All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  DEBI YOUNG (MAKEUP DEPARTMENT HEAD): When we first started, he went to the craft services table. We were working in downtown Baltimore, and he went to get something to eat, and the security people stopped him because they didn’t know who he was. They thought he was somebody off the street.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): I was shuffling around and mumbling to myself and grabbing at the food, and Security chased me. They thought I was a junkie trying to steal stuff from craft service. This boy was ready to fuck me up. One of the other guys came like, “No, no. That’s one of our actors.” They were like, “You about to get knocked out. You look for real.” It was certain things like that that would happen that really kept me feeling like I was doing a good job or going in the right direction.

  STEVE EARLE (WAYLON): My scenes were meetings, and it was relatively early in my own recovery, so that part of it was really cool, because when you see those places in The Wire, they are places where meetings actually take place, and a lot of the extras are members of those home groups. Anonymity, you don’t tell anybody which one. There’s other people in there that are just extras. I have people in recovery come up to me all the time and say, “Those meetings are so real.” Usually, twelve-step meetings on television, you can tell that they aren’t that great and that’s why. It was funny. With the exception of one director that I worked with, we were always encouraged to say when something didn’t ring true. We were encouraged to speak up on those things, and the writers put it in.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): I call it my street Oscar. We were shooting a scene. I think it was that one time where I sat on a bench and I had no lines. I was planning whether I was going to stay clean and waiting for Sonja’s character to call me. I was walking back to my trailer. This junkie came, and he was just walking by me. He saw me and he said, “Yo, they giving out testers over there. You need this.” I guess my makeup was exceptionally beautiful that day.

  He gave me a handshake. At first, I didn’t know what he was doing. He’s just like, “They’re giving out testers.” Gave me a handshake and kept moving. When I looked at my hand, I had a little vial of some drugs. I was like, “Oh, shit. This is awesome.” I kid you not, walked in my trailer and sat there and pondered a little bit. This is one of the moments where I’m like this, If I really want to know how this feels, if I really want to be awesome in this role, maybe I should take this. See what it feels like. I did; I thought about taking it. Then I was like, Motherfucker, you’ll be good for one take and one take only. It will be over. You might fuck yourself up. Then it was like, If they find out you’re trying it, it might be all the love you got for your acting, that you’re not an actor. You copped out. You became a junkie. I didn’t take it, but I kept it for a little while.

  SETH GILLIAM (SGT. ELLIS CARVER): I had to watch the show with the subtitles on, even though I had the script, to understand what was happening on it. I seem to recall the first episode that Dom Lombardozzi and I were watching, and figuring, Wow, this show is really slow and boring. I don’t know how long this is gonna last.

  LAWRENCE GILLIARD JR. (D’ANGELO BARKSDALE): I didn’t think that it would get picked up. I’d never read anything like it before. When you’re reading scripts, there’s a formula. Anything that deviates from that formula, you think, Okay, this is an issue. There’s a problem. This isn’t going to work. You read a show like that, it’s kind of taking its time. It’s developing. It’s not trying to spoon-feed you the information too fast. It’s just taking its time. I’m reading it and I’m thinking, Who’s gonna watch this? We all want our entertainment quick, fast.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): The first reviews we got was from the Daily News, and they gave us half a star. Said we were too slow, a TV show that wants to be a book or a book trying to be a TV show. There’s too many characters. HBO’s under the wire with this new show.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): Initially, it was, “Don’t worry, they won’t get past the pilot.” And then it got past the pilot, and they said, “Don’t worry, they won’t do more than one season.” And then it was, “They won’t do more than two seasons.”

  In fact, David Simon had to fight for every season. It would have been canceled every season had David Simon not been so tenacious, so it wasn’t until Season Four or Five that we realized certain people enjoyed it, lawyers and gangbangers, but no one else. It was more obvious in America, but in the UK, I’d just come home after each shoot, and no one had ever heard of it. It was only in the fifth season, I walked into my local store and someone recognized me and I thought, Oh God, people are watching it.

