All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  Nina Noble recalled a rapport that frayed over time. The show’s soundstage was originally hosted in an old Sam’s Club, but was forced to move to Columbia after the third season, when the landlord wanted the space for a retail tenant. “The unfortunate thing is I think we were sort of part of the end of show making in Baltimore,” Noble said. “In other words, there were some incentives here, not in Baltimore, but in Maryland, that ceased to be funded at the end of The Wire. Once O’Malley then became governor, he was not interested in funding this industry, and that’s really unfortunate because there was a good crew based here, great locations, and infrastructure.”

  The show injected millions of dollars into the city and offered sound to those either without a voice or with a muted one. “By choosing a real city, we declare that the economic forces, the political dynamic, the class, cultural, and racial boundaries are all that much more real, that they do exist in Baltimore and, therefore, they exist elsewhere in urban America,” Simon wrote in that same Baltimore magazine article. The cast and crew soon reflected a working-class mentality. Michael Potts (Brother Mouzone) once stood in the rain during a shoot. An overeager wardrobe assistant asked to hold an umbrella over him. Potts tried refusing her. He felt odd, but finally acquiesced after she insisted several times. Soon, Potts spotted Noble signaling to someone and that person beelining toward him. “Nina says for you to hold your own umbrella,” Potts recalled the crewmember saying. “We don’t do that stuff. That’s LA stuff.” The show stayed away from Hollywood. The city adopted the cast and crew and became home to some of their best, most challenging work. The spotlight also created a pressure cooker, and the city served as a locale to occasionally blow off steam.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): People ask me what was the best character on the show. I always say Baltimore. It helped us all stay really tuned into what we were doing and what we were talking about. It can be any city. What we were talking about happens everywhere. Right now, we’re in Baltimore and we’re talking about it. The first time I got to Baltimore, coming from the Bronx, I had an idea. In my mind, I’m not scared to go in any hood. I know what a hood looks like. I ask my boys about what Baltimore’s like. They were like, “Baltimore is a place where you sell drugs, and you get more bang for your buck if you go to Baltimore.” When I went there, it fucked me up. When I got to Baltimore, I took the Amtrak. I got to the neighborhood. I started seeing where we were shooting. I started looking around.

  The feeling of Baltimore at that time was so despaired, so, We’re not trying no more. It is what it is. This is where we live and who gives a fuck? People just drive through, people on their way to DC or New York. We’re forgotten. At that time, I don’t know what the mayor was doing, but at this point, when we got there in 2001, there was these big billboards that said, “Believe. Keep Trying,” weird subliminal messages saying, “Don’t Give Up.” It looked like something out of A Clockwork Orange or some shit. I was like, “What’s happening?” I saw this half a building torn up and somebody coming out the building locking the front door. I’m like, “What the fuck are they locking the front door for if the other half of the building is rubble?” In my junkie garb, I would walk by some kids, and they would look at me with a look on their face. I’m talking about nine-year-old and seven-year-old kids looked at me like I was their uncle. Wasn’t scared of me, just giving me a dirty look like, “Move on, junkie.”

  I was like, This place, they don’t care. It is what it is. That just broke my heart. That just made us feel like you don’t want your world to end up like this, where nobody gives a fuck anymore. That’s what Baltimore felt like. As we got on telling the stories and when the show started airing, you start feeling different. People start feeling like, They’re talking about Baltimore. We matter. This is our show. They started taking a little sense of pride. People was like, “I saw the front of my house on your screen. On one of your episodes, I saw the front of my house. Shit, I got to clean it up.” We started seeing and feeling that. Even people that didn’t like the show. People were complaining about it, but they were talking about it. “We don’t like your show because you’re showing the bad parts of Baltimore.” At least they were talking. Before, they were just not giving a fuck. Now they’re fighting for it.

