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

by Brett Martin

  To Sorcher, this was the defining decision of his time at AMC—even more consequential, and requiring more nerve, than green-lighting and taking on the expense of the Mad Men pilot. At least that show and Broken Trail were of a piece with some existing elements of the network’s brand; they could be packaged with The Apartment or El Dorado or other films from AMC’s well-established inventory. Breaking Bad fit no discernible genre at all—except quality. “‘If we do this,’ I thought, ‘we’re going all the way out on this limb,’” Sorcher said. “We had had success with Mad Men. And once you’ve had that cookie, it tastes good. You want another one. The decision to go a different way, believe me, it was fucking terrifying. But once you did, once you chose quality over everything else . . . you could do anything.”

  • • •

  By now, the staff in the office of “Delphi Information Sciences Corporation” had assembled and dispensed with the first and most important task of the day: ordering lunch. To Gilligan’s left, wearing a green San Diego Zoo T-shirt, sat Tom Schnauz, whose joke had inspired the show and who was now supervising producer. The fifth episode of the fourth season, 405, which was currently on the table, was his to write. Elsewhere around the table were Gennifer Hutchison, Moira Walley-Beckett, Sam Catlin, and Peter Gould. One more writer, George Mastras, was out of the office, writing an episode. At the far end, across the long expanse from Gilligan, the writers’ assistant and script coordinator, Kate Powers, sat feverishly transcribing everything said. She wore black carpal-tunnel sleeves over both wrists.

  On the wall behind Gilligan was a large corkboard. Across the top were pinned thirteen index cards representing the thirteen episodes of the season. In rows beneath them, more neatly printed cards (Schnauz, who had the best handwriting on staff, was the deputized card writer) contained detailed story points. The cards looked like a pile of leaves that had faced a stiff, left-blowing wind, clustered deep under the early episodes but gradually thinning as the as-yet-unwritten season progressed. Under 413, the final episode of the season, there was only one single, fluttering card. It read in bold, matter-of-fact Magic Marker, “BOOM.”

  On the other walls were maps of New Mexico and Albuquerque and a detailed schematic, with photos, of Walt’s fictional meth superlab located underneath an industrial laundry. Gilligan had originally set the show in Southern California’s Inland Empire, the area east of Los Angeles. Thanks to tax incentives, though, production had been moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. It proved to be a fortuitous change; the tone of the show became inseparable from the Southwest’s gaping empty deserts and parking lots, its cul-de-sac communities and domes of vast blue sky. The show was as rooted in its geography as The Sopranos was in New Jersey.

  Like The Sopranos, too, it uncannily anticipated a national mood soon to be intensified by current events—in this case the great economic unsettlement of the late aughts, which would leave many previously secure middle-class Americans suddenly feeling like desperate outlaws in their own suburbs. At the same time, the real-world meth epidemic and, across the border, the increasing violence of the Mexican cartels provided a dramatic new backdrop and a whole world into which to expand.

  Behind Schnauz was another corkboard, representing episode 405. As the room worked through the episode, each beat or scene would be written on a card and pinned to the board. The last card was always pinned with a little ceremony that meant the episode was locked down. At that point, Gilligan said, it would be so fully imagined and outlined in such detail that, in theory, at least, any of the writers in the room would be able to take over and supervise production.

  Right now, the 405 board was blank.

  Nearly every discussion in every writers’ room, Gilligan explained, boils down to one of two questions: “Where’s a character’s head at?” and “What happens next?” Ideas vs. action. Text vs. subtext. This, it happened, was a “What happens next?” day, in which the details of a relatively banal plot point need to be worked out.

  “Some days you need to build the blocks,” he said.

