All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  WILLIAM F. ZORZI (STAFF WRITER): Carcetti is based on [Martin] O’Malley, yeah. He’s based in part on O’Malley. He’s sort of based on a number of different politicians.

  AIDAN GILLEN (MAYOR THOMAS CARCETTI): I think on my first day, [David Simon] said something like, “Okay, this is the deal. You were Bob Colesberry’s last casting call, so whether we really wanted you or not, we had to give you the job.”

  SEITH MANN (DIRECTOR): I shadowed a couple of times, and David introduced himself to me. He said, “Bob was a big fan of yours, and his secret plan was for you to direct an episode [in Season Three]. That’s not going to happen. We’re just finding our way without him, but we wanted you to come have an opportunity to learn all you can.” That was great, too.

  I was very green. Fresh out of film school, had never worked in television, had never been on a television set, and didn’t really know how it all worked, but I was really interested in television. I shadowed Ed Bianchi first, and then Ernest Dickerson. Jamie Hector was in my short. The Wire was a big break for both of us. The first day, he’s on set, and I’m shadowing Ed. My belief is you behave as a shadow. Shadow goes where the director goes and doesn’t say shit. That’s a shadow, right? I was sticking pretty close to Ed, and so Jamie, he was eating lunch and we’re talking. He’s like, “Damn, you and my man so tight, I swear you going to turn him black.” We just laughed about it. A couple episodes later, I’m shadowing Ernest Dickerson. Jamie comes up to me and says, “Damned if you ain’t do it.”

  Eventually, George Pelecanos pulled me to the side one day and gave me some advice. He said, “Look, I think you can do this and I think you can be great at this, but it’s not going to happen if you don’t talk to David about letting him know you want to direct.” Self-promotion has not necessarily been one of my strong suits historically.

  That was way outside of my comfort level, but at the same time, for him to take the interest and give me some advice, I kind of got to at least act on it. I proceeded to have a fairly awkward conversation with David and Nina, expressing my desire to direct. Neither one of them committed to anything. Truth be told, I don’t know if that conversation had anything to do with it at all, but [I got a chance to direct] when they finally got their pickup for Season Four.

  AIDAN GILLEN (MAYOR THOMAS CARCETTI): I remember Bill Zorzi’s eyes kind of out on stalks when I walked into the room, the writers’ room, off the plane from London to start as Carcetti. I looked more like Ziggy than Carcetti—big mop of hair and scruffy clothes, etcetera. Someone said, “Get this man’s hair cut and get him down to Brooks Brothers immediately.” I was Bill’s responsibility, and I knew he was going to be writing on the political strand. He took me on a crash course tour of local politics over the next few days. I had lots of questions, as I wasn’t familiar with the American local government scene. He led me through it with great knowledge and wry wit. He filled me in on lots of local political characters and lore, where you’d eat, what sandwich you might have. He’d been a political writer at The Baltimore Sun, just as David Simon had been a crime writer, and I knew I was in good hands.

  If I had any query on what might be going on in a particular scene, he would answer an email at any hour, day or night, and he would do it comprehensively. I really mean that. One night, I’d asked if he could write something for me to say at a street rally that was down for shooting the next day but didn’t have written dialogue, as it stood. Bill said sure, and I went out to the bar with my brother. Come in at two a.m., and there’s five pages of dialogue slid under the door.

  WILLIAM F. ZORZI (STAFF WRITER): My wife says that I don’t hide my feelings very well. It’s always obvious what I think. When he had stepped into the room and sort of looked like he had just come off some punk-rock bender, I was like, Holy shit. This guy can’t be our councilman.

  AIDAN GILLEN (MAYOR THOMAS CARCETTI): My first scene, it was with Frankie Faison, and he was gentle with me. We’d gone out the night before to eat, which he’d suggested, God bless him, ’cause I guess he knew it’d make me feel more at ease, which it did. We were at a crab joint, and he taught me how to smash them proper with the hammer, and we had bibs on. I ate one of the bits I wasn’t supposed to, in my enthusiasm. Have you ever eaten a crab lung? Anyway, luckily it didn’t kill me. The scene was a good one to kick off with, as it was Burrell giving Carcetti the lowdown on what might lie ahead.

