An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  More often I stayed away from the FrontRunner and killed the time by roaming. “Luck Credential” read the laminate around my neck, so I was set upon by track employees who fancied themselves actors—a much higher percentage than I’d have predicted. They mooched around, hoping for a bit part or a screen test. Milch was an even bigger target, but he had a strategy for dealing with the wannabes. He sent them to an acting coach he knew from Deadwood and paid for the lessons to prepare them for the roles they’d never get. For David, that was easier and less messy than saying no.

  I ate constantly as I roamed. Between the gargantuan breakfasts and lunches that union rules required, I nibbled at the snacks on the food carts that circulated—platters of sushi and rare-roast-beef sandwiches, stacks of petit fours and slivers of cheesecake. I gained four pounds the first month, a victim of boredom. There really was nothing much to do but eat. I understood Mann’s desire to keep Milch at arm’s length, but he also refused to send us the dailies, so we were in the dark about how the script played. Our show had been hijacked, and we’d been orphaned.

  The conclusion of the shoot came as a relief. We went back to work at Redboard and waited for Mann to deliver a rough cut of the pilot. Waiting was integral to the life of Hollywood, it seemed, along with gossip, money, and wretched excess. Finally, in April, David returned from the production offices clutching a DVD he’d agreed to watch only in the privacy of his own home—such were the security precautions enforced. A small group of us accompanied him to the house. There was a flat-screen TV available, but Milch couldn’t operate the DVD player and was too tense to ask for help, so we huddled around a computer instead.

  The first few minutes were stressful, especially for the maestro. The track jargon was difficult to decipher on account of a murky sound mix, but when the camera fixed on Kerry Condon—Rosie, the Irish exercise rider—astride Walter Smith’s horse in full gallop, I could feel the adrenaline pumping. The moment was transcendent, capturing the elemental bond between horses and human beings so central to Milch’s vision.

  In the racing sequences, Mann’s work approached the sublime. Thoroughbreds in action had never been photographed so beautifully or intimately. In terms of pure technique, he’d raised the bar very high indeed. He put the audience inside the fray, scraping along the rail with Leon Micheaux, the apprentice jockey, as he tried to find a hole in the field. Mann caught the color and the pageantry of the track, as well as the danger. The scenes of the horse breaking down were both shocking and elegiac.

  The director had done a first-rate job. Nobody denied it. One could almost forgive Mann’s imperial style on the set, but not quite. The howlers hurt, and the little dialogue changes stung Milch, even though he often remarked, about the delicate nature of collaborations, “You never get all your cargo to port.” But there was still so much to savor—the low comedy of the degenerates, Escalante’s ongoing battle with the English language, and the wryly tender exchanges between Bernstein and his consigliere, Gus Demitriou. “It adds up to a world, doesn’t it?” David asked.

  * * *

  After viewing the pilot, the HBO executives ordered Luck to series—eight more episodes—and put me on the payroll as a story editor. Though my duties didn’t change, Milch was glad to have the network cover my salary at last. He’d been footing the bill for me and almost everybody else at Redboard through his production company. But no sooner was he out from under than he hired two new recruits for ill-defined jobs he invented on the spot, and they spent the better part of a year trying to figure out what they were supposed to do.

  He was just as contrary when it came to script assignments. In a town where well-established writers would eat a spoonful of dirt to be awarded one, he chose rookies instead. He’d taken a shine to them, I guess, or glimpsed a hidden potential or felt obligated to do somebody a favor. Whatever the case, he seemed remarkably unconcerned about their inexperience, maybe because he knew he’d wind up doing most of the writing, or rewriting, himself, just as he’d done with my NYPD Blue episode so long ago.

  In spite of Luck’s hundred-million-dollar budget and the tight demands of the shooting schedule, he continued to work in the same painstaking way, issuing the familiar commands to his typist—“Go back, go forward”—and finishing a scene or two a day, while an ever-increasing, mostly adulatory crowd looked on, with interns spilling down the hallway. At times he marched around like a general under siege. His sworn enemies were the production people with their ceaseless queries about when he’d deliver a script. Deadlines he regarded with dread.

