Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion Read Free Page A

ground,” says Kotcheff, who was tapped to be in charge of the operation’s East Coast sector.
    The switch in his career path stunned people he knew in the industry, one of whom even teased him: “Hey, Kotcheff! I understand you’ve gone over to the other side.”

    Ted Kotcheff
    The man who lured Kotcheff to the other side, Dick Wolf, remains certain of his decision. “When I heard that Ted was interested in doing television, I was both amazed and delighted,” he writes in an email. “As the director of one of the greatest sports films in the history of American cinema, North Dallas Forty (1979), he is an extraordinary talent. Ted is very versatile—he has expertise in drama, comedy, and character, and his films, including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) and Fun with Dick and Jane (1977) speak for themselves.”
    The SVU launch also was graced by an experienced writer well known to Wolf: Robert Palm, who had left Law & Order after the first two seasons because “I got bored with the format. I was proud of my work there, but felt kind of handcuffed.” Drum roll, please, for that law-enforcement imagery.
    Palm went on to co-author several TV pilots with Wolf throughout the 1990s, though none were ever picked up. Then the two men had a falling out and stopped speaking altogether.
    One day, Palm’s agent called him about a pilot that his estranged L&O friend had written for a new series on sex crimes. “I told (Wolf Films president) Peter Jankowski, ‘I will never ever work with him again.’ He said, ‘Please, just read the fucking script.’ I did and, son of a bitch, it was brilliant. Later, Dick said to me, ‘So, forever is five years, huh?’”
    Palm, an L. A. resident at the time, became SVU ’s first showrunner. As such, it was his idea to refer to the original Law & Order as the Mother Ship. “We made up stationery that dubbed our (new) show ‘The Bastard Step-child,’” he recalls.
    His goal was to give the series “a strong woman’s perspective. I helped bring in female writers—more women than might normally be found in Wolfland, shall we say.”
    His former boss sees it somewhat differently. “Depending on the season, there are many female writers on all these series,” Wolf contends. “We tend to have several female writers on SVU because of the subject matter.”
    Among the gender pioneers were Dawn DeNoon, now a co-executive producer, and her writing partner at the time, Lisa Marie Petersen. Their route to SVU was a bit circuitous, however.
    Longtime fans of the Mother Ship, they reacted with glee when their agent delivered some good news: “ Law & Order wanted to meet with us? Oooh! And this was not SVU , this was L&O ,” DeNoon recalls.

    In May of 1999, the duo talked with René Balcer (then the L&O showrunner, now a consulting producer for USA’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent ) in L. A. “He said they weren’t hiring staff, but they were doing a spin-off of L&O that year, which I couldn’t imagine because it was such an institution, called Sex Crimes , which was the original title,” DeNoon says.
    She and Petersen subsequently met with Palm, who promised: “‘You’ll hear from me this week,’ and we heard nothing.”
    Time passed. The two women had an interview for the CBS show JAG , which made them an immediate offer. Before they could respond their agent got a call with a second offer—from the fledgling SVU . “So there was no question over which one to take, not to say anything against JAG ,” DeNoon confesses. “We screamed when we heard we got a job with (the new) Law & Order .”
    Symbolically, it could have been a scream heard clear across the country. In New York City, Jonathan Greene was writing and producing documentaries on a freelance basis. In his spare time, he tried his hand at fictional scripts that never quite made it to the finish line.
    Greene eventually paired with a former TV journalism colleague, Robert F. Campbell. He, in turn, knew