  ERNEST DICKERSON (DIRECTOR): It was just great doing scenes with Glynn Turman [Mayor Clarence Royce], who’s an actor that I grew up watching all the way back at Cooley High, and Frankie Faison, who I first met on the set of Do the Right Thing and just always loved his work. To see a black mayor and a black police commissioner doing Shakespearean power moves around each other, as an African-American filmmaker, that’s the kind of stuff you just dream about directing. Plus, when you have two actors who are obviously having such a great time working with each other and playing with each other and doing these scenes with each other, it was cinematic heaven. I don’t want to get corny with it, but I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, Damn, man, this is the best show in the world. It was the best job in the world to see these guys, these two pros, really play these scenes. These are the kinds of scenes you hardly ever see in any dramatic medium: cinematic or television. For me it was a privilege to be able to do stuff like that.

  FRANKIE FAISON (ACTING COMMR. ERVIN H. BURRELL): Glynn Turman is an actor that I’ve been wanting to work with my whole life. He’s an actor that I have admired, his work and the arc of his career. I love Glynn. When I found out he was coming onto the show and he got the role, it was almost like it was magical. I had never met Glynn before, and I’ve been in the business a long time, and he’s been in the business a long time, even a little longer than me.

  When we met, it was such an amazing chemistry. Glynn and I were just very good friends, and we were also very respectful of the body of work that each of us were bringing to this experience. Some actors you work with, it’s like working with family over and over and over again. He and I have that kind of relationship, and every time I see him, it’s more than just acting, bonding to do a show. It becomes something much more than that. Then, whenever we were on set together, he was always funny, entertaining, exciting, but it was also very professional. We both bring a lot to the table on the work process, but we also both know how to just relax and enjoy ourselves on the set. That whole thing was magical for us, and hopefully it was magical for people around us who were shooting and filming in scenes with us.

  GLYNN TURMAN (MAYOR CLARENCE V. ROYCE): They break in on me and I’m getting head. How much more memorable can a motherfucker [scene] be? Shit, I guess you don’t get exposed to that degree often in the biz, and that was indeed a memorable moment, as attested by my wife. “You did what?” It was a great moment, well done, and it did take me by surprise in the writing. You’re reading it—I said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What? Let me read this again. How are they gonna do this?”

  WILLIAM F. ZORZI (STAFF WRITER): I have to credit that to David. That was based on a rumor.

  GLYNN TURMAN (MAYOR CLARENCE V. ROYCE): Simon is probably one of the smartest people that I’ve had the pleasure to meet and certainly one of the most creative producers-writers that I’ve had the pleasure of working with. And I knew it early on, when it was first call to the first day on set. I had been doing a movie called Sahara that we were shooting in Morocco with Matthew McConaughey and Penélope Cruz. I wasn’t finished with that when I had to come to Baltimore to do the first scenes and then go back to Morocco to finish the Sahara movie. So, Sahara had the first dibs on me as a result, so to speak.

  I had a goatee and a mustache, and David had come up to me and said, “Glynn, can we lose the goatee for Mayor Royce?” And I said, “David, I’d love to, but I’ve gotta go back and finish shooting Sahara, so I can’t take it off.” Right there on the spot, he kind of scratched his chin a little bi
t and he went, “Okay. I’ll tell you what. Next season, you’re gonna be in a mayoral race against a younger man. We’ll have you lose the mustache and the goatee then, when you try to get reelected.” So, he looked that far down the line. He knew his storyline so well that he could see a year ahead where his characters were going. That’s when I said, “Who the hell is this guy?”

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I can’t say we had Royce in our head. But we had like a Clarence “Du” Burns in our head. That’s the real guy. And then we had a white insurgent who was really the last sort of white liberal insurgency on the Democratic side in a time of high crime. That was Marty O’Malley. Things were happening in Baltimore that we were tending to.

