All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  LAWRENCE GILLIARD JR. (D’ANGELO BARKSDALE): Especially on a good show, it’s hard for me to go and watch everybody else working and I’m sitting at home. It’s like when you don’t make it to the Super Bowl. When you’re the team when you lost the one game and you didn’t get to the championship because you missed the shot, do you really want to watch the finals? Everybody else is playing, and you’re at home. She continued to watch the show, even when I wasn’t watching the show. Then she got her opportunity to be on the show. She was really excited about it, and I was really happy for her and proud of her.

  As I was watching the show, I was just rooting for her, just hoping she was having fun, having a good time. I know she was very nervous when she was doing it, because she’s coming in the last season. The show’s pretty well established. She sees the quality of the work, so she’s sweating a little bit. She’s like the new cat out of college and she’s going to play with [Michael] Jordan.

  TOM MCCARTHY (SCOTT TEMPLETON): David would constantly be inviting his reporter friends from The Washington Post and sometimes The Baltimore Sun, and you’d be sitting there talking to an extra at your desk waiting for the shot to get set up, and you’re like, Man, this guy knows a lot about a lot. Then he would ultimately introduce himself, and you’d be like, Oh, yeah. You’re not an extra. You’re a wonderful investigative reporter for The Washington Post.

  CHRIS YAKAITIS (RESEARCHER): We needed newspapers created for that season that would show how the events of the show were being reported on by The Sun; what The Sun was doing was factoring into the police investigation. So, we needed these papers made, which was a pretty demanding task for a prop master. We were wondering how we’re going to do this. We had some feature story we wanted the cameras to pick up that would help the story along, but you still needed everything else on the page. Traditionally, in television and filmmaking, they do what’s called “Greeking.” It’s literally Greek. They’ll pick some passage in Greek alphabet and print it on the page anywhere that’s going to be slightly out of focus. Of course, that’s not going to fly at The Wire, so we needed to do a whole front page, or internal pages, depending. There was a point early on in production where it was discussed actually getting an Associated Press subscription, so that we could reprint The Wire stories just to fill out these papers.

  For each episode, I would basically write fake news stories that would populate front pages, inside pages. Then David and the other writers would do the headlines and the text for the main stories that we needed. So, we had our own little newspaper shop going while we’re also producing a television show.

  Dominic West directed the fifth season’s seventh episode, “Took.” “I was most anxious about how the other actors would feel about it,” West said. “Why are you taking direction from a fellow actor who you’ve been with for five years, particularly people like Wendell and Seth Gilliam? And I thought they were going to kill me. I thought they were going to ignore everything I said or take the piss out of me. They were really amazing. They listened to the horseshit I was telling them. I remember saying to Wendell, ‘Play the silences,’ which is the most ridiculous direction anyone has ever given anyone. He would listen politely and nod and then ignore me.”

  NINA K. NOBLE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): Directing was part of what he negotiated at first, and so it’s sort of the price of having him continue to be involved in the show, but he did a great job. He came in and did his homework and was prepared and took it really seriously.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): If you want to direct an episode, tell them you’ll come back, but they got to let you direct an episode. He had aspirations to do that. He didn’t think they were going to say yes, but they said, “Yeah, of course. Direct an episode.” That was one of the other things that got him back. He got to come back and direct the episode. He was scared. He thought the show was going to be whack. He didn’t know that the whole world [had fallen] in love with the kids. When we met the kids and it was going to be from these young kids’ point of view, we were like this: “You just turned our show into Fat Albert? Is that what we just did? Did we just turn our show into the Fat Albert fucking show?” I remember going to a picnic with Dona, the costume [supervisor]. I met some of the kids. “Don’t fuck up. We got the ball rolling. Don’t fuck it up, you fucking kids.” They were like, “Yes, sir. No, sir.” They were really polite, really cool, really awesome. We got caught watching these kids. When they act, we were on the set like, “These kids are good.”

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): Nina Noble came up to me afterward. She was never one full of compliments, and she said, “You know what? You did really well.” She said, “You do know that you shot more footage of film than any other director we’ve had?” I said, “Did I?” She said, “Yeah.” She was in charge of the purse strings, so I think she was being slightly critical about it, but the reason we did is, we had this big court scene in Episode Seven, and we had this brilliant, real-life lawyer [Billy Murphy], and he’s a Baltimore attorney who had actually got Don King off a murder rap. He was a celebrity attorney. He was playing himself, and I said, “I better just see if he can act before we get him on the set.” So, I went through the script with him, and he was brilliant. He was just playing himself, and he loved it, because he was a real showman and he’s used to acting up in front of a jury, and he was perfect. I thought, Oh, this is going to be great. Then we get to the scene—and we have a lot of characters who were not actors, and they do great—we get to the scene, and he’s brilliant and he has these pages and pages of speech that he’s really good at, except that he has no idea about continuity.