  It was not like any show that had come before. I was aware of that and aware of also how special the writing was, but I was so, so scared of it and so sort of concerned to get it right, to get the action right. I suppose that was my main consideration. I didn’t really care how special it was as long as I didn’t fuck up, but, really, in terms of it being popular or watched by anyone, that wasn’t apparent for years. I remember for the first two or three years, I wasn’t aware that anyone was watching it. Not many people were watching it, and whenever I went home, people back in England said, “What are you doing at the moment?” I said, “I’m doing this little show that you wouldn’t have heard of,” and sure enough, they hadn’t.

  JOE CHAPPELLE (DIRECTOR/CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): We had a cast meeting, when all the cast members come and you sit at the table and everybody reads their part and you go through it. David and Bob were there, but they had left the room, and so then the cast turned to me. They hadn’t seen anything yet. It was Episode Six, so they’d been shooting, and the pilot hadn’t aired yet. But I had seen rough cuts of like the first two or three episodes, and the cast was like, “Is this show working?” They had no idea if this whole concept would work, because it was so dense and it was so layered. Nobody had really seen anything like this in television. The cast was questioning whether it was all working. I said, “Guys, it’s working. Stick with it. You’re going to be fine.”

  WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): I definitely thought it was done. I was like, “Oh man. Damn. This shit.” Because you weren’t accustomed to it. We’re accustomed to it now. Now everyone’s like, “Oh, an anthology show that goes on? Okay, I understand it now. A show that changes every season? Oh, okay. A different case every season?” They understand it now.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): Nobody wanted to let HBO down. We wanted to be a hit show. We wanted to be big. We assumed we were going to be big because it was HBO. Everything they do is big. We were happy and even shocked that this is a big fucking cast. It’s a lot of black people. We haven’t seen this many black people on-screen since A Different World. This is awesome. We also were like, “This is really slow.” When we saw the pilot, we only had that little pilot testing. We thought that show wasn’t getting picked up, because it’s too slow. TV doesn’t move like this. Everybody in TV world, in La La Land, they know Law & Order. You catch the bad guy at the end. It’s all wrapped up. This is some slow-talking shit. They’re going to hate this shit.

  At the same time, we’re watching shit like The Shield. That shit is a hundred miles an hour. There’s action every five minutes on The Shield. We’re like, “This show is going to suck. They’re not going to pick it up. Hope everybody didn’t spend that money, because it’s over. It’s a one-episode job. Now back to the grind.” A lot of us felt that way. When the show got picked up, we were shocked. Truly. We believe this show got picked up—or I believe this show got picked up—because I just thought HBO is making so much money. Sex and the City taking in money. Six Feet Under is nominated all the fucking time. HBO was like, “We’re not going to be a network where we’re going to have all these shows with white people. We need a show with some black people in it, so that people don’t buzz us and say, ‘What about diversity?’ We got a show with all these black people. Fuck it
. Let’s do it. Let’s just pick it up and see how it does. In the meantime, we’re paying attention to The Sopranos and all this shit.” We got picked up, and it was off and running. It always felt like we weren’t the show that HBO was thinking about. We always felt like we were about to get canned.

  CHRIS ALBRECHT (CHAIRMAN AND CEO, HBO): We were trying to distinguish ourselves from what else was on television. We were a paid channel. It had to be worth paying for [and] needed to be something different. Certainly, on the comedy side, with stand-up comics and with stand-up comedians, having black artists on the channel was always something that was well received. I always thought there was a real valuable voice in that, that it was important to include in whatever we were doing. Honestly, to me, it was just the quality of the work, the quality of what was on the page, and the fact that I thought, We’re the only place that could do this. No one else will ever do this. When you got something that’s good and that no one else would ever do, I think you just take the leap.

  BRIAN ANTHONY WILSON (DET. VERNON HOLLEY): It was so urban and so dark, physically, literally, and figuratively. I remember the first day I shot. You normally have set decorations, but we shot in an alley that had actual crack vials there. They weren’t put there by Props. It was an alley that had crack vials in it. You didn’t have to dress it. I was, “Wow, isn’t that deep? Life imitating art, and vice versa.”

