UTA BRIESEWITZ (CINEMATOGRAPHER): The color just didn’t match the person that was wearing it.
JAMES “P.J.” RANSONE (CHESTER “ZIGGY” SOBOTKA): Then, after we shot it, I was like, “Hey, can I keep that thing? Just as like, a souvenir, you know?” Because can you imagine, “I want the shark fin from Jaws.” I was like, “I want this huge fake cock.” Right? Maybe one day I’ll show it to my kids, and then I’ll be like, “This is what people thought your old man was made of.” But then they were like, “No, you can’t have it.” They were like, “What if we need it for reshoots?” So, it’s literally hanging in a warehouse somewhere, in case we were going to reshoot it.
PABLO SCHREIBER (NICK SOBOTKA): That was funny. Obviously, if your character is written with a massive schlong, then you either have it or you don’t. Well, you know, maybe P.J. does and he didn’t want to show his own. Maybe he wanted to keep his for himself. Either way, the stand-in penis did a great job. Everybody was very happy with his work. Everybody was very complimentary to the penis afterward.
JAMES “P.J.” RANSONE (CHESTER “ZIGGY” SOBOTKA): Chris Bauer really sort of was the first person to come along and make me really respect, I don’t want to say my own talent, but my own sort of process or abilities. He created sort of like a nurturing space, so anytime that we really got to dig into anything, the work just became really interesting for me.
I think we had a little bit more of like a father-and-son thing because he had his shit together a lot more than I did when I was in my twenties. He sort of helped me through some really dark times in my life, but beyond that, he’s been the first sort of shepherd that I’ve had in terms of being able to respect myself—not myself, that’s a lot, but to respect the artistry that I was trying to undertake. I don’t know if I would have been able to do anything that I did on that show if it weren’t for him specifically.
PABLO SCHREIBER (NICK SOBOTKA): I would immediately lock myself in my room and read the whole script from front page to back, because they were so involving and I was so into the story at that point. So, when Zig kills the guy, I remember reading the part where he went back and sat in the car, and I remember reading it for the first time. I’m not really an emotional reader. Scripts don’t usually affect me emotionally that much, but I remember actually crying a little bit when he went back to the car, and I thought, Oh fuck. That’s it for him. We’re not going to see him anymore. And then, obviously, one of my first reactions was, Well, shit. What’s going to happen to Nick? How is this all going to play itself out? Am I not going to be involved in the show anymore?
JAMES “P.J.” RANSONE (CHESTER “ZIGGY” SOBOTKA): Ernest Dickerson shot that episode, and we had sort of already gotten into our rhythm. We knew it was coming to a close, both the show and our storylines. A lot of times in TV, when they call for you to cry, you can use fake tears. I use them a lot still. I’m not too proud to say that I do. When we were shooting the jail scene, I was like, “All right, I want to make this as authentic as possible.” When Chris and I shot that jail scene, we had developed such a kinship. They shot my coverage of that first. They were like, “All right, we’re going to shoot your side.” And then they were like, “All right, once we sort of have what we want to view, we’ll come around and we’ll get Chris Bauer’s side.”
It’s really tiring to cry that much. You gotta work yourself into a pretty dark state, and you have to stay there to make it conceivable. We’re on Chris’s side. I have the choice whether or not I just remove myself from that dark space and feel like I don’t have to cry as much anymore. I was a pretty young dude, and I was like, Fuck that, this dude has shown me gratitude and respect. I think that there’s a better performance of me that didn’t get filmed because I was like, I want to give you the best version that I possibly can every time so you have something to react off of.
CHRIS BAUER (FRANK SOBOTKA): By the time we got to that jail scene, the weight of the story between us was so apparent, and the words so elegantly placed to avoid sentiment or indulging an emotional understanding beyond the characters’ own understanding, that the scene played itself. It is an utterly loving embrace of people at their most human; witnessing the dissolution of their best intentions in excruciating pain because there’s nothing they can do to stop the collapse of their lives. And why is it my favorite scene? Besides how permissive and supportive the crew and director Ernest Dickerson were, it’s a beautiful love scene. I think of it now and I get moist in the eyes. They were fucked. Look at the writing in that scene. Sobotka says to Ziggy in a noble effort to rouse some fight and macho optimism, “You’re a Sobotka.” Ziggy answers “Fucked is what I am.”