  I’d go, “Okay, cut. Okay, that was great, but you have to do that when you say that word, you have to have your…”—he was carrying a stick, and I should have not made him carry a stick—“Your stick is in the other hand.” Continuity issues, which I hadn’t really thought of. It completely threw him, completely fucked him up. We shot endless footage of him. It got pretty hard going because I’d constantly have to cut it and go back and say, “That works, but you’ve got to put your stick in the other hand.” Anyway, all that technical stuff that you don’t realize is part of the skill of screen acting, I suppose, and that was what Billy didn’t have and therefore why I shot more footage than anybody else.

  George Pelecanos often invited neighborhood kids inside his home to watch The Wire. He wanted to see the show from their perspective, and he began noticing, like all the writers, that the character of Omar had taken on an unintended mythos. “But also,” Pelecanos recalled, “things were being misunderstood by kids. Like when they burn Randy’s house down and it’s supposed to be a tragedy, the kids in my neighborhood were saying stuff like, ‘Yeah, Randy’s a bitch. He deserved it.’

  “I took that shit to heart. It got me thinking about the perception of this versus what we were trying to do, which is something that you always need to consider. You don’t know what’s in anybody’s heart, but you also don’t know what the perception is of what you’re doing, so the thing with Omar is, ‘Let’s make sure that people know he’s not a hero.’ He had a code and he was an honorable guy in his own way, but he’s not a hero.”

  The conversation in the writers’ room did not revolve around whether they should kill off Omar. That was a given. A debate centered on how Omar would meet his demise. They decided that he would not last until the finale, and ensured that his death would be sudden and unexpected.

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): Donnie [Andrews] was in the writers’ room with us, and he was the model for Omar. The funny thing about that scene where Omar jumps out of the apartment balcony, breaks his leg: Donnie did that, and some of the stuff on the Internet was, “Now they’ve jumped the shark. That could never happen.” We sort of laughed about that, because when Donnie jumped out of that balcony after a shootout, it was off of a floor higher than the one Omar jumps out of. Donnie broke his leg, but he walked on it to a waiting
car, got in it, and sped away.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): In the Nine Hundred building, he jumped out. When they’re coming through the door with shotguns, it’s not a bad move.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): What we shared in conversations, I chose to keep that between [Donnie] and I, in his honor. I will tell you this, he’s a good man. He lived with a lot of remorse for what he has done, a lot of pain, a lot of guilt, but he made good, I believe. He paid his debt to society and he made good to the community for all he had taken out. I’m proud to say that I’ve known him and he was a part of my life.

  DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): I liked the scene where Omar dies because I’d advanced the idea in the writers’ room pretty passionately that he die randomly and without dignity, and that the killer be a child. Ed jumped right in to support the idea because Ed hated anything that smelled of wish fulfillment or romanticizing that world. And David agreed pretty quick, too. So, that was a win.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): We were thinking about Omar dying, as he had to make room for Michael. Dennis Lehane says, “We should shoot him, not in the end, last cut. We should shoot him before that. Just have some kid walk in and kill him.” And that sounded so appropriate, because that was the Jesse James story, with Robert Ford coming up.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I knew we wouldn’t write what everybody wanted to see, a big glorious gunfight, because they were watching The Wire for the wrong reasons. If they get the big, glorious gunfight and he kills Marlo, it’s just going to add to his mythos. If Marlo kills him, there is an indignity to Omar’s end in that the mythos is transferred to the guy who is the greatest sociopath in the story. That’s too dark for even me: the drug dealer who is the most narcissistic and the most sociopathic character we had claims the one who began with maybe one of the more fundamental street ethics. So, there was no outcome of coming back to Marlo and vengeance.

  There’s no way to proceed other than to find a third path. We came up with the idea of the Errol Barnes [from Clockers] moment. I knew it was right. I had a lot of arguments in the room with other people. People wanted to see more out of the storyline, but it felt like, No, this is right.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): I read the script like everybody else. You get a call from David never. It’s business, man. It’s a job. You just read the script. We in the field. No violins to play. We’ve got a job to do.

  Omar ran the streets, so it’s not like I didn’t know what it was.

  ANTHONY HEMINGWAY (DIRECTOR): The moment I found out I was directing Omar’s death, there was a rush of emotions that ravaged my body. I cried like a baby. I high-fived everyone I encountered, whether I knew them or not. I screamed. I cried again. This was a huge deal to me and the show. It was, in an interesting way, the resolve to my debut. This was a pivotal episode in the grand scheme of the series, so the reality that I was being entrusted to handle it was an amazing feeling. Then it was time to get to work, and I began to do what I always do, which was: Whatever it takes. No sacrifice is too great for me to give this my two hundred percent. Once we found the perfect location to shoot the scene, I could then start to block the scene and break it down to figure out all that I needed to approach it and prepare to shoot this important and intense scene.

  The funny part involving Thuliso [Dingwall, as Kenard], I didn’t anticipate how the scene where he shoots Omar would impact him—or me, for that matter. At this point in the series, I had already prayed for forgiveness for damaging and corrupting this child. We had him cursing and completely going against everything that his mother and father taught him not to do. It was terrible. But by this point, I initially didn’t think twice about him walking into the store carrying a gun and shooting Omar. And prior to shooting the scene, I had several conversations with him, which he, too, brushed it off, so there wasn’t anything to be alarmed by.

