These are kids. I’m on set, literally having this debate. Like, these are kids. And they finally kind of opened up, and they said, “Jonnie, listen, the guy you’re playing is actually based on a real officer, and right now we can’t tell you too much, but he’s on trial. Just know that you’re doing everybody a service by going there, by taking these extremes.” They were saying this stuff just to keep me going. “Don’t let him blink. Don’t let him say, ‘You know, I’ve had enough of this.’ ” It was tough. I really can’t stress enough how hard that role was, especially the scene where I had to do the car chase and I ultimately catch up with the kid [Donut, portrayed by Nathan Corbett] and create one of the most memorable moments on the show. That’s what people tell me. They say that that scene was crazy, when I broke the kid’s fingers. That was hard. That was pretty tough. I think, when we got done shooting that, we were all silent. There was no clapping. They watched it on playback, and they’re like, “Holy crap.”
JERMAINE CRAWFORD (DUQUAN “DUKIE” WEEMS): Because me and Julito are so cool now, I can say this, but we fucking hated each other. Oh my God, we hated each other. But it was so crazy because the dynamics of our characters was really our real dynamic. It was just kind of by circumstance. Like, me and Tristan were very close immediately, and he was kind of always like a caretaker. Julito was always talking shit. Maestro was just like, “Aw, whatever. I’m here.”
We were literally our characters. You have no idea. But I think it was at the end of Season Four, Julito and I started to develop a really dope friendship, and to this day we keep in touch, got kids, speak, and we’re really fond of each other.
JULITO MCCULLUM (NAMOND BRICE): I wouldn’t say “hated.” Just the dynamic: you were putting four kids together. Just me and Tristan had met, but we really didn’t know one another. We were all new on the show. We didn’t know each other. I was coming from New York, Jermaine from Maryland, Maestro all the way from Chicago. Maestro was the vet in a sense, because he had been working for many years before that. That dynamic was tricky. Then the long schedules and tutoring. We would have to mix in our long shooting schedules with trying to get work in with the tutor. That was extremely hard. We had our moments. We had our moments, and we were kids doing the main characters of a TV show that was one of the biggest shows in the world at the time. All that led us to have some moments.
SANDI MCCREE (DE’LONDA BRICE): When I was in Cleveland, I would go in the community and work with different social service agencies using drama-based activities to deal with some issues with kids. In this group of girls, we were talking subjects from sex to school to who they lived with.
This little girl came in and she had the word bitch in her nose ring. I said, “I’m not comfortable with that. Could you take it out?” She said, “No, my mother said not to take this out of my nose.” I said, “Call your mother. I don’t want you wearing this in here giving energy.” She called her mother. Her mother came up right away to talk to me. I said, “My name is Sandi McCree, and I just want your daughter to take the earring out of her nose.” She said, “Why? I bought it for her. She’s a bitch. She ain’t nothing but a bitch, and that’s why she has it.” I was like, “Well, I’m not comfortable, and we’re trying to make smarter choices.” She said, “Just take the damn thing out. Take it out. Take it out. Goddamn. Take it out. Give it to me before you lose it, because it’s fourteen karats.”
I was trembling on the inside because I could see why this girl inside my group was trying to act all tough, but when her mother came up, she was just broken down, nothing. She tries to be her mother when her mother was not around. I said, “Okay, thank you.” And I told the mom what I was trying to do. I said, “We’re trying to teach them about healthy choices, not getting involved so early with sex. These kids, they don’t know about healthy relationships, you know, we’ve got to hug our kids more.” She said, “I ain’t hugging her. I ain’t no lesbian.”
This was the craziest, nastiest, ignorant—if I could have been De’Londa in real life, I would have smacked her ass. That’s where De’Londa came from. This mother didn’t have a clue about being a mother. She just carried that child in her womb, but she didn’t know anything about love, and she wasn’t passing on anything about love to that girl. My backstory for De’Londa was that hard bitterness. That’s the only world that she knows. She goes at it hard, and she thinks she’s being the best mother she knows how. I have made up that the reason Wee-Bey was loyal to her was that they met in foster care and they made their own little family. They created the strength, even though it was dysfunctional. They were trying to be a family because they never had a real one.
