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January 6, 2004
Profitt and Loss
WISEGUY: Mel Profitt, SEASON 1, Part 2
Original Series:
- Originally aired: 4 January, 1988 through 28 March, 1988, plus "Aria for Don Aiuppo," 7 December, 1988
- NR
- Stephen J. Cannell Productions/CBS
- Cast: Ken Wahl (Vinnie Terranova), Jonathan Banks (Frank McPike), Jim Byrnes (Daniel Benjamin Burroughs, "Lifeguard"), Joan Severance (Susan Profitt), Kevin Spacey (Mel Profitt), William Russ (Roger Lococco), David Spielberg (Herb Ketcher), Melanie Chartoff (Lillah Warfield), Ben Halley, Jr. (Henri LaLonde), Clyde Kusatsu (Kenny Sasusha), Will Zahrn (Charles Shagrass)
- Directed by Robert Iscove, William Fraker, Bill Corcoran, and others
- Credited writers: Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo, creators, along with Gina Wendkos, Carol Mendelsohn, David J. Burke, and others
- Cinematography: Frank E. Johnson
- Significant music: Mike Post's opening theme
Premise in one sentence: An undercover FBI agent falls into the jet set life of an international tycoon.
Disc Stats:
- Studio Works Entertainment, and Stephen J. Cannell Productions
- $59.99
- About 11 hours
- Four disc set
- Color
- Full frame transfer (1.33:1)
- Animated, musical menu with five-chapter scene selection per episode (unlike the previous set, which had no scene selection)
- Single sided, dual layered discs
- Dolby Digital 5.1, English 2.0
- No subtitles
- Region 1
- Street Date: 30 December, 2003
- Fold out digipak in slipcase
Extras: Disc One
- Audio commentary track by Ken Wahl to episode "Player to be Named Now"
Extras: Disc Four
- Bonus episode: "Aria for Don Auippo"
- Video interviews with Stephen J. Cannell (14:18), David Burke (11:42), Cannell and Burke together (7:50), Kevin Spacey (on the set of his Bobby Darin biopic; 17:09, in widescreen), Joan Severance (8:44), Elsa Raven (10:49), William Russ (6:39)
- Twelve page booklet with introduction and episode summaries
In a recent episode of BOOMTOWN (aired Sunday, December 28), Virginia Madsen played an aspiring actress who stumbled into a fame-attracting situation, though not the kind she would have preferred. A well-written episode, the show was notable for among other things a clever flashback cum montage scene in which we see Madsen's character audition for parts that decrease in importance, from specific young people to older people then down to "Customer Number Three." Her appearance deteriorates to match her increasing desperation.
The vagaries of show biz, the sadness of blasted hopes and the oft-times arbitrary basis for fame, were well delineated, and seeing the episode in the context of watching WISEGUY Season 1.2 made for a salutary contrast, because if there is one person whose career was blessed by the Gods of Casting Happenstance, it is Kevin Spacey. His short tenure in the series launched his career, which he acknowledges.
Spacey played Mel Profitt, the international drug and arms merchant with a mysterious past and an almost biblical attachment to his sister Susan (Joan Severance). Before that, Spacey had been a regional theater actor, a faux standup comedian specializing in impersonations (his mimicries as seen on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE are outstanding), and a little bit of feature and TV work. He had appeared in a few movies, such as HEARTBURN and HENRY AND JUNE (where he was reportedly overhead arguing on the phone with his agent about the direction his career was taking). He had some success in plays such as HURLYBURLY, but the more lucrative and much busier world of movies had yet to beckon. As Spacey tells the story in a video interview for the WISEGUY DVD set, he wouldn't have even been offered the part if another actor hadn't dropped out at the last minute (the common rumor is that the actor was Gary Cole, but that hasn't been confirmed anywhere). A tired and reluctant Spacey, who hadn't seen the Steelgrave episodes of WISEGUY, arrived in Los Angeles for different reasons, was spotted by an agent as a likely candidate to replace the suddenly-gone other actor, was cast Friday night and started shooting the following Monday. From then on he was the guy who caused you to lean over to a friend in movie theaters and say, when you saw his name in the credits of films such as OUTBREAK before the ultimate success of THE USUAL SUSPECTS, "He is a great actor."
But how fragile that entry into success was! If Spacey hadn't been in Los Angeles, if he hadn't been taking a tour of his agent's office building, if he hadn't had the time to meet with Stephen J. Cannell and the series writers, but even back further in time, if another actor hadn't dropped out of the show, then the whole chain of happenstance would not have fallen Spacey's way.
