EdwardBurns

NY Daily News “Bridge and Tunnel” Feature

Ed Burns wanted to make a show that made him smile, so he went home to Long Island.


The six-episode EPIX drama “Bridge and Tunnel,” premiering Sunday at 9 p.m., was envisioned as a series set in 1980: half on Long Island, half in Manhattan. Burns, who wrote, directed and stars in the show, had everything planned.


“It was these bridge and tunnel kids going into the city to pursue their big dreams while also living their smaller lives at home in their backyards and on their front stoop,” Burns told the Daily News.


Then COVID-19 hit and 20% of his budget was redirected to testing and PPE. Suddenly, dreams of recreating CBGB and a bustling LIRR were dashed.


“Forget about a nightclub scene where you might have 80 extras; that scene had to be turned into three people sitting at a backyard picnic table having the same conversation,” Burns, 52, explained.
Instead, “Bridge and Tunnel” turned into a quieter affair, a simple story of six recent college graduates figuring out what comes next.


It’s a little “Freaks and Geeks” and a little “The Graduate,” but for Burns, who grew up in Valley Stream, it just felt like home.


“The time in New York that I have overly romanticized has always been the late ’70s going into the early ’80s. The birth of punk and new wave and early hip hop and the fashion scene and the art scene at that time,” he told The News.


“I didn’t get to experience that — I’m 11, 12 years old in 1980 — so I kind of looked at that as when New York was at its coolest. This was an opportunity for me to selfishly recreate that world so I could experience it.”


The pandemic cut out the noise and focused the show on the group of six who grew up together and were faced with separation and, for some, leaving the island for the first time.


Burns started at the end, working backwards from where he wanted his characters to land. Jill (Caitlin Stasey) would be a fashion designer, maybe working in the Garment District or maybe the next Donna Karan. Pags (Brian Muller) will manage a band or be an A&R guy for a studio.

 

Jimmy, Burns’ on-screen son played by Sam Vartholomeos, is taking photographs, a journey on which he begins “Bridge and Tunnel” with a six-month trip to Alaska for National Geographic.


“Do I have him being a photojournalist working for the Daily News or does he end up becoming an assistant for Richard Avedon or does he end up becoming a sports photographer?” Burns said.


First jobs and first loves are as high-stakes as “Bridge and Tunnel” gets. Jimmy and Jill, the central love interests, have broken up and made up a half-dozen times before and will do so a half-dozen more by the time the first season is over.


“The strength of the story relies very heavily on believing they love each other,” Stasey, a 30-year-old Australian actress who worked with a dialect coach to nail Jill’s nasally accent, told The News. “When someone loves someone and you’re young and naive, you can justify a lot of choices they make, even if you disagree with them.”


Vartholomeos, the Queens native who plays Jimmy, joked that it’s every actor’s dream to “play a New Yorker in the ’80s with Ed Burns as his dad.” But showing off his hometown was even more special.
“It’s really easy, as a New Yorker, to just look at this place and be like, ‘Ayyy, there’s freakin’ garbage everywhere and everybody freakin’ sucks but I love ‘em,’” the 25-year-old actor said, exaggerating his natural New York accent. “But there’s something super kinetic here. There’s a mold to this city that we love to break.”


“Bridge and Tunnel” isn’t a true story. The most biographical tidbit Burns wrote in is the all-girl punk band Wildfire, an homage to the license plate on his sister’s friend’s ’77 Camaro. But in its simplicity, it could be anyone’s true story.
“There’s that line in ‘The Great Gatsby’ about going over the (Queensboro) Bridge and the city holds such ‘wild promise,’” Burns told The News.


“For most bridge and tunnel kids like me, eventually you learn to wear (the name) as a badge of honor. Especially if you came into New York and you were able to make it happen.”

Variety “Bridge and Tunnel” Feature

Edward Burns was only 12-years-old in 1980, so he doesn’t consider that decade to be one he experienced to the fullest at the time. Having some distance from the politics or harder events of the time period, though, makes him look back on it fondly as a simpler time, “the way you look back at an old photograph and think, ‘Oh that looks so nice,’” he says. That is what made it the perfect setting for his new Epix dramedy “Bridge and Tunnel.”

“I thought of this as, ‘You’re making “Downton Abbey.”‘ In no way was I trying to recreate the 1970s [or] 1980s, but look at it through the rose-colored, nostalgia look back,” Burns tells Variety.

“The time period that I’ve always been obsessed with is the late-’70s in New York: You’ve got the birth of punk and New Wave and hip hop; you’ve got a great art scene; you’ve got a great fashion scene. New York is still gritty, but I’ve always romanticized it,” he continues. “The scenes of the block are clearly me reminiscing about what that felt like as a little kid.”

“Bridge and Tunnel,” which Burns created, as well as writes, produces, directs and stars in, centers on six young friends who are all set to embark on their professional careers and true adult lives after having graduated from college — but first they reunite in their hometown on Long Island, and old relationship dynamics rear their heads, which threatens to upend some of their plans. The central character of Jimmy (Sam Vartholomeos), for example, is all set to be a photographer’s assistant for National Geographic but being back in Jill’s (Caitlin Stasey) orbit makes him think twice about leaving New York because he doesn’t want to lose their romance.

“I’m sure most people can relate to that night before Thanksgiving when you’re younger [feeling]: you go home to your parents’ house and everyone goes to the local bar, and I always thought it was interesting that regardless of what was going on, the old pecking order, for some reason, reestablished itself. That was one of the things I wanted to play with,” says Burns.

Other characters are struggling with following their dreams, without backup plans and to varying degrees of success: Pags (Brian Muller) wants to be in music; Jill wants to be a fashion designer; Mikey (Jan Luis Castellanos) has artistic talent but is actually trying to start a career in accounting; Tammy (Gigi Zumbado) works as a waitress, and Stacey (Isabella Farrell) has been living big city life in Manhattan by moving in with a boyfriend.

