All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  A woman comes out. She’s probably in her early twenties. I explained to her, “I’m doing this TV show. There’s this Russian and there’s a bunch of strippers, and we have to say these things. I need to know how to say it.” She knew it, but she was so embarrassed to tell me. She’s like, “Let’s just go over here.” We went into the corner of the bakery, and she’s pronouncing it for me, and I’m writing it phonetically. Sometimes, it was stuff like that that you had to figure out.

  NORMAN KNOERLEIN (RESEARCHER): If someone says, “I need a three-legged blue pony,” the only two questions you ask are, “When do you need it and how much are you going to spend?” That’s it. There’s no other questions you need to ask me. One of the more interesting tasks I was given was—Uta Briesewitz, she’s a wonderful, sweet, sweet person—and Nina said, “We want to do something special for her birthday, can you get her this cake made out of this German meat product?” I was like, “You want me to get a cake made out of meat?” “Yes.” “Okay, when do I need it?” “This afternoon.” “Great.” Think about that. I can’t call a bakery. This is a really interesting request. I called a place and said, “I’m looking for this German kind of meat, do you have it?” They were like, “Yeah we have it. We sell it by the pound.” I said, “Great. Can you make it look like a cake?” They were like, “How many pounds of it?” I go, “I don’t know how many pounds it is. Just can you make it look square, like a cake?” I literally went to this place, got this meat cake, and took it to set. Everybody goes, “What the hell?”

  RAFAEL ALVAREZ (STAFF WRITER): We needed a crime to launch Season Two. You couldn’t forget that it was still, in some ways, a story about police and criminals.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I had one question I needed to answer. I knew the story in my head. We went to the management. After they gave us the whole dog and pony show, I said, “Can you steal one of these things off the docks?” “No way.” Fuck. Then we went to the bar that night, where the longshoremen were. Same question, “Can you steal?” The guy says, “Which one do you want?” I said, “There we are.” That was the story. It was as simple as that. Everything flowed from that.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I was able to vocalize the rule once we had a writers’ room. A real writers’ room began in the second season. It was a nicer, new construct of what we tried over the first season. Once we had a full writers’ room, I had to sort of express the rules. We had to say, “It either happened or it didn’t happen or it is rumored to have happened, but we’re not quite sure.” With all three cases, it could have happened. The parameters of this universe make all of the outcomes plausible.

  Some things The Wire made up. Some things absolutely happened. Some things we always heard they happened, but they were part of cop stories or what people said somebody did or why somebody got killed. But it couldn’t violate the basic tenet of: This is the world. This is how it works. This is a logical and rational outcome of this.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): You’re trying to say, “There’s a truth here,” and you have to see it. These characters are not the everyday world of the inner city, because the everyday world within the inner city—you wouldn’t want to watch that show. It just goes on. It’s relentless. I always think of it in terms of human drama, with the emphasis on the human. You’re staying true to the characters and you’re just trying to share what they’re going through. They’re all composites, but there’s an integrity to them that flows. There’s no miracles happening. They’re on this course, and tragically enough, very little can steer those kids, those people, away from that particular course that they’ve started out.

  You don’t get a story unless there’s a back-and-forth. David and I provided the wind, and guys like George Pelecanos and Bob Colesberry, if we went off too much in one direction, they would turn the ship back, get closer to reality again. It’s like a hop, skip, and a jump. Next thing you know, you’re way over here and you don’t want to be over here. Yes, we argued all the time. I would say there’s two-thirds argue.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): The argument was creative, and if somebody stops arguing, it’s because they don’t give a fuck. Ed gave a fuck, and I expected him to argue and I expected him to be frustrated and I learned it is not always pleasant. We probably finished four to five seasons with Ed feeling like we left stuff on the table that we couldn’t get to. Ed is a guy who if you present him with a scenario like, we’re going to have a story arc that goes here, he’ll come up with enough material for thirty-five episodes. Then it’s up to the practical choices of what we can get to and what’s best. What would be the best choices here? Even when you make those choices, you’re leaving thirty elements behind, because that’s how fast and how thoroughly Ed turns a Rubik’s Cube. “If we do this, then we can speak to that.” He does all that. Ed would always finish the seasons incredibly frustrated. He’d be like, “We blew it. We could have done this.” Like, “Yeah, well, we did what we did, Ed. We opened some doors, we closed some other ones.” He would go, “What’s the point?”