JULITO MCCULLUM (NAMOND BRICE): The first time I met Sandi, I was like, This is the nicest lady I probably ever met. It was at either a table read or rehearsal, and when they said, “Action,” and she turned into De’Londa, I was like, “What?” It was night and day. Sandi’s the nicest person ever. Her talent is remarkable because she’s able to turn it on and off.
ROBERT WISDOM (HOWARD “BUNNY” COLVIN): She is a sweetheart, and she played the hell out of that bitch.
In The Wire, Proposition Joe serves as one of the final vestiges to the old way of doing things. As the drug kingpin of Baltimore’s East Side, he is a chess master, always one or two moves ahead of his opponents until finally being cornered by Marlo. The character, played by Robert Chew, serves the storyline capably and provides memorable lines. In one such moment, he tells Omar that “a businessman such as myself does not believe in bad blood with a man such as yourself. It disturbs the sleep.” Behind the scenes, Chew played a pivotal role in The Wire. He taught acting to children at Baltimore’s Arena Players theater troupe, and many of his young protégées were cast in Season 4. “Whenever I had to dig deep and find kids who not only had the talent but the reality and the belief,” Pat Moran, the Baltimore casting director, told The Baltimore Sun, “kids who didn’t look like the ones in a Jell-O commercial, I called Robert.” Chew also worked intimately, individually and collectively, with the four main kids cast for Season 4: Jermaine Crawford, Maestro Harrell, Julito McCullum, and Tristan Mack Wilds. Chew died of heart failure in 2013 at the age of fifty-two. “I don’t think Robert Chew realized how good he was,” said S. Robert Morgan, who played Butchie on the show. “I really don’t. He was spectacular. What you have to understand is that what you saw in Prop Joe was so far from what Robert Chew really is. He is the most soft-spoken, understated person I have ever met.”
ERNEST DICKERSON (DIRECTOR): Season Four was when we worked with the kids. It was really amazing, because from the earlier episode and then going back later for the later episode, just seeing the growth in those kids, seeing how much they had learned. The person that was coaching them every day was Robert Chew. He was teaching them how to break down a script. He really taught those kids really, really well. By the time the last episode came around, they were like seasoned pros. Even Snoop, she was a seasoned pro by that time. She was helping new people on the set, helping them get acclimatized and getting used to being on set, giving them advice. It was a very fertile playground for the actors.
JERMAINE CRAWFORD (DUQUAN “DUKIE” WEEMS): I probably would not have gotten the role if it wasn’t for Robert Chew. I remember it was down to the screen test, and we all were kind of battling for roles, and they were switching us in and out, and after I went in and did my first take, they had their notes, but he pulled me to the side. He said, “Look, Jermaine. You can really get this role. I need you to focus. I need you to lock in. I need you to pull from within. I need you to think about what you’re saying.” I went in and then, a week later, I got the call. And, of course, when we got every script, he would rehearse with us, so we would have our act together by the time it was ready to go up on camera.
JULITO MCCULLUM (NAMOND BRICE): Honestly, that first meeting we had, where we were all there and we met him, I came into this situation very nervous, very afraid tha
t I wouldn’t do the job correctly, even though I knew I was confident in Namond’s character. I came in just wanting to do it right. I was a kid and I wasn’t sure of myself. Robert was there. He was assigned, in a sense, to be with us throughout this journey and to make sure that we did these roles correctly and we brought the true Baltimore kids in. Because of his work with the children of Baltimore, he was the best guy for the job.
From the first day on, he was giving me advice and ideas on what the psyche of Namond is. That was just really a breath of fresh air to be with him and to be with him on the entire journey, because anytime I needed support, anytime I wasn’t sure of myself, he was always there to say the right thing, to guide me in the right direction. I’m very grateful for Robert. I don’t know if we could’ve done justice to the roles like we did without Robert, honestly.
