The Wire

by Rafael Alvarez

  It is, said Williams, something he has learned to live with. On The Wire, Omar the stickup artist often announced his presence by whistling the “The Farmer in the Dell” nursery rhyme.

  What none but a few know, however, is that the ominous whistle belongs not to the man who made the shotgun-toting assassin one of the most feared villains in television history, but a 57-year-old Maryland woman named Susan Allenback.

  Michael K. Williams, for all of his many talents, cannot whistle.

  “My claim to fame,” said Allenback, a founder of Women in Film and Video of Maryland who had bit parts in the films Syriana and John Waters’s A Dirty Shame.

  “At one of the first looping sessions, someone asked if I could whistle. I said yes and they showed me footage of Omar walking through a deserted street at night, carrying a sawed-off shotgun … whistling to let people know they should clear the way because someone was going down.”

  Allenback whistled in sync with William’s feeble attempt and sound editor Jen Ralston lined it up flawlessly.

  Said Allenback: “I always loved the fact that my white middle-aged woman alter ego was a badass black homosexual criminal!”

  •

  The Baltimore “loop group” that Allenback was part of – some dozen or so people, both pros and lay folk providing voices for footage that needed fixing – was helmed by Jen Ralston, supervising sound editor for all five seasons of The Wire.

  A New York University graduate and native of Bloomsburg, PA, the 38-year-old Ralston got her start as a radio station intern, noting that sound editing is not something you dream about when you first become enamored of filmmaking.

  Now a 15-year veteran of sound editing, she is only half-kidding when she tells young people, “Don’t get good at things you don’t really want to do … it’s soul-sucking to spend all your time helping someone else achieve their vision.”

  But good she is, having succeeded in delivering to David Simon the sound of a feature film and not a television show.

  “The sound aesthetic of The Wire was closer to documentary than straight-ahead narrative,” said Ralston, who also edited Simon’s 2009 HBO pilot, Treme.

  “Verisimilitude was the watchword. Whatever sounds got used the most were a reflection strictly of what the show was about.”

  [“Jen never traveled without her little digital recorder,” said Allenback. “At a moment’s notice she would capture the sound of ice cream trucks and city traffic, kids playing in the park … Baltimore was her palette for the landscape of The Wire.”]

  In Season One when the wire detail is in the courthouse basement, “extras kept walking by on the sidewalk above the windows,” said Ralston.

  “We had to look at those shoes, determine if they were sneakers, heels, loafers, boots, etc. and then sync up the appropriate type of footsteps to the action … that’s not a cut-and-paste job.”

  Season Two, of course, enlarged an already vast canvas to include the port of Baltimore, the centuries-old economic engine for the state of Maryland.

  Aural field work was assigned to sound effects editor Ben Cheah.

  “Cold, winter 2003 … after September 11 port security was very intense and you could sense how locked down those parts of the country had become,” said Cheah, an editor on the 2000 film Joe Gould’s Secret, based on the book by the great Joseph Mitchell.

  “The area [covered] was enormous,” said Cheah, “… and Bob [Colesberry] was very clear about wanting to hear heavy machinery… the cranes and container movers along with the seagulls.”

  Courtroom or container, the question always to be answered, said Ralston, was “What would the characters hear where they are right now [and] what of that do we want to hear without getting in the way of the dialogue?”

  The Wire loop group included Tootsie Duvall, who played assistant school principal Marcia Donnelly in Season Four; and Fran Boyd, mother of De’Andre McCullough, who played Lamar, Brother Mouzone’s go-fer.

  Screen Actors Guild members in “loop” included Tim McAdams, Bill Thomas and Matt Ryb working “behind the glass” along with Fran’s brother “Scoogie” Boyd, who appears on screen telling Stringer he’s not sure how much more dilution an already weak batch of dope can take.

  “Scoogie and Blue (George Epps) bantering in a bar about a drug deal, talking off the top of their heads, that made the hair on your neck stand up for its reality,” said Allenback.

