All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): Idris is a big man, yeah. Yeah, he can drink his drink. No, there was quite a lot of that. I mean, everyone was away from home. In my case, I was really missing home. I was really missing my daughter, so you tend to go out at night, and there were some titanic drinks and boozers among the cast and the crew, the crew particularly, and then, of course, once the show was a bit better known, every bar Wendell and I went into, we’d be bought whiskey constantly. People would be constantly sending over Jameson, and I still get that now, so it was hard to stay sober.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): When Seth got in, he was like Rage Against the Machine. You couldn’t fuck with him. When Seth got drinking, he loved you so much he’ll punch you in the face. “I’ll punch you in the face, and you punch me back, because we love each other.” He was one of those dudes.

  SETH GILLIAM (SGT. ELLIS CARVER): One time, we were out with Wendell and Sonja and Andre and a few other people. I wasn’t paying attention, but I went over, and Wendell was weeping. I was like, What did Andre say? And he was weeping because he had offended Andre and he didn’t realize it. And he was feeling very badly about it, and he was apologizing to him. And Andre was looking at him like, You fat fucker. And I looked at Andre and said, “Where is your compassion?”

  DOUG OLEAR (FBI SPEC. AGENT TERRANCE “FITZ” FITZHUGH): For the most part, I was hanging out with the cop side [of the actors], but they were all partiers. As soon as they cut or Friday night came, we were partying till six in the morning, and then you get a couple hours sleep and go on set. It was a party atmosphere.

  I had [actual friends in the FBI], and I’d invite them all the time, like on Friday night, and they would always get so pissed off at me. Dom and some of those guys were paranoid, too, because they were much more in the limelight than I was. Going out and getting hammered, doing the fun stuff we’d do, a lot of it was illegal. You don’t bring an FBI agent. I had to stop doing that after a while. Although, I’ve got to tell you. The FBI agents were just as rowdy. It was crazy. Behind the scenes, they’re humans.

  FREDRO STARR (MARQUIS “BIRD” HILTON): My niggas, Hassan, J.D., and I went down to Baltimore, and I hadn’t seen them in a while. We all blazed in my room. The whole floor smelled like weed, and HBO told me to move hotels. I did, and they blazed up the room again. I think that’s why I got wrote off the show real quick.

  I do think they probably thought I was a handful or maybe too much to handle. Maybe. I only did two episodes. Then they was like, “You’re going to jail,” or whatever. The writers wrote that because they were writing it every week, so they could have wrote that in: “All right, let’s just send him up to jail forever. He’ll come out of jail when Jesus comes home.” Something like that. I think maybe that might have played a part. Or maybe that was just the way they wanted Bird to be, a hit man, in and out.

  Back in the days—I’m not going to lie—I was just doing a whole lot of other stuff. It was on my part, not even thinking. Whatever. Fuck it. We’re going to blaze the hotel up. In corporate America, you can’t do that.

  SETH GILLIAM (SGT. ELLIS CARVER): [Lombardozzi and I] both ended up talking to a couple of different police officers that said, because of the amount of time they spent together and because of how much they had come to rely on each other, that they could basically finish each other’s sentences, that they were more like married couples in terms of how much they knew about each other and how familiar they were with each other. Dom and I wanted to have that sense on-screen, that we knew each other real well. And to do that, living together seemed to be the best way. And also, we didn’t figure the show would go on very long, and it was cheaper to do so.

  DOMENICK LOMBARDOZZI (DET. THOMAS “HERC” HAUK): It was Season One, so we both rent an apartment together. Seth is really heavy into [the football video game] Madden. I kind of played. He turned me into a maniac with it. We kind of left our door open for whoever wanted to come and play, so Corey [Parker Robinson] would come. Michael K., Andre, and Hassan Johnson. There were two types of groups. The other one was with Clarke Peters. They were very bohemian, which we enjoyed. Clarke Peters, I love him. I used to love his house. It was just a different vibe there.

  CLARKE PETERS (DET. LESTER FREAMON): We were given a stipend for each year, and it just seemed to make sense that, if the amount of money that you’re spending on rent is equal to the amount of money that you could be spending on a mortgage, what would you do? I am, after all, Lester Freamon. Follow the money, buddy.

