All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): I was really against it. I fought David tooth and nail on that one. I just think growing up in Washington, DC, as I have, politics are really boring, and when I say it’s boring, I think it’s pretty basic.

  DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): We were trying to break a transition in an episode once, where McNulty and Greggs needed to gather the information necessary to figure out Bubbles’s whereabouts. We’d been at it for a couple hours, just banging on the box, and it was turning into a time suck, all over this minor transition. So, I said, “I know it’s not pretty, but what if we just have McNulty and Greggs happen across a CI [confidential informant] and ask where Bubbles is? And the CI says, “The soup kitchen on such and such?”

  So, Ed Burns, who hates anything that smells even a little bit like it was something he ever saw on a shitty network cop show, leans back and folds his arms and stares across the table with a kind of bemused contempt. And he says, “In twenty years as Bal’more police, I never, not once, just happened to come across a CI who was conveniently in possession of the location of another CI on the other side of the city. I mean, who is this guy, fucking Huggy Bear?” And there was much snickering and pained looks of pity and commiseration for me and my dumbass idea. And for the rest of the week, Ed called me Huggy Bear or Starsky or Hutch. The takeaway there was: Don’t cut corners, even if it’s a lot harder not to. Taught me more about how to write good TV than just about any lesson I can think of.

  CHRIS COLLINS (STAFF WRITER): A traditional writers’ room is where writers get together every single day from—let’s say, for regular office hours, nine to five. A bunch of writers sit around a table. They talk about ideas, pitch stories, that kind of thing. For instance, you might take two weeks to break an episode on Sons of Anarchy, which I was executive producer on. On The Wire, it took about two to three days to break an episode. We would get together for two or three days. The show basically always started out from some point of view of David or Ed that was based on some sort of historical reference or personal experience. Then it would jump off into the fiction. We would start with that kernel of fact. Then they would somehow twist it into the fiction of the show, the mythology of the show. Those episodes were very fast. David and Ed were lightning fast in the room. I’ve never seen anyone, in the twelve years I’ve been doing this professionally as a writer, turn stories as fast as they do.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): In the beginning, there would be days before we even wrote a beat. We would just talk about who the characters should be. First thing was: What were we trying to say? What are we trying to say about the death of work, the blue-collar story in Season Two? What are we trying to say about reform in Season Three? What were we trying to say about the drug war? Then, that would induce a discussion, argument. Nobody would put a card up on the board for days. After three or four days, we put a card up.

  Then we’d argue about that. By the time you get to Episode Five, now you’ve opened some doors and you slammed some of those shut that you can’t open again. You’ve made choices. By the end, I think it was moving pretty quickly, because we committed to certain stories that we were going to tell and we had abandoned other ones that we weren’t going to tell. I didn’t feel that way about it. If Chris says that about the beginning, boy, it didn’t feel that way to me.

  DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): Working with David was great. Smooth as glass. I’ve been told that’s maybe not everyone’s experience, but Dave and I worked real no-muss-no-fuss together. As far as I was concerned, I was in that room to service David’s and Ed’s vision, not my own. And it happened to be a vision I believed in, which made it all the easier. The biggest difference between the writers’ room on The Wire and some others I’ve worked in subsequently is how little time we wasted. We came there to work, man, and to cut to the chase and figure this shit out as fast as we could, so we get film in the can. We investigated a lot of possible paths in terms of story, but we rarely got lost down those paths. I’ve been in rooms where they’d been up and running four months and still had no idea what the major beats of their “A” storyline were.

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): The very first scene we did in The Wire, the political scene, was in that deli with Burrell and Carcetti sitting at a table negotiating with each other. After we shot it, I was being a smart-ass, but I said, “That’s it, right? We’ve said everything we need to say about politics. They negotiated. Each guy wanted something, and they came to an agreement. That’s all it is.” I sort of fought him for a long time, and I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t know. Once I saw it coming out, I saw what he was trying to do, which was broaden the world. You can’t really tell the whole story unless you bring the politics into it, because now you’ve got the panorama of this city, and that’s what we were missing before. He was right and I was wrong, and I told him I was wrong.

  DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): George is funny that way. I remember he was initially against the middle school thrust of Season Four, too. But that was something I know David counted on in George, that he would push back against Dave’s wonkier instincts. You can’t value your own voice until people you respect question it. And you should always have at least one person around you, creatively speaking, who feels comfy speaking truth to power. The Wire, if mishandled, could have very easily started to feel like homework for the viewer. George and, to a lesser degree, I pushed for the show to retain its roots as a cop show. David never saw it as a cop show. George and me did. Not just a cop show, by any means, but a cop show in its DNA. The yin and yang of those competing ideas helped make it richer, in my opinion. As for the political stuff, I grew up in the shadow of a Democratic machine in Boston, so I know how that works, but I didn’t know it the way Bill Zorzi did. I could play the music, but I couldn’t compose it. So, I just waited to hear the tempo and ran with what I was given. I enjoyed that aspect of the show: Clay Davis and Carcetti and all that. Good stuff.

