Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

by Brett Martin

  Almost two decades later, long after the widespread use of cell phones, Simon worried that replicating the beeper system in The Wire might seem anachronistic, but Burns reassured him. “Ed hated cell phones. He carried a pager because he thought it was a discipline,” Simon said. “I asked if we’d get in trouble with this old technology and he said, ‘No. Anything’s a discipline.’”

  Soon after Marty Ward’s death, Burns and his team were ordered to bring their case in. They ultimately traded a short-term gain—the arrest of Williams, Farmer, and others—for a long-term failure, the missed opportunity to delve into Williams’s organization and perhaps the deeper roots of Baltimore’s drug and murder trade. That would have to wait for The Wire.

  • • •

  In his bible, Simon expended characteristically strenuous effort emphasizing “McArdle’s” Celtic heritage: “the Irishman,” he’s introduced as. In this, his antiauthoritarianism, and his maverick role in the Barksdale case, he was clearly a version of Ed Burns, though Simon acknowledged that much of McNulty’s private life—the failed marriage, the guilty absent parenting—was drawn from his own experience. Plus, “David doesn’t like authority either,” observed George Pelecanos, who would emerge as the most important writer of The Wire after its two principals.

  Burns saw himself also in the wise older detective Lester Freamon, exiled to the pawnshop division for McNulty-like behavior in his youth and then resurrected for the Barksdale case. The narrative problem, he pointed out, was that McNulty’s rebellious behavior often forced him to the periphery of the show’s actual detective work; he spent much of The Wire in exile from the main action, first in the BPD’s marine division and, later, coincident with the actor Dominic West demanding less screen time in season four, walking a beat.

  Finding an actor to play McNulty had been a crucial element to getting the series green-lighted, and the search had not been easy. The production team first targeted a different British actor, Ray Winstone, who better matched their vision of McNulty as a man who was older and had gone further to seed. Simon, The Corner producer Robert Colesberry, and Clark Johnson, the onetime Homicide actor who was now developing a reputation as a director of pilots, flew to Canada to meet with Winstone at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2001. The group was stranded in Toronto for several days after September 11 but returned with nothing to show for the effort; Winstone’s American accent wasn’t good enough to cut the role of a Baltimore cop. In the coming weeks, an astonishing range of other names was bandied around: John Hurt, Tate Donovan, Donnie Wahlberg, Guy Pearce, Josh Brolin, Tom Sizemore, Viggo Mortensen, Liev Schreiber, David Morse. In Winstone’s fleshier mode, John C. Reilly was a favorite choice for a while, until word came that he was uninterested in working on a series.

  Meanwhile, a tape of West reading a scene between McNulty and Bunk arrived from London. The thirty-two-year-old Yorkshire native, educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Dublin, had worked primarily on the classical stage. His audition won over casting director Alexa Fogel with a McNulty-ish piece of cheek: it showed West on-screen, reading a scene between McNulty and Bunk. No matter how hard she strained, though, Fogel couldn’t hear the off-screen actor reading Bunk. She fiddled with the monitor, called people in to check if she was going mad. At the end of the scenes, West turned to the camera and apologized that his reading partner had been caught in traffic. He’d been reading on his own.

  He still wasn’t an easy sell. Both Simon and Albrecht worried that he was too young, too pretty, and that his aristocratic accent came through his attempts at a Baltimore honk. Who cared? argued Clark Johnson. “I said, ‘His accent sucks? Well, he came here from Dublin when he was nine and he’s still got a trace of accent, so what? We’ll live with it.’”

  Fogel made a case for something else in West’s makeup: “Chris Albrecht turned to me, because I was the one making the case for Dom. I told him that I believed he possessed an emotional damage that was the same as what David wrote. I don’t know what it was, but there was serious bad business underneath the surface.”