  NEAL HUFF (CHIEF OF STAFF MICHAEL STEINTORF): I was living with Clarke Peters and Reg E. Cathey on North Calvert. I basically took over Jim True-Frost’s room after he was gone. Reg E. would always get recognized in Baltimore when we were walking. They would kind of say, “Oh my God. I love you.” They would then turn to me and do a double take and go, “I hate you. I hated you.” If I’m ever recognized for The Wire, that’s generally the second sentence. “I fucking hated you, man.”

  CLARKE PETERS (DET. LESTER FREAMON): It was a five-bedroom house. I myself don’t need five bedrooms, despite the fact that my son and wife were coming out. That still left three bedrooms that were just there. People were coming in and out. Some of them were there for weeks on end, sometimes just for a couple days. Anytime someone came on in, like John Doman or Jim [True-Frost], they’d hole up at the Tremont. I said, “Look, whatever you’re paying at Tremont, pay me half of that. Come stay with me.” The one who took it up first of all was Reg E. Cathey, in the fourth season. Reg E. and I was pretty much the mainstay of that house for those last two seasons. That helped.

  I wasn’t looking to make money. I was just looking to make sure that we all had a place to stay, and that was that. The good thing about it is that for those first two years that we had it, we didn’t have a television. All we had was a radio, guitar, some painting, a couple of bottles of wine, a fireplace, and conversation. What had happened was that we wound up finding ourselves organically creating this little salon kind of society, where we would read books and sit down and talk. We spent our time like that. It was really very edifying. I really miss that.

  NEAL HUFF (CHIEF OF STAFF MICHAEL STEINTORF): Like the first night I was there, like ten a.m. one morning, the sound of an alto saxophone was coming out of Reg E.’s bedroom. I came out of my room, and the door was open. There was Reg E. playing his saxophone in his underwear, ten a.m. in the morning, just loving life.

  REG E. CATHEY (NORMAN WILSON): We would paint. Clarke’s an amazing painter, and he would make everyone do a painting before the year was up. We painted. I played the sax and the guitar. Clarke plays the piano and the guitar, and he was learning the bass. We grew grapes and made wine. We came up with five different film ideas, because there was no TV. We would just talk, with lots of wine drinking, lots of music.

  JOHN DOMAN (DEP. COMMR. FOR OPERATIONS WILLIAM A. RAWLS): He’s quite an artist. In the basement of the house, he had an art studio, and we’d all go down there. We’d all have our own paintings going.

  CLARKE PETERS (DET. LESTER FREAMON): The only TV that came up was actually [Dominic West’s]. That’s because he needed someplace to store his from one season to the other, and that stayed downstairs in the cellar. I think maybe somewhere in the fifth season, we put a DVD, used it as a monitor.

  NEAL HUFF (CHIEF OF STAFF MICHAEL STEINTORF): With Clarke, we had a lot of really, really great meals.

  CLARKE PETERS (DET. LESTER FREAMON): A healthy body. Mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind is a healthy body.

  The Wire’s second season proved disorienting for the few viewers who had previously tuned in. Prior storylines were nudged to the background. David Simon had pledged from the beginning to take The Wire beyond the norms of a typical cop show and planned to deliver on that promise. With Season 2, the series’ focus largely shifted, a dynamic that persisted in subsequent seasons. The diminished camera time rattled the show’
s established actors who had enjoyed their first taste of mild success, including Andre Royo and Michael K. Williams. They noticed, as did the tiny loyal audience, that their time had mostly been bequeathed to white actors and characters. Simon preached patience to the original cast. The second season would be the most watched of the series, although its ratings still lagged severely behind HBO mainstays such as Sex and the City.

