JONNY LEE MILLER IN SMITH

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Episode one

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Smith on CBS - Includes videos, bios and more

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SMITH CANCELLED

RAY LIOTTA's new crime drama SMITH has been cancelled by US TV network CBS after only three episodes.

The GOODFELLAS actor starred alongside SIDEWAYS actress VIRGINIA MADSEN, JONNY LEE MILLER, AMY SMART and SIMON BAKER in the show, which focuses on the lives of a gang of professional criminals.

CBS have confirmed they are pulling Smith from their Tuesday night schedule after only attracting 8.5 million viewers and will fill the slot with re-runs of CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION and CRIMINAL MINDS.

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Making 'Smith'

The pilot for CBS's heist series "Smith," which filmed a portion of its pilot in Pittsburgh this year, runs a hefty 60 minutes without commercials. Executive producer John Wells, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate, said the premiere episode won't be cut but will air as a 90-minute premiere with commercials or as a commercial-free, single-sponsor hour.

The show is set in Los Angeles with a band of thieves (led by Ray Liotta and including Simon Baker of "The Guardian") who travel the country staging commissioned heists. In the pilot, they steal art from Pittsburgh's fictional "Tanner Museum" (Oakland's Mellon Institute plays the exterior, while the Carnegie Museum was used for filming some of the interiors). "We'll come back to Pittsburgh," Wells said. "I'm not sure it will be this year because we just did it, but it's a beautiful city to shoot."

Director Chris Chulack said he'd never been to Pittsburgh before "Smith," but he was impressed with the city visually and with the filming experience. "We were moving fast and furious, setting off explosions, and I think the city treated us really well," Chulack said. "The crew we hired there was great. It didn't feel different from shooting in New York, Chicago or South Africa. For the stuff we did in the short time we were doing it, it couldn't have gone more smoothly."

Baker plays a cold-blooded killer in "Smith" who shoots two guys in the pilot when they throw him off a Hawaiian beach. Like his "Guardian" character, he doesn't say much in "Smith." "Actions speak louder than words," Baker said, grinning. While other cast members justified the likability of their characters at a news conference, afterward Baker said that was of less interest to him, saying he couldn't care less whether anyone likes him, because "I had fun."

Baker, who moved his family back to Australia before "Smith" and has since moved them back to Los Angeles, said returning to Pittsburgh, where "The Guardian" was set and occasionally filmed, was "weird." "It was the same hotel, but a different time of year," Baker said. "Every time we were there for 'The Guardian,' it was summer, and this time it was freezing cold. It was just nice to see people in the lobby of the hotel, people who worked at the hotel, who I knew. I ran into familiar faces."

Baker, who just wrapped the film "Sex and Death 101" (starring Winona Ryder and written and directed by Daniel Waters of "Heathers" fame), said he doesn't miss "The Guardian." "Three years was enough to get it out of my system," he said. His time on "Smith" could be briefer. Wells envisions the series as one with the potential for a lot of cast turnover.

"The idea with this series is there will be a lot of actors in this show if it lasts five or six years," he said. "People get caught, people run away, people die."

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Smith to be shown in the UK

ITV has today announced its own pickings from the LA screenings, with a drama a piece for its three multichannels.

Heading the slate is Smith, an all-star crime drama featuring Ray Liotta, Virginia Madsen and Jonny Lee Miller that follows criminal masterminds from a "humanised" perspective. The show, from Warner Bros, has been earmarked for male channel ITV4.

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Tuned In: CBS pilot episode hits the city's streets
Friday, March 24, 2006

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 show.

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.

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