So yes, for the drug dealers and the cops, I spent years gathering string on who they are, how they think and talk. When we needed to add politicians, well, I covered some politics so I had the general tone, but we added Bill Zorzi, the Baltimore Sun’s best political reporter, to the writing staff. When it came to longshoremen, we added Rafael Alvarez, a former reporter and short-story writer who had quit to join the seamen’s union and whose family was three generations in the maritime industry. And the rest of us, myself included, spent weeks getting to know longshoremen and the operations of the port and the port unions, just hanging around the shipping terminals for days on end, so as to credibly achieve those voices. Again, what I wanted was that longshoremen across America would watch The Wire and say, Cool, they know my world. I’ve never seen my world depicted on TV, and these guys got it. And I feared that one of them would stand up and say: No, that’s complete bullshit. So that never changes for me.
Which brings us back to Average Reader. Because the truth is you can’t write just for people living the event, if the market will not also follow. TV still being something of a mass medium, even with all the fractured cable universe now reducing audience size per channel. Well, here’s a secret that I learned with Homicide and have held to: if you write something that is so credible that the insider will stay with you, then the outsider will follow as well. Homicide, The well. Homicide, The Corner, The Wire, Generation Kill – these are travelogues of a kind, allowing Average Reader/Viewer to go where he otherwise would not. He loves being immersed in a new, confusing, and possibly dangerous world that he will never see. He likes not knowing every bit of vernacular or idiom. He likes being trusted to acquire information on his terms, to make connections, to take the journey with only his intelligence to guide him. Most smart people cannot watch most TV, because it has generally been a condescending medium, explaining everything immediately, offering no ambiguities, and using dialogue that simplifies and mitigates against the idiosyncratic ways in which people in different worlds actually communicate. It eventually requires that characters from different places talk the same way as the viewer. This, of course, sucks.
There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time – hence the need for this kind of viewing to be a long-form series or miniseries, in this bad metaphor – but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely. We’re after this: making television into that kind of travel, intellectually. Bringing those pieces of America that are obscured or ignored or otherwise segregated from the ordinary and effectively arguing their relevance and existence to ordinary Americans. Saying, in effect, this is part of the country you have made. This too is who we are and what we have built. Think again, motherfuckers.
And the only difference between what we’re doing and a world traveler getting off the beaten path is that our viewers don’t really have to play the fool. They don’t even have to put their ass out of the sofa. They now have a sense of what is happening on a drug corner, or in a homicide unit, or inside a political campaign – and our content, if gently massaged to create drama, is nonetheless rooted in accurate reporting and experience.
And of course the last thing is that on some level, you have to love people. All different kinds. That seems to me a prerequisite for capturing dialogue well. Stand around and listen. A favorite story to finish: once Richard Price came to Baltimore to research part of Freedomland. We had a murder case similar to the one he was writing and he wanted a tour, so that he could acquire more of the tone of the thing, I guess. So down he comes and we go around and research his case, meet the witnesses and the detectives and whatever. And because he’s Richard fucking Price and I’ve loved his ass ever since The Wanderers, I just gotta show my shit a little. I was researching and writing The Corner, the book, at the time. So we drive over to West Baltimore and I start to show him the ’hood where Ed and I are gathering our stuff. And at some point I run into Gary McCullough, one of my main characters. And Gary, who had just copped and was high as a kite, is talking with us and he laughs at something I say, and says, “Oh, man, you is an apple-scrapple.” Apple-scrapple being a particular Baltimore phrase in the African-American idiom meaning, well, a special dessert or special treat. Gary says it and I see this look cross Price’s face and I think, for just a second, Oh, shit. Now he’s got apple-scrapple. I hope he doesn’t publish before I do or he’ll beat me to it. Sure enough, when Gary departs, Richard immediately turns to me and says, “Apple-scrapple. That’s a keeper.”
Fucking writers.
Nick Hornby
SEASON FIVE
SEASON FIVE OVERVIEW
WHO WANTS YESTERDAY’S PAPERS?
“In the back of my mind is a man looking upon the world as a newspaperman, even though I don’t have a newspaper …”
DAVID SIMON
For one year, Simon did have a newspaper, an alternate universe edition of the Baltimore Sun delivered to home subscribers via cable television. He did not write for this paper, he invented it.
At this paper, an ambitious reporter made things up to get ahead of his colleagues (and did so); top-level editors, chasing Pulitzer Prizes, chose not to investigate the fabrications in a way that an average reporter might; staff buyouts (to increase shareholder profits) and doing more with less impeded basic news-gathering; the one editor who cared enough to stand up for the news was dumped on the potter’s field known as the copy desk …
And a fictional Bill Zorzi – channeling the real-life reporter of the same name, temperament and matinée-idol good looks – tells an editor who has already asked for the moon and the stars: “Why don’t you just shove the broom up my ass and I’ll sweep the floor while I’m at it?”
