Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Abrams
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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CROWN ARCHETYPE and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 9780451498144
Ebook ISBN 9780451498168
Cover design by Alex Merto
Title page and chapter-opening art © Shutterstock/Bro Studio
The Wire type on front cover and title page is used courtesy of HBO. All rights reserved. HBO and related channels and service marks are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.
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For Danielle and Michelle, big sisters who unfortunately knew how to put their little brother in his place
This book is not an episode-by-episode companion of The Wire—though the pages are filled with spoilers—but, rather, an oral history that hopefully provides an illuminating retrospective from the creators, actors, and others involved in its making. No one anticipated that the show would experience the enduring afterlife it has, but many at the time realized they were working on a project of precision and purpose.
I tried interviewing as many people involved with the show as possible for this book because—what’s the saying?—all the pieces matter. Thankfully, nearly everyone happily obliged.
In the interest of streamlining memories and anecdotes, I’ve removed many of the hitches that we all use in speech (“you know,” “um,” and “like”). Those occasions are rare, though, and I believe the spirit and meaning of every conversation is preserved. Each quote from an actor is offered with his or her character’s name and occupation. Some of the characters’ job titles changed as the show advanced; for example, Councilman Tommy Carcetti became Mayor Carcetti. In those instances, the characters are introduced with the job titles for which they are most well known.
The positions of those behind the camera are also listed with their quotes. Some people held multiple roles, moved up ranks, or changed jobs as the show aged. For example, Anthony Hemingway began as an assistant director before directing episodes in the show’s later run. In the case of those behind the scenes, the person is listed with his or her most prominent job title.
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Preface
CHAPTER 1: AN ARGUMENT OF DISSENT
CHAPTER 2: LIKE A NOVEL
CHAPTER 3: CHARACTER RESEARCH
CHAPTER 4: BUILD A CITY
CHAPTER 5: A REAL ROM-COM
PHOTO INSERT
CHAPTER 6: NO ONE WAS EVER SAFE
CHAPTER 7: THE BASTARD CHILD OF HBO
CHAPTER 8: KIDS DON’T VOTE
CHAPTER 9: TURN THE CAMERA BACK
CHAPTER 10: WE OPENED THE CONVERSATION
Works Cited
Acknowledgments
Wendell Pierce addressed an expectant audience at Columbia University. The eager crowd had filed inside Cowin Auditorium in April 2016, ignoring a bitter New York City day that stubbornly refused to recognize winter’s end. Pierce sat inside, surrounded by some of his contemporaries from The Wire, including Jamie Hector (Marlo Stanfield), Sonja Sohn (Det. Kima Greggs), and Felicia “Snoop” Pearson. The background of the actors reflected the sizable range of those who appeared in the trailblazing HBO show. Pierce is New Orleans through and through. Yet he was no stranger to New York, having attended the Juilliard School’s Drama Division. In The Wire, he depicted William “Bunk” Moreland, a dedicated, competent detective who struggled to balance his work and his personal life. Pierce discussed his experience of sharing scenes with Pearson, who played an androgynous killer and had never acted prior to The Wire. “The first night Snoop came onto the set, Snoop sat in the director’s chair with David [Simon] on one side, Ed [Burns] on the other,” Pierce recalled. “She’s trying to be cool. I’ll never forget, there was a shootout scene and she said, ‘Motherfuckers don’t shoot like that.’ I thought it was great, and it shows you how you take your personal experience and bring it to the show. If you’re gonna be authentic, you’ve gotta be authentic.”
Pearson laughed with a husky rasp, relaying another story from one of her nascent days on set, when an assistant director cautioned that she shot the prop guns with too much accuracy. “Snoop is an amazing woman,” Pierce continued. “You hear that profile and then you engage with this charming, talented, incredible person, and it’s this cautionary tale that she’s allowed herself to be onstage. Understand that you may never look at any kid who may be going down that wrong path as anything other than a full, loving human being and if you want to change that course, embrace that before you embrace any idea of ignorance or negativity. Understand that there’s that humanity there, and she’s a living example of why the show tapped into people’s psyches and why the show has created an examination of policy, an examination of the influence of art changing people’s lives in a practical way at universities across the nation. You didn’t see no damn show about Gilligan. These are people’s lives and the examination of the dysfunction in our American culture that was on display in The Wire has changed people’s lives.”
