All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): It’s just funny about Hamsterdam because when I wrote that scene where the kid says that, that wasn’t discussed or anything in the writers’ room. It’s just I always try to figure out a way to get out of the scene and I thought, Well, some of these kids, they don’t know what Amsterdam is. They don’t know what it is and so they would mispronounce it. I just wrote it. “I ain’t going to no Hamsterdam,” and one of the kids that delivered it was a Baltimore kid. He wasn’t an actor, so he did it perfectly.

  David called me up and he said, “How’d you think of that?” I guess I got a laugh out of him. I just said, “Look, I was just trying to get out of the scene. It’s no big deal.” Our thing was: don’t ever write a boring scene, even if the material is boring. I hated the political stuff. I hated writing those scenes, because it’s just people talking in a room, but we would always say in the writers’ room that every scene counts. Don’t ever throw away a scene, because then it’s going to be the scene where somebody gets up to take a piss or goes to the refrigerator to get a beer and we don’t want them to leave their seat.

  BENJAMIN BUSCH (OFF. ANTHONY COLICCHIO): What was amazing was how closely The Wire paralleled what was happening in Baltimore. There was a lot of surgery going on in the streets up there, and what they were depicting, with the flushing out of some of those poor neighborhoods, to gentrify them, was happening in real time. They actually put the Hamsterdam set in a place that was about to be leveled. And during the show, it was. All of those row houses which we shot in were knocked down months later.

  CHAD L. COLEMAN (DENNIS “CUTTY” WISE): We would be in neighborhoods, and I swear, I’m literally standing there going, “God dang. I know there’s nobody living there.” And the people would stick their head out the window.

  CHRIS COLLINS (STAFF WRITER): We were on a block that was just full of abandoned row houses. Then I looked over and I see this guy come out of this row house with a broom. Then I see two pots he put out there, with plants in them, next to the door. He just started sweeping the doorstep.

  That guy is just hope right there. There’s a guy that’s living in the middle of nowhere. He’s taking time out of his day to come out and sweep his front stoop when every single house around him is abandoned. It was a powerful image for me, that this guy did not give up.

  LEO FITZPATRICK (JOHNNY WEEKS): Shit, man, because I was there shooting a television show, it didn’t seem that bad. But there are people that live in the building next door and the one next to that. Every time we went to Baltimore, I thought, Man, this has to be the worst block of Baltimore. 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. That’s crazy. Of course, there was set dressing and that sort of thing, but there was nothing built on a stage. Those were all real buildings. Whatever was on the floor was on the floor. I definitely worried about putting my face on it at times. Hamsterdam, it was surreal to shoot there because when you were shooting, it felt very much like a set. But when you left, when you were going home for the night and you saw all the actual residents and the people coming out of the woodwork, you were like, “Holy shit, this is fucking real.”

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): It was one of those times I’d been away from home for a while. I was living in Brooklyn. I invited my wife and daughter. My wife had never been to a set before. She came and—I think I was upstairs. I was shooting a scene with me and Johnny. He was getting really high. After the end of the scene, they say, “Your wife and daughter is downstairs.” I was like, “All right. Cool.” I’m coming down the stairs and I’m looking for her. We’re on location. Everything is on location, except for the headquarters, the police headquarters. We’re on a block, a regular block. It’s not dressed. It looks the way it looks because that’s the way it looks. I’m looking at my wife and she’s talking to some random addicts, or regular people. She thought they were extras. She’s talking to them.

  I’m like, “Come here. What are you doing?” She came over, and when she walked toward me, I forgot I had all this stuff on. She saw me, and it just hit her. It hit her, and she started tearing up like, “You look so bad. Does it hurt?” She’s looking at my face. I’m like, “No, it doesn’t hurt. Why you talking to those cats?” She’s like, “I was asking where you were.” I was like, “They wouldn’t know where I’m at. Those are not actors.” She just looked around. She’s like, “This is not a set?” I said, “No. This is a block.” She just saw that, and it really hit her. She’s like, “It’s crazy that people live like this. This is somebody’s house. This is somebody’s house you’re in. This is what people see when they wake up in the morning every day. I thought you built this. I thought this was a Hollywood backdrop.” I was like, “No, this is life.” It brought her to tears. Same with my daughter. My daughter saw me, forgot I had [makeup], she came and gave me a hug and looked at my face, and she thought Daddy was hurt.

