Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (22 page)

Nor was Milch insensitive to the demands of production. If, for instance, certain actors were on call for a particular week, or certain sets were out of commission, he would write to fit his producers’ needs. “We’d say, ‘It would be good if we could shoot in the Gem all day.’ So he would write scenes for the Gem. And a lot of times one of those scenes might be a three-quarter-page monologue that Ian would have to deliver and that he’d get the night before. He’d come in knowing it fucking cold. It’s an English acting thing,” Bianchi said.

In guiding actors, Milch was more likely to deliver historical context—say, on nineteenth-century views of medicine—than concrete notes. The actor Garret Dillahunt, who first played Wild Bill’s killer and then the character Francis Wolcott, was given and asked to study 190 pages of biographical material about a sixteenth-century heretic named Paracelsus. “None of it ever appeared,” he said. At the same time, Milch could seem genuinely open to—even dependent on—what his actors brought to the table. Often, character details were drawn from the real-life production—as though the band of actors, writers, and crew people out in Santa Clarita were itself a microcosmic gold rush town. Once, he observed the actor Dayton Callie self-consciously showing off a new coat to crew members. Transposed onto Callie’s character, Charlie Utter, the new coat became a metaphor for Utter’s changing role in the community.

“I didn’t know Charlie Utter until I knew Dayton Callie playing Charlie Utter,” he once wrote.

How you experienced working with Milch depended much on your own personality, said Mark Tinker, who followed him from
NYPD Blue
to
Deadwood
.
“If you’re an actor who can’t go with the flow, you’re fucked. If you’re a producer who must have everything in order, you’re fucked. But if you can relate to the creative process and you get enthralled with David’s brain and his approach to work and the heart that he exhibits, then you’re going to be fine.” He paused. “For a while.”

Tinker himself reached the outer limit of his ability to work with Milch during the filming of
John from Cincinnati,
the inscrutable and brief follow-up to
Deadwood
.

“I’d had enough. So, we went for a little walk around the
Deadwood
lot, which was where we were also shooting
John
. I said, ‘David, I gotta go eat McDonald’s for a while.’ His work was just too rich a meal for me to comprehend and digest. No day was ever the same. You never knew what was going to set him off, what was going to please him. . . . I needed something where I knew what it was going to taste like every day,” he said.

At the time of this retelling, Tinker was executive producer of
Private Practice
, an hour-long spin-off of
Grey’s Anatomy
,
about oversexed doctors in Los Angeles. So, how did McDonald’s taste?

“Be careful what you wish for,” he said.

• • •

I
f all showrunner-writer relationships, fraught as they are with approval and rejection, discipline and reward, take on a distinctly Freudian tinge, it’s no surprise that Milch’s were especially susceptible. He explicitly fostered a mentor-mentee, if not outright paternal, dynamic with chosen writers, telling Mills, for instance, that he would teach him everything he knew, until the younger man had had enough and was forced to leave. His professional relationships were particularly intense with the female writers who came into his orbit. Theresa Rebeck, after detailing the many crimes of “Caligula,” turned more self-reflective: “I both loved and hated this guy. I was desperate for him to think highly of my writing. . . . I needed to pretend that anything he wrote on a napkin was vastly more brilliant than anything I might write, ever, because it was simply true,” she wrote. “For months [after leaving the job] I wallowed in the confusion of wondering whether I was any good as a writer and why I couldn’t get Caligula to see that I really did have the talent and ability to be a great writer of his show. Why couldn’t I get Caligula to value me and treat me with just a shred more respect so that I could have stayed and let him destroy me more?”

Others had a very different, though equally loaded, experience. Regina Corrado was another New York playwright lured to Los Angeles to write for TV. At the recommendation of a friend, she wound up in the
Deadwood
writers’ room. From the beginning, she felt immense, loving support from Milch. “I can’t say enough wonderful things about him. He just so effortlessly changed my life,” she said. She was aware enough to note the personal significance of starting to work on the show the same year she lost her father, who happened to also be a charming, highly educated drinker. (“You’ve been training for this job your whole life,” one of her sisters said.)

And she could see Milch’s potential to be more brutal—particularly with male writers. She and fellow writer Liz Sarnoff would watch writers walk away from meetings with the showrunner, shoulders slumped, and half joke to each other, “Another spirit broken.”