The make-believe Zorzi had been asked to cover two courthouses in the wake of the most recent buyout at the paper. The city court reporter headed for greener pastures and was not replaced.
This was the writing on the newsroom wall that would keep knowledge and foresight out of the paper: reporters who once embodied a single beat so thoroughly they were never at the mercy of “public information officers” were now too busy to meet sources for lunch, the paper too depleted to pay for that lunch.
“The trend we depicted is, I think, unmistakable,” said Simon. “Profittaking through cutbacks, an inability to confront and compete, [use of] the Internet, stunted coverage, small-time editorial ambitions, and a useless, self-absorbed prize culture.
“That,” said Simon, “is what remains of the good grey lady of journalism.”
•
When I left the Baltimore Sun in 2001, I’d had a desk in the newsroom for more than half my life; from the day I joined the sports department in 1978 to compile horse-race results (after a year in circulation) to the cold night in January when I walked out the back door onto Guilford Avenue for the last time.
Before I took a buyout (knowing my time was up, I’d best take my leave while there was still money was on the table), I’d been busted from general assignment reporting back to night rewriting, where 20 years earlier I’d learned the craft from the real Jay Spry for whom Donald Neal’s The Wire character is named.
[For pure physical resemblance, Professor Irwin Corey – now in his 90s – would have been my choice to play Spry, never seen leaving the newsroom without an armload of unread papers.]
In the unraveling of my career as a newspaperman, there was no small measure of personality conflict, but the ultimate, unstated charge was that I cared more about personal ambition (a reduction of caring only for the stories I wanted to tell) than work deemed “good for the paper.”
I found this a curious distinction, believing that what was
good for readers – Baltimore natives, their offspring, and their neighbors, whom I knew better than my carpet-bagging bosses – was indisputably best for the paper. In the end, my preferred narratives were those with no newspeg and sometimes without reason, stories that have proved durable in a way that the scandal du jour does not.
I not only maintain that the mystical amidst the ordinary endures longer in the reader’s imagination than mere news – illustrated in the story of Bubbles’s rare triumph over heroin – but the daily record should be broad enough to leaven the hopelessness attendant to atrocities that no longer astonish.
The last editor to share a trench with me was the late and beloved Norm Wilson, a native New Yorker and the first African-American to cover City Hall for the Baltimore Evening Sun, the paper of Mencken, put to bed for the last time in September 1995.
[If he had it to do over again, Simon would have saved the homage of Norman’s name for Season Five’s city editor instead of using it for Mayor Tommy Carcetti’s chief-of-staff.]
I worked rewrite and Norm ran the desk after the big shots had gone home. One night, most likely after an extended dinner hour wandering the city in search of something to please my constituency, Norman approached with intel about a boss indistinguishable from The Wire’s Tom Klebanow. Leaning down, Norm whispered a warning worthy of Blind Butchie: “They watching you.”
And soon they would watch me walk from the rewrite desk to Guilford Avenue and out of daily journalism.
Guilford Avenue, where the boys from the composing room drank deep into the night after the final edition went to bed; parallel to the highway that connects Baltimore to Pennsylvania, below which a village of Bubbleses and Dukies have lived under tarps and cardboard since the Reagan Administration.
Guilford Avenue, where we first meet city editor Gus Haynes at the beginning of Season Five of The Wire, smoking with colleagues on the loading dock.
“Gus Haynes, the patron saint of journalism,” said Clark Johnson, who played the role and directed the first and final episodes in The Wire’s five-season run. “That perfect editor.” A good man fed into the cold maw of an institution – this time corporate journalism – too big to care about those who keep it going any more than those it was created to serve.
Just as Frank Sobotka and Bunny Colvin got theirs before him.
By turns, the five seasons of The Wire took near-documentary passes at the war on drugs; the death of labor in a post-industrial America; reform taken to the extreme of legalizing drugs; the failure of the urban school system; and, wrapping all of it up like haddock between the headlines, the media’s failure to adequately report, much less explain and correct, all of the above.
“The Wire is about capital and labor and when capitalism triumphs, labor is diminished,” said Simon. “Season Five is the same as what happens to labor and middle-management in every other [depicted] institution.”
Before taking the role of city editor Gus Haynes, Clark Johnson’s previous experience with newspaper work was delivering the Toronto Star (the paper for which the young Ernest Hemingway filed dispatches from Paris in the early 1920s) and writing a column for Ottawa’s Glebe Report. “I did an exposé on old folks’ homes,” he said. Who hasn’t?
As Haynes, Johnson relied on Simon and Zorzi for the finer points of a role “so well-written I didn’t need to go too deep in my own research.
“That last season,” he said, “showed what news-gathering really means, [and] how instincts play an important part in that.” In many ways, said Johnson, The Wire served the social function that newspapers once did.
“If it was just a Robin Hood [adventure] show in a time far away,” the end of the run wouldn’t be much different from any other reasonably popular show going off the air.
“But Baltimore is still ticking away and we stopped talking about it,” he said. “Shit is still going on but the 24-hour news cycle comes and goes and we move on.
