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Printed Articles & Interviews Saskatoon Star Phoenix March 15, 1996 |
Ordeal basis for television series
This is a shortened version of the interview that appeared in
The Detroit Free Press 1/29/96 and The Chicago Tribune 1/31/96
by Scott Williams
NEW YORK--Study the picture. Titled "Hidden Agenda," it depicts an execution in a Third World country. It was taken by documentary photographer Thomas Veil, and suddenly one night its mere existence nearly canceled out his own.
All record of his identity is erased. His wife and friends deny knowing him. Veil becomes the pawn of a conspiracy so vast it's as if an occult hand had plucked him out of our reality and dropped him into a primate nightmare.
To save his life and quite possibly his sanity, he must discover the truth about the photo and himself.
Such is the tingly premise of "Nowhere Man," which stars Bruce Greenwood, as the beleaguered Veil. It airs Monday nights, right after UPN's flagship "Star Trek: Voyager," and is retaining 60 percent of the "Trek" audience.
So, Mr. Veil, asks a reporter, thrusting a copy of "Hidden Agenda" before actor Greenwood -- what do you see in this picture?
"I see the end of my career, if I tell you exactly what's in it," he says, grinning hugely. "In this haze here, I see (executive producer) Larry Hertzog, pointing his finger at me, saying, "If you say what I think you're tempted to say....'" Greenwood lets the sentence dangle ominously.
It's a compelling photograph. It shows four hooded bodies in ragged peasant clothes, hanged from a crude scaffold in a jungle clearing. At their feet two civilians kneel, in prayer or grief, and a little girl and a soldier look up at the dead.
Behind them, in the left foreground, a burly man in camouflage fatigues, his back to the camera, stands in the door of a Humvee, smoking a cigar and looking at the hanged people.
A soldier, helmeted, salutes the interior of the vehicle, while beyond it, another soldier is shoving along a couple of civilians. In the right foreground, a tattooed soldier draped with bandolier ammunition surveys the scene.
"It hasn't been made clear where this was taken," Greenwood said. "And you might cast your eye in here, if you cared to, sometime," he said, casually gesturing at the hazy region immediately around the cigar smoker.
"It's not as hazy as you might think, but that's all I'm going to say about it at this time," he said, savoring the moment. "It would be so easy to lead you astray, and I'm so horribly tempted."
Hmmm. Detailed examination of the area with a magnifier reveals a corrugated metal roof, a clothesline, crates stacked behind an open truck, the hint of another, taller structure but nothing definite.
Veil since has tracked down the tattooed soldier, Harry Corners, who went insane. "I think he was driven insane not by this event, but by events that followed it, when he was debriefed," Greenwood said.
"Although he may have thought he knew what he was looking at when he saw it, even the people there may not have realized the import of the occasion," he said.
"More than that, though, I haven't asked myself. For example, how many letters are described in that scaffold?" the actor said. "There's a lot of the alphabet hidden in that scaffold, if you care to look at it."
For Greenwood the role is a natural career move.
Last season, he played an emotionally damaged tax auditor in Exotica.
Nowhere Man
