I remember walking on set a little grumpy. I had a little attitude. I talked to [David Simon] and I asked the question, “What’s this season about?” He had some interesting things to say. His point of view, which I believe to be correct, he was like, “Listen. I cannot tell a drug story. I cannot tell a story about the drug game and it be all about black people. That’s wrong. I feed into the stupid lying stereotype that the industry has been doing for years, in that drugs is a black problem. It’s not. It’s not. I need to tell this angle, because white people are involved in this shit, too. This is not a race problem. It’s a human problem. I don’t want this show to look at it and just be a drug game and a violence game and it be all black people.” I agreed with that, but it took me a minute.
MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): Season Two, I was so ignorant to the game with David, his sophisticated style of writing and his take, which is why he even got into show business in the first place. It wasn’t to be some Hollywood writer. He had a message to get out there. I was clueless to all of that. When he brought all the white actors in to tell the dock story, I was very ignorant. Long story short, I got very ignorant and bitter.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Andre was furious. I tried to explain it. The guy who I explained it to and who started to get it, I had a conversation with Michael K. I said, “If we just stay focused on the Barksdales, we don’t move the story around. We don’t change the prism; we’re a much smaller show. We will not be about what we’re going to be about.” I said, “This is the moment where we say, ‘We’ll do anything. This is where we claim the whole city for our own.’ ”
It’s not that the characters are white. It’s that the characters were at the point of importation of the drugs and the death of the working class. The union that you’re going to see under pressure is going to be multiracial. There’s going to be black stevedores. But it is important that it have a white presence, because the last thing I want to do is suggest that you can track the drug problem through America by following black people. That’s a very reductive thing that I’m not going to say. I’m going to say you can track the drug problem into America by following class, and that, in a very fundamental way, the working class, white and black, is being devoured, and the underclass is growing because of the industrialization. I said, “If we don’t suggest that the morality is permeable to all races at this point, we’re saying some ugly shit that I don’t believe in and we have no right to say.”
I want to see Nicky Sobotka become a drug dealer like the guys I knew down in Pig Town, [whose] dads were stevedores, and then they were on the fucking corner. I sort of said, “We’re not forgetting you. We’re not walking away from anything.” But it was really hard. We never thought of it as a black show. We were doing Baltimore. So, I would say that to them, and they would be like, “But we did. We thought we had this. They had The Sopranos. We had this, and now you’re fucking it up.” I was like, “I’m not thinking about it like that.”
LANCE REDDICK (LT. CEDRIC DANIELS): The race part of it was almost tangential. I feel like the more conscious attempts that The Wire made in making people look at that, was in terms of class.
GLYNN TURMAN (MAYOR CLARENCE V. ROYCE): I’ve got to admit that it crept up on me slowly while doing the show. I didn’t watch the show a great deal before I got on the show. I had friends telling me about it. I’d tune in every once in a while. But once I got on the show is when I started reading the scripts that came through and found out that I was reading more than just my part, that I was reading the whole script. You get a script and you just want to read your role, but I would read it because it was like reading a book. And I realized somewhere during the course, I said, God, over half the characters in this piece are black. And it dawned on me, and the major thing was I never got a sense that it was a quote-unquote black show. But the question was: How did that happen? How is it that it doesn’t feel like a black show and that over half of the characters are black and that it’s a show that takes place in the hood, on the corners, and it still doesn’t come across as a black show? What is that all about? And it’s because all of the characters were so multidimensional and so nonstereotypical. And that the show never spoke down to its audience, no matter what level you were dealing with in the structure of society that the characters dwelled in. Everyone was bright and everyone had a point of view and everyone had a dimension that was a human quality no matter how steeped in chaos and mire that they were.
