Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

by Brett Martin

  In his Baltimore version of Olympus, the roles of gods were played by the unthinking forces of modern capitalism. And any mortal with the hubris to stand up for reform of any kind was, in classical style, ineluctably, implacably, pushed back down, if not violently rubbed out altogether.

  “That was just us stealing from a much more ancient tradition that’s been so ignored, it felt utterly fresh and utterly improbable,” he said. “Nobody had encountered it as a consistent theme in American drama because it’s not the kind of drama that brings the most eyeballs.” It was possible in this time and place because, in the new pay cable model, eyeballs were no longer the most important thing.

  Yet The Wire was also, inescapably, modern; its characters operated based on real, idiosyncratic psychologies, refusing to be pushed around like figures on a board. Sometimes they surprised even their creators. One passionate argument in the writers’ room was about a major moment in season one’s next-to-last episode, “Cleaning Up”: the execution of the young drug slinger Wallace by the tougher, only slightly older thug Bodie Broadus. Just before shooting his friend, Bodie hesitates, gun shaking. Burns raised an objection: The Bodie we had seen to that point, he argued, was the very incarnation of a street monster, a young person so damaged and inured to violence by the culture of the drug game that he would never hesitate to pull the trigger, even on a friend.

  “It didn’t go with the character. Bodie was a borderline psychopath. I was like, ‘We’re leading the audience down this path, and now this guy is backing off?’ That’s fucked up. That’s bullshit,” he said, remembering his feelings on the scene.

  In future seasons, though, Broadus would emerge as yet another McNulty figure: a soldier who tries to make his own way and ends up ground down by the system. His death would be unexpectedly poignant. All of that, Burns granted, was set up by his unexpected moment of humanity in season one.

  “What it did was it allowed for a wonderful dynamic that went on for four seasons. It brought out a lot of comedy that psychopaths don’t have,” he said. “It was a learning curve for me. Originally I just didn’t like it because you don’t pull punches like that with the audience. Now, when I think about it, I think, ‘This is cool. This is something that allowed for another dimension.’ It worked. It worked fine.”

  • • •

  It helped that, beginning with “Cleaning Up,” written by Pelecanos, a major section of voices in the writers’ room belonged to novelists, for whom plot and character were almost second nature. Simon and Pelecanos had met only the previous year. Laura Lippman, a Sun reporter and novelist who became Simon’s third wife, had suggested Simon read one of Pelecanos’s crime novels, set in Washington, D.C., noting a kinship between the two writers’ sensibilities. Simon later admitted it took him a long time to actually pick the book up, partly out of a native Baltimorean distrust of D.C. Soon after he finally did, the two met at the funeral of a mutual friend, and Simon asked Pelecanos for a ride from the service to the shiva call. On the way, he explained the series he had just sold to HBO—a “novel for television,” he called it, with “chapters” rather than episodes. He asked if Pelecanos might like to write one of the chapters.

  Simon bet, correctly, that Pelecanos’s experience would be a particular asset in dealing with all the complicated narrative business that the next-to-last episode required. In future seasons, Pelecanos always wrote the script in that penultimate slot (Simon would write the first and last episode of each season), with the consequence that he became a kind of Grim Reaper, since that episode consistently boded poorly for at least one major character. Before The Wire came to an end, he’d be responsible for dispatching Wallace, the union leader Frank Sobotka, Stringer Bell, and the androgynous hit woman Snoop, all in climactic fashion.

  Before that first script, Simon came over to Pelecanos’s D.C. bungalow and the two sat on the back porch while Simon explained the process, what a beat sheet was, how each page was about a minute of screen time. Don’t worry about street names or other Baltimore-centric details, he said; all that can be filled in later. That should have been the first clue that writing for TV was very different from writing novels, particularly the research-heavy type over which Pelecanos was accustomed to having absolute control. When Pelecanos received the final draft of “Cleaning Up,” he called Simon.

  “What the fuck? Where’s all my work?” he wanted to know.

  “How much of your stuff do you think survived?” Simon asked. “Thirty percent?” Pelecanos agreed. “You’re doing pretty good, then,” Simon told him.