Gives me chills.
JAMES “P.J.” RANSONE (CHESTER “ZIGGY” SOBOTKA): He said that a lot more poetically than I did, that motherfucker.
CHRIS BAUER (FRANK SOBOTKA): I have a vague but treasured memory of walking with David Simon down the waterfront while he told of a wonderful character’s imminent demise. He said something like, “The audience doesn’t get to decide who lives and dies. The story does.” If only all writers in television felt the same.
Although The Wire’s canvas expanded, the show consciously tended to the storylines of continuing characters while still introducing new figures, such as Robert Wisdom’s Maj. “Bunny” Colvin and Method Man’s Cheese Wagstaff, who would play larger roles in future seasons.
MELANIE NICHOLLS-KING (CHERYL): I got pregnant in between first-season and second-season shooting. I was concerned. I was like, Uh-oh, I don’t know where they’re going with this. I don’t know what their plans are for this character. Not to say that lesbians don’t have children. I didn’t know where the writers were planning to go with it. I was worried that it would be a detriment to me being able to continue to play this character. Then I got the first script to Season Two, and it said our first scene together was Kima and Cheryl are investigating in vitro fertilizing. I was like, “Oh my God. That is total universe. Thank you.” That’s what would be going on. I was able to tell the writers.
It was funny because I was still kind of worried because they hadn’t made a clear decision about who was going to actually carry the child. Because Kima is really a character, I assumed that they would probably have her go through that journey. I actually didn’t tell them, the first episode that I went down to Baltimore to shoot, I didn’t tell them that I was pregnant and it was only the wardrobe person who was like, “What’s going on, because your boobs are huge?” I wasn’t really showing in the belly yet. I was like, “I’m pregnant and I don’t know what to do.” Eventually it was like, “You need to share it with them.” Also, I was like, “I don’t want to deny this beautiful life that’s inside my tummy.” I told Nina. I felt comfortable going to Nina because she was female and an executive producer. I told her first, and she was amazing. She was like, “Oh, my God. That’s amazing. Congratulations. That’s perfect. Now we don’t have to decide, because we’ve been going back and forth with it. Cheryl or Kima, Kima or Cheryl? Now we know. It’s Cheryl. I’m so glad you made our lives easy. We don’t have to put a belly on you. We can just use your belly.” She actually said, “I wish you’d have told us earlier,” because I don’t think I told them until we were shooting the fifth episode or something. We could have shown the gradual increase of the belly. Then, the beautiful thing that happened is that Elijah, my son, ended up playing our son on the show.
ROBERT WISDOM (HOWARD “BUNNY” COLVIN): When Bunny gets introduced, at the end of the second season, I was down doing that movie Ray in New Orleans, and my manager got the call that David Simon and The Wire were offering a role. I had no idea what that role was, but I had gotten caught back up. I admit that after not getting the Stringer Bell role, I said, “Fuck that show.” But I came into it maybe after the third or fourth episode, and I was a fan of it. They offered this role, and we took it and then I looked at it and there were very few words to the character, not too many ti
p-offs about who this guy was or what the scale of the role was. We had no idea about anything. I would go to these various locations. There was the murder of this kid in a drive-by shooting, and it was just going to these different sites of collateral damage that was happening in the hood, because of the violence and the drugs and everything that was out of control—I just stood looking at these scenes. David came in early in the day and just laid out kind of generally what would be happening. When I look back on it, the whole skeleton, it laid out beautifully: the skeleton of Bunny’s arc and Bunny’s story, in just that one episode.