Or would it? Actors are different from you and me. It's not just that they are better looking and in great shape (usually). It's also that they have faces that allow them to be actors. Many have noted, such as Gore Vidal in his novel HOLLYWOOD, that actors tend to be short people with big heads, the better to be photograph or attract attention and/or dominate from the stage. But it goes beyond that. The best actors are blessed with a peculiar and unduplicatible bone structure and muscular mobility that allows them, basically, to act. Most of us can't do it. Conversely, many can do it but don't know they can because that quality is never revealed (or maybe they do know and use their natural thespic abilities in sales or big business or teaching). Actors have faces (and bodies in general) that naturally convey emotions, thoughts, and fears. Their faces rhyme with emoting. The inner and the outer man rest easily on the visage of the actor. In that regard, they are "naturals," and sooner or later Spacey would have been discovered, by someone somewhere else.
Spacey is one of the few actors who really does anger well ("Will. You. Go. To. Lunch."), and that power first blossomed in WISEGUY. There are a few other great anger actors — Lee J. Cobb, George C. Scott, J. T. Walsh — but I guess most actors don't want to be "angry," they must want to be liked. Spacey seems to want to play with your mind, just like his character, Mel Profitt.
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In case you don't know, the 11 episodes of the so-called Mel Profitt arc concern undercover FBI agent Vinnie Terranova (Ken Wahl) who, between jobs, is assigned the one-off task of investigating a mysterious figure named Roger Lococco. His boss, McPike (Jonathan Banks), approaches Terranova at the start of the arc while he is sitting brooding on the beach, like William Petersen in MANHUNTER, and ends up just as conflicted. Terranova succumbs to McPike's entreaties to get "back on the horse." But soon Terranova learns that Lococco is not his own man, that he has a violent and erratic boss. This boss is an international tycoon named Mel Profitt (Spacey) who, with his sister Susan (Severance), rules an underground empire founded on marijuana, cocaine, and arms trading. Vinnie is drawn closer to Susan and also finds Lococco increasingly competitive with him. Lococco has his own agenda however, and the clashing of diverse elements leads to surprising twists and unexpected revelations.
It's unlikely that you'll see a run of episodic television as crazy as this one. Incest is in the air, along with lots of drugs. Susan shoots a Dr. Feelgood concoction into Mel in between his toes, and Mel's whole empire is founded on the principals of economist Thomas Malthus, who proposed that population growth will always exceed the food supply. From the (rather tame) orgies on Mel's boat yacht, to the episode "Smokey Mountain Requiem," set in a weird deep south with Hispanics battling hillbillies, WISEGUY 1.2 caught the viewer off guard at almost every turn. What's equally surprising is that Mel disappears relatively early, appearing in only seven of the 11 eps.
I have a theory about that. I bet that the Profitt arc of WISEGUY wasn't originally supposed to be all Profitt. I don't think that Mel was meant to be the main character. I think that the arc was really meant to be about Roger Lococco (who re-appears later on in the series), and that Mel was suppose to be shadowy, mysterious, and distant (like the dealers in the show's partial inspiration, James Mills's book THE UNDERGROUND EMPIRE). I think what happened is that Kevin Spacey threw the Profitt story arc out of whack. Spacey was such a strong actor, and he had such a good rapport with the writers, that his part went in directions that even Cannell, who was allowing himself to go a little nutty with the scripts, didn't anticipate. In fact, he was such a strong actor doing such a strange and new character that he has had a lasting influence on movies and TV shows (you see a residue of Mel Profitt in the short-lived 1996 Fox show PROFIT, staring Adrian Pasdar, for example).
To speculate wildly with no foundation whatsoever, I am guessing that if Gary Cole, or some equally more-TV like actor, had done the Mel Profitt character, Mel would have been weighted appropriately to the mechanics of the story and the characters; that is, that he is just the boss, and Roger is the real core of the arc, inscribing a variation on Vinnie's relationship with Sonny Steelgrave into the second half of the first season. Instead, Spacey came on strong, and so when he vanishes from the arc in episode eight, a little something dies in the show.
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Mel and Kevin aren't the only reason to watch the show, however. At the time, Joan Severance blew all red-blooded American teens away as well. Where did this exotic, gorgeous woman come from? It was her first job, but even though she was a newcomer she managed to be sexy and steely, nursey and nutty all at once. As one of my friends, who even looks like Joan Severence, said about later stories in the series, "WISEGUY was never the same after Joan Severance left."
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William "Buckwheat" Russ is great, too, comical and scary and convincing as an angry vet. But Wahl is a little underrated, and he's even the star of the show. As Wahl says on his commentary track, Vinnie mostly has to react to the people around him while hiding his real feelings. That's a tough job. But Wahl was great at it. Not only was he gorgeous (despite the monobrow) with those huge limpid eyes, but also he was a great laugher. Few actors laugh as convincingly as Wahl does, such as when he has to milk a cow, or when he is watching Mel/Spacey trying to hit a baseball.