  The day we shot the scene, all our preconceived confidences had left the building. At the moment for Thuliso to do what he needed to do, there was something that washed over him, causing him to internalize and not say much. Thankfully, later, I discovered he was scared but didn’t want to say anything and just wanted to do what he was needed to do.

  THULISO DINGWALL (KENARD): I was in middle school, still around maybe eleven or twelve years old. I got the script a couple of days before, to see what was going on. I didn’t quite understand it when I was first reading it, so my dad was telling me like, “Yeah, you’re going to shoot Omar when you guys go on set tomorrow.” I’m like, “Really?” He was like, “Yeah.”

  Me and my mom were going crazy. Just like, What’s going on? We get on set. Initially, they’re telling me how to hold the gun. They’re telling me what’s going to happen, breaking it down for me how the scene’s going to go, because it’s a very quick scene. I’m in the store, and there’s a guy in the corner who had this machine on his back and it sprayed out, like, banana bits and like strawberry shit. I don’t know what it was, but it was like strawberry. It really looked like brains. It was weird. They did really well on that, whoever’s job that was. I think that’s really what scared me as a child, honestly, was seeing all that stuff splatter on that Plexiglas. They gave me the gun and they said, “Look, don’t shoot. Don’t pull the trigger. Everything’s going to be done by us. You just hold the gun, and then when we tell you to drop it, you drop it. Boom.” That’s what it was. Real simple.

  When it happened, it just looked so real to me. I know I was young, but it just looked absolutely so real to me that I started to cry immediately after. Immediately after the scene was done, I ran out that store and down the block and cried because it looked so real, because I thought I really killed him.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): He was traumatized is what it was. No, we should’ve been charged with child abuse that day, when you look back at it. I’ll say it, because that was brutal. He was what? Ten, thirteen, twelve years old? No one prepped him. I think there was so much going on that day on the set. We had to hide me because, by that time, there were mobs of people. The people of Baltimore would come out. When they heard Omar was shooting in the hood, they would come out to see what Omar was going to do. They had to hide all that blood makeup because they did not want you to see I was indeed going to die that episode. That information was a hot topic back then.

  THULISO DINGWALL (KENARD): I never held a gun in my hand before. This is new to me. The whole concept around kids and guns didn’t really click to me until afterward, after watching it for the first time myself, when I was around maybe twelve, thirteen years old. I guess it made more sense to me then than it did initially, because to me it was just, “Oh, I’m gonna kill a guy on TV.” It was nothing to me. I didn’t really pay attention to the social problem of kids around guns.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): No one wants to talk about the elephant in the room, which, in my opinion, was no one wanted to deal with the reality that it felt like mourning a fictitious television character. I don’t think no one was able to go there that day. There was a job to do, and no one felt like no teary-eyed shit. I think no one just had mental capacity to go there. Everybody was supposed to act like it was just another day at the office. In my mind, it was an elephant in the room, a sadness that this shit was really coming to a fucking end. Nobody really wanted to really deal with that, in my mind.

  I remember Dona, the wardrobe lady, she came in my dressing room, and I was sitting there listening to Young Jeezy, “Bury Me A G.” I will never forget that, man. She walked in my trailer and she just looked at me and she said, “Uh-uh. We’re not going there.” She just snapped me back into a false reality, so I could get through the day. Then we got ready. We got the shot all together. Then the blood splattered, and then the woman’s screaming behind the pane, and my body goes limp on the floor. This little kid looked at that shit, and it was too much for him. It was too much. The reality got blurred for him in that instant. It happens to us as actors, you know
what I mean? Cross over and he was pulled into a place of shock and terror. That look on his face is so sincere. It’s so sincere. He was like, “Oh my God. What have I done? What have I done?” We had to stop. We had to console him. I had to let him see it was just fake. I had to hold him, let him know he didn’t kill me. I felt really bad that day that we didn’t think about that shit.

  DONA ADRIAN GIBSON (COSTUME SUPERVISOR): [Williams] was crying, because it had come full circle. I remember the day that we met, quite honestly, because he was a day player, and I don’t think that anybody thought that he was really going to develop into such a cult character. It was great, because we were just kicking it. He’s always just been lovely, and I guess it just really kind of rang true for him, right in that moment, that that whole legacy was over.

  ANTHONY HEMINGWAY (DIRECTOR): My style of directing is akin to a lot of old-school training. I like to be as close to set as possible, if not right on set. Especially if the scene is intimate or requires me to be close. So, as I called, “Action,” Kenard enters the store from outside, walks up to Omar, raises his gun, shoots Omar in the head—the blood squibs applied to Omar’s head exploded, spraying blood everywhere, making this moment very visceral and real, then Kenard lowers the gun and runs out of the store. After I cut, I first checked on Michael, or Omar, then went outside to check on Thuliso, and he was in his mother’s arms crying. And of course—I’m like a cup at the ready to run over on a dime—[I] started tearing up. But at that moment, I had a reality check, recognizing how this affected Thuliso in such a major way and that made me a little bit happy, happy that doing this act of violence would hopefully scare him from wanting to ever do anything like this again, especially in his personal life.