Post by mizhowlinmad on Jul 20, 2009 10:44:02 GMT -5
(Miz' note: once again, I have used abbreviations for things we already know: DB, SJC, etc.) 
Day Four
Interior: a cliffside estate in Paradise Cove, west of Malibu. The Team is wrapping up some close-ups before breaking for lunch. Dwight Schultz sits off camera in a director's chair, giving an autograph to a 10-year-old boy.
Schultz had dome almost all of his acting on stage, in regional theatres and in New York, before flying to L.A. to read for the part of Murdock. His normal speaking voice is restrained and articulate, leagues away from the comic cadence he affects for his bizarre role. I ask him if signing onto TAT has changed his life dramatically.
"It's like a jolt of electricity," he says. "I guess I've done about 10 years of normal living in one-including getting married. The rapidity of the work, the speed with which you go before the camera and just do it-you're filming rehearsals, in effect-that's still very novel and invigorating to me. And usually your days are completely consumed by this.
"People complain about that, but...I don't see how you can. You're doing what you want to do. It's not a struggle, it's a thrill--something to be grateful for."
One former Team member, the departed Melinda Culea, had been vocal about her dissatisfaction with her series role. What about her absence this year?
"Well," DS answers in roundabout fashion, "the last thing I did in NYC was an off-Broadway play. It was tremendously successful. The reviews were the best I have ever received from the big three major critics. There were lots of rumors of it going on to Broadway. One day I picked up the paper and read that the show was indeed going on to Broadway--but with another actor, not me. I was shocked. Obviously something had been wrong, but I'll never know the reason I was replaced. (Miz' note: could this have been one of the early cases of DS' political leanings being a factor?)
"And I think it's much the same case with Melinda. There were lots of little problems...but whatever happened in the offices over there, we'll never really know. They made the decision it was the best thing to replace her.
"But every actor is replaced at one point or another. That's what this business is about: replacing and being replaced...being on top one year, then unemployed the next two or three, then up again. That's the name of the game."
The company has broken for lunch. DS nods his head at the now-empty set. "But this is just a terrific bunch," he says. "It's been a joy. I couldn't imagine something more fortunate." He pauses, and for a moment his eyes reveal a sliver of Murdock's manic gleam. "Except a leading role in a major motion picture, with Meryl Streep as my co-star!" Then he laughs.
As we walk outside toward the company's lunch tables, we pass an equipment truck whose open door features a formidable array of Mr. T posters and photographs. "He is amazing," DS says, looking at those pictures of his co-star. "The man is a tycoon. He's so smart. When he started out, he said, 'Before this is done, I'm gonna get money even from people who hate me. I'm having a dart board made.' That's what he said!"
The big action sequence after lunch involved two helicopters in a chase past a poolside cocktail party (Miz' note: what a coincidence that's the very episode we're up to now!)
Preparations are elaborate. Stunt and effects coordinators stand by the main camera and relay instructions from the director to the copter pilots via walkie-talkie. An assistant with a bullhorn shouts directions and warnings at atmosphere people and onlookers. "Pay attention to me, please! We can't afford to make mistakes! If you don't have to be here, go to the other side of the building!"
At the call of "action!," the poolside tableau moves into life. The helicopters wheel and hover, the gusts from their blades bending the palm trees. A table overturns, scattering food and crockery. Stuntpeople leap into the water. The stench of explosives fills the air, and a thick mist of dust obscures everything.
Director Gil Shilton, wearing a grey-checkered cap and blue nylon windbreaker, calls up anxiously to the second camera operator on the roof above him: "We got stuff? OK, great."
With the speed of an army unit, the crew grabs equipment and heads for the trucks, on the move to another location before they lose the light. A crew member, jazzed by all the action, thumps me on the arm as he strides past. "Pretty interesting stuff, huh? You're with the A-Team now!"
