Leuci @ the Hartford Club, 6-3-10, Conducting Workshop,
13th Annual CT Young Writers Celebration
-- photo by Bob Thiesfield
Sunday's Event
12/04/2011 - 6:30pm
The Ridgefield Playhouse Film Society
Presents Prince of the City
Q & A
with Actor TREAT WILLIAMS and NYPD Narcotics Officer [retired] Robert Leuci
-- Actor Treat Williams With Director Sidney Lumet During Filming of Prince of the City
From The Playhouse Announcement:
Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City is a classic crime film about a NYC police officer who chooses to expose police corruption for idealistic reasons. The character of Daniel Ciello (Treat Williams) was based on Robert Leuci, a real-life NYPD Narcotics Detective. The film and its screenwriters, Director Sidney Lumet and Jay Presson Allen, received an 1982 Academy Award Nomination for “Best Adapted Screenplay.” That year, the film also had received three Golden Globe nominations and Sidney Lumet won the NY Film Critics Award for “Best Director.”
Film Critic Roger Ebert said, “Prince of the City is a film about cops, drugs, and New York City, in that order. After the film starts to turn itself over in your mind, it becomes a much deeper piece, a film about how difficult it is to go straight in a crooked world without hurting people you love. The film is about the ways in which a corrupt modern city makes it almost impossible for a man to be true to the law, his ideals, and his friends, all at the same time. The movie has no answers, only horrible alternatives.” The film is based on a book by former Ridgefield resident, Robert Daley about Robert Leuci, a New York police officer who cooperated with a 1971 investigation of police corruption. In the movie Leuci is called Ciello. He is played by actor Treat Williams in a demanding and grueling performance.
Williams is almost always onscreen, and almost always in situations of extreme stress, fatigue, and emotional turmoil. We see him coming apart before our eyes. He falls to pieces not simply because of his job, or because of his decision to testify, but also because he’s in an inexorable trap and sooner or later will have to hurt his partners.
Actor Treat Williams and former NYPD Narcotics Detective Robert Leuci,will be on hand for the Q&A. Robert Leuci is the author of numerous books and short stories including “All the Centurions” and “Blaze.” He has also worked as a TV series writer on Sidney Lumet’s “100 Centre St.”
Ticket Price: Adults $10, Seniors $7.50, Students $5.00
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Among Leuci's titles:
All the Centurions: A former New York City narcotics detective discusses his work on such film-inspiring cases as the French Connection and Serpico, and shares his disillusionment in the face of corruption, and the criminal justice system's dark side.
Fence Jumpers: As kids, they took on New York's mean streets. As men, they're on opposite sides of the law. Dante O'Donnell and Jimmmy Burns took up the oath, the badge and the gun of the police force. Jo Jo Paradiso took a different path as a rising player in the Paradiso crime family. Today the three friends are trapped in an ever-more-vicious game of betrayal -- one that threatens to break much more than the bonds of their youth.
Odessa Beach: A Russian and the American mob make strange bedfellows in a brilliantly plotted masterpiece of cross-cultural criminality. The book is set in Brighton (renamed Odessa) Beach, Brooklyn, where Nikolai Zoracoff has defected from Moscow -- not seeking political asylum but escape from the KGB. A charming hedonist and a criminal only because in Moscow luxury is bought by crime, Zoracoff's assimilation into America includes cowboy hats, Dolby stereo and a drug connection which, in New York, means an alliance with the Mafia -- and a game which is harder than Zoracoff can bear.
Blaze: A rising star in the NYPD, Captain Nora Riter has a private life that threatens to torpedo her career. A streetwise actor/conman Nicky Ossman faces prison for assaulting a vice cop. Nora needs Nicky to help her re-establish personal and professional control as she takes on a case that leads her to taking down a psychopathic criminal kingpin known as "Blaze."
Captain Butterfly: This is a riveting thriller about police corruption and the labyrinth of the human heart.
The Snitch: A highly-principled police detective is chosen to infiltrate the notoriously corrupt Organized Crime Control Bureau. When the OCCB raid a nightclub, leaving seven people dead, the powers that be decide a major bust would look better than a police corruption case -- only the detective refuses to compromise his principles.
Renegades: A thriller about three friends who grow up together on the tough streets of New York. Their friendship, loyalty and courage are tested when two become policemen and the other becomes a mafia boss.
Double Edge: A tough, all-too-human police drama set on the dangerous streets of Washington, D.C. Cotton is a crack dealer who's seen it all. Scot Ancelat is a detective who's seen too much. In a vivid, brutal tale, their stories intertwine, as Ancelat struggles to solve the senseless murder of a young boy.
Selected Links For LEUCI BOOKS
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-- photo by Chion Wolf
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