"I was having an incredibly difficult time casting that role because the black actors who were coming in to read for it were still being very 'street,'" explains Fontana. One of the more fascinating characters, and performances, in the series, was that of Kareem Saïd, played by British actor Eamonn Walker. Terry Kinney, who played Tim McManus, behind the camera. When I was a bartender, I had this mantra in my head: 'If you leave my bar with cab fare, then I've failed.' I think there was a whole kind of stew there that Tom saw between those two worlds, and that's how the character of Ryan O'Reilly was born."
"Tom came in and said, 'Listen, don't quit just yet-I'm doing this little experimental show for HBO it's their first cable show, and I've written you this really incredible role.' Tom really based my part on two things: the character Iago from Othello and watching me bartend. "I was in my trailer, and I really didn't think the acting life was for me," he tells me over the phone. This was in 1992, when Winters was a jobbing actor who was all but ready to give up on his career until Fontana-who occasionally drank in Winters's bar-visited him on the set of the Mel Gibson political thriller Conspiracy Theory. Photo by Eric Liebowitz/HBOĭean Winters-who played the duplicitous Irish American string puller and old romantic, Ryan O'Reilly-worked in a bar on New York's Upper East Side with his brother, Scott, who would go on to play Dean's mentally disabled on-screen brother Cyril in the show. Tom Fontana (left) and Dean Winters on set. In fact, he wrote many of the parts with specific people in mind. He said, 'I don't care if they're likable as long as they're interesting.' That was my mantra."įontana wasn't stuck for interesting actors to play these interesting characters, either. Everything I do I start with character anyway, so I just started laying out who all the major characters were. "I think he saw the value of that for his audience they had had great success on HBO with prison documentaries. "He was in the mood for a prison show," Fontana tells me. However, for Chris Albrecht, it was something of a no-brainer. Twenty years ago, American television was largely restrained by the chaste, Tipper Gore–esque attitudes of middle America, so commissioning a show like OZ could have proved a risky move. There was no grand vision of the future of cable television-all I knew was this guy was gonna let me make this crazy prison show, and do it without any censorship." "The thought was that I was prescient," says Fontana, "which I've always said I wasn't. But it isn't just a format: The hour-long cable drama-coupled with the emergence of the DVD, capable of holding more shows per disc than a VHS, at a higher quality-created a new way of consuming television. Since OZ first aired, the network's name has become synonymous with quality programming (with the exception of Entourage and Vinyl-nobody's perfect.) The shows it has produced-and still produce-have dominated conversations around the format it's credited with creating. These days, the idea of HBO picking up your show as a bad thing seems unfathomable.
#OZ TV SHOW CHARACTERS MOVIE#
I was like 'Yay! This is gonna be great!' and all of my friends in the business were like, 'Why do you want to do a show on HBO? It's a movie channel, nobody watches it.' I said, 'Well yeah, but they're going to let me make the show I want to make, so I don't care if nobody watches it.' Like I said, it was a lonely place 20 years ago." "In fact, when I was pitching to Chris Albrecht, and he said he wanted to do OZ, I was exuberant. "They were showing features, buying libraries of movie studios," says Fontana.
#OZ TV SHOW CHARACTERS SERIES#
"We were sort of this lonely outpost on HBO," says Fontana, "because we were the first drama series on there, and back then, we were out there just doing what we thought was right-but we had no idea whether anyone would have any interest in it whatsoever."īefore Fontana took his idea to HBO, the cable network was just a vessel for movies.
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