Day Five
Mr. T is subdued. He sits quietly in a chair in the lobby of the Arco Center, a Long Beach skyscraper. On his head, a goofy cap with a red rooster's comb, a gift from TAT co-executive producer Frank Lupo. "Feels like a draft in here," T murmurs. One of his brothers immediately wraps an orange-and-brown wool shawl around T's huge shoulders. Mr. T has two of his own brothers with him on the set who keep him within sight at all times, big men with builds to match his own. One of them wields some sort of steel exercise bar with plastic grips at the ends and middle.
Thinking to exchange pleasantries during this idle moment, I approach him. "Morning, T," I say.
In an instant, Mr. T transforms himself into a rigid Buddha, a stone statue wrapped in a burnt-orange shawl. Glaring straight ahead, he concentrates on making me invisible.
"Is there a problem?" It's one of his brothers, the one in the purple sweat suit and the flowing LeRoy Neiman mustache.
"I don't think so. I just wanted to talk to T for a minute."
"Oh, I don't think there's much chance of that, unless it's a matter of life and death."
"Hmmmm. How 'bout during lunch, then? Or maybe later this afternoon?"
"I'd say that's a definite no. He don't like to give up his lunch. He don't like to give any kinda interviews while he's working."
The brother smiles, as if we share some private joke.
T's lassitude passes once lunch is called. He and all the cast move quickly to run the gauntlet of fans (mostly youngsters) who stand waiting outside the Arco Center. "I'll pose for pictures later, after work," T promises as he trots toward the food tables, "but not now, please!"
In the vacant lot where the caterers have set up, Mr. T wastes no time finding the desserts. "Put a whole pie on there, man! Gimme a whole pie! Aw, man! This what we got to have!"
Meanwhile, DB sits in his trailer perusing Nielsen ratings. "No. 2," he says in a tone close to wonder. "60 MINUTES is No. 1 and TAT is No. 2..."
Talk turns to TAT's network, and DB says, "NBC doesn't like to discuss this show too much publicly. They're a snob about their own product. They've come out as a network that's interested in Emmys, 'quality programming.' In their minds, this is not an Emmy kind of show; this is succumbing to 'mass entertainment.' It's such a terribly hypocritical predicament to put yourself in..."
DB was raised in Montana ("My childhood was Hemingway: hunting, fishing, riding") and he says he got into acting because it seemed to him "a great adventure." Classical training and repertory work led to Broadway roles (Miz' note: I guess I was wrong about GP and DS being the only cast members with stage training!) and then on to Hollywood, where the thought of staying on a series for a number of years is not a happy prospect.
"Not because I find it professionally frustrating! Hell, I'm in the No. 2-rated show! How often does that happen? This is a great adventure in itself, but...after a while it becomes the Known. No surprises. It's the Known. I want the Unknown. So the idea of doing this for five years---well---I just gotta take it a day at a time."
A knock on the trailer door signals the end of the half-hour lunch period.
"'Scuse me," says DB. "I gotta brush my teeth."
From the sink, he asks, "Have you talked to all the guys?"
"Not quite."
"Well, there ain't a dummy in the bunch. 'Cept me, maybe. I'm the dumb blond." Teeth brushed, he checks his wardrobe in the mirror. "You don't have to be bright to be a TV star," he says. "You don't even have to be a human being! You can be a chimpanzee or a dog. I mean, what are we talkin' about!"
"It's the bottom line, isn't it?" He laughs. "It's unbelievable. But human beings start to believe it! A dog doesn't. Benji doesn't say, 'Yes, I'm different from those other pooches.' Huh? He's just a mutt. And that's all we are: a buncha mutts, and we're in a show, so all of a sudden people want autographs and somebody'll come in your trailer and interview you, but--the fact that we're having this conversation ain't got nothin' to do with Dirk Benedict. What-so-ever!"
Back in the lobby of the Arco Center, a woman from the crew is taking up a collection for the stuntman injured two days earlier. "It's George's idea," she says. "No names; it'll just say 'from the company.'" The man suffered some displaced vertebrae and will be in the hospital for a week, but it looks as if he'll be working stunts again before long.
