Turning a hit movie into a successful TV show is a tricky business. I'm not sure if the makers of the new fall series "Crash" have made it easier or harder for themselves.
"Crash" the movie, released in 2005, won the Best Picture Oscar with a series of interlocking stories about race and class in Los Angeles, acted by a stellar ensemble including Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle (right), Matt Dillon and Thandie Newton. The producers of "Crash" the TV show are keeping the idea of interlocking stories about race and class in L.A., but with a completely new cast and set of characters.
"I don't see how this relates to the movie at all, except it happens in Los Angeles and people are angry," one reporter said at press tour on Friday.
"I really enjoyed the film. It left a big impact on me, and I felt like, as an artist, that that was material that I wanted to tackle," said Glen Mazzara, writer and executive producer of the series. ". I left that movie thinking, wow, I wish I wrote that. And so then the idea of continuing the characters or picking up the storylines, I didn't think I was going to do it justice.
"I didn't feel the need to go back to that movie and say, OK, what happens on the next day?" Mazzara said. "It really comes out of the emotion that I felt when I watched the film. It really was just a feel of that film I was going for."
The TV show will examine life in L.A. through characters including a psycho music mogul, his young black limo driver, a Guatemalan immigrant, a cop and a Korean-American EMT. All of them are played by relative unknowns, except the music mogul, played by Dennis Hopper. "He's totally out of control. He's, well - I shared an office with Phil Spector for about 10 years," Hopper said, to laughter.
There are a couple of other connections to the movie. A car crash, duh, is one of the plot devices that brings the characters together. And the series producers include Cheadle and Bobby Moresco, who co-wrote the film.
"I never saw it as a series necessarily, but I thought that there were a lot of hanging chads, so to speak, from the film, and a lot of storylines that, if not specifically, that the energy of where these storylines were going would be interesting to see how they were carried out, and how they would further themselves in a series," said Cheadle.
The other big drama involved in "Crash" is about where it's playing. The 13-episode "Crash" is the first drama series attempted by the movie channel Starz. Executives there hope it will put them on the map the way "Mad Men" has AMC.
"We've been in the movie business and taking movies on our channel for a long period of time and it's been great content," said Starz COO Bill Myers. "But the one thing we've always wanted to try to get is to have some real compelling content that will bring the customer back week in and week out. ...And what we wanted to do was to be real measured as to how we got into it, as opposed to just jumping in. So we were really looking for the right idea and the right content, and we think this is a great start for us."
"Crash" debuts Oct. 17.