  Everything about Luck had grown in size. Now when Milch called an impromptu meeting, his office filled with fifteen or so staffers and their canine companions. The maestro’s tendency to ramble became more pronounced—I remember a disquisition on Benito Cereno that lasted an eternity and put me in mind of the college classes I dozed through—but he was so good-naturedly self-deprecatory about his foibles that we all cut him plenty of slack. His employees invoked the word genius to describe him.

  The sessions were more often useful. David vamped on story lines, and our task as writers was to flesh them out. That sounds simple, but he improvised so nimbly that the scene in question could rarely be improved. Even if you made it better—or thought you did—he’d hack away at your version and, with a few swift verbal strokes, take it to a higher level. To some extent this was a parlor trick, the result of long years at the craft, but I still found it frustrating and consoled myself with fantasies of locking him in a closet and not letting him out until he’d written a three-hundred-page book.

  By my own lights, I believed I’d started to grasp the essence of screenwriting, a minimalist art compared to the kind of work I’d always done and one whose poetic component was significant, at least in Milch’s hands. There was so much leaving out to be done, and so much left to the viewer’s imagination. Nothing could be forced. You had to listen, breathe, relax, and let yourself be guided. I enjoyed a sensation of effortlessness when it went well, although that came, of course, only after lots of effort.

  As we plunged ahead, Milch’s relations with Michael Mann became more cordial, the tension no doubt leavened by HBO’s strong support for the series. However belatedly delivered, the scripts were well received and studied with ardent interest. The directors Mann hired were impressed enough to stop by L.A. Farm to have lunch with David and explore the subtleties. Dustin Hoffman visited frequently, upbeat and unpretentious, meticulous about his lines, and Nick Nolte dropped off notes for his character, twenty or so single-spaced pages of scenes and suggestions Milch dutifully read and set aside.

  In the absence of a meeting, he ate with us at a big central table in an atrium-like room with climbing vines and fire pits. Sometimes he was all business, but his mood could also be merry. In common with other former addicts, he harbored a rueful affection for his follies, awed that he’d managed to survive. His misadventures had receded far enough into the past to appear comic rather than self-destructive, but I wondered if his generosity and compassion might be a way of doing penance for any harm he might have caused.

  At any rate, he had stories to tell. His days as a boozy Yale frat boy yielded some gems, although he was circumspect about George W. Bush, a classmate and fellow DKE, except to confide that he’d once been in a Texas duck blind with the Bushes and nearly shot George H. W. by accident. Had he talked with the former president recently? No, but Timmy Kissinger—Henry’s son, another DKE—had contacted him a while ago and reported to David that George W. had recalled a number of Milchean escapades and concluded his account of each by saying, “And I barely escaped with my life.”

  Milch told stories about growing up in Buffalo, too, and how his father, the local mob’s designated surgeon, regarded Christians as an exotic species. Elmer Milch wouldn’t allow them into his house, but a goy playmate of David’s once injured himself and required some patching up, so David broke the rules and rushed the kid inside. His dad made the necessary repairs and then proceed
ed to explain the arcana of Judaism to his befuddled patient. He’d hold up a fork and say, “This is a Jewish fork,” before moving on to the knives and spoons.

  Then lunch would be over, and I’d either step lightly or trudge back to the office, depending on the circumstances. If I had scenes to write, the hours flew by, but when we were in a holding pattern as Milch fumbled to discover where the story should go next, I endured the doldrums every writer ever hitched to Hollywood has bemoaned. In any event, David was exhausted by quitting time, rising woozily from the floor like a boxer from the canvas, hitching up his jeans, and heading for the Mercedes.

  The writing took its toll, yet the labor was worth it. In the early spring, Mann sent us some DVDs of nearly completed episodes that lacked only a title sequence and credits. When I watched the first at home, I was unprepared for the emotional impact. A manuscript travels no great distance to reach the printed page, but Luck was evoked on a larger scale more vulnerable to human error. Against the odds, Milch’s seed of an idea, planted in 2005, had blossomed into a work of art that amounted to more than the sum of its parts and stood in tribute to everyone involved.

