"Joey treated me like dirt; I didn't know he could be so cruel": That's the line being recited over and over by Hoffman, who plays Joni, an honest girl engaged to dishonest Joey Coltrera, the son of a New Jersey underworld figure. The film crew is crammed into a corner of this tiny diner; extras in leather jackets and leather miniskirts chomp and chatter picturesquely in the background.
Dream Street is, an NBC news release asserts, "a rock-and-roll drama . . . about a Jersey blue-collar family and a group of friends in their 20s." It's being filmed on location in Hoboken and Jersey City, and its executive producers are the creators of thirtysomething, Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick.
Industry wits are already referring to this new show as dirtysomething and A Year in Da Life. Looking at the battered warehouses outside Jordan's Diner while makeup people make glamorous actresses look alluringly frowzy, one thinks of other titles: Grime Story, or - given the amount of soul-searching
from the show's brooding working stiffs - Rocky Gets a Migraine From Thinkin' Too Much.
The two pop-cultural phenomena that have been regularly invoked by NBC as inspirations for Dream Street are the heroic music of Bruce Springsteen and the sexy, jumpy TV ads for Levi's 501 jeans.
In TV terms, 501 jeans ads communicate some sort of gritty reality, and Springsteen is a master of documentary realism - romanticism mingles with the everyday to create what Herskovitz has called "drama that's raw and exciting."
Raw and exciting, and self-conscious. The scene Hoffman and Moore are shooting, for example, tries to get to the heart of their characters' friendship. Moore's character, Kara, wants to go out on a date with a dreamboat of a novelist she's just met, but she's obliged to attend a party with her pal Joni.