  Pelecanos proved a quick study in the essential lesson all TV writers must learn: that the job is to subjugate one’s voice to the showrunner’s and the challenge to find ways to accumulate personal creative satisfaction along the way. By the time he wrote the penultimate episode of season three, “Middle Ground,” he and his boss had worked out a unique system: Instead of going back and forth with drafts, Pelecanos would tell Simon what parts of a script he was most attached to and let Simon do whatever he wanted with the rest. He estimated that as much as 90 percent of his original writing made it to screen on that episode; he called the deeply multilayered final conversation between Stringer and Avon, before each departs to betray the other, “the best thing I’ll ever have my name on.”

  Pelecanos was only the first, and most influential, of the novelists Simon recruited to work on the show. From up and down the East Coast they came, like representatives of the crime families: Pelecanos from D.C.; Dennis Lehane from Boston; Richard Price from New York. Price’s 1992 novel, Clockers, had anticipated The Wire with its tragic dual story of cops and dealers in a fictional northern New Jersey city. It also lent the show several scenes, most memorably a scene in which Herc and his partner, Carver, run into Bodie and some other corner boys at the local movie theater, all “off duty,” like Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf clocking out after a long day of battle in a Looney Tunes cartoon.

  It was, by any measure, a heavyweight conglomeration of talent, buoyed by much mutual admiration, but not uncompetitive. “Lehane and I came up together, started writing novels at the same time. And Price was a guy we really looked up to. But, having said that, I didn’t want Richard to write a better script than I could,” said Pelecanos.

  The men would angle to get the best scenes into their own episodes. If too much good stuff seemed to be accumulating on another guy’s beat sheet, Pelecanos would grumble, “Why don’t you just give him the Emmy now?” (In fact, The Wire would go down as the most scandalously under-awarded show of all time. It received no Emmys and only two nominations, both for writing; Pelecanos shared one of them with Simon for “Middle Ground.”)

  “Price was insidious, because he could take stuff that didn’t look like it would be great and make it great. You’d start sweating just thinking about it. You could see his wheels turning. Like, ‘This is meat. I’m gonna turn this into a whole meal.’”

  Price, for his part, had watched the first two seasons of the show and arrived “intimidated,” he told the journalist Alex Pappademas. “I put everything I had into Clockers. I didn’t have some secret information in my back pocket that now was going to come out for The Wire.”

  • • •

  Upon arriving in Baltimore, Pelecanos, a devoted researcher, had been pleasantly surprised by the openness of the Baltimore Police Department. “It had taken me years to get into the places I needed to go in Washington, like the homicide squad,” he said. “I walked into BPD and someone tossed me a Kevlar vest: ‘Come on, we’re going on a drug bust.’”

  Whether it was born of institutional transparency or overwhelmed disorganization, the BPD’s open door policy extended to The Wire’s actors, many of whom were brought down for educational ride-alongs. Even for those who regarded themselves as reasonably savvy about urban realities, it was a shocking experience.

  “I’d grown up in housing projects, but it wasn’t blocks of boarded-up houses
and naked babies in the arms of twenty-five-pound heroin addicts,” Seth Gilliam said. He and Domenick Lombardozzi were assigned to a ride-along with a notoriously gung ho narcotics officer who went by the nickname Super Boy. On one ride they found themselves crouching in the backseat during a firefight. “I’m thinking, ‘My head isn’t covered! My head isn’t covered! Am I going to feel the bullet when it hits me?’” he remembered.

  Wendell Pierce, who played Bunk Moreland, and John Doman, the formidable major Bill Rawls, and West were in another group. “We went to shootings and stabbings. There was a guy with a knife still in him. Another guy who got shot and the cop was still trying to take him downtown for questioning,” Doman said. “All of us were like, ‘This is unbelievable.’”

  Far from most of their homes and families in New York, Los Angeles, or London, the cast spent a lot of time hanging out together. At least two social groups developed. The first centered on the town house that Clarke Peters, who played Lester Freamon, had bought after season one. Peters was an erudite, fifty-year-old native New Yorker. He had left the United States as a teenager for Paris, where there were still the remnants of a great African American expat community. Within weeks of arriving, he’d met James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and the blues pianist Memphis Slim, among others. When the musical Hair came to France, he worked as one of the production’s costume designers and eventually joined the cast. He settled in London, acting mostly in the theater, but he had a Simonian pedigree, having played the avuncular junkie Fat Curt in The Corner.