  A rising tide of expectation began to sweep through Redboard. The DVDs lent an actuality to what had been curiously spectral. Already we heard rumors about a second season, and maybe a third. The only sour note concerned a pair of horses who’d broken down during filming and had to be euthanized. The deaths were doubly upsetting because HBO had tried so hard to prevent such mishaps, adhering to a stringent four-page set of protocols the American Humane Society had devised to protect the animals.

  The horses were forbidden from running on such widely prescribed drugs as Butazolidin, an anti-inflammatory, or Lasix, a medication for bleeders, and were tested at random to be sure they didn’t. They submitted to physical and radiographic exams, and the vets had access to their full medical records. Still, as always, the deaths were haunting and symptomatic of the problems facing an industry whose attitude toward policing itself was lackadaisical at best.

  Sadly, that was more true and damning than ever. Horses—primarily cheap ones—were breaking down at an unacceptably high rate around the country because trainers who were greedy or strapped for cash—or plain dishonest—entered their sore and injured stock in races. In many instances, the trainers were tempted by the money on offer. At tracks with a casino attached—“racinos”—the purses had grown fatter owing to the proceeds from slot machines and table games, so the incentive to cut corners and turn a blind eye had multiplied.

  But nobody spoke of those issues at the wrap party Nick Nolte threw in Malibu. Fun was the order of the day. I’d just fished my first beer from an icy cooler when a jockey-size man in a broad-brimmed cowboy hat approached and piped up, “I’m in your book!” Sure enough, I located him later on page 8 of Laughing in the Hills, where I identified him as Jimmy Cuzick, an apprentice rider and fellow tenant at the Terrace Motel in Albany, California.

  I’d spotted Cuzick strolling barefooted across the motel parking lot one afternoon. His mount, Spiced Falcon, had reared up in the starting gate, and Cuzick suffered a concussion and wore a patch over an eye. I’d hoped to talk with him about the accident, but he disappeared before I had a chance—racetrackers did that all the time, past masters at vanishing without any warning—and now, thirty-five or so years later, I’d caught up with him—Jamie, not Jimmy—in Nick Nolte’s garden, a member of the Luck company who played Walter Smith’s groom.

  * * *

  Another Hollywood lesson soon came my way. When the last script’s finished, the writers are instantly laid off, and it’s uncertain when or if they’ll see another paycheck. Though I hadn’t developed a “lifestyle,” I still felt the pinch and tried to pin down Milch about what the future might hold, but that was futile. He can be an unreliable narrator. In his irrepressible urge to be kind, he’s capable of telling people what they want to hear, even when it isn’t in his power to make it happen.

  “You’ll be back to work in a month or so,” he advised me.

  Six months later, in October 2011, I finally did go back to work on Luck’s second season. The configuration at Redboard had changed again during our hiatus, with a new writer on staff—Waylon Green, an old pal of David’s—as a coexecutive producer. Though Green’s TV credits were extensive, stretching from Hill Street Blues to Law & Order, he was most famous as the author of The Wild Bunch. Amiable and ebullient, with a host of tales to tell, he seemed delighted with the job, reporting to the office just three days a week from his ranch near Santa Barbara.

  Green was a favorite with the interns, who soaked up his yarns. At the drop of a hat, he had a story to match the moment, as in, “That reminds me of the time …” They were funny stories, too—a tequila-drinking contest in Mexico with the young Paul Newman, which Newman lost, or a catalogue of the pranks George Clooney had pulled on the set of ER. His anecdotes about the documentarian David L. Wolper, with whom he’d worked, were priceless. Imitating Wolper’s high-pitched voice, he recounted how his old boss hated dialogue that measured more than “two fingers” on the page.