JERMAINE CRAWFORD (DUQUAN “DUKIE” WEEMS): Tristan and me, Maestro, and Julito, we wanted to see the sex scene with Sonja Sohn, Kima, so we watched that. Other than that, that’s the only thing I saw of the show before shooting.
JULITO MCCULLUM (NAMOND BRICE): We snuck and watched it, and we were like, “Oh…okay.” It was cool. We had met Kima. We met pretty much all the cast members, but we didn’t know who they were, so we didn’t really know their characters. Then when we saw that. Yeah, it was a good time.
JERMAINE CRAWFORD (DUQUAN “DUKIE” WEEMS): There’s film in the production office, and the production office wasn’t too far from set. We would go to school in one of the office rooms. They had a room, and we got our hands on a DVD, because I believe one of them had seen it or heard about it. And lo and behold, we were all changed that day.
TRISTAN MACK WILDS (MICHAEL LEE): We all watched it and was like, “Holy shit.” Now, of course, I had already seen it, but I’m young. So, that’s one of the scenes that, when it comes up, my mom was covering my eyes. So, I really didn’t get how deep or how graphic it was. It was always funny. My mom is more okay with me seeing somebody get shot on the show than actually letting me watch people have sex, which I still talk to her about today. “Mom, I can watch Stringer Bell get killed, but I couldn’t watch Kima’s sex scene? I couldn’t do that? You wouldn’t let me?”
MAESTRO HARRELL (RANDY WAGSTAFF): The one question that never gets old: “Oh man, so when you were shooting it, did you know?” That’s one thing I can definitely say. We never got scripts early. I never get tired of answering that, because it’s just like, “No, I did not know.” I was thirteen. I was dealing with thirteen-year-old stuff, and I was a part of a show of that magnitude with some incredible actors, and no, I did not know it was going to be what it turned out to be. Even a lot of times people will say, “Oh, man. Season Four is my favorite.” Even then, it’s like, “Wow, that’s amazing.” Not just me. We all did something, all the kids, on a show that had already been running. We added something to it, and it already was an incredible show.
ROBERT WISDOM (HOWARD “BUNNY” COLVIN): That fourth season, when we were in the schools, there were three fields that spun into being. You had Jim True-Frost’s world with the kids upstairs. You had our world with the kids downstairs, special needs kids. Then you had the world with the kids on the streets when they went home and what they went back to.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I was at Hamilton Middle School. After the first year, our test results hovered between one percent and three percent. I went to the principal. She was an open-minded woman. I said, “I had this idea between the stoop kid and the corner kid.” She says, “First off, I don’t like those terminologies. Can we think of something else?” I said, “I just have something here for you: acclimated and unacclimated.” “How do we decide that?” I said, “It’s very simple. The kid that can sit in the chair, he’s acclimated, and if he can’t sit in the chair, he’s not acclimated.”
And we divide the class up into acclimated and unacclimated. The unacclimated was about maybe ten percent to fifteen percent of the class of two hundred and something kids. We had the most experienced teachers working with them. My team, which was all young people, worked with the vast majority of the kids. Our classrooms were small, but we’d have like thirty-five to forty in a classroom. The other teachers had like five. We spent the whole summer preparing all sorts of ideas and getting small grants and stuff like that. The other team, they were experienced, so they didn’t have to learn anything. In the two years that we went with these kids—we looped seventh through eighth—we got almost ninety percent of the kids in our group into special programs around the city that were for advanced kids. Our scores went up through the roof, and they shut the program down. They called it racist. All the kids were black and most of the teachers were black, but there was some white teachers, myself included, that were pioneering working with this, and the unacclimated kids ran riot over their teachers. That’s the group I wanted to be with, because that’s the kids I love, but I got the acclimated kids. The results were truly unbelievable, and when they shut the program down, that’s when I left the school and I went over to the City College, which is a high school.