Although a lot about “Bridge and Tunnel” is perfectly in-line with Burns’ past catalogue of work, from its New York sensibility, to its complicated relationship dynamics, and despite Burns having grown up on Long Island with dreams of pursuing the art of filmmaking himself, he says he did not intentionally draw on anyone he knew or use his own experiences to shape these characters. (In fact, it was only when he was filming the show that his longtime producing partner Aaron Lubin pointed out that the on-screen dynamic between Burns’ character Artie and his son Jimmy was similar to Burns’ relationship with his own teenage children. “My kids are in high school so the college conversations have started, and the idea of empty nesting is somewhat disconcerting,” he says.)

In order to craft his characters, “I tried to put myself into Seasons 2 and 3. What are the dreams that each one of my six leads are going to have that are going to be fun to drop them into in 1981 New York?” Burns says. “I had so many different places to go, so I built backwards from there.”

The idea for “Bridge and Tunnel” as a series started over dinner between Burns and Epix president Michael Wright, the auteur recalls. It was a few years ago, well before the COVID-19 pandemic upended the way the world worked but already in the middle of Donald Trump’s presidency, which had already caused a lot of division. Burns says Wright turned to him and said, “I need a show that will put a smile on your face. We are living through some really tough times and there’s a lot of very good programming out there that is dark and depressing, and you turn on the TV at night and you just want, maybe, to have another option.”

Burns says he knew Wright was a fan of “Diner,” Barry Levinson’s 1982 film, and Wright was also championing period pieces. These two elements proved to be the key elements that shaped “Bridge and Tunnel.”

Originally, Burns shares, the first season of the show was going to be eight episodes in length, with half of them showing the dynamics of these friends on Long Island, and half following their adventures in Manhattan. The pandemic forced Burns to pivot, and to condense his season into only six episodes. “Twenty-percent of our budget had to go to COVID protocols,” he explains, citing everything from testing and PPE to “moving people out of their homes” when shooting on location. Additionally, Manhattan was closed for productions, so Burns reimagined a number of scenes that would have been in a restaurant or night club in the city to take place on Long Island.

A park became an important hangout area for this group of friends, which was a “happy accident,” Burns says. He wanted to set as many scenes as he could outside to make everyone as safe as possible, and he also wanted to “embrace the simple pleasures of a smaller world,” including “sitting on your front stoop with your girlfriend, just talking; sitting on the hood of your car sharing a beer with a friend, grilling in the backyard, family dinners.”

“It ended up being a happy accident,” he says, but “it ended up being some of my favorite stuff.”

“Bridge and Tunnel” premieres Jan. 24 at 9 p.m. on Epix.

The New York Times “Bridge and Tunnel” Feature

Edward Burns has carved a distinctive path as an indie filmmaker in the quarter-century since he made a splash with his debut, “The Brothers McMullen.” He has consistently made movies for small ($250,000 for “Looking for Kitty”) to minuscule ($9,000 — yes, you read that right — for “Newlyweds”) budgets, and was experimenting with new distribution models even before the rise of streaming. In 2007, he made the first straight-to-iTunes movie, “Purple Violets,” and in 2010 he inaugurated Comcast’s straight-to-VOD Indie Film Club with “Nice Guy Johnny.”

Now, he sees a bright future for indie filmmakers — “I don’t know if you can call us that anymore, but we’re independent-minded storytellers” — in streaming and premium cable.

“These are the perfect platforms, and it’s one of the most encouraging times for someone with a story to tell,” Burns said.

While he previously ventured into broadcast and basic cable television for short-lived series like “Public Morals,” his new dramedy “Bridge and Tunnel,” premiering Sunday on Epix, marks his entry into premium cable.

Burns said the Epix was looking for “a half-hour show full of promise and joy” as a departure from the darker themes of many prestige TV series. His tonal model for “Bridge and Tunnel” were the early Beatles hits that “put a smile on your face without being cornball-ish,” he added. “We do need that now.”

Set in 1980 in Valley Stream, N.Y., the Long Island town where Burns grew up, the show revolves around six recent college graduates as they try to figure out their futures. “That period when you’ve been away for four years and you’re back in your house with your parents — for some people it’s a week, for some it’s a couple of years — and you’re not quite an adult, but no longer a kid, is really interesting to me,” Burns said.

Burns, who also plays the father of Jimmy (Sam Vartholomeos), an aspiring photographer, includes plenty of period flourishes. A poster of the Mets fan favorite Rusty Staub can be glimpsed on the wall of Jimmy’s childhood room, and Burns lent his own vintage 1960s Mets jersey to Brian Muller, who plays Pags. One character makes a commercial that’s an homage to the pitchman Crazy Eddie, a New York TV fixture in the ’80s; if there’s a second season, Burns hopes to have another character appear in one of the Milford Plaza Hotel “Lullaby of Broadway” ads that ran endlessly back then.

Burns recently spoke by phone about “Bridge and Tunnel” and what he had to do to keep it alive during the pandemic. (The show was shot on Long Island last summer and fall.) These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Burns said the Epix was looking for “a half-hour show full of promise and joy” as a departure from the darker themes of many prestige TV series. His tonal model for “Bridge and Tunnel” were the early Beatles hits that “put a smile on your face without being cornball-ish,” he added. “We do need that now.”

Set in 1980 in Valley Stream, N.Y., the Long Island town where Burns grew up, the show revolves around six recent college graduates as they try to figure out their futures. “That period when you’ve been away for four years and you’re back in your house with your parents — for some people it’s a week, for some it’s a couple of years — and you’re not quite an adult, but no longer a kid, is really interesting to me,” Burns said.

Burns, who also plays the father of Jimmy (Sam Vartholomeos), an aspiring photographer, includes plenty of period flourishes. A poster of the Mets fan favorite Rusty Staub can be glimpsed on the wall of Jimmy’s childhood room, and Burns lent his own vintage 1960s Mets jersey to Brian Muller, who plays Pags. One character makes a commercial that’s an homage to the pitchman Crazy Eddie, a New York TV fixture in the ’80s; if there’s a second season, Burns hopes to have another character appear in one of the Milford Plaza Hotel “Lullaby of Broadway” ads that ran endlessly back then.

Burns recently spoke by phone about “Bridge and Tunnel” and what he had to do to keep it alive during the pandemic. (The show was shot on Long Island last summer and fall.) These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

There’s a vintage soundtrack, with bands ranging from Toto to Blondie, and music is a constant topic of conversation. But why no mention of Billy Joel, the ultimate Long Island star? “Glass Houses” was a number one album in 1980.

