ROBERT WISDOM (HOWARD “BUNNY” COLVIN): Not one word in The Wire, not one single word, was ever improvised. Every “fuck,” every “shit,” every whatever term—everything was written. And it was performed.
DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): I was always just trying not to fuck up. I think everybody was. What’s amazing about David as a writer is that every single character, from a cop to a gangbanger to mayor, we had to learn meticulously every word that he wrote. Otherwise, I’d no idea what this character was like. You watch it and you think—particularly, I think—in the street scenes, that a lot of it must be improvised, but I think I’m right in saying that none of it was ever improvised, and no one ever went off the script. It just shows you what great writing it is. He has an incredible ear for the way people speak and the way different people speak differently.
DOUG OLEAR (FBI SPEC. AGENT TERRANCE “FITZ” FITZHUGH): One of the things Dominic West said to me was, after a couple of takes, “Fucking Dougie, they never fucking say anything to you. You always ad-lib. You always swear. You always bring in all these fucking things. If I do one thing, they’re like, ‘Excuse me, Dominic, that’s not in the script.’ ” I’d laugh at it because I’d work hard on my small scenes and I would always improvise. There’s outtakes that [Ernest] Dickerson shot—and we must have done fifty takes, and they just kept shooting because they would keep laughing at the swear words that I would bring up and the names that I would call them, like “circus clowns” and “dick holes.” Whatever it was, it was never in the script, but they always kept it.
WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): There are only two lines that I know of that were ad-libbed that made it into The Wire. There’s only two that I’ve been involved with. One season, Clarke is walking away with his bowlegs, and I said, “Yeah, I made him walk like that.” We were always making little jokes. I said, “Look at him. I made him walk like that.” David said, “I can’t believe all these hours we’ve worked on this and some fucking actor in the spur of the moment just comes up with this great line and I just had to leave it in.” They were on us about the words, man. Every piece is important. All the pieces fit. “All the pieces matter.” That was the mantra. He was very exact about the dialogue.
The other is when I was laughing after catching Snoop and [Chris] Partlow, and I had the handcuffs on them and I’m laughing. “What you laughing at, man?” I said, “I’m thinking about some pussy.” Snoop says, “Me, too.” I was already laughing. You ever see something like some major slam dunk by LeBron James or something, the whole place erupts? That’s what it was like. She says, “Me, too,” and everyone’s like, “Ohhh.”
Richard Price sat in on a writers’ meeting for his first episode, and at one point, he noticed a quiet man in a running suit jotting down notes. Price took the man as an HBO representative dispatched to monitor the meetings. “Turned out that that was the real Omar,” Price recalled. “His name was Donnie. I’m thinking he’s an executive.” The show often collaborated with its inspirations, which meant that people previously arrested by Ed Burns occasionally served the show as advisers. Donnie Andrews, one of the primary avatars for Omar, had once terrorized Baltimore drug dealers, but he had maintained a code that dictated he never involve women or children in his exploits. He once contracted a double killing to fuel a burgeoning heroin habit. When the murders weighed heavily on his conscience, he turned himself in to Burns and received a life sentence. In prison, he worked to pivot his life by providing insider information to police and counseling inmates on addiction. Andrews met Fran Boyd, the mother featured heavily in The Corner, through Ed Burns and Simon. The pair wed in a union documented with a feature in The New York Times. Andrews was freed from prison in 2005 after Burns, Simon, and others advocated for his release. He joined The Wire, where he worked as a consultant and occasionally appeared on-screen as an associate of Omar’s. Melvin Williams also sought redemption, and a role with the show, after leaving prison in 2003. On The Wire, Williams portrays the Deacon, a calming presence and community mentor.
Andrews died from complications following heart surgery at the age of fifty-eight in 2012. Williams passed in 2015, at the age of seventy-three.
CHAD L. COLEMAN (DENNIS “CUTTY” WISE): Donnie said hi and he chuckled, and I got a chill, because I knew he had killed people. He wasn’t trying to be intimidating. He was very quiet, like, “Hi, man. Hey, how you doing?” I said, “Oh shoot. Okay.” Tread lightly until you get to know this man because you don’t want to say the wrong thing around this dude. Then he began to tell me what he was all about. These are some incredible human beings. God rest his soul. I was with him last up in Harvard. This man was putting it together where he was going to be the one responsible for us going around to all these universities.