  To borrow a handy acronym, the question was this: WWJD? What will Jesse do? At this point in the series, the two protagonists, Jesse and Walt, had become dangerously, inextricably tied up with Mexican drug cartels and are under the sway of an ice-cold, manipulative kingpin named Gus Fring, who poses as the upstanding head of a fried chicken franchise. Jesse, distraught from having killed a man for the first time at the end of season three, has been falling apart, hosting a meth-fueled house party that lasts the span of the three previous episodes. This is simultaneously a threat to Gus, who needs both men, and an opportunity to gain the upper hand.

  As Gilligan recapped, “If Walt is dead, Gus has nothing, because Jesse can’t cook like Walt. If Jesse’s dead, Walt goes berserk and doesn’t cook and Gus has nothing. But if he keeps Jesse alive and yet divides Jesse’s loyalties in his Machiavellian fashion, then he’s really accomplished something.”

  To accomplish that, Gus instructs his fixer, a flinty, aging hit man named Mike, to take Jesse on as a partner for the day and give him a task that will raise his self-esteem in a way working for Walt doesn’t. That still left a bevy of questions. Mainly: “What would that task be?” But also: “How much does Mike know about the plan?” “Is it something meaningless or something for which Jesse is uniquely qualified?” “Is there anything for which Jesse is uniquely qualified?” And so on.

  “This is one of those moments where we know in theory what happens, but we need the specifics. We had a lot of good stuff Friday, but none of it really stuck with me over the weekend,” Gilligan said. “Part of me thinks it should be supersimple.”

  “What I like is that Mike doesn’t want him there,” one of the writers said. “This is the last guy he wants in his fucking car.”

  “I like that, too,” said Gilligan.

  “I don’t think Mike would tell him jack. I think it’s nice for us to just wonder, ‘What’s going on here?’”

  “There’s never any harm in that,” said Gilligan. “It’s okay to be mysterious. It’s not good to be confusing, but mysterious is good.”

  “Are we skipping over the cliff-hanger from 404?” Walley-Beckett wondered. “Of whether Jesse’s about to get whacked?”

  “I agree, we need to see that moment. But that moment can string out. Say, just for argument, the first scene, Mike pulls his piece-of-shit Buick onto some side street, pulls up to a curb, stops, turns off the engine. Jesse’s sitting there, waiting to see what the play is. Mike says, ‘All right, here’s the deal. See that house there? You walk in there, you buy an eight ball. You got any money on you? Here, buy an eight ball.’ He’s like, ‘I’m going to go in there and have an accident, is that what this is about?’ ‘Not if you don’t fuck up. Today’s not the day you die, unless you fuck things up. Which is very possible.’ Obviously this is the worst dialogue ever, but there’s a way we can take it completely off the table for the audience in the first scene.”

  “I don’t believe it, though,” somebody said.

  Gilligan sighed. “Yeah, why do that?” he said, answering himself. “Why take away the drama?” He sighed again.

  • • •

  With lunchtime approaching, there was a marked increase in shifting in the writers’ office chairs. In the center of the table, there were three categories of items. In ascending order of importance: things to play with (magnets, puzzles, paper clips, a lump of clay) things to write with (stacks of legal pads and index cards, a pretzel jar filled with pens and Sharpies), things to eat (candy and snacks of every description). Catlin was diligently involved in manufacturing miniature Mark Rothko reproductions using highlighters and index cards. There were more and more bathroom breaks and a brief conversational detour into quotes from The Big Lebowski. A small faction of the writers took a quick trip downstairs to see how extreme the temperature had gotten. The patter became slightly punch-drunk, as in an exchange about a scene, ultimately
discarded, in which a character walks across the desert, dragging a dripping roller bag.

  “What’s in the suitcase, that you’d bother dragging across the scorching hot desert?”

  “Dope.”

  “Money.”

  “Organs on ice.”

  “Orchids?”

  “Yes, orchids. Rare orchids.”

  “Tulips. He’s doing business with the Dutch and they demand payment in tulips.”

  Throughout it all, Gilligan kept up a stream of talk about the problem at hand, sometimes as if to himself. “Fuck,” he finally said, spinning around in his chair. “Why is this so hard?”