  A second Boyd son – De’Rodd, along with his girlfriend Denita – and Tyreeka, mother of De’Andre’s young son, also worked the show.

  “Anyone they needed, I would bring,” said Fran Boyd, whose own journey from addict to productive citizen (she is a counselor at West Baltimore’s Bon Secours Hospital, established in 1919) was detailed in the David Simon HBO miniseries, The Corner.

  In 2007, Boyd married Donnie Andrews, a convicted murderer and Baltimore stickup artist whose life was a partial inspiration for Omar, with whom Donnie shares a scene in Season Five.

  The Boyd/Andrews love affair, begun while Donnie was in federal prison, was detailed in a New York Times society page wedding announcement that listed David Simon as the couple’s best man.

  “We did so doggone many of those looping scenes,” said Fran. “If there was a shooting on the streets we go [into the booth] and scream things like, ‘OH MY GOD!’”

  With her troops gathered at Producers Video on Malden Avenue in a Baltimore neighborhood known as “Television Hill,” Ralston would lay out that day’s work.

  Workers in a voting precinct; a telephone operator; almost always a police dispatcher; couples having intimate restaurant conversations; TV news reporters – once a televised dog show – a screaming woman; all manner of squad room bullshitting; cops singing at an Irish wake for Detective Ray Cole … on and on and on.

  What is called “rhubarb” in Great Britain is known as “walla” in the States – sound effects imitating the murmur of a crowd behind or to the sides of the main action.

  Before the walla could be layered, “sweetened”, and dropped precisely where it needed to be, it was often scripted by whatever writer was assigned to the loop group that day.

  Other times Ralston, whose first major sound job was working as a foley editor on The Big Lebowski, would give her rowdy loopers a free pass to what became known as “ad-lib-ville”, culling what she needed from the resulting soundscape.

  [Isn’t this how Beatle John and Sir George Martin did it on “I Am the Walrus”?]

  “TV is so sonically flat because it’s almost all exposition: we’re here, this is what we see, this is what we say about it, next scene,” said Ralston. “That’s the pacing and language of television.”

  “Movies,” she said, “try to immerse you in a deeper world with a pace that isn’t dictated by commercial breaks. The screen is bigger, the sound is surround … there’s more emotional involvement with the characters as they run the bases.

  “On The Wire we had to build something that sounded like a movie – all those schoolkids in Season Four and the touts in Hamsterdam were created in looping – but with the budget and schedule of a television show.

  “Pick any scene from The Wire,” said Ralston, “remove all of the principal dialogue and you are left with “an entire world of off-camera conversations.

  “And we made sure they all made sense, they all belonged there – right terminology, right accents. That’s a scale of detail that many movies don’t even bother with these days.”

  In addition to detail worthy of a Maysles Brothers documentary, much of the background sounds supported overall themes and character arcs in ways the actors were rarely aware of.

  [“Loop group was always separate from the rest of production, it was easy for us to feel like stepchildren,” said Allenback. “There was never any mention of Jen at the wrap parties or the gag reels. But we knew we were there and what we did.”]

  “Do I think they achieved the goal of having a TV show sound like a feature film?” asked Ralston. �
��Well, they didn’t fire me …”

  An especially poignant example of subtle support for the storyline involves Detective Jimmy McNulty and neighborhood dogs.

  Said Ralston: “If Jimmy showed up at Ronnie [Pearlman’s] in the middle of the night for a drunken booty call, he would set the local dogs to barking.

  “It was a judgment on him,” she said. “Whenever he was being a dog, dogs barked at him.”

  To which Dominic West – who inhabited the McNulty role for more than five years without connecting dogs to Jimmy’s liberal definition of sexual fidelity – said: “Brilliant!”

  “I never realized it … one of the myriad hidden details laid to please the [most] astute viewer.”

  SEASON FOUR EPISODE GUIDE

  “Everything changes … one minute the ice cream truck be the only thing you wanna hear … next thing, them touts callin’ out the her-ron be the only thing you can hear …” BUBBLES

  In which we witness the making of a corner kid, the transformation of another youngster – born with more or less the same moral tuning fork as anyone else – who isn’t necessarily seduced or jerked into the drug trade.