  Good casting always depends on that kind of sensitivity to what’s bubbling under the surface, not just on it. On The Wire, that principle was extended to something like an institutional ethic, a belief that almost anybody could play any part. It took viewers almost three seasons to understand why Avon Barksdale, played by the pantherine but slight Wood Harris, had the internal stuff to rule the West Side drug game while Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell, powerful, handsome, and very much Hollywood’s vision of a gang lord, was fatally stuck as a number two. Likewise, Jamie Hector as Marlo Stanfield—indistinguishable physically from the gaggle of corner boys until one started getting the measure of his dead, sharklike eyes. As in life, the show seemed to say, it’s dangerous to mistake looks for character.

  Fogel learned her lesson about selling Brits to the powers that be: When she brought in Elba to read for Stringer, she instructed the actor to hide his natural thick Cockney accent so as not to prejudice the producers. When it came time to cast Irishman Aiden Gillen as season three’s ambitious city councilman Tommy Carcetti, the notion of casting foreigners was no longer an issue. (Though that willingness would play a part in ensuring that Fogel did not get the job of casting director on Mad Men several years later. Matthew Weiner refused to cast English actors for Americans, claiming he could always tell the difference.)

  In the end, what emerged was likely the largest cast of black actors ever assembled for TV. Notably, they were not all playing drug dealers or street people. The Wire presented a realistic world in which, without comment or fanfare, African Americans played a role in every strata of urban life—from the mayor on down. Looked at with The Corner, Spike Lee’s pair of documentaries about Hurricane Katrina and the failure of New Orleans’s levees, the movie Life Support starring Queen Latifah as a working-class woman with HIV, and more, it solidified HBO’s unlikely role as the smartest and most sophisticated chronicler of black life in America.

  • • •

  As important as casting, in those early days, was the enlistment of Colesberry to reprise his role as executive producer of The Corner. Colesberry was a compact, quiet, patrician-looking man and the bearer of great gentle authority. An ex-army battery commander, he had studied drama at NYU and then worked primarily as a producer of features, including projects by Ang Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Alan Parker. His work on TV was as rarefied as the medium offered; in the eighties, he had produced a renowned version of Death of a Salesman starring Dustin Hoffman and, after The Corner, Billy Crystal’s piece of New York Yankees mythmaking, 61*. He had an easygoing knack for diplomacy. When Charles Dutton raised objections to Simon’s presence on The Corner set, Colesberry, who was certainly no less white, had been able to act as mediator. He was a crack logistic producer—“He’d been in the artillery,” said Clark Johnson. “He did the fucking math: ‘If you aim this thing over there, it’s going to land within five feet of the target’”—but he was also heavily involved in creative decisions. He would sit in the writers’ room, silent until he sensed that things were going off track. Often, a wince or raised eyebrow was enough for his opinion to have its desired effect.

  On-screen, Colesberry became known to viewers in the small role of hapless detective Ray Cole. Most important, he was one of the men Simon trusted to both share his mission and argue forcefully, at a level approaching his high standards, when they disagreed. For all of his clarity of vision, the veteran of open newsrooms thrived on that kind of feedback. “Whether it was Bob, or Ed Burns, or David Mills, Simon always needs a bounce,” said Johnson.

  “One time I asked Bob something about the budget and he said, ‘I don’t care about money. Ask Nina,’” remembered one Wire director. “Nina” was Nina K. Noble, Colesberry’s no-nonsense deputy, who would herself become one of Simon’s most valued bounces. Like Simon, she had studied under Jim Finnerty on Homicide, and she became a feared enforcer of budget and time
, as well as a manager of the show’s outsize personalities.

  Though the majority of The Wire would be filmed on location, Noble’s first order of business was to find a place in Baltimore to build sets such as the detectives’ offices and McNulty’s apartment. She located an abandoned Sam’s Club that fit the bill. Because the building technically required a retail tenant, moving in meant that The Wire, something of a Hollywood outlier in every other sense, started life as an illegal subletter. When eventually the authorities caught on, Noble briefly considered accommodating the code by opening a retail “Wire Shop” selling T-shirts and DVDs.