“He was more liberal with his abuse of men, in a way,” she said, invoking a
Deadwood
scene in which Swearengen slaps another man across the face and tells him, “See that? It didn’t kill ya!” “He was saying, ‘You take your beatings like a man and give some back. It doesn’t have to be that your ego gets crushed every time.”

But none of this diminished her sense of genuine connection, whether it was sitting in Milch’s office, watching him work—“I remember once, he wrote this line for Calamity Jane, ‘Every day takes figuring out how to live again,’ and he turned around to me with tears in his eyes”—or accompanying him to the track and picking up his winnings, in one case $90,000 in a paper sack.

The angriest Milch ever got with her, Corrado said, was when she tried to get out of moving up to become an on-set producer. “Get the fuck out of my office!” he told her, furious that she would turn down the opportunity for which he had groomed her. After working on
John from Cincinnati
, Corrado left to work on another, more traditionally run show, but she thought often of her days with Milch.

“I miss it. It was always so filled with excitement,” she said. “But Liz told me, ‘Once you leave David, you can’t go back.’ You can’t be in that world if you’re not in that world. You can go back and visit, but it’s never the same.’ He used to say it was the killing off of the father. You have to kill him off.”

• • •

M
ilch’s feelings about working with others were as complicated as everything else about him. This was a battle every modern showrunner faced in one way or the other: the push and pull of auteurship and collaboration. Few scenes could embody it more vividly and literally than Milch’s method of composition. It was practically a piece of performance art on the theme. He had begun developing the process as far back as
Hill Street Blues
and had fully refined it by
Deadwood
. And he was well aware of what it looked like to an outsider.

“This will be easy to dismiss if you think it’s just an ego trip,” he warned a visitor about to observe the same process on the HBO series
Luck
, which premiered in 2012. “But it’s not. It’s something else.”

A group of
Luck
’s writers, interns, and various others, predominantly young and female, were waiting for Milch outside a darkened room in his Santa Monica offices. They resembled vestal virgins. Milch entered, arranged some cushions, and lowered himself to the floor. He assumed a position to accommodate his bad back: head propped up on one arm, one leg bent awkwardly at the knee so that the foot faced upward. It was not unlike an especially awkward male pinup pose.

In front of Milch, at eye level, was a computer screen. At a desk to his right sat a typist/transcriber and the assigned writer of that episode’s script, taking notes. The vestal virgins filed in and silently occupied the couch and chairs behind Milch. He called for the writer’s first draft of a scene to be put up on the screen and began to dictate.

“Is it better ‘This is how church is lately now, too’?” he said. “I like that better.”

“Yeah,” said the writer.

“‘This is how church is lately now, too.’ Go forward. Stop. Go forward.” The cursor dutifully followed his directions, and the gallery followed along.

Milch described this process as “problems of spirit turned into problems of technique.” Laying hands on the keyboard himself, he explained, would be too powerful a trigger for his obsessive-compulsive tendencies. The audience, in addition to witnessing his brilliance, was a kind of disciplinary force, pushing him forward.

Eventually, he came to a section of scene description, interspersed with a few lines of dialogue, in which several characters—including a trainer named Turo Escalante and a couple of wiseguys, Bernstein and Demitriou—watch a horse, Mon Gateau, deliver a mighty performance on the track. The resulting monologue could have been a lost Samuel Beckett prose poem, in which the disembodied authorial voice labors to get his story just right:

Lose the rest. Stop, please.
Descending toward the . . .
Starting
toward the winner circle . . . Starting his
descent
to the winner’s circle.
Double dash. Comma.
Perfunctorily acknowledging
a patron.
Double dash. Now the patron’s gonna speak. “
Cand
y
comma
huh, Turo?” Perfunctorily acknowledging a patron’s congratulations.
Starting his descent to the winner’s circle. Descending to
the winner’s circle.
Stop.
Close on Escalante, descending to the
winner’s circle, perfunctorily acknowledging. . . . “Candy, huh, Escalante?” Escalante: “He run good, yeah.”
Period
. “He run good, yeah.” Close on Escalante making his way
to the winners’ circle. . . .
Lose the “s” in congratulations.
“He
run good, yeah.” . . . Bernstein and Demitriou. On their feet, watching
Mon Gateau gallop out. Far in front of the
remainder of the field . . . Of the
rest
of the
field. Far in front of the rest of the field.
Double dash.
On their feet
, comma. Go forward. Lose
the rest
there. Lose
among the horses
. Lose
and
. Lose the last two lines starting with the assistant. Go forward. Stop
.

