Post by kwintet123 on May 21, 2003 22:49:53 GMT -5
Here is a copy of the article that I have just posted on SBOL, it is a very long one so I will have to make more than one post to include it all- hope you enjoy it. Iconic will be putting it onto Simonshpere as well:-
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The Age’s Green Guide this morning held a pleasant surprise when it came out of its wrapping this morning. A full page (new, so iconic informs me) picture of Nick Fallin on the cover in a nice pinstripe suit with an equally nice pinstripe shirt and dark shiny tie - very yum. The words on the front cover: ‘BAKER’S RISE - Simon Baker talks to Debi Enker about his craft, his character and success in America. Page 8’.
Page 8 as follows: (with large picture of that beautiful Emmy shot)
COVER STORY
Fallin on his feet (in large letters)
He may not like his character but Simon Baker makes him work.
Debi Enker meets the star of THE GUARDIAN
There was a striking symmetry when Simon Baker presented two of the big three awards on Logies night. Eleven years ago, Baker had been the recipient of the Most Popular New Talent award for his work on E Street. Now, he’d returned to the stage of Australian television’s much-hyped night of nights as the golden boy made good, the star of the US drama series THE GUARDIAN, and as a high-profile celebrity guest.
Over the last decade, Baker has carved out the kind of career that many aspiring actors dream about. He started out in soaps (E STREET, HOME & AWAY, HEARTBREAK HIGH), then packed up his young family to take a chance on Tinseltown. His first role was a small but memorable one in the award-winning thriller, LA CONFIDENTIAL. After finding a foothold in the film industry, he also found favour with Leslie Moonves, the head of the CBS network, and was offered the lead in the Pittsburgh-based legal drama.
His perpetually troubled character, lawyer Nick Fallin, is now a familiar TV presence and the show is comfortably poised between its second and third seasons. Baker, who has also directed an episode in the second season, is even in a position to do a movie during the “hiatus”. And he had a pile of scripts to choose from.
The only one he’s picked is a psychological thriller “about relationships and fidelity” by writer-director Alan Brown, who previously made a short film that was well-received at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s not a big-budget, mainstream choice and it doesn’t seem destined to become a box-office blockbuster. Which is part of the reason that Baker has chosen it.
“I read a lot of scripts during the year in the hope of being able to work on something during the hiatus, just to have something else to do creatively other than being that little prick, Nick Fallin,” Baker explains with disarming candour. “I’m drawn to stuff that is not necessarily commercial. I figure I work on commercial television, I don’t need to do a big cheesy, commercial movie.”<br>
Baker is clearly proud of the series in which he plays the title character, a hot-shot corporate lawyer and convicted drug offender who’s ordered to serve out his sentence doing community service work in a child-advocacy office. But that doesn’t mean he’s not aware of the show’s limitations, either for him as an actor or as a product of free-to-air network television.
“There’s a certain standard that the show sets when we get it right, which is obviously not every episode,” he says. “But when all the elements come together the right way, we capture something that is rare on commercial network television in America. I’m excluding shows like THE SOPRANOS and SIX FEET UNDER which screen on HBO and don’t have the restrictions that a show like ours has. We have to deal with Standards and Practices, advertisers and affiliate stations. We have to adhere to a five-act structure, with commercial breaks. On HBO, they have a subscription base, they have no limits, really, as to what they can do. We have to create stand-alone shows that can be played out-of-sequence.”<br>
Created by David Hollander, THE GUARDIAN has both the top end of town and the grimy mean streets covered. Nick spends a part of his professional life in the offices of Fallin & Fallin, a powerhouse law firm he runs in partnership with his father, the venerable Burton (Dabney Coleman). There he deals with bullying CEOs and corporate takeovers. Then he grabs his expensive coat and natty briefcase and heads downtown to a desk in the less luxurious offices of Legal Services, where he battles to represent the interests of teenage incest victims, abused street kids and child prostitutes.
He’s forced to straddle the two worlds and to deploy his street smarts, negotiating skills and courtroom wiles to best effect in both places. The price he pays is that, in these worlds of murky moralities, where law and justice might be very different things and where good intentions often don’t result in great outcomes, there’s a lot of heartache. THE GUARDIAN isn’t a drama known for its sunny disposition: most of the time, life in Pittsburgh is pretty grim.
For Baker, the show might have a legal backdrop, but it’s really about a father and son. “The core of it is this sort-of love story between the father and the son, how they’re trying to have a relationship and they can’t: they just can’t communicate. That’s something that’s not necessarily spoken about in the show, but it’s the core.
Baker thought from the time that he read Hollander’s pilot script that he could do something interesting with Nick Fallin. Although his experience on a failed pilot, THE LAST BEST PLACE, in 1996, had soured him on the idea of working in television, things had changed. For starters, his wife, actor Rebecca Rigg, whom he’d met on the set of E STREET, was expecting their third child, so Baker was thinking of a more stable working life.
He’d made nine films, as various as MOST WANTED (1997), JUDAS KISS (1998), LOVE FROM GROUND ZERO (1998), RED PLANET (2000), and THE AFFAIR OF THE NECKLACE (2001), but found that “every time I’d do a film, I’d come back and have to hit the pavement again and audition for other films. I didn’t get the Hugh Jackman ride or the Heath Ledger ride: one movie and click. In America, it has so much to do with money. If you’re involved in a film that makes a lot of money, suddenly you’re a star. But you never know how a film’s going to turn out when you’re making it. You always hope for the best. People don’t set out to make shitty movies. You do the best you can and you hope.”<br>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Age’s Green Guide this morning held a pleasant surprise when it came out of its wrapping this morning. A full page (new, so iconic informs me) picture of Nick Fallin on the cover in a nice pinstripe suit with an equally nice pinstripe shirt and dark shiny tie - very yum. The words on the front cover: ‘BAKER’S RISE - Simon Baker talks to Debi Enker about his craft, his character and success in America. Page 8’.