As a young guy, I once saw Billy Joel outside a pizza place and when he got into his car, my friends and I followed him. So I’m keeping Billy Joel and that scene in my back pocket for Season 2.

Pags, who loves Styx, gets belittled by his sister, a huge Clash fan. Did you worry you were stacking the deck too much in her favor?

I have a soft spot in my heart for Styx. “Paradise Theatre” came out when I was in eighth grade — if you were in 10th grade maybe you said, “Absolutely not,” but for us it was a big album. I still know guys who are so pissed that Styx is not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, they are completely blinded by their love for the band. I wanted Pags to represent those true Styx fans.

Your characters are working class but mostly went to college and have bigger ambitions. Class isn’t an explicit issue, although Jill (Caitlin Stasey) is belittled for her accent by her snooty Manhattan bosses, but you underscore how things were different.

I think it’s tougher for working class kids today to pursue their dreams. I was able to go to Hunter College at $600 a semester and take film classes. The barrier to entry to some of those fields is tougher now. Tammy (Gigi Zumbado) is going to Columbia Business School and is paying for it with her waitressing job, but today I don’t think that would be enough to make it realistic.

You were set to make the series and then the pandemic happened, and Covid protocols like constant testing and deep cleaning cost $2 million, a big chunk of your budget. Did your background as an indie filmmaker help prepare you for this?

I’ve made so many no-budget and low-budget movies — you have to be able to think on your feet, to rewrite a scene on a moment’s notice, tear up your plans for the day when you lose an actor or when the cops show up and say, “Hey you don’t have a permit.”

If I do have a strength as a filmmaker, it’s my ability to pivot. They said with the $2 million they didn’t think we could do the series. I said, “I can reimagine this show.” We were originally doing eight episodes and half the show took place in Manhattan — we’d see characters coming out of an interview or meeting in a bar there.

I said I’d cut it to six episodes and rewrite everything to take place on the block where they grew up. I moved as many interior scenes as possible to exterior locations for safety, which is why they’re always in the park or hanging in the backyard.

Early in your career you cast rising stars like Connie Britton, Leslie Mann, Cameron Diaz and Amanda Peet. Was it fun looking for new faces again?

Definitely. We didn’t need name recognition so I said “Let’s find the best actors, but look for the kids who keep losing out to the more well-known actors.” Like a ballplayer in Triple A who’s ready and just needs someone to take a chance on him.

Sam Vartholomeos is from Astoria and still lives in Queens. When he came in, he said in auditions it always came down to him and another guy and he’d lose out. But I knew he was the real deal.

He went to LaGuardia High School and he’d had a teacher saying, “You’ve got to get rid of that Queens accent.” He was really concerned and was working on it until another teacher said, “Don’t worry so much — plenty of actors work with an accent. One day, hopefully, you’ll get to play Ed Burns’s son.”

At his first wardrobe fitting he asks whose playing his parents. When he was told I’m playing his dad, he says, “Get de [expletive] outta here. Are you kiddin’ me?”

Edward Burns’ 1 Tip for Making Your Mark

Edward Burns’ résumé boasts an impressive list of filmmaker credits, but “Stoolie,” “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” and “Rainy Dog” are not among them.

At first glance, they’re his failures—scripts about Irish-American cops and gangsters he couldn’t get made over the course of his 20-year career as a microbudget indie moviemaker. But as Burns gears up for his new TNT crime drama, “Public Morals,” it’s the abandoned ideas that are providing his greatest inspiration.

“I was always fascinated with Hell’s Kitchen and the Irish gangs and tough guys that sort of dominated that area for 100 years—just New York City folklore and all these archetypes: the tough-talking Irish cops, the Times Square hookers and junkies, the Italian wise guys, the Dead End Kids, the Bowery Boys, and those types of characters,” says Burns, who grew up the son of an Irish NYPD officer.

“My dad didn’t tell me a lot of stories about being a cop, but there were, like, five he told over the years,” the filmmaker says. “Sometimes when they would lock up hookers, if they knew they were going to night court and the girls were going to have a long night in a jail cell before being processed, they would take the girls out for sandwiches or a hamburger or something before bringing them down to book them.”

The anecdote stuck with Burns, and he wrote the scene into five screenplays that never got made. “When this show got greenlit, I was, like, ‘Of course I’m writing this scene into one of these episodes,’ ” he says.

Premiering Aug. 25, the 1960s-set “Public Morals” focuses on the NYPD as it tries to keep the peace when a war between two factions of the Irish Mob breaks out. “It’s a family saga and I dress it up like a gangster story, so I took two Irish-American families—the Muldoons, who represent the cops, and the Pattons, who represent the gangsters,” says Burns, who plays patriarch cop Terry Muldoon and is backed by a cast of veterans, including Brian Dennehy (“Death of a Salesman”) and Neal McDonough (“Justified,” “Suits”), and newcomers Aaron Dean Eisenberg and Keith Nobbs, among others.

After his arc on the 2013 drama “Mob City” ended, TNT approached him about developing a show for the network, and Burns jumped at the opportunity to tell this gangster-cop story he’d been dreaming up for years.

Backed by executive producer and friend Steven Spielberg, the writer-director-producer-actor was poised to experience a career high after struggling in “microbudget film land” for some time.

“I got to the place where I thought about throwing in the towel on the idea of being sort of an ‘indie auteur’ after a movie I made [in 2007] called ‘Purple Violets,’ ” says Burns, his third consecutive venture that “just didn’t work.”

The film was released solely on iTunes, and Burns’ next project, “Stoolie,” a Hell’s Kitchen gangster drama, never amounted to anything more than an idea. “We just could not get it made,” he says, flustered. “I mean, we knocked the budget down from $7 to $5 to $3 to $2.5 million and still couldn’t find anyone to cut a check. So I called my agents and I’m, like, ‘Maybe I should look at taking a director-for-hire gig,’ and basically just go direct a studio romantic comedy and get a paycheck.”

His agents were “over the moon,” but as a filmmaker who’d honed his own personal style for over a decade, Burns was reluctant.