Milch was not wrong that the process would appear to an outside observer as a piece of astonishing, self-aggrandizing theater, a kind of religious rite in and of itself, with Milch acting as shaman. The content, though, was remarkably quotidian, consisting largely of the kind of fitful process—adding emphasis here, cutting a word there, then replacing it, then cutting again—that most writers suffer alone and in silence. Likewise, he had a need to express out loud, and record, the larger, underlying thinking—about themes, subtext, resonance, and so forth—that for other writers would remain intuitive, hidden, and unarticulated.

Just as Milch’s rap eventually began to seem oddly guileless—it was, you came to believe, the only way he knew how to speak—so too did this séance style of writing come to seem like something more than just absurd showmanship: an actual attempt, perhaps informed by the rigors of rehab, to achieve communion with other creative souls—what he referred to as a “going out in spirit.” Corrado once wondered aloud whether she, or any of the other writers, had any effect on the work they were supposedly involved with. Milch stopped and looked her in the eye. “The essence of this work is the essence of you,” he told her.

When asked if he would prefer, given the luxury of time, to write every episode of a series himself, he admitted that it was a tempting idea.

“The ‘(b)’ answer is, I’d write it all myself,” he said. “Which is to say that in my vanity and egoism, I would think that that would be the way to proceed. But I know deep down that the better answer is: Even having all the time in the world, it’s better to collaborate with your brothers and sisters. It’s ultimately the richest experience. It’s a much more eventful journey.”

In this struggle, Milch himself was not unlike the citizens of his Deadwood or, for that matter, any of the difficult men who populated TV’s Third Golden Age, from Tony Soprano on. All of them strove, awkwardly at times, for connection, occasionally finding it in glimpses and fragments, but as often getting blocked by their own vanities, their fears, and their accumulated past crimes.

“We’re in a stream or river or something,” Milch said. “We are being carried along on something, in which technology has taken over from religiosity. And the story which is being told is the story of the individual trying to learn how to fucking swim.”

Have a Take. Try Not to Suck

I
n December 2003, five white men in various stages of middle age gathered at a hotel in Tarrytown, New York. By day, they played competitive racquetball games. Somebody with a little foresight, and a concern for productivity, had chosen a hotel that didn’t have a functioning bar. Instead, at night they shot pool for money until an employee kicked them out of the rec room for gambling. In between, meeting in the living area of a hotel suite, they decided to elect a white mayor in an overwhelmingly black city, reform a major police department, and, just as a policy experiment, legalize drugs.

The Wire
was on hiatus between its second and third seasons, and the men in Tarrytown were the show’s brain trust: David Simon, Ed Burns, Bob Colesberry, and George Pelecanos. Also there was William Zorzi, one of Simon’s old colleagues from the
Sun
.
Zorzi was working on a book project that he and Simon hoped to get off the ground in nearby Yonkers, so Simon invited him to sit in on what Colesberry had arranged as a kind of brainstorming retreat for season three. Simon had an ulterior motive, too: Zorzi had been a political reporter, and despite the pronounced grumbling of his main collaborators, Simon planned to use season three to take on City Hall.

Viewers of
The Wire
, what relatively few there were at that point,
had already learned that they might be expected to follow the show in unexpected directions. Season one had been a beautifully self-contained tragic drama. Like season one of
The Sopranos
, it had also ended in something of a narrative dead end. The eponymous wire was dead; the investigative detail had been broken up, with McNulty banished to the marine division; Avon Barksdale had reclaimed his hold on the Western District’s drug trade; and, generally, the powers that be on both sides had groaned, possibly swayed a bit, but then settled back into place, as implacable and unyielding as ever.

