Omar and his sawed-off, accompanied by the professional assassin Brother Mouzone, corner Bell in a building Stringer was hoping to renovate in his foray into a world he craved: legitimate, high-rolling capitalism.
“Killing Stringer was a high-profile scene and it weighed on me,” said Williams, who said when at the moment of letting loose a blast Bell shouts, “Well, get on with it,” it took him to a very dark place.
“I battled with the whole black-on-black violence thing. Was I perpetuating something or just telling a story?”
Chief intelligence officer and second-in-command to his childhood friend and drug lord Barksdale, Bell’s story was key to one of The Wire’s primary arguments: If you deny an entire segment of society access to the big game, they will create a shadow game mirroring the establishment in every way but societal legitimacy.
A gangster who used half-lens reading glasses, a murderer fond of parliamentary procedure and hot cups of tea, Stringer Bell was played exquisitely by Idris Elba, who called his character “a bad guy with a brain and power.”
Of the show, and Bell specifically, the New York Times editorial page had this to say: “A good villain is hard to find. To create a truly wicked character, one dastardly enough to be loathsome but complex enough to fascinate, is among the most challenging tasks a writer faces.
“To slowly twist readers or viewers around until they sympathize with the very same character is a feat only for the foolhardy or the brilliant. This is the genius of the character Stringer Bell …”
Even those on the inside, the folks who contributed the stitching with which the amazing, muted-color flak-jacket of The Wire was made, marveled at Bell’s high-wire act.
“I was fascinated by Stringer for what I’m sure are the same reasons that made him such an icon” to viewers, said Joe Incaprera, a native Baltimorean who got his start as a PA on NBC’s Homicide, and on The Wire rose from an assistant director to unit production manager.
All about business (the books upon his shelf include a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations), Bell is ruthless in protecting the small empire he and Barksdale – “us” – built with blood and guts.
“Stringer just gets in there, orders the deed and bam – that’s it, it’s done,” Elba has said. “He doesn’t think twice about it.”
And is perplexed beyond words when his enduring beef with Omar cannot be fixed with money.
“Here’s this guy who clearly wants to belong to one world and has the skills to be successful, but grew up on the streets of Baltimore in the middle of ‘the game,’” said Incaprera.
“He navigated this world of gangsters and police as a businessman playing every angle despite a daily threat of a catching a bullet or going to jail.
“There was no room for error in Stringer Bell’s world.”
Yet as we live, we will surely err. And, oh shit, here come Omar.
“The day we filmed [Stringer’s death] was surreal,” said Williams, whose character, time and again, declared the torture of his lover Brandon – orchestrated by Stringer as a payback for an Omar stickup – as beyond the pale.*
“On a personal level, no one was happy with it because we had become family. I was friends with Idris. No one wanted him to leave the show.”
Once he did, however, Idris Elba became, if not a fully-fledged movie star, a much brighter Hollywood light thanks to his work on The Wire.
He starred in the 2009 romantic thriller Obsessed with Beyoncé Knowles, and the same year had a six-episode role as the boss of Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) in the American version of The Office.
The only child of a Sierra Leonean father and a mother from Ghana, the DJ turned actor was born Idrissa Akuna Elba in 1972 and grew up in Hackney, East London.
Divorced from the Liberian actress and dancer Dormowa Sherman, the pair became parents in 2002 when their daughter Isan was born.
The year before he became a father, Elba played Achilles in a New York production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, directed by Sir Peter Hall.
Said theater critic Bruce Weber of the performance: “… with an ever-present wine goblet in his hand and a controlling arm often around his doting companion, Patroclus, [Elba has] the swagger to convey both his physical prowess and his graceless egomania.”
Elba’s first credited role came in 1995 as a gigolo on Britain’s Absolutely Fabulous. By the end of the decade he was playing a forensic scientist on Dangerfield.
Soon afterward, he moved to New York City and there – between spinning records in the East Village – came to the attention of the people casting a new HBO series set in Baltimore.
One of the actor’s first goals was to get his mouth around the way in which black folks talk in Crabtown. To that end, he worked briefly with a Maryland dialect coach, BettyAnn Leeseberg-Lange.
In a 2003 interview with longtime Baltimore Sun reporter Carl Schoettler, Leeseberg-Lange said Elba came to her “speaking a London accent which is very close to Cockney … [but] he wanted to sound like an African-American from this area.
“He went and talked to black cops and really got a sense of what the neighborhood speech was like … he has a wonderful ear.
“He and I [ultimately] agreed that we weren’t going to work [together] because he needed to hear the other musicality … mine is a white musicality.”
Though Elba has appeared in many mainstream productions, from a Tyler Perry comedy to the HBO movie Sometimes in April about the Rwandan genocide, Stringer Bell remains his most enduring role.
Said Elba: “I fell in love with what [Bell] accomplished.”
And many viewers, no matter the conflicts Bell’s character presented, fell for him.
“Just a magnetically attractive man,” said Katherine Porterfield, a 44year-old psychologist born and raised in Baltimore, now living in New York.
“But what really got me were the scenes of him sitting in business class at [community] college with his little reading glasses on. That just nailed it for me.”
