DEIRDRE “DEDE” LOVEJOY (ASST. STATE’S ATTY. RHONDA PEARLMAN): It was educational. I jokingly say I’m just a dumb white girl from Indiana. I have lived in New York for thirty years. It is not like I’m a kid. Showing up on a set that is eighty percent black men, I would be like, “Oh my gosh.” That awareness was enough to make me just sort of be able to scratch the surface of what every black or Asian or whatever it is goes through every day. I have got to tell you, it is sobering.
JIM TRUE-FROST (DET. ROLAND “PREZ” PRYZBYLEWSKI): Both from the story and from my friends in the cast, I think I gained a much clearer window on the experience of the black characters in the story and the black actors in the show. If you’re a member of the privileged majority, you can’t, no matter how compassionate or insightful you are, you can’t—let’s just say, the closer you are to the world of people who are in the minority and the more you’re exposed to it, the more you truly can relate, I guess. In my case, in art and in drama, I wasn’t only exposed to the story, but I was a part of telling the story, and that was a real blessing as well.
MICHAEL HYATT (BRIANNA BARKSDALE): I remember Idris before he was Idris Elba. I remember having a conversation with him on set. It must have been the second season. I was comfortable with the guys that I was working with. He was saying he wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to stay in this country. He knew French or some shit. I remember him saying there’s an opportunity for him to do some work in France, and maybe he should take that. I was saying to him, “Brother, are you fucking out of your mind? People are going to love you as this character. You’re not going anywhere, dude.”
He was not at all conscious yet of the fanfare. He had not started receiving the fanfare from the show. He was just wondering where the fuck is his next job going to come, because nobody knew how long this was going to last. There was no promise of anything. He was trying to figure out what his next move was. I was saying, “I think you should stay here. I think people are really going to like you in this show.” I’m sure I had nothing to do with his choices. I’m not suggesting that. I just remember that conversation and just remember thinking, Dude, you’re fucking clueless. You’re not going anywhere. This is going to be really successful for you.
IDRIS ELBA (STRINGER BELL): My understanding of the show when it got picked up was Stringer and Avon does one season. This is about Avon. I was like, “Okay.” By the end of the season, they were obviously still writing it. There was more and more Stringer and Avon stuff coming. At that point, they were like, “We want you back for next year.” I was like, “Really?” That became clear that my character was popular. Not just my character, but the whole Barksdale clan just became more and more popular with the rest of the show.
ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): What was funny about Idris was, from my point of view, we would have long talks at the hotel bar. When he first got on the scene, he was really, really nervous. We were all unknowns. Wendell was probably the biggest one we knew. It just was like, “I’m trying to hide this accent. I’m trying to be a believable Baltimore hood dude.” He was just nervous. Nobody do hood better then Wood Harris. That was the dude. Idris was the number two guy, and he didn’t think he was doing it justice. He felt like he was faking it. We were like, “Fake it until you make it. You’re doing great.” There were always moments where we would have to check each other and reassure each other that we’re doing a good job.
George Pelecanos described it as a pincer move when he and David Simon cornered novelist Richard Price before a reading at a bookstore. Pelecanos had mentioned to Simon that the pair should measure Price’s interest in writing for the show. To Simon, the addition of Pelecanos had worked better than anticipated. Why not? he thought. Simon and Price enjoyed a history. Simon’s Homicide: Life on the Street and Price’s Clockers had debuted at around the same time. Clockers snatched Simon’s interest. This gripping novel, based in a fictitious New Jersey city, captured the dual perspectives of police and an urban community. Price and Simon shared an editor in John Sterling, who once brought Simon to Price’s downtown apartment, which featured a view into Jersey City. Their first “play date,” as Price later labeled it, arrived the night of the Rodney King verdict. They watched the unrest unfold from Price’s apartment, and the eternally curious minds then ventured to Jersey City to witness it firsthand. “Price had written tons of movie scripts in the same vernacular,” Simon said. “He was supposed to write The Wire. Before The Wire, if they had given him the charge to write a thirteen-episode cop show around a drug wiretap, he could’ve gone in and holistically written it.”
