All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  What I am convinced of is if you show an exalted Hollywood view of anybody, black or white, it gets attention. It is regarded as exalted and it is regarded as artifices, and you are all a part of that. You have portrayed glamouring. You make a show about the inner city of Baltimore and anywhere else, and you put the camera on it, these motherfuckers in Hollywood think you’re turning the camera on and it is just some weird documentary. It was like there was no sense that we were working to create, that that America that you left behind is deserving of as much attention and craft like that as the other America.

  Peruse Ed Burns’s career path and you will find a man who has spent a lifetime trying to bring change to institutions where it’s difficult to make a dent in the problems, let alone cure the ills wholesale.

  Burns served in the infantry during the Vietnam War and worked as a policeman for two decades. He found teaching kids in Baltimore just as frustrating as those vocations, if not as harrowing. He taught at Hamilton Middle School and City College for seven years before departing for The Wire. “I never asked the question again, but I did ask one of my classes how many kids had been shot,” Burns said. “It was eleven. One kid had been shot twice, and he was so proud. He’s pulling up his shirt.” For Burns, teaching became draining. Many of his students were stunted emotionally and mentally, and Burns could not rationalize the expectations that the school system placed on the students versus the realities of what they could handle. He estimated that among his eighth-graders, the students’ reading levels ranged from first to sixth grade. “Opportunity is what these kids lack,” Burns said. “The path is the corner or the stoop. We’re talking about these kids here on the corner. They don’t have advocates…Corner kids, there’s nobody rooting for them. You have to change that world, and where you have to start is ages zero to three. That’s the most formative years of your life, and you’re not even in charge of it. You got to go back and you got to create institutions that give that child the dignity, the self-respect, the love that he or she needs to go out into the world.”

  For three seasons, Burns served as an integral architect in creating and outlining The Wire. Nowhere is his imprint felt more than in Season 4, which critics universally hailed. “The Wire keeps getting better, and to my mind it has made the final jump from great TV to classic TV—put it right up there with The Prisoner and the first three seasons of The Sopranos,” Stephen King wrote in a 2007 column for Entertainment Weekly. “It’s the sort of dramatic cycle people will still be writing and thinking about twenty-five years from now, and given the current state of the world and the nation, that’s a good thing. ‘There,’ our grandchildren will say. ‘It wasn’t all Simon Cowell.’ ”

  Each season marked the dysfunction of an institution and that dysfunction’s impact on the city and the drug culture. In the political thread, newly minted mayor Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) decides that the governor’s offer of a school bailout would be too damaging to his future political ambitions. The school system’s breakdown results in kids being funneled onto the corner, where their real education takes place. The season focuses on the disparate, disheartening paths of four middle school children: Duquan “Dukie” Weems (Jermaine Crawford), Michael Lee (Tristan Mack Wilds), Namond Brice (Julito McCullum), and Randy Wagstaff (Maestro Harrell). They begin innocently enough, before most of the group is confronted with life’s bleak realities amid a lack of opportunities and resources. The overwhelmed educators include two familiar faces from the police force, Roland Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost), who has turned to teaching after accidentally killing an officer, and Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom), who has become a field researcher, trying to offset his diminished pension after being reprimanded for creating Hamsterdam.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I knew how Season Four was going to be in an instant. I knew how Marlo would hide the bodies. It just comes to you. Once it comes to you, you have to unwrap it. It’s like a gift. This is cool, now how do I get there? You have to unwrap it. That’s the way I get stories. Once I have the idea, the essence of it, the gift, then you just start playing the characters in your head and you see them. They almost speak to you, and then you pick up bits and pieces and it unfolds. It’s really cool sometimes to go out on the set and just watch guys like Andre Royo, those guys doing it, and it makes it like they’re projections of my mind. You know what I mean? Strange relationship, but there’s always an internal logic. The story has to have an internal logic that drives it, and that way you stay true to the characters.

  DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): On Season Four of The Wire, David nailed the thematic line that the entire season drove toward—“kids don’t vote”—in the first week.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): In high school, the game is already over. The dropout rate in Baltimore for the high schools in the inner city was approaching sixty, seventy percent. The kids that you want to tell the story about, if you put them in high school, they wouldn’t be there. They had already dropped out. Middle school is where you see the biggest graduation ceremony. Kids get all dressed up and they arrive in limousines and all the family is there, because they all know that this is the last graduation they’re attending. Middle school, that’s where the heartbreak is. These kids don’t go on. They just go off to the corner. That’s what they’re being trained for. It had to be middle school. High school would have felt wrong, real wrong. Today, you could probably do it in elementary, because the ravages of this holocaust has affected kids who are five and six years old in school. They would be too young to be actors. Middle school made all the sense in the world. Besides, I taught in middle school. You go with what you know.

  JOE CHAPPELLE (DIRECTOR/CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): Part of it goes back to the casting of the boys. We had to find four distinct character types. When you’re following Dukie, you know exactly what he’s like and what he looks like. You didn’t want to have four kids who looked the same. We struck gold with all those guys. They were fantastic.

  ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): I love those boys. It was a pretty massive undertaking for the amount of time we had. I think we only had about six weeks. So I hired people in different parts of the country. The one thing [that] is true of people in that age group is the cream rises to the top pretty quickly, which is what did happen, and so we were able to kind of narrow it down to about ten kids, then down to finally these four. We did do a big day of auditions in Baltimore with Robert [Chew] also there working with them and mixing and matching them, because so much of what they needed to do wasn’t written yet, but it was in David’s mind and the minds of all the writers. They knew what the story was going to be. So, we had to do work where we could see enough of what they were capable of, so when the stuff was written, they would be able to stand up to it.

  TRISTAN MACK WILDS (MICHAEL LEE): My mom got me hooked on The Wire. It was one of the in-house rituals. Every Sunday, my mom would have to turn that on. My older brother would come in from outside, and my dad would watch it. It was one of the shows that kind of, in a weird way, it kept us all together.

  I was a fan of Idris, first and foremost. He was the man. Idris and Wood Harris, the men. We didn’t have very many shows that looked like what was going on outside of my door, right outside of my window. I grew up in the Stapleton projects, so a lot of stuff they were talking about and touching on, I was seeing and dealing with on a daily basis. To have a show that looks like us and feels like us and speaks in the same language as us, and you get to see both sides—you see [that] the cops aren’t always good guys and the bad guys aren’t necessarily quote-unquote bad guys. It was an amazing juxtaposition to always watch, and kept us on our toes just being able to see what was going on in the quote-unquote real life that The Wire was portraying.

  JULITO MCCULLUM (NAMOND BRICE): A week or two weeks before my audition for The Wire, my mom, we went to another audition. At the audition, they wanted to get to know me, so they asked me a few questions, and one of the questions was, what’s my favorit
e TV show? At that time, I was a young kid, really didn’t watch much TV, so I asked my mom, like, “Mom, what do I put?” She said, “Put The Wire.” I was like, “What’s The Wire?” She’s like, “It’s a really great show on HBO.” She started telling me a little bit about it, and then she said, “If they ever got kids on the show, yo, it’ll be great.” Then, a week after, I went on the audition for The Wire.

  MAESTRO HARRELL (RANDY WAGSTAFF): I knew a lot of people who loved it and watched it. At the time, I was thirteen, fourteen. Not only did it come on a little late because I had school and whatnot, also there was no HBOGo at the time or even Netflix. Was Netflix even around at the time?

  JERMAINE CRAWFORD (DUQUAN “DUKIE” WEEMS): I wasn’t old enough to even watch the show. I had no idea what I was getting into. I was just super excited to be cursing, and my mom was okay with it.