Page 8 as follows: (with large picture of that beautiful Emmy shot)
COVER STORY
Fallin on his feet (in large letters)
He may not like his character but Simon Baker makes him work.
Debi Enker meets the star of THE GUARDIAN
There was a striking symmetry when Simon Baker presented two of the big three awards on Logies night. Eleven years ago, Baker had been the recipient of the Most Popular New Talent award for his work on E Street. Now, he’d returned to the stage of Australian television’s much-hyped night of nights as the golden boy made good, the star of the US drama series THE GUARDIAN, and as a high-profile celebrity guest.
Over the last decade, Baker has carved out the kind of career that many aspiring actors dream about. He started out in soaps (E STREET, HOME & AWAY, HEARTBREAK HIGH), then packed up his young family to take a chance on Tinseltown. His first role was a small but memorable one in the award-winning thriller, LA CONFIDENTIAL. After finding a foothold in the film industry, he also found favour with Leslie Moonves, the head of the CBS network, and was offered the lead in the Pittsburgh-based legal drama.
His perpetually troubled character, lawyer Nick Fallin, is now a familiar TV presence and the show is comfortably poised between its second and third seasons. Baker, who has also directed an episode in the second season, is even in a position to do a movie during the “hiatus”. And he had a pile of scripts to choose from.
The only one he’s picked is a psychological thriller “about relationships and fidelity” by writer-director Alan Brown, who previously made a short film that was well-received at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s not a big-budget, mainstream choice and it doesn’t seem destined to become a box-office blockbuster. Which is part of the reason that Baker has chosen it.
“I read a lot of scripts during the year in the hope of being able to work on something during the hiatus, just to have something else to do creatively other than being that little prick, Nick Fallin,” Baker explains with disarming candour. “I’m drawn to stuff that is not necessarily commercial. I figure I work on commercial television, I don’t need to do a big cheesy, commercial movie.”<br>
Baker is clearly proud of the series in which he plays the title character, a hot-shot corporate lawyer and convicted drug offender who’s ordered to serve out his sentence doing community service work in a child-advocacy office. But that doesn’t mean he’s not aware of the show’s limitations, either for him as an actor or as a product of free-to-air network television.
“There’s a certain standard that the show sets when we get it right, which is obviously not every episode,” he says. “But when all the elements come together the right way, we capture something that is rare on commercial network television in America. I’m excluding shows like THE SOPRANOS and SIX FEET UNDER which screen on HBO and don’t have the restrictions that a show like ours has. We have to deal with Standards and Practices, advertisers and affiliate stations. We have to adhere to a five-act structure, with commercial breaks. On HBO, they have a subscription base, they have no limits, really, as to what they can do. We have to create stand-alone shows that can be played out-of-sequence.”<br>
Created by David Hollander, THE GUARDIAN has both the top end of town and the grimy mean streets covered. Nick spends a part of his professional life in the offices of Fallin & Fallin, a powerhouse law firm he runs in partnership with his father, the venerable Burton (Dabney Coleman). There he deals with bullying CEOs and corporate takeovers. Then he grabs his expensive coat and natty briefcase and heads downtown to a desk in the less luxurious offices of Legal Services, where he battles to represent the interests of teenage incest victims, abused street kids and child prostitutes.
He’s forced to straddle the two worlds and to deploy his street smarts, negotiating skills and courtroom wiles to best effect in both places. The price he pays is that, in these worlds of murky moralities, where law and justice might be very different things and where good intentions often don’t result in great outcomes, there’s a lot of heartache. THE GUARDIAN isn’t a drama known for its sunny disposition: most of the time, life in Pittsburgh is pretty grim.
For Baker, the show might have a legal backdrop, but it’s really about a father and son. “The core of it is this sort-of love story between the father and the son, how they’re trying to have a relationship and they can’t: they just can’t communicate. That’s something that’s not necessarily spoken about in the show, but it’s the core.
Baker thought from the time that he read Hollander’s pilot script that he could do something interesting with Nick Fallin. Although his experience on a failed pilot, THE LAST BEST PLACE, in 1996, had soured him on the idea of working in television, things had changed. For starters, his wife, actor Rebecca Rigg, whom he’d met on the set of E STREET, was expecting their third child, so Baker was thinking of a more stable working life.
He’d made nine films, as various as MOST WANTED (1997), JUDAS KISS (1998), LOVE FROM GROUND ZERO (1998), RED PLANET (2000), and THE AFFAIR OF THE NECKLACE (2001), but found that “every time I’d do a film, I’d come back and have to hit the pavement again and audition for other films. I didn’t get the Hugh Jackman ride or the Heath Ledger ride: one movie and click. In America, it has so much to do with money. If you’re involved in a film that makes a lot of money, suddenly you’re a star. But you never know how a film’s going to turn out when you’re making it. You always hope for the best. People don’t set out to make shitty movies. You do the best you can and you hope.”<br>
But I don't really understand the name of his co-actor real well. 
...