  ERNEST DICKERSON (DIRECTOR): The dealers hated us, because a lot of times we were shooting right down the street or a couple of doors down from a working crack house. That always interrupted their business.

  LEO FITZPATRICK (JOHNNY WEEKS): The people in Baltimore didn’t really give a fuck we were shooting the show in Baltimore. They were more frustrated that we were shutting down their streets and the corners that they worked on. Me and Andre shot in probably the worst places in Baltimore. It’s where actual drug dealers worked at night. You roll in with your twenty trailers and police escorts. These drug dealers would be getting pissed.

  There are really nice areas in Baltimore, too, and there’s really bad areas. The two just kind of ignore each other. It’s sort of like, “You stay on your side of the street, and I’ll stay on my side of the street. We won’t talk about each other.”

  CLAIRE COWPERTHWAITE (SCRIPT SUPERVISOR): Because the shoots were long, I remember there was always a challenge for me to get home at night because we would do several company moves. I was staying in the Inner Harbor, and I didn’t know the area at all. I would drive to the location, do a couple of company moves, and then, at the end of the night, there were no directions for me to get back to my apartment that they put me up in. I had no idea where I was. I would be stopping, “Excuse me, Mr. Crack Dealer?” They would come up to my window, and they were like, “You buying?” “No, honey. No, no, no, I just need directions.” They were like, “Girl, you in the hood.” I said, “Honey, I’ve been in the hood all day. I know. My feet are killing me. Do you know where the harbor is?” They’re like, “No, no, man, I don’t know.” So, I take all these kinds of points that I thought they might be able to get me in the right direction. “Do you know where the harbor is? Do you know where Johns Hopkins is?” I knew if I knew where two areas were, I could get back home.

  Every night, I’d be asking some crack dealer, some prostitute, some whatever that’s on the corner, how I could get home at night. That’s what I did every night. I’d wind down my window, “Hey, can you come here for a second? Hey, hey, can you come here for a minute?” They’d look at me, stay on the corner because I’m this white woman and they’re thinking, Hmm, this is odd.

  VINCENT PERANIO (PRODUCTION DESIGNER): We scouted many funeral parlors in the neighborhoods. Certain ones were just gorgeous, beautiful, Victorian houses and others modern, where they had multi-funerals in different rooms and a main area where people would mourn. When we found this one in the heart of our neighborhood, it was just a corner row house, and the people lived upstairs, and it’s just two rooms downstairs that were the viewing rooms. When we went to scout it, there was already someone set up in the funeral, and it was a kid that had just gotten shot, a young man. These people said that they get a lot of those. They get a lot of young black men. And it was so unlike any other funeral parlor I’ve been to. It was just a room set up.

  CLAIRE COWPERTH
WAITE (SCRIPT SUPERVISOR): We’re in the Baltimore City Morgue and we have to stop shooting because they have to bring a real dead body of a seventeen-year-old who hanged himself. Because we were shooting in this location, you never knew what was going to happen or who was going to be there. There was always a level of realism wherever we shot, because there was somebody who was real there. The real homeless guy is in our shot.

  UTA BRIESEWITZ (CINEMATOGRAPHER): We were working in a morgue downstairs, where they process the bodies and everything. Anyway, out of nowhere, they are wheeling body parts right past me that they have found somewhere underground. I don’t know where it was. I just said, “Please, guys, give me a warning next time. I want to prepare myself for what I look at,” because images really stick with me. What images really, really stuck with me was when we were shooting upstairs, in one of the offices. Our script supervisor, Christine Moore, was sitting at one of the desks and she was looking at photographs and she said to me, “Uta, you should come over here and take a look at these photographs.” I said to her, “I don’t think I should look at any photographs that are connected to the morgue,” And she goes, “No, no, no, you should take a look at these photographs.”