  KURT SCHMOKE (HEALTH COMMR./FORMER MAYOR OF BALTIMORE): It was somewhat ironic to sit there, the former mayor, and playing the health commissioner, while [Turman is] playing the mayor. I was impressed with his ability. He moved from being very jovial on set to, once the cameras were running, to being in character, very serious and committed to conveying a strong message as mayor.

  GLYNN TURMAN (MAYOR CLARENCE V. ROYCE): I was able to personalize who this guy was, and he was loosely based on Schmoke. Schmoke was not as strident as Mayor Royce was. Mayor Royce was a little more arrogant and sort of entitled in his approach to his power. He felt that he was entitled to the power that he had, and I never got that from Schmoke.

  I had the opportunity to work with Mayor Schmoke and talk with him about some of the things that happened and how close they were to what he had going. One of the things that has stuck with me in talking with him was talking about Hamsterdam. He said that he wished that he had phrased it all differently. Because it was indeed a brilliant idea, and I think the country is actually employing, under a different name, some of those policies. But he thinks that had he couched it under a health situation, a health resolve, that it would have flown.

  REG E. CATHEY (NORMAN WILSON): Norman is still one of my favorite characters. Before, I had done Querns in Oz, which I loved doing, Querns. But first of all, what was great about The Wire is that you had all these different black characters on the same show. When I was living out in LA, I would audition for the black guy on the show, and that would be the only black guy. He wouldn’t have any black friends. Maybe he’d have a black wife or black girlfriend. He was the black guy, and usually he was upstanding and honorable, because everyone wants to have a good role model. But in The Wire, there were all different types of characters and different types of human variables, and it was fabulous to play. In terms of Norman, to play a smart man, a man with brains, a man who drank and smoked and made mistakes and told truth to power because he just didn’t give a fuck anymore—it was so much fun. And then David would joke with me that he would give me these one-liners and then he’d come up to me before, these perfect little one-liners, and say, “Okay, we’re not going to spend a lot of time on this. I want you to get it right in one time. Don’t be fucking around. But no pressure.”

  ISIAH WHITLOCK JR. (STATE SEN. R. CLAYTON “CLAY” DAVIS): First season, I did maybe, like, one episode. I think the second season, I made a couple of small appearances. I was doing Othello, doing a Shakespeare play, and just said I was going to let it go. But everybody kind of corralled me and said, “It’s a great opportunity, and you should do it.” Because they were going to run my storyline. Once I got my head wrapped around that, then I agreed to go ahead and keep working on it. But there was one moment when I said, “I’m going to go off and do my own thing.” Fortunately, I went ahead and did the show.

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): A lot of black guys say “shit” like [Whitlock’s Davis]. David wrote it originally. He just gave it to him, and Isiah ran with it.

  ISIAH WHITLOCK JR. (STATE SEN. R. CLAYTON “CLAY” DAVIS): Nine e’s. Yeah. I don’t know where I came up with nine e’s, but I said, “Okay, if I’m going to live with it, I’m gonna have to spell it.” I always tell people, “If you write it to me, use nine e’s. If you do any more than that, you’re not saying it right.”

  MARLYNE BARRETT (COUNCIL PRESIDENT NERESE CAMPBELL): In rehearsal, it did take a couple of minutes. Like, “How long are you going to do it for? How long is it going to last? I just need to know rhythmically. Is it going to be a sheeeeeeeee-it? Is it going to stop?”

  ISIAH WHITLOCK JR. (STATE SEN. R. CLAYTON “CLAY” DAVIS): My uncle used to say it all the time. But he wasn’t the only one. A lot of people used to always say that. It was a very, very funny way that he would always say it. He would always say it—at least every time I spoke to him. It was just part of his language. So, I remember when I did the film for Spike [Lee], I got the opportunity to use it, and the rest is history. But that’s not something I really came up with. A lot of people used that.