“Are the problems solved? No. We have to talk about it.”
But where?
In June of 1986, the Baltimore Sun was sold by the heirs of its founders to the Times Mirror Corporation for $600 million. The paper reportedly carried a $250 million price tag during 2008 negotiations between local investors and the Tribune Company of Chicago, which bought the Times Mirror media corporation in 2000 and declared bankruptcy in December of 2008.
By the following summer, a reasonable asking price for the Baltimore Sun, give or take, was said to be $23 million, including the entire city block on which it sits.
•
Variety called it the most on-target depiction of a newsroom in the history of film and television, a physical and atmospheric recreation leading former reporters with cameos to wonder if they’d taken a ride in Mr. Peabody’s “wayback machine.”
Beyond the usual variety of plots and intersecting arcs that make up the final season of The Wire – crowned with a villainous turn by Jimmy McNulty, who perpetuates a serial-killer hoax – the big drama was the slow, ugly death of the American newspaper.
“Season Five begins with a moment of first-rate journalism,” said Simon, referencing the discovery by city editor Gus Haynes of a quid-pro-quo real estate scam between the city and Ricardo “Fat-Face Rick” Hendrix, a drug trafficker and strip club owner.
“And it ends on an act of first-rate journalism – the narrative account of a story that viewers know to be more than true, the salvation of Bubbles and his human worth, accurately depicted.”
These tent-poles – pick-and-shovel investigative work on one end and the finely drawn portrait of a modern-day Lazarus on the other – provided a glimpse into the Big Top of big-city journalism as practiced for more than 170 years in Baltimore – which is barely practiced any longer.
“This was not the work of people angry at the Sun or trying to get even with this institution or that editor,” said Simon, who took considerable heat for Season Five within the newspaper industry, particularly from those who saw it as a score-settling attack on top management in place when he left the Sun for a career in television.
“It was written by ex-journalists who love the craft and who fear for its future,” he said. “When I left the Sun on the third buyout, I knew it was never going to be the paper I wanted it to be.
“When we wrote Season Five [in 2006-2007], after more buyouts, we knew the Sun was not going to be a paper anyone wanted it to be. That was the message of Season Five.”
Set in the recent past, and bowing out in March of 2008, the final season of The Wire was set in the very recent past and pointed to a future that arrived sooner than expected.
In April of 2009, some 60 editorial employees, many of them longtime editors and veterans of positions from Jerusalem correspondent to chief of the copy desk – a full quarter of an already decimated staff – were laid off in a single day.
“As much as I expected [and foreshadowed] new layoffs at the Sun, my former home of 40 years, the extent of the slaughter was unimaginable,” wrote David Michael Ettlin, a retired deskman who played himself in Season Five and keeps tabs on his old employer in a blog called The Real Muck (ettlin.blogspot.com).
The news was received throughout the state of Maryland as a bloodbath, and, like much of the violence in the real Baltimore channeled by The Wire, it trumped anything portrayed on the show.
“We did not envision layoffs [but] round after round of buyouts and attrition by hiring freeze until the paper was hollowed out and the last margin of profits taken,” said Simon. “There is always some awe that reality provides.”
•
Just before Omar dispatches Stringer Bell to the great shareholders’ meeting in the sky, the stick-up artist blows away Bell’s bodyguard. In the scene is the real estate developer Andy Krawczyk, teaching Stringer the cold truths of a new game.
When Bell’s bodyguard falls, Krawczyk drops in fear, whimpering on his knees, hands over his head. The look of contempt Omar gives Krawczyk before striding away to bag Stringer is extra
ordinary.
Said Michael Kenneth Williams of Krawczyk: “That’s your last word before you die? At least get on your feet. Say a prayer.”
Without a prayer, newspapers are on their knees.
When death comes for Omar, the story of one of the most feared killers in the history of Baltimore doesn’t make the paper because no reporter is familiar enough with life in the ghetto to know that the sun has set on a legend.
In the Huffington Post, David Simon wrote: “Any good journalist will – if he or she loves the business … wince at the stories systematically missed, the undiscovered and unreported tales of the city …”
But before you can wince, you have to be aware of what has slipped by: Carcetti, elected as a reformer, manipulates crime stats just as the mayor before him; the schools are teaching answers to a test that kids must pass for the system to look good; the execution of Prop Joe – the guy who floods the city with dope right off the boat – is taken at face value as the homicide of a used appliance store owner.
And the murder of Omar Little is missed because the paper doesn’t have a source even once removed from the street – a cop, preacher, community activist, or the old busybody who knows everything – to tell them just who it is who has died.
“Someday,” says Gus Haynes in those opening moments on Guilford Avenue, “I want to find out what it feels like to work for a real newspaper.”
As you read this, Haynes’ desire is all but moot and sure to be alien to a generation now being born, one that will only wonder what it must have been like to work for that thing called a newspaper.
The Wire Page 34