Yet the show rings especially true in its cradle of Baltimore, where many of the people who make the show happen, including Peranio and Moran, were born and raised.
“Baltimore is notorious for breeding odd ducks. Mencken was the biggest odd duck of them all,” said Moran, a graduate of Mount de Sales, a Catholic high school for girls.
“Put them together with the transplant goofs that are drawn here – maniacs like Poe and the Duchess of Windsor, come on now – and you’ve got a whole region of offbeat people.
“It’s a cheap, comfortable place to live,” said Moran. “There’s no bullshit.”
Odd ducks swimming along ponds bereft of bullshit: that is the charmed and tragic city that drives The Wire.
A character bleak and unvanquished.
A star.
“Ugly can be very interesting.” said Peranio, whose initials, V. E., for Vincent Eugene, commemorate his 1945 birthday of May 8, when the Allied “Victory in Europe” was declared.
“I’m intensely interested in the vacant houses and the peeling paint and how the flat, repetitive rhythm of the city is [ruined] when an abandoned house goes down. It makes a huge statement when something is missing from repetition – like having a tooth pulled – and it lends visual excitement to the city.”
Peranio grew up playing in the alleys around Cross Street Market, not far from Frank Sobotka’s old waterfront neighborhood in Locust Point.
“I think every Baltimorean is born with two things built into their personality,” he said. “Nostalgia and apathy.”
His nostalgia is often for the back alleys he played in as a kid, passageways gone to hell by the time he worked on The Wire.
“Baltimore has some of the best ghetto alleys in the country,” he said. “Especially in the summer when they’re like jungles overgrown with weeds and debris and trash that’s literally been tossed out of the back windows.”
To Peranio’s keen eye, the city has become a more desperate place in the last 20 years, while Moran would argue that things have improved a bit.
More times than not, it’s an up and down tempo responding – usually late – to job opportunities, how afraid the middle class is to return to the city to restore old housing and whatever administration – be it Democrats who legislate from the bottom up or Republicans who do the opposite – control the White House and Congress.
Peranio, who watches little or no television, particularly cop shows, takes particular pride in designing crack houses and police stations.
And, it would seem, what passes for patio furniture in the hood.
Many projects and paychecks down the road from the days when he made the 15-foot long lobster that raped Divine in John Waters’s 1971 film, Multiple Maniacs, Peranio now buys most of what he needs or directs someone else to build it.
“But I still love finding that one little thing in the alley … the orange couch that played such a big role in the first year is a good example.”
Scouting locations for The Wire pilot, Peranio found the orange, crushed-velvet sofa, a larger-than-life relic of the 1970s not unlike a Chrysler Newport, propped against a dumpster.
The supernova beauty of it dominated the pilot, which went on to become the show’s first episode, as alfresco HQ for D’Angelo Barksdale’s ragtag crew of drug slingers in The Pit.
[The sofa wound up adorning the back cover of a CD of The Wire music called … and all the pieces matter, released by Nonesuch Records in 2008.]
“It’s rare for a pilot to get picked up and become a show, so after we wrapped, we didn’t think about the orange sofa,” he said. “A month later, The Wire gets picked up and I told my staff to go get the couch.”
Nobody moved, and Peranio became immediately aware, and more than a little angry, that the couch had been tossed.
They had three weeks to find a perfect match for an item out of style since Gerald Ford was handing out pardons, and soon enough it became clear it wasn’t going to happen.
“Our carpenters built a new one from scratch, but we still had to upholster it,” said Peranio.
“We searched everywhere between here and New York and couldn’t find orange crushed velvet. It was from that gold and avocado period of the 1970s and was long out of style. The only place that had something that matched was a homemade-wallpaper shop in England.”
By the time they had cloned the rained-on, spit-on, and torn-down couch – “After we built it, we had to rip it apart and make it filthy,” said Peranio – it had cost the art department $3,000.
“We didn’t tell the producers, we just put it out there and no one knew any different,” said Peranio.