  Many options had already been explored: Jesse would be sent into a drug house to buy meth. He’d be sent to sell meth. It would be as simple as getting something out of the trunk of Mike’s car or as complicated as becoming Gus’s informant. Should it be two missions—one a failure, the other successful? Three missions?

  Inevitably, the line between “What happens next?” and “Where’s a character’s head at?” began to blur. “By the end of the season, it should be that Jesse is torn between two friends, or masters . . . ,” Gilligan said, groping toward a breakthrough.

  “Just say ‘lovers,’” said one of the writers.

  “No, it’s a custody battle! ‘I don’t know whether I want to live with Mom or Dad!’” Gilligan nearly shouted, grinning.

  This instantly rang true. Jesse’s relationship with Walt had always been that of a dysfunctional father and son. And the room’s energy was suddenly refocused.

  “Walt is like, ‘He’s trying to turn you against me, don’t you see?’”

  “His house is bigger than mine. Is that the problem?”

  Gilligan was laughing: “‘He’s got a PlayStation. All I have is Sega.”

  The insight did little to overcome the immediate hurdle, but it added yet another thread to the dense psychological warp and weft of the series. One thing notably missing from the conversation was discussion of dialogue. In part, this was because that would fall under the purview of Schnauz when he took a finished outline and began to write his script. More than that, though, it spoke to Gilligan’s approach to television.

  “Historically, this has been a medium in which you say more than you show. You just didn’t have the budgets and scheduling largesse that movies had, so you had to have two people in a room, talking it through,” he said. As television budgets increased—along with the size and quality of televisions themselves—that had changed, and Gilligan was intent on taking advantage of the shift. Breaking Bad is by far the most visually stylized show of the Third Golden Age. It employs and empties the entire filmic bag of tricks—from high-speed time-lapse montages to wide-open landscapes that are more John Ford than anything a revisionist western like Deadwood could ever allow itself.

  The signature shot, used at least once per episode, is a fish-eye view up from under or inside some improbable place—a table, a toilet, a bag, a massive chemical boiler. Seen once, it is a cool effect; twice through ten times, a self-conscious gimmick; sixty-five times, something approaching a guiding ethic.

  At the same time, as behooves a story with chemistry at its heart, the show is obsessed with the concrete and literal. The camera lingers with intense curiosity on significant objects—a broken pair of glasses, a box cutter, the missing eye of a stuffed animal—and on processes, How Things Work: Walt shaving his head; an insistent finger of chemical pushing its way through a tube; the somber disassembly of a motorbike for disposal, after its young owner has stumbled, fatally, upon Walt and company robbing a train. A jaunty montage of Gus’s meth distribution network, tucked into vats of fried chicken batter, played like a factory tour on 1970s Sesame Street.

  All of this adds up to a commitment to visual storytelling that makes Breaking Bad a perfect complement to its hyperverbal network mate, Mad Men. Midway through season three, Gilligan said, Peter Gould had come up to him, beaming. “Look at my script that we’re about to start shooting,” Gould said. “I’ve counted and there’s five uninterrupted pages where not a word of dialogue is spoken!”

  “I was so proud of him,” Gilligan said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, man, that’s something to be excited about! That excites me, too!”

  • • •

  This afternoon, it seemed, little storytelling would be taking place—visual, verbal, or otherwise. Lunch came and went, with no answer to the Jesse question. “It’s the kind of thing where we’ll know it when we hear it,” Gilligan said with genial resignation. “I just haven’t heard it yet.” Finally, the staff broke for the day. The discussion would take up another three days before being settled: Jesse would be explicitly instructed to guard the radio knobs in Mike’s car while Mike ran errands—not touch the knobs, merely guard them. The detail was duly recorded on an index card and pinned to the bulletin board. At the end of the day, it would be included in a fifteen-page, single-spaced digest of daily notes. Then it was enshrined in an outline, to be fleshed out in Schnauz’s script. That, in turn, was passed around for notes from each of the other writers and Gilligan himself, before being sent back for a revision. Eventually, it would make its way into the crisp white pages of a production draft.

