All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  He was eyes. I was ears. I had to become a little more eyes and learn a little bit more of what I was asking my directors to do, and Nina had to become more specific about what we were looking for in our personnel and what to tell them. It used to be the tone meetings were just to discuss the script and the ideas of the characters. It was the writers talking to the director. Then Bob would get with them about the template of the show visually. The tone meetings, we began incorporating rules about what the camera can do, what it can’t do in our tone meeting. I was shocked to hear myself vocalizing that fairly quickly into Season Three. He taught me an awful lot, I’ve got to say.

  UTA BRIESEWITZ (CINEMATOGRAPHER): I pretty much owe everything to Bob Colesberry, because I was doing indie movies. When you do indie movies, maybe you do one or two a year. That was more than ten years ago. It was not as vivid a landscape as it is today, with all the outlets that you have today, and also it was before the digital revolution. It was harder to get an indie film off the ground. My paychecks didn’t come so regular, and sometimes I was almost struggling a little bit to pay my rent. I was starting to get concerned, like, Wow, will there ever be a career for me that I can actually support myself with?

  Bob Colesberry gave me that. Once I started working on The Wire, I got a real paycheck, and I got it for a long time. It put me on the map, and after that, I had no problems getting other jobs.

  KAREN THORSON (PRODUCER): I know that David Simon was deeply wounded, had lost a friend, but he felt alone out there making the show. His mother told me that several years later. In fact, it was not too long ago, maybe three or four years ago. I was sitting with Mrs. Simon and she said that David really mourned the loss of Bob and was worried that the show wouldn’t go on without him, but as you can see, it took a different turn and it worked out all right.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I think Colesberry really affected David. They were very close and they were professionally very close. I stayed away from David and Bob. I did. Bob and I had our own little thing.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Nina and I turned to face HBO and say, even if we didn’t feel it, “We’re fine.” We needed to do that politically, to keep them confident. But we definitely missed him. I remember the first episode of Season Three, Uta and Ed Bianchi—Ed Bianchi was directing, and Uta was shooting, and I’m looking through the monitor now and I don’t have Bob next to me. There was something wrong, and I knew it was wrong and I didn’t have the vocabulary, and on the [spur of the] moment, I had to invent my own vocabulary for expressing why the camera movement is problematic.

  DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): Bob Colesberry died while I was in the earliest stage of the script, so we had to regroup, and David sent me the new beats that incorporated the death of Ray Cole, the character Bob played on the show. He also sent me a list of all the projects Bob had been involved in as a producer—it was an impressive list—and I incorporated some of them into Landsman’s speech. I was pretty anxious about that storyline. I told David I thought I wasn’t the guy to write it, but he asked me to do a first pass, and Bob was such a great guy—you never come across anyone who didn’t love the guy—that I did the best I could. Then David took those scenes over and made them his own personal tribute to his friend. He also added the Pogues’s “Body of an American” to the bar scene at the end, because it was Bob’s favorite song.

  DELANEY WILLIAMS (SGT. JAY LANDSMAN): That was a pretty long and hard day, I’d have to say. Kind of a well-remembered scene, I guess, for my character, and certainly it is for me. The scene takes two or three minutes, and of course we shot it for probably eight hours. We basically monologue for eight hours straight. I guess the hardest part for me was that I was the only one who had to stay sober. We’re shooting in a bar, and I had all the words. Dom and Wendell, they had their own lunch. Lunch for me, I just had to stay in the business of the scene, I guess is the only way to put it. It was emotional and it was kind of a touching moment. At the end, we raised a glass to him, to say goodbye.