  You felt the energy coming back to the city somewhat. It’s one of those cities where the architecture is beautiful. It looks different at different angles. It has so many different looks to it. The people are the most honest people. There’s no lying in the people. It’s just that, at one point or at some time, it was a forgotten city. They got John Waters. You had rich characters coming from Baltimore, Tupac [Shakur], you got one of the greatest performing arts schools there. It didn’t feel like it was being talked about. Nobody was giving it a look. Now, all of a sudden, it’s starting to get a look because The Wire was giving it so much attention that we felt the city was starting to care more. They enriched us with us being a part of that. We would walk around; we became these little heroes of Baltimore. We got mad love. It was awesome. It was awesome to feel like you were a part of some sort of rejuvenation or some sort of pride about a place.

  FREDRO STARR (MARQUIS “BIRD” HILTON): Filming in Baltimore, that itself was an experience. Baltimore is one of the, I would say, less financial cities. It’s broke out there. Everything is torn down. It’s not a lot of businesses. I don’t know about now, but when they shot The Wire, it was like living in the past. It was kind of like a third world country to me, almost. Just cracks on the sidewalk. When you come out your trailer: bums, crackheads, gangsters, all by your trailer. Me personally, coming from [the hip-hop group] Onyx, the hood knows me from Onyx, too, so it was like, “Yo, what’s up, Fredro?” I’m out there mingling with everybody. Being a part of the community, not just in my trailer, because of who I am as far as what I do in hip-hop.

  It was an experience in Baltimore. It was an experience just being out there. It was kind of like, Wow, this is very real out here. They picked an ill place to shoot this shit. They could have shot on set somewhere that look like the hood and put fake crack vials on the floor and busted glass on the floor, but that was all real. When I got thrown on the floor in one of the scenes—I was coming out of the store—glass was by my face. It was like, “Hold up, let’s shoot the glass.” It was real. Like, Oh, this shit is ill.

  STEVE SHILL (DIRECTOR): What would typically happen is you’re sitting there at four o’clock in the morning, at some miserable street corner that’s either one hundred ten degrees in the middle of the night or it’s snowing, but they’re saying, “Steve, what line are we picking up from?” My little joke with them—I’d say, “We’re going to pick it up from ‘I’m going to pop a cap in your bitch ass.’ ” They’d say, “Picking up from, ‘I’m going to pop a cap in your bitch ass.’ Where are we going to cut?” I would turn the pages and decide. “I think we’re going to cut on ‘You’re a motherfucker. I’m going to bitch slap you upside your head.’ ” We had some laughs about that.

  JOE CHAPPELLE (DIRECTOR/CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): When David and all the writers, when they would write something and it was on a corner, whatever the street corner was, we would shoot at that corner. It wasn’t like we go to a fun location and put up fake signs. We’d go to that specific corner.

  UTA BRIESEWITZ (CINEMATOGRAPHER): I remember coming out of a scouting van and the van pulled forward a little bit and pulled over an empty plastic bottle. The plastic bottle made a pop and, instinctively, Robert Colesberry went for cover. I remember finding that incredibly amusing. Not so much anymore, after I’d been involved more and worked on The Wire for a while and witnessed and experienced what, obviously, Bob already knew. If you hear a pop and you are not quite sure whether it is a shot or not, you had better duck for cover. Later on, we lost locations because row houses simply would burn down. It was just all very, very real. You really immersed yourself into the culture. It was not always a very pleasant environmen
t to be in. The houses that we would shoot in, where characters would shoot up in, you would step on syringes and vials and everything. It was there. Everything was just real.

  LEO FITZPATRICK (JOHNNY WEEKS): Walking from set to the trailer, I don’t think we ever had any kind of security. We just blended in with the other people in the neighborhood. When I was in Baltimore, it was fine. But sometimes I would have to run to get the train back to New York at night, still kind of, not in wardrobe but in makeup. That’s when you noticed the difference of how people looked at you. In Baltimore, in those particular streets, it was fine.