  Season 2 highlighted the choking death of America’s blue-collar working class and how a son could no longer necessarily trail in his father’s footsteps in a postindustrial world. The series told the story through the decaying Baltimore waterfront, its unions, and the Sobotka family. In order to increase lobbying funds for a port expansion, Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), the leader of the dockers’ union, begins smuggling goods for a shadowy figure known as “the Greek.” His erratic son, Chester “Ziggy” Sobotka (James Ransone), and his nephew Nick Sobotka (Pablo Schreiber) turn to drug slinging as their opportunities to earn money legitimately dry up. Lester Freamon’s line of “All the pieces matter” became apparent as the show progressed. Maj. Stanislaus Valchek (Al Brown) appears sparingly in the show’s inaugural season but becomes a central figure in Season 2. His petty argument with Frank Sobotka drives the plot and reestablishes the Major Crimes detail. McNulty, reassigned to a harbor boat, finds a floating body and links it to the deaths of thirteen more young women found in a can meant to be smuggled off Sobotka’s dock. The season ends in the tragic dismantling of the Sobotkas, with Ziggy charged with murder and Frank killed after he agrees to become an informant and betray the Greek.

  The season hit home for Rafael Alvarez, who came up with Simon as a young reporter at The Baltimore Sun. Alvarez’s father had worked as a tugboat engineer, his grandfather as a shipyard worker. The expectation had been that he would always have a job at Bethlehem Steel if all else failed. Alvarez opted for a buyout from the paper in 2001. Shortly after, Simon asked if he wanted to collaborate on a book about the docks and the death of the working class. Alvarez passed, as he was already planning to write a book on his family’s maritime history, and Simon sold the show to HBO. Alvarez spent two years on the ships after leaving the paper, then joined The Wire as a staff writer. He saw his grandfather and father as Frank Sobotkas, people who worked their tails off so that he did not have to work with his hands. “I knew that this had been on David’s mind for a long time,” Alvarez said. “I knew that he wanted to somehow document the death of organized labor in a city like Baltimore, and I was thrilled when he decided to use the docks as the vehicle to tell that story.”

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): To be honest, I thought, if they give me thirteen episodes and I get to tell a singular story about the drug war in Season One and they cancel me, at least it’ll be a single season. Until they came back to me somewhere in the middle of the first season, after they’d seen five, six episodes, and said, “We’re picking you up for another season,” that was when I was like, Okay, now I’m going to build a city. I didn’t know I was going to get more than the one. And then I remember going back to HBO and saying, “We’re going to go away from this. We’re going to go to the port.” That was after I talked to Ed, and I remember Chris Albrecht saying, “Was that the plan?” to Carolyn Strauss, and she was just like, “It is now.”

  CHRIS ALBRECHT (CHAIRMAN AND CEO, HBO): Then, at the end of the first season, we went back and told David, “Hey, you got to keep some of these characters alive and let’s see if we can do a totally different thing, but we can’t just drop this story.” He then went off and figured out a way to have them both be parallel, with a slight interweaving of them.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I think Ed will confess he didn’t want to do the second season. He was like, “We just built this universe. We can do more with it.” And I’m like, “Yeah, and we will. But if we stay tight on the Barksdales second season, then the show is only going to be about the drug thing, and it’s going to veer into that us-against-them soap opera of a cop show.” I said, “We have a chance to build a city.”

  To credit Ed, he fought and he fought and he fought. Then, the first moment that we started touring the port and talking to people and meeting the union guys, he was like, “This is great and I have ideas.” That’s Ed. You’ve got to lead him sometimes and go, “We’re doing this, Ed. I’m taking you by your shoulders. This is what we’re doing. I already sold it to HBO. Let’s make the best of it.” Then he goes in, and you turn around and he’s in the middle of its guts, chewing. That’s who he is.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): We were wondering where McNulty would end up. I said he would end up on the boat, and the reason I said that was my dad bought a twenty-two-foot old wooden boat. I’m surprised it even stayed afloat. He would take us out when we were kids, to go fishing in the Chesapeake Bay. By about one o’clock, the water stops rocking. It just bakes. It’s hotter than hell. That damn engine wouldn’t start most of the time. We had to have someone tow us in. There’s a diesel smell. I hate boats. I said, “That’s where they’re sending him, to the boats.” And that gave us the docks. It was pretty easy after.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Season Two, I knew I wanted to go to the death of work. Because where do these drug corners come from? They come from deindustrialization. Our economy no longer needs mass employment. The only factory in town that’s still hiring and is always hiring are the corners. You can see the need for it, to show the economy shrugging people off. But did I know they were going to be port workers? No. In fact, the first thing I thought of was, I wonder if they’ll let us do an assembly line. Because I had in my mind the Blue Collar movie with Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto and Richard Pryor. As it happened, the place that let us in to do a working-class movie was the port. It was state-run, and they were for the film industry and they wouldn’t let us into other factories, so it ends up being a port. Did I have an idea that we were going to do a working-class story? Yeah. And that we were going to have a guy as the local union president? Yeah. But did I think it was going to be the United Auto Workers at first? My first thought about it? That’s the adaptation that happens.