It wasn’t so much Stringer’s quest for success in the real world that seduced Porterfield beyond his looks, “it was seeing him show that ambitious, brainy part of himself,” regardless of the arena.
She did, however, “have to fight the creepiness factor when Stringer started sleeping with D’Angelo’s girlfriend after having had him killed.
“Even when he faced death after realizing there was no way out and said, ‘Get on with it,’ that just made him more mythic – R.I.P.”
episode thirty-seven
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
“… we fight on the lie.”
– SLIM CHARLES
Directed by Ernest Dickerson
Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by David Simon
Ding-dong, Stringer Bell is dead, Bunk gets the case and McNulty is robbed of an obsession that has driven him for two solid years.
Avon Barksdale accomplished what the great Jimmy McNulty could not: he brought down Stringer Bell.
His partner’s death, and his role in it, has an effect on Avon that the cold-ass gangster didn’t anticipate. It is powerful enough for him to see that perhaps Stringer was right about the game all along.
“Fuck Marlo,” says Avon when Slim Charles says they will go hard on the enemy. “And fuck this fucking war. All this beefin’ over a couple of fuckin’ corners.”
In the eye-for-an-eye argument that makes everybody blind, Charles says: “… don’t matter who did what to whom. Fact is, we went to war an’ now there ain’t no goin’ back … If it’s a lie, then we fight on the lie.”
On Hamsterdam, which Carcetti is reluctant to exploit, D’Agostino says: “C’mon, Tommy. They dealt you a winning hand and you’re acting like you forgot how to play.”
The detail suspects Marlo to be Stringer’s killer and Colvin passes Avon’s safe house address to McNulty, a bit of tit-for-tat from the grave.
Daniels tells the detail to sit on the safe house until Avon appears.
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br /> Prezbylewski and Freamon talk about what charges Prez may face – the case is being referred to the grand jury – for killing a cop.
When Royce orders Burrell to take the fall for Hamsterdam, the commissioner responds that he also has a story – “[you] brought your liberal-ass do-gooders in here to seriously consider this horseshit” – and is prepared to tell it.
Burrell then angles for a full, five-year term as police commissioner in exchange for putting Bunny Colvin in the public’s crosshairs while taking whatever flack deflects the shit from City Hall.
When the cops roust everyone from Hamsterdam, Johnny the junkie’s body is found in an abandoned rowhouse. Marlo is found at his favorite rim shop and Avon shows up at the safe house to prepare to settle the score. Before he can come back out, the cops descend.
McNulty says Avon will finish out his previous sentence on a parole violation and then hands Barksdale the warrant showing that it was Stringer Bell who betrayed him.
Later, without complicated gangsters to chase or a new skirt under which to stick his head, a lonely McNulty stops by to see Beadie Russell, the cute port cop from Season Two.
Jimmy is looking for a new way, perhaps as a Western District beat cop who finds it in him to be faithful to a good woman.
For his audacious and arguably successful social experiment, Colvin not only loses his big security job at Hopkins but is busted to lieutenant, robbing him of his major’s pension.
Hamsterdam is razed and Marlo’s boys return to the corners. With the old game back in swing, Cutty’s boys, who suddenly have something more lucrative on offer than the discipline it takes to perfect the sweet science, desert his gym.
At City Hall hearings on the Hamsterdam fiasco, Carcetti listens to Rawls’s explanation that Bunny Colvin was a solitary cowboy and says: “We can forgive Major Colvin, who in his frustration and despair found himself condoning something which can’t possibly be condoned.
“But, gentlemen, what we can’t forgive – what I can’t forgive, ever – is how, we – you, me, this administration, all of us, have turned away from those streets in West Baltimore … that we surrendered to the horrors of the drug trade.”
* In an early draft of “Middle Ground,” Omar urinates on Stringer Bell after he and Brother Mouzone gun down the Barksdale lieutenant.
“Idris was unhappy at the idea; it bothered him,” said David Simon, noting, of course, that the stunt would have required the actor to be actually present for the filming of such. “I was prepared to go ahead with it on the basis that it spoke to something ugly at the heart of Omar and his Ronin-like quest.
“But then George [Pelecanos], author of the episode, soured on the idea after his initial draft and argued against it.”
THE POLITICS OF BALTMORE
Sheee-it.
Yup. That’s it. Of all the words written for all the characters in The Wire’s political realm, that’s the one best remembered.
And, I’m chagrined to admit, the writers had little to nothing to do with it.
The wit and nuance of that utterance was all Isiah Whitlock Jr., the actor portraying R. Clayton Davis, the shamelessly larcenous state senator who popped up time and again in and around the edges of the Baltimore drug game. He just trotted it out one day on set, and it was an instant hit.
Ironically, Isiah’s rendition of that old favorite was exactly the reaction of most of the writers when the notion of a political storyline in The Wire was floated for Season Three.
Nonstarter.
In fact, if it had been up to the majority of writers on The Wire, the political storyline would have been immediately dispatched, never to be heard of again. It was a hard sell, close to being lost in a not-even-close vote, victim to a chorus of “Not our show” and “Not The Wire.”
