Free Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion by Susan Green, Randee Dawn Page A

compared with digital.”
    For Kotcheff, beauty comes across most powerfully in “a whole gallery of distinctive, colorful places. Every second should be entertaining. I tell our directors, ‘Make it new.’ If a producer says, ‘That’s not a very important scene,’ I ask them: ‘Oh, you want to do it badly and have the audience lose interest?’”
    Failure is not an option in showrunner Neal Baer’s purview. “Last year (season nine), we were too dark; we want better lighting (in future episodes),” he points out. “I’m looking for ways scripts can push our visual style and I believe nothing is verboten if it serves the story.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    THE CORRIDORS OF KA-CHUNG
    I n the summer of 1999 Karen Stern was about to apply for an editing job at another Dick Wolf show, DC , when a friend told her a Law & Order spin-off in the pipeline would be “crewing up, as well.”
    The choice was easy. “I’d never missed an episode,” she says of her viewing habits. “So I went for that interview instead.”
    A decade later, Stern and her fellow editors, Nancy Forner and Steve Polivka, work in a rotation; she covers every third show. Amoung them, they may be working on nine episodes in various stages at once.
    Like the others, Stern is holed up in an SVU “cutting room” at the Verna Fields Building, which encompasses editors for all programs in the NBC Universal realm.

    Peter Jankowski and Charlie Engel
    “There are three editors and two assistants for each Law & Order show,” explains Wolf Films president Peter Jankowski. “You walk down the hallway and hear that ‘ka-chung’ all day long.”
    The indelible electronic sound, originally created by Mike Post for the Mother Ship, also now demarcates scenes on SVU and Criminal Intent . He calls it “the clang”; at least one TV critic ( Entertainment Weekly ’s Ken Tucker) has referred to “an ominous chung CHUNG.”
    Post’s ubiquitous “time/location signature” between scenes has prompted Wolf to playfully taunt him ever since: “Isn’t it great that you worked all these years to become a serious composer and after you’re gone they’ll remember you for two notes?”
    Stern keeps a copy of those two notes in a bin with other sound effects and musical interludes to insert into her initial edit. It’s part of a system that requires bouncing episodes-in-progress across the country and back again.
    Every night, the “dailies”—representing what the director decides to print from his twenty-four hours’ worth of footage—are shipped from New York to Los Angeles, where a lab processes them. (The ratio of raw footage to each show’s actual length of forty-two or forty-three minutes is approximately ten to one.)
    The negative of the processed material is then transferred to digital video. Stern, who has by then read every successive draft of the script, begins to assemble her cut, which takes about three weeks. “My job is to give the director the best blueprint possible,” she notes.
    Executive producer Arthur Forney, who oversees post-production, says the next step is when “the editor’s cut is sent to the director, who has four days to make his own (cut). We leave him alone to do his thing.”
    A first screening is then attended by Forney, showrunner Neal Baer, supervising producer Randy Roberts, the writer, and the editor, who together do the fine-tuning. “Most directors work on different types of shows, whereas the producers are there for all twenty-four episodes a season,” Forney says. “We know the arc of the series.”
    At this juncture, they collaboratively determine “if it needs tightening, the story is too confusing, if we’re giving away too much information, if the episode needs a little more suspense,” Stern says. “We have to build performances that are absolutely true. I think our shows are quite seamless and very naturalistic in tone. So much of what we do is from gut feelings.”
    A final look from Wolf,