by Brett Martin
What with Williams’s involvement (which required scenes chewy enough for an actor of his stature) and the normal process of rewrite, Simon later estimated that about 50 percent of the script he and Mills wrote wound up on-screen. Any TV veteran would recognize that ratio, particularly on one’s first try, as a wild victory; on the strength of it, Mills headed to Los Angeles and continued his TV education under David Milch at NYPD Blue. But for a reporter accustomed to complete authorship, the degree to which “Bop Gun” had been rewritten felt like a kind of failure. Simon retreated to journalism.
The Sun, however, was feeling less and less like the home he knew. The paper had been bought by the Times Mirror Company, and two out-of-towners, William Marimow and John Carroll, had been installed at its helm. As elsewhere in the newspaper world, the new leadership’s primary purpose seemed to be cutting costs; a series of buyouts had led to an exodus of veteran editors and reporters. Worse, from Simon’s point of view, was the arrogance of the outsiders and their focus on winning high-profile prizes like Pulitzers. “Carpetbaggers,” he called them, who’d cultivated “a carefully crafted mythology in which no one knew how to do their job until the present regime brought tablets down from Sinai.”
“By the mid-nineties,” he later wrote, “there was enough intellectual fraud and prize lust at the Sun for me to realize that whatever I had loved about the Sun was disappearing, and that, in the end, the artifice of television drama was, in comparison to the artifice of a crafted Pulitzer campaign, no longer a notable sin.”
In 1996, he took a buyout and joined Homicide as a staff writer.
That didn’t mean he was ready to shed the vanities of rebellious journalism. “He showed up with a goatee, black faded jeans, with his little Miami Vice ponytail, like, ‘All these fucking Hollywood types are invading my city, they’re not doing justice to my book,’” said Yoshimura.
He was quickly immersed in a television education, not only in storytelling (Yoshimura told him to go home and read all of Chekhov), but, under the tutelage of Jim Finnerty, another colorful Irishman he idolized, in the physical realities of TV production. One area that took particular adjustment was actor/writer relations. “There was a constant volleyball game between the actors and the writers. We were a really strong-willed, opinionated, confident cast, and they were the same,” said Clark Johnson, who played one of the lead detectives and was known for extensive ad-libbing. “Simon came in like Elvis for a little while. You know, ‘The writer is God and we [are] just meat puppets.’” At the same time, he admitted, “I would never have said this at the time, but generally speaking the scripts were so flawlessly and beautifully written, you didn’t need to change anything; a lot of times you’d be embarrassed that this white Jewish guy from the suburbs of Baltimore would be getting us black guys current with our own street lingo!”
• • •
That dynamic—of a white man confidently writing black voices—and the emotional questions it raised would beat like a background drum throughout Simon’s career. Soon, it would be raised in a more contentious way. By the time The Corner was published, an idea had begun to grow in Simon’s head: using the book and its milieu as the starting point for a fictional series about Baltimore on a grander canvas. He approached HBO, which was then developing its first wave of original series, including The Sopranos, but he was quickly shot down; instead the network wanted to make The Corner as a miniseries.
It did have a concern, though. HBO had always had an uncommonly large black audience, thanks in part to its long history of broadcasting boxing and to such programs as Def Comedy Jam. With The Corner, which portrayed such a complicated and unpleasant slice of African American life, the network worried about a backlash, particularly since the show came from two very white writers. At an early meeting, Simon was asked, circumspectly, if he knew any other TV writers. He mentioned Yoshimura and Mills, who was African American, though so light-skinned that he often delighted in catching people dropping racist comments in his presence at cocktail parties. HBO leapt at the name (“What, brown wasn’t good enough?” Yoshimura asked), and Ed Burns, by then teaching social studies in the Baltimore school system, was effectively shut out.