Okay. Politics is difficult. It can be boring to some folks. Inside-baseball stuff. Besides, in film terms, there’s no action. It’s all sitting behind desks and talking. Not necessarily compelling TV. They almost convinced me – and I didn’t even have a vote on that committee.
Thankfully, for me and my then-future employment possibilities, balder heads prevailed, and David Simon convinced the others that this was the way to go. With that, the fictional universe of The Wire’s Baltimore expanded yet again, this time swallowing City Hall.
At first, it seemed a tough fit for a white city councilman named Thomas J. “Tommy” Carcetti, a guy with skyrocket-high political aspirations, to find a raison d’être in The Wire World. It was not exactly a seamless match with the established storylines on a show best known for its real-life insight into the urban drug culture.
Sure, state Senator Clay Davis made the first of his recurring appearances early in the series – back in Season One, before I started – but he seemed to meld perfectly. He was a politician who understood his West Baltimore constituents, the street, the life and especially the draw of the long con. He played it so well.
On the surface, the politics practiced by Carcetti and others in the Establishment didn’t seem to lend itself to the life-and-death questions that the street world and police work often deal with.
Yet, it is exactly that machinery that pulls the strings, causing the chain reactions down the line, from City Hall to police headquarters, on out to the corner.
It wasn’t so far-fetched. It was a natural. Politics has everything to do with the war on drugs. After all, it was invented by politicians.
It seemed a natural for me, as well. I grew up with the politics of the city and state all around me. My father was a newspaperman and covered politics. It was always talked about at the dinner table. It was in the blood. And then I spent nearly 20 years covering government and politics for the Baltimore Sun.
So, I had street cred to do this. All I needed to do was carve out a little space for Carcetti in The Wire and populate it.
I stole shamelessly from the stories I knew – some true, some thought to be true, some too good to be true. I spent hours upon hours in the writers’ room with Ed Burns – an initially reluctant, but ultimately very good sport (as he is wont to be) – running out the threads of potential storylines, many of which fell by the wayside for want of airtime.
While some of the characters who inhabit the political realm are rooted in reality, they are composites, drawn from any number of politicians we’ve known over the years.
Viewers are always asking if such and such a character is so and so. (And usually make the pronouncement that a particular character is absolutely based on a single, real-life person.)
I always hate to disappoint them, though they can rarely be persuaded otherwise, but story was always paramount, and that meant that no storyline was ever twisted or bent in order to squeeze in a “real” character. If anything, it was the other way around. Some characters were just pure fiction, created solely for the purpose of story.
Which is not to say there wasn’t room for a little hometown homage. The political piece of The Wire did present an opportunity for a tip of the hat to some of the pols we’d known – the power-brokering “b’hoys” and the solid party-line-voting muldoons alike – who inhabit the world of Maryland politics.
Among those folks I wanted to salute in some way were Thomas J. D’Alesandro, Jr., aka “Big Tommy,” a three-time Baltimore mayor, and his son, Thomas J. D’Alesandro III, “Young Tommy,” who was elected mayor eight years after his father was finally defeated, but called it quits after just one term.
In Season Four, Carcetti has lunch with a former mayor very much modeled on Young Tommy – we called the character “Tony” – who advises the councilman and mayoral aspirant on the daily pain and difficulties of holding that office.
He recounts one of my all-time favorite stories, first told by Tommy in his waning days as mayor in the early 1970s, though I’d heard it many years later. The shorthand for it would be “the bowl-of-shit story.” It involves the mayor sitting in City Hall on his first day in office, only to be served, and forced to eat, silver bowl a
fter silver bowl of shit, each sent by another constituency.
“And you know what?” an aide tells the young mayor. “That’s what it is: you sit there eating shit, all day long, day after day, year after year.”
Then there’s the story of D’Alesandro’s father, Big Tommy, sometimes known as “Old Tommy,” and what could best be called “the conversation between desks.”
I first heard the tale from my father, a political reporter for the old News-Post and Sunday American who had covered D’Alesandro’s City Hall. But the conversation apparently had occurred with more than one reporter and been repeated countless times over.
David Simon had heard it and saw that it was included in my Episode 52 script in Season Five. In the version he’d heard, Frank P. L. Somerville was the reporter. Somerville, now long retired, was the Sun’s religion editor (earning the nickname “Father Frank”), one-time night editor and all-round desk hand who’d been a young reporter in Big Tommy’s last years as mayor.
As the story goes, the reporter tells the mayor that his “desk” – a common reference to a newspaper’s editors, particularly when a reporter’s looking for cover – wanted to know some sort of information that the mayor didn’t want to give up.
At that point, Big Tommy, seated at his desk, puts his ear down to the blotter, nods a couple times, mutters a few words, looks up at the bewildered reporter and says: “My desk tells your desk to go fuck itself.”
Very funny stuff. All the more so because it’s true.
There are other familiar touches, as well. About a minute into the opening title sequence of Season Three flashes a quick shot of a little shrine designed and assembled by the art department, mainly production designer and Baltimore boy Vince Peranio, behind a bar that was supposed to be in Carcetti’s political clubhouse.
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