No one except for producer Nina Noble, who had signed the expense order for the orange velvet.
In the fall of 2003, an orange couch and retro-hipsters were featured on the cover of an issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine.
Someone should have told Mott the Hoople: the 1970s were back.
Several weeks before filming started in May 2004 on Season Three, the orange couch from The Pit was set to be auctioned on eBay for charity, raising money for a fund that honors the lifework of Ella Thompson, heroine of The Corner.
“In the old days, back when I was an anti-art director, we’d take stuff to the dump and come back with more than we took,” mused Peranio. “Now they’re in a hurry to bulldoze everything.
“But when I started in this business, you could go to the dump and see a mountain of refrigerators on fire with rats running through them. That was good pickings.”
For Season Three, Moran had more than two dozen principal roles to cast, and Peranio was given the challenge of building a 1950s-era police precinct inside The Wire’s soundstage, an old Sam’s Club a few miles east over the city line near Essex.
[By Season Four, the sound stage would be moved to the quintessentially suburban city of Columbia in Howard County, to the west of Baltimore.]
“I’ve got 29 principal roles to be cast and that’s just the first episode,” said Moran of Season Three. “That’s not counting extras for atmosphere and crime scenes.”
New characters include a heavy-set policewoman named Caroline with ears so fine she can hear dust settle on the wiretap; an ill-tempered drug slinger named Fruit, and a string of district-level plainclothesmen, sergeants, and lieutenants.
The show’s New York casting director, Alexa Fogle, who sent Michael Kenneth Williams to the producers for the role of Omar – saw more experienced actors for such parts as Baltimore’s incumbent Mayor Royce, the new drug king Marlo and the old street muscle Cutty.
“I know I’ve cast at least a thousand people [for the first two seasons] and from the look of this first new episode, add another thousand,” said Moran. “It’s like Ben-Hur goes to The Bottom.”
A note for out-of-towners: The Bottom was once a rough-and-tumble area of West Baltimore so named because it encompassed the bottom of black Baltimore’s famed grand concourse, Pennsylvania Avenue.
What was once The Bottom is now divided into thirds: a small strip of rehabbed row homes, a stretch of the Martin Luther King Boulevard, and a part of the University of Maryland’s medical and law campus.
It is a sign of Moran’s Crabtown pedigree that she even remembers the term.
Peranio built the inside of the Western District for Season Three with the facade of St. Brigid’s Catholic School on Hudson Street in Canton used for the outside. The school’s fenced-in playground, devoid of swing sets and monkey bars, served as the district’s back lot.
“St. Brigid’s and the Western District came out of that same period of Baltimore architecture in the late 1940s and 1950s, modern but not contemporary – that brutal, fascist look just before the crazy 1960s hit.
“The Western was always the roughest, always overcrowded, and we’re reproducing it in layers of history and chaos and piles of furniture in the hallways and lobby.”
The Peranio version was, he said, “without charm because nobody cares … they built grand
entrances back then, but they’re never used. They didn’t anticipate people parking around back and coming in a side door.”
Moran and Peranio have worked on virtually every film made by their old friend and fellow traveler John Waters, from the crazy kid stuff [1969’s 16mm The Diane Linkletter Story] on through what now passes for mainstream in the Waters canon [2004’s A Dirty Shame].
Like Waters, and a recent protégé, the young writer/director Matthew Porterfield, whom he calls the best filmmaker to come out of Baltimore in years, they are devoted to their hometown.
So, yeah, the weather is great in L.A.
The big shots are in New York.
And there’s more money in both of those places than any string of ten Baltimores put together.
So what?
When Hollywood crossed the continent to find Moran and Peranio in their own backyard, they were ready.
“You better be,” says Moran, “because it moves like a freight train.”
episode twenty-two
STRAY ROUNDS
“The world is a smaller place now.” - THE GREEK
Directed by Tim Van Patten
Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by David Simon
Bang!