“I felt bad about that, but at that point I just wanted to get it made,” said Simon. “I would still be doing the Lord’s work for Ed and me, selling the book.” He told Burns that he saw The Corner as a foothold toward returning to the larger, more ambitious project and asked him to start drawing up notes for an ongoing series. “I told Ed, ‘All the other stuff that we couldn’t use in The Corner? That’s the place where we start.’ With this inverted form of capitalism that is the drug trade. And the failure to police that. And then from there we start building a city.” Burns, Simon later learned, thought he was just being given busywork.
With the script for The Corner completed, it fell to Chris Albrecht, then in the process of figuring out just what HBO was going to be, to give the ultimate green light. He found himself on a flight from L.A. to New York with two scripts from the miniseries division: one was an adaptation of The Children, David Halberstam’s account of the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. The other was The Corner. Both were serious works that grappled with America’s racial divide, but only one would get made.
“I started to read The Corner, and it was so dark and so intense, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, no one’s going to want to watch this.’ So I picked up the script to The Children, and I read a couple of pages and thought, ‘I wonder what’s happening in that Corner script?’ Literally I did that about three times,” Albrecht said. “By the time I got to New York, I had read two or three hours of The Corner. What I realized was, anybody could do The Children, but only HBO could do The Corner.”
As further insulation against charges of exploitation, HBO hired Charles “Roc” Dutton to direct the miniseries. Dutton was a Baltimorean himself and had grown up in The Corner’s world, with both a brother and a sister addicted to drugs. He had gone to prison at age seventeen, serving almost ten years over two different stints for manslaughter and weapons possession. While there, he had discovered the works of Douglas Turner Ward, August Wilson, and other black playwrights, and he’d emerged with a new mission in life.
The matter of African Americans’ exclusion in Hollywood, particularly on projects like The Corner, was a passionate one for Dutton, and he made no secret of his displeasure with how things went. When his mostly white crew of department heads showed up for the first day of production, Dutton turned his back and walked away, refusing to greet them. He especially disliked Simon’s presence on set, and eventually the writer decided to stay away, using as an intermediary a gentle, charming producer named Bob Colesberry, who would later prove vital to Simon’s continuing TV education.
• • •
The Corner ran in six hour-long installments in April and May 2000. Critical reception was immediate and positive, with little of the backlash that HBO had feared. By any measure, it was among the most fearlessly bleak works to ever appear on TV, a film that didn’t flinch from having, say, a mother ask with one breath if her son has been going to school and, with the next, whether he has any heroin she can cop. The cast is familiar, like watching an early production of The Wire Players: Clarke Peters, who would play Detective Lester Freamon, is Fat Curt; Lance Reddick (Lieutenant Cedric Daniels) pops up as a junkie; Delaney Williams (Jay Landsman) is a scrap metal dealer. Khandi Alexander, as Fran Boyd, gives an outrageously fierce, complicated, and devastating performance, and would later anchor Simon’s Treme.
And yet, viewed post-Wire, it is obviously an apprentice effort. Before the start of episode one, Dutton delivers an earnest lecture (which he refused to allow Simon to work on) directly to camera and periodically conducts awkward “interviews” with the actors playing their characters. All feel clumsy and pedantic. More generally, The Corner is inhibited by the responsibilities of being a true story. It becomes the homework many viewers feared, w
rongly, that The Wire was, without any of the mythology and invention that made The Wire so much more.
The Corner was a revolutionary step for both its authors and its network. But it is held to earth by mere facts. It would take the new form of the open-ended series, and the freedom of fiction, to let the truth soar.
Seven
The Magic Hubig’s
David Simon was the master of the memo: a medium that neatly combined his two native gifts, for writing and for argument. Once the writer got a head of steam behind him, recipients of a Simon missive could find themselves alternately bullied, cajoled, flattered, talked circles around, and on the floor laughing. Very often, they also found themselves convinced. But of all his substantial oeuvre, no memos could have been more important than the ones he wrote selling The Wire—with the possible exception of the one he’d later write to save it.