  He would go into the hibernation of being off for a month, completely disgusted with the whole process and then by the end, the episodes would come out and, not that he was sanguine about everything, but he would come back ready to work the next season. He needed the month off to just take a breath. Everybody in the room would be in agreement. “Okay, this is what we’re doing.” Ed would come back the next day and say, “It’s not right,” and he would proceed with the argument. Sometimes he would turn us all around and sometimes we would just have to go, “Ed, we can’t. We don’t have the characters. We don’t have the locations. There’s no sensibility in the story that that would happen. We’ve traveled a million miles to get to some point that we can’t justify turning to.” Other times, he would turn the whole ship around. He’d be like, “I agreed to this, but you know what? Think about this. Because two or three episodes from now or next year, what you will have effectively said is X when you needed to say Y.” We’d all sit there going like, “Shit. We just wasted a day yesterday. We’re back to square one.” That’s Ed. By the way, that’s the core DNA of what made The Wire what it was, was Ed arguing.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): David would get very, very frustrated because I would come in—after the beat sheet was all done and the writer was off writing—I’d come in and say, “We got to change this. This works better.” It would drive him crazy, but he’d change it. David handled everything. That left me free to handle just story, and that’s all I was interested in. He would do post and he would deal with HBO and deal with the actors. I could just be free to do story.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): George is the barometer. When the morality of the show or the ethos of the show, when it’s going wrong or when we’re not honoring something or a character, that’s where he’ll assert [himself] in a way that can change the direction of the storyline or story arc. Once the universe is established, if we’re getting too schmaltzy, he’s on it. If we’re being brutal just to be brutal, he’s on it.

  I’ve learned to listen to him. Ed and I could argue for hours, and George would be the third guy who would spin it one way or the other. George was the third vote. If you swayed George, then you were probably right. If you didn’t sway George, it was time to rethink.

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): Not in the sense that I went one way or the other. The one argument was about the chips in the phones. That went on for a week with the SIM cards.

  “Guys, can we move on? Like, this is ridiculous, you know? Let’s get some cards up on the board.” That was my role, was to be sort of the adult and say, “It’s time to stop arguing. Let’s just move on, because we’ve got to get some work done.” There’s that expression, David always uses it: “I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.” He never will give up a fight, and Ed’s like that, too. Even when they’re wrong.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I didn’t get everything I wanted in the scripts. I lost a
rguments to Ed. Ed lost arguments to me. Ed doesn’t like to lose arguments. He’s pretty unrelenting. It becomes sort of a hive mentality if it works. If it doesn’t work, then you don’t have a writers’ room. If it becomes just one person, you can’t imagine the universe well enough. You can’t imagine all these different characters well enough to have it have the breath that it needs to have. You gotta let air into the room.

  You have to argue. The room has to be about argument. It has to be good academic arguing. It can get a little heated. You’re basically arguing a story. You’re not arguing self-validation. These are writers. They’re novelists by training. George is a novelist. George sits down, and it’s him and the paper, maybe an editor behind him and that’s it. That’s the only thing between him and broadcast and publication. This is not that. What I’m saying is writers are about ego. What else has a greater vanity than coming to a sort of collective campfire and saying, “I have a story I want to tell. My story is good. Pay attention to me. This is my story. I’ve got a great story. My story is better”?