  In Baltimore, Peters’s house became a kind of groovy bohemian salon for an older set of cast and crew members that included Doman; Jim True-Frost, who played Roland Pryzbylewski; and others. Several ended up renting rooms in the house. Peters, a strict vegetarian, would cook elaborate group meals. There was a piano and impromptu jam sessions fueled by red wine and pot smoke. For those seized by the after-hours impulse to paint, there were canvases on easels set up in the basement. Among its habitués, the house was called “the Academy.”

  Meanwhile, a rowdier scene existed among the younger cast members—untethered, far from home, and often in need of blowing off steam. This social group was centered on the Block, the stretch of downtown East Baltimore Street populated by a cluster of side-by-side strip clubs (and, in semipeaceful détente across the street, BPD’s downtown headquarters). The cast of The Wire became legendary visitors to the Block, with a core group including West, Gilliam, Lombardozzi, Wendell Pierce, Andre Royo, J. D. Williams, and Sonja Sohn—holding her own among the boys in one of many on- and off-screen parallels.

  “We finished shooting at like one o’clock and, you know, normal places close at two, so we’d go down to the Block, just to feel the energy,” said Royo, who played the sharp-eyed junkie, Bubbles. “The owners of the clubs would come out, the girls would come out. It was like we were heroes. The local heroes.” At a cast and crew softball game, Royo hired a limousine and a team of strippers to act as cheerleaders.

  West, predictably, attracted his share of female attention, professional and otherwise. “A man could live off his leftovers,” Pierce would say. All were champion drinkers, and things had a way of getting out of hand. Gilliam took especially poorly to being approached while enjoying himself off duty.

  “He could be an angry drunk in a minute,” Royo said. “If somebody would be like, ‘Oh, you those guys from The Wire,’ Seth would be like, ‘I don’t know what happened to manners, but we were talking.’ And these were guys who weren’t used to being talked to like that. Who had already humbled themselves to come over.” Yelling and pushing would often ensue, though usually not more. “Sonja would always have her eye on one of the bouncers and could give him a look. She’s a sexy little chick, so they’d make sure she was comfortable.”

  Gilliam and Lombardozzi, the show’s on-screen Bert and Ernie, shared a large apartment in Fell’s Point. They hosted epic evenings of beer and video games, including Madden Football tournaments pitting “Good Guys vs. Bad Guys,” cops against the drug dealers. The games would run until five or six a.m., when half the players would have to depart for an eight a.m. call. (Peters, the refined bohemian, articulated the cast’s generation gap after hearing Lombardozzi brag about a particular Madden move he’d pulled off the night before: “He’s going, ‘Yeah, man, what you do is push x, x, y, x, y, y . . .’ I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck? This is how they spend their free time?’”)

  The pent-up energy that fueled all this revelry had a darker side. For many of the actors, particularly those working long night shoots on grim streets, production was both physically and spiritually exhausting. Royo found it especially difficult to play Bubbles. As a child, with a father who owned a Harlem clothing store, he had taken special pride in his appearance, showing up for school in wing tips and double-breasted suits. He knew that the sight of him in filthy junkie gear caused his parents particular heartache—not only on sartorial grounds, but because it was the type of role African American actors were all too accustomed to finding as their only options. At his audition, in front of Simon, Johnson, and Colesberry, Royo voiced his concerns that Bubbles not be just another clichéd black junkie. “They just looked at me and were like, ‘Oh, you don’t know how we get down.’”

  Still, Bubbles may have been more than a cliché, but it was a difficult character to play day after day. “My character’s head space was not a pleasant one,” Royo said. “I’d look at Idris? Nothing but bitches outside his trailer. Dom West? Nothing but bitches. Sonja? Dudes and bitches. Me? I’d have junkies out there. They fell in love with Bubbles. I’d go into my trailer and clean my shit off and come out and they’d look at me like, ‘You’re not one of us. Fuck you.’ And then when I had the Bubbles garb back on, it’d be, ‘Hey! What’s up? Welcome back!’ That’s a head trip, man. That shit eats at you.”