From its deliberate pacing to its desolate portrayal of Baltimore’s blight and all points in between, The Wire strove for realism. Those earnest efforts confused many during the show’s sixty-episode life span from 2002 to 2008. HBO had produced groundbreaking, original television prior to The Wire, with shows such as Oz and The Sopranos. The Wire was something different, though. Its creator, David Simon, originally frowned upon the entertainment business. He envisioned the television show as a novel, with the postmodern institutions of Baltimore representative of Greek gods. The show plopped the viewer into the middle of a vast universe without an explanatory guide. The plot was complicated, and the dialogue may as well have been in another language. The series shifted focus each season. Too many characters lived in its space, and Simon brought forth no obvious heroes. Few watched the show when it aired. Award voters mostly ignored it. The Wire faced cancellation almost annually. “First, we thought it was a silo, because people weren’t watching the show when it was on,” Pierce told the crowd. “We thought we were doing a good show. But it was really in a silo and it wasn’t until maybe the third year when we were coming back and noticed, ‘Hey, people are starting to check on the show.’ ”
No show has aged as gracefully. The Wire stood the test of time after only intermittently being acknowledged while on air. “How many shows are being taught?” said Darrell Britt-Gibson, who played Darius “O-Dog” Hill. “That’s its impact. It’s left a lasting impression on the culture, and hopefully it continues to do so with the next generation and the generation after that. It’s a timeless piece of art.” The panel at Columbia University took place as part of a weekend conference on The Wire. Academics and professors convened, hosting panels that discussed the fictional show’s various real-life intersections of subjects such as mass incarceration, narrative journalism, and religion and politics in the inner city. Columbia University is not the only college to host discussions on the show—or even the lone Ivy League school, for that matter. Yale and Harvard are among the many universities that have featured conferences or classes that examine the show’s enduring impact. “I actually went to a university to speak about The Wire in Utah,” said Seth Gilliam, w
ho portrayed Sgt. Ellis Carver. “I talked to kids who were excited to be discussing the subject matter that The Wire brought up. I don’t know a lot of cop shows that have this far-reaching impact almost a generation later.” The Wire simultaneously exposed America’s sores and, somewhat accidentally, evolved television.
Who the fuck is this guy? Ed Burns thought after David Simon introduced himself in the winter of 1984. The moment would mark the beginning of a collaboration neither could have foreseen, one that would mature into a groundbreaking book and culminate in a revolutionary television show. But first impressions? Burns joked—well, partly anyway—that he hoped to arrest Simon. Somehow, Simon had finagled his way beyond security and into the Drug Enforcement Administration offices as Burns readied material for a grand jury preparing to bring an indictment against Melvin “Little” Williams, a disciplined drug trafficker who had successfully flummoxed Baltimore law enforcement for years. Simon told Burns that he was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and had permission to follow the case. Burns and his partner, Harry Edgerton, both Baltimore police detectives, had finally pinned the elusive Williams through the use of a wiretap. Simon expressed interest in being able to listen in on the wire. “I’d love to take you in there, but if I do, that’s a ten-year offense and I’d love to lock you up,” Burns said. He stiff-armed Simon’s request, but agreed to meet with him later to discuss the case.
Who the fuck is this guy? David Simon thought after meeting Burns a second time. Not much time had passed when they greeted one another at the Baltimore County Public Library branch in Towson. Simon had already surmised that Burns did not behave like any typical detective he had come across. He now eyeballed the book titles Burns prepared to check out, Bob Woodward’s Veil: Secret Wars of the CIA and The Magus, by John Fowles, among them. “I read all the time, and it impressed him,” Burns recalled. “I don’t think David reads anywhere near as much as I do, but a cop reads? My God. I know a lot of cops who read. It was no big deal, but David was a good guy and he had a passion.”