  But if you were on an Amtrak looking like that, you noticed people changed seats and kind of separated themselves from you. At the end of a shooting day, I would have a beer. I would walk into a deli or a liquor store and buy a beer. Nobody batted a lash. Nobody looked at me crazy. They just assumed, “All right, here’s just another white kid junkie.” I think the white thing threw them off more than being a junkie. They were like, “What are you doing in this neighborhood, kid?”

  KWAME PATTERSON (“MONK” METCALF): Season One, they said they were shooting a scene with the cops, and somebody had just robbed somebody. He was being chased by the police, and he had pretty much got away, and he turned a corner and he was on The Wire set. He saw all these “police officers,” and he just lay down on the ground and gave himself up, and he didn’t realize until the other cops caught up that those [“police officers”] were actors. I know he felt so stupid when he was in jail, because they say he had gotten away. The real cops were so far behind him that he was gone.

  UTA BRIESEWITZ (CINEMATOGRAPHER): I remember going up to the location where we were shooting, and we were held back a couple of blocks away from where we were supposed to shoot. Two things happened. One, I couldn’t get closer because there was a sniper somewhere on a roof and they were trying to get the sniper off the roof. Another time, they were clearing out a dead body. Those are two things that happened.

  DOMENICK LOMBARDOZZI (DET. THOMAS “HERC” HAUK): We were shooting once, and two blocks over, you see cop cars flying and gunshots, kind of simulating what we were doing. It was just happening two blocks over for real.

  J. D. WILLIAMS (PRESTON “BODIE” BROADUS): I’m from Newark, New Jersey, so we have a certain level of harshness or brutality, exposure to those types of things. Anywhere I go, most places are easier to adapt to than Newark. Most places I go just might be missing something, like maybe the store closes too early or you can’t buy this or find that. As far as the trouble and danger and things you get to see, you kind of get used to certain things. Baltimore just reminded me of home basically, and then it took me that first year to get used to Baltimore.

  MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): Growing up in Newark gave me those layers. Being able to see real shit on a daily basis made it something that I was comfortable with. That was normal. So, being in Baltimore and in that environment, it wasn’t something that was strange. It wasn’t foreign. The dialect, being around it a little bit more, they might move a little different, talk a little different. You’ve been in one hood, you’ve kind of sort of been in them all. Some are different than others, but for the most part, poverty is poverty.

  J. D. WILLIAMS (PRESTON “BODIE” BROADUS): Baltimore closed down two o’clock sharp, and I mean sharp. So, I came outside of the club one night, not moving fast enough for the police or just not being where I was supposed to be. The police, they grabbed me, slammed me down into the gutter. I was dressed up. It was a nice suit, and they slammed me down into the gutter, put the ties on me, and threw me in the truck, and they held me there. That was two o’clock when they took me in, and I didn’t get out until about ten o’clock in the morning. I had to walk home.

  My point in that story was about how the police, particularly Baltimore police, at that time, how they just respond without thinking and with force. It could’ve turned really ugly and really dangerous really quickly. Thank God it didn’t. I’m sure that type of occurrence was common, if it’s not still common now. That was my first year down here, so I had to learn Baltimore quick.

  VINCENT PERANIO (PRODUCTION DESIGNER): The strip club [filmed in Season One], I have to say is a real strip club about two blocks from my house, but I never really frequented. We scouted for that. We found the most urban one, on Eastern Avenue, what is called the Ritz in reality, and we really liked it. They were really game to let us film there, and the thing is, we knew we would be filming there several times. So, it’s different than just a one-time thing. They really have to want to put up with you. And part of it was we were going to spiff it up a little, add some lights and decorate it a little. So, we filmed at the strip club. While we were filming at the strip club, the owner got charged federally with money laundering and was put in jail, and the FBI took over the strip club. So, for the next six months—because of course we weren’t finished with the season—we had to deal with the FBI as our landlords.