  The second season had closed with Nick Sobotka leaning on a fence, anguished over the death of his uncle, Frank Sobotka. Steve Earle’s “I Feel Alright” next played over a montage punctuated with several brief, vivid shots of the decaying, neglected docks. Robert Colesberry, at the persistent urging of David Simon and Nina Noble, directed the episode and pieced together the montage. “I loved the montage they concluded with,” said Karen Thorson, Colesberry’s wife and a producer on the show. “It’s a pity. That’s, for me, the saddest thing when I think back on my life with Bob. I would’ve liked to have seen him go forward with that, and he would have done well. He would’ve done better and better, and I can only imagine what other things he would have directed and whether he would have remained a producer. I think he would’ve remained a producer-director. I think he would’ve remained in television, but at least he got there. It hurts my heart to think of that lost opportunity for him.”

  Colesberry, the man Simon eternally credits as the eyes of the show, died suddenly in February 2004 following complications from heart surgery. Thorson, Simon, and Noble were among those at his bedside in his final hours. The loss sent the cast and crew, just weeks from starting to shoot Season 3, into deep mourning. Colesberry had established the show’s visual template. Beyond that, he had been a teacher and mentor, someone who possessed a quiet, steadying influence. Colesberry had calmed down an antsy Dominic West. He had gone horseback riding with Clarke Peters. He had offered the right advice when he sensed someone was hesitant to ask. He had an impressive past, having worked with a number of well-known directors, and seemed primed for an even brighter future. As a producer, he had been soft-spoken, subtle, and discreet, Simon wrote in an appreciation of Colesberry for The Baltimore Sun: “He made his points after everyone else in the room had already had their say. Bob could back you into a better idea and convince you that it was probably your own. And he was forever pathfinding through the forest of overgrown ego that flourishes on any movie set.” Thorson, Simon, and Noble privately spread some of Colesberr
y’s ashes on the set during the first day of filming Season 3. The writers wrote in a wake for Det. Ray Cole, the minor character Colesberry played on the show, in the third episode of the season. In it, Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams) delivers a eulogy peppered with tributes to Colesberry and his work on films such as Mississippi Burning and After Hours.

  AIDAN GILLEN (MAYOR THOMAS CARCETTI): We met at Bubby’s, in Tribeca, for breakfast. We had a good long chat, about an hour. He was outlining this character he said they were thinking of introducing and that he was a politician. I’m thinking, Wow, I’ve never played a character like that before. And I hadn’t—hardly any establishment figures, but lots of the opposite. I hadn’t seen The Wire, and as Bob described it, I remarked that it sounded like the John Sayles film City of Hope, and Bob said that he was involved in the production of that film. Having that touchstone prompted further movie chat and general chat, and at the end, we bid our farewells. He said they’d keep in touch, and I walked away thinking, Fuck, that sounds good.

  About six weeks later or so, I asked my agent what the story was, so she put in a call, and the word came back that Bob had died just the day before, which was astonishing news, obviously, as he’d seemed so vital. A few weeks later, I got that call to come in and try out the scenes. I got cast, and the first day on set was actually a memorial service for Bob. There was a red sports car parked on the set, which was inside a big warehouse space, and I asked, “Whose car was that?” It was Bob’s. Then, on the show, they gave his character, Ray Cole, an Irish-style wake, including the song “Body of an American,” by the Pogues. For someone I only met for an hour, it feels like I knew him a bit more than that would afford, and the upshot of that hour was that he and Alexa Fogel changed the trajectory of my career, and I’ll be eternally grateful for that. It was nice getting to know his widow, Karen [Thorson], a bit over the subsequent few years.

  SEITH MANN (DIRECTOR): I do not know who handed Bob Colesberry my short film. He got ahold of it and reached out to me and invited me to a coffee. We went and talked. He was very complimentary about the film, very cool, and said, “Come shadow on the show.” I said, “Great.”

  I’ll never forget, on the way in, Ed Bianchi came in, and that was his next meeting. He introduced me. He said, “Hey, Ed, this is a young director.” I remember it was cool because he called me a director. I had a twenty-two-minute short. This guy had obviously directed I don’t know how many episodes of television. That was the one and only time I talked to Bob Colesberry. I never saw him again because, unfortunately, he passed away.

  A couple months later, I get a call from Nina Noble saying, “Bob was a big fan of yours, and out of respect of his memory, we’d like to invite you to come shadow on a show. We have a place for you to stay in Baltimore, and Ed Bianchi has already agreed to let you shadow him.”

  JEFFREY PRATT GORDON (JOHNNY “FIFTY” SPAMANTO): The night that Robert Colesberry passed away, there was an HBO function in New York, and I was with Chris Bauer, Andre Royo. Omar was there, his assistant. It was a very social, very light atmosphere. We were either at a bar going to the party or leaving the party and going to a bar, and I remember walking down the street and Andre Royo got a call, and as we were walking and talking, he was on the phone. He hangs up and says, “Guys, I’ve got some bad news.” We all stop on the corner in New York, and he said, “Colesberry just passed away.”