  Green’s assignment, we all assumed, was to speed up the delivery of scripts. Toward the end of the first season, with David worn out, the pace had slowed to a crawl, and at least one director had complained about not having enough time to prepare properly. So Waylon jumped right in and took charge, and Milch appeared to welcome his guidance and support. Green was almost as facile as the maestro, but he didn’t bring the same emotional depth or psychological insight to the task, I thought. To be fair, few writers could match David in those categories.

  In our first script for the second season, Green introduced a Russian oligarch into what I felt was a series already top-heavy with crime and criminals. For all I knew, he might’ve been heeding an HBO directive—adding more Boardwalk Empire–type material—but some of us feared that we’d stray too far afield from the track and the horses, and depart from Luck’s original premise. Yet we had no choice but to proceed and try to strike an acceptable balance. HBO wanted four scripts in hand before the filming started again in February.

  Initially, Waylon seemed confident we’d meet the deadline. Even Milch bought into the fantasy, although he couldn’t curb his habit of rewriting. He acted a little dispirited, not as energetic this time around, and no longer indulged in his loopy but entertaining lectures—no further mention of Herman Melville or Yale’s Mr. Warren. Maybe the burden of writing ten new scripts, or roughly five hundred pages of text, weighed more heavily on him than we understood. “This doesn’t get any easier,” he once remarked after a grueling session.

  He got more notes from various sources, too, and Michael Mann asserted more control, but he and Milch had difficulty finding common ground. Their goals as artists were at odds. Mann preferred fast-paced action, high drama, spectacular visuals, and conflict spelled out in capital letters—the very elements that had garnered his movies such praise. But he seemed to have no feel for nuance or ambiguity, or for the intricately wrought language and subtle grace that were the hallmark of David’s best work. Mann’s talent was operatic, while Milch dealt in chamber pieces.

  In spite of the abundance of notes, David had scarcely rolled over. He stuck to his method and still roped us into idling for days on story lines he’d ultimately scuttle. He knew no other way to do it than by trial and error. Even with Green trying to ride herd, he’d veer off to improvise and come up with several tantalizing “what-ifs” that sent us off in a new direction. Here was the wellspring of his genius—an ability to conjure the miraculous from thin air—but genius pays no mind to the clock or the cost.

  One afternoon, apropos of nothing, he decided he had to write a part—absolutely—for Joe Pesci, so he grabbed a phone and contacted Pesci’s elderly attorney, who hadn’t heard of David, Luck, or maybe even HBO. Milch and Waylon swapped some gossip about Pesci after the call—maybe not such an easygoing guy as Newman or Clooney—and raved about his gifts as an actor, after
which Milch retired to his office with some pencils and a yellow legal tablet. Yet by week’s end, Pesci had vanished as mysteriously as Jamie Cuzick from the Terrace Motel.

  While we got lost on such sidetracks, HBO began to take the wraps off Luck. The pilot aired as a sneak preview after the last episode of Boardwalk Empire, but it failed to hold a significant portion of its lead-in audience. Undeterred, the network launched a massive publicity campaign before our official debut in January 2012. You’d have to live in Borneo not to hear about the show, and I often muttered to myself, “If any of my publishers had spent a fraction of HBO’s budget promoting one of my books …”

  In a relatively unprecedented move, HBO sent all nine episodes of Luck to the TV critics, acknowledging what we already knew—the show was a dense piece of dramaturgy that best revealed its charms and virtues over time. On balance, the reviews were quite good, with Milch’s writing and Mann’s camera work singled out for accolades. The only major dissenters were at the New York Times and New Yorker—the old “East Coast bias,” somebody muttered, and perhaps that wasn’t entirely wrongheaded.

  Still, our mood was upbeat on the night of the premiere. It took place at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, no less, with a red carpet and a noisy gang of fans snapping cell-phone photos of the stars. For the first time, I watched the pilot with strangers rather than friends or colleagues, and realized why some directors find such exposure so nerve-racking. Your carefully crafted work stands naked, and when a line falls flat or fails to get a laugh, you cringe inside. Is it your fault for being too cute or obscure, or is the audience just too dumb to grasp your intent?