All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  JIM TRUE-FROST (DET. ROLAND “PREZ” PRYZBYLEWSKI): For all I knew, it was just another cop show. I had worked a single episode of Homicide, and Clark and David and Bob all remembered me from that.

  UTA BRIESEWITZ (CINEMATOGRAPHER): When Bob Colesberry called, I had just moved to Los Angeles from New York and also had changed agencies. At one point, I got a call saying I had an interview for The Wire, this HBO pilot. I seem to remember my agent saying, “We got the in, but don’t get your hopes up.” When I had my meeting with Bob, Bob told me that he was the producer that [had] brought Michael Ballhaus to America and then kind of hooked him up with Martin Scorsese. Of course, I was very impressed by that story, because Michael Ballhaus was the cinematographer that German cinematographers looked up to. Everybody was aware of who Michael Ballhaus was. Just taking that away from the meeting, I felt like, “Oh, cool. I met the producer who brought Michael Ballhaus to the States.”

  At the same time, Bob Colesberry also kind of let me know that he considers himself somebody who can find new talent and bring people up. At that point, I didn’t really apply that too much to myself. I really thought I was just getting a meeting as a courtesy to somebody at my agency and that’s all. I had no expectations. The entire time, Bob passionately was talking about the show. He asked almost nothing, no information from me. I didn’t get to say anything, but I remember walking out of the meeting, calling my agent, like, “I think this was the worst meeting I ever had, because I didn’t really get to say anything.” In retrospect, I learned that when a producer passionately talks about the show, it kind of indicates that they already made up their mind about you and what they are doing right now is trying to sell the show to you.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): I was off to Baltimore. We wasn’t going to start shooting for three weeks or so. I had time to really get on top of this and doing this character justice. Not knowing about that addiction, that’s when I started doing my homework. I started doing what I thought would best serve me understanding what this character’s going through and why he’s making the certain choices that he makes. That was exciting. That’s when all your acting classes and all your teachers—all that stuff you can put into practice. You can go, What’s my objective? How do I get into this person’s head?

  You start doing your homework. It was awesome. It was exciting to find different ways. I found out just talking to people. I talked to a ton of people. This woman named Fran Boyd was out there in Baltimore and she helped me out a lot. She was a recovered addict. She was the one they based the character on in The Corner, the miniseries. She was dope. We really hit it off. She had no apologies and took me around all over Baltimore talking to people in the midst of their addiction or coming out of their addiction or fighting their addiction. I was looking for a gimmick. I was just trying to find little movements that I can do that would just automatically go, “Oh, he’s a junkie.” I didn’t find it. Everybody was different. It got me a little scared. They were talking to me like, “Please don’t fuck it up. This is heroin. We’re not crackheads. There’s a difference between a crackhead and a meth head. There’s a difference between a meth head and a heroin addict.” I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me? I watch movies. They all act the same to me.”

  I got deeper into understanding not about the addiction, but about the person. I started looking at myself like, What do I do? One day, I was in New York and I was going somewhere and I saw these people standing outside smoking cigarettes. I think it was one of those zero-degree days. I was like, “What the fuck would make somebody come outside and smoke a cigarette outside in the cold?” I started going, Wait, you know what? They do whatever it takes to get that fucking nicotine. That’s the same thing as Bubbles getting his heroin fix.

  What do I do every day? I found out. I started studying myself. When I come in the house, no matter what back then, I would turn on the TV. That’s the first thing I would do. I would drop my keys, turn on the TV, then go about my business. I was like, Why? Why do I turn on the TV? Then I made a list of things I do every day. I always drink Coca-Cola. I was a Coca-Cola fiend. I didn’t like water. I was horny. I was trying to make love to my wife, or my lady at the time, every day. For about thirty days, I didn’t do any of that.

  When you go in your house like day seven and you don’t turn on that TV, you start fiending. You’re like, Damn, I just want to see a commercial. I just want to see who won the game, the Knicks or something. I couldn’t turn on the TV. I’d be pacing around the living room trying to think about, What if I turned on the TV just once and turn it off real quick? I started building this need and writing down how I act when I’m agitated, or I’d be mad at myself when I couldn’t have Coca-Cola. I started writing all that stuff down, and that helped me build the desire that I thought Bubbles would have every time he woke up. You start by getting high.

  There was a couple of movies—there was two movies that I saw. I never subscribed to watching other actors, but I was in New York and I just wanted to see certain ideas and feelings. I watched The Panic in Needle Park, with Al Pacino. With him, with that character, you just saw him. Every day, he was trying to get high. His character would be looking on the floor because he might find cigarettes or something. Lady Sings the Blues was the other one. I remember watching that with my mom and dad. Richard Pryor had this small part. He was such a cool dude, funny. He was a junkie. He got high, but he was functional, played the piano. When he died, it was heartbreaking. It was awesome that he wasn’t in the movie that much and he was a cool guy, a nice guy, just a down-to-earth guy. He just had an addiction. I fell in love with him. I was like, That’s what I want Bubbles to be. I want Bubbles to be a human first, addict second. I wasn’t trying to play the addiction. I was going to play the person.