  I walked over and I took a look at the photographs that she was referring to. They take these photographs when they have dead bodies. They take these photographs from straight above the person, so it’s like a portrait, but it shows the upper torso. There was this big stack of photographs of African-American men in their prime, really young, maybe age seventeen, no older than twenty-five. Beautiful young men, and all dead. One had a bullet to the head. Another had two bullet holes to the chest. They were already cleaned up, so you just saw these black holes there. It was not messy. It was not bloody. All these men looked like they were sleeping. It was this big pile, and I went through this pile, and it was just one young black man after another. This was when it really hit home for me, what a tragedy this all is. How many lives lost with the war on drugs. It hit me really hard. I will never forget these portraits of these young black men falling victim to what’s happening in Baltimore.

  CLAIRE COWPERTHWAITE (SCRIPT SUPERVISOR): You didn’t know if that day was going to be a really sad day or you were going to laugh a lot or you were going to be heartbroken or you’re going to be afraid or you’re going to be appalled. You just never knew from day to day.

  CHAD L. COLEMAN (DENNIS “CUTTY” WISE): Times where you would hear pop, pop, pop, pop, and you didn’t know how close it was. It felt close, and it gave me that kind of “oh, shit” moment. It was real like that. It was times we had to shut down because of that.

  JANICE KINIGOPOULOS (HAIR DEPARTMENT HEAD): We were in a community where the houses were so close together that if we were there at two in the morning, a lot of the kids would come out because they were hungry. It’s naturally upsetting, but I have to say, Nina was always so cognizant and aware of the neighborhoods and trying to help any kids that they could.

  CLAIRE COWPERTHWAITE (SCRIPT SUPERVISOR): This little boy from the show who was sick had come up to me. A lot of the kids would hang out together. He was the cutest thing. He said, “I was wondering, Ms. Claire. I was wondering, maybe, if you could be my mom.” And I was like, “Oh my God.” It took my breath away. I was wanting to cry right there and then. I said, “You know what honey, you have a mom, but how about if I be your friend? Friend is much more fun. Let’s be friends.” That was hard.

  As the show advanced, the writers noticed an evolving mentality on the Baltimore streets. A new crop of dealers came of age. They appeared detached from the previous generation, the elders who had played the game with a sense of decorum and unbreakable rules. The writers charted a crew to rival the Barksdale organization and reflect this transformation. Robert Colesberry had noticed Jamie Hector in a short film and advocated for his casting as Marlo Stanfield. Stanfield was consumed with accumulating power. Hector played him beautifully, terrifyingly, and with restraint. Gbenga Akinnagbe became Marlo’s number two as Chris Partlow, a quiet, efficient murderer. Most improbably, Michael K. Williams came across Felicia Pearson one night and accompanied her to the set. Pearson was Baltimore inside and out. She was tiny in stature, spoke with a raspy voice, and dressed like a man. She had been convicted of second-degree murder at the age of fourteen and served nearly seven years at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women, in Jessup. The show offered her a small role depicting an enforcer in the Stanfield organization, for which she kept her real name. For a while, Pearson continued dealing drugs even after being cast. “I wake up in the morning, get dressed, leave my work on the block to walk into a world about make-believe work on the block,” Pearson later wrote in her book, Grace After Midnight. “But because I ain’t that sure the make-believe work is real, I keep my real-life work. My shop stays open.” Her role on the show eventually increased, as did her attempts to leave the drug game behind.

