To be filmed in Rhode Island, The Brotherhood will depict a city of political ambition, neighborhood loyalties and changing demographics.

01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, June 18, 2005

BY SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writer

EAST PROVIDENCE -- This time, television's reel image of Providence will be a lot closer to the real place of peeling paint, ethnic neighborhoods and fractious politics than the last time Hollywood featured the city.

Filming starts early next month on The Brotherhood, a Showtime TV series about two Irish-American brothers on opposite sides of the law -- think of Boston's infamous Bulger clan -- set in a Providence neighboorhood designed to resemble the Smith Hill of a couple of generations ago.

"We want a sense of a neighborhood where people live close, where everybody knows everybody . . . and where politics is interesting," said Blake Masters, the show's executive producer, in an interview yesterday. "A tight-knit neighborhood your grandfather would recognize as the place he grew up in."

It will be a long way from the treacly NBC show Providence, which ran from 1999 to 2003. It portrayed Providence as bathed in a permanent golden autumnal light, with postcard-perfect shots of the East Side and the downtown riverwalks. In Providence everyone looked as if they were headed to Brown Stadium for an Ivy League game on a sun-dappled September afternoon; there were lots of adorable puppies and restored Colonial manses but few shady pols or shot-and-beer taverns.

The Providence depicted in The Brotherhood will be more familiar to Rhode Islanders. It is a city of political ambition, neighborhood loyalties and changing demographics. A place of triple-deckers, barrooms, St. Paddy's parades and a majestic State House.

In The Brotherhood, the old white ethnic neighborhood feels besieged, pressed on one side by an influx of minority residents and on the other by gentrifying yuppies, Masters said.

The series is scheduled to begin airing in January. A dozen episodes are scheduled to be filmed in Rhode Island. The productions are expected to pump about $25 million into the local economy, according to Steven Feinberg, director of the Rhode Island Film and Television Office.

The lead actors are Jason Clarke (Rabbit-Proof Fence), who is cast as a local politician, Annabeth Gish (The X-Files, The West Wing) as his wife, and Jason Isaacs (The Patriot, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) as his brother.

REPORTERS AND FEDERAL AGENTS have long known that some of Providence's richest stories and scams take place at the intersection of politics and money. The Brotherhood will explore some of those themes and others that will take viewers into such neighborhoods as Mount Hope, Federal Hill, South Providence, Smith Hill and Fox Point.

Another big difference between Providence and The Brotherhood is that the new series will actually be filmed in Rhode Island. The cast of Providence graced the city with its presence a few days a year, then Melina Kanakaredes, who played the comely surgeon Dr. Syd Hansen, and her cast cohorts fled back to Los Angeles, where most of the scenes were filmed.

The Brotherhood is being put together in a cavernous, 60,000-square-foot former pet-food warehouse in East Providence, which the crew has transformed into a set that will replicate the interiors of tenement apartments and such venues as the House Corporations Committee hearing room in the State House.

Masters, the executive producer, said he has learned what Rhode Islanders and savvy outsiders have known for years -- that McKim, Mead and White's State House is an architectural wonder.

Hollywood last used extensive shots of the State House in Steven Speilberg's Amistad, where the building was a stand-in for the U.S. Capitol.

"It [The Brotherhood] is about politics, and a lot of it takes place in the State House," said Masters, an energetic 34-year-old Stanford graduate. "It is a beautiful building, one of a kind."

Filmmakers like Rhode Island because so many different scenes are available in such a cozy territory, Masters said.

Rhode Island offers filmmakers what Feinberg calls the "smallest state with the biggest back lot."

"Except for mountains and desert, Rhode Island has every environment you could want," said Feinberg. "And it is all within such a short distance."

Said Masters, "We can shoot a triple-decker on Carpenter Street [near Providence's Broadway-Federal Hill neighborhood], then within a 20- or 30-minute drive do a beach vacation scene in Narragansett."

So far, Masters said, Rhode Islanders have embraced the production. More than 1,000 people showed up two weeks ago to try to become extras in the series. And local officials and labor unions have been helpful in smoothing the way for work to begin, he said.

THE PROJECT has another familiar Rhode Island, art-imitates-life ring: it took intervention from State House political figures to make it happen.

The Brotherhood was slated to be filmed in Toronto, where to save money many Hollywood films and TV series are shot. But a tax-credit program pushed by the General Assembly and likely to be signed into law by Governor Carcieri gives filmmakers and TV producers tax incentives if they spend at least $300,000 making productions in Rhode Island.

Lawmakers in other states have given filmmakers economic incentives to film in their states, and Rhode Island needed to match the effort to have The Brotherhood made here, Masters said.

Michael McMahon, state economic development director, said the tax credit is easy to monitor because filmmakers do not receive anything until they show evidence that they have spent money in Rhode Island.

House Speaker William Murphy, D-West Warwick, and Senate President Joseph Montalbano, D-North Providence, drew criticism from Republicans in March for using a legislative maneuver to ensure that The Brotherhood received a $300,000 state subsidy to get production rolling. But any controversy seems to have abated; McMahon said Carcieri, a Republican, supports the measure, and it passed the House and Senate with virtually no opposition.

The Brotherhood has already started an economic ripple; several people working on the sets yesterday -- which resemble construction sites -- said they were pleased to be working near their homes.

Joe Rossi, a makeup artist from Cumberland, said he usually has to commute to New York City or Boston to work on such a production. "It's great to work this close to home," he said.