Certainly the history of popular art features few documents as baldly, eloquently ambitious as the show “bible” that Simon submitted to HBO in September 2000. The series, he wrote, would be, just as Hill Street Blues had once been, a Trojan horse—nominally a police procedural set amid the devastated landscape of postindustrial, drug-afflicted inner Baltimore, but in fact something very different. The Wire’s audience, he predicted confidently, having been seduced by the genre, would be left with a very different reward, not “the simple gratification of hearing handcuffs click. . . .”
The Sopranos becomes art when it stands as more than a Mob story, but as a treatise on the American family. Oz is at its best when it rises beyond the framework of a prison story and finds commonalities between that environment and our own, external world. So, too, should The Wire be judged . . . as a vehicle for making statements about the American city and even the American experiment. The grand theme here is nothing less than a national existentialism. . . .
In the few short years since Tony met his ducks, it was safe to say, TV had come a long way from pitches like “Her husband died, but he came back as her dog.” As Simon wrote in a follow-up letter to Carolyn Strauss, explaining precisely how much the future brand of HBO depended on putting his show on the air:
For HBO to step toe-to-toe with NBC or ABC and create a cop show that seizes the highest qualitative ground through realism, good writing, and a more honest and more brutal assessment of police, police work, and the drug culture—this may not be the beginning of the end for network dramas as industry standard, but it is certainly the end of the beginning for HBO.
Simon, never particularly diffident about his talents or ambitions, felt he was in a good position to strive so lavishly. “My attitude, and the attitude of most of the people working on that show, was, ‘If this doesn’t work, fuck it, we won’t stay in TV. It seems like there’s a window right now, but if we’re wrong about that, we’ll go back to books.’”
Still, that window was alluring. As much as Simon was devoted to the romance and art of journalism and, more important, to nonfiction, even he had to concede that fiction film and TV were the primary communication media of his era. “To get a best-selling novel on the New York Times Best Sellers list, you need to sell a hundred thousand copies. A poorly watched HBO show is going to draw three or four million a week. That’s ten times as many people acquiring your narrative.” And that mattered because, to Simon and his partner, Ed Burns, The Wire was explicitly a piece of social activism. Among its targets, large and small, were the War on Drugs, the educational policy No Child Left Behind, and the outsize influence of money in America’s political system, of statistics in its police departments, and of Pulitzer Prizes at its newspapers. The big fish, though, was nothing less than a capitalist system that Burns and Simon had begun to see as fundamentally doomed. (If Simon was a dyed-in-the-wool lefty, Burns practically qualified as Zapatista; by ex-cop standards, he might as well have been Trotsky himself.) In chronicling the modern American city, Simon said, they had one mantra, adapted from, of all sources, sports radio personality Jim Rome: “Have a fucking take. Try not to suck.”
Neither Burns nor Simon would ever seem entirely comfortable acknowledging the degree that The Wire succeeded on another level: as beautifully constructed, suspenseful, heartfelt, resonant entertainment. They would show little to no interest in discussing such matters as character or dialogue, camera technique, plotting, the things that obsess most fiction writers and filmmakers. “It’s our job to be entertaining. I understand I must make you care about my characters. That’s the fundamental engine of drama,” Simon said dismissively. “It’s the engine. But it’s not the purpose.” Told that The Wire had transcended the factual bounds that, for all its good intentions, had shackled The Corner, he seemed to deliberately misunderstand the compliment: “I have too much regard for that which is true to ever call it journalism.” The questioner, of course, had meant the opposite: that The Wire was too good to call mere journalism. As late as 2012, he would complain in a New York Times interview that fans were still talking about their favorite characters rather than concentrating on the show’s political message.
Simon, then, was a Trojan who found himself perturbed by the artistry of his own horse, annoyed that viewers were so busy marveling at its sculpted contours and realistic paint job that they barely noticed they were being attacked. Such, 99 percent of the time, are the makings of terrible drama: wooden characters, contrived plot machinations, clunky dialogue. The real miracle of The Wire is that, with only a few late exceptions, it overcame the proud pedantry of its creators to become one of the greatest literary accomplishments of the early twenty-first century.