  I got chills on my arms now. We all just stood on this New York street corner with jaws on the ground, like, “Holy shit.” It was like the carpet ripped out from under you.

  NINA K. NOBLE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): He created the visual style of the show. He was involved in the first meetings and the first research, and he hired the first cinematographer that we had, Uta Briesewitz, who I think is really the one who created the style most people recognize in The Wire, in terms of camera work and lighting, and Bob also came from movies and, I think, really found his element. He was really happy working on The Wire, and it fulfilled a lot of his creative urges in terms of directing, in terms of helping guide other directors and other filmmakers in collaborating with David. It was very sudden, surprising, and devastating to lose him, both as a friend and a coworker. We were not prepared for that at all.

  THOM ZIMNY (EDITOR): He loved his working day. One of the details I remember with Bob is he’d wake up very early and read The New York Times and get to set early. He loved his work and was passionate about the process. That was intoxicating, because it just made you feel part of this bigger process. When he passed, his presence still was there in spirit with the season.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): He was a mentor to me, and I remember going in the first year and saying, “Look, I don’t think this is the job for me. I think someone else could do much better and I really want to go home. I miss my daughter.” And he took me in hand and said, “Look, I’ve been in this game a long time, and this is a really unusual and really exceptional show, and I think you’d be making a mistake.” He really reassured me, looked after me, and then he took me up to his house and we had this amazing weekend. My daughter came over. I felt particularly close to him and indebted to him.

  When he died, you realize that everybody felt the same way. He treated everybody that way. He was really unusual. Producers tend to be either total assholes or they are at least quite superior and, I don’t know what the word is, but set apart, but you’d never know he was the boss. He was always sort of behind the camera or just quietly encouraging people. When he died, I suppose we all thought that was the end of it, that was going to be the end of the show, and fortunately it wasn’t. David took that decision, I suppose, and was pretty brave to do so. Bob, we all thought he was too big a personality and too big an influence on us all to be missed, but Karen, his wife, came on board as the editor, and I think that helped.

  CLARKE PETERS (DET. LESTER FREAMON): Quiet, and he had this little Philadelphia kind of lilt, soft-spoken. He was just one of the lads. Just as bowlegged as I was. That was something we all shared in common, people who are bowlegged. We’re like a private group that nobody understands. Women think that you look attractive, but you know what, it’s painful to have that allure. I really liked that man. I really liked him.

  DELANEY WILLIAMS (SGT. JAY LANDSMAN): I didn’t know him that well. We weren’t friends or anything. We’re just colleagues, but every time I dealt with him, he made me feel like a better human being. It was the end of a very long night, and I was working episode to episode, and he and I happened to be walking back to base camp, where the trailers were. He turns to me and says, “Do you have an agent?” And I said, “No, I don’t. Most of my work’s here in DC and Baltimore. I work mostly onstage, some television when it comes to town, and when I go out of town. I pick up the work.” He said, “You need to get an agent.” At the moment, it was just something he said. Moments later, we’re apart, I’m getting dressed, and I’m thinking, Wait a minute, that’s the executive producer of the show telling me I should make his job harder. What kind of human being does that? It was in the string of almost every conversation I had with him, where he was thinking about me as opposed to himself.

  ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): It was just such a shock. There was a big transition time for everyone. It’s just hard to kind of align again.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): He very much set the tone for the sort of collegiate, democratic nature of the show, that everyone was equal, everyone was contributing, and there was no room for starry behavior.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): When he passed away, that threw us all for a loop. It also brought David Simon and Nina Noble out to [the] set. It brought them out from the cave and forced them to come out and try to make sure the actors were cool and [to] talk to the actors and make sure we still feel that team spirit, that family spirit.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): [Noble] took over picking the directors. She became the arbiter of how we would get the c
amera to move and how we would light. She became more involved in the creative function of the show, as Bob was. Not only because the writers think of things that are impractical or impolitic or disruptive to production, but because production can often offer insights the other way. And she became more and more essential, because she had to. So did Karen. Karen became involved in a lot of the aesthetic discussions and took over the credit sequencing and began giving notes about the visual episodes.

  Everybody tried to fill in, but Nina was effectively my partner in terms of trying to achieve story from even before I met Bob. She’d never been completely without creative input. I always relied on her for her assessments of story and of acting and what we had, what were our assets, where we were weak, where we can improve. I always had her in my ear from the beginning of The Corner, with Bob. Bob, Nina, and I, we started as a little trinity there in terms of director, producer and writer, producer, line producer. Then, when the director-producer wasn’t there anymore, I had to take some functions, and Nina had to take some key functions. The influence of Bob in the writers’ room, when we’d sailed off course or when something started to sound like it was derivative of something else we’d done, that was when Bob, in his own quiet way, would set us right. He was remarkably ineloquent about everything but film. You had to listen as Bob talked like this, but if you didn’t interrupt him, he landed it exactly. You ever been with somebody, “Eh, you know? That’s sort of…” Don’t interrupt him. He’s going somewhere. With film, he understood right away.