  JULITO MCCULLUM (NAMOND BRICE): I was always Namond. I actually was the first kid to be casted, and when I went in for Namond, that was the day I booked the role. I think the first audition I went on, I was very calm and collected. Namond had just resonated for me, growing up in Brooklyn and in the projects, and my dad also being a drug dealer before he had his demise. It just resonated with me, the character.

  TRISTAN MACK WILDS (MICHAEL LEE): Actually, my first audition was for [the part of] Randy [Wagstaff]. I went in for Randy and got pretty far, probably went through three or four auditions for Randy. It just got to the point where, after sitting in front of Ed Burns and David Simon and Robert Chew, God rest his soul, me at that age, I was too big for Randy. We ended all the auditions there, and I thought that was the end. Like, I thought, Okay, it’s a wrap. I’m not going to be on the show that me and my mom watch every Sunday. It’s a wrap. But, eventually, they called back, and when they called back, they were like, “We want to call you for another role. We don’t know how it’s going to go. Just come in. Just do the audition and we’ll see from there.”

  JULITO MCCULLUM (NAMOND BRICE): I kind of lived the life like that where I was the kid in the class who liked to get the attention, who was probably the class clown. To see what had came from my life, personally, to know that I had the opportunity to portray a character like that and not live that life anymore, but I’ve got another success where I’m portraying a character like that, it was like, “Wow. I really came really far.” I was like that as a kid. I was a Namond in the classroom.

  JERMAINE CRAWFORD (DUQUAN “DUKIE” WEEMS): I auditioned for [the part of] Michael, and Michael took me all the way up to the end, and then it became Dukie. That was that. But I think that it worked out exactly the way that it was supposed to.

  TRISTAN MACK WILDS (MICHAEL LEE): One of the conversations from Ed that I remember the absolute most, it was during my audition. We’ve had deep, intellectual conversations and we’ve had ones where he’ll say a few words that will stick with you for the rest of your life. This is one of the joints that stick with you for the rest of your life. I was in the middle of the auditions, and it was kind of the last audition for the character of Michael, and it was me and one other kid that they had auditioning for Michael. Julito had already got the part for Namond. And I think Maestro was there, and Jermaine was there as well. I was in the audition room. I did the audition, and then they said, “We’re going to give you a second and then we want you to come back and do the audition again.”

  Ed pulled me out. He’s kind of sitting there, kind of just thinking. He said, “Less is more. Remember that for the rest of your life. Anything that you apply. With Michael, especially this character, less is always more. The less you do, the more everybody will feel it. Because we’re so prone to seeing so much. With acting, with life, whatever. We’re so prone to seeing so much more. But when there’s less, the mystery behind it, it leaves people guessing. It feels so much more. So, just remember that when you’re going back into this room and you’re reading those lines. Less is more.” We went back in and we nailed it. But just those words guided me through my entire career, through my life. It’s just one of those things that I always keep in the back of my head. I always have him saying it in the back of my head, whenever I need it.

  MAESTRO HARRELL (RANDY WAGSTAFF): Ed was like how almost like [Albus] Dumbledore does to Harry Potter. He would tell us things that I don’t know if we were necessarily supposed to catch on to, but then they would probably really affect the decisions we made actingwise. He’s that guy. He’s that intelligent where he can talk to you about something and then just plant an idea, but it’s your idea. Like [in] Inception. He’s a genius.

  JERMAINE CRAWFORD (DUQUAN “DUKIE” WEEMS): Ed Burns, when we were filming some of the scenes, I remember he pulled me to the side and said, “Some of the kids in this room are real-life Dukies.” It was that moment when it was just kind of like, Wow. Oh, my gosh. These kids are like me. They are me.

  I would literally put myself in his shoes. I can remember it vividly, the eviction scene. The shit was out there. When you’re younger, your imagination is so wild. They put me in the clothes. They put me in the hair and makeup. I was in hair and makeup for forty-five minutes every day, longer than everybody, because they had to make me look like shit each day, literally. It had an effect on me. My skin started breaking out. My hair was nappy all the time. I couldn’t cut my hair. Everybody else could.

