with special victims (which seems to mean those of sex crimes). Stars include Mariska Hargitay, whom you’ll remember from her season-long stint on ER as Mark Green’s dippy front desk girl lover, as Olivia Benson. She’s partnered with Elliot Stabler, played by Christopher Meloni from Oz. Their boss, Donald Cragen, is played by Dann Florek, who is reprising a character he played for the first three seasons of Law & Order (although I remember his annoying jerk act from LA Law best). There’s also Richard Belzer, whose John Munch has now been transferred to this unit (see page 4). Michelle Hurd will be getting more screen time as Monique Jeffries now that Dean Winters left the show (to go back to Oz, we guess.) With the show performing in the ratings, especially since it inherited the similarly -themed Homicide’s Friday night at 10 timeslot, Burbank East may materialize. You can just see Emanuel Stern, whose Hartz Mountain Industries owns the building where Special Victims Unit is filmed, and who has made getting television and film tenants a priority, salivating. For now, the cast and crew seem just fine with the idea of working in New Jersey. “I live on the West Side, so it’s right through the tunnel and you’re here,” said Richard Belzer, who originated the role of John Munch on the Baltimore-based Homicide and later joined the cast of Law & Order. A visit to the set The Special Victims Unit set is rumored to have more plentiful and better food than Law & Order. That’s apparently the kind of thing Special Victims Unit star Mariska Hargitay says to reporters when she gets time to talk to them. As for me, I got as close as the inside of her dressing room. (Lots of Polaroids of Hargitay and other cast members horsing around hang on the door with slightly-creepy fan letters; a sparse yet cluttered interior with scented candles burning.) About two hours into my on-the-set visit (during which I perched on a desk in the interrogation room, trying to look cool in front of the publicist and another reporter), Hargitay arrived from shooting a scene for the crossover with Law & Order (which airs Friday, by the way). Everyone hugs her. The talk on the set is about how poor Mariska will be working here until 4 in the morning, jetting off to L.A. to present at the Golden Globes by 8 a.m., only to return the next day for more work here. We look at pictures of Mariska’s dress, check out photos from the People’s Choice Awards (“She looks so good with that curly hair,” the script supervisor says), watch someone bring her pants into the dressing room and even see Hargitay close up, as she apologizes for having no time to do the interview. With Richard Belzer, it’s a slightly different story. The publicist, the AP reporter and I enter the dressing room area to find most of the cast in a jovial conversation. They scatter on sight. As we approach Belzer’s room, he securely closes the door and apparently locks it from within. Obligated by her profession not to take a hint, the publicist knocks on the door and enters. Through the paper-thin walls, we hear Belzer say, “I just got new lines. Can’t someone else do it?” On the set, things are progressing slowly, and 4 a.m. begins to look like an optimistic time to end the day. Extras climb up and down the squad room stairs for take after take; craft services replaces the peanuts and dried fruits snack with a more substantial spread of hot dogs and ‘kraut. I can’t help but notice a guy with dyed blond hair and an earring, the kind of slightly-aging, impossibly handsome man who was probably an actor/model and has now taken on the guise of another passion to keep some kind of career going. He spends his time quizzing the director, typing notes in his trendy laptop and repeating witticisms found in a copy of the New Yorker to whoever will listen. I later learn he’s going to direct a future episode of the show. By 7 p.m., I have to go because I have another interview to do that night. Even though the set feels a lot like a high school clique for the most part, I would’ve stayed longer. It’s exciting to see people you recognize from TV, I admit. They’re all better looking in person than on TV, where they look pretty good already. It’s like being inside the National Enquirer – who hates whom (no one, from all I could tell), what they’re really like (who can be a real person with all these hangers-on?), who’s anorexic or bloated (they could all be anorexic, but everyone looks just this side of the healthy/starved line). I can’t wait to see how the scenes I saw being shot will look on the small screen. Will they use the take before or after Hurd got a rewrite on a particularly troublesome line? Will we be able to tell that Munch/Belzer has his new dialogue written on an off camera crib sheet during the scene where the detectives enter a chat room? Will I run off and join the cast as the sassy receptionist for May sweeps? (A girl can dream.) Later, after Hargitay’s publicist has blown me off long enough to prevent her client from ever being interviewed for this paper, I question my attraction to all things television. They’re just people, I tell myself; they’re playing make-believe while wearing expertly-tailored suits and earning more every week than I make a year. You know where you’ll find me: an Entertainment Weekly in my lap, tuned into NBC this Friday at 10.
NBC drama films in North Bergen