  Often, they simply wade into it, like the high-school sophomore who walks into a hamburger joint and asks for a job.

  This season, said Tristan Wilds, who played the middle schooler turned drug dealer Michael Lee, “you get to see why.”

  Asked how the show chose to set the drama in a middle school instead of high school, The Wire producer and former Baltimore cop and public school teacher Ed Burns said that by high school, most of the important choices in the life of an inner city kid have already been made.

  “What drugs have not destroyed,” David Simon has said, “the war on them has …”

  episode thirty-eight

  BOYS OF SUMMER

  “Lambs to the slaughter here.”

  – MARCIA DONNELLY

  Directed by Joe Chappelle

  Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by David Simon

  Snoop pores over nail guns at a suburban home improvement superstore, and is quickly educated by a middle-aged sales assistant as to the finer points of new-generation power tools.

  “You’re looking at two people, again, from two different cultures,” explained Ed Burns to public radio “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross in September, 2006. “They’ve crossed the chasm.”

  As Omar might say, they have crossed indeed.

  “We could kill a couple motherfuckers with this right here,” says Snoop to her assassin boss Chris Partlow as she gets in the car with the nail gun.

  Meanwhile, in the Clinton Street offsite detail office, detectives Lester Freamon and Kima Greggs meet with Assistant State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman to review the members of the Marlo Stanfield organization who’ve been caught on the wire.

  To get the proper signatures to keep the wire up and running for at least another month, Greggs gets her supervising lieutenant to sign the necessary subpoenas by burying the paperwork under a requisition for an office fan.

  Again, the Barksdale money trail – the breadcrumbs through the ’hood that keep getting swept away by official corruption and incompetence – is uppermost in Freamon’s mind.

  Bodie works a corner with a lethally jealous young man named Lex, who complains that the mother of his child is now dating Marlo’s boy Fruit. Working for Bodie is a wise-ass middle-school kid named Namond Brice, played by Julito McCullum.

  To Bodie’s complaints that Marlo’s crew has the good corners, Slim Charles says: “Nary a Barksdale left, so you on your own out here.”

  He does have the son of a Barksdale soldier, however, in Namond, the middle-schooler with the pony-tail, and progeny of Wee-Bey and a woman named De’Londa, a half-assed student and half-assed corner boy whom Bodie claims to employ simply out of respect for the kid’s father.

  Carecetti, calling for two debates with Mayor Royce, is dismissed by the incumbent as “a lost-ball-in-high-grass-motherfucker.”

  Snoop and Chris shoot and kill a man in a gutted rowhouse, with Snoop pouring quicklime on the body. The man had begged for his life only to be shot and wrapped in an old shower curtain. The killers leave with tools in hand like a couple of guys working off a Mr. Handyman home repair truck.

  They are building a mausoleum of sorts: the Tomb of the Unknown Homeboy.

  Tilghman Middle School assistant principal Marcia Donnelly and principal Claudell Withers look up to find their new math teacher: Roland Pryzbylewski, a cop without a teaching certificate who not long ago killed another cop in an accidental shooting.

  Teachers are hard to come by and Prez is in.

  Over at the Western District, the house that Bunny Colvin built, Cedric Daniels is now in charge as major. When a uniformed patrolman with a winning smile – Officer James McNulty – comes knocking, Daniels tells him to leave the beat and help them solve cases. Jimmy declines.

  On Bodie’s corner, plainclothes DEU Sergeant Ellis Carver and Officer Anthony Colicchio pull up. McNulty arrives, ordering Bodie to shut it down in an hour. Meanwhile Carver waits for a proper farewell.

  “A good evening to you, Sergeant Carver,” says Bodie.

  To a puzzled Colicchio, Carver explains: “You bust every head, who you gonna talk to when the shit happens?”

  At “Carcetti for Mayor” HQ, Tommy is admonished for being behind schedule and reluctantly begins making cold calls looking for campaign donations.