MICHAEL POTTS (BROTHER MOUZONE): Brother Mouzone was somebody they had tried to cast for a while. I know my then-agents were trying to get me in for it, but Alexa didn’t see me for that role. I didn’t come in to read for it until very late in the game and I think I had a very persistent agent, who kept saying, “Alexa, see him, see him. He can do this. Let him read for this.” I came in basically when they had pretty much given up on finding the actor for the role, and that first episode that I came in, I had just one line, just one word, just “Officer.” And that was supposed to be it. He wasn’t supposed to come back after that. That’s as much as they thought. They didn’t think they’d be able to cast the role or it wouldn’t work as they had envisioned it.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I knew a guy, his father was a preacher and he was very articulate. He got involved with a spin-off of the Panthers and he started robbing federal guards to get their equipment, which is not the brightest thing in the world. He got caught, but when I was talking to him, he was very focused, revolutionary-type ideas, very firm, and I thought, Maybe you can take that attitude, that strength, and take the discipline of one of [Louis] Farrakhan’s people and mold them into this guy and then, find an actor who could play that part. And we did.
MICHAEL POTTS (BROTHER MOUZONE): All I was thinking in my head, If I can get three episodes, I can catch up. I can get all my bills paid and I can be even for the year again. They gave me one word in the very first, and in the second episode, they gave me a monologue. Method Man said, “They bringing you in nice.”
METHOD MAN (CALVIN “CHEESE” WAGSTAFF): When auditions went out for the first season of The Wire, I made a conscious choice whether to go audition for that show or do the job that I was doing at the time, which was Brown Sugar, that Sanaa Lathan movie. I stuck around to do that. It turns out that shit didn’t even make the movie. It hit the cutting room floor. They put it in the extras on the DVD. That’s the only way you’ll know that I was even in the damn movie. But yeah, I blew my shot there, because me and Hassan, who played Wee-Bey, was there at the same time. He didn’t like how they were utilizing him at Brown Sugar, so he kind of stormed off the set, left, and did The Wire audition and got it. So, I watched the first season, and I wanted to get on the show when the casting call went back out for it. I went in and read for Alexa Fogel, and it went pretty well because I had read for Alexa before, so I was comfortable. I had read for her for Oz before, and I got the part. So, when I went back to read for The Wire, I remember being comfortable. I remember the audition going well.
I thought it could have been better, but when I walked out, I remember seeing Mr. Cheeks, and I was like, Aw, shit. This part must be for a rapper or some shit. So, I kind of was turned off by it for a second. But then, when I heard I got the part, I was excited, and first day on the set, I guess they were expecting some big entourage or something like that, but once they saw I was regular and accessible, it ran pretty smooth after that.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): You talk about a hero in the neighborhood. Holy smokes, and all my kids in school, all their notebooks, had that Wu-Tang Clan symbol. It was remarkable. You would have thought he was the Second Coming when he showed up.
VINCENT PERANIO (PRODUCTION DESIGNER): Baltimore, despite what many people think, it’s an extremely friendly place. The people are not jaded. They let you come into their house. Baltimore’s interested that somebody’s interested in them. Having the film about them and their neighborhood that nobody else cares about really picked up the attitude in the neighborhoods. They were excited about it. They didn’t try to disrupt us or play loud music.
METHOD MAN (CALVIN “CHEESE” WAGSTAFF): Fans were a little rambunctious. Like, in between shots, I would have to either stay inside if we were shooting inside or go inside my trailer when people left, because I would basically be signing autographs every time we yelled, “Cut.” So, yeah, it was a little crazy. They shot on location in Baltimore, so some of those streets they shot on were in real rough neighborhoods.
One day, this family, they were just playing this music loud when we were trying to get our shot, and I remember the crew constantly asking if they could [turn it down] and they was just beefing like, “We ain’t doing shit. We live here. We ain’t gotta do shit.” So, I walk over there and I ask them politely, but I didn’t ask them at first. First, I started kicking it with them. “Yo, what’s up Method Man? Blah, blah, blah. What’s good? What’s good?” This, that, and the third. Then, I politely asked them if they could turn the music off while we get our shots off and shit. They were like, “Yeah, we’ll do that for you.” But don’t get me wrong. They had goons on the set that would shut anybody down that would try and cause problems on the set. It just so happened that, that day, I kind of stepped up and did it in a diplomatic matter, where nobody was offended.