MICHAEL POTTS (BROTHER MOUZONE): One of the actors who was working with Omar was actually someone that Ed had arrested back in the day. He knew a lot of the people that some of the characters had been based on. He would tell me that some of the guys who used to be in the life would call him and go, “How did they know that? You must have been telling them.” He would say they would be getting on his case about “They shouldn’t know that.”
One day, between takes, because we were mic’d up, he covers his mic and he goes, “I know the guy you’re based on. You’re doing real well. I’m sure he likes what you’re doing.” I said, “Does he really exist?” He goes, “Oh yeah. I know the whole family.” He kept covering up the mic and looking around as if he was an informant or something. “You do realize this is make-believe? This is TV. Why are you nervous?” He said, “I know the whole family. I can take you to meet him. Nice family. I know them. I know the brothers. You look like them. Nice family, but don’t cross them.” He literally did this: He said, “Don’t cross them, the whole family.” He said, “Next time you come, I’ll take you to meet them.” I said, “Maybe.” Because, clearly, I don’t want to piss them off. He said, “No, no, no, I guarantee you, he’s smiling at what you’re doing.”
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): Melvin, he got in touch with us, with David and I, when he came home, did sixteen years. He wanted to kill Barry Levinson, the guy who did Rain Man, because he did a movie about Baltimore and he had this guy play Little Melvin in the movie, wearing this green suit. Melvin was extraordinarily offended by that because Melvin had hooked up with the Gambino family and they had taken him to places where you got suits—this is back in the sixties, and you’re paying six hundred and seven hundred dollars for a suit back then. He wanted to kill him, Barry Levinson. We said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea, but if you want, we will create a role for you.” He was the most robotic in the precision. If he did this on a word and we shot it again, he did it exactly right every time. It was perfect.
WOOD HARRIS (AVON BARKSDALE): That was weird, because I’m kind of like him in stature in real life. It was just odd. I know it was probably more surreal for him, looking at somebody that’s taking on that role. He wasn’t one for a whole lot of words. I didn’t talk to him a lot. He was quiet and he was to himself.
BENJAMIN BUSCH (OFF. ANTHONY COLICCHIO): I never felt that the show depicted this animosity between the law and the street. There was this strange sense that the criminals knew they were committing crimes, [that] they were supposed to avoid the police, but if they got caught, that’s just the way it went. The police, frustrated though they were with the crime, knew that it was just part of the job. Their job was to hunt those guys down. I guess the way to symbolize that, for me, was that Melvin, having been put in prison, partially by Ed Burns, comes out and plays a character on the show who is redeemed. He plays a formative pillar of the underground, the street side. That’s his character. He was about as dark and dangerous a character as you could have run into in the streets of Baltimore back then.
Ed was a young police officer and he was a younger man. Despite prison, despite all the wreckage caused by the two forces going against each oth
er, there was no hate between them. I thought that was kind of fascinating, that relationship between the law and its opposition. They didn’t oppose the police. They were just trying to get around them.