The A-Team's first work of the afternoon involved the four guys, new girl in tow, blasting their way through a private door and past the lobby guard to escape in a hail of gunfire. As the scene is blocked, Mr. T takes issue with the way he and GP have been told to come into view.
"We wouldn't expose ourselves like that," T tells Peppard, "maybe get our legs all shot up. Man, we're professionals. We'd take cover."
"Well...let's see," says GP.
He paces through the motions, seeing whether he can duck a bit lower a bit sooner. When the scene is finally filmed, the choreography will look virtually the same, but T's input will have been given due weight.
Moments before the actors' weapons are loaded with blanks, director Shilton takes a look at the Lloyd's Bank branch adjacent to the lobby. Suddenly, something occurs to him. He asks, "Has anyone told the people in the bank there's going to be shooting out here?"
Day Six
An overcast morning outside the Culver City soundstage.
Mr. T sits outside wearing a green bathrobe and his red rooster cap, reading a magazine, a scowl of intense concentration on his face.
GP, though, stands at his dressing-room trailer with a smile and an open hand.
"Thomas! Come in, come in. Can I offer you a pop, or coffee? I hope I didn't offend you that day."
"Oh, hey," I reply.
"A newsman on the set should be known. Personally, I like tape recorders. That way, we know exactly what was said. So: turn on your machine. What do you want to talk about?"
The intense schedule everyone's always mentioning seems as good a place as any to start.
"Well," he concedes, "it's damned hard work. But then again, we're damned well paid. I feel very much that this show is a blessing, and that its success is due to the fact that God has smiled on us."
The role of Hannibal came to him, GP says, after "a really bad five-year period" of little employment. "I got a little movie here, little movie there, took another mortgage on my house...I was supposed to do a Broadway play. Someone else was cast. And I called my agent and said, 'I want to do a television series.'
"Two weeks later I was in [executive producer] SJC's office. This all occurred 14 months ago, and here we are today. So if you want to ask me if I'm a man who believes in prayer---yes, I certainly do."
And they've been going like this, on the killing schedule, for the last 14 months?
"We've been going like this for about...25 years," GP estimates, crinkling his blue eyes in a half-laugh. "I think we have about 10 years more before we finish this season, evn. It's endless. At times it just seems inhuman. I mean, you can hear my voice---this is about a tone lower than normal, maybe two. I'm just tired. I'm 10 pounds overweight. I can't get along on five hours of sleep a night. Right now I'm running on about two gallons of gas. I'm just trying to get through today! Survival is the real thing here."
But he doesn't go through all this alone, he points out. There's the crew--"a hundred-member family"--and the rest of his cast.
"When you're working these long days and everyone is weary, you look into another actor's eyes for help. And if they're not professional enough or good-hearted enough to make that effort, then your misery quotient goes up a notch. But if you look over there and there's someone working for and with you---it lifts you.
"When this season started I told the cast I wanted them all to become giant stars. I said if they could become big enough so that I could come on at the beginning of the program and say, 'Now Team, this is the plan,' and then come back at the end and say, 'Beautifully done!' I would have achieved my ambition."
He's reluctant to talk of his past films; says he rarely looks at them.
But surely he watches TAT?
"Always," he says. "That's part of the 'what-did-we-do-right, what-didn't-we-do-right, what-can-we-do-better.' Also, you know, there's some stuff I'm not in, and then I have some fun out of the rest of the cast. I've even laughed a couple of times at Hannibal, and that's unusual. There I have to give credit to the writers. Sometimes he's just irrepressible. You know he's going to pull off something, that's typical of him, and if I'm just adequate in doing it---it comes out all right."
From somewhere nearby comes a burst of weapons fire. "Must be the A-Team," says GP.
