ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 10, 1997 TAG: 9702120016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
Mary Tyler Moore and Edward Asner, who have 15 Emmys and a Hall of Fame sitcom between them, pair up again in ``Payback,'' a thriller about a rogue cop and the woman who reported his brutality.
This one, obviously, is not a comedy. It airs tonight at 9 on WSET-Channel 13.
Moore plays a restaurant owner who calls the police to report a suspicious man sitting in a nearby car, then watches as the cops who respond beat him unmercifully. When she testifies against them, one begins a vendetta against her. She, too, becomes a victim.
Asner is the internal-affairs officer who asks her to testify and investigates the case. In one sense, he is the good guy to whom Moore turns for help when she realizes she is being harassed.
``In another sense, although it is not spelled out, I am the villain, because I do get her to blow the whistle,'' Asner said, ``but I am an ineffectual eunuch, because I constantly fail to protect her. In that sense, I am the bad guy. It's her initiative that finally gets things moving.''
There is a moment when Asner is called on to wield his weapon, a scene requiring some agility that was made easier for him because he had had both hips replaced before making the film.
It was surgery that had to be scheduled during a rare break in Asner's long and busy career, which includes the New York stage, more than 40 films, 15 television series and miniseries and two terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild.
But to some, Asner will always be grumpy Lou Grant, the television news director whose assistant producer was the ever spunky Mary Richards, on ``The Mary Tyler Moore Show'' (1970-1977). When that program closed, Asner reappeared in ``Lou Grant'' (1977-1982). He won five Emmys and four Golden Globe Awards for that character alone, then both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for ``Rich Man, Poor Man'' and another Emmy for ``Roots.''
And it is Moore whom he clearly adores.
As executive producer of ``Payback,'' he said, ``I really wanted to get across an idea that I thought should be dramatized and have Mary star in it. She's a wonderful actress, and she never gets a chance to do drama.''
He also cast his daughter as co-owner of Moore's restaurant. ``She's lovely, and lovely in it,'' he said of Kate Asner, who appears in ``Inside Out,'' a film screened in January at the Sundance Film Festival.
For his part, Ed Asner guested in mid-January on ``Mad About You'' and will appear in two theatrical movies: ``The Flood,'' with Morgan Freeman, Randy Quaid and Christian Slater in May, and ``The Fanatics,'' in March. He'll also do a staged reading of ``Don Juan in Hell'' in Stamford, Conn., he said.
Asner said that although stories about corrupt law-enforcement officers crop up now and then in news reports, this week's television movie is ``total fiction.'' His major concern, he said, is ``that it will discourage whistle-blowers. If we ever needed whistle-blowers, it's now. There are all kinds of laws that protect these [corrupt] people, and the various branches of the government do not inform citizens of how they can be protected.''
But he said he insisted on a line of dialogue at the end of the movie for the benefit of thousands of honest police officers working across the country:
``It's my line, wherein I walk up to his gurney and he says, `You should have killed me, you - ,' and I say, `No, no, no. I want all the cops you didn't corrupt to hear all about you.' And in that way, we somehow redeemed it, said something for all those cops who aren't corrupt.''
LENGTH: Medium: 67 linesby CNB