by Bill Barich
“Sarah Jessica Parker wants to play her,” Milch let drop, and I nodded dumbly, learning my second Hollywood lesson. Everybody’s susceptible to star power, regardless of how sophisticated or jaded they pretend to be. After the conference, I blurted to my wife, “And guess who’ll play the lady jock? Sarah Jessica Parker!” which, of course, never happened.
In an hour or so, David was done. He popped out the cassette and tossed it to me. “Go back to Dublin and write the pilot,” he said, and I did, with due diligence and honest effort this time. I spent six weeks on the job and sent the script by email to Santa Monica. Then I waited—and waited. One afternoon, I discovered a check in my mailbox, but Milch remained silent again, choosing to tackle the mystical surfing series John from Cincinnati rather than the horses. That left me out in the cold, or so I believed, until his call on St. Stephen’s Day.
After our talk, without asking any questions, I bought a one-way ticket to L.A. I had faith in Milch and thought I knew what to expect. I could count on him to treat me well, and to rewrite my copy as he saw fit—a prerogative he deserved, given his mastery of the craft. I knew, too, that he’d be under pressure from the network. John from Cincinnati had lasted only a single season and puzzled the same critics who’d loved Deadwood, and his next show—Last of the Ninth, about New York City cops in the 1970s—never saw the light of day, even though HBO spent a reported ten million dollars on the pilot.
The racing series sounded special, though, close to Milch’s heart. He’d been crazy about horses since he was a child. His father, a surgeon from Buffalo, used to take him to Saratoga every summer, where he placed his first bets at the age of six, with the help of some older confederates. Over the years, he’d poured a small fortune through the pari-mutuel windows, once losing a million bucks on a particularly bad afternoon. As an inveterate gambler, he must’ve understood the show would be a risky venture, but how could it be otherwise, with a title like Luck?
* * *
Los Angeles greeted me with 72-degree weather when I landed in early January, a balm after the Irish winter. I dragged my jet-lagged self to Redboard, where Milch, enthused and excited, quickly addressed the question of my weekly salary—five times higher than I’d have dared hope for—and installed me in an apartment by the beach at his own expense. As I walked to the bar at Hotel Casa del Mar to watch the sunset that evening, I found it impossible not to imagine a radiant future for myself.
The next day, we got down to business. The Kentucky governor was history and so was Churchill Downs—we’d set the piece at Santa Anita instead—and so, too, was my script. It no longer reflected what Milch had in mind. His vision for the series had grown broader and more inclusive, focusing on the hothouse universe of the track and the many diehard players—jockeys, trainers, agents, railbirds—who labor under the illusion that a transformative bolt from the blue will someday change their lives for the better.
David scoffed at the notion. “You know what luck is?” he asked. “It’s when you wake up in the morning.” We should be grateful for every breath we draw, I took him to mean, but our longing gets in the way.
Redboard proved to be an eccentric place to work, designed to accommodate Milch’s idiosyncrasies. He refused to carry a cell phone, for example, not knowing how to use one, so a land line was always in easy reach. Computers baffled him completely. He’d never surfed the Internet or sent an email and only read the emails he received as hard copies. At inspired moments, he liked to indulge in the liberty of gathering the troops and reading aloud an instructive passage from Billy Budd or Kierkegaard while occupying a battered leather armchair that seemed, by its very nature, to encourage his professorial leanings.
He kept most outsiders at bay, but dogs were welcome to roam freely. Sometimes two or three padded around, most memorably a giant Newfoundland with a gas problem, and David would lower himself to their level for an ear-scratching session. There were no cocksuckers in the canine kingdom, only gentle souls to be petted and praised. He also had a soft spot for children, and if he spied a tot in the lobby, you could count on him to wander over for a bit of small talk.
Adjacent to his office was the “writing room,” where a typist sat before an Apple Mac, perennially at the ready, should Milch choose to start dictating. He wrote that way, consulting notes at times but more often winging it, lying on his side or assuming a modified lotus position in deference to his bad back. He enjoyed performing for an audience, so the dictation had a theatrical flair. His words appeared in script form on three computer screens deployed around the room, allowing any observers on the floor or a sectional couch to follow along.