“I thought, Do I really want to give up my dream? I’d spent whatever it was at that point—15, 16 years—pursuing a certain thing. Even if my thing was out of style, it was still my thing,” he admits. “I owned my tone, and if I went and did this I’d be giving that up. I was, like, What if Bruce Springsteen just all of a sudden decided, Well, no one’s into my stuff anymore so I’m going to hire some songwriters and do a pop album?”

The tone that Burns was unwilling to cast aside began taking shape with his first film, “The Brothers McMullen,” the 1995 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner about three Irish Catholic brothers on Long Island dealing with love, marriage, and infidelity—the success of which he attributes to “tenacity. I was 25 and didn’t know any better; I didn’t know the rules and didn’t know I was breaking them.”

Partnering with cameraman Dick Fisher, whom he’d met while working as a PA on “Entertainment Tonight,” the then-aspiring filmmaker put an ad in Backstage: “Low-budget film seeks nonunion actors. No pay but will feed,” with a description of the characters.

Burns, living in an illegal sublet at the time, set up the submissions to go to his parents’ house. “My dad calls me up, like, ‘What the hell is going on here? We just got, like, 500 headshots,’ ” he says, laughing.

Over the next two weeks, another 2,000 headshots arrived, two of which belonged to future “McMullen” cast members Connie Britton (“Nashville,”“Friday Night Lights”) and Michael McGlone (“She’s the One”)—friends the director would end up keeping throughout his professional career.

“Eddie is a very intelligent, a very literary, and a very charming filmmaker,” says McGlone. “He puts people at ease and you feel genuinely good in his company, which creates an environment that people want to thrive in.”

From the beginning, the actor says he knew “McMullen” was going to be something special because “you just don’t have that much happiness in a situation if it’s not blessed.”

Shot in 12 days over the course of eight months, according to Burns, the filmmaker “used available light. You piecemeal it together based on the availability of the actors you weren’t paying and the crew you weren’t paying,” he explains.

After being rejected by every film festival, a chance meeting with Robert Redford landed “McMullen” at Sundance, after which it secured distribution by Fox Searchlight and grossed $10 million nationwide.

Burns went on to make several films, including “The Fitzgerald Family Christmas,” “Newlyweds,” and 2010’s “Nice Guy Johnny,” which he calls “McMullen 2.0” because of its ultra low-budget production.

“[We spent] $25,000, three-man crew, unknown actors. Everyone had to do their own hair and makeup, the actors had to wear their own clothes, [and] we wouldn’t pay for a single location.” Putting these budget parameters on the projects, Burns says, helped him fall back in love with the process of making movies.

“Eddie’s ethics and his vision of what he wants as a director have always been very strong and very clear and that’s never wavered,” says Britton, who adds that she and Burns are “touchstones” for one another in a business in which it’s easy to forget your roots. “That was such a special and unique time during ‘The Brothers McMullen,’ so I think when we see each other now it’s a really lovely reminder of both where we came from and how fortunate we’ve been since then.”

Peppered with stories from his father and scenes that never made it into failed projects, “Public Morals” is Burns’ “shot”—a story he’s been fighting to tell for a long time, and an opportunity he might have lost if he’d taken a director-for-hire gig.

“The winds will change, but don’t change with them,” he says. “Stick to your thing. For an actor who wants to make his mark, he’s got to own his tone—whatever he feels he does well, whatever is authentic to him. Whatever your thing is, believe in it and just follow through on it.”

From ‘Public Morals’ to Spielberg’s ‘Spies’

Every working actor’s dream is to be cast in an Oscar-winning director’s newest film. Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, James Cameron—who wouldn’t relish an opportunity like that?

Well, stick with Burns and that dream could become a reality, as not one, but two actors cast in “Public Morals” now have parts in Spielberg’s upcoming historical thriller “Bridge of Spies,” starring Tom Hanks.

The “Schindler’s List” director took one look at Austin Stowell’s audition for the TNT drama and said, “We need to cast that kid; he’s a movie star,” according to Burns. 

“We were very lucky to have Steven watching,” says Burns. “I mean, he would watch every audition of everyone who had even the tiniest little part and be like, ‘Where did you find that one? He’s incredible,’ ” he adds, in a spot-on Spielberg impression.

In addition to Stowell was Stephen Badalamenti—an actor in his 40s who recently quit his job in advertising to pursue his dream of performing. “He came in to play the Italian wise guy and he was just so good,” according to the filmmaker, that Spielberg cast him to do audio work in “Bridge of Spies.”

“Here’s this guy who, basically, wasn’t really a full-time actor, and Steven watches his audition tape and says, ‘I got a job for him,’”Burns says. “Makin’ dreams come true!”

Rolling Stone Feature

When Ed Burns was a kid, he remembers his relatives giving him pictures of his great grandfather, these grainy black-and-white shots that hinted at a wild, we-make-our-own-rules-here past. “He’s standing on the roof of his place in Hell’s Kitchen, with giant scissors in his hand,” the writer-director says, sipping a Guinness in a Tribeca bar near his home. “And he’s about to cut the ears of his champion fighting pitbull, this beast with a muzzle on. I asked my dad, what’s the deal here exactly? Seems the old man was in the trucking business, from the teens until the 1940s. I never got confirmation as to whether or not he was a gangster, but…” He pauses for a second and then shrugs. “It started my fascination with the old neighborhood’s Irish Mob, that’s for sure.”

Years later, when Burns was on the set of Saving Private Ryan, his father and uncles came down to visit for an afternoon and started regaling the crew with stories about being New York City cops during the Sixties and Seventies, colorful tales of busting perps and buying meals (“a sandwich or a hot dog”) for streetwalkers who’d missed night court. Afterwards, Steven Spielberg pulled him aside and said, That’s your next movie. “I told Steven that I already had this idea for an Irish-American Godfather — a big father-and-sons saga dressed up in cop clothes and filled with gangsters. He was like, ‘I love it, let’s do it.’ So I was all set with my post-Ryan project.” Burns laughs. “That was 1998. And now, here we are.”