That passion unfurled into the canvassing five-part series that Simon wrote on the making and inner workings of Williams as a Baltimore drug trafficker kingpin. For Simon, his life’s purpose had been achieved by working at a newspaper. His father, Bernard, had once been a journalist who devoted the bulk of his working days as a public relations director for B’nai B’rith, the oldest Jewish service organization in the world. His mother, Dorothy, spent time working for an organization that aided students from underachieving public schools to find better education. Simon attended the University of Maryland, where he wrote for the student newspaper, The Diamondback. He joined the Sun after graduating, reporting on crime. To him, being a newspaperman and bringing accountability to influencers meant something. “I grew up in a house where we argued politics,” Simon recounted. “We argued sociology. We argued culture. We argued. It was not personal. Arguing was how you got attention in my family.” One of Simon’s enduring memories is debating politics with his two uncles as a boy, the moment climaxing with him flatly telling his uncle Hank that he was in the wrong. “Who knew he had a brain?” Uncle Hank retorted.
Reading Simon’s 1987 Sun series, entitled “ ‘Easy Money’: Anatomy of a Drug Empire,” is akin to viewing the organs of The Wire’s first-season wiretap investigation. Williams was a self-made entrepreneur who imported the bulk of Baltimore’s heroin influx as the city’s honest economic opportunities shifted and dwindled. “An imperious, intelligent man who chooses words with care,” Simon described “Melvin Williams refuses to be stereotyped. Street sales of narcotics were routinely punctuated by murderous violence, but Williams was a family man, devoted to an eleven-year marriage and two young daughters.”
Williams conducted most of his business through his number two, a consigliere named Lamont “Chin” Farmer. Farmer orchestrated both a simple and intricate communication system involving the use of beepers. He also headed a print shop and took business courses at a community college, à la Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell.
Simon’s series meticulously captured Williams’s life and downfall—not only as a drug kingpin, but also as a respected figure in the community, where, as Simon wrote, “he was hailed as Little Melvin, the Citizen, speaking at the request of National Guard officials during the 1968 riots, urging a restless crowd to go home.” Burns appreciated that Simon showed all facets of the case and offered a depiction of Williams that was beyond a caricature. “When the case came down, he wrote a very good article because he went out and saw some of the gangsters and it was a most balanced article,” Burns said. “I liked that.”
Simon spent Christmas Eve 1986 on an overnight shift with the Baltimore Police Department Homicide Unit for another story shortly before the series on Williams debuted. During that night, a detective mentioned that someone could write a damn good book if they documented the department’s happenings for a year. With the permission of Police Commissioner Edward Tilghman, Simon gained complete access to be a fly on the wall with the unit, despite the objections of some of the department’s personnel. “A captain had a vote,” said Jay Landsman, then a homicide detective sergeant, who also lent his name and acting abilities to The Wire. “He took a poll of who wanted to do it and who didn’t. Twenty-eight out of thirty of us, including myself, voted against it. We worked murders in the ghetto. You lived in a gray area with that. It doesn’t always look pretty. Everything we did was legal, but it was kind of how were they going to interpret it? So, naturally, since they had a democratic election and we all voted against it, they gave him the go-ahead.”
Simon took a leave from The Baltimore Sun, becoming a “police intern” in January 1988. Members of the department playfully hazed him until he proved game for the task. He gained enough insight into the minds of the squad members that some later acknowledged that he had accurately captured words and feelings they had never verbally expressed. Houghton Mifflin published Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets in June 1991. The book, like the series on Williams, is peppered with scenes later extracted for The Wire. In it, Simon provides a penetrating portrait of how the detectives attempted to unravel murder cases and the humanistic toll it took on them. “It was daily that we told him if he printed anything we didn’t like, we would kill him,” Landsman said. “But he grinned at everything. As it turns out, we weren’t as bad as we thought we would be portrayed by David.”
