All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  I am not sure what triggered Michael to have such a memory of that scene. I would never argue with directors, especially not with Ed Bianchi, who always was one of my favorites and who I respected very much. Michael and I had a great relationship. Maybe he is trying to give me credit here for something that just shouldn’t be given.

  The Wire allowed its audience space to interpret. It would not fully explain scenes, instead leaving viewers pondering the meaning of them for episodes, and sometimes seasons, at a time. One early moment hammered that methodology home. In real life, Ed Burns and Harry Edgerton had worked the murder of Dessera Press, who had been dumped by one of Williams’s lieutenants, Louis “Cookie” Savage. In retaliation, she had threatened to turn Savage into the state’s attorney. A gunman killed her, firing from outside a glass window. Through that case, Burns and Edgerton unearthed Savage’s connection to Melvin Williams. In a storyline that recalled Press’s killing, Jimmy McNulty and Bunk Moreland visit the apartment of a murdered young woman in Episode 4. They quickly discover that the previous detective bungled the investigation, and they slowly and methodically retrace the murder and link it to Avon Barksdale’s conspirators. Television had never seen anything quite like it. McNulty and Bunk conversed in the nearly five-minute scene by using only iterations of the word fuck. Simon credits the scene as an ode to Terry McLarney, a detective sergeant and a fixture in Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): We’re standing at a crime scene. We’re staring, and cops are just cursing left and right. Somebody said something that was so profanity laden that Terry McLarney just started giggling and saying, “One day we’re going to get to the point where we’re all going to be able to just use the word fuck to communicate.” And it was just a throwaway line for Terry, but I remembered it. So, I came to Ed with it, and then Ed wrote that scene.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): Terry is an amazing guy. He might even still be on the force. He was telling David, basically, these homicide things are so matter-of-fact, it just becomes a matter of grunts. I wrote it, and I used four variations of the word fuck: “What the fuck? Oh, fuck. Fucked up.” But just four, and the actors were uncomfortable with the four lines, so then he was like, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” and I asked the director, “Just give me the one. Get them to do the fucking job that they’re being paid for,” and I went to them and I said, “We need the one.” It turns out that David used the “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” which, to me, is like, wait a minute, the scene is about this harmony of doing an investigation and they’re so used to it. But we ended up with the “Fuck, fuck, fuck” because it was a little bit, apparently, more fun. I didn’t particularly see it that way, but it was fine.

  WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): David comes up to us and describes a scene. He says, “You’re going to go to the scene. You’re going to realize that [the previous] detective, he did a bad job. Wendell, you’re going to see the photos of the girl. Dominic, you’re going to start getting the stats, looking at what the report was. Going back over, you’re going to realize it’s impossible to have gone down the way it was reported, because the guy would have to be like eight feet tall to get that trajectory. If he did, then something must be left in here, and you’re looking for any evidence that may be around, and Wendell, you discover that there’s a shot through the window. The glass is on the inside. It means it came from the outside. That means whoever the perpetrator was wasn’t inside, like the person they say in the report. The bullet came from outside. From there, let’s see the trajectory. It would be right here, in the refrigerator. Let’s see, not the wall. In the refrigerator, we find the bullet here. Let’s go outside, make a new discovery.” He explained the whole scene to us. He said, “Now you guys are going to do that whole thing, but they’re going to be on me about the profanity and language that we use.” So, I said, “Let’s just come out the box with it.” He said, “You’re going to do that whole scene, but the only word you can say is ‘fuck.’ ” I said, “What?”

  CLEMENT VIRGO (DIRECTOR): I wanted to really let the audience in and know exactly what was happening visually. It took a long time to shoot that scene, but I wanted to get it right. I wanted it to be kind of like the shower scene in Psycho, where it was a lot of setups. The story was told visually, and so I was very detailed in shooting that scene. I remember our cinematographer, Uta, shot the whole thing—we shot the whole thing handheld—and I remember looking over at her, and she was wiped out from holding the camera for a long time. I really wanted to get all the kind of little details, and I wanted the audience to not have any mystery about what was happening in the story.

  WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): I think it’s an example of one of the best displays of my acting in the whole series. I tell folks, “Study that if you want to study what intent is,” because everyone understood exactly what we were doing at every moment, even though we were using just that one word or [a] variation thereof. That was one of the best-acted scenes that I did on the show. The one thing they cut out that I regret is we said, “Fuck. Fuck me. Mother fuck. Fuckity fuck,” all of that. Then we were [being] watched the whole time by the super. “Fuck. Motherfucker. Fuck.” We go outside and we find the casing, and the super says, “Well, I’ll be fucked.” They cut that out, though. I was like, “Oh, man, they should have left that in.”

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): Every time someone said, “Cut,” we were crying with laughter, Wendell and me, because it was really fun to do. It would get outrageous, sort of go, “Fuckkk,” and “Fuuuckkk,” most of which hit the cutting room floor, thank goodness, but it was just the most ludicrous varieties of saying “fuck” that we could think of.