It would take several false starts, abandoned scripts, side roads and the reinvention/revolution of the small-screen medium before Public Morals, his new TV show on TNT, would finally see the light of day. But according to its creator, he’s glad he had to wait. A sprawling, multi-story series involving a 1960s NYC vice squad headed by plain-clothes officer Terry Muldoon (played by Burns himself), it weaves together tales of ethically compromised cops and young prostitutes in peril, family melodrama and the inter-criminal power plays that happen when a mobster bigwig is made to sleep with the fishes. Blessed with actors like Timothy Hutton, Brian Dennehy, Neil McDonough, and a who’s-who of indie-cinema veterans, this ambitious attempt to chart a vintage era of Gotham law and disorder might have felt rushed in a two-hour setting. Given the freedom to tell its story over 10 episodes, however, Burns uses the breathing room to turn his police procedural into a miniature epic.

The result is a complete 180-degree turn from the sort of movies the Brothers McMullen filmmaker had made his name from over the last two decades. “I mean, I’d done a historical crime story before, but not a real historical crime story,” the director says, referencing his Eighties-set gangland opus Ash Wednesday (2002). “The budget was so low that you never really knew it was another decade! But I’d just played Bugsy Siegel on [Frank Darabont’s post-Walking Dead TV show on TNT] Mob City, which takes place in the 1940s. I watched how Frank was on set with no interference, with enough resources to do something with scope, and with the ability to put together a great cast — and I was starting to get jealous of people who made TV shows.

“So when the network came to me at the end of my run,” he continues, “and asked if I was interested in doing something with them, the first thing I thought of was: the ‘Public Morals’ vice division my dad used to tell me about. Plus I’d done research on Irish-mob blood feuds for at least three original projects that all got put in the drawer ages ago. So as soon as I got back to New York, I took the old scripts out, read over the ideas I jotted down back in the late 1990s, and thought, the cops and gangsters…it’s all already here. I finally have a chance to do it, and do it right!”

Once Burns and his producing partner Aaron Lubin developed the idea further and finished a few drafts, they sent it to Spielberg, hoping to get some constructive notes before the official pitch meeting; instead, the Amblin head honcho immediately signed on as executive producer. (“Imagine you’re pitching a network, and then Steven Spielberg suddenly decides he’s going to sit in with you,” Lubin says, laughing. “It’s like going to play a pick-up basketball game and hey, now you have LeBron James on your team.”) Everything went into green-lit overdrive from then on, and after the series premiered to impressive numbers late last month, TNT quickly posted the first four episodes online for mini-binging. (You can check them out here.) Burns has already hinted that, if the show gets picked up, he already knows what he wants to do for Season Two, which would involve a peripheral character stepping forward and taking center stage.

“You know, The Brothers McMullen turned 20 this year,” he says, “and after it showed at Sundance, everyone kept saying ‘He’s influenced by Woody Allen.’ Which is true, obviously! But my two movie gods have always been Allen and Martin Scorsese, and for ages, I wanted to see if I could do something that sort of paid homage to that influence as well. And one of the first days I was on set for this, I remember getting ready to set up a shot and I turned to my director of photography and said, Wow, we have the money, we have the toys and we have New York City. It’s finally happening. We can do our Scorsese movie, it’s just going to be 10 hours once a week now!”

Ed Burns on Four Specific Movie References in Public Morals:

The Hustler

“There was this Times Square pool hall, the Ames — it was a famous place in for fencing stolen stuff and a big Irish wise-guy hangout in the 1970s. I was like alright, we have to recreate that. We tried to find it, I thought maybe the pool hall’s still around, and it’s long since gone. So we would freeze frames of the movie, blow them up, and look at the details: Where’s the water cooler where Paul Newman takes a drink? Is that a balcony up there? And then we recreated the whole thing in a church basement in Brooklyn.

“There’s a scene in the first episode where this young cop played by Keith Nobbs walks up to Timothy Hutton’s character in a pool hall, and we mirrored the set-up so from a sequence in The Hustler. It’s like, Jackie Gleason comes in, walks by one of the guys, takes his coat off, pulls out his cigarette, lights it, and sits down on the couch. And if you watch the two scenes back to back, it’s almost exact. We didn’t quite match it, but we got close.”

The French Connection

“Public Morals takes place in the early 1960s, but we didn’t want to be specific about years, or even specific events — Mad Men already did that beautifully, and we weren’t going to do better than that. Plus we wanted to throw in a lot of references to our favorite New York movies from the Seventies as well, and I mean, come on…you’re not going to do a French Connection homage?

“There’s a scene where Gene Hackman walks into a bar and meets up with Roy Schreider. There are three girls singing on a stage, kind of like the Supremes. So, what he does is he walks in, he talks to the cigarette girl, whispers in her ear, gives her a little kiss, stops — all one handheld shot. It rack-focuses to the three women on stage. Hackman turns, we focus on him, he walks over to the bar. [You can catch a glimpse of the scene at the 12-second mark in the video above.] So what we did was, we recreated that nightclub, we take Ruben Santiago Hudson [who plays the police chief] in, he comes in, turns, rack focus to our three girl singers, walks over, kisses the cigarette girl, walks over, sits down with one of the gangsters. So there are the little nods like that, and then there are the bigger ones, like Michael Rappaport’s hat. That’s the most Popeye Doyle-ish hat I’ve ever seen!”

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

“According to my dad, every precinct had a bar within a block of the station house that was where the cops conduct most of their business, when they were “apparently” drinking on the job [laughs]. Before you went into the office, you went into the bar, talk to some folks, found out what’s going on. You get a tip on this, a tip on that, great. So we needed to create the local precinct bar for the show. So I was telling my production designer and my location scout, “We need a place that looks like the bar in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the one where Robert Mitchum sits down with Peter Boyle. So we look at the film, my location scout says, ‘Okay, let me see what I can find.’ Can’t find it. We’re totally out of luck.

“Then my production designer says, ‘Let’s just build it.’ So the bar where the Public Morals cops hang out at, Pop McKennas, is almost perfectly recreated to scale and color the bar from Friends of Eddie Coyle. I come from the indie-film world where you never have the time or budget to do that kind of stuff, so to be able to a designer go, Yeah, let’s just make it…I mean, that’s indie-filmmaker heaven, right?”