• • •
The show’s seventy-nine-page bible was a concession to the reality that The Wire was not like other series—even those on HBO. Albrecht and Strauss had not been satisfied with Simon and Burns’s pilot and had asked for two more episodes. Even then, the story had not yet introduced the eponymous wire. This was a work of art that required hours of investment just to begin to get into, and that’s no way to get an easy green light.
The spine of the story—which the bible outlined in meticulous detail—had taken shape in Simon’s Federal Hill bachelor apartment. He had recently moved back to the city from the suburban home in Columbia, Maryland, he’d shared with his second wife and son after starting a relationship with Laura Lippman. In the midst of the divorce, he threw himself into writing and selling The Wire. “It was a really difficult time,” said Joy Lusco Kecken, who worked with Simon as an assistant during that period. “This meant a lot to him. I think he felt he had to sink or swim with it.”
The story outline hewed closely to the case that had first introduced Simon to Burns, that of Little Melvin Williams. Little Melvin was a Baltimore street legend, though one all but invisible to the city’s white population and, for a long time, law enforcement—a disconnect in civic realities that would become a consistently shocking theme of The Wire. He had started out in the late 1960s as a pool hustler, “playing the angles to perfection in the Avenue pool halls,” as Simon wrote with hard-boiled lyricism in the first of the five-part series that ran in the Sun in 1987, after Burns had finally arrested Williams.
As Simon told it, Williams had been in the right place at the right time as heroin flooded urban America. He spent the next two decades revolutionizing and institutionalizing its sale—through connections to organized crime in New York above and a hierarchy of young, increasingly violent enforcers below. He was, in position, if not in personal style, much like The Wire’s more low-profile drug lord Avon Barksdale.
Williams also had a deputy, Lamont “Chin” Farmer, a ruthless manager of the operation’s young army. Farmer was an innovator in his own way, a cerebral drug dealer who took business classes at a local college and was once taped lecturing his older brother, another dealer, on heady points of free-market economic theory. Among the legitimate businesses from which he operated was a print shop. Here, then, was the DNA of Avon Barksdale’s own, fatally flawed number two, Stringer
Bell—or, as the bible had it, “Stringy.”
(That these small differences in working names—McArdle for McNulty, Aaron Barksdale for Avon, Stringy for Stringer, Flubber for the ex-con who would become Cutty—are as disorienting as they are is further proof of how intimately we come to know these characters; would the phantom Tommy Soprano have possessed the same magic as Tony? The world will never know.)
The story of Williams’s downfall is also familiar to The Wire devotees. It began with a murder: a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student found dead in her kitchen, shot through the house’s back window. Burns, then a homicide detective, and a partner were assigned the case and duly investigated the crime scene—a process immortalized in a nearly five-minute scene in The Wire in which Bunk and McNulty use only the word fuck, in nearly every one of its myriad meanings, inflections, and variations. (That succinct dialogue, short on vocabulary but long on meaning, was in turn lifted from a scene in Homicide the book.)
The murder became a gateway for Burns to begin investigating Williams’s operation. In his Sun series, Simon described it in terms that would not, with few exceptions, have been out of place in The Wire’s statement of purpose: “There were no car chases, no gunfights, no dangerous undercover assignments. The case was two years of exacting, often aggravating police work—most of it in parked cars, sipping 7-Eleven coffee, or in cluttered city offices, checking tax records or monitoring phone calls from a government desk.”
The case’s breakthrough was the discovery that Williams’s organization exclusively used beepers to communicate. Burns got a court order to “clone” five beepers, using men stationed on top of nearby buildings to monitor when Williams’s men were using their devices. The final breakthrough was cracking the simple but clever code the men were using to identify who was calling. It involved “jumping” numbers over the 5 on a standard pay phone keypad.