  LANCE REDDICK (LT. CEDRIC DANIELS): We all had an opportunity, at least the cops, to spend time with other cops. I had to spend a day with a narcotics lieutenant. At the time, he was also going back to school at night, at Johns Hopkins, to get his MBA. I later found out from David that that’s a fairly common thing for cops to move up the promotion ladder: to get advanced degrees.

  Two things that I remember most about that guy were how he talked about leadership. I remember him saying, “In a lot of ways, you have to treat people like your children. You have to be firm with them, but you have to be compassionate.” He also said that whenever he would go in [to arrest people] with waves of his people, go in front, so that they knew that he was doing it from the front.

  The other story that he told was telling, because that was when I started to understand the mentality of what it is to be a cop. They had figured out that there was a dirty cop on the force. They raided the guy’s house. He was the first person on the guy. Apparently, the guy went to reach in his dresser, and he thought it was for a gun, and he said, “Please, reach for it, because I would love nothing more than to blow you away, because I fucking hate dirty cops.” That stuck with me, because not being a kid from the streets and not having grown up around law enforcement, I realized just how much there has to be underneath the surface, because that’s the world that you’re dealing with. You have to have that level of savagery and ferocity that you have to be able to call up in an instant and be able to tame and put away in an instant.

  SETH GILLIAM (SGT. ELLIS CARVER): The ride-along was terrifying for me. It started off with him giving us bulletproof vests. And I thought, Well, this can’t be good. And then, at one point, Dom [Lombardozzi] and I were sitting in the backseat. This is after he had already jumped out a couple of times, the officer—his name was Super Boy—and Parker, his partner, was still behind the wheel. But at one point, we’re driving along and the car suddenly stops and the doors slide open and they all jump out and start running to some people who they were trying to corner. We’re just sitting in the back of the car, both doors open, and I’m thinking, My head is going to explode at any moment. My head is going to explod
e at any moment. I’m sitting there protecting my head. I was sure that I was going to get shot in the head from behind. It was a bit of a rush at first. Aside from that end, it was pretty uneventful.

  Those guys went from zero to one hundred miles an hour in a moment’s notice. They’d be joking with each other and joking with each other, and in two seconds, the entire energy would change and shift among them. Then they had each other’s backs. It was very much working like a fine-tuned machine, in terms of being able to turn it on and turn it off. Also, the interactions that I saw them having with the people in the neighborhood—everybody knew Super Boy, and he would be jumping out and he would have his hand on his gun behind his side. Then things would just stop at one point, and it was like, “This guy’s pretty serious, because he knows who’s dangerous and who’s not at this point.”

  SONJA SOHN (DET. SHAKIMA “KIMA” GREGGS): Like most black folks who grew up in underserved areas, I did not have a positive view of the police. For me, that was my main obstacle to playing a cop at the time. I had to get over my own sort of early traumatic interactions with the police and what I had experienced. My early interactions with the police in my childhood were never positive, and that had affected me more deeply than I had imagined going into the show. I realized for me to play this character, I had to have some understanding of the motivations of good cops and what the motivation was for a good cop to become a cop. Kima was the good cop. She’s the moral compass of the police. For me to embody that, truthfully, as an actor, I have to be willing to understand that that kind of cop existed and how that kind of cop came into being.

  MELANIE NICHOLLS-KING (CHERYL): In my audition for the show, they had told me, the executive producers, not to be too upset that I wasn’t getting the chance to continue to read for Kima, because she was going to die. When I met Sonja and we were hanging out, I said, “I think it’s really horrible that they’re killing Kima off.” Then Sonja was like, “What? What are you talking about?” I was like, “Oh shit. That’s what they told me. I totally told them that it was a bad idea and how could you do that? You finally have two lesbian characters on a national show. How are you going to kill off one of those characters?” I would like to believe that it was because of me fighting for it that they didn’t kill her off.

  SONJA SOHN (DET. SHAKIMA “KIMA” GREGGS): She revealed that to me during the pilot, when I met her, thinking I already knew the information. It was a shock for me to learn that the character was actually slated to be killed off. For the first, I’d say, solid ten years of my acting career, I was always questioning the profession itself. I did not have a lot of respect for it. I had people coming to me during my poetry years, thinking that I was an actor because of the delivery of my poetry. For me, it was very offensive that you would think I could be involved in such a shallow business as the entertainment business and [that] I would even want to endeavor to choose a career that, at the time, I thought was so vain. It sent me into a questioning of the integrity of the producers, because I felt that if that was the case, then why not just tell me off the bat, just so I know? People get these jobs and you assume that you at least are going to have a year’s worth of work. You’re going to be a part of the full show, if you book a job as a series regular.