  By the third season, he said, “I was drinking. I was depressed. I’d look at scripts like, ‘What am I doing today? Getting high or pushing that fucking cart?’”

  He was not alone. In the isolated hothouse of Baltimore, immersed in the world of the streets, the cast of The Wire showed a bizarre tendency to mirror its on-screen characters in ways that took a toll on its members’ outside lives: Lance Reddick, who played the ramrod-straight lieutenant Cedric Daniels, tormented by McNulty’s lack of discipline, had a similarly testy relationship with West, who would fool around and try to make Reddick crack up during his camera takes. Gilliam and Lombardozzi, much like Herc and Carver, would spend the bulk of seasons two and three exiled to the periphery of the action, stewing on stakeout in second-unit production and eventually lobbying to be released from their contracts.

  Michael K. Williams, whose Omar was far and away the series’ most popular figure (a GQ writer quipped that asking viewers their favorite character was “like asking their favorite member of Adele”), was so carried away by sudden fame that he spent nearly all his newfound money on jeans, sneakers, and partying. At the very height of his popularity, Williams found himself evicted from the Brooklyn public housing project he’d grown up in, for nonpayment. He and Royo were only two of many Wire veterans who said they sought help for substance abuse once the experience was over. This is not to mention those non-actor cast members brought from the real Baltimore into the fake one—among them Little Melvin Williams himself, out of prison on parole and cast as a wise, battle-scarred deacon.

  As James Gandolfini could attest, the hardships of inhabiting difficult men episode after episode, season after season, were hardly limited to The Wire. Still, the peculiar ways in which the show affected its participants’ lives seem like another facet of the intimacy and intensity with which Simon and his collaborators insisted on engaging with their story. Once rolling, it was, mostly for the better, a creative upwelling that tossed and lifted all in its wake. Henceforth, nearly all other depictions of police and city life would seem so divorced from reality that they might as well have taken place on another
planet.

  Eight

  Being the Boss

  In February 2001, New York’s Museum of Modern Art screened the first two seasons of The Sopranos in their entirety, along with a series of films titled Selected by David Chase. (They included The Public Enemy, Mean Streets, and the Laurel & Hardy feature Saps at Sea.) It was a triumphant moment. Under the curatorial direction of Peter Bogdanovich, MoMA had played a crucial role in elevating and institutionalizing the generation of American cinema that Chase so admired. (He honored that lineage by casting Bogdanovich in a recurring role as Dr. Melfi’s therapist.) To have The Sopranos effectively installed in that pantheon—and later added to the museum’s permanent collection—was, Chase would later say, among his proudest moments connected to the series.

  Other signs of highbrow acceptance abounded as the show’s third season was set to begin. The New York Times TV critic Caryn James gushed, “As no single film or ordinary television series could, The Sopranos has taken on the texture of epic fiction, a contemporary equivalent of a 19th-century sequence of novels. Like Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series or Balzac’s ‘Comédie Humaine,’ The Sopranos defines a particular culture (suburban New Jersey at the turn of the century) by using complex individuals. So what if Tony is not a prostitute out of Balzac but a mobster out of David Chase’s imagination? His outlaw status offers a way of assessing mainstream society in all its savagery and hypocrisy, even while the series creates a unique family history.”

  As for the other side of the coin—popular acceptance—there could be no question that The Sopranos had arrived at something approaching the status of a national institution. Across the country, people would celebrate the March 4 premiere with viewing parties, complete with baked ziti and costume contests for best over-the-top Jersey-wear. There had been the MAD magazine parody (“The Supremos”); The Sopranos pinball machine; a line of The Sopranos cigars and humidors; the official cookbook, complete with a chapter supposedly penned by Bobby Bacala titled “If I Couldn’t Eat, I’d F**king Die.” Shops in Little Italys everywhere were stocked with Tony-related T-shirts. When the production set up to film outside in New Jersey or New York, the location would be immediately besieged by gawkers, lending the street an almost carnival atmosphere. Vendors would materialize; businesses blared “Woke Up This Morning” from their doors. Terence Winter remembered going to a show in Atlantic City with a group of cast members, including James Gandolfini, and having the spotlight turned on their table as the whole place stood to applaud. “It felt like being with the Beatles,” he said.