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Granville Adams, the actor best known for his performance as Zahir Arif on HBO’s “Oz,” has died following a long struggle with cancer. He was 58 years old.
“Goodnight, sweet prince/and flights of angels sing thee to they rest,” Fontana wrote.
read the article here: Variety
One of TV's all-time great shows, long stuck in streaming purgatory because of a music-rights issue, should be coming soon to a service near you
Fontana recalls, “Scott invited me to lunch and literally said: ‘Sam Spade, South of France, 20 years after “The Maltese Falcon.”’ I said, ‘I’m in.’” And so began the story of “Monsieur Spade.”
read the article HERE
"It was quite groundbreaking and had an amazing cast. Thankfully, a lot of the people have gone on from 'Oz' to do some wonderful work, and I'm so proud to have been a part of it."
“… some of it seemed extreme at the time, but now the way things have unfolded in society, nothing seems that seems extreme at all.”
read the article HERE
The WNET Group Honors
Rita Moreno
at Star-Studded Gala
At The Edison Ballroom in Manhattan, The WNET Group honored the legendary Rita Moreno at its 2024 Gala for her trailblazing career and ongoing support of public media.
Tom Fontana, creator of HBO’s Oz, spoke on-stage about Rita’s impact in the entertainment industry.
Tom Fontana Films 'The Wrong Road' with Buffalo State Students
Watch the video above and read the article HERE
Before The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Six Feet Under, The Wire, or any of the other popular HBO shows, there was Oz. The one-hour drama chronicled the lives of the staff and inmates at the Oswald State Correctional Facility, a maximum security penitentiary home to the most violent offenders in the state. It’s been over twenty years since the series concluded, but creator Tom Fontana is back with an Oz short film starring Lee Tergesen as Tobias Beecher and Dean Winters as Ryan O’Reily.
Watch
the film HERE
One Of The Best Prison Dramas Ever Made Is Getting An Unconventional Sequel
The imaginative and groundbreaking prison drama "Oz" is getting a short sequel from its original creator, according to series star Kirk Acevedo. The actor who played inmate Miguel Alvarez for six seasons of the HBO series took to X/Twitter this week to spread the word about "Zo," a YouTube short film from series writer-creator Tom Fontana.
Homicide:
Life On The Set
delves into the making
of the
multi-award-winning
television show
“Homicide: Life On The
Street”.
This podcast features
exclusive interviews with the cast and crew,
looking at what made this innovative show an enduring
classic.
Pembleton was brilliantly written (including by Fontana, another product of Jesuit education, whose complicated relationship with faith informed the character), but it was Braugher who brought Frank’s faith struggle to life with power and honesty.
Read the article Here
Prison dramaOzgets a close-up, and producer Tom Fontana makes the case that that series, more thanThe Sopranos, ushered in TV’s golden era. “The kind of risks that are being taken now stem directly from the risks we took withOz,” he said. “It reduced the fear factor that afflicted executives.”
Buffalo’s one-and-only Tom Fontana (Emmy Award winning writer/producer, and Buffalo State alumnus) will be participating in a community talk at Buff State on Thursday, 9/28. Fontana will be joined by TV network casting executive, Rosalie Joseph. The community talk will be moderated by Buffalo State associate professor of Television and Film Arts, Jeffrey Hirschberg
Buffalo writer Tom Fontana is coming to Western New York on Sept. 28 and Sept. 29 to talk at his high school alma mater, Canisius, and his college alma mater, SUNY Buffalo State. He is doing a fundraising luncheon at Canisius and a day of classes at Buffalo State.
During the strike, Fontana can still write but there are conditions. “I can write a play, I can write a short story and I can write a TV script, but it cannot be under contract. In other words, if I signed a contract with Showtime to write a pilot and then we went on strike, I can't write that particular pilot.”
He is writing a play.