The script was slow to gather steam. Milch confronted the blank computer screens with palpable fear and trembling. (“Before I write,” he liked to say, “I pray.”) I assumed he’d have the pilot blocked out by now, but he came at it from scratch just as I did. I’d never been able to outline a book in advance. It was too inhibiting, plus it foreclosed on the happy accidents that keep one alive to the flow, so I felt sympathetic toward the maestro. He’d crawled out on a limb. In a medium devoted to the formulaic, he paid a price for his literary aspirations.
After much hesitation, he dived into a scene about a Chilean horse arriving at Santa Anita by van, where a crooked bloodstock agent is waiting. Milch combed over the dialogue with infinite care, deleting a word or turning a sentence on its head until a previously lifeless exchange sounded right, true to the reality he aimed to serve. He’d close his eyes, rock back and forth, and massage his scalp so vigorously his hair stood up in ragged cowlicks. He looked electrified, as if wired to the very dynamo of creation. All writers recognize the sensation of breaking through a barrier to discover what they’ve been struggling to say, but it was high drama indeed to watch the breakthrough enacted.
Along with his quest for the right word, Milch was a stickler for authenticity. He spent hours talking about vans and transport with Darrell Vienna, a trainer friend, only to scrap the scene with the Chilean horse in the end. The scenes I wrote met with a similar fate, consigned to a file labeled “other stuff.” I was disheartened until I realized we were amassing the bedrock material of the series, a loose-limbed first draft. Our lack of progress still bugged David, though. If he fell into a funk, everyone at Redboard walked on eggshells. Even on a productive day, he was loath to celebrate. “That’s not bad,” he’d say, giving himself the tiniest conceivable pat on the back.
At lunch, he tried to lighten up. As a newcomer, I aroused his curiosity, so he peppered me with questions. Was I of the faith, he asked, meaning, “Are you Jewish?” (No, I told him, though there are Jews with a surname that’s spelled differently but sounds the same.) Had the wart under my left eye been properly examined by a specialist? (As a doctor’s son, with a doctor brother, Milch often manifests as a doctor manqué.) And the apartment—did I find it comfortable? It’s terrific, I said, with a little galley kitchen where I cook my meals. He regarded me suspiciously, as if cooking were akin to sorcery.
One morning, under the guise of research, he invited a few of us to Santa Anita. His real mission was to check out a colt for sale, although he supposedly didn’t own horses anymore—at least not for the record—because his wife took a dim view of his costly hobby. But the Pamplemousse was no ordinary nag. A big three-year-old roan, he had Kentucky Derby potential. His trainer, Julio Canani, later became the model for Luck’s Turo Escalante, described in the pilot script as “a Peruvian trainer of acknowledged accomplishment and sordid repute.”
At Canani’s barn, a groom paraded around the Pamplemousse for our inspection. The colt was as impressive as advertised, a one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar purchase as a yearling, but Milch was put off by how he moved, favoring a back leg. (The Pamplemousse later suffered a tendon injury that kept him out of the Derby.) While David dickered with Julio, I toured the barn on my own, glad to be on the backside again. I watched a bowlegged goat with huge testicles hobble past, followed by a rooster pecking at the
dust, and talked with the Mexicans filling feed tubs and mucking out stalls.
To no one’s astonishment, David decided to hang around for the races. His table at the FrontRunner Restaurant was the best in the grandstand, smack on the finish line. He held court there for a motley crew of pals with nicknames like Jimmy the Hat. A tabletop TV showed simulcasts from four or five other tracks, and he bet every race, marching poker-faced to the high rollers’ window—minimum wager five hundred dollars—at five-minute intervals. Only when he hit a big exacta did he drop the sober mask and insist on spreading around the wealth. We all pocketed four hundred dollars.
Gradually, the script began to take shape. If I was no match for Milch in terms of dialogue, structure, or psychological acuity, I felt confident enough to handle the narrative sections, those blocks of prose that establish a scene. “The racetrack’s backstretch world is waking to its business,” I wrote, inspired by our visit to Canani’s barn. “The Big Horse hears riders’ voices, snorts and nickers from other stalls, some mariachi music on a tinny radio, a groom chattering in Spanish as he wraps a stable pony’s bum leg.” The bowlegged goat earned a walk-on, too.