(Miz' note: I thought there was a Day Seven, but this is the end of the article. Shoulda been titled "Six Days With The A-Team" instead.)
Day Four
Interior: a cliffside estate in Paradise Cove, west of Malibu. The Team is wrapping up some close-ups before breaking for lunch. Dwight Schultz sits off camera in a director's chair, giving an autograph to a 10-year-old boy.
Schultz had dome almost all of his acting on stage, in regional theatres and in New York, before flying to L.A. to read for the part of Murdock. His normal speaking voice is restrained and articulate, leagues away from the comic cadence he affects for his bizarre role. I ask him if signing onto TAT has changed his life dramatically.
"It's like a jolt of electricity," he says. "I guess I've done about 10 years of normal living in one-including getting married. The rapidity of the work, the speed with which you go before the camera and just do it-you're filming rehearsals, in effect-that's still very novel and invigorating to me. And usually your days are completely consumed by this.
"People complain about that, but...I don't see how you can. You're doing what you want to do. It's not a struggle, it's a thrill--something to be grateful for."
One former Team member, the departed Melinda Culea, had been vocal about her dissatisfaction with her series role. What about her absence this year?
"Well," DS answers in roundabout fashion, "the last thing I did in NYC was an off-Broadway play. It was tremendously successful. The reviews were the best I have ever received from the big three major critics. There were lots of rumors of it going on to Broadway. One day I picked up the paper and read that the show was indeed going on to Broadway--but with another actor, not me. I was shocked. Obviously something had been wrong, but I'll never know the reason I was replaced. (Miz' note: could this have been one of the early cases of DS' political leanings being a factor?)
"And I think it's much the same case with Melinda. There were lots of little problems...but whatever happened in the offices over there, we'll never really know. They made the decision it was the best thing to replace her.
"But every actor is replaced at one point or another. That's what this business is about: replacing and being replaced...being on top one year, then unemployed the next two or three, then up again. That's the name of the game."
The company has broken for lunch. DS nods his head at the now-empty set. "But this is just a terrific bunch," he says. "It's been a joy. I couldn't imagine something more fortunate." He pauses, and for a moment his eyes reveal a sliver of Murdock's manic gleam. "Except a leading role in a major motion picture, with Meryl Streep as my co-star!" Then he laughs.
As we walk outside toward the company's lunch tables, we pass an equipment truck whose open door features a formidable array of Mr. T posters and photographs. "He is amazing," DS says, looking at those pictures of his co-star. "The man is a tycoon. He's so smart. When he started out, he said, 'Before this is done, I'm gonna get money even from people who hate me. I'm having a dart board made.' That's what he said!"
The big action sequence after lunch involved two helicopters in a chase past a poolside cocktail party (Miz' note: what a coincidence that's the very episode we're up to now!)
Preparations are elaborate. Stunt and effects coordinators stand by the main camera and relay instructions from the director to the copter pilots via walkie-talkie. An assistant with a bullhorn shouts directions and warnings at atmosphere people and onlookers. "Pay attention to me, please! We can't afford to make mistakes! If you don't have to be here, go to the other side of the building!"
At the call of "action!," the poolside tableau moves into life. The helicopters wheel and hover, the gusts from their blades bending the palm trees. A table overturns, scattering food and crockery. Stuntpeople leap into the water. The stench of explosives fills the air, and a thick mist of dust obscures everything.
Director Gil Shilton, wearing a grey-checkered cap and blue nylon windbreaker, calls up anxiously to the second camera operator on the roof above him: "We got stuff? OK, great."
With the speed of an army unit, the crew grabs equipment and heads for the trucks, on the move to another location before they lose the light. A crew member, jazzed by all the action, thumps me on the arm as he strides past. "Pretty interesting stuff, huh? You're with the A-Team now!"