  Throughout The Wire’s run, David Simon fielded one question often: How could a white man adequately tell a story so intimately linked to the experience of blacks? He would grow weary of the question, and tried allowing his work to speak for itself. The fact is he would have failed as a reporter covering the crime beat had he not learned to listen and interpret the demographic of the city he reported on. Behind the scenes, Simon attempted to groom young black writers and directors. He was a fan of Spike Lee, and hoped Lee would direct an episode of The Wire, although talks over this collapsed. Simon has conceded that he probably missed aspects that black creative minds could have spoken to more capably. Often, he would be tested with his cast on his intentions. It started with Sonja Sohn in the first season.

  WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): The first year, Sonja and David bumped heads. David Simon said, “It’s a show with no hope.” Sonja went off.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): What I was saying to her is effectively what the show said, which is: “This is going to be a cruel world and nothing’s going to get fixed that matters systemically.” Systemic. I was going to promote all the wrong people, and the same policies were going to go on. Regardless of any conversation I had with her, that’s how the show ended.

  But she’s right, the characters themselves, as individuals, were entitled to a certain figure of dignity at points. Some of them, anyway. As it should be. Even in a rigged game, people don’t cease to be human, and the human heart doesn’t stop beating. But at the time that I said it, I think we were arguing past each other. She was talking about characters, her character, other characters, and I was talking about the systems that we were depicting. I think the system part of the show was more in my head, and Ed Burns’s head, than in the people who were being asked to depict the world. Because it has to be. You’re asking them to be in the moment, and human beings in the moment, we all live as we live. We’re not constantly standing back and going, “Let me have my omniscient moment of seeing the whole.”

  Actors are particularly susceptible to seeing the world powerfully from the point of view of their characters. It’s what their job is. You never tell an actor who’s about to do a bad thing, “You’re a bad guy.” I’m always tel
ling my actors when they’re about to do something bad or something morally transgressive, “You’re a good guy. This is a bad moment, but you’re a good guy.” Because unless you’re a total sociopath, which very few people are, the people doing bad things are still people, and the people having noble moments are still people, and the next moment they’ll do a bad thing. I think, in some ways, we weren’t even applying the terms in the same way. But I do remember butting heads with her. Because she’s a progressive, optimistic person, and I’m a progressive, pessimistic person.

  SONJA SOHN (DET. SHAKIMA “KIMA” GREGGS): It’s really important [to know] that the context of my understanding of the business, my knowledge of who David was, is very different now than it was then. My perspective now has adjusted a little bit from what it was at the time. Because of David’s experience, twenty years on the streets of Baltimore, and now that I have been on the streets of Baltimore, I fucking get it. I thought that he was losing it in that blanket statement.

  Today, I understand the truth of that statement, where he was coming from, because he really was talking about the systemic, structural, racist policies that inevitably are going to keep a large number, if not the majority, of people struggling to survive in the hood. I didn’t understand structural, institutional racism at the time the way I understand it now, so David was really making that statement more from that perspective. For me, I was someone who had spent a lot of my childhood, a lot of my life, making sure that I was not going to be one of the people that was going to stay oppressed and suppressed by my environment.

  I found that statement appalling because I knew that even though I didn’t grow up in Baltimore, I did grow up in a comparable environment. I grew up in an underserved community that was dealing with a lot of those poor issues. Even though it was a generation earlier, and it looks different in the seventies, the core issues were the same. I had worked my way out of having to live in survival mode. I had worked my way into a place where some people call it the beginning of life’s success. All I had was my own hopes and dreams and the knowledge that I was going to escape the traps. When David said that, it just struck me as a real sour note. I also knew there were some guys who were actors who had all transcended those environmental obstacles to be on the show, to get to a place in life where they could have a successful acting career.

  We were the hope. We were evidence that it’s possible. All of us, not just actors, but all of us who have come from those backgrounds, have acquired some level of success in the world. We are the hope for those who are struggling.

  LANCE REDDICK (LT. CEDRIC DANIELS): Somehow, I was alone with David, and we just got to talking. I asked him something. I remember him saying organizations can’t be reformed, but people can. I remember being struck by it when he said it, because I knew that I had never thought of it that way, and I knew that there was something profound in the insight. Then, over time, particularly when I watched the show, I realized how we see both on the criminal side and on the police side, you see people struggling to live up to the codes of the institutions that they’re a part of and seeing how it chips away at their humanity.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I had told him it was much harder to reform a system. The things that reform systems are trauma. Great trauma. Nobody gives up status quo without being pushed to the wall. I believe that politically. The great reformations of society are the result of undue excess and undue cruelty. The reason you have collective bargaining in America and it became powerful is that workers were pushed to the starvation point. The reason that you have the civil rights we do is that people were hanging from trees. That notion of the system [being] self-reforming without incredible outside pressure and without first [bringing] about incredible trauma through inhumanity or indifference—I find that to be really dubious. I’m arguing for reform. It’s not like I can say this and say we should throw up our hands and can’t try. Every day, you gotta get up. I’m saying this with the clarity of: there’s no choice but to try.

