Month: January 2021

Actor Ed Burns joins Hoda and Jenna to discuss his new series, “Bridge and Tunnel,” about a group of college graduates setting out to pursue their dreams in 1980s Manhattan while holding onto the familiarity of their Long Island hometown.

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.”

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.

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?”