Posted on Thu, Dec. 18, 2003

Ellen Gray | 'Hack' cabbie Morse takes a write turn

By Ellen Gray

graye@phillynews.com




HACK. 9 p.m. Saturday, Channel 3.

YOU COULD SAY that no one has put more of his stamp on CBS' "Hack" than David Morse.

Not only does he star in the drama about a disgraced cop-turned-cabdriver, but he's responsible for its Philadelphia setting, having insisted he'd do the role only if it were filmed in the city where he and his family live.

On Saturday, he expands his influence, as the network airs an episode written by Morse in which the son of his character, Mike Olshansky, is kidnapped by a hit man - played by Titus Welliver - when Olshansky's caught in a war between mobsters.

"I had just been reading the newspapers and I read that there was a mobster for real, a Russian mobster, who was trying to make a move, move into this area," Morse said this week. "That really struck me as interesting, how they can do that from Moscow. So I just invented a character who was doing that."

Though Morse has done a little writing before, both credited and uncredited - Sean Penn, he said, even offered him a credit on "The Crossing Guard," "but it was really his creation" - there's a reason actors don't generally write for the shows in which they star: Both jobs tend to be more than full-time.

"I actually started writing an episode during our hiatus," Morse said. His original plan had been for a two-parter, "but we've decided not to do those this year" and when executive producer Robert Singer asked him to compress the action into one episode, the rewrites ran into the production season, he said.

That involved "working a 14- or 15-hour day and going home and writing or writing on the weekends, which is not really what I want to do," said the actor, a father of three.

Morse's script also "turned out to be much too ambitious for our show," with too many stunts and challenging locations, so "I had to kind of adapt things as we went along," he said.

"Part of my problem is that all the writers are out there in Los Angeles and they have a process" that involves breaking down and outlining stories before they're written, niceties Morse didn't have time for.

The show's writers did some work on the script to simplify it, "and then I did my version of that," he said.

"I might feel differently if I was out there, in the office, where you can all talk to each other all the time. From here, it's awkward. I'm not sure I'm nuts about committee scripts. If I was going to put my name on it, I wanted to make sure it was something I had written, and by the end of it, I felt like it was."

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