  This was the first show that I had booked, so I didn’t really understand the business side of these contracts at the time. I didn’t know at the time that, even though I was a series regular and I [had] signed the contract for five years, that they could actually kill me off at any time. That would be fully within their rights. Because I didn’t know that and had an expectation that I would be a part of the show as a series regular for the duration of the show, when it was introduced to me during the actual pilot that I’d be killed off, that ends up being a one-season recurring role. It’s not a series regular. I’ll have some episodes, and then I’m gone. Why not just present that to me from the beginning? Because I had come from a place of really struggling and meeting my bills at the time, I had felt some level of relief having booked a job. That’s why it came as such a shock. It was just like, Why not just be up front and tell me about it? For me, that signified to me the kind of bullshit about the corporate business world. I’ve always been a bit of the anti-establishment side of things. I had very radical opinions about capitalism and the corporate structure.

  For me, having people not being transparent, upfront about it, my anger really was based in that. My anger really came out of that, and then, because I felt like if these producers who were presenting the business side of things for me at this time, based on my limited knowledge of how the business worked, were of high integrity, then they would have been transparent with me about the information right off the bat. What means something to the people who are putting the show together is the show. They have a show and a vision that they’re trying to execute. For me, in not being transparent about that, it meant that there was no care or concern for the people involved, for the human aspect of what an actor who is booking a job and raising a family and making plans on how they need to move.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Carolyn [Strauss] was the one who said, “That character has legs. Don’t kill that character so quick.” She was wounded and not killed at the end of Season One, and Carolyn made compelling arguments about the show going forward and the need for a strong female lead on the cop side, that we were short on female leads and that it was a perspective that could allow us things that we otherwise would not have.

  Carolyn came back to Ed and I, and I remember saying, “Man, Carolyn really wants Kima to go on. What does that do to the show?” We trotted it out a little bit and said, “You know what? Okay. It doesn’t allow McNulty’s darkness to go as deep that he got her killed rather than wounded. It closes some doors to us dramatically and it opens others.”

  CAROLYN STRAUSS (PRESIDENT, HBO ENTERTAINMENT): I just thought she was a great character. Yeah, she was supposed to have an untimely demise. I think it boiled simply down to, I thought she could be really good for the rest of the storytelling. She could be really useful to him. It was just a different stripe. Number one, different from anybody else in the show, and number two, [different from] anything that we’ve seen before.

  The pilot’s complexity alarmed a number of the show’s actors, and they openly wondered among themselves who would watch it. Several figured that HBO would pass on picking the show up, and they expressed surprise when the network signed off on it relatively quickly—surprising especially when one thinks of the later impassioned pleas needed from David Simon to secure future seasons. David Simon and Bob Colesberry deliberated opening theme songs for weeks before Tom Waits’s “Way Down in the Hole” beat out John Hammond’s iteration of “Get Behind the Mule.” The show used a different version of the song each season, with the Blind Boys of Alabama recording the initial rendering. The Wire—beyond a hiccup involving the iconic orange couch following the filming of the pilot—was off, and premiered on June 2, 2002.

  The Wire’s first season hemmed loosely to the antiquated real-life wiretap investigation of Melvin Williams. It bypassed television’s traditional redemptive narrative for a thirteen-episode exposition on the futility of the war on drugs. The audience gained perspectives on characters ranging from high-ranking police officials, such as Dep. Commissioner Ervin Burrell (Frankie Faison) and Maj. William Rawls (John Doman), to low-level drug dealers such as Wallace (Michael B. Jordan) and Preston “Bodie” Broadus (J. D. Williams), to drug-addicts-turned-informants such as Reginald “Bubbles” Cousins (Andre Royo). Det. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) watches as D’Angelo Barksdale (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) escapes a murder conviction through witness intimidation orchestrated by Stringer Bell (Idris Elba). McNulty’s complaints to a judge infuriate his police superiors, who initiate a haphazard detail that is designed to superficially appease the judge. (In real life, Ed Burns said he had told the state’s attorney, who went to a judge, that the police department should be more pro
active in its investigations. “He called up the deputy commissioner, who in turn called my captain, who in turn screamed at me as I was walking out the door to go to work on that case,” Burns said. “Sure enough, at the end of the case we brought back, he was very, very happy, and then they tried to get rid of me.”) Largely through McNulty’s stubbornness and disregard for his future in the police department, the ragtag detail infiltrates the drug ring by using a wiretap and pager clones, as D’Angelo begins pondering the morality of a life spent dealing drugs. The case’s tentacles spread into the political spectrum, an area the police chain of command refuses to visit. The police command prematurely reels in the case once a cop is nearly killed in an undercover operation gone wrong, with elusive kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) sentenced to a light charge and Stringer left free.

  Critical reception initially varied. Those who viewed The Wire’s singular episodes as chapters in a novel appreciated the show. “The Wire is compelling in its complexity, heart-rending in its humanity, and surprising in the ways it finds to spin the conventions of cop drama,” wrote Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune. After reviewing five episodes for the New York Daily News, David Bianculli described the show as interesting but slow. “But without characters to care for, much less root for, I’m not exactly burning with curiosity—the way I am with most of HBO’s other series,” he wrote. The New York Post’s Adam Buckman ventured further: “If I were from there, I’d really be offended,” he declared. “As it is, I’m not from Baltimore, so I’m put off only by [Simon’s] new show, which demonstrates, if nothing else, that even the vaunted HBO can cough up a dud once in a while.”