PABLO SCHREIBER (NICK SOBOTKA): People got really comfortable with the characters in that first season, and then, all of a sudden, they were forced to develop relationships with a whole new cast of characters. I think it really tested people’s patience, and everybody has their own vision of what the show should be.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I certainly think the show had a ceiling built in, because the majority of the cast was African American. Okay, race has got to be a part of any show. If you’re writing about America, if you’re trying to make a critique about urban America, you have to make sure that you acknowledge that. But I didn’t even think we were really writing about race, if that makes sense. We scheduled a cast in Baltimore that we knew. We accepted the city on the terms that we knew.
I live in Baltimore. I still live in Baltimore. We made the police department the racial breakdown of the department that we have. In city hall, we structured it like it is. We just took it as a given. Nobody woke up in the morning and said, “Oh, we are going to make a black show.” That’s all just a form of ghettoization itself. “I’m going to make a black show.” Fuck that. We are making a show about Baltimore, but we didn’t pull the punch and go, “Oh man, we need to have sixty percent white people or we are going to lose a white audience.” I think I always assumed that we would lose audience, and in a weird way, the HBO model allowed a new show like this to survive without degrading it. It was a luxury. If we were chasing advertising dollars and tried to maximize the audience, the show does not survive. But HBO brought people into the tent to watch it for what it was. It didn’t bring everybody into the tent. More people came for The Sopranos. But as long as we added to the amount of people who subscribed or helped, we could be part of this little family and they’d leave us alone.
SETH GILLIAM (SGT. ELLIS CARVER): David Simon told us at one point, “You know that frustration you’re feeling as actors is a frustration that Herc and Carver are feeling as cops, so you can use that.”
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): He was like, “Fuck you. I’m upset.” “Use the frustration.” “Fuck you.”
But then, they get pushed into the Western District. And both characters have this arc. And that was the thing about certain seasons: Some people are going to come into the fore and be more active, and some of them are not. And if you tried to service everyone in the same way, then you would end up with five separate narratives that are the same. Not every tool for every job.
SETH GILLIAM (SGT. ELLIS CARVER): I’d asked him about it at one point, and he had mentioned that. And he was kind of smiling as he said it, like, “You’ll understand when it all comes together.”
DOMENICK LOMBARDOZZI (DET. THOMAS “HERC” HAUK): The second season, we probably were a little frustrated, because we were kind of reduced to second unit. We were just doing a lot of surveillance stuff. I was never really upset at that kind of stuff. I just wish Herc would turn into another type of guy or go down a different kind of path. Maybe not always be this rough guy. That kind of stuff, because after a while, that sits with you. You go to work, “Okay. What am I doing? Okay. I’m beating up Bodie again.”
When you sit back and you think about it, it’s genius, because it’s part of David’s genius. He never jumped [the] shark. Everything was true. Everything was solid. Everything was where it was supposed to be. People, they do not change. That’s reality. What you want and what happens in reality are two different things. As an actor, I don’t know any actor that doesn’t get frustrated. You pla
y a character long enough, sometimes you’re going to see things differently, but second season was only because we were reduced to a second unit. In retrospect, I’m kind of glad we were, because we got to work with Bob Colesberry a lot. I learned a lot from Bob. I wouldn’t trade the second season and what I had to do and all that time I spent with Bob for anything. He was the eyes of the show. David was the ears of the show. A lot of that vision, that’s all Bob Colesberry.
ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): We didn’t see David Simon after the first season. He was in the room, the think tank. Ed Burns you saw every once in a while. He’ll come to set, but you didn’t really talk to him, because he was scary. He just didn’t talk. When he talked, you felt like an idiot. Bob Colesberry was our producer that was a go-to between the actors and everybody. Colesberry was a good mixture of both. He was like, “I’m smart like these motherfuckers, but I’m cool and personable. I can hang out with the actors. I can tell you the football scores without making you feel bad.” He was this guy producing Mississippi Burning. He understood good storytelling. He was a cool dude.
