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NYPD BLUE
Initially, NYPD Blue was to be about the main character, John Kelly,
played by David Caruso, and in the very first episode Sipowicz gets shot;
in the first re-write – Franz found this out later on – it was questionable
whether or not he was going to live. “Things could have been much,
much
different than they are now,” Dennis muses. Caruso only stuck around for
the first year, however, and during that year the writers enjoyed writing
for the Sipowicz character. The audience seemed to like him too. When
Caruso left, he was replaced by Jimmy Smits, and, along with Franz,
NYPD Blue became a two-person show.
One of the endearing clothing traits of Detective Sipowicz was the
ill-fitting shirt he inevitably wore. “I always felt that when I came to work
and put on that short-sleeved shirt it helped me step into that character,”
Dennis says. He reveals that the shirt was not a normal short-sleeved shirt.
It was a long-sleeved dress shirt whose sleeves were cut a little too short,
making them stick out like wings. “It looked odd, and that’s what I liked,”
he says. His shoes also added to the idiosyncrasies of his character. The
Rockports he wore on the set had a heavier sole and gave him a different
sense of walking. “When I put them on, I felt more like Sipowicz,” he
says. At one point, someone even approached Franz about creating a line
of clothes based upon his character.
Dennis Franz, as veteran detective and recovering alcoholic Andy
Sipowicz, took on bad guys, fell off the wagon, got beat up, got married,
bared his behind, engaged in questionable activities and fought with his
personal demons for twelve glorious years as America’s most popular and
most conflicted law enforcement officer.
And now, Montecito has him.
What luck.
After a hugely successful 35-year stage and screen career, are
there things Dennis Franz never got to do that he wanted to do,
we wondered? “For the longest time,” he answers, “I was trying
to get the rights to do ‘Marty.’ I thought I would have been just
right for that role. That was the one thing that I kind of wanted
to do that would have showed a different side of me. And then,
I thought I’d like to have tried the role that John C. Reilly had in
‘Chicago.’ I especially would like to have tackled the ‘Cellophane
Man’ number.”
The billboard behind Dennis and his new NYPD Blue co-star, Jimmy Smits, had just gone up on Pico Boulevard in L.A.,
and the two actors had this photo taken of them during a lunch break, as the studio was only ten blocks away