Catch Me If You Can

“There’s a shot in Catch where there’s a long-lens tilt down off of the Pan Am building, which we loved, and Leonardo DiCaprio is crossing Park Avenue, and he goes into a phone booth. We have a scene where my character meets with Brian Dennehy for a private meeting at the Waldorf Astoria, so we’re scouting the hotel, and okay, I’ll be walking from here to here. And I then I realized, ‘Wait a second, the Met Life building, that was the old Pan Am building!’ If we’re doing the 1960s, let’s do that, and let’s do that shot. So I’m on the phone, I looked up at that moment, and we did the exact same thing. I wanted to throw a hat tip to Steven in there anyway, because he’s been such a mentor to me. And it wasn’t like I could do a shark coming down Sixth Avenue [laughs].”

TNT’s fine ‘Public Morals’ sets itself apart from cop dramas

“Public Morals” is proof that even in this time of television’s Great Overcrowding, one should never judge a show by its genre.

In theory, Edward Burns’ tale of cops ‘n’ gangsters mingling and mangling on the mean streets of circa-1960 New York is the last thing we need. Add a zombie menace and/or a female character Fighting to Be Taken Seriously, and you have a show so close to modern drama du jour it risks becoming parody.

Except it doesn’t, not at all. “Public Morals,” which premieres Tuesday on TNT, is a picaresque, briskly written and quickly captivating series that is neither afraid nor ashamed of entertaining its audience. Though it deals with its genre’s big issues (the difference between law and order, the danger of defining oneself through loyalty), “Public Morals” does not fall prey to the current epidemic of Televisionous Prestiguous (symptoms may include swollen monologues, lethargy and sensitivity to normal light).

Instead, with a touch so light it defies gravity , Burns simply tells a story that he knows — his father was a New York cop — in the way of storytellers he admires. Martin Scorsese is, of course, fully accounted for in careful choreography of sudden violence and hierarchy of menace; the calmest, most gracious character, in this case a mob boss played by Brian Dennehy, is always the most dangerous. The influences of Steven Spielberg, who serves as executive producer, also make themselves felt in the scenes of family dinner and parent conferences with the nuns, in the newsboy caps of street kids who say things like “I ain’t got no muddah.”

But the fulcrum is all Burns, who created, writes and stars as Terry Muldoon, the unofficial organizer of the NYPD’s Public Morals Division, a team defined by its relationship to the city’s Underworld.

Handsome, genial, devoted to family and friends, Muldoon is, of course, on the take. As he explains to clean-cut newcomer Jimmy (Brian Wiles), who might just be a rat, most of the jurisdiction Public Morals covers is ridiculous. Does any real cop think he’s going to end prostitution by busting a couple of hookers and their johns? Does anyone really care if a few “queers want to play grab-ass” or if people like to gamble their money away in high-stakes games?

No, of course not. But the city needs to remain peaceful. Public Morals is there not to eradicate this type of crime but to manage it. “Think of us as landlords,” Muldoon says. “If you want to do business, you have to pay the rent.”

He and his less-talk-more-action partner Charlie (the always excellent Michael Rapaport) make it all look so easy. When he isn’t lecturing a john, from whom he just took a bribe, to leave New York hookers alone, Muldoon’s letting his son know that sassing Sister is the first step on the road to the wrong side of the street.

With his wise-guy squint and husky tenor, Burns sells the sincerity of his character if not his world view. This is not a broken hero, but a practical one. In another set of circumstances, Muldoon could be a politician, or a mob boss.

That is, of course, the point, as it almost always is in stories about lawmen and lawbeakers. That line is so darn thin, especially in a place like this version of Hell’s Kitchen, which, with its mostly Irish population, is so insular that Muldoon’s uncle, Mr. O (Timothy Hutton) is the local numbers man as well as the father of Sean (Austin Stowell), a member of Muldoon’s team.

And, indeed, Mr. O is about to set off a series of events that destroys the calm that Muldoon and his crew have maintained for so long. New players are on the scene, with big ambitions and little deference to the old codes.

Mercifully, Burns is in no rush to hit a hard-R rating or prove some big point about the changing state of the nation. The show may lean digital in distribution — the first four of 10 episodes will be available online after Tuesday night’s premiere — but the narrative unfolds the old-fashioned way, with multi-layer stories full of, but never overwhelmed by, colorful characters, archetypal themes and small odes to genre.

Muldoon is in constant but loving battle with his wife over parenting techniques and her desire to move to the suburbs, Charlie becomes the protector of a young prostitute, and everyone tries to figure out whether Jimmy can be trusted. On the other side of the law, prodigal son Rusty (Neal McDonough) has returned to his aging father/crime boss Joe Patton (Dennehy) with predictably incendiary results.

It all flows swiftly across the screen in oversized taxis and a chorus line of shot glasses and beer bottles, propelled by a men-wearing-hats syncopation that nods to the films of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson but doesn’t kowtow.

Out of memory, myth and the inevitable allure of mayhem, “Public Morals” creates its own cinematic world, as inbred and self-curated as the most lived-in, teeming New York neighborhood and just as much fun to visit.

“Public Morals” Premieres Tonight!

Public Morals premieres tonight, Tuesday, August 25, at 10/9c only on TNT.

Watch a Behind the Scenes clip here:

Recent Articles:

Edward Burns Explains How Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and ‘Game of Thrones’ Influenced His (Great) First TV Series, ‘Public Morals’Indiewire

Edward Burns is arresting in ‘Public Morals’USA Today

Ed Burns’ real-life cop father inspired his new police dramaNew York Post

Edward Burns’ 1 Tip for Making Your MarkBackstage

More “Public Morals” Press

Public Morals premieres Tuesday, August 25, at 10/9c only on TNT.

Look out for Edward Burns on ‘Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’ tonight, Tuesday, August 18. Check your local listings.

Check out some additional recent press:

Ed Burns on the Phone Call With Steven Spielberg That Lead to TNT’s ‘Public Morals’The Wrap

‘Public Morals’ star Edward Burns finally brings his passion project to lifeHitFix

More on “Public Morals”

Public Morals premieres Tuesday, August 25, at 10/9c only on TNT.

Look out for Edward Burns on ‘Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’ tomorrow, Tuesday, August 18. Check your local listings.