  It wasn’t integral in the story, obviously, but it was central to the experience for the people working on the show. In that regard, it was really important. It’s a pretty long monologue for a television show, so it was a lot of work, and you had to get it right every time, so I had that sort of pressure. The hard part was actually getting to do it, for me. Because, at the time, I was hired episode to episode. I could expect to be hired, but I didn’t know, so I wasn’t on a contract. During the downtime between seasons, I obviously had to work. The mind is conflicted, as I was doing a play at the time at Arena Stage, in DC. Unfortunately, I think it was the third or fourth episode of the season, of that next season after Bob passed, that we did this, and I had been written into the previous episodes, but I couldn’t do either of them because the play wouldn’t let me out to do it. I had to go through hell or high water to get the play to let me out of the one night to shoot that. We did it Friday night, like all through the night, which is the time I should’ve probably been onstage. My understudy had to do the role in DC while I was working on the show, and it was one of those things that fortuitously came together. Both of them are businesses. I just needed that day off because that scene was that important. Whether I worked again on the series or not, I wanted to make sure I was there that night.

  KAREN THORSON (PRODUCER): Joe Chappelle came on board as a director-producer type and was helpful. He definitely had his own aesthetic. It was different than Bob’s, but he brought some good ideas to the show.

  I do think that the visual style definitely changed, and I don’t think we were quite as adventurous because we were wounded. We had talked about going to widescreen and that we were going to do that Season Three, and we just didn’t do it. We didn’t do a lot of bigger changes because we were wounded, and if we didn’t have to fix something, we had to do so much healing, why add to the burden?

  I was, of course, doing as much healing as anyone, and I was just grateful for the job because, for me, the work is what pulled me through. If I didn’t have the structure of the work, I don’t know what would’ve happened to me. It saved me. I put all my energy into the show, because when you’re in that kind of pain, when somebody dies that’s close to you, if your day is twenty-four hours and maybe for three hours you don’t think about it, that’s a good day. Having the distraction and the focus of the work was really important to me.

  David Simon, a journalist at heart, only reluctantly recognized television as an effective medium to present discussion. “I’m more interested in the arguments,” he said about the show’s surviving popularity. “I wish that were the legacy of the show.” KRESTINE HAVEMANN

  D’Angelo (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) teaches Wallace (Michael B. Jordan) and Bodie (J. D. Williams) chess by drawing an analogy to the Barksdale crew in one of The Wire’s most memorable scenes. DAVID LEE/HBO.

  Andre Royo as Bubbles, the heroin addict and informant who never stops battling to right his life. “I want Bubbles to be a human first, addict second,” Royo said. “I wasn’t trying to play the addiction. I was going to play the person.” DAVID LEE/HBO

  Members of Season 1’s police detail: Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick), Leander Sydnor (Corey Parker Robinson), Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn), Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam), and Michael Santangelo (Michael Salconi). Reddick recognized the show’s potential to be special early on and remains upset over The Wire’s lack of awards. “I’ll be pissed off about it until the day I die,” he said. DAVID LEE/HBO

  Set decorators found the original iconic orange couch in a Dumpster and established it in The Wire’s pilot before discarding it. An expensive scramble ensued to replicate the couch with this replacement once HBO picked up the show. DAVID LEE/HBO

  Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce) investigate a crime scene. Pierce, from New Orleans, and West, a native of England, developed a quick rapport on and off the screen. “Our chemistry, it’s been a great friendship from the bat,” Pierc
e said. “He has a great curiosity about things. He’s very well read, loves to go out and have a good time. I think we share that approach to life.” DAVID LEE/HBO

  The city of Baltimore served as the show’s biggest star. Pictured are some of the city’s vast number of row houses, many of which became vacant during Baltimore’s population drop-off. “Some of the lighting to me was almost like a painting from the past, like from the seventeenth century, a Rembrandt look about it, the darkness of the house and the sunlight searing through the boarded-up windows,” said Vincent Peranio, the show’s production designer. “I think the show was bleak and beautiful in the way that looking at ruins in a ruined civilization are.” DAVID LEE/HBO

  Wallace (Michael B. Jordan) speaks to D’Angelo (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) in The Pit. Jordan’s Wallace lasted only one season, but David Simon rightly predicted the character’s impact would be enduring. Jordan later blossomed into a movie star. DAVID LEE/HBO