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As a show, WISEGUY looked grainy and dark and desaturated all at the same time, with the DP trying to achieve noir effects in color stock, not as easy then as it is now. Still, the DVD set looks the way I remember the show, and it has an improved 5.1 soundtrack. According to its press release, Studio Works Entertainment is offering WISEGUY 1.2 for $60 bucks, instead of the $70 dollars stamped on the last one (making the whole of season one pricing out at $130, which is what you pay for a season of DEEP SPACE NINE, though smart shoppers will find it for about $50 bucks a box most places).
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In terms of extras most people will probably turn first to Kevin Spacey's 17 minute edited interview (cut down from an hour's worth of material shot in England on or near the set of BEYOND THE SEA, his Bobby Darin biopic). Spacey is charming as he recounts how he came to audition for the series (see the quote-of-the-week below), and tells us that, since he had to be on the set three days after getting the part, his "research" amounted to watching THE GODFATHER and SCARFACE in his hotel room on the Sunday before his first day of shooting (in fact you see a few Pacinoesque hand gestures, lip pursings, and eye rollings in early episodes).
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I wonder if William Russ and Joan Severance ran into each other on the day they shot their interviews, because they are placed in front of the same big potted plant somewhere. Both give funny and valuable information about how they got the parts and how the show affected their careers. Russ says sincerely that he enjoys people coming up and reminding him how much they appreciated him in the show; so feel free to call him Buckwheat if you see him in an airport.
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Wahl only does one commentary track on this set, over episode four on disc one, and as with his previous yak, it sounds like he was interviewed, with his interlocutor's Qs edited out later. On the one hand, Wahl will go into maddening detail about the wholly insignificant differences in what Canadians and American film crews call their directors of photography, and then turn around and tell part of an intriguing behind the scenes anecdote about the making of the show that makes you sit up and go, "Wha?" Only once does he convey the idea that there may have been some tension on the set. There's a scene in which Russ as Lococco throws something against the wall. In the original staging, Wahl was supposed to catch it. But Russ, according to Wahl, complained that Vinnie's catching the thing upstaged him, so everyone agreed to let Russ hit the wall with it. Wahl considers this "throwing a bone" to the fussy Russ, conjuring visions of a preening Russ adjusting his black t-shirt with precision before flexing his pecs in his big action scene. But I also get the impression that Wahl is just teasing Russ a little. Maybe Russ will hit back on some later disc track.
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Cannell and writer David Burke chat about the show first individually, and then get together spontaneously for a double act. Their insights are valuable and amusing, and Cannell tells a funny story about a writers' rebellion mounted against him after they had all read the first Mel Profitt script.
Studio Works Entertainment has announced that it is releasing four more WISEGUY boxes, bringing the total to six, and personally I can't wait. Those who want to keep up on info about the show can, as I did while pondering this review, consult the invaluable newsgroup alt.tv.wiseguy. Contributor Joseph Russo invites questions and comments about WISEGUY (vince4587@yahoo.com).
By the way, one of the pleasures of viewing old shows is seeing now prominent actors in minor roles, and seeing vague connections that otherwise don't mean anything. For an example of the first, in episode five of the Profitt arc you can see a very young Cancer man from the X-FILES. And regarding the second, there is a funny moment in episode three in which Mel ponders "all dreams fulfilled" — a curious anticipation of Jack Vincenne's discovering of Pierce Patchett's greeting card, "All You Desire."
DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Kevin Spacey: "I'll tell you something I am just profoundly grateful for, is a conversation that I had that first weekend I got to Vancouver. I had done a production of a Eugene O'Neill play for most of the previous year with Jack Lemmon. And I remember all these times when Jack would sit around and he'd talk about the Golden Age of television. So I called him that weekend and I said, 'Tell me why is it that you and so many others view that time in television in the '50s as the Golden Age. What was it about it? Why?' And Jack said to me, 'Well, one of the reasons was because it was a brand new medium. So nobody had any idea what was gonna work. And it wasn't commercially driven. And it wasn't driven by ratings. It was this new medium in which you could do anything. You could do comedies one week, you could do drama, you could do a musical; you could take chances. You could' — and this was the word that hit me like a lightning bolt — 'you could approach your work with total abandon.' And I thought, 'Total abandon. Now that's not a word that I would normally associate with television.' Not that good work can't be done, because that camera doesn't know, it's just a TV camera. And that is literally how I decided to approach the whole series, with total abandon." —Kevin Spacey on how he approached Mel Profitt on WISEGUY (7:18).
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