Price had already made a cameo in the show during Season 2, as a prison English teacher. He quickly mulled over the offer before accepting it and convened with the show’s inner circle of Simon, Pelecanos, Ed Burns, and Robert Colesberry at a hotel in Tarrytown, New York, to outline Season 3’s focus on the death of reform and the introduction of local politics. “I don’t know where that money came from to send us up there, but that was nice,” Burns said. “I don’t think we were a big hit with HBO, I’ll tell you that.” Bill Zorzi eventually joined the group after Price departed. He originally planned to briefly stop by and say hello to Simon, a former Baltimore Sun colleague, and instead stayed involved through the show’s run. Dennis Lehane, another renowned novelist, who authored Mystic River, also joined the writing staff. The experience in the room established an atmosphere of competitiveness. Many had already described The Wire as a visual novel. Now novelists worked on most of the episodes moving forward.
Yet, for all the additions, the show would soon be shaken by a devastating, sudden, loss.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): We went to get George, and George worked out great. After that, George was introducing Price at a bookstore in Washington. Price was touring on, I want to say, [his novel] Freedomland. He said, “Let’s go get Price.” He just said it like that. That was George. I was like, “Man, Richard Price is like a literary lion.” He was like, “Let’s try it.” So, we both went to the bookstore and we pulled him up, and he said, “Yeah, I’m interested.” And then it was like, “Let’s go get Dennis Lehane.” At a certain point, I was just joking, like, “Who do you want now?”
GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): It’s very obvious why you want Richard Price. He’d already written Clockers, and all his other books fit right into what we were doing, but if you read Dennis’s books, the best part is the dialogue, and it’s very natural and it’s witty. We thought he’d be good for this, and it didn’t matter that they were respectively from New York and Boston. I told them, “Don’t worry about it. You don’t need to know the street names. Just put “STREET, BALTIMORE” in the slugline. We’ll plug in the street name later on. That’s not why we want you. We’re not coming after you because you know Baltimore through and through. You know people. That’s why we want you.”
I think David went after Walter Mosley, [too], and I don’t know what happened there, but he didn’t write for us.
RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): When [David] and George asked me to do it, I didn’t want to do it, because my fear was that they thought, because of Clockers, I knew so much about the world of The Wire, and my feeling is I gave everything. I emptied my brain out on that book. It felt like if I wrote an episode, it’s gonna be “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: “Well gee, I guess he doesn’t know as much as we thought he did.” I said yes because how could you not? I killed myself on that first episode. Did ride-alongs in Baltimore. Like cops in Baltimore are any different from cops in New York or LA.
DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): A few years earlier, I was hanging with David, Laura [Lippman], and George at a writers’ conference, and David was talking about a show he’d pitched to HBO under the guise that it was a cop show. It was, at that time, in late development stages, I believe. Dave had this idea that he wanted to hire novelists for his writers’ room because he thought most TV writers had probably picked up bad habits working on ba
d shows for network TV. Fast-forward to a few years later, and George had written the penultimate episode of Season One and raved to me about the experience. He mentioned that David was interested in having me in the room for Season Two. Problem was that I was buried in The Given Day, and it was at a fragile point, where any distraction could conceivably have killed the book, so I declined, but said, “Please come back to me.” And they did. And I hooked on for Season Three.
RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): I had never been in a writers’ room before. My whole experience with TV, I wrote a pilot in 1981 for NBC, and I didn’t even know what I was doing. I had never done TV before, but I had known the characters just from watching. I could do the characters. Somebody said to me, “It’s like watching [Donald] Trump long enough on TV. You could do him. You could do a credible imitation of him. Anybody could.” I just had integrated so much of each individual character that I could do it very fluidly. I’d never been in a writers’ room before, and before Season Three they had a meeting. It was Ed Burns, Pelecanos, and Simon in Tarrytown.