  It kind of started for me in Spike Lee’s film 25th Hour. And then I did another movie for Spike. To be quite honest, I’ve done it in every Spike movie that I’ve done. I’ve done about four. But I think it really took off when I used it in The Wire. That’s where a lot of people know it from. But it makes people smile. At first, I didn’t quite get what the big deal was. I said, “I always thought everyone says that.” A friend of mine says, “Everybody does say it, but it’s the way you say it that makes it special.” I’m glad people are happy with it.

  FRANKIE FAISON (ACTING COMMR. ERVIN H. BURRELL): I liked [Burrell]. I thought he was a good guy. I always saw him as a nice guy. He was just caught between a rock and a hard place. Circumstances, they always reveal to him how he should act. As time went by, I began to see a little bit more rough edges about him. Not that I still didn’t think that he was a nice guy, but he was a guy who was driven to succeed and to reach the highest levels he could reach in law enforcement. I kind of got it when I used to walk down the street and people would say, “Man, what is this guy doing?” I used to say, “What do you mean? He’s a teddy bear. He’s a sweetheart.” I see him going home from work, going home to his wife and kids and just playing in the backyard and eating meals.

  The trick is, you may be thinking you’re portraying something, but the way it’s viewed by the audiences at large—they go by fact, by what they see, what they hear, what the character is doing. They go by that. You didn’t see very much backstory with Burrell, outside of the law enforcement arena. That thing was for me. It was only for me alone. I had it somewhere in my memory bank as something that I could use, but it never showed or revealed itself. In very rare instances did it reveal itself throughout the life of Burrell in this series called The Wire. There was not a lot of opportunity or chance to reveal that. I wish that there had been, but there wasn’t. That’s just the story that you have.

  I found a lot of things, a lot of information, kind of about myself and kind of about society at large, through the character Commissioner Burrell. Anytime a character can inform me in that way, then I think it’s been a very successful role for me to play.

  ISIAH WHITLOCK JR. (STATE SEN. R. CLAYTON “CLAY” DAVIS): To be quite honest, I never thought [Davis] was going to be convicted. There was a moment where I really honestly believed in everything I was doing. I believed the character, everything that he believed, that I was actually doing some good for the people. I know there were a lot of people who are going to dispute that. But in the playing of it, I really believed that what he was doing was right and that I wasn’t going to be convicted. To me, that’s the only way you can approach a character like that. You’ve got to have some belief that what you’re doing is right, and I think that’s what kind of made the character believable, is that I believed so much in what he was doing. Otherwise, if you go the other way, people can kind of dismiss the character, so I had to make sure that I made him likeable, so people wouldn’t dismiss him, that everybody, no matter where he was, everybody had to be aware that he was in the room. I think that kind of translated to the people watching it. When Clay Davis shows up, you know he’s there for some reason or some purpose. You h
ave to take notice.

  JOE CHAPPELLE (DIRECTOR/CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): It was a really galvanizing mix of really experienced, really great actors, professional actors, people who knew their craft and then, in the same scene, working with someone who had never been in front of the camera before, but was so authentic and so real in that moment. Seeing those styles sometimes in the same frame working, to this day, it just kind of blows my mind how cool that was and how dangerous it was in the sense that it was like, Oh man, this could just fall apart because we were dealing with many nonprofessionals in front of the camera.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): It was Season Three that I had to get humbled. I had to go through some things. When I got there, I realized that, “Mike, this ain’t even about you. This is bigger than you and your career and all this shit.” I started looking at the story of the people that The Wire was telling and the people it was affecting and how it was affecting. This little dude from Chicago, Mr. Senator, or Barack Obama, mentioned that it’s his favorite show, and then he’s president of the United States. All of that kind of just came about. I was like, “Okay, whoa. Like, whoa. That just happened.” It put me on my quest. That was the beginning of my enlightenment, when I started realizing that I can be of service through the gift that I’ve been given to express myself through art and the story that I tell through art. It became something other for me than just about my career.