  VINCENT PERANIO (PRODUCTION DESIGNER): I picked the right neighborhoods. I know Baltimore. I’ve lived here all my life. I’m not afraid of any neighborhoods. I’ve been down every alley in this city. So, pretty much, when David talks about places, I know what he’s talking about. The story is about more West Baltimore than East Baltimore. East Baltimore is different than West Baltimore, even though there’s a lot of crime in both. East Baltimore is the typical row houses. There are blocks and blocks of these row house façades. It’s very graphic. And it’s even more graphic in that there’s no trees in that part of the city. It’s just cement, asphalt, and brick. That’s all you see, and when you walk in the alleys, it’s jungle. I love that contrast, and I love the bleakness of it.

  Also, I like the lighting. In so many vacant houses where we were filming, we’re filming in a natural light or making it look like natural light, because it didn’t have electricity. Actually, some of the lighting to me was almost like a painting from the past, like from the seventeenth century, a Rembrandt look about it, the darkness of the house and the sunlight searing through the boarded-up windows. I think the show was bleak and beautiful in the way that looking at ruins in a ruined civilization are.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): I’m from Sheffield, which is quite similar to Baltimore in a way in that it was a formerly industrial powerhouse, but it lost its industry, which happened to Baltimore as well. I grew up in the seventies and eighties, when Sheffield was in economic depression. All the steelworks were closed down, and there was no new industry replacing it. There was a lot of unemployment. It was quite similar to Baltimore, but the difference was that Baltimore was hot and sunny, and so anywhere that was sunny, when you come from England or certainly from Northern England, seems to be incredibly affluent and well off.

  When I got to Baltimore and we went down the beautiful row houses and those streets in the hot, bright sunshine and blue skies, David Simon even—lots of people—kept saying, “Isn’t it terrible?” There’s shooting galleries and there was empty houses and a bit of derelict buildings, and I thought, No, I think it’s great. You should see Sheffield. I told that story in Sheffield, and it didn’t go down very well.

  MICHAEL KOSTROFF (MAURICE “MAURY” LEVY): The Wire gets you on Episode Three, because David Simon is a very artful and gradual storyteller. He tells stories the way a novel unfolds, and so it’s very easy to watch the first episode and go, “Okay, and…?”

  ERNEST DICKERSON (DIRECTOR): The show really plays like a novel. You can’t just tune in any time and know what’s going on. You have to pretty much watch it from the beginning. It is like reading a book. I like that. I wasn’t too crazy with the way American television was going, where you had the hour-long series and the conflict happens and it’s totally resolved within an hour. I like the idea that this was a serial, that it was stretched out over time and it gave the characters a lot of time to develop. It felt more like life. That’s one of the things I loved about it. Plus, I love the fact that it was shot on the streets of Baltimore and that it was very, very gritty.

  CAROLYN STRAUSS (PRESIDENT, HBO ENTERTAINMENT): If you go back and you look at that pilot, there’s a lot in that pilot that’s obscure. There’s a lot of things yet to be revealed. Things that aren’t stated out loud. Things that aren’t shouted. The Wire, about the fourth show, you’re like, “Oh, yeah. I’m in this.” You give it a couple episodes, and I would say, for most of the shows that I did that were really good shows, the pilot’s good but there’s a couple episodes and then you really lock down. It’s a slow unfolding of complicated people, and it takes a while.

  DEIRDRE “DEDE” LOVEJOY (ASST. STATE’S ATTY. RHONDA PEARLMAN): My first day of shooting on the series—after the pilot had been done and the show had been picked up—happened to be the scene at Rhonda Pearlman’s house, where McNulty shows up and they wind up having sex. We were filming that sex scene in a house that had been picked to be Rhonda Pearlman’s home location. It was Season One, so nobody had certainly seen the show, and we were on the second floor, in the bedroom of this house that these people had rented to this HBO TV show. Unfortunately, the people were still there on the third floor, with their little child. They had just decided to stay on the top floor and let the crew have their bottom two floors. We were shooting the scene, and we had a Hungarian director who was very, very vocal and screaming things like, “Louder! Louder!” Then, he, many times, screamed really loud, “Climax, now!” Then, you have to wait a little after he is done talking to actually do it, so that they can actually cut the sound in. Anyway, this went on, and these people were listening to this. Apparently, they decided that night that their house was no longer available as a location for this trash show because they thought we were shooting porn. Everybody got such a kick out of it that the crew, as a wrap gift, made tee shirts that said, “The Wire, Season One: Climax Now! Louder!”