It was an interesting process. They have six characters. “What’s the theme this year? What institution are we going to focus on?” In Season Three it was Hamsterdam. “Okay, so, what’s the overall arc for Omar? What’s the overall arc for the Barksdales? What’s the overall arc for the mayor’s office? McNulty, etcetera, etcetera.” For an overarching meeting in Tarrytown, you can’t get too intimate. You can’t ever get to a point in an overarching meeting to say, “Well, in Episode Six this is what happens exactly.” Because even right before you write Episode Six, you’re still gonna be off, because you’ve still gotta [consider] what happened in Five. Every time you write, there’s a good chance some of your stuff is gonna go an episode later under another guy’s name and stuff from the episode previous is gonna be shoved into yours. It’s sort of an assembly line. The story trumps the author.
WILLIAM F. ZORZI (STAFF WRITER): It was sort of a fluke that I ended up being in Tarrytown, which was the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of July of 2003. It was at the Dolce Tarrytown House. I had been in Long Island and Queens for a funeral for the morning of the twenty-third—a father of a friend of mine had died. I knew David was up in Tarrytown somehow, so I thought I’d just drive up and kind of drop in.
I just dropped in, like to say hi. That’s how I kind of stumbled into it, and David was good enough to put me on the table as a staff writer eventually. The rest is history or something. I did all the political stuff. Ed and George had no desire to have anything to do with politics.
GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): Nina controls all the stuff, like where you stay. She tried to book us into a hotel up there that didn’t have liquor, didn’t have a bar, and we promptly booked ourselves into a different hotel. That’s one thing I remember. She might dispute it, but I have brought it up with her recently. I’ve never forgotten that.
We did find a place where we could drink at night, even though it was kind of in, to me, the boonies. For all I know, it’s a nice place, but it looked like just a hotel sitting on a bunch of land. We also played handball, and Richard Price was very competitive.
RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): Mainly what I remember from Tarrytown is it was like the most anti-Wire setting in the world. It was a corporate events hotel. Everyone’s having motivational meetings and bonding sessions for their sales corps, and stuff like that. We’re sitting there going, “Well, who’s Omar gonna fuck this year? Yeah, I think a Barksdale is gonna die.” Everybody else is studying the acronyms for success and getting on the links. We’re sitting there killing people in Baltimore.
I remember, at one point—I used to play a lot of racquetball—I wound up on a court with Burns and Pelecanos, but I didn’t bring any shorts, so somebody lent me their shorts, and they kept falling down to my knees on the racquetball court. It was maybe the most memorable thing that happened to me there.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I have a very good sense of story. I don’t know where it comes from. Maybe being Irish. I don’t know where the fuck it comes from. I know this world. I know this world intimately. I know that I can sit in a room and make a story, and it’s fun to do that. There’s a competitiveness there. There’s bouncing off of each other. When you have a room with the talent that we had, we can always make the story. Richard Price is probably the sharpest, quickest, funniest guy you’ll ever meet. When he gets on a roll, there’s no story. He’ll have you on the floor laughing. He’s just amazing.
GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): All these people are writers, so they’re pretty vain, and they all think that their ideas are the best ideas. And they all think that they’re the best writer in the room, which is as it should be. There’s dealing with the personalities and kind of pushing your ego aside, because, after a while, since everybody gets to know each other, it’s not so polite. It’s like, “That’s a stupid idea. We’re not going to do that.” All those types of things that you thought you put behind you back in high school.
RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): In a script, there’s no writing. It’s just dialogue and directions. There’s not one sentence of prose. There’s no writer of a script. It’s a one-hundred-twenty-page memo to the director: “Do this. Say this.” What The Wire had that Clockers didn’t have is, I kept Clockers on the worm’s-eye view. It rarely left the trenches. It rarely got higher than the Homicide Squad, if it did at all. He went top to bottom. It was like he went from the general’s tent to the grunts. I always admired that about the ambition of the show. I couldn’t have written it. I didn’t know anything about how the DA’s office works, the interoffice politics in a police department, how City Hall works—any of that. That’s a lot of Ed Burns because he had been a homicide cop. Before that, he was a military man. Zorzi had the city desk at The Baltimore Sun. Simon was a police reporter for the most part. They each had different areas of experience. I did best with the guys on the street, in my opinion.
DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): Richard is the reason I’m a writer. He’s foundational. No matter how many times we’ve hung out, worked together, chatted each other up, I can never feel comfortable around the guy. It’s fucking embarrassing because I’m a pretty social dude, good at putting people at ease, but Richard must think I need Adderall because I simply can’t chill around him. I was fourteen when I read The Wanderers in the basement of my house in Dorchester, and the world was fundamentally altered between when I picked that book up and when I put it back down. And to follow his writing for my very first teleplay twenty-odd years later—that was just too daunting to contemplate. So, I blocked it out. I read the notes on his episode, saw where he was going with it, and then just put my head down and banged out my ep’.
RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): It’s a real rom-com, you know? I was intimidated by both of them because of what they’d done on the show. I guess George had been reading me, but I’d also been reading George. I read Homicide and read The Corner.
DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): I’m an urban writer. I’m fascinated by the ways a city does, or doesn’t, work. I love the street slang and the hum of city life, the sense that within that density, a million stories are waiting to be told. The particulars of Baltimore—the names of specific streets or neighborhoods, its local patois—all of that was filled in by David or Ed.
RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): The Wire was kind of painless, other than my own stage fright of giving me an episode that didn’t make me look like a horse’s ass. It was a writers’ show, and Simon was very respectful of people he wanted to work with. Because he was the big poo-bah of the show, he took all the crap from HBO. He’s Patton; I’m just a solider. Tell me where to go, and I’ll execute. That was very painless, because I like Simon. I like Pelecanos. I like the subject. I really dug the characters. It’s easy. It probably took me two weeks to write an episode.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): As soon as the second season happened, Ed was thinking about education. “We’ve got to do education. We’ve got to do ed
ucation.” We were always thinking seasons ahead, because guys had ideas of stuff, of slices of the city they wanted to get to. I knew we had to get to politics. You can’t do education without establishing what oversees it. By then, you want City Hall as fast as you can get it after Season Two. But Ed was hungry to do education, and I always wanted to end on the media, because I wanted the whole show to be a critique of what we’re not attending to and why.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I didn’t like politics.
RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): How could you not like writing Omar? No, I really liked writing about some fucking corrupt councilman. It’s Omar. Everybody loves Omar.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): Every moment we saw of politics was one less moment we conceived a character that I liked.
WILLIAM F. ZORZI (STAFF WRITER): Once David drove the point home that he wanted a political storyline, I spent a lot of time with Ed, and I’m sure Pelecanos had many a laugh at our expense, really. He would just walk out. First of all, Ed has amazing stamina. He could sit there for hours upon hours upon hours and just spin up scenarios about plotlines or thoughts that he had about politics or “try this one on for size”—that kind of thing.
We spent a lot of time sitting in that room on Clinton Street, just the two of us, after George just sort of left shaking his head, going over possible political storylines. I don’t know that any of them really made it. It helped shape who the Carcetti character was, but there wasn’t a lot of room—nor was there the inclination to make room, except by David’s doing—for the political storyline.
Ed and George were absolutely more concerned with the actual investigation by the unit and the characters who had already been established, what they were going to be doing and what their arcs were going to be. I don’t think they really much gave a shit about Carcetti. Ed is sort of a funny cat. It’s a push me–pull me thing. He’s completely resistant, yet he’s willing to sit there for hours and days and discuss the possibilities of, “Well, here’s an idea.” These guys were not obstructionists. I’m not trying to paint them in that way. It just wasn’t important to them. Politics seemed like, “That’s not what our show is.” I can’t remember the specifics of them saying that, but I would be willing to bet body parts vital only to me that both of them said to me, “That’s not our show.”
All the Pieces Matter Page 16