  Baltimore had a limited prior cinematic history. There had been Homicide and a triptych of films by Barry Levinson, but the city’s most significant and sustained exposure to film production had been through the oeuvre of another native son, John Waters. His was about as far from The Wire’s sensibility as it’s possible to get, but the show nevertheless wound up employing veterans of Waters’s experimental, over-the-top films—most notably Pat Moran, a flaming-red-haired barrel of a woman who handled casting of local extras and day players, and production designer Vince Peranio. It is the happy truth that Peranio, the man who taught America what the inside of a realistic heroin shooting gallery looked like, was the same man who taught it kitsch, in such films as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs. In the latter film, Peranio himself had appeared as a giant lobster, named Lobstora, raping a murderous sexual-freak-show operator played by Divine.

  Of course, The Wire in its way was as much of a constructed reality as Multiple Maniacs. When shooting in a vacant town house or drug den, the production team would clean out piles of debris, trash, and human waste and then replace them with their own meticulously re-created versions of the same. Though the story was set largely in Ed Burns’s old Western District, its exteriors were shot mostly on Baltimore’s East Side, where, Peranio said, fewer trees and more vacant houses provided a grimmer landscape. The high-rise housing projects of the type that were the locus of Avon Barksdale’s power had in fact been demolished in Baltimore several years before filming started. Scenes at “the Towers,” therefore, were shot at a residence for senior citizens, with its lower floors dressed to look like projects and a green screen above, on which upper floors were digitally added in postproduction. (The residents were not overly amused by the disruption and were probably happy when The Wire’s reality caught up with Baltimore’s and the Towers came down at the beginning of season three.)

  None of this was remotely scandalous or would even have been particularly notable were it not for Simon and company’s public fetish for verisimilitude. A measure of that impulse could be taken behind the scenes of Simon’s next HBO project, Treme, which documented New Orleans in the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Created with Eric Overmyer, Treme was, if anything, even more obsessed with accuracy than The Wire. The walls of the show’s offices were covered with photos, news stories, and dense, detailed timelines of everything that had occurred, and precisely when, in the years after the storm. Yet in a season one episode, when one of the main characters, the chef-owner of an understaffed and faltering restaurant, found herself without any dessert to serve, she reached for New Orleans’s beloved local version of a Hostess Fruit Pie, a Hubig’s Pie.

  It was a great detail, one that conveyed deep local knowledge—not only of endemic junk foods, but of what the gesture of giving, and accepting, such a modest gift would have meant in those postdisaster days. There was only one problem: The Hubig’s factory had not actually reopened until many months after the scene was supposed to take place. After much discussion, it was decided: The pie would stay. How? “Well,” explained Simon, “it was a magic Hubig’s.”

  That line between absolute accuracy and the demands of compelling drama remained a shifting target throughout the making of The Wire. Simon and Burns, the ex-journalist and the ex-cop, often alternated positions on either side of it. In matters of dealing with HBO, the logistics of filming, and other production issues, The Wire would always remain Simon’s show. His was the autocratic final decision on all matters of substance, while Burns remained happily insulated. “I don’t even really know what a producer is,” he said, not without some pride.

  In the writers’ room, however, they were closer to equals. Simon’s primary strengths were at once global—setting the agenda for each season—and nitty-gritty, taking the final pass on every script after the other writers had weighed in. Burns, meanwhile, emerged as a prodigious, sometimes exhausting fount of ideas, a veritable one-man plot engine. “People ask me, ‘Where do you get ideas from?’” said William Zorzi, Simon’s ex–Sun colleague who joined The Wire in season three. “I say, ‘Ed Burns brings them in every morning. Where do you get yours?’”

  “These are two guys who can finish each other’s sentences,” said Chris Collins, who sat in the writers’ room as an assistant. “When they’d start breaking story, they’d be five steps ahead of everybody else. One would drop a name. That would remind them of something else. All of a sudden they’re way out ahead.”

