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

two as the show’s ADA Alexandra Cabot. “That is a pain in the neck to get to. (And) how depressing is that place? You’re floating in the middle of Secaucus.”
    She saw a stark contrast between the Jersey Swamp Thing and the Mother Ship anchored at Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers. “Every time we would shoot at the Law & Order stages—and we shot there a lot because we didn’t have (our own) courtroom—I would think to myself, ‘Why can’t we shoot at the pier? It’s six blocks from where I live. It’s in the middle of Manhattan. Why not? Why not?’ Nope, I have to get my sorry self through the (Lincoln) tunnel.”
    After reaching the other bank of the Hudson, March felt stranded in a gloomy building surrounded by an industrial wasteland. “That place is an energy sucker,” she contends. “I remember when my mom came to see it, she said, ‘Do you think they’ll change the lighting? ’ I said, ‘I don’t think so, no.’ . . . You’re totally trapped out there, because you can’t pop out and do anything else.”
    March disliked the marsh but others involved with SVU were less bothered by the bleak North Bergen ambiance as long as the faux squad room was correct. Writer Amanda Green, then a law-enforcement employee in real life, encountered a little bit of déjà vu all over again when she first visited the soundstage.
    “My biggest concern was that the set looked right,” she says. “I walked around that day and saw real wanted posters for cases that I’d worked on and I’ll never forget going, ‘Gosh, that guy looks familiar. Why does he look familiar? Right! Because I worked that case. I was there in the lineup and I was there when he got convicted at trial.’”
    For Green, verisimilitude soon kicked in. “Looking at details in the squad room that the scenic designers had just copied from what they’d seen, I knew what everything meant and it was right. They don’t even know why they’ve done it but they’ve done it right. So I was really impressed.”
    While inspecting the set, Green had also spent three hours with Dick Wolf, telling him what she thought about the show. “The next day my phone rang and it was Dick’s assistant saying, ‘Come out to L. A. and meet the writers.’ I asked, ‘When?’ and she said, ‘Tomorrow. ’ I told her, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m on trial.’ So that was that.”
    Not exactly. “Couple hours later the phone rang and they asked, ‘So, when would you be available to come to L. A.?’” Green recalls. “And that started what became the next three years of my life—which was not telling a soul what I was doing because I was afraid it would undermine my credibility professionally.”

Way Out West
    Compared with the mammoth New Jersey soundstage, there’s a smaller, tidier operation on the Universal Studios lot in Los Angeles, where the writing and editing of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit unfolds. It’s nestled next to the gift shop and down the street from the commissary. (Recommended to visitors: try the peanut-butter cookies.)
    All three L&O shows are housed in adjacent structures. SVU has set up shop in a one-story gray bungalow that’s named—appropriately—in honor of Jack Webb, the creator and star of Dragnet. The legendary NBC crime show ran from 1952 to 1970, before being all-too-briefly resurrected by Dick Wolf in 2003 on CBS.
    But the L&O empire now rules the roost, where just outside select parking spaces are available for the SVU personnel inside: executive producer and showrunner Neal Baer; co-executive producers Jonathan Greene, Dawn DeNoon, and Amanda Green; and some novices, supervising producer Daniel Truly and story editor Mick Betancourt.
    The SVU quarters are little more than a long hallway with offices branching out to each side; depending on staff seniority, the capacity increases mightily. Truly and Betancourt seem lucky to have a window, desk, and whiteboard, while DeNoon, Greene, and Green enjoy enough space to