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Richie Silverman, NYPD Movie/TV Unit Officer
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Richie Silverman, NYPD Movie/TV Unit Officer
Richie Silverman's job is a bit like wrangling mercury. As the Planning Officer for the NYPD Movie/TV unit, he juggles the shifts of 23 officers, who are assigned to an average of 10 film sets per day across the five boroughs of New York City. "The biggest challenge is trying to nail down where and when they are actually shooting, because their schedules change constantly. The industry is very fluid." Movie/TV unit officers are assigned to any shoot involving pyrotechnics, actors in police uniform, and diversions of traffic or stunts. Their focus involves maintaining safety for the pedestrian and vehicular traffic moving through and around sets, and have been doing so since the unit's inception in 1966.
Silverman joined the unit in 1986 and was initially assigned to exterior film shoots for 10 years. He then became its Planning Officer in 1996 and is the unit's official senior veteran. Consequently, he has become a living, breathing expert on New York City's traffic grid. Name any set of cross streets and he can tell you every conceivable challenge presented by that intersection, advise a production on how to pull off their scene at that location - or at a better one. A typical day on the Movie/TV unit for Silverman involves fielding multiple requests from feature films, television shows, music videos or commercials, getting an accurate read on the activity at each location, and prioritizing jobs. "It's interesting for me because it's about making a puzzle into a workable formula." The end result is a daily bible - the roll call for the unit's officers detailing production company names, locations, descriptions of activity and officers assigned.
In short, Silverman can make or break a major scene for a production, and he nearly always finds a way to make it work. While he receives over 40 requests from production companies on a daily basis, Silverman asks only one thing of them: "I don't want to be the last stop. When the company knows there is a change, I want to be their first phone call."
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Each month we will showcase a City agency employee or an industry specialist who helps to facilitate production in New York City.
