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Law & Order creator goes native
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
HBO offered TV critics a heavy dose of weighty topics Friday, from AIDS to the Evangelical movement to a serial killer. And Dick Wolf, uber-creator of the ubiquitous “Law & Order” franchise, maintained the thematics, showing up to give his pet project, the film version of “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” his stamp of approval.
The film spans the late 19th century as the Sioux Indians struggled between assimilation and annnihilation in the hands of the U.S. government. As befits a big HBO production, it stars the likes of Anna Paquin (“X Men,” “The Piano”), Aidan Quinn (“An Early Frost,” “The Book of Daniel”) and “Law & Order” chief prosecutor and former U.S. senator Fred Dalton Thompson. (Thompson plays Pres. Ulysses S. Grant.)
Wolf said back around 2001, his former boss Tom Thayer asked him if he had read the seminal 1971 book “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.” Wolf said yes. Thayer asked him if he wanted to jump aboard a film project based on the book. “I immediately wanted to get involved,” he told the media. “And we went to HBO and it was fast-track from there and here we are five and a half years later. Maybe a new record for HBO.”
As he made clear, HBO likes to take its time on projects it cares about and he lavished praise on the pay cable’s distinct culture.
“I’d do anything that HBO wanted me to do given the strictures that I’m under contractually,” Wolf said. “I would love to find more ways to work with them because it has been an amazing experience. But I would love to send some network people in to intern there for awhile.”
The audience laughed. He later apologized for being so flippant about the broadcast networks who have made him fabulously wealthy, noting that HBO’s business model is so different from, say, NBC. HBO can pick and choose a handful of projects a year while the big three networks have to fill 22 hours a week of mostly original programming.
“They [the broadcast networks] are in the numbers game, the daily numbers game, and that leads to the decisions that are not necessarily artistic or what is best,” Wolf noted.
HBO relies solely on subscribers so while it’s immune to advertiser pressure, it still needs buzz-worthy, appointment TV series, something the network has failed to conjure up lately with the possible exception of “Entourage.”
Wolf even noted HBO’s extravagant period-piece drama “Rome,” which ends after just two seasons this year after modest ratings in relation to its cost. ” ‘Rome’ is one of the most awesome television achievements to me in the past 20 years,” he said. “Again, it was that you look at it and go, boy, they really didn’t care how much it cost.”
The HBO beancounters probably twisted uncomfortably in their seats after hearing that comment.
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