PABLO SCHREIBER (NICK SOBOTKA): First day, I slept through my alarm. I guess what happened was, it was the early days of cell phones. I set my cell phone as an alarm, and then the battery ran out overnight. I woke up to being like an hour and a half past my call time, jumped out of bed, got in the car, sped down there as quick as I could and ended up getting stopped on the way and got a speeding ticket and ended up showing up to set two and a half hours after my call time for my first day of shooting. P.J. [Ransone] and I were kind of the new additions to the season, so we hadn’t been there, and that was the first impression I was making, was showing up two and a half hours late. They were all obviously very upset and disappointed. I was petrified. I thought for sure I was going to shoot that day and be asked to leave the following, but they were very gracious in saying, “Just focus on your work and get the best work done you can and don’t worry about this.” And yeah, I don’t remember the next time I was late the whole season.
CHRIS BAUER (FRANK SOBOTKA): I have a vivid and uncomfortable memory of my reaction to finding the dead girls in a can on the harbor front at the end of the first episode of Season Two. As the scene unfolded, Ed Bianchi, the great director, blocked the shot so that as the door opened to reveal the dead bodies, I was in position to express shock, dismay, and panic, a great “Oh, shit” moment. The first couple takes, I overacted so much he had to pull me aside and—if I remember his exact words, they were: “What the fuck are you doing?”
That was the last time I tried to show anyone how good I was.
ED BIANCHI (DIRECTOR): A big problem with the beginning of that season was establishing the yard where the cans were and the set we were shooting on. We weren’t actually shooting on the set where the cans were. We were shooting on a parking lot right next to it, where we had our own cans, but a limited amount of them. We had to shoot half the scene in one place and then, for the reverse, we were allowed to go on the real yard, where the boxes were coming in, and shot that on another day. That was an interesting thing that we worked out between Bob and I. It really made you feel like you were in the real place, as opposed to being on a set.
AMY RYAN (OFF. BEATRICE “BEADIE” RUSSELL): We have these amazing women, these extras [playing the dead women]. They weren’t dummy bodies. They were real people huddled up on top of each other, and it was scary. I only had gone through it once. The camera person knew where I was going, but I think that was such an extraordinary scene. It’s so chilling because it happens. It’s not just like Hollywood make-believe. I’m sure that happens more often than we really know about, and I just found it scary, like a horror movie.
PAUL BEN-VICTOR (SPIROS “VONDAS” VONDOPOULOS): I think it was the first episode when I had to slit that guy’s throat. Bill [Raymond] and I had never worked together. We actually became friends, and ended up doing some other things together. I remember that first scene. We dragged the guy in. He’s tied up in the chair, and when I do slit his throat, we had this whole blood rig that was geared up to his throat, so it would get nice and bloody. The first time we did it, when we rehearsed it in the moment, the actor who was playing the victim there, he really got into it. When I grabbed him, he really struggled from me and got out of my hand. We lost our rhythm, and the blood went everywhere and it didn’t really work, so we had to do that twice, having to clean him all up, get everything all rigged up again.
DEBI YOUNG (MAKEUP DEPARTMENT HEAD): The engineer guy that was naked, he had his throat slit by one of the Greeks. Bob Colesberry, he came over to me. He said, “Debi, in this episode, I want, when his throat is slit, for him to bleed on camera.” I’m like, “Okay.” He said, “Well, he’s going to be naked.” I’m like, “Okay.” Sandy [Linn Koepper] and I start thinking about it. We don’t have anywhere to hide anything. We had to do all that.
We first worked out how we were going to get the blood to come out of the pump. Then we just had to figure out how we were going to do it. We were in an old warehouse. We took surgical tubing and we had blood that we’ll pump through the tubing that we were hiding our contraption under, an old, dirty staircase in this warehouse. We had the tube run across the floor, and then we taped the tube up the back of the metal legs of the chair. Again, he’s sitting there naked, a costume, of course, covering his private parts. We had beat him up in the trailer, got his face all bruised up and cut. When we got out there, we had to bring that tubing across the floor of the warehouse, to the chair, tape the tubing up the chair. We taped it up to behind the seat and taped it up his back. Then, we brought the tubing up under his left arm and had the tubing open up into his palm. We told him, “Once he has pulled that knife across your throat, bring your hands up to your throat,” and that’s when we started to pump. The blood just oozed out through his fingers.