  The relationship was often contentious—uncomfortably so. “Ed was always challenging David. He’d come in with five ideas and he would fight for all of them,” said Joy Lusco Kecken, a season two writer.

  “I don’t think there were ever names called, but things could get heated. Certainly the subtext was, ‘I think you’re ridiculous and that’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard,’” said Overmyer, who also served on The Wire in season four. “David’s pretty left-wing, but Ed, I think, is even left of him. It was like the Bolsheviks versus the Mensheviks.” It would often fall to Pelecanos to suggest that perhaps it was time to move on from some point of debate. “George is a man of few words. You’d see him looking around the room while Ed and David were off debating finer points of Baltimore city politics and then say, ‘Okay, so, Namond goes down to the store, that’s where we were, right?’”

  To Pelecanos, who commuted daily from Washington, D.C., starting in season two, it could feel frustratingly like a two-man show. “I don’t even have to be here,” he’d complain.

  “We talked about things like changing SIM cards in a phone all year long. As soon as you thought it was over, Ed would come back from lunch and drop a whole new bunch of information. You’d be like, ‘Seriously? We’re doing this again?’” he said.

  Burns could be frustrated by the journalistic frame Simon brought to all he did. “There’s a difference between fact and truth,” he said. “If you stick with fact, you’re fucked.” At the same time, it was Burns who often raised technical objections, such as strenuously protesting a proposed shooting location for a stash because it didn’t have a second exit should its inhabitants need to escape. Such details, Burns said, were like a down payment to the audience, one that earned a certain amount of suspension of disbelief later. Simon surely agreed. The two just weren’t always on the same page about which details mattered and what, in fact, the truth was.

  Adding to the creative tension during season two was the presence in the writers’ room of the cackling Rafael Alvarez, Simon’s old Sun colleague. Alvarez, a Baltimore native, had been brought in specifically to work on the show’s dockworkers subplot. He infuriated Burns and Pelecanos with his constant snacking and habit of lying down on the floor of his office for afternoon naps.

  But all of this was as Simon, the lifelong believer in the positive powers of argument, wanted it. “I never liked fighting with Ed because it was tiring and slowed the process down,” he said. “But I never had a fight with him that, in the end, didn’t make the show better.”

  And the multilayered negotiations between the demands of art and documentary truth resulted, more often than not, in the right decisions. It was absolutely correct to stick with beepers as a plot device, despite the prevalence of cell phones, just as it was correct to save the demolishment of the high-rise projects for the beginning of season three. Placed there, the Towers com
ing down signified the breakdown of the relative order upheld by the Barksdale regime and the subsequent rise of a new, more vicious breed of drug lord, personified by Marlo Stanfield.

  Such liberties also allowed The Wire to invest its characters with mythical weight. Omar Little may, in his constituent parts, have been a realistic figure. As a detective, Burns had relied on tips from stickup boys, crazily brave operators who lived, albeit usually briefly, outside even the marginal rules of the drug game. And, indeed, the ranks of his informants included a soft-spoken but ferocious man named Anthony with a particular aversion to foul language. But as a fully realized character, Omar—always “Omar,” not “Little”—was unmistakably something more: a larger-than-life force of nature, part Br’er Rabbit trickster, part Robin Hood outlaw hero. Likewise the meathead cop Herc, the very incarnation of the unwitting, destructive status quo. Or McNulty as hero: the One Who Sees.

  Such resonance suited Simon because, when not insisting on The Wire as a work of politics, he found his literary comparisons centuries before most critics’ preferred reference point, Dickens—centuries, even, before Shakespeare. The Wire, he said, was essentially a Greek tragedy.

  “The ancients valued tragedy, not merely for what it told them about the world, but for what it told them about themselves,” he said. “Almost the entire diaspora of American television and film manages to eschew that genuine catharsis, which is what tragedy is explicitly intended to channel. We don’t tolerate tragedy. We mock it. We undervalue it. We go for the laughs, the sex, the violence. We exult the individual over his fate, time and time and time again.”