Day Five
Mr. T is subdued. He sits quietly in a chair in the lobby of the Arco Center, a Long Beach skyscraper. On his head, a goofy cap with a red rooster's comb, a gift from TAT co-executive producer Frank Lupo. "Feels like a draft in here," T murmurs. One of his brothers immediately wraps an orange-and-brown wool shawl around T's huge shoulders. Mr. T has two of his own brothers with him on the set who keep him within sight at all times, big men with builds to match his own. One of them wields some sort of steel exercise bar with plastic grips at the ends and middle.
Thinking to exchange pleasantries during this idle moment, I approach him. "Morning, T," I say.
In an instant, Mr. T transforms himself into a rigid Buddha, a stone statue wrapped in a burnt-orange shawl. Glaring straight ahead, he concentrates on making me invisible.
"Is there a problem?" It's one of his brothers, the one in the purple sweat suit and the flowing LeRoy Neiman mustache.
"I don't think so. I just wanted to talk to T for a minute."
"Oh, I don't think there's much chance of that, unless it's a matter of life and death."
"Hmmmm. How 'bout during lunch, then? Or maybe later this afternoon?"
"I'd say that's a definite no. He don't like to give up his lunch. He don't like to give any kinda interviews while he's working."
The brother smiles, as if we share some private joke.
T's lassitude passes once lunch is called. He and all the cast move quickly to run the gauntlet of fans (mostly youngsters) who stand waiting outside the Arco Center. "I'll pose for pictures later, after work," T promises as he trots toward the food tables, "but not now, please!"
In the vacant lot where the caterers have set up, Mr. T wastes no time finding the desserts. "Put a whole pie on there, man! Gimme a whole pie! Aw, man! This what we got to have!"
Meanwhile, DB sits in his trailer perusing Nielsen ratings. "No. 2," he says in a tone close to wonder. "60 MINUTES is No. 1 and TAT is No. 2..."
Talk turns to TAT's network, and DB says, "NBC doesn't like to discuss this show too much publicly. They're a snob about their own product. They've come out as a network that's interested in Emmys, 'quality programming.' In their minds, this is not an Emmy kind of show; this is succumbing to 'mass entertainment.' It's such a terribly hypocritical predicament to put yourself in..."
DB was raised in Montana ("My childhood was Hemingway: hunting, fishing, riding") and he says he got into acting because it seemed to him "a great adventure." Classical training and repertory work led to Broadway roles (Miz' note: I guess I was wrong about GP and DS being the only cast members with stage training!) and then on to Hollywood, where the thought of staying on a series for a number of years is not a happy prospect.
"Not because I find it professionally frustrating! Hell, I'm in the No. 2-rated show! How often does that happen? This is a great adventure in itself, but...after a while it becomes the Known. No surprises. It's the Known. I want the Unknown. So the idea of doing this for five years---well---I just gotta take it a day at a time."
A knock on the trailer door signals the end of the half-hour lunch period.
"'Scuse me," says DB. "I gotta brush my teeth."
From the sink, he asks, "Have you talked to all the guys?"
"Not quite."
"Well, there ain't a dummy in the bunch. 'Cept me, maybe. I'm the dumb blond." Teeth brushed, he checks his wardrobe in the mirror. "You don't have to be bright to be a TV star," he says. "You don't even have to be a human being! You can be a chimpanzee or a dog. I mean, what are we talkin' about!"
"It's the bottom line, isn't it?" He laughs. "It's unbelievable. But human beings start to believe it! A dog doesn't. Benji doesn't say, 'Yes, I'm different from those other pooches.' Huh? He's just a mutt. And that's all we are: a buncha mutts, and we're in a show, so all of a sudden people want autographs and somebody'll come in your trailer and interview you, but--the fact that we're having this conversation ain't got nothin' to do with Dirk Benedict. What-so-ever!"
Back in the lobby of the Arco Center, a woman from the crew is taking up a collection for the stuntman injured two days earlier. "It's George's idea," she says. "No names; it'll just say 'from the company.'" The man suffered some displaced vertebrae and will be in the hospital for a week, but it looks as if he'll be working stunts again before long.