Even given that narrative challenge, though, season two came as a shock, relocating a major part of the action to Baltimore’s dying waterfront and introducing an entirely new cast of characters. Cynics suggested that the shift to a subplot that included mostly white characters was a pandering response to the show’s poor ratings. Nothing about Simon’s personality made that seem likely, though. And if the goal was giving HBO’s viewership faces to which it could relate, a roster of roughneck stevedores, truck drivers, and union leaders would have to be seen as a questionable strategy, at best.

In fact, Simon’s fallback plan, if
The Wire
didn’t get off the ground, had always been to continue the series of year-in-the-life, nonfiction books he’d begun with
Homicide
and
The Corner
. He had even discussed the next installment with his editor, John Sterling, who envisioned the series in the grandest terms. Simon, he said, was turning Baltimore into his own version of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. The proposed third book would follow four longshoremen as they dealt with an industry that was disappearing, if not already vanished, in cities up and down the eastern seaboard. As Simon put it, about season two, the story was about “the death of work.”

Not everybody was happy about
The Wire
shifting to tackle that topic. “It just didn’t feel like
The Wire
,” said Burns. But Simon was vehement: by turning their attention to a different sphere early, he argued, they would be claiming the prerogative to do anything they wanted later. “We claimed the whole city,” he said. “If the show survived, we could go anywhere. And if it didn’t survive, if it was only going to survive as a cops vs. gangsters thing, then fuck it, I didn’t want to do it. There wasn’t enough there to waste five years of my life on. It had to grow. So, let’s take our shot now.” The result would be like a brass rubbing, each season uncovering a new section of the landscape, until by the end, an entire panoramic metropolis was revealed.

If, in light of that goal, the title
The Wire
seemed oddly literal and unambitious, Simon disagreed. “In my mind it was never just about the wiretap. It was about the delicate high-wire act, about the connections between people. It worked on that level. We’re all connected in some way.”

Some critics regarded season two of
The Wire
as the weakest of the first four seasons, the one in which romanticism most clouded Simon’s usually clear-eyed judgment. Certainly it was a premonition of the far more serious problems to come in season five. But it was also the season that revealed, thrillingly, the scope of what
The Wire
project would be.

At the end of the season,
The Wire
won its one relatively easy renewal from HBO. Simon even began thinking of a spin-off focused on politics and tentatively titled
The Hall
. When that failed to get off the ground, he decided that
The Wire
could accommodate an area of the brass rubbing even farther afield from its original focus. The story he brought to the table was based closely on the career of Martin O’Malley, the young white Baltimore city councilor who improbably split the black vote in 1999 to be elected mayor and later became governor of Maryland. “The journey of the serious journalist is ‘Why?’” he explained. “Who, what, when, where, how—a fourteen-year-old with a phone and a formula can write those stories.
Why
did something happen is epic. So if we’re trying to explain why the American empire is in decline, why we can no longer solve our problems, or even address them, then we
have
to introduce the political realm. And so what if it was an editorial?”

Once again, he faced resistance from his fellow writers. All of them.

“I thought it would be boring. We’re barely holding on by a thread [ratingswise] anyway. Let’s not do something where the audience is going to take a piss break every time the mayor shows up,” said Pelecanos. “The discussion went on all season. I’d argue against those scenes, and David would say, ‘You just don’t want to write them.’ Yeah, because they’re fucking
boring,
David. Give me a scene with Bunk and McNulty in a bar talking about their dicks. That’s what I want to write.”

The battle was a matter not just of taste, but of real, quantifiable space. Even given the expansive scope of serialized TV, screen time is a zero-sum game and every minute given to a new character or plot arc means one fewer for everything else. Viewers of a show deep into a long run often look back on early seasons with something like the nostalgia of a firstborn child: “Remember when it was just us?”

“If you look at season one or two of
The Wire
, you’ll find an A story line, and a B story line, with maybe a small C. All of a sudden, we started having A-line, A-line, A-line, B-line, B-line, C-line, C-line . . . and it’s like, ‘What the fuck are we doing here?’” said Burns.

This was the flip side of Simon’s determination to expand
The Wire
each season. You can see it in Pelecanos’s story notes and beat sheets, handwritten on legal pads, which begin season three in neat, amply spaced penmanship and grow increasingly more cramped and chaotic—filled with arrows, cross-outs, reorderings, and parentheticals—as the episodes progress. The notes are also tantalizing glimpses into phantom story lines left