Check out some recent press:

To Hell and BackEmmys.com

An Illustrated Guide to New York City’s Modern VicesVulture

On A Hot Streak: Edward Burns Co-Chairs Authors Night, ‘Public Morals’ In The Wings27east

Turner Jumps On Binge Bandwagon, Will Release ‘Public Morals’ Episodes On-Demand FirstDeadline

Ed Burns’ new cop drama hits close to homePage 6

Unearthing signs of the ’60s in New YorkThe Bulletin

Ed Burns and his filmmaking dream come trueCBS Sunday Morning

More Press Surrounding Edward Burns’ New Memoir

Check out these recent interviews and press clips.

Thompson on Hollywood (February 20): ‘Independent Ed’ by Edward Burns a Primer for Riding the Industry Waves
Click here to read the interview.

TV3 (February 17): Edward Burns: Tenacity wins!
Click here to read the article.

ET (February 16): Ed Burns’ Advice For Making It In Hollywood: ‘Be Passionate and Be Tenacious’
Click here to watch the interview or watch directly below.

Edward Burns’ new memoir, Independent Ed: Inside a Career of Big Dreams, Little Movies, and the Twelve Best Days of My Life, is available now. Click here to order the book from Amazon.

More Interviews with Edward Burns Discussing his new Memoir

Check out these recent interviews with Edward Burns.

Newsday (February 11): Edward Burns discusses his movie memoir, ‘Independent Ed’
Click here to read the interview.

i am ROGUE (February 10): IAR Exclusive Interview: Edward Burns Talks ‘Independent Ed’ Memoir, ‘The Brothers McMullen’ Sequel, And ‘Public Morals’ TV Series
Click here to read the interview.

Edward Burns’ new memoir, Independent Ed: Inside a Career of Big Dreams, Little Movies, and the Twelve Best Days of My Life, is available now. Click here to order the book from Amazon.

Recent Interviews

Check out these recent interviews with Edward Burns.

Today Show (February 3): Watch the interview below, or click here to watch at Today.com.

The Street (February 5): Watch the interview below, or click here to watch at TheStreet.com.

Interview with SiriusXM host Ron Bennington for an episode of Unmasked.
Visit theinterrobang.com to listen to clips and read more about it.

Edward Burns’ new memoir, Independent Ed: Inside a Career of Big Dreams, Little Movies, and the Twelve Best Days of My Life, is available now. Click here to order the book from Amazon.

‘The Brothers McMullen’ Prequel

Ed Burns announced last week on Twitter that he is beginning work on a prequel to The Brothers McMullen:

“I had to throw out the McMullen sequel idea. I just didn’t fall in love with any of the ideas I had about where to find them 20 yeas later.”

“So instead of McMullen sequel Im writing a prequel. Set in 1986, Jack is a senior in college, Barry a senior in HS, Pat finishing 8th grade”

Read more at The Huffington Post.

More Interviews and Press

USA Today Talking Your Tech
December 18, 2012
Part 1: “Edward Burns delivers small films straight to you”
Part 2: “Edward Burns | Making Movies on Canon 5D: pro and con”
Part 3: “Edward Burns | Movie Marketing in Digital Age”
Part 4: “Edward Burns | Advice to young filmmakers”

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
December 20, 2012

More at latenightwithjimmyfallon.com.

CultureMap Houston: “Thanks to Tyler Perry, Edward Burns gets back to his filmmaking roots with Fitzgerald Family Christmas” (December 20, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas”: More Interviews

‘The Fitzgerald Family Christmas’ is in select theaters now. Or watch it on VOD or iTunes tonight: http://bit.ly/FitzmasRelease

Check out more recent interviews…

ELLE: “Edward Burns on His New Movie, ‘The Fitzgerald Family Christmas'” (December 7, 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

BlackBook: “Ed Burns Comes Home With ‘The Fitzgerald Family Christmas'” (December 7, 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

NextMovie: “Q&A: Ed Burns Returns With the Tyler Perry-Inspired ‘Fitzgerald Family Christmas'” (December 5, 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

NY Daily News: “TV vet Connie Britton returns to her indie roots in Edward Burns’ ‘Fitzgerald Family Christmas'” (December 7, 2012)
Click here to read the interview with Connie Britton.

Anderson Live: Edward Burns Talks Family Holiday Traditions
December 10, 2012
video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo
player

More at andersoncooper.com.

“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas”: Latest Interviews

“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas” is available now via on demand services. It will be released in theaters this Friday, December 7.

Filmmaker Magazine: Five Questions with The Fitzgerald Family Christmas Director Edward Burns
December 4, 2012
Click here to read the interview.

Film School Rejects: Edward Burns on ‘The Fitzgerald Family Christmas’ and Taking the Schmaltz Out of the Holidays
December 4, 2012
Click here to read the interview.

The Huffington Post: Connie Britton, ‘Fitzgerald Family Christmas’ Star, On Her Acting Debut In ‘Brothers McMullen’ & ‘Friday Night Lights’
December 4, 2012
Click here to read the interview.

“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas”: More Interviews

“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas” is available now via on demand services. It will be released in theaters this Friday, December 7.

The TODAY Show: Ed Burns: Forgiveness a big part of Christmas
November 29, 2012

More at today.msnbc.msn.com.

PopSugar: Ed Burns Talks His New Holiday Movie and Christmas Traditions With Christy Turlington
November 30, 2012

More at popsugar.com.

The Huffington Post: Ed Burns On ‘Fitzgerald Family Christmas,’ Connie Britton & The Power Of Social Media
December 3, 2012
Click here to read the interview.

“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas” Interviews & Review

“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas” is available now via on demand services. It will be released in theaters on December 7. Check out the latest press on the film.

Esquire: “Q&A: Ed Burns’s Extremely Awkward Holiday” (Nov 21, 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

Irish American News: “Latest Movie by Ed Burns Available Today” (Nov 21, 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

Forbes: “Ed Burns And His Winning Holiday Movie, ‘The Fitzgerald Family Christmas'” (Nov 21, 2012)
Click here to read the review.

More Articles About “The Fitzgerald Family Christmas,” Plus an Exclusive Clip from the Film

“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas” will be available via on demand services starting tomorrow, November 21, and will be released in theaters on December 7. Here are some recent articles.