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): The camera was coming around the bed behind us. We couldn’t see where it was. He said, “When the camera gets to your left shoulder, will you climax?” I said, “Look, I can’t see the camera. I don’t know when it’s coming, and I’m concentrating on Dede.” He said, “All right. I’ll shout.” We’d get into it, and the camera would be coming around, and he’s Hungarian and he shouted, “Climax now!” We all fell about laughing. Yeah, that was the funniest sex scene I think we did. That was bloody funny.

  PETER MEDAK (DIRECTOR): That love scene was great. It was very sexy and very clean. When I do love scenes in movies, to take the curse off the nudity, I always shoot it in a circular way, around the bed, so the duvet kind of semi-hides what is going on. It’s always so much better with love scenes to be very suggestive and beg everybody not to cover themselves up, because it’s better to be completely naked when you make a love scene, and I can avoid showing both of the people very easily, but if they’re strapped up, the ladies, with all kinds of padding and things on the nipples, it always shows and it restricts you. It’s much better just [to] hide it with the movement of the camera, and then it becomes very sexy. That really is one of my best memories of that episode.

  DEIRDRE “DEDE” LOVEJOY (ASST. STATE’S ATTY. RHONDA PEARLMAN): I had done one day on the pilot, and Dominic is literally lying on top of me; we’re completely naked. He’s got the little bag that covers the male parts, and I’ve got the pasties on; they’re covering the female parts. He is lying on top of me, and he says, “Oh, this is weird. Last week, I was on top of Renée Zellweger.” He had just shot the movie Chicago. I was like, “Oh, thanks for that. Th
at was really helpful to me.”

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): What an asshole. Did I say that? Dear, oh dear. What a jerk. It was actually true. In Chicago, that’s all I did. I came on, had sex with Renée, and then she shot me. Then Chicago starts. That was a hilarious scene.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): He has that kind of personality where he can say things and you just sort of go, “How did you get away with that?” I once stood behind him on an elevator—this was back in the early days, before he was married. We had a beautiful day player in the scene, and she was only there for the day, then she was taking the train back to New York. I stood behind him. He didn’t know I was behind him. It was a crowded elevator, and he’s only got this moment. She’s headed for the teamster van. He just worked a scene with her, but there was no time while they were working. You know what his pickup line was? She turned toward him and she said, “You know, I just broke up with my boyfriend.” And he looked at her and he went, “Really?” And so, later on, when she missed her train back to New York, I was like, “That’s all you needed? ‘Really?’ ” I think for the next two years I just kept going up to him whenever he was talking bullshit, “Really?” That was my code for “Fuck you.”

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): That guy, they just flocked, and it’s the most incredible thing you’ve ever seen. It’s like, the PAs [Production Assistants] would bump into telephone poles, that kind of thing.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): I do think Americans are particularly forgiving with people’s accents. I mean, if you listen to Mel Gibson in any of his heyday films, his American accent is terrible, but he got away with it.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): David and Dominic spent a lot of time: “Now, say it like po-lice.” “Police.” “No, po-lice.”

  PETER GERETY (JUDGE DANIEL PHELAN): Dominic had a trailer as his dressing room, and he said, “Pete, come here. Come on in my dressing room, my trailer, all right?” I said, “Yeah, what’s up?” He said, “I need you to listen to me. I’ve got to get this Baltimore accent down,” because, of course, he’s British. He actually does a really good American accent, but I sort of sat with him, and he just worked through stuff for a couple of days, just to get his Baltimore American accent closer. Not that I was all that great with it, but I think I helped him a little bit.