The A-Team's first work of the afternoon involved the four guys, new girl in tow, blasting their way through a private door and past the lobby guard to escape in a hail of gunfire. As the scene is blocked, Mr. T takes issue with the way he and GP have been told to come into view.
"We wouldn't expose ourselves like that," T tells Peppard, "maybe get our legs all shot up. Man, we're professionals. We'd take cover."
"Well...let's see," says GP.
He paces through the motions, seeing whether he can duck a bit lower a bit sooner. When the scene is finally filmed, the choreography will look virtually the same, but T's input will have been given due weight.
Moments before the actors' weapons are loaded with blanks, director Shilton takes a look at the Lloyd's Bank branch adjacent to the lobby. Suddenly, something occurs to him. He asks, "Has anyone told the people in the bank there's going to be shooting out here?"
Day Six
An overcast morning outside the Culver City soundstage.
Mr. T sits outside wearing a green bathrobe and his red rooster cap, reading a magazine, a scowl of intense concentration on his face.
GP, though, stands at his dressing-room trailer with a smile and an open hand.
"Thomas! Come in, come in. Can I offer you a pop, or coffee? I hope I didn't offend you that day."
"Oh, hey," I reply.
"A newsman on the set should be known. Personally, I like tape recorders. That way, we know exactly what was said. So: turn on your machine. What do you want to talk about?"
The intense schedule everyone's always mentioning seems as good a place as any to start.
"Well," he concedes, "it's damned hard work. But then again, we're damned well paid. I feel very much that this show is a blessing, and that its success is due to the fact that God has smiled on us."
The role of Hannibal came to him, GP says, after "a really bad five-year period" of little employment. "I got a little movie here, little movie there, took another mortgage on my house...I was supposed to do a Broadway play. Someone else was cast. And I called my agent and said, 'I want to do a television series.'
"Two weeks later I was in [executive producer] SJC's office. This all occurred 14 months ago, and here we are today. So if you want to ask me if I'm a man who believes in prayer---yes, I certainly do."
And they've been going like this, on the killing schedule, for the last 14 months?
"We've been going like this for about...25 years," GP estimates, crinkling his blue eyes in a half-laugh. "I think we have about 10 years more before we finish this season, evn. It's endless. At times it just seems inhuman. I mean, you can hear my voice---this is about a tone lower than normal, maybe two. I'm just tired. I'm 10 pounds overweight. I can't get along on five hours of sleep a night. Right now I'm running on about two gallons of gas. I'm just trying to get through today! Survival is the real thing here."
But he doesn't go through all this alone, he points out. There's the crew--"a hundred-member family"--and the rest of his cast.
"When you're working these long days and everyone is weary, you look into another actor's eyes for help. And if they're not professional enough or good-hearted enough to make that effort, then your misery quotient goes up a notch. But if you look over there and there's someone working for and with you---it lifts you.
"When this season started I told the cast I wanted them all to become giant stars. I said if they could become big enough so that I could come on at the beginning of the program and say, 'Now Team, this is the plan,' and then come back at the end and say, 'Beautifully done!' I would have achieved my ambition."
He's reluctant to talk of his past films; says he rarely looks at them.
But surely he watches TAT?
"Always," he says. "That's part of the 'what-did-we-do-right, what-didn't-we-do-right, what-can-we-do-better.' Also, you know, there's some stuff I'm not in, and then I have some fun out of the rest of the cast. I've even laughed a couple of times at Hannibal, and that's unusual. There I have to give credit to the writers. Sometimes he's just irrepressible. You know he's going to pull off something, that's typical of him, and if I'm just adequate in doing it---it comes out all right."
From somewhere nearby comes a burst of weapons fire. "Must be the A-Team," says GP.
(Miz' note: I thought there was a Day Seven, but this is the end of the article. Shoulda been titled "Six Days With The A-Team" instead.)
