Ed Burns on Moonlighting as a Model and Recreating '60s Style
Writer/director/actor (and sometimes model) Ed Burns talks about his new show ‘Public Morals’. (Photo: Trunk Archive)
When I first interviewed actor-writer-director Ed Burns almost a decade ago, he was relishing the role of being a bit of a Hollywood outsider. Despite the breakout success of his first feature, Sundance-winning The Brothers McMullen, his witty comedies weren’t doing well at the box office. Burns’s response was to buck the studio system and release the first straight-to-iTunes feature ever, Purple Violets. The gamble paid off, allowing him to turn a profit and continue making movies his way. For Burns, that meant New York characters and backdrops paired with loads of clever dialogue. Over the years, Burns figured out how to make movies with smaller and smaller budgets (Nice Guy Johnny was made for $25,000, and Newlyweds went for $9,000), did some modeling and acting gigs to make money (he moonlit as “Mr. Nautica”), and stayed true to his voice. But on Aug. 25, with the launch of his new series, Public Morals, which he writes, directs, and stars in, Burns is no longer playing the part of the indie outsider. His TV debut features none other than Steven Spielberg as an executive producer, and 10 beautifully shot, written, and acted episodes on cable network TNT.
Lest you think that scoring a big budget for strong actors, countless extras, and sets and costumes that perfectly capture every detail of 1960s New York would mean selling out, Burns says he signed on the dotted line because he didn’t have to. “I’m very lucky that the folks over at TNT are moving the network in a new direction. They’ve embraced this idea of giving the storyteller creative control and just supporting their vision for the show. I think it’s almost like going back to the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, when the studio heads were doing that with filmmakers, and we had that golden era of great American cinema,” says Burns. “Maybe it was a little bit the right place at the right time for me and this show, but they allowed me to write and direct 10 episodes. I never had any executives on set or in the editing room.”
1960s cars from the Public Morals set. (Photo: TNT)
Burns describes the show, set in 1960s New York, as “a family saga dressed up in police clothes.” “At the end of the day, it’s the story of two warring families,” he says. “You’ve got the Muldoons, the Hell’s Kitchen Irish cops, and then you’ve got Brian Dennehy’s Hell’s Kitchen Irish mobsters.” Burns plays plainclothes officer Terry Muldoon, who, alongside his partner, played by Michael Rapaport, is in a murky ethical middle ground between being on the right and wrong sides of the law.
Beyond the strong performances and smart writing, one of the things that stands out most about Public Morals is the level of detail in capturing 1960s New York. Everything from the sets (apartments with vintage wallpaper and sunken living rooms), to fashion (a more working-class take on Mad Men style), and beauty (the show may bring back the updo), feels authentic to that era. Burns worked with his longtime collaborators costume designer Cat Thomas, hair stylist Suzy Mazzarese-Allison, and makeup artist Steve Lawrence to get the details right.
“We all sat down and brought in what we wanted to use as inspiration. Everything from stills from movies like The French Connection and The Hustler to Robert Frank photographs, so we were all on the same page. Just basically pouring through a ton of photography from that era” explains Burns. From the cat-eye makeup and stylized waves of the teacher-turned-hooker character played by Katrina Bowden, to Burns’s clean-cut grooming and police-budget suits, the team was obsessed with every visual aspect. “Cat Thomas basically had to comb through vintage shops and thrift shops to find all of those great old clothes,” says Burns. “We found a wardrobe supplier who happened to have vintage uniforms from the time. We also found this incredible tailor, Martin Greenfield, in Brooklyn who recreated suits for me and Brian Dennehy and Michael Rapaport. They are the kind of suits that we couldn’t find anymore, the designs that were only from that era.”
Actress Katrina Bowden, who plays a call girl, and Burns in Public Morals. (Photo: TNT)
For the backdrop, Burns and his team combed New York to find streets and locations untouched by time, including the Waldorf Hotel, the Russian Tea Room, and the Old Town Bar. “The most exciting was finding a street that had pretty much remained unchanged, and then filling it with these period cars and 50 extras in period clothes and makeup, and watching a street in the West Village in 2015 morph into the early 1960s,” says Burns.
Another detail of the 1960s that Burns captures perfectly is how different parenting was back then. In one memorable scene from the pilot, Burns’s character delivers a sarcastic, frustrated rant to his 12-year-old son after he gets in trouble at school. He tells what would seem like a sweet story of when his son was born, and then turns, saying at that time he “always dreamed of having a son that would grow up to be an asshole.” It’s hilariously harsh, standing in stark contrast to the touchy-feely, positive parenting that’s so prevalent today. Burns says that scene was the one autobiographical element in the show.
“It’s funny, that is word for word me and my dad when I was a kid. That was a very famous story in the Burns household, the School Fool Story, or the Class Ass Story. It had been retold around the dinner table for the last 30 years. I knew one day I would write it into a screenplay, and this was the place to recreate it. So you can imagine it was pretty funny, or surreal, sitting opposite Cormac — the actor who played my son — and playing my father delivering that speech that I can remember like it was yesterday,” laughs Burns. As for whether he’s been influenced by his father’s parenting style for his two children with wife, model, and activist Christy Turlington, Burns is quick to chuckle: “There’s no comparison. That kind of tough love doesn’t exist in our home. We have a more gentle approach these days. Which is a good thing… I think.”
Speaking of Turlington, Burns appeared alongside the supermodel in a Calvin Klein fragrance campaign last year. “She kind of took me along for the ride,” laughs Burns. Would he ever moonlight as a model again? “I mean, absolutely, if it were something that I, you know, I thought it would be, you know, if the photography was interesting and quite honestly, the money is right, I’d absolutely do it,” states Burns, before making a joke. “The older you get, nobody’s knocking down my door anymore.”
With positive reviews for Public Morals coming in, Burns is enjoying the moment — one he says he’s been waiting for almost two decades. “This show has been my dream project for 18 years,” says Burns. “I tried to get a feature made 18 years ago that took a look at a multigenerational Irish cop family, and I also had three or four Hell’s Kitchen gangster screenplays that I couldn’t get produced. So the fact that I’ve been able to get my two passion projects and marry them into one story, and now it’s up and running — I only hope that I get to do another two, three, four, five seasons, if they’ll allow me.”
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