That’s where I saw the greatest tragedy, because all the kids coming into City College and Poly, the two magnet schools in Baltimore city—Poly is the math/science, and City is the humanities—the kids coming into City College, from kindergarten all the way through eighth grade, were straight-A students. When they walked in my classroom, they couldn’t write. They didn’t comprehend what they were reading, but they were very, very quiet, and they went through eight years of middle school and elementary school being the good kids. We had lots of tears in the classroom, frustration. I went to the principal and said, “If we could do this, this, this, and this…” “We don’t do it. We don’t do that.” Most of the kids that graduated from City went to bullshit colleges and were home after six months, five months, because they were homesick. They were insecure. They didn’t have the skills. And that, to me, is a betrayal.
ROBERT WISDOM (HOWARD “BUNNY” COLVIN): In the restaurant scene, watching these kids who were larger than life back home, they just become tiny when they were in this room where they couldn’t read the codes anymore.
JULITO MCCULLUM (NAMOND BRICE): Honestly, exactly how I played Namond was how I was in that scene. Myself, personally, I had no idea what the lady was saying. It was very real. They casted the extras perfectly. On the other side of the restaurant, it was the actual restaurant happening. The actual business was still going. When I looked at the menu, because I think they had asked us if we wanted to eat, I looked at the menu, I had no idea what was on the menu. It was very real. It was very real. Scenes like that—I didn’t realize how important they were until I was older.
DAN ATTIAS (DIRECTOR): When Randy gets called to the principal’s office and the principal is going to call his [foster mother] for the fact that he stood outside the bathroom while a girl inside was having sex and now she’s saying it was rape, he’s desperately trying to convince her not to call. She says, “I’m sorry. I’m going to call.” He keeps offering up things. He says, “I can tell you about this and I can tell you about that.” Then he says, “I can tell you about a murder.”
I knew in that moment that that was kind of key to his whole downfall and the whole rest of the season, because he was going to be known as a snitch. That scene, by the way I was doing it with a child actor, which has always presented its own set of issues, but he was a really good kid and a really fine actor. As he offers up these sacrificial offerings, “I can tell you about this. I can tell you about that,” just before he says, “I can tell you about a murder,” I wanted him to have a catch in his voice, like some weird thing, way beyond his years, however old he is. He just knows that this is going to be a turning point. He catches himself for just an instant. But then his own need for survival and not to be sent back to the home requires him to blurt it out. I thought it was so great, because it just set up somewhere, this kid knew that this was going to turn everything, even befor
e the audience knew that this was going to play such an important thing.
MAESTRO HARRELL (RANDY WAGSTAFF): I obviously knew that it was something he shouldn’t be saying, just because Street Etiquette 101 is that you don’t talk or snitch about anything. That being said, I still didn’t know that things were going to turn out the way that they did post that episode. It was kind of funny, too, because I remember when I first even got the scripts, and I was like, “Oh wait. My house gets burned down. Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is all moving a little too fast. What the hell is going on right here?” It’s kind of funny how that worked out, because I knew that it was something that he probably shouldn’t have been doing, but I just thought it was going to be nothing more than some small repercussions, then he goes back to selling candy or whatever was popping at the time.
JAMIE HECTOR (MARLO STANFIELD): I created a backstory for [Marlo], and it was very similar with Michael’s upbringing and his being an old soul and him being responsible and the trauma that he faced with his mother and everything that he has to see and visualize. For instance, Marlo’s mother was very promiscuous, and she had relations with different men back to back every night. He would see this and walk in on it, which forced him to actually stay outside more as he had a chance to. In staying outside more, hanging around with the older folks, he developed that old soul, that old wisdom of the streets and power and leadership.
TRISTAN MACK WILDS (MICHAEL LEE): I personally think that’s probably why him and Michael connected the way they did, or even why he ordered the hit for Michael’s dad. These are the underlying stories of these kids that we see nowadays. These kingpins, or all of these kids that are growing up and being the killers that we see or the wild guys that we see, they all come from very similar circumstances. They all kind of grew up in very similar ways to where they feel like they have no other option, but they have to go out and get it, and this is the only option that they have.
All the Pieces Matter Page 27