Read
the article by Travis M. Andrews
Co-written by Fontana & Frank, and to be directed by Frank, Monsieur Spade centers around writer Dashiell Hammett’s great detective Sam Spade (Owen). Monsieur Spade finds Spade (Owen) in the South of France in 1963 at the end of the Algerian War. Living out his golden years in the small town of Bozouls, Spade will soon find his tranquility interrupted.
"The show was prickly, funny, morally forceful, endlessly discursive and filled with a murderers’ row of actors, including the future stars Andre Braugher (who won an Emmy for his performance as Frank Pembleton), Melissa Leo and Giancarlo Esposito, along with veterans like Ned Beatty, Yaphet Kotto and Richard Belzer, known primarily then asa stand-up comedian."
..."Getting more money for fewer shows is an economic issue," Fontana said. "AI is truly an existential issue. The minute they can say, 'we'll just have AI write the next Marvel movie,' that's a very short way to, 'why not have AI write the spinoff of 'Yellowstone' once a pattern is set on a television series or a movie?' " readthearticle HERE
"I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Richard Belzer. He's a true artist, and I'm lucky to call him a friend." Tom Fontana
"Nothing's in a vacuum. I would credit 'Oz' for showing me that there was this network out there that would tell a dark story and tell an adult story. 'Homicide' [Simon's first book] had been made into a TV show. But with 'The Corner' [Burns and Simon's nonfiction book centered on a West Baltimore drug market], I was like: 'The rights are worth nothing. Nobody's going to put that on American television.' And then I saw 'Oz,'.
read the article by Anya Stanley HERE
...this was a revolutionary concept when it was first proposed almost three decades ago and initially was met with resistance. Involved in its inception were two top TV showrunners, Law & Order creator and executive producer Dick Wolf and Oz creator and executive producer Tom Fontana.
The two had been good friends since Fontana was on St. Elsewhere and Wolf was on Hill Street Blues in the early ’80s. “We kept in touch as our career wended its way through various highways,” Wolf says. “Tom moved back to New York, I stayed in LA.”
“Homicide was one of my favorite shows, he said Law & Order was one of his,” Wolf says. “We were talking, and we thought it would be interesting and fun to do a story that crossed over both shows. He didn’t think anyone had done that and neither did I.”
“City on a Hill,” Showtime’s critically acclaimed Boston crime drama starring Emmy nominee Kevin Bacon and Screen Actors Guild Award winner Aldis Hodge, has been renewed for a third season. Emmy-winning executive producer and showrunner Tom Fontana, creator of HBO’s “Oz” and Canal Plus’ “Borgia,” is set to return for Season 3.
“Among the diverse group of poets and prose writers are Carl Dennis, Gary Earl Ross, and Tom Fontana—who contributed an original short story featuring four families in an apartment building on Buffalo’s West Side, a slice of their lives in early days of the pandemic.
“With the inspired pairing of Kevin Bacon and Aldis Hodge and the inspired writing of Tom Fontana and Chuck MacLean, we believe there is a rich future for this compelling series.” Gary Levine
A revealing look at the foster care system as seen through the eyes of those who know it best. From Oscar-winning filmmakers Deborah Oppenheimer and Mark Jonathan Harris
The Paley Center will reunite key members of the cast and creative team of one of the most influential and acclaimed dramas in television history including: Richard Belzer ("John Munch"); Andre Braugher ("Frank Pembleton"); Tom Fontana, Creator and Writer; Barry Levinson, Executive Producer.
Tickets go on sale for Paley Center Individual Members onFebruary15 at noon, and to the general public on February 16 at noon. To learn more about the benefits of Paley Membership, including the ability to purchase tickets ahead of the general public, please visit paleycenter.org/join-us.
Two decades on, it’s clear that the 1997 premiere of Oz was the Big Bang of Great TV.
“Bless you, Bill Daniels! Thanks to your wonderful book, I get to live the best years of my life over again—the magical ’80s when we did St. Elsewhere. And not just those wonderful times—I get to relive Two for the Road, The Graduate, and 1776 in the bargain. What a treat!”—Ed Begley Jr.