Ed Burns, working another prolonged investigation, scarcely figured into the book. He was already grappling with the limits of how little one outside-the-box thinker could influence a lurching institution. “We were like family,” Landsman said. “But [Burns] was the biggest pain in the ass in the world. He once said everybody in police should have a bachelor’s or master’s degree. I said, ‘Then we’d all be like you. That would be hell, because you’re an asshole.’ It was all in fun, but he played to his own drummer. When you really needed something done, you had to just put your foot down on it. But he was tenacious as hell, a little bit gullible. Like that informant Bubbles that he had. I wouldn’t believe Bubbles as far as I could throw him. A broken clock is right at least twice a day, and I guess that’s the two times he gave Burns good information.”
Burns left the police force, having knocked his head against his superiors for much of his two decades as a patrolman, plainclothesman, and detective. He was about to start his new life as a middle school teacher when Simon proposed a collaboration. Simon’s book editor, John Sterling, suggested that the proper follow-up to Homicide would be observing a drug corner in Baltimore for a year and depicting the story’s previously undocumented other side of addicts. Burns agreed to contribute, and the two settled on the intersection of West Baltimore’s Fayette and Monroe. For weeks, Burns spent his days gaining the confidence of dealers and users, while Simon worked at the newspaper before taking a second leave. “The badge can get you under that yellow tape, but it can’t get you into their shooting galleries and places like that,�
�� Burns said. “I could sit down on the third floor of a shooting gallery with five or six guys pumping all around me, a prostitute working out in the bed over there, and have a conversation. Every once in a while, they take the syringe off [from behind] their ear, get a little hit, put it back on, and it would be a conversation where you knew that these people were aware of what was going on and how they had been sucked into this trap.” As he had in Homicide, Simon displayed a perceptive ear in deciphering the corner’s dialogue. He had to learn the appropriate jokes to laugh at, when to show concern, when to blend in, or when to pop up with a question. Homicide was heavily saturated with cop jargon—a red ball, a whodunit, dunkers. The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood was published in 1997 and introduced the reader to a new vocabulary, with words such as testers, the snake, and speedballs. The piercing narrative focused on the McCullough family and their efforts to function as a unit even as they dealt with the toll drugs extracted from them. Gary McCullough, the father, had been a businessman who fell into the throes of addiction once his marriage to Fran Boyd crumbled. Boyd, also addicted to drugs at the time, still tried mapping a better life for her sons. They included DeAndre McCullough, who, at the age of fifteen, had already begun peddling drugs. (DeAndre would go on to work on the set of The Wire and portray Lamar, Brother Mouzone’s dim associate, before his death at the age of thirty-five in 2012.) Some, including a few inside The Baltimore Sun, accused Simon of ennobling and romanticizing drug dealers and users. In truth, the book offered a voice to those who had been left behind as forgotten casualties of the war on drugs.
Simon originally did not think much of the deal when the Baltimore-born director Barry Levinson bought the rights to Homicide and plotted to develop it into a TV show for NBC. Simon passed on an offer to write the show’s pilot—he just hoped that a television show would help sell a few more copies of the book. He accepted a subsequent offer from showrunner Tom Fontana to write another episode and teamed with his college friend David Mills to author an episode that would premiere the show’s second season in 1994. The episode, titled “Bop Gun,” guest-starred Robin Williams and won a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Screenplay of an Episodic Drama. The experience left Simon unsated. Only half of what he and Mills had written, Simon estimated, prevailed in the final script. While Mills departed for Hollywood soon after, Simon returned to the newspaper, satisfied to spend the rest of his working days arguing with his feet up and bumming cigarettes off younger reporters. But the paper, his paper, started feeling more unfamiliar. It had been purchased in 1986 by the Times Mirror Company. Buyouts cut into the depth and experience of the newsroom. Simon felt that the new top editors placed an unwarranted emphasis on claiming journalism prizes rather than covering the mundane issues plaguing Baltimore.
All the Pieces Matter Page 1