  Michael K. Williams beautifully played the many sides to stickup artist Omar Little. Several real-life figures known to the show’s creators formed the character’s background. Williams believed that Omar would be killed off early in the show’s run; however, he lasted long enough to evolve into President Barack Obama’s favorite television character. NICOLE RIVELLI/HBO

  Idris Elba did not recognize the budding star power in his portrayal of Stringer Bell, the suave gangster who strived for legitimacy, during the show’s early run. “People are going to love you as this character,” Michael Hyatt, who played Brianna Barksdale, recalled telling him. “You’re not going anywhere, dude.” PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

  The discovery of a container holding a dozen dead women drove Season 2’s plot by linking the police detail and the docks. “They weren’t dummy bodies,” said Amy Ryan (Beadie Russell). “They were real people huddled up on top of each other, and it was scary.” LARRY RILEY/HBO

  Chris Bauer originally auditioned for Jimmy McNulty before being cast as Season 2’s Frank Sobotka. “Imagine a bloated, hungover, mumbling McNulty who looked like he’d be single his whole life,” Bauer joked. “Frank Sobotka was a much better fit.” LARRY RILEY/HBO

  Robert Colesberry in his small, recurring role as Ray Cole. Colesberry played a much larger, significant role behind the camera. His sudden death in 2004 following complications from heart surgery caused deep heartbreak among the show’s creators, cast, and crew. LARRY RILEY/HBO

  Members of Season 2’s police detail: Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam), Beadie Russell (Amy Ryan), Rhonda Pearlman (Dede Lovejoy), Herc Hauk (Domenick Lombardozzi), Roland Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost), and Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn). “I went to high school with Seth Gilliam,” Ryan said. “We were good friends and so that was a cool moment, that first scene we filmed together in [Cedric] Daniels’s office and every time they block us next to each other, we just crack up.” LARRY RILEY/HBO

  David Simon on location with Andre Royo (Bubbles) and Leo Fitzpatrick (Johnny Weeks). “Every time we went to Baltimore I thought, Man, this has to be the worst block of Baltimore,” Fitzpatrick said. “And then we’d find one that was worse. It’s fine for a TV show. But when you think that people actually live there and that this is people’s reality, that’s a mind blower.” PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

  Michael Potts as Brother Mouzone, the calm enforcer eternally dressed in a bow tie who became a threat to Omar. “They gave me one word in the very first, and in the second episode they gave me a monologue,” Potts said. “Method Man said, ‘They bringing you in nice.’ ” PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

  Frankie Faison as Ervin Burrell and John Doman as William Rawls. The characters portrayed bureaucratic careerists in the police department. Faison, behind the scenes, added levity while shooting some of the show’s more serious scenes. PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

  The Wire often blended fact with fiction. Here is the “real” Jay Landsman as Lt. Dennis Mello. David Simon awarded another character Landsman’s name. Landsman, a longtime Baltimore homicide detective, instead depicted Mello, which in real life was the name of the first black officer in Baltimore to reach the rank of captain. PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

  Some assumed that the show’s great reformist had arrived with the introduction of a white mayor (Aidan Gillen as the originally idealistic Tommy Carcetti). “Um, just wait,” Simon would say. “Hero’s a big word.” PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

  Delaney Williams pictured as the fictional Jay Landsman. Landsman served as a middle man caught between his bureaucratic commanders and his squad of subordinates. David Simon regarded the character as one of his favorites to write dialogue for. PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

  Michael K. Williams met Felicia “Snoop” Pearson in a bar and encouraged her to come to The Wire’s set. The show’s creative forces urged her to leave behind a past of illegalities for acting. In an Entertainment Weekly column, Stephen King labeled Pearson, “perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series.” PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

  Season 4’s the Corner Boys: Dukie Weems (Jermaine Crawford), Randy Wagstaff (Maestro Harrell), Michael Lee (Tristan Wilds), and Namond Brice (Julito McCullum). The season featured each boy confronting life-derailing issues and hurdles. PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