  The whole act of telling a story is a grandiose thing in some ways. So, now you get a bunch of storytellers in the room, and they have to get along. They have to create one singular thing. It’s at a point the showrunner has to be a little bit totalitarian and say, “I have to look out for the whole.” But long before I do that, you need to be open enough and benign enough to let the arguments lead you where they’re going to lead you. Those were the moments that made The Wire better than it might’ve been.

  The casting of several new starring members stretched casting directors Alexa L. Fogel and Pat Moran. Chris Bauer had previously auditioned for McNulty. James Ransone was a young, talented Baltimore actor more than capable of pulling off a “Bal’more” drawl, and Pablo Schreiber left an original, indelible mark after his reading.

  PABLO SCHREIBER (NICK SOBOTKA): The second season was a huge baby of Robert Colesberry. He was one of the main producers on the show. He was in the room with David when I had my callback. I guess part of the reason he liked me so much is when I came for my callback, there was an assistant of the casting director, Alexa Fogel. Alexa had this casting assistant at the time and her name is Jennifer Lafleur. She’s actually an actress now, and it’s funny. I flirted with her outside of the audition before I went in, and after I finished the audition. I left and I called the casting office after I had left and I asked for Jennifer and they put her on the phone and I asked her on a date. She said no because she had a boyfriend. And I guess she obviously told Alexa that this had happened, and when Robert Colesberry found out that I had done this, called the casting office to ask this girl on a date, he was very taken with my ballsiness or something.

  CHRIS BAUER (FRANK SOBOTKA): I had [watched the first season] and was scared shitless by its authenticity and patience. If you bullshitted for one second in that aesthetic, you’d stand out like a dirty diaper. I didn’t audition. They very generously trusted me enough to offer the part. I did, however, audition for McNulty while they were casting the pilot. Imagine a bloated, hungover, mumbling McNulty, who looked like he’d be single his whole life. Frank Sobotka was a much better fit.

  JAMES “P.J.” RANSONE (CHESTER “ZIGGY” SOBOTKA): My friend Leo Fitzpatrick was on the first season and he was Johnny, Bubbles’s junkie pal. We sort of knew each other from New York. I would see posters [for The Wire] on the train, and I’d be like, “Oh, that’s that show that Leo is going to do.” You have to remember, no one cared about that show until the fourth season. No one watched it.

  I was twenty-one or twenty-two, and it was probably my third legit job and definitely the biggest. It was the most corporate gig I’ve had up until then. I was just really young.

  AMY RYAN (OFF. BEATRICE “BEADIE” RUSSELL): I was a huge fan of the show. I went to high school with Seth Gilliam. We were good friends, and so that was a cool moment, that first scene we filmed together in Daniels’s office, and every time they block us next to each other, we just crack up.

  When I am a fan of something, I turn to mush when I get there. I’d watched the whole first season, and I remember when I was on the show, we were working on this sound stage the second season of the show, I saw the orange couch stored up in the rafters, and it literally took my breath away, “Oh my God. The couch. The couch.”

  AL BROWN (MAJ. STAN VALCHEK): I was astounded when they got in touch with me, when it was time to start thinking about the second season. As an actor, I hadn’t missed church for a whole bunch of weeks. As far as I knew, I was a day player, one shot and I was done. And suddenly, a year after that, pretty much that season was largely about me and another picayune argument, because I was only pissed at [Frank Sobotka] because the priest put his [stained-glass window] in the right part of the church and I ended up in the basement. I was trying to be teacher’s pet, and Sobotka beat my ass to it. That’s about what it boiled down to.

  CHRIS BAUER (FRANK SOBOTKA): I loved Al and was obsessed with his accent, a very nice guy. I thought, There’s no way that guy could be an actor. He’s gotta be the real thing. It was as if they went and handed some commander at the nearest precinct a couple pages and told him, “Go.” He’s one of those Peter Lorre types who just stands there and talks, and the audience is transfixed. There were a lot of those bastards on The Wire. Naturals.

