Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, December 11, 1994                   TAG: 9412130027
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MICHAEL KILIAN CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium

TV COPS RESEARCH THEIR ROLES ON THE STREET

Starting with ``Hill Street Blues,'' and expanding into a profusion of authentic police dramas such as ``N.Y.P.D. Blue,'' ``New York Undercover'' and ``Homicide: Life in the Street,'' the trend has been to dirty ashtrays and peeling-wall squad rooms, to corpses who look very dead indeed and scum-of-the-earth bad guys, to actor cops who sweat, swagger and swear the way actual policemen and policewomen do.

How do actors prepare for that? How do they turn themselves into such believable hardcases?

For James McDaniel, who plays Lt. Arthur Fancy on ``N.Y.P.D. Blue,'' Patti D'Arbanville-Quinn, who's Lt. Virginia Cooper on ``New York Undercover,'' and Daniel Baldwin, who's one of the most realistic cops of all as ``Homicide's'' Det. Beau Felton, it's simply, and brutally, a matter of getting out there on the streets with real cops - in Baldwin's case, even packing some heavy heat himself.

Each of their shows has one or more police officers assigned to it as technical adviser, but each actor went out to get first hand street experience on his or her own. McDaniel and D'Arbanville-Quinn rode with detectives in some of the worst precincts in New York. Baldwin rode with cops in Los Angeles and Baltimore, where ``Homicide'' is shot.

``I spent a lot of time going around, checking out murder scenes,'' said McDaniel, a Washington-born veteran New York stage actor. ``I remember seeing a kid who had lost the top of his head. A teen-ager. Everything else looked normal. His eyes were wide open. It look like he was wide awake, but the top of his head was open. He was a cab driver, evidentally a real good kid. He was working his way through college - came from a poor background - and he got stuck up. They pulled him out and executed him.''

D'Arbanville-Quinn, who grew up in New York's Greenwich Village and is married to real life New York fireman Terry Quinn, didn't have street encounters that grisly, but found her most disturbing experience was observing line-ups in which the hardened criminal ``perps'' were little kids.

``That was the most difficult to see,'' she said. ``They were having a rash of incidents where these young kids would knock on the door and look like angels. An old lady or old man would answer the door and then they'd shove their way in and they'd rob them and beat them and stuff. So they had these kids in the line ups. I saw two perps, one in each line up. The other kids were from the recreation center down the street or somewhere. What was really interesting about watching the kid who was the suspect was that he had hands like my little 12-year-old boy's. He had little baby hands, you know? He [didn't care] about being there, but his little hands looked like a child's hands.

``Then he looked up and his eyes were dead. What happens to a kid to look like that? He looked like he had been in prison for 20 years. No regard for life or property or work. It's really frightening, because these are children.''

Baldwin, of the famous acting family that includes brothers Alec, Billy and Steven Baldwin, had spent a lot of time with L.A. cops preparing for detective roles in the movies ``Night Moves'' and ``L.A. Takedown,'' and has been with Baltimore cops so much that ``I'm friends with some of those homicide guys now.''

But ``to get an idea of the city, and the beat of the city,'' he went out one night with only one ``friend'' - a 9 mm automatic pistol.

``It was the first night I got there,'' he said, sounding in real life just like tough guy Felton does on the screen. ``I called a cab at 10 o'clock at night and asked him to take me to the worst intersection in the city.

``I'd put on an overcoat that I'd rubbed dirt and mud all over and I rubbed it on my face and my hands. I took an Evian bottle and put it in a paper bag to make it look like I had a bottle of wine or beer with me, and I sat down on Pennsylvania Avenue and watched the hookers and the runners and the drug deals go on, and I saw there for hours watching the whole thing. I had to walk for a real long time before I finally got out of there.''

One thing all three agree on is that, for all their rough, raw verisimilitude, today's real life cop dramas don't fully reflect the true horrors of real cop life - and crime.

``You couldn't possibly show on TV what really happens,'' said D'Arbanville-Quinn. ``It would be too much for anybody to watch.''