  NINA K. NOBLE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): We initially were turned down by the port. They had concerns about safety. It’s not that long after 9/11, and they had a lot of different Homeland Security measures changing all their guidelines every day, so that was a nuisance for them, and they didn’t want to be involved. The way we got permission was we rented a section of the port, an unused part of the port in Locust Point, and built a set there. By doing that, we became tenants, and I was able to start attending meetings of the private-sector ports association as a tenant. By attending those meetings, I learned that a lot of the concerns that we have about making our days work and staying on budget were concerns that they also had, so I was able to forge some relationships there that made it possible for us to film.

  RAFAEL ALVAREZ (STAFF WRITER): My dad was a tugboat engineer in Baltimore Harbor for thirty years. A lot of it, I was reliving my childhood.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): We had a young assistant who had an in at the docks. He took us down there.

  NORMAN KNOERLEIN (RESEARCHER): There are checkers and then there are longshoremen. They are two different things, completely two different roles, and we really focused on the checkers, but we couldn’t get the checkers to talk to us. Finally, we set up a meeting where it was all the producers, all the writers, everybody was in the room: Simon, Burns, everybody. I was literally the last person in the line, just jotting down notes. The head of the union came down, shook everybody’s hands. Then he looks at me and he goes, “Are you Phyllis’s son?” I said, “Yeah.” He’s like, “You can have whatever you want. You guys have complete access.”

  This guy’s Walt Benewicz. He went to high school with my mom, and my mom is this sweet, sweet person. They ran in the same circles, so when Walt’s mom died, my mom wrote a letter saying how much Walt’s mom meant to my mom and how friendly they were. Because of that, Walt
Benewicz gave us complete access to information.

  DAVID INSLEY (DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY): Everybody was invested in the show. Most of the crew was there from day one and lasted all the way through. They were all invested in it. They looked forward to it. They did whatever. They went beyond doing whatever was needed to make the story, because we all felt like it was a mission, something important to get across to the viewing populace.

  LAURA SCHWEIGMAN (SCRIPT SUPERVISOR): One thing that I loved about working with David is that we work really, really hard. He works just as hard right next to you. He works just as hard, if not harder than you do. When Bob [Colesberry] and David and Ed would be in there in the preliminary meetings, talking and working, just to kind of be a fly on the wall and see how passionate they were was incredible. You’re telling this story. You’re telling the story of someone’s life. You’re telling the story of a community, and that’s different than “Wouldn’t it be cool if that happened?” It’s totally different than a lot of other things, like, “Oh, this will be cool. That would be interesting.” It’s like, “No, this is a story we need to tell,” and it always related back to life experiences or things that they knew about or were involved in, which helped made it real.

  I remember we’re doing this Russian piece once, and we’re trying to get this Russian translation. The people that we were talking to for the Russian translation weren’t getting what we were saying. I’m like, “Well, I live in Pikesville. Right next to where I live was this Russian neighborhood and Russian bakeries.” We needed to know how to call somebody a pussy. The guy couldn’t get it. The researcher, initially, he’s like thinking, “Oh, it’s a cat.” “No. That’s not what I mean.” He couldn’t get what we were saying. I took the script and I drove to the bakery. First, I talked to the main manager, and he wouldn’t talk to me about it because he was embarrassed. Then, there was an older lady, and she was like, “Oh. Oh.” She’s going to get whomever; it was like her daughter or her niece in the back.