With the atmospherics in place, David set the story in motion. The Big Horse’s trainer, known only as the Old Man, arrives at the track with his dog, Bruiser. He carries a bag containing a frosted doughnut and absentmindedly gives it to his night watchman, who informs him that his colt has slept well. They gossip about the Pick Six jackpot on offer, and the Old Man wonders if he ought to let his horse strut his stuff. Nothing much “happened,” but the scene was still very moving. The handful of lines spoken, deliberately prosaic, acquired an emotional depth by virtue of being so true to the situation—and by what Milch had left unstated.
By early March, he’d gained some real traction and had fallen into a productive routine. He read the script at home every night, then incorporated his fixes in the morning. With ten or twelve tolerable pages written, he felt on top of things, and my contribution—largely moral support and some minor editing—wasn’t essential anymore. Probably, too, he’d awakened to the fact—or been made aware of it by his accountant—that what he’d agreed to pay me, in a moment of excess, would be too much even for an Emmy winner, which I most certainly was not.
I stuck around for one more week. David bought me a farewell lunch at the Buffalo Club—originally owned by Buffalo natives toiling in Hollywood, including Milch—and expressed how much my help had meant to him. I took this with a grain of salt but thought better of it later. He wasn’t the type to bullshit. Moreover, he harbored a belief that we—human beings—are all connected in ways we sense but can’t articulate. If I concentrated hard in the writing room, not even speaking, did that forward the progress of Luck? Maybe so. The maestro seemed to think so, anyway.
* * *
After I’d departed, Milch polished the script for another six months, and an assistant emailed a revised version to me and some others five or six times a week. He wasn’t seeking any feedback, just keeping the loop intact. I read the most recent dispatch over breakfast in Dublin every morning, watching the piece grow sharper and leaner as he trimmed the fat and knitted the various threads together more tightly. It was an oddly compelling spectator sport. I cheered when the writing went well and felt dismayed when it floundered, but all the while I was learning.
The Old Man acquired a name—Walter Smith—ideal for his taciturn, plainspoken manner. David saddled Joey Rathburn, a jockeys’ agent, with a stutter that reflected his anxiety-ridden state. Chester “Ace” Bernstein was the most complex character and the toughest to illuminate. Loosely modeled on the fabled mob fixer Sidney Korshak, Ace was in transition, caught up in the act of becoming. Often confused and unsure of his motives, he vowed not to repeat his past mistakes. As he coped with the challenges of aging, he saw in the nobility of the racehorse a chance at redemption.
When Milch turned in the final draft of Luck, HBO gave him an immediate green light, although not the carte blanche of the Deadwood era—not after two straight disappointments. Instead the network coupled him with Michael Mann, the A-list movie director, who’d supervise the casting and direct the pilot, as Martin Scorsese did on Boardwalk Empire. By all accounts, Mann loved the script. David respected Mann’s eye and couldn’t argue with his record at the box office, but how well they’d get along, considering their sizable egos, was a matter for conjecture.
In January 2010 I returned to L.A., settled into a furnished studio—I was paying my own rent this trip—above Planet Raw, a vegan restaurant far from the beach, and reported to Redboard, where there’d been some changes in my absence. The office was crawling with interns now. Some were troubled—a drug problem, say—and in need of Milch’s counsel and support, but most were aspiring screenwriters basking in the maestro’s aura and hanging on his every word. He paid them a “living wage” of fifty grand or so for their six-month stint, and fed them a daily takeout lunch on which they visited a ferocious appetite, leaving a trail of burrito wrappers and half-eaten burgers in their wake.
David had also hired John Perrotta, a racetrack insider, who’d run breeding and training farms in Kentucky, Florida, and New Jersey. (Jay Hovdey, the Racing Form’s witty columnist, later became the third member of the writing team.) As Milch put it, “John knows where the bodies are buried.” Like the boss, Perrotta was a gambler, be it on poker or the ponies. He and I were charged with writing scenes for future episodes, in case HBO picked up the series. Additionally, John would serve as a technical advisor during the shooting of the pilot, relying on his expertise to enhance Michael Mann’s grasp of the track’s fine points.