  Over time, the name of the novelist George Pelecanos kept popping up in conversations David Simon was having. Kary Antholis, the HBO executive, originally recommended that Simon read Pelecanos’s book The Sweet Forever. Simon took the suggestion as needling. He owed Antholis late scripts for The Corner and interpreted the earnest recommendation as a prod to him to hurry. Simon and Pelecanos finally talked at the funeral of a mutual friend. The pair, standing next to each other, believed that the friends and family of the deceased bookstore owner would gently place the first layer of dirt on the grave in traditional Jewish burial fashion. Instead, a backhoe jumped to a start and began piling dirt onto the plot. “Is this traditional?” Pelecanos asked, turning to Simon without a trace of a grin on his face. “Is this traditional for you guys?”

  “He cracked me up,” Simon recalled. “He just slayed me. I was no good for the rest of the day. I was like, Man, not only is he a good writer, he’s funny. Dark and funny. I sought him out after that.”

  Pelecanos became a needed third voice and, in some cases, tie-breaker, for the creative forces of Simon and Burns during the run of the show. Simon entrusted Pelecanos to author many of the show’s fine-grained scenes, and he wrote the seasons’ penultimate episodes, which often killed off major characters, beginning with the gut-wrenching murder of Michael B. Jordan’s Wallace by his friends Bodie (J. D. Williams) and Poot (Tray Chaney) in Season 1. Eventually, actors began flipping to the back of any script Pelecanos had written to make sure their character had survived.

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): [David Simon’s wife, the novelist] Laura [Lippman] and I both knew this woman who passed, and we went to the funeral, and David was there. Laura, unbeknownst to me, had given David one of my books, and it happened to be a book called The Sweet Forever, which is one of my deep, sort-of urban novels from that period. It was very close to what he was doing. It was kind of fortuitous that he read that book in particular.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): My wife and I [had] just started dating then. My wife’s a novelist, and she was a contemporary of George’s. She’d been on me to read George. She goes, “You should read Pelecanos. He’s interested in the same stuff. His heart is where your heart is.” And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s from DC.” I had that Baltimore [thing], like, “I’m sorry, those are the lawyers who come to the Orioles games and sit there on their cell phones for five innings. Fuck those guys.” And I’m from DC originally, so I had sort of like [a] Baltimore chip on my shoulder. So, I hadn’t pulled one of his books up.

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): I didn’t have a ride back to the shivah. He says, “Ride with me. I want to talk to you about something.” I ride with him, and he says, “I’ve got this show. Would you want to write an episode? Would you like to try it?” I said, “Sure, I’ll try it.” I didn’t know David at all, even though he grew up just about three or four miles from me and we went to Maryland together. But I didn’t know him at Maryland. He’s a little bit younger than me, and he was real involved with The Diamondback, the school newspaper there. I wasn’t involved with anything. When I got out of classes, I went to my job, which was selling women’s shoes.

  Even when he first approached me to write for the show, he didn’t overdo it. He said to me, “Yeah, I’ve got a show. I just sold the pilot to HBO. It’s about drug dealers and cops in Baltimore.” That sounds pretty basic, right? I had watched Homicide for the whole run, but especially The Corner, [which] had been on already. I saw what he had done. The Corner is sort of a blueprint for what The Wire was going to be. I knew what he was capable of and where his heart was politically and socially. And actually, that’s what convinced me to give it a shot. I think, in a very broad sense, he’s always had the overarching idea in his head of this show, and what he wanted to do with it. He’s a macro guy. If you say to me, go write a book about the drug war’s failure, it would probably intimidate me. I’m more of a micro guy. I like to dig into the characters in the individu
al scenes and dialogue. But David knew what the big picture was.

  My first script for The Wire, I wrote it and turned it in, and I can’t even remember if David gave me any notes. When I got the published script, let’s say about thirty percent of what I had written was in the final script. I called David up, and of course I said, “What happened to my script?” If I remember correctly, he had Jim Yoshimura in the room with him for some reason. They were hanging out. He’s friends with Jim. They worked together on Homicide. They were on speakerphone, and David says, “Hey, Jim, Pelecanos got thirty percent. He’s complaining.” And David said, “That’s pretty good, to get thirty percent your first time.”

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): It’s hard to get into the voice of a show that is not your initial creation. You’re flying one plane and on the runway. Other people in the control tower are looking at the whole screen. Some things you did perfectly well, but the script came in before you went in a different direction, or the script that’s coming after you has to do something and you’re not setting it up right. Maybe because the beat you were given was imprecise. Maybe because you veered in a way that was worthy for your script, but doesn’t work for the whole. There’s all these variables that can conspire against even a perfectly fluid and competent writer when they turn in a script on a continuing series.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): A long time ago, David was like, “Do you want to be an okay television show or you want to be a classic television show? This is not Walt Disney. People have to die. It doesn’t matter if you kill one actor that’s in a couple of scenes. If the audience doesn’t care about the actor you’re killing, then you haven’t done your job. They got to care about this person.” We knew that was the theme.