SheKnows: “Exclusive clip: The Fitzgerald Family Christmas | Burns Shares Most Personal Story Yet” (Nov 19, 2012)
Click here to read the article and watch the exclusive clip from the film.

The Miami Herald: “Ed Burns comes full circle with Fitzgerald Family Christmas” (Nov 20, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

New York Daily News: “Edward Burns’ new film ‘The Fitzgerald Family Christmas’ delves into icky family dynamics” (Nov 17, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

Irish Central: “Ed Burns talks about his Irish American roots with ‘The Fitzgerald Family Christmas'” (Nov 19, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas” in the Press

“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas” will be available via on demand services starting November 21 and will be released in theaters on December 7. Here are some recent articles and the trailer.

Huffington Post: “‘The Fitzgerald Family Christmas’: Ed Burns & Mike McGlone Reunite For New Drama” (Nov 9, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

Entertainment Weekly: “Ed Burns and Connie Britton together again in ‘The Fitzgerald Family Christmas’ — EXCLUSIVE ONE SHEET” (Nov 8, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

Irish Central: “Ed Burns returns to his Irish American roots ‘The Fitzgerald Family Christmas'” (Nov 10, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

Recent Interviews & Articles

THIRTEEN – New York Public Media | MetroFocus: “Why Filmmaker Ed Burns Makes Movies for $10,000” (Feb 28, 2012)
Click here to read the feature & watch the interview.

Huffington Post: “A Conversation with Edward Burns” (Mar 2, 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

The Globe and Mail: “On-demand vital for indie filmmakers: Burns” (Feb 29, 2012)
Click here to watch the interview.

FilmContact.com: “Edward Burns says on-demand viewing options key for indie filmmakers” (Mar 1, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

Recent Interviews

The Scorecard Review: “TSR Exclusive: ‘Newlyweds’ interview with actor/writer/director Edward Burns” (Feb 22, 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

Parents Magazine: “Six Questions With Ed Burns ” (Feb 14, 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

Splash Magazines | Los Angeles: “Edward Burns Interview – Up Close and Personal Frank Talk on His Life As Writer, Director, Actor, and Family Man” (Feb 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

Talking About “Man on a Ledge”

Check out the interviews below…

MyFoxDC.com

iamROGUE.com

The Hollywood Reporter: “Elizabeth Banks, Edward Burns Talk On-Screen Chemistry in ‘Man on a Ledge'” (January 27, 2012)
Click here to watch the interview.

Collider.com: “Edward Burns Talks MAN ON A LEDGE and How Independent Film Has Evolved Over the Last Ten Years” (January 24, 2012)
Click here to watch the interview.

WISN Milwaukee: “Gino Sits Down With Actor Edward Burns” (January 28, 2012)
Click here to watch the interview.

Movie Fanatic: “Man on a Ledge Exclusive: Ed Burns Takes Us Inside Filmmaking” (Jan 27, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

JoBlo Video: “Exclusive MAN ON A LEDGE Interview – Star Ed Burns” (January 25, 2012)
Click here to watch the interview.

More “Newlyweds” Interviews & Articles

Huffington Post: “Newlyweds Lets $9,000 Go a Long Way” (Jan 17, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

Movie City News: “Movie Life in the Post-Theatrical Age? An Interview with Director/Writer/Actor Edward Burns” (Jan 17, 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

HollywoodChicago.com: “Interview: Actor, Filmmaker Edward Burns on Guiding ‘Newlyweds'” (Jan 14, 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

Chicago Tribune: “Ed Burns keeps it real, and really small” (Jan 13, 2012)
Click here to read the interview.

More “Newlyweds” Press Coverage

New York Daily News: “Ed Burns calls it ‘liberating’ to make ‘Newlyweds,’ a Tribeca romantic comedy filmed on $9,000” (Jan 12, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

New York Daily News: “‘Newlyweds’ and ‘Tower Heist’ N.YC. film shooting budgets: $9,000 . . . vs. $85 million” (Jan 12, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

New York Post: “Burning the marital foil” (Jan 10, 2012)
Click here to read the article.

More “Newlyweds” Interviews

Vanity Fair: “Q&A: Director Ed Burns on Using Twitter to Make His $9,000 Movie Newlyweds” (Dec 28, 2011)
Click here to read the interview.

Miami Herald: “Ed Burns: 2012 is going to be busy” (Dec 28, 2011)
Click here to read the interview.

Huffington Post (Dec 27): “I’d Call That a Success: Ed Burns on Newlyweds” (Dec 27, 2011)
Click here to read the interview.

Huffington Post (Dec 21): “Edward Burns On ‘Newlyweds’ And His Wife, Christy Turlington” (Dec 21, 2011)
Click here to read the interview.

On Demand Weekly: “VOD Spotlight: Ed Burns (Newlyweds)” (Dec 26, 2011)
Click here to read the interview.

Anthem Magazine: “Q&A with Edward Burns” (Dec 25, 2011)
Click here to read the interview.

iamROGUE.com: “Ed Burns and Caitlin Fitzgerald talk ‘Newlyweds'” (Dec 24, 2011)
Click here to read the interview.

Glamour: “Here’s a Gift From Ed Burns to You–An Exclusive Clip of His New Movie Newlyweds and Lots of Scoop on Love and Marriage” (Dec 23, 2011)
Click here to read the interview.

“Friends With Kids” Will Be Released in the U.S. Spring 2012

Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions have acquired the U.S. rights to the upcoming film “Friends With Kids”
starring Jennifer Westfeldt, Jon Hamm, Adam Scott, Megan Fox, Kristen Wiig, Edward Burns, Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd. The firm was shot in New York earlier this year. It is scheduled for a theatrical release in Spring 2012. For more information, visit variety.com.

Tribeca Film To Distribute “Newlyweds”

Tribeca Film will be distributing “Newlyweds” in the U.S. & Canada. Look out for a release via multiple platforms later this year.

For more info, check out these articles:

L.A. Times – “Tribeca hitches wagon to Edward Burns’ “Newlyweds”” by Joshua L. Weinstein
Indiewire.com – “Tribeca Film Gets Hitched to Ed Burns’ “Newlyweds”” by Brian Brooks
Variety.com – “Tribeca Film takes ‘Newlyweds'” by Gordon Cox