Perrotta also had the unenviable job of talking down the officials at Santa Anita. They were thrilled about Luck at first, eager for the publicity it would bring to a dying game, but they developed cold feet after reading the script. In particular, they objected to a scene in which a horse breaks down, fracturing a leg. But for David that scene was integral. It drew a line in the sand. He was full of disdain for sugarcoated movies like Seabiscuit that played fast and loose with the facts, and wanted the viewers to know up front they were in for a truthful, if occasionally rough, ride.
In due time, the officials swallowed their reservations. How could they not? Luck had generated a buzz in town, and actors were supposedly begging for roles. Sam Shepard as the Old Man? That rumor made the rounds. Even Sarah Jessica Parker merited a mention again, but the big fish was Dustin Hoffman, and Milch was angling for him. Hoffman would be the perfect Ace Bernstein, David thought. He was the right age, intelligent and supremely talented, although demanding—“higher maintenance than God,” as somebody once said.
We lived on a steady diet of whispers until the afternoon Milch strolled into my office unannounced. He looked tired but happy. “We got Dustin,” he said, flopping onto the floor to pet Oscar, Perrotta’s Welsh corgi. With Hoffman on board, Nick Nolte was the next star to sign on—he, not Shepard, would play Walter Smith. As part of the package, David took on Dustin’s two sons as interns and then Brawley Nolte, who supplied us with avocados from his dad’s back forty in Malibu.
In early March, on the first day of principal photography, I set my alarm for 4:00 a.m. and reached Santa Anita in Arcadia just as the sun crested the San Gabriels. A crowd had already gathered on the apron of the track. Almost everyone associated with Luck put in an appearance, whether or not they were scheduled to work. Hoffman and Nolte chatted over coffee at Clocker’s Corner, while the crew prepared to shoot the first scene of the day—a confrontation between two degenerate gamblers arguing about the Pick Six ticket they proposed to buy.
Then the head-butting began. As the cameras rolled, Mann’s assistants made certain Milch and his staff steered clear of the action, confining us to the periphery of the set—too far from the actors to hear their lines—and barring us from the “video village” where Mann could review each take. In one fell swoop, we were reduced to the lowly status of second-class citizens. Nobody bothered
to explain. The assistants were only following orders. Perrotta and I were stunned, but David must’ve known in advance his presence wouldn’t be required or possibly even tolerated.
Still, he chomped at the bit. Luck was his baby, after all, and he felt protective and inclined to ignore the agreed-upon division of labor. But Mann was no pushover and enforced the terms of the deal as he understood them, unwilling to grant David any leeway to coach the actors or fiddle with the script at the last minute. Fair enough, one might say, but it grated when Mann altered a line or two of dialogue himself. Worse, he failed to heed Perrotta’s advice, and that led to the kinds of mistakes that the hardcore racing fans were sure to notice.
Under such constraints, Milch grew sulky. He’d put in a day at Redboard, then go back to the set to mingle with the players at lunch or hang out in his trailer. Maybe he indulged in a magical belief that Mann’s resolve would weaken, but that was the longest of long shots. Power in all its manifest glory was on display, so David eventually gave up and surrendered to the gravitational pull of his table at the FrontRunner.
Sometimes I joined him there, and that was almost always a mistake. Around high rollers, one throws caution to the wind. It’s like catching a virus. Instead of my usual miserly five- or ten-spot bets, I invested twenties and fifties, trusting the tips so agreeably offered. Three came at me in rapid succession one afternoon. Perrotta alerted me to a “live” horse at Gulfstream Park, who lost; Milch touted a mare Darrell Vienna trained, who lost; and both experts assured me that a recently gelded colt in the fourth race at Santa Anita couldn’t miss. The colt lost.
With alarming speed, I dropped two hundred bucks and beat a hasty exit from the grandstand, only to miss Milch’s astonishing reversal of form. His losing streak ended, and he won a hundred grand or so over the next few hours. “You left too early,” he chided me in the morning, giving me a five-hundred-dollar voucher to compensate for the cash I’d tossed away. He’d papered the track with money to celebrate his victory, in fact, laying Ben Franklins on anybody who had the wit to approach him with a hand extended, palm up.
