I INTERVIEWED PETER BOYLE, the actor who died this week, back in 1993 when I was writing The Scene column for The Inquirer. This is the column I wrote on March 28 of that year. Tomorrow I'll tell you how I happened to meet him and what what happened as we drove around West Philadelphia together:
LOOK WHO'S BACK IN THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD
After leaving Philadelphia more than 30 years ago to pursue a career as an actor, Peter Boyle finds himself back in his old neighborhood in West Philadelphia for the first time as an actor starring in a major production, an hour-long TV drama that very well could become a network TV series requiring him to work on location for months at a time not far from where he grew up at 51st and Hazel.
The return to his roots has been intense, almost philosophical - sort of, you Kant go home again. "It's been very emotional, very enlightening, and I don't feel sad," he said.
Boyle understands the nature of the neighborhood. He knows that he may be a famous movie star, he may have even more famous friends - John Lennon was best man at his wedding in 1977, for crying out loud - and he knows that despite all that, generations of Philadelphians see him and say, "Look, there's Uncle Pete's boy."
"That's fine with me," said Uncle Pete's son.
Uncle Pete Boyle was Philadelphia's Mr. Rogers, a fixture on local TV during the late '40s and '50s. Hometown baby boomers grew up watching Uncle Pete behind his artist's easel drawing cartoons and sketches and introducing Our Gang comedies. Boomers never forget, "One time I was in an airport somewhere and Daryl Oates of the band Hall and Oates came up to me to tell me how much he enjoyed watching my dad's show when he was a kid," Boyle said.
What Peter Boyle didn't know until he arrived in Philadelphia to begin shooting was that the principle location in the pilot and the series, the former Engine Co. 65 at 54th and Haverford Avenue, is about a block away from the block on Westminster Street where Uncle Pete grew up.
TYPECAST? ARE YOU CALLING ME TYPECAST?!
Uncle Pete had one thing his son was denied. "He had a wonderful head of hair," Boyle said. "I take after my mother's side of the family."
But Peter Boyle has a great face. It starts at his neck and runs clear to the back of his head. It's an intense urban working-class visage, a mug that's made for a cop, a psycho, a wise guy, a pirate, a bigot, a hard hat, a dope dealer, a revolutionary or even a tap dancing Frankenstein as long as he's from the neighborhood.
But if you've ever seen Boyle doing his Brando, you realize something else.
He coulda been a contender for leading man. He coulda had class. He coulda had hair.
What he has is a face that launched a thousand scripts, most of them about average Joes with Irish surnames. In fact, he's played a bunch of Irish Joe starring roles, starting with his 1970 breakthrough as Joe Curran in the movie Joe. Then there was "Skinhead" Joe McGinnis, Joe Bash, Joe McCarthy and a guy known only as Duffy.
But his new role in Philly Heat breaks from that mold. Sure he's playing a Philadelphia fireman, but it's a Philadelphia fireman with a Polish name: Stanislas. That's right Battalion Chief Stanislas Kelly.
DID SOMEONE SAY DISASTER? THE THEORY OF ATTRACTION
There's a strange phenomenon connected with movies and TV that Boyle calls The Theory of Attraction. It works something like this:
"If you're making a movie about an airplane crash, chances are something's going to go wrong with an airplane sometime during the filming," he said. For instance, that massive four-alarm fire in Chinatown broke out three days after filming began on the Philly Heat pilot.
A coincidence?
I'm not so sure after seeing The Theory of Attraction at work outside the second floor window of the the abandoned firehouse in West Philadelphia where Boyle was filming a scene for the pilot Thursday afternoon. If the series sells and becomes a hit that firehouse at 54th and Haverford could become to American firefighters what Hill Street Police Station was to cops, an occupational shrine. Remember what Cheers did for a bar in Boston or what the Rocky did for the Art Museum.
In that brief scene Boyle as Battalion Chief Kelley tells one of his men that a certain situation is "a disaster waiting to happen." They have to repeat the scene eight, maybe 10 times. Meanwhile, outside the window I watch a situation developing. Gasoline was gushing from the ruptured fuel tank of a car across the street.
Jerry Walsh, an actor from suburban Wilmington who plays a fireman known as Bernie the Couch Potato, had backed his 1984 red Capri into a raised concrete block in a small parking area. Gas was spreading across the sidewalk into the street in three directions as Boyle kept repeating the line about "a disaster waiting to happen."
Cops assigned to keep traffic moving around the production respond by cordoning off the gasoline drenched area with pylons and yellow police barricade tape. But kids returning from school continue to walk through the puddles. All it needs is a match. I kept thinking of that fiery scene in the gas station in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
Finally, real firefighters arrived from Company 41 about 8 blocks west on Haverford Avenue to hose down Walsh's gas tank and the area.
The Theory of Attraction it's called.
Just think, that was only the pilot.
Continue reading "Peter Boyle: He coulda had hair." »