A street shoot-out between Bodie’s gang and the independent crew stealing business from The Pit. Bullets everywhere, hitting nary a dealer or anyone else in the game but finding a kid getting ready for school inside a shitty rowhouse bedroom.
The battle brings an army of cops to throw slingers and junkies against the walls and to the ground. On the scene, Major Howard Colvin of the Western District – soon to be a key protagonist in Season Three – says wearily: “Fucking pointless … chasing this shit from one corner to the next like it’s a plan.”
The detectives assigned to solve the nine-year-old’s murder – a “red ball” priority straight from City Hall – work the case while Bodie explains his logic to a disgusted Stringer Bell.
Bell orders Bodie to dispose of all the weapons used in the shootout, and Bodie tosses them off a bridge in the Curtis Bay neighborhood and right on the deck of a passing barge.
Prop Joe’s offer of better drugs for better territory is sounding better and better to Bell. Though he does not have Avon’s approval, Stringer gives up three of his six high-rise towers to Eastsiders in exchange for Joe’s steady package of “the real.”
Stringer then tries to get Brianna to sell the deal to her brother, but Avon is insistent on keeping his territory. Not only is he looking for a new connection, he has contracted the fabled Brother Mouzone to keep the towers in Barksdale control.
On the wire, when customers call the warehouse for narcotics – asking for La-Z-Boy recliners when they want heroin, davinas for coke – they’re told that those models are “no longer carried.”
On the eyeball surveillance, nothing has gone into the warehouse or come out, and McNulty worries that they might have tipped their hand. But Freamon points out that if they were sure the police were on them, the smugglers would’ve closed shop entirely.
Nick, waiting on a re-up from The Greek, is told by Vondas that the meager size of his purchases make him a small potato and passes him off to a corner boy named “White Mike” McArdle.
Hell-bent on proving himself a player in some kind of game, Ziggy hooks up with Johnny 50 on a fresh caper. He goes to George “Double-G” Glekas – the guy who moves hot goods from The Greek through his East Baltimore appliance store – and offers stolen Mercedes cars as if from a catalogue.
Another can disappears from a Talco ship with Horseface on the job, and the detail lets it go: they know where it’ll end up. They also get a new number from a call made by Serge and go for a second wiretap.
Agent Fitzhugh, McNulty’s friend from the FBI, does Jimmy a favor by running names through a federal crime computer and comes up with an old hit on Glekas.
Fitzhugh puts a call in to the agent who handled the case, and the minute the agent, a Greek named Koutris, gets off the phone, he makes a personal call on his cell phone saying hello in his native tongue, then adding in English, “We need to talk.”
Soon, Glekas is at the Ikaros restaurant on Eastern Avenue with The Greek and Vondas, along with Eton and the madam of their whores – a conclave of bosses and lieutenants.
“Our friend in Washington does not know why” the cops are interested in Glekas, says The Greek. “Only that they are asking.”
To repay the favor to their “friend,” The Greek meets Kourtis on a public bench and blows the whistle on dope coming into Baltimore from South America. It is both a favor to a friend and a payback to the Colombians who have reneged on the agreed price for the chemicals stolen by Nick and Ziggy used to process coke.
McNulty gets inside the brothel, and shows little self-control. The detail raids the location, further establishing a conspiracy case against the Greeks, although there is the embarrassment of noting that McNulty, left alone in a room with two whores, followed through on what comes naturally.
From a cell phone, the detail hears Serge say to White Mike about a body found in the street: “Did he have hands? Did he have a face? Yes? Then it wasn’t us.”
And Ziggy’s duck?
Couldn’t hold its liquor and drops dead.
episode twenty-three
STORM WARNINGS
“It pays to go with the union card every time.” - ZIGGY
Directed by Rob Bailey
Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by Ed Burns
Open on Roland Pryzbylewski alone in the detail office, quietly arranging photos and names of various targets on a corkboard as a tape plays of Johnny Cash singing “I Walk the Line.”