STEVE SHILL (DIRECTOR): The biggest dilemma for me as a white British man trying to interact with Method Man—I was like, what do I call him? Do I call him Mr. Man? Method? Or Method Man? This is a guy who’s already a giant star. I’m like, “I’m going to show this guy the respect that he deserves, but as an Englishman I need to find the right way to meet him at the correct level.” But he didn’t need direction. The scenes that I did with him, the only thing you need to tell him is, “I think you come in here. You meet this guy here and you set your car on fire over there.” That’s all he needed to know. He did all the rest.
The Wire carefully picked moments to unravel the myth of Omar and his beliefs. One opportune moment presents itself in the Season 2 episode “All Prologue.” On the witness stand, Omar identifies Marquis “Bird” Hilton as the killer of a state witness, William Gant. The writing made clear that Bird had likely murdered Gant, and that Omar was not present at the time of the killing. Upon cross-examination, Bird’s lawyer, Maurice Levy, describes Omar as “a parasite who leaches off the culture of drugs.” “Just like you, man,” Omar interrupts. “I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It’s all in the game though, right?”
The moment is one of the few times in the series that Levy, played by Michael Kostroff (the brother of Nina Noble), is flustered. Kostroff said he appreciated the scene and the ability to show another side of Levy, often remembered as conforming to Jewish stereotypes. “If we only told stories where people didn’t fall into different stereotypes, it would be really false, so I had no problem playing what some may call a Jewish stereotype,” Kostroff said. “I do believe that there are corrupt, successful Jewish lawyers. Rhonda Pearlman is also a Jewish character, and she’s on the side of good. I think people noticed it more because Deirdre Lovejoy doesn’t appear to be Jewish, so I think people don’t notice the fact that there’s two Jewish characters on both sides of the law. But I think we’ve gotten a little bit too careful about telling those stories. The Wire showed us black drug dealers and black elected officials and good guys and bad guys, and thank God for that range. But if we objected to the portrayal of black drug dealers, we wouldn’t have that show.”
MICHAEL KOSTROFF (MAURICE “MAURY” LEVY): A lot of these actors, I just found intimidating, but right before Michael K. Williams and I shot that courtroom scene, we had a good laugh, because I was scared of him and he was scared of me, because we’d only seen each other on the show, and he’s the sweetest guy in the world, but I didn’t know that. And he thought I was very mean and tough. So I took a deep breath and I w
alked over to him and I said, “Hi, I’m Michael Kostroff.” He goes, “I was scared to meet you.” I said, “I was scared to meet you, too.”
MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): I was intimidated. There was a lot of people I respected. He was one of them. He had done stuff on Law & Order and was out and about. I was like, “That guy. Holy shit. He was in my living room, my living room just two weeks ago.”
MICHAEL KOSTROFF (MAURICE “MAURY” LEVY): The one thing about Levy is, he’s a good strategist, and not only does he enjoy being a good strategist, but he enjoyed showing everybody the strategy that he’s come up with and how he’s going to win an impossible case. He never saw that coming, particularly from a street thug, and Omar presented a really, really valid debate at that point and took him down in front of people. It was just something that he wasn’t accustomed to encountering.
I made a decision about Levy pretty early on, which is ugly to hear, but [it] really served the character. When I saw the phrase “You people” in the first episode, that tells me a lot, as somebody who’s grown up around black people. I know what that means. “You people” is a racist term. I made the decision that he was very happy to work for these guys, but really didn’t have a high opinion of black folks. What’s delicious in particular to me about that scene is that he’s taken down by somebody that he would have dismissed as not intellectual and not capable of forming that valid argument. That’s what I loved about it. It hits him out of nowhere, because Omar is also a great strategist and also kind of brilliant. I think that’s what I love, is that [Levy is] shut down by the person that he thinks is just a stupid animal.
All the Pieces Matter Page 14