  PABLO SCHREIBER (NICK SOBOTKA): What was interesting was feeling the vibe of the guys who had been there in the first season and a lot of that, like, “Who the fuck are these new guys and why is he writing stuff for them all of a sudden?” And then, when it came out, I think people who had watched it kind of religiously, a lot of people were kind of taken aback, because it was obviously the first time the show had shifted and changed like that, and a lot of people expected it to stay the same. So, a lot of people were sort of taken aback and frustrated by the shift. Then there was a whole other sort of people at the time who discovered the show for the first time with that season. And then they had to go back and watch the first season. For that whole group of people, who were watching at the time and discovering the show, it wasn’t as disorienting or off-putting.

  But yeah, it was interesting. Great actors like Andre Royo and Wood [Harris], some of the characters that weren’t getting written for in the second season, they were like, “What’s going on? Why are they writing for these guys? What’s happening?” But obviously, everything, in retrospect, makes a lot of sense in looking at the canvas that he created.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): After Season One, we weren’t a popular show, but it was a popular show in our hoods. When everybody would go back to their neighborhood, they were the street stars. We’re telling a story about us and we’re doing it in a way that’s being looked at as really, really good. People are loving that they can relate to it. It’s dope. We’re feeling good, and not for nothing, this is the first time you’re getting paid per episode. Most of us weren’t at that contract where you get paid no matter what. At that point, you got to do an episode to get paid.

  You get a call from David Simon or Nina, and they go, “For Season Two, HBO is not going to let us have series regulars on contract. We got to release your contract, and we’re bringing in this new story. We’re telling the storyline from a different perspective.” The businessman in you is stuck and pissed off. I got a contract and now you’re telling me my contract is null and void? What’s that about? It is what it is. This is what the deal was. They told me, “This is what’s going to happen. We’re going to release your contract. We promise you in Season Three, you’ll have all shows produced where you’ll get paid, whether you do an episode or not. I need you not to fight Season Two. We’re going to cut your contract and renew your contract.”

  My manager at that time was serious. She’s like, “This is a business. This is how they do.” She told me not to come back. She said, “What we’re going to do, you’re going to say no. You’re going to do Two, but you’re not com
ing back for Season Three. You’re done with the show.” I was like, “Word? Is that the move we want to make?” She was like, “Yeah. Guess what, Dre? You did Season One, and you weren’t supposed to be one of the standouts, but people know you now from that season.” She talked to me about the things I was scared of. She was like, “You don’t want to be typecast. If you stay in the show too long, that might happen. Two, you see these people, they do whatever they want with the contract. They can say the contract is good. No, they’re trying to fuck you. This is how the business is. I want to protect you. Don’t go back.” I was like, “Okay. Where am I going? What show am I going on next?” She was like, “We don’t know, but the only way we’re going to find out is you got to believe in me and you got to not go back.” I was like, “Oh shit. All right.”

  Then, I’m looking at a daughter with her shoes that were too tight, who needs new shoes. I’m looking at my life like, I can’t. I got to go back. I think the show is too important. If David Simon said they’ll bring us back Season Three, then I got to believe him. She’s like, “Okay. I doubt it.” She started making phone calls. She started becoming a pest to the point where Nina Noble had to call me and go, “Listen. Did David Simon tell you about what’s going on with Season Two and how we’re going to bring you back in Season Three?” I was like, “Yeah.” “Do you believe David Simon?” I’m like, “Yeah.” “Well, then you got to tell your manager to stop calling us. We’re not going to deal with the manager, and if we got to deal with the manager, then we can just release you right now. If he gave you his word, you got to trust him.” It put me in a position where I had to fire my manager. I had to be like, “You can’t call this guy. I know you’re fighting for me, but I told you I’m going to do it. We believe these people.” She was like, “I get it, Dre. I know I crossed the line. I just want to let you know that’s how the business is. Just be careful.” I loved my manager. She’s the one that believed in me and got the ball rolling when I first started doing the theater to television. I was a little nervous.