By AMANDA SPAKE
Yaphet Kotto, Lt. Al Giardello to the growing number of Homicide junkies, hurries out of the shift commander's office on the set of the NBC drama Homicide: Life on the Street. Tall and broad-shouldered, Kotto fills the screen, barking orders in that unmistakable voice -- part melody, part gravel.
"Pemberton, Bayliss!" he shouts, enunciating each word as though he were still playing Shakespeare's Othello, as he did nearly 30 years ago. "Get out to the Mariner house and talk to the wife. Let's find out if Mariner had any angry compadres." This week, a sniper is terrorizing Baltimore.
Kotto, 47, has been on the set since 7:45 a.m. He arrived for make-up at dawn. He is never late. He comes knowing his lines, prepared to work. After 28 movies, including the cult classic Midnight Run with Robert DeNiro, an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Idi Amin in the TV movie Raid on Entebbe, and now a fourth season on Homicide, Kotto does not take his success for granted.
"You don't want to give anyone an excuse," he says, referring to the line he feels black actors still must walk. "I've tried to pattern myself after Sidney Poiter -- a perfect professional. He opened up this damned industry for all of us."
It is two days after the Million Man March on Washington and one of today's background actors, another middle-aged black man, stops Kotto as he's leaving the set for lunch.
"Hey, brother," Kotto says. "Were you down there Monday?"
"Yeah. It was beautiful. There were people all the way to the river. Did you go?"
"No," Kotto says. "I was here."
"Here" is Baltimore's City Pier, a public bathing and boating pier, abandoned and left crumbling at the foot of the waterfront neighborhood of Fells Point. Executive producer Jim Finnerty took the pier off the city's hands, transforming the block-long, red brick structure into both interior and exterior sets for Homicide. Like most of the cast and crew, Kotto lives half the year in Baltimore, Fells Point to be exact, so he can walk to work. His wife and three teenage daughters are in Toronto, where the family moved before Homicide took off.
Locating the entire operation in Maryland, outside the Hollywood loop, is part of what makes Homicide unique. "The writing is different than most television shows," Kotto says. "It's better." Indeed, writers/executive producers Henry Bromell (Northern Exposure and I'll Fly Away) and Tom Fontana (St. Elsewhere) know their way around TV scripts -- Fontana won a 1993 Emmy for Outstanding Writing for an episode of Homicide.
"What's also unusual about this show," Kotto adds, "is that among the cast we have three different kinds of black men." Joining Kotto are the riveting Andre Braugher, who plays Det. Frank Pembleton, and Clark Johnson, as Det. Meldrick Lewis. The selection of three black actors to play roles that on another series might well have gone to whites, says Kotto, is a tribute to Fontana and executive producer Barry Levinson. "They had the daring to make the artistic choice without prejudice of any kind. I don't think there's another network show on the air with this sort of cast composition."
Next page: Kotto on the racial politics of dating.