Monday, April 3, 2000
Can network TV do the mob justice?
By ERIC DEGGANS -- St. Petersburg Times
Actor Titus Welliver made a pilot for Falcone in April 1999. CBS was going to air the show that fall. Then two kids walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. and killed 13 people.
The resulting debate about media violence cooled the demand for a show that featured five shootings and an ice-pick stabbing in its debut episode ("Anyone who thinks the media has nothing to do with (violence) is an idiot," Les Moonves, CBS Television president, said back then.)
The Mafia drama was off the network's schedule again.
Welliver, who plays bad guy Mob captain Santino "Sonny Boy" Napoli, says he was heartbroken when he got the news.
Months earlier, he'd done some of his best work on CBS' Brooklyn South, a 1998 cop drama best known as the first -- and so far, last -- network TV program to show the top of a man's head blown off in prime time. Despite such an attention-getting debut, the show drowned in lackluster ratings.
Falcone was going to be his return to series television.
"I feel passionate about this project," says Welliver, who plays bad guy Mafia captain Santino "Sonny Boy" Napoli. "I didn't really see it as a reason to not put a show on. If anything, our show depicts these characters as they really are . . . common hoodlums."
What a difference a year makes. Less than 12 months after Columbine, CBS feels strongly enough about Falcone that it has scheduled episodes for eight days straight, giving viewers a serious dose of Mafia drama.
For Pistone, the weeklong debut offers a welcome chance to find out quickly whether his show can cut the prime-time mustard. "Everybody I've talked to, says it's a great thing ... it means they're really high on the show," he adds. "At least this way, you know in a week whether you're going to get picked up (as a full series)."
Of course, some people would prefer Falcone never got a second chance.
"This is what we were predicting all along," says Dona De Sanctis, director of research and cultural affairs for the Washington, D.C.-based National Italian American Foundation. "The success of The Sopranos has spawned all these wanna-bes. A glorification of a marginalized, illegal life . . . is that really entertainment?"
De Sanctis' group and other Italian-American organizations have complained that movies and TV shows such as Analyze This, The Sopranos and Falcone too closely associate Italian heritage and culture with murder, thuggery and organized crime.
If you think that's just political correctness, consider this: CBS is developing a comedy pilot about a gay man and his Italian buddy, called Kiss Me Guido.
Can you imagine a similarly titled show about black people, Jewish people or Asian-Americans?
Such circumstances are insult added to injury for De Sanctis. "I love it when one of these hitmen crosses himself and then goes to whack somebody," she says, noting that she plans to watch Falcone's debut before taking any official action to protest the show.
"These shows take everything that's near and dear to us -- our religion, our family, our work ethic -- and put it into this foul-mouthed, criminal element."
Pistone, a New Jersey-bred descendant of Sicilian immigrants, replies: "I don't think that by writing about (mobsters) or making movies, you slur the good Italians."
Certainly, the mobsters filling CBS' Falcone are prettier and more sophisticated than the broken-down Lefty Ruggiero character immortalized by Al Pacino in Donnie Brasco.
Welliver's Sonny Napoli is a slick, smart gangster who tools around in a Cadillac SUV and wears expensive, subdued suits. Like many other CBS dramas, Falcone lands on the far side of believable, with a hero who seems a little too concerned with being a good guy and actors who are a little too good-looking for their circumstances.
This isn't the first time a Brasco project has faced charges of sanitizing reality. The Donnie Brasco film moved key scenes at the King's Court nightclub in Pasco County to Miami, and a woman who managed the club told the St. Petersburg Times in 1997 that Pistone/Brasco and the FBI were hardly as virtuous as they seemed in the film.
As Depp did for Brasco, Gedrick gives Joe Falcone an offhand, street-smart quality. While Napoli ascends the organized crime food chain, Falcone tags along -- stealing away periodically for evenings with his family, just as Pistone did during six years undercover.
"What happens is you can't get home, so you call home every day ... but every phone call ends with a hang up," explains Pistone, who somehow stayed married to wife Maggie through his time as Donnie Brasco. They've been married nearly 40 years now. "You're away five, six months at time. What woman would be happy with that?"