  Lex murders Fruit in front of his baby’s mama, Patrice, says hello to the horrified woman, and walks away. It doesn’t start a gang war, but it does put Lex on Marlo’s radar.

  In the detail office, Bunk allows that it’s odd that someone controlling as much of the West Baltimore drug trade as Marlo hasn’t generated more homicides.

  Dukie keeps getting beat up and his homeys decide to retaliate by luring the Terrace Boys into a trap where they will be pelted with balloons filled with urine. The plan, alas, has some holes in it.

  In the race for mayor, Royce buys $300,000 of TV ads. Carcetti is left to get his message out via the radio. The first poll will place him running third.

  And Prez is assigned his homeroom, a shitty nook in a shitty cranny of a shithole school system.

  episode thirty-nine

  SOFT EYES

  “I still wake up white in a city that ain’t.”

  – CARCETTI

  Directed by Christine Moore

  Story by Ed Burns & David Mills; teleplay by David Mills

  The arc of the next two years of Herc’s life is established when he walks in on Mayor Royce while hizzoner is getting a down-on-her-knees blow job from his secretary.

  The wise-ass Namond and his mother visit the boy’s father – Barksdale soldier Wee-Bey – in prison. At the meeting, the boy’s mother admonishes him for missing work and spending his money on dumb shit.

  Of his son’s pony tail, Wee-Bey says, “Even the white police lookin’ out from three blocks away gonna be able to spot you from every nigga out there.”

  A Marlo lieutenant hands out cash to kids going back to school – seed money for the labor pool – and Cutty turns down a job in the ’burbs running his own gardening crew.

  On the corner, Namond persuades Bodie to let Michael Lee (played by Tristan Wilds) be his surrogate as Bunk and Carver ask about the murder of Lex, done in for taking out Stanfield soldier Fruit.

  With his rolling, “we bring the product to you” T-shirt business in a shopping cart, Bubbles realizes that Sherrod – this year’s Johnny on the Spot – cannot do simple math and demands he return to school.

  Carcetti fails to win the Fraternal Order of Police endorsement and, preparing for the first debate, is all but assured that he has lost the race.

  When Michael refuses Marlo’s walk-around money, the big man steps up to the schoolkid, taken with the boy’s sense of self and says: “Ain’t no thing, shorty. We cool.”

  [Michael will also turn down Cutty’s offer to teach him to box, though he
is intrigued by the idea.]

  Randy Wagstaff, one of the four best friends highlighted this year – along with Michael, Namond and Dukie – is cornered in an alley by a Western District patrolman, who takes $200 off the boy.

  [Wagstaff is played by Maestro Harrell, who portrayed the young Cassius Clay in the 2001 Michael Mann film Ali.]

  With info gleaned from the wire, developer Andrew Krawczyk and state senator Clay Davis are served subpoenas.

  Herc goes to Major Valchek, who has known a cocksucker or two in his long police career, for advice on the long-and-short of what he saw in the mayor’s office.

  Says Valcheck: “Kid, careers have been launched on a helluva lot less. Just shut up and play dumb.”

  Doing what he can to launch Carcetti into City Hall, Valcheck feeds the candidate info about another witness in a drug case turning up dead. Buoyed by this, Carcetti uses the dead witness to broadside Royce in the debate, admonishing him for not spending money procured from the federal government on witness protection.

  Back in the detail, the wiretap crew marvels at Marlo’s voice showing up on a cell.

  When Namond gets home, his mother has a spread of new schools for him. When he turns on the TV in his room, the Carcetti-Royce debate drones on about the failure of public education.

  The boy switches over to his Xbox and begins killing bad guys.

  episode forty

  “HOME ROOMS”

  “Love the first day, man. Everybody all friendly an’ shit.”

  – NAMOND

  Directed by Seith Mann

  Story by Ed Burns & Richard Price; teleplay by Richard Price

  Omar Little, with a new lover and protégé – Renaldo – wakes up to the sound of a garbage truck and walks to the corner store for cereal in his pajamas.