  SEITH MANN (DIRECTOR): The thing about that scene [where the girl student slices the other girl’s face] that really struck me, was Dukie and the fan. After this girl does this horrific thing, Dukie is reaching out with this fan in this sweet way. It was profound to me, seeing Dukie and the way he goes in the story. One of the things that makes everything so tragic about that season is that you get to know these kids and you fall in love with them, and we’re not going to save them because it’s a TV show. No, we’re going to let things go south. We’re going to show you life, because sometimes life doesn’t save the kids, and they don’t [get saved] in Baltimore all the time.

  Seeing someone in the midst of all that chaos, for him to zero in on this girl and try to extend this gesture of kindness, of sweetness that can’t really be articulated, was poetic. Even in the midst of all this madness, there’s this sweet soul trying to touch somebody else and knowing the rest of the season and how he gets lost on his way, to a certain extent, is why I think that season is so powerful. Just having an inherently good heart does not help you when you’re in certain circumstances. That’s tragic.

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): Ed brought a lot of this stuff to the table. Ed, he’s got all the experience in the world. He’s a Vietnam veteran, a combat veteran, twenty-something years in the force, public school teacher in Baltimore right after that. I mean, you see where a lot of this stuff came from.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): Here’s the secret to teaching, [as] with anything else: If you blame yourself for the mistakes, you can only get better. If you blame the outside world, the kid, the person you’re working with, if you blame them, you’ll never get better. So, you’re, Why did I fuck that up? What can I do better? If that’s the driving energy, you come to the next day revved up and ready to go, Let’s see if this works.

  ERIC OVERMYER (WRITER): I was impressed by how much Ed Burns brought to the project. His experience in the Baltimore middle schools was really crucial. You can’t touch David when it comes to city politics and issues of criminal justice and the drug war. He’s very eloquent. He’s very well versed. It wasn’t that he didn’t know about the middle schools, but Ed had hands-on experience. Many of the stories in Season Four really come out of Ed’s experience. Oddly enough, Richard Price had some teaching experiences, too, and there was stuff from his experience that ended up in the show as well.

  JIM TRUE-FROST (DET. ROLAND “PREZ” PRYZBYLEWSKI): His having played that role in real life and making that career switch was just like a constant resource available to me. I talked to Ed a lot. It’s difficult to point to any particular tip he ga
ve me. It’s more just asking him for stories and observing how he talked about it and the emotional experience. It’s like what comes through when you talk to Ed, and [what] comes through in the script, is his deep anger about the injustice of the situation, with kids in school who should have every opportunity that any kid gets, but who get so cheated and just happened to be born into the wrong zip code. I think it’s the anger and also the sadness. He watched kids like Dukie. He watched kids like Michael, and he befriended them and helped them.

  There’s a sense of loss, and this isn’t some sort of overleaning liberal pity party—it’s just a human connection of being with those people, watching them grow, and watching most of them just cling to this track that they’re in with no chance of getting out, no matter how much you give to them, no matter how much you pour into the job of being the teacher that they’re with from nine a.m. to three p.m. I think from both Ed and my wife [a former high school teacher and now a law professor], that both anger and sadness is what I took away, both as a human and as an actor playing Prez, I was able to take away and process and use.

  CHRIS COLLINS (STAFF WRITER): We were showing a failure at a very early stage in the lives of children that ultimately made them easy targets to recruit into the drug gang or to perpetuate a cycle of violence. So, for me, Season Four really tried to get to the root of problems of why this is happening and to shine a light on how bad the schools are. It was a really great sort of accurate light into what some of the problems are in the inner city and how kids are being left behind at a very early age. People don’t tend to talk about it a lot out in the real world. We used to talk about it in a way where people are paying attention.