There was a moment of hushed, stunned silence after Crash was announced as the Best Picture winner at the 2006 Academy Awards. True to its title, the character-driven drama that explored racial tensions in modern-day Southern California crashed what was supposed to be a coronation of Brokeback Mountain.
Small screen, you’re next.
Amid the ever-growing world of original cable dramas, Crash now enters the fray as a weekly series, hoping to conquer another medium. It boasts some of the same creators of the film (including the film’s director Paul Haggis, and star Don Cheadle, in producer roles) and an entirely new cast of characters. It airs Fridays beginning Oct. 17 on Starz.
Leading the roster is Dennis Hopper, who pulls no punches as Ben Cendars, an aging music executive losing his relevance and perhaps his grip on reality. In a career filled with playing unhinged roles, Hopper says Cendars ranks among the wildest.
“[He’s] as crazy and probably crazier than any of them,” he says. “He’s totally out of control. He changes directions about 20 times in a minute.
But, you know, it’s a great part. It’s beautifully written, and we have no language … or sexual [content restrictions]. It’s just free. It’s as free as television will ever be.”
For instance, in his first scene, Cendars has a lengthy monologue with a certain part of his anatomy, causing his horrified female driver to quit. It’s indicative, Hopper says, of a man who “doesn’t have an edit button.”
Hopper says the show is hard work, including some 17-hour days, but it’s worth it “because of the material, and it’s because the people I’m working with are just terrific.”
One of those costars is Jocko Sims, whose character gets a literal front-row seat to Cendars’ unraveling. Sims plays Anthony, an aspiring African-American music producer who takes a job as the old man’s driver in order to learn from the legend.
Sims says Anthony, in working to achieve his dream of becoming the next P. Diddy, has to move beyond the violence that surrounded him growing up.
“It’s like a roller coaster ride every week,” Sims says. “Anthony was brought up in a world in which to survive you had to do whatever you can. It’s not about right or wrong at that point; it’s just living. He is special in that as he begins to grow up, he realizes there is a different way of life and he doesn’t have to go this route. He’s often torn between what he knew growing up and what his mind and heart is telling him as he’s getting older.”
Writer and executive producer Glen Mazzara (The Shield) says the relationship between Cendars and Anthony is indicative of the complicated interactions the show sets out to portray.
“[Cendars] sees this kid as his redemption,” Mazzara says. “I would say that he is a very sympathetic character, and this relationship, this human interaction, becomes a basis for the character arc in which Ben is trying to mentor this kid. … He’s probably a bad influence on this kid, and he’s probably not the man that the kid should be learning from. And yet the kid is trying to … run his own hip-hop label. And so these two guys are trying to get what they want out of each other moving forward.”
Other characters in the L.A.-based drama include an impulsive cop (Ross McCall) and his partner (Arlene Tur), who used to be an actress; a privileged but frustrated mom (Clare Carey), her struggling real-estate developer husband (D.B. Sweeney) and their 16-year-old daughter (Eloise Mumford); an EMT (Brian Tee) trying to put his past as a gang member behind him; a brash, rule-bending detective (Nick Tarabay); and an illegal Guatemalan immigrant (Luis Chavez).
In a recurring role, veteran character actor Tom Sizemore will play a detective investigating a police-related shooting.
Mimicking the form laid out in the film, the characters’ lives and storylines will intersect, but not to the point of distraction, Mazzara says. There was no sense of having to rush to connect everybody, thanks to the multiple-episode commitment the show was granted from the start. That allowed Mazzara to take the unique step of assembling his entire staff of writers — an all-star group that includes veterans of such acclaimed shows as The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire and The Shield — before putting one word on a page.
That approach, Mazzara says, “lets us get better faster. A lot of the feeling-our-way process that you normally do on a show through the first few episodes we were able to do in the planning process.”
For Sims, that has translated into the exhilaration of never knowing what’s next for his character. The writers are fond, he says, of writing themselves into a seemingly inescapable corner only to find some brilliant way out of it and on to the next storyline. But the drama comes not only from the situations, but from how relatable the emotions are.
“The things I’m reading, I’ve never seen before on television,” Sims says. “It’s all about the American dream, it’s all about the struggle. It’s just a slice of real life and everyone trying to attain the same goals. I think the show could have been — honestly — titled something else. It has all those elements of everybody crossing paths. You don’t know, the person you talked to yesterday knows the person you meet tomorrow.”