JAY LANDSMAN SR. (LT. DENNIS MELLO): I’m not as forgiving as David and Ed were. Both of them are dead now, Melvin and [Nathan “Bodie”] Barksdale. But I didn’t particularly care for them. I never liked Melvin, and I hated Barksdale. Barksdale’s a scumbag. The time that he spent in jail didn’t break the ice for what he should have spent in jail. Donnie’s a great guy. There’s a guy that truly made amends for his ways. But Barksdale has always been a scumbag. So was Melvin. I didn’t like that they used Dennis Wise. They made Dennis a kids’ coach. Dennis was the most vicious man I ever knew in my life. Cutty was Dennis Wise. He was known as “Two to the head and you’re dead.” He was a hit man in West Baltimore. He used to just walk up behind somebody, blow their head off.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): These were sort of nods to the universe. Usually, we mangled up the names. Avon Barksdale doesn’t exist. It’s very funny. Nathan Barksdale later on tried to put out a video and said, “I’m the real Avon.” The real Avon was Melvin, more Melvin. It was Melvin and six other guys. We used the name “Barksdale” because there were like twelve Barksdales. It was just a West Baltimore name. We gave Bodie a different name. I think he had the last name of Broadus. It was a nod to [hip-hop artist] Snoop [Dogg, whose birth name is Calvin Broadus]. We gave him the nickname Bodie, which was Nathan Barksdale’s street name. But I was just listening to a lot of that West Coast stuff at the time. I think when we were naming the characters, [Snoop Dogg’s] “Gin and Juice” was playing on the stereo, and I went, “Eh, your name is Broadus.” That’s how little interest we had in the precision of the last names. We mangled stuff up.
Then we see people trying to do a one-to-one ratio, like Jay is doing there, and it doesn’t make any sense to us. Let me say this: Nathan Barksdale was not a good guy. When he showed up on parole, [he] walked up to our site one day and said, “I want to do something in the show, because he used my name,” we gave him a small role. We were like, “Okay, we’re all about redemption.” And he terrified the Wardrobe. I mean he terrified the Hair and Makeup. He was unrelentingly discomforting to the people on the show. Jay’s right about the real Barksdale, but Avon Barksdale was a character that had that surname but had nothing to do with Nathan. The only way that Melvin got on the show—I mean there was no Melvin Williams on the show. Melvin, he actually played the role of the deacon, because I wouldn’t let him play a gangster. In our heads, that’s what I’m saying, it’s all mangled up. We were taking surnames because they sounded real to us. We weren’t really thinking about how they matched up to the actual people.
Filming The Wire produced daily unpredictable experiences. Some of the show’s actors had family members in law enforcement. For them, their experience with the show brought to the forefront the many dangers and paradoxes their loved ones continually faced.
Others spent so much time with police in preparing for their roles that they felt like cops. Robert Wisdom (Maj. “Bunny” Colvin) hung close to the real Jay Landsman. “He’s the real deal,” Wisdom said. “He took me under his wing and led me and became my best buddy. We were joined at the hip. I bounced questions off of him for veracity. Between him and Ed Burns, I was being held.” Wisdom visited enough barbecues that after a while the real officers started referring to him as “Major.”
Bunny Colvin offers his approach to reform in one of the major Season 3 storylines through the creation of Hamsterdam. The character creates three small zones where drugs can be sold with immunity if dealers stay confined to the area and operate peacefully. The compromise is made to allow officers the freedom to keep peace in other neighborhoods and to pursue legitimate criminals. “He came up with that idea and lost his job because of it,” Wisdom said. “If you rode around Baltimore and you looked at people who were prisoners in their own homes because of what was happening, you tried some radical shit to try to help those people out, and it made a certain type of sense. We were locking up guys for bullshit. I mean, literally, for bullshit. And they were right back out on the streets. It was really such an impotent system that a radical measure had to be taken if you wanted to say you were going to leave something behind.”
DOUG OLEAR (FBI SPEC. AGENT TERRANCE “FITZ” FITZHUGH): My dad was a cop. He was paranoid. My dad would put locks on the house, and you wonder why. You work in the county courthouse and you saw some stuff. Shit happens. I remember when he started out early; he worked at a state prison. He was a prison guard and moved his way up. At one point, he was guarding a prisoner at a hospital, and they were on twelve-hour shifts. His shift had just ended and he left, and the other guy took over, and the prisoner had to go to the bathroom, and the guy was a young kid. He took the handcuffs off the guy. The guy grabbed his gun and shot him in the head and jumped out the window. My dad left five minutes prior to that. Stuff like that, they see all this stuff. I have a real profound respect for these guys. They’re thrown into this world, and it’s a tough thing. It’s a really tough thing to navigate through that and keep your sanity.