  WOOD HARRIS (AVON BARKSDALE): It’s funny, because we didn’t really use the strip club as much. We never saw actual dancers in there, just actors whenever there was any [dancers]. We used the upstairs area of the strip club. It ended up being like any other set. The only thing is, because that was a popular place, sometimes people would show up for us, the actors, and wait outside for hours and hours and hours until we came out. We started seeing some fanfare occur every so often. You get the PA come up to you. “Wood, Idris, there’s people waiting outside.” “Oh yeah, okay.” We don’t think anything of it. Then, six hours later, they’re still outside.

  IDRIS ELBA (STRINGER BELL): Eventually, Wood and I would hang out and we were like buddies and friends. Even though our characters were best friends and were going through stuff, Wood and I spent time outside of the set hanging out. He was into music, and I was into music. We used to write songs, a couple of songs. I don’t even know where those songs are. We had a couple of songs that we’d get together when he was rapping and I was rapping. Overall, it was a really good relationship and good chemistry.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): There was quite a strip club culture, Chubbies.

  MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): I’m grown now. I can say that shit. I went. They took me out, man. They took me out. They let me see the strip clubs and be in that environment. We called it character development, character research. We would go down to some of the strip joints and have a good time.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): Mm-hmm. That’s right. We’re playing these characters that you know were out and about in the streets and talking shit. It’s all part of the Method acting. We all logged it into research. We’re just doing research.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): Wendell and I had to judge a pretty pussy competition there once, I remember that. We took it really seriously and were very technical about it. Six girls bend over. It’s brilliant.

  WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): We looked forward to Baltimore because we knew we would have a good time. “Let’s paint the town red. Let’s go for it.” It was a boys’ weekend that lasted for six months.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): It really was a bit tricky. I wasn’t with the mother of my daughter, but my daughter, she was only three or four, so I really missed her. Three weeks was the maximum I could be away without going mad. I had a lot of jet-lagged weekends, just come back for a day or two, just to see her. That was pretty tough, and then I’d be spending most of my time fighting off sleep and jet lag and trying to brave it out. Then she came out whenever there was school holidays. That wasn’t great, but I was single, I hasten to add. The only drawback was that I did miss a lot of her years of a two-, three-, and four-year-old. That was pretty tough.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): We used to get hammered. You do some positive stuff and you also let go of some steam. We got fucked up. J.D., he challenged Idris to a drinking contest. Somehow or another, it was Idri
s and J.D. and they were arguing about some shit, either about [John] Madden or about hip-hop. They start talking about drinking. I believe J.D. started having visions or some shit. He started having visions and went under the table fearing for his life, like Pokémon was coming to get him or some shit. He got fucked up. It was a lot of fun. There was a lot of moments that we just got tore up and we got to pushing the envelope in so many aspects.

  J. D. WILLIAMS (PRESTON “BODIE” BROADUS): Me and Idris, we have a million stories. With the drinking contest, Idris is like two hundred and something pounds. At the time, I might have been one forty, one fifty at the most, maybe, but I was a drinker. So, I told him, “Let’s go.” So, we went in. We downed a pint each, but then, after that first pint of Hennessy, I got probably through another quarter bottle, and he was still going. It was over. I was literally under a glass table looking through it at him, and a couple of other cats came in. Andre came in. I think Larry [Gilliard] was there. Hassan [Johnson] might have been there.

  I’m looking at all of these guys from under the table, through the glass, and they’re all cracking up at me. I woke up the next morning in the middle of my floor in my underwear. It looked like my clothes exploded off of me or something, and I had to make some phone calls that morning, asking the guys what happened the rest of the night. The last thing I remember was being under the table. I had a little cut on my forehead.

  IDRIS ELBA (STRINGER BELL): J.D. was my guy, man. We used to hang out a lot. He just liked being with the old actors and talking shit and whatnot. He used to rag on me for being English, and said, “You guys can’t drink.” I think we poured a couple of bottles of Henny and started doing shots and seeing who would last. He didn’t last, just put it that way. I don’t remember how he got under the table. I just know that he was three sheets to the wind.