AMY RYAN (OFF. BEATRICE “BEADIE” RUSSELL): When we were shooting, we were inside the warehouse, in the containers. It was January in Baltimore, and however cold it was outside in the water, it was even colder inside, because everything’s just metal, like being in a big refrigerator. I was in layers and layers of silk, and long johns underneath. They put the whole gun belt gadget stuff on me, and even with all those extra layers of clothing, it pulled. I started to have plumber’s crack. They pulled it out and gave me a plastic gun. It doesn’t make you feel very tough for a standard [officer], but Beadie Russell was never really that tough.
CHRIS BAUER (FRANK SOBOTKA): By the end of the first episode I shot, I never thought for one second about performance, because my faith in the authorship was blind. Those words did all the work. Even a casual familiarity with text analysis yielded a strong sense of theme, and especially regarding Frank Sobotka, an Aristotelian batch of hubris that would ultimately take a character down.
JAMES “P.J.” RANSONE (CHESTER “ZIGGY” SOBOTKA): The first scene that I auditioned for was the bar scene in Episode 201. A lot of the dialogue is so dense, and I was talking about all these characters that I had no idea about. The dialogue was really dense. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just was like, “Oh, I can do a Baltimore accent.”
NORMAN KNOERLEIN (RESEARCHER): The whole Ziggy character came literally from stories from Walt Benewicz. There’s a guy named Pinky. He was a complete oddball, but because he was related to the head of the union, he was able to get through. He would wear a suit to the bar in the afternoon. He, at one point, had a duck. This is completely true. He had a duck with a diamond collar, and he would bring it into the bars.
South Baltimore was checkers and union workers, and they worked in the Port of Baltimore. They lived in this really small neck of the woods, where everybody knew everybody. Everybody was connected. Everybody drank in the neighborhood bars. You’d have these little shops. Sometimes people would have bars in their front rooms, and it was like a converted town house. Pinky would come in there with this duck with the diamond neck
lace, and he’d give it vodka. One time they kept saying, “Get this duck out of here. Get this duck out of here.” The duck drank too much vodka, fell off the bar, and died. The bartender’s like, “You need to clean up this dead duck.” He’s like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s not mine.” Pinky left, and then he came back, because the duck had this diamond necklace, got the diamond necklace back, and then gave [someone] fifty bucks: “Go bury that duck in the backyard.”
PABLO SCHREIBER (NICK SOBOTKA): I do remember having a great time with P.J. in that scene where he comes out of the bar really drunk. It was after he had been in the bar with the duck the whole time, and I come and basically slap him around a little bit. I guess that probably sounds like most of the scenes we had together.
JAMES “P.J.” RANSONE (CHESTER “ZIGGY” SOBOTKA): They gave me this penis prosthetic and they brought it in my trailer. It was like the fucking size of my forearm. I was like, “This thing’s insane. This could kill a person.” It was really translucent, so it looked like it had just come out of some factory mold. It looked really fake. I had to wear it on this big harness. Then, we got to set, and I’d pull it out, and we had this German director of photography, a woman named Uta Briesewitz. I’d pull it out, and she’d go, “It’s reading too light in the lens.” Then these women, these really sweet middle-aged women who David Simon has worked with since Homicide, they would have to come over and shade in my fake penis as it was hanging out of my pants. Then they’d be like, “Oh, okay. I think that’s a little darker.” Then they’d pull it out again, and Uta would be like, “It’s still too light in the lens.” Then they’d have to come over and airbrush it. So, it became this beautiful work of art.
All the Pieces Matter Page 13