RICK OTTO (OFF. KENNETH DOZERMAN): My father spent thirty-six years on the job in the Baltimore Police Department and ended up retiring as the major in charge of the Homicide Department. That was a good memory for me. To have had the experience growing up the son of a police officer, you can really get a sense of what his life was like. My dad did a good job of not bringing his work home. He could be moody, so in that sense, the job affected him. He’s mellowed now. He’s been retired a few years, but he was really, really just tough. From what I understand, he was a very fair police officer. He was very hardworking. You either really liked him or you thought he was the biggest asshole in the world. There was no in-between.
I took my role on the show very seriously, and I wanted to sort of honor the best I could, what it’s like to be a police officer. I did, probably, a thousand hours over my time on the show, on ride-alongs with the guys in the police department that I’d set up through my dad and two buddies that I knew. It was enlightening to me to understand what he did every day for twelve, fourteen, fifteen hours, sometimes twenty-four, forty-eight hours at a time, depending on what the severity of the case was, and how police officers really do sacrifice. I mean, I think there’s some bad apples. There’s no question about that. We can look at the news on a daily basis and see that. I also think there’s a large number of white officers that work in areas that they don’t live, their children don’t go to school in, they don’t shop there, etcetera. For the sole reason that their skin is white and the people that they’re primarily policing are minorities, they’re looked at as if they don’t care about the community. But they do care.
In present-day Baltimore, my experience is there are some assholes out there, no question about it, that treat people disrespectfully no matter what the color of your skin is. But, all in all, they mostly just want to make a difference to the people in these communities and get home to their families.
Sadly, this so-called war on drugs, mandatory sentencing, and the privatization of prisons and militarization of police forces hasn’t ingratiated law enforcement to most inner-city communities. I remember just listening to my dad when he would tell stories on how he would walk a foot beat and you would know everybody in the neighborhood and know the seven people that were constantly in and out of trouble. You could impact them. So, maybe in two years, there were only four people in trouble. You could actually change lives, and I think it’s less about that now, because of lawsuits and because of cameras everywhere.
All I would say, the greatest gift it gave to me was an understanding of what it really is like to be a police officer and what it was really like to try to make a difference when sometimes no matter what you do it isn’t going to make a difference. Not only that, it’s not appreciated by either the size of your paycheck or the amount
of grief you get from the public at large. The other interesting thing for me that’s sitting here right now is the fact that people complain about the police, their tactics, or abusing civil rights. But they’re also the first ones that people call when there is really a problem, and they show up. That is a really interesting paradox to me. The real issue, I think, has to do with poverty and a sense of hopelessness that is far too prevalent in our inner cities. I hope, in my lifetime, that will change.
ROBERT WISDOM (HOWARD “BUNNY” COLVIN): When you have the sheer volume of these kind of incidents happening, it becomes overwhelming for a city, because nobody knows what to do. So, that’s when you have the Bunny, who’s just way down in some little corner of some division, who just says, “I’m going to try and do something here.” I don’t think he even got how futile that effort could have been, but he saw it as his reason for being. If one person could be helped, it was worth it. If one kid could be saved and [if] all of these people who made the decisions to live with drugs in their lives could all just go over there and do it out of our sight and we shift our forces to keep it contained, it’s worth it. It’s twisted, but it’s worth it.
RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): They found a street [for Hamsterdam] that they didn’t have to set-dress at all. It just looked like Dante’s hell. The problem was, right before they started shooting, they realized that you could see, on a rise, the back of a museum. The museum called the city, complaining, and refused to be in a shot, and the city came back and says, “You can’t shoot there.” They looked at each other. What are we going to do? They moved literally fifty yards that way and found the next street, where you couldn’t see the museum. It was the exact same thing. I think they lost an hour.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): That was Hamsterdam. It was David’s idea, and I remember where it came from. We were sitting on Vine Street, which is off of Fayette Street. You look up the hill, and there was this setting sun, this big orange glow, and a local drug dealer had just serviced about thirty, or forty, or fifty addicts. It was like the walking dead how they were all moving around. We were sitting on the steps of this old vacant house and David said, “Maybe they should move them all into one place.” And I said, “David, they already did. Look around. They’re all fucked up.” That’s what we did in Season Three.
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