  Marlo (Jamie Hector) holds court with Chris Partlow (Gbenga Akinnagbe), Monk (Kwame Patterson), Snoop (Felicia Pearson), O-Dog (Darrell Britt-Gibson), and Cheese Wagstaff (Method Man). Hector quickly recognized Marlo as a character who was economic and efficient in everything. “What Marlo really wanted is power, just pure, uncut, unstoppable power,” Hector said. PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

  Andre Royo’s Bubbles, sober and working near the end of the show’s run. “You don’t know if he turned it around,” Ed Burns said. “That’s the thing. Most guys do detox fifteen, twenty, thirty times before it might work. It’s not like walk in, walk back out.” PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

  The cast of The Wire consisted of a deep and talented range of African-American actors. Andre Royo and Robert Wisdom decided one day to preserve that breadth with a photograph. “Everybody felt, especially with 20/20 rear view, that it was really worth doing and they were proud that we were able to pose,” Wisdom said. COURTESY OF ANDRE ROYO

  David Simon recalled some assuming that the arrival of a white mayor to The Wire marked the introduction of the hero who would reform an inept system. “Um, just wait,” Simon would say. “Hero’s a big word.” Instead, in Season 3, Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen), along with Maj. Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom) and Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), portrayed how little individual reformists are often able to influence archaic institutions. Carcetti started as a boyish, idealistic city councilman, but by the end of his arc, he allows his political ambitions to consume any original altruistic intentions. The Wire’s third season delved into Baltimore politics, depicting the overseers of a political system that allowed the police department to lurch aimlessly onward. The show arrived at the topic with most of its creative minds staunchly opposed. “They never convinced me,” Ed Burns insisted as late as 2016, and he may as well have spat when he said it. But Simon remained steadfast in expanding The Wire’s horizon and mirroring the actual happenings in his Baltimore. The addition of Bill Zorzi to the writing staff aided that effort. No one knew the ins and outs of the local political scene quite like Zorzi. He was the son of a political journalist who had never accepted as much as a free doughnut at a presser during nearly two decades chronicling politics for The Baltimore Sun. Simon and Zorzi poured months into hammering authentic dialogue that politicians would use, though the most iconic line was created by an actor, when Isiah Whitlock Jr. (who played corrupt state senator Clay Davis) liberally stretched the word shit, which became one of the show’s most memorable catchphrases.

  For many locals, the examination of politics severely blurred fact and fiction. In one scene, the incumbent mayor, Clarence Royce, briefly ponders the morality of the de facto legalized drug markets created by Colvin and colloquially known as “Hamsterdam.” A health commissioner cautions him,
“Better watch out, Clarence, or they’ll be calling you the most dangerous man in America.” Kurt Schmoke, a former Baltimore mayor, depicts the health commissioner. In reality, Schmoke’s mulling of decriminalizing drugs nearly ended his political career, with Rep. Charles Rangel labeling him America’s most dangerous man. In another scene, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., Maryland’s governor at the time, plays a security guard who tells a waiting Carcetti that the governor cannot see him that evening. The scene mimics the circumstances in which Martin O’Malley, the former Baltimore mayor, sought an audience with Ehrlich.

  O’Malley would become forever linked to Carcetti’s character. He ran for Baltimore’s mayor in 1999, triumphing in a predominantly black city over two black council members once Schmoke decided against reelection. O’Malley’s friendship with Councilman Lawrence Bell III mirrored The Wire’s pairing of Carcetti and Councilman Anthony Gray. Once mayor, O’Malley, like Carcetti, pivoted ambitions toward becoming governor. (Unlike Carcetti, O’Malley also made a failed bid for the presidency, in 2016.) Simon and Zorzi have asserted through the years that Carcetti is sourced from several real-life Baltimore politicians, O’Malley included. O’Malley, for his part, denounced the comparison, labeling himself in 2009 on MSNBC as, “The antidote to The Wire.” Simon once offered O’Malley a cameo on the show, in the same vein as Ehrlich Jr. The offer was declined.