  Then the story moved onward: to the tone meeting, the production meeting, the table read. It was pored over by line producers, prop masters, location scouts, production designers, scenic designers, costume designers, directors, assistant directors, second assistant directors, and second second assistant directors—at each step becoming more real, as if slowly emerging from the shimmer of some distant desert horizon. Finally, it was off to New Mexico to be set, forever, on film.

  And then it came to us: By fiber-optic cable, by the Internet, by digitally imprinted disk; into our homes, our bedrooms, the phones in our pockets; and we absorbed it, discussed it, argued about it, recapped it, pressed it on our friends. It became one more holy object in the communal sacrament that, thanks to the gods of business, technology, and creativity, TV had become in the early twenty-first century.

  Somewhere along the line, the knobs were dropped. The task ended up as nothing more complicated than riding shotgun while picking up hidden packages of money in a series of remote locations. Unfolding as a montage, it took up eighty-two seconds of screen time.

  Epilogue

  Endings are the hardest part.

  VINCE GILLIGAN

  In the new world of television, now nearly fifteen years old, there may be nothing more unnatural than an ending. After all, the whole financial model of the medium depends on longevity, the long run, the gaudy number of seasons. In a perfect TV world, no door shuts forever, no show ever dies. As the song goes, “The movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on. . . .”

  It was the happy accident of the Third Golden Age that precisely that impulse, in the right hands, helped transform TV into not only a serious art form, but the dominant art form of the era. No endings came to mean no crappy endings, no cheap catharsis—new kinds of stories free to wend their way through an approximation of real life.

  At the same time, we know that all shows have a natural life span, a period after which the intersection of overfamiliarity and overcontrivance starts producing diminishing returns. Rare is the show—thanks to commercial pressure and the myopia that comes from being too close to the action—that recognizes its organic expiration date until after it’s passed. Remember what David Milch said: “There are some series that end halfway through and just don’t know it.”

  Certainly the revolution in how we watch, where we watch, and what we watch goes on beyond the span of this book, just as it flowed out of events before it. Let’s, then, honor the approach to endings taken by The Wire, which closed every season, including the last, with a montage of its characters and institutions, forever in motion, sailing into the future.

  David Simon continued to work at HBO, moving toward the conclusion of Tre
me, his and Eric Overmyer’s love letter to post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, rendered in both The Wire–like documentary detail and a deeply romantic blush. It was, he said, a kind of rejoinder to The Wire, a celebration of what the urban experiment does well, why it is necessary, in a city that nearly disappeared.

  “You go into a bar in Kathmandu or Budapest and some form of African American music with a flatted third and a flatted seventh note has triumphed as almost the dominant musical form of the species. That could only happen and did only happen in an eight-square-block area of New Orleans. And it only happened because of a variety of things that are uniquely American. It’s the greatest American export. This is what the city is capable of. This is what the city can give you,” he said.

  Simon had also increasingly become a kind of pundit laureate, a ranter in chief, particularly on the subjects of urban policy and the future of newspapers. He tacitly embraced the role by starting a blog titled The Audacity of Despair—as if his output were not already sufficiently prodigious or, for that matter, audacious and despairing. Oddly, for such a dedicated newsman, he explained the move to the Web in part as a way to circumvent traditional media, which, he said, often misinterpreted him.

  In any event, it gave us the gift of an anecdote, from a family summer vacation in Italy: Simon and his teenage son were in Pisa, regarding the Leaning Tower. “I’m supposed to be the pessimist,” he wrote. “I’m the guy who is reputedly drawn to a constant parsing of human failure. The Leaning Tower should be pretty much in my philosophical wheelhouse, right?”