True crime pays: North Jersey actors landing roles in a hugely popular TV genre

Dying may be easy — from a theatrical standpoint — but playing dead can be oh-so-hard.

Just ask Glen Rock's Charlie Sara, who portrayed murder victim Paul Duncsak in an Investigation Discovery show's re-creation of one of Bergen County's most notorious homicide cases. In 2006, Duncsak was ambushed inside his Ramsey home, a crime for which his former father-in-law was convicted.

"He murdered [him] in very close quarters in the entry foyer of his home, and it was close-range gunshots, six of them, one to the groin," Sara recalls of one gruesome scene he shot, for a 2015 episode of the ID series "I'd Kill for You," at a mansion in Sparta. "And then the hardest part was laying on a cold marble floor for about four hours as they shot camera angles of the dead body."

Sara, a professionally trained actor who owns and operates an ambulatory-care facility in Paramus, has since played a prosecutor and a murderer in two different ID shows. He is a part of two intertwining television trends — the huge popularity of the true-crime genre and the rise of Sparta Township, a Sussex County community with one of New Jersey's lowest crime rates, as a filming locale.

"It's one of the safest communities, but it's the set for the re-creations of some very heinous crimes from all over the

country," says Sparta police Lt. John-Paul Beebe, who, along with local Realtor Duffy Brennan, is credited with igniting the filming boom a few years ago, as a way to pump up the local economy.

The ascendance of true-crime to a so-called "prestige" TV genre is evidenced by the success of compelling documentary series like HBO's "The Jinx" and Net- flix's "Making a Murderer," along with net- work TV news magazines' obsession with real murder and mayhem. But most of all, there's ID, which produced more than 650 hours of original programming last year, and ended the fourth quarter of 2015 as the No. 1 ad-supported cable network among 25 to 54-year-old women, according to the network.

"ID addicts" — as the network calls avid fans — often wonder "Who are these people who play these victims, villains and lawmen?" They don't seem to be actors we've seen on scripted crime shows like "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" or "Elementary."

As it turns out, ID shows are non-union productions and so, the players you see on them have a wide variety of acting skills — and motivations.

For Joseph Borzotta, a longtime Rutherford resident who recently moved to Ocean Township, getting acting roles — he played the father of murdered actress Rebecca Schaeffer in a 2014 episode of ID's "Dead on Arrival" — was "just a bucket-list-thing."

Borzotta, an artist who has a painting studio in Hoboken and Palette Gallery in Asbury Park, saw a posting on a casting website, applied for the job, and was hired.

"The tricky part was, I didn't know that they were going to film me and the woman who played the mother getting the phone call that our daughter had just been killed. I'm not an actor, so I was like, 'Oh, my God, how am I gonna do this?' "

Luckily, his scene partner was a stage actress. And they agreed that as they embraced, it should be her face that was turned toward the camera. "I didn't know how to fake it as good as she could," Borzotta says. "She was phenomenal. She collapsed in my arms. She got so emotional. Her craft was pretty amazing to see."

His one-day shoot (in a Jersey town he can't recall) also involved a going-away party scene. "Those re-creation shows pay very little, but they're usually fun, interesting gigs," Borzotta says, adding that he applies for jobs where he has "a good shot of being on camera. That's how I get the kick out of it. To do a giant crowd scene doesn't really interest me."

Extra roles of the crowd-scene sort are not hard to get on ID shows. "We usually cast our main roles here in [New York City] — they are non-union actors, but they are professional actors — but we absolutely look to the community to help us with the background performers," says Lee Beckett, an executive producer with XCON Productions, which does "A Crime to Remember" for ID. "As far as the background performers, we're more than happy to cast people who've never done a lick of acting."

She cites a very cooperative Sparta couple who, among other things, allowed her production to shoot at a gully that abuts their property. The husband, Jeremy Manjorin, became a background actor, playing the medical examiner at the crime scene.

Little prep time

Though there's far more care given to casting a major role like Duncsak, a 40-year-old pharmaceutical executive when he died, the actor may get scant prep time. "I auditioned on a Thursday, I was hired on a Friday, and we started production on Monday, so I had the weekend to grab as much as I could on this gentleman," says Sara, who watched a "Dateline NBC" piece about the case, listened to the 911 tape, read the divorce decree and spoke with a longtime close friend of Duncsak.

He also read about Duncsak's father-in-law, Edward Ates, who infamously mounted an unusual (and unsuccessful) defense, claiming he was "too fat to kill."

"You always try to portray the character as close to who he was when he was alive," Sara says. "I knew his children would be watching because they knew it was being filmed."

He also played a Las Vegas prosecutor named John Giordano on an episode of ID's "True Crime with Aphrodite Jones," which also shot in Sparta, in a different house. "They converted the basement into a prosecution office. We were putting together the timeline of what happened and the big reveal at the end was my line, 'Gentlemen, we have our case.' So, it was kind of fun."

And in ID's "On the Case with Paula Zahn," Sara played a killer — William Cosden Jr., who was convicted, 28 years after the fact, for the 1973 slaying of 14-year-old Seattle hitchhiker Katherine Devine. That four-day shoot was mostly at a West Orange gas station and a Montclair wooded area.

"These particular jobs are non-union, so they pay anywhere between $150 to $600 per day, which is a little bit under union scale," says Sara, who is eligible to join SAG-AFTRA, but is not a member. "But because they were non-union, I did not have to pay 10 percent to my agent."

Actors on these shows generally do not get residuals, Sara says. "You get paid for the day or the role." (For his eight-day Duncsak shoot, Sara says he made about $4,000.)

But his ID work has also been a good showcase, he says. "I've been acting for a long time, but I tell you, I've gotten so much exposure on the ID channel, it's just amazing," Sara says. "I mean high school classmates of mine from 1985 are calling me, finding me on Facebook, saying 'Oh, my God, that portrayal was unbelievable.' "

Of course, Sara doesn't just do ID shows. Recently, for example, he shot a skit for "Late Night With Seth Meyers" (slated for February) and he played New York State prison escapee Richard Matt on the two-hour History channel special "America's Greatest Prison Breaks." And in 2010 he had the lead role — the head coach of the 1951 San Francisco Dons — in Fox Sports Network's "Amazing Sports Stories," which was nominated for three sports Emmys.

Sara — who lives in Glen Rock with wife Cheryl and their three children — grew up in Cliffside Park. He studied theater at Montclair State University, but says he left when the theater department's dean balked at his taking on soap-opera gigs. Sara then studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, and subsequently earned a master's degree in health services administration.

"That's my secondary career, which actually pays the bills as I've been pursuing acting for the past 25 years," says Sara, who, in addition to owning Northern NJ Pain and Rehabilitation Center, is on the faculty at Rutgers-New Jersey Medical School.

"The way I relieve my stress is to go on acting jobs and get hired to play different characters," Sara says.

"It's a wonderful way to really complement your real life, playing someone else."

Email: rohan@northjersey.com