CBS pilot episode hits the city's streets

Dawn Keezer, director of the Pittsburgh Film Office, talks with John Wells, writer and executive producer of "Smith," during filming on Liberty Avenue, Downtown.






"Smith" director Christopher Chulack talks with Amy Smart, who plays Annie, a professional thief, and Maria Diczia, who plays Nancy, during a break in filming on Liberty Avenue.






From:Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Date:March 24, 2006
By Rob Owen

A microphone operator points his boom into Downtown traffic to record street sounds.

Crew members greet and introduce themselves to one another.

Actress Amy Smart ("Road Trip," "The Butterfly Effect") takes a Taser-style stun gun to another actress in an alley.

Welcome to day No. 1 of production on "Smith," the pilot episode of a prospective CBS series written and executive produced by John Wells ("ER," "The West Wing").

Although the lead character lives in Los Angeles, "Smith" follows a crew of professional thieves who travel to various cities to stage heists, including Pittsburgh, where Oakland's Mellon Institute will play the exterior of the fictitious Tanner Museum. Thieves, led by actor Ray Liotta and including Simon Baker ("The Guardian"), will attempt to swipe two Rembrandts and a van Gogh.


Smart plays one of the crooks, too, filming her scenes yesterday, playing a distraction to the art theft who gets distracted herself.

Before chatting yesterday afternoon with students at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, Wells looked on as director Christopher Chulack shouted "Action! Action! Action!" Background actors moved through their paces on the sidewalk as cameras on both sides of Liberty Avenue filmed Smart in a short sidewalk scene. Later, a scene in an alley with Smart, another actress and a stun gun was shot.

Wells explained "Smith" will focus almost entirely on thieves, with FBI agents arriving only in the closing moments of the pilot in a scene that explains the show's title.

" 'Smith' is a name the FBI will give to a person or persons unknown that they're trying to identify," Wells said.

"Smith" is the first pilot Wells, one of television's most successful and respected show runners, has written (as opposed to produced) in several years.

"The last pilot I probably wrote was 'Third Watch,' " he said, explaining he was distracted by "West Wing" duties after Aaron Sorkin departed that

With "Smith," Wells wanted to create a series that could shoot in different locales for a stylish look. He also wanted to steer away from the glut of cop and investigative shows currently on the air.

"I really like to look for pieces that work in the genre so we can write about characters -- how they interact, what their lives are like," Wells said.

Because of his production company's experience working on "ER" scenes in Chicago, "Smith" was initially set there.

"We had some resistance from The Art Institute, and there were only a few limited hours we'd be able to shoot there," Wells said. Ultimately, Wells and company decided the script would work just as well in Pittsburgh.

"Our locations are better here," he said. "The relationship of the roads to the river [helps us]. How low-lying some of the roads are will allow us to do boat chases along the river and run alongside it with equipment and a helicopter. A lot of things about it work better for us -- although Pittsburgh really needs a [non-red eye] direct flight from L.A. again."

A few scenes featuring explosions and fireballs will be filmed during the production's stay, which wraps up Tuesday.

"It won't be a sniper shooting pigeons again," Wells said, chuckling over the incident that shut down parts of Downtown Wednesday. "It'll be us."

Executive producer Brooke Kennedy, who previously worked with Wells on "Third Watch" and "Trinity" and filmed the 1990 Susan Lucci TV movie "The Bride in Black" in Pittsburgh, said she was happy to return.

"One of the exciting things about shooting on streets, you never know what it brings to you," Kennedy said as pedestrians traipsed past film cameras. "You've gotta embrace it all."

Though the show's thieves are not based in Pittsburgh, Wells and Kennedy said the production crew might return.

"What usually happens with shooting companies is once you've been to a place, you get to know people, and you say, 'Oh, we could go back,' " Wells said.

In addition to local exterior shooting, "Smith" will film inside galleries at The Carnegie Museum in Oakland. One interior gallery will be re-created on a soundstage in Los Angeles, recycling the White House East Room set from Wells' soon-to-conclude "The West Wing."

"We have to shoot it up a bit and we were getting ready to tear it down, so why not shoot it up?"

"Smith," produced by Warner Bros., is a pilot CBS will consider for its fall schedule. Every year around this time, the broadcast networks order dozens of test episodes of prospective series and choose from among these pilots to set their fall schedules. The fate of "Smith" won't be known until May.

This year, CBS ordered 11 drama pilots, according to The Hollywood Reporter. But looking at CBS's schedule and considering that most of its drama series already have been renewed, there appear to be few openings for new dramas, unless CBS scraps time slots currently devoted to sitcoms or its faltering Sunday night movie. (CBS will likely order a few back-up series for mid-season as well.)

Wells knows getting picked up is no sure bet, but he's not worried about following after other new thief shows (NBC's "Heist," FX's "Thief") when criminal investigators clog the schedule.

"When it comes to crime, criminals are under-represented and law enforcement is over-represented on the schedules now," he said.

If "Smith" gets picked up, viewers nationwide will see Pittsburgh playing itself. But if it doesn't, no one outside of Hollywood studio and network screening rooms will ever see this program.

"Smith" isn't the only TV project shooting in Pittsburgh this week. "Prison Girl," a Japanese TV movie for Nippon Television about a Japanese woman wrongly imprisoned in New York, is shooting at the former Western Penitentiary.

FromPittsburgh Post-Gazette.