Very comfortable with puzzles, Prez enjoys the slow, thoughtful process of connecting the dots: from the original target Sobotka and the dock boys on through The Greek’s organization and Prop Joe’s Eastside drug ring.
All the way to an index card that simply says “Boss Man.”
“Fuckin’-A,” says Prez.
On the street, the new Barksdale dope, courtesy of Stringer’s deal with Prop Joe, is fabulous, so good that Bodie can’t remember when a package sold so well.
When Stringer tells Bodie to accommodate the presence of Cheese and the Eastsiders – who have been given three high-rise towers in which to “grind,” Bodie can hardly stomach it.
The detail team has put global-positioning trackers on the cars of The Greek’s crew, including Eton, Glekas, and the brothel madam.
This takes them to a pair of regular meeting places: Little Johnny’s diner and the seawall along the old Fort Howard Veterans Administration hospital in North Point.
Having started the detail as his own personal vendetta, Major Valchek rages over the fact that the target has become more than Frank Sobotka.
Valchek calls in the FBI, who are interested in the idea of union corruption but little else with regard to inner-city drug trafficking or prostitution.
When the FBI starts keyboarding local suspects into their database – Eton, Glekas, the madam, and Serge as targets along with Sobotka and Horseface – the info once again pops up on the screen of FBI agent Koutris.
Koutris meets The Greek at a Washington art gallery (the paintings on the wall are the work of former Wire staffer Amelia Cleary) and warns him: “They’re on you with wiretaps. Several phones, several addresses.”
Ziggy and Johnny 50 cut through the chain-link that fences in a field of new cars and begin driving them away, making it look like an outside job, though in fact the luxury sedans are going back into containers to be shipped abroad.
In the high-rise towers, Brother Mouzone arrives from New York and immediately makes his presence known, wounding Cheese with a slug of ratshot and rousting the Eastsiders from the projects. All of it is witnessed from the sidelines by Bubbles.
Cheese goes to Proposition Joe seeking vengeance. Joe balks: Mouzone is too tough and Stringer can’t cross Avon. But there is one man who might take the job, but for
pride, not money, says Joe, picking up the phone.
With the stolen cars headed overseas, Ziggy shows up at Double-G’s appliance store to collect his money, only to be chumped when Glekas says he’ll only pay ten percent instead of the agreed-upon 20.
It is the last insult for Ziggy, who goes back to his car, a stolen Mercedes, and grabs a handgun he bought with pawn money from his duck’s diamond necklace.
Ziggy wounds a clerk and puts several slugs in Glekas’s back as the man tries to run away. When Glekas begs for his life, Ziggy utters the word that so many of The Greek’s crew have used to ridicule him – malaka – firing a final bullet next to Glekas’s eye.
Tossing the money at the wounded clerk, Ziggy goes outside to wait for the police, later signing a full confession.
McNulty and Bunk, on the trail of the GPS trackers, use the police boat to anchor off the banks of Fort Howard, taking pictures of Vondas and Eton talking on the seawall. The suspects then throw their cell phones into the bay while Vondas sends a text message on a separate device.
Later, McNulty will use the GPS coordinates of the seawall where Vondas stood to isolate the text message through its cell provider. Soon they are looking at subpoenaed text messages in Greek.
Butchie, Omar’s bank and mentor, receives a visit from Proposition Joe, who says Stringer is hot for a meeting with Omar, but won’t say why.
Don’t feel right, says Butchie: the Barksdale people can’t be trusted. But Butchie agrees to the meet provided he is able to provide the security.
At the detail office, Valchek enters to find his worst fears confirmed, the detectives are working with the FBI and the investigation continues to sprawl well beyond Sobotka.
Furious, Valchek tries to pull his son-in-law, Prez, from the detail, and Prez sucker-punches him.
Nicky tells Frank Sobotka that his son has just been charged with murder.
The Wire Page 16