Hometown boy Dennis Leoni, 72, is proof a television career in Hollywood can be had, it just takes a lot of work.
“You really have to hustle,” he said. “It’s not easy; it’s just a hard business.”
Leoni is the writer, creator and executive producer of the groundbreaking series, “Resurrection Blvd.,” aired on Showtime beginning in 2000. What made the series remarkable was that all the main characters were Latinos, a first for Hollywood.
“I’m very proud of it,” he said. “There wasn’t and there still isn’t a lot of opportunity for Latino actors.”
This year celebrates the silver anniversary of the series, which was on for only a few seasons, although viewers can watch the show on YouTube. The show has been off the air for a couple of decades, but people are still talking about it. In fact, just recently many of the actors were in the Old Pueblo to mark the occasion at the Fox Tucson Theatre. Still, it never occurred to Leoni when he was writing it that it would have such longevity.
“I don’t think of it in terms of, ‘This was good,’ while I was writing it,” he said. “You just try to do the best you can and you try to make it fun and you try to make it dramatic and put all the elements that you can muster and you just hope that it turns out well. I’ve seen some great scripts and they’re bad pilots and I’ve seen some not-so-great scripts and they turn out to be good pilots.”
But that’s just one in a long list of his projects.
Leoni said his latest is trying to break 80 on the golf course. But when he’s talking about his life, one thing is immediately apparent: It has been nothing if not interesting. “Resurrection Blvd.” was just one bus stop along the way.
Leoni’s roots are deep in Southern Arizona, going back generations.
“The Latino part of my family is from Patagonia,” he said. “We’ve always been in Southern Arizona… Tucson has always been very special to me. It’s my home, it’s where I come from… I just love Tucson.”
Leoni’s grandparents lived in Tucson’s first public housing project, La Reforma, on 10th Avenue and 19th Street, he said. His parents lived on the east side of town and he graduated from Rincon High School.
After graduation, it was off to the UA to study public administration, but much to his parents’ displeasure he quit after two years to work at Old Tucson Studios, where he was the first Latino stuntman hired there. Leoni will tell you proudly that he became the fastest gun in Old Tucson.
“I didn’t look like the other cowboys,” he said. “I did look like a bad guy. I could play bandits. I did play mean, darker characters but I also played some sheriffs. Because the shows were prerecorded with different voices, I just played the voice that was on the tape and nobody was the wiser.”
It was at Old Tucson where he got the bug to be in the movie business.
After a year or so of getting punched in the gut, plunging to the ground from rooftops and falling off horses, Leoni followed his then-girlfriend, now wife, to Hawaii, where he became a part of the 1970s series, “Hawaii 5-0,” starring Jack Lord.
“I took my headshots and in those days you could just walk right into the studios,” he said. “I remember walking right into the casting office and saying, ‘Hi. My name’s Dennis Leoni and I’m just in from the mainland. Here are my headshots. I can do stunts, I can act, I can do all these other things,’ and she took the pictures and said, ‘Thank you very much.’ She called me the next week and put me in the show as an extra.”
The following week she called again, this time to be a double for Jack Lord.
“They put a wig on me and a blue suit on me,” Leoni said. “I went up into a helicopter and then I doubled some other people and then they hired me as a stand-in.”
Eventually he became a production assistant. From there he worked as a second director, allowing him to learn how a series is made from behind the camera.
“I wasn’t that great of an actor and probably my strong point was I was smart enough at least to know I wasn’t that good of an actor,” he said.
That’s what led him to writing.
Leoni began collecting 5-0 scripts and breaking them down until he felt he could write one as good as any of them. Once he moved back to Hollywood he shopped his first script around. It was good enough to generate attention and land an agent.
“I just slowly started writing spec scripts and moving up the ranks and I became a writer,” he said. “And writers on series become producers and that’s really how I saw the writing, as a way to gain power in the business. It’s certainly not an easy business to move your way up in and that was a way I thought I could do it.”
He said he wrote eight or nine scripts before he got his first job. Eventually HBO hired him. He said his mother, who loved movies, didn’t really got it.
“I wrote a limited series for HBO,” he said. “I got the job to do a pilot and six episodes. They were paying me what I thought at the time was a boatload of money to do this thing. I called my mom and I said, ‘Hey mom, they hired me to write a story on HBO.’ At the end of the conversation she said, ‘You know, the railroad is hiring.’”
It wasn’t until he did “Resurrection Blvd.” that his mom finally understood what the work was about.
In 2015, Leoni suffer a series of strokes. He has worked hard to come back from that though he admits he still doesn’t move or walk as well as he used to. He said he can still write as good as he ever did, though he isn’t as motivated as he once was.
“I just don’t have the taste for business the way I did before,” he said. “I think I’ve done my time. I’ve really done the best I could to create opportunities for other people to follow in my footsteps.”
As tough as it is to make a go of it in Hollywood, it can be done.
“The cool thing about Tucson is if you look at the television landscape in the past 30, 40 years, two guys have come out of there as show runners, myself and Peter Murrieta,” Leoni said. “He’s a wildcat. Unfortunately, he teaches at ASU.”
Find Resurrection Blvd. here: youtube.com/watch?v=AC1rNgqWkUc&rco=1
To find out more about Peter Murrieta, look here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Murrieta