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): If you look at the first couple seasons, even though a lot of those guys, like Poot and Bodie, are young, they’re still almost Old World gangsters, because they’re following guys who have been around for a while. They have a code. They have their own sense of morality. We were always reflecting what was going on in Baltimore at the time. As the show progressed and as time went on, we were seeing a lot of guys coming up in Baltimore who had no morality, who were just doing executions and didn’t care who got caught in the crossfire, and that’s where the whole thing came from in that sequence where there’s a shootout on a Sunday morning. That’s a no-no. You don’t do that. So, we were just trying to show the change.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): Melvin [Williams] has some style about him because Melvin’s people worked, and he lived in a working neighborhood. The next generation, a little bit less. The next generation, even less, and then you come to the Marlos—nothing.

  JAMIE HECTOR (MARLO STANFIELD): We sat down and we worked on the material. When you don’t have much to work with, you got to figure it out. As an actor, you can try to do something a thousand different ways, especially if it’s your first series regular and your first project. It was not my first project, but we’ll unpeel layer after layer after layer after layer to try to figure this person out. Why did he say that? What’s the setting? What’s really going on? Where’s he going right now? Where’s he coming from? What’s his life about? Who is this dude with two lines? Now let’s flash back through the rest of the season and figure this cat out. We don’t even know who he is. We’ve got to narrow this down. For him to walk out and a guy’s about to get murdered, and he only says a couple of words, that’s when we realized that he probably wastes nothing at all, not even words, not food, not time, not money, nothing.

  FELICIA “SNOOP” PEARSON: I met Michael K. Williams. It was a nightclub called Club One. Mike was sitting over there. He was just ice grilling me. You know? I didn’t know who he was. I heard about the show. I seen them shoot the show, but I never was into it, because I was just outside. I wasn’t into the TV thing like that.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): I was so immersed in Baltimore culture, I could spot it a mile away. It had become more than just a TV show. I had moved down there. I had friends, people I could stay with in the off season, on hiatus. Baltimore really became a second home for me. The first time I’d ever really experienced that outside of my neighborhood, that love for a community and people.

  When I looked at her, I instantly knew that she was the quintessential Baltimore. Then her beauty. You know, when you just look at somebody and you just know that, damn, they’re supposed to be in your fucking life? They’re supposed to be in your life. She was one of those people. I took one look at her and I knew that she was supposed to be in my life. I was right. I was right. I love her.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): Felicia has a very positive energy. I mean, she exudes energy. When Michael brought her to me—she’s got that hoarse voice: “You ain’t going to believe this, but I just got
out of jail.” I said, “I believe you, because I see the tats well enough.” She goes “Ha-ha.” Her laugh is a killer laugh, right? We put her in. She didn’t make it the first round. She got locked up in New York for a stolen car. The next script came up, [we] put her back in. She was right as rain all the way through.

  I tried to get her to start to envision a broader range, but that was tough. I definitely wanted her to get out of Baltimore. It took her getting arrested again before she made that move. Michael’s been a real good influence in her life. The girl’s got something. She’s got a magic to her. That was an easy call.

  FELICIA “SNOOP” PEARSON: First time I had met David Simon and Ed Burns and Nina, when Mike told me come on set, everything was looking crazy, and I was like around all these white people and all that. I ain’t never been around all these white people. You know what I mean? I was kind of nervous.

  ANTHONY HEMINGWAY (DIRECTOR): Sitting here thinking about Snoop puts a smile on my face. I love to call her by her government name, Felicia. And she hates it. Snoop’s first day on set was one for the books. It was her first day ever on set. She was so nervous, vulnerability at its best. It was actually really cute, because she was so determined and did not want to let herself or anyone else down. Once I saw that, I had to support and help her succeed. That’s when our relationship started. Trying to handle my own AD [Assistant Director] responsibilities at the time, I couldn’t get more than a few feet away before hearing my name in her distinct Baltimore accent. I have so many great memories with Snoop, but day one is definitely a highlight. Watching her work through her on-set nerves, I kept encouraging her to be herself and that truth is what comes out in the performance. It felt so real [that] I then had to start saying, “It doesn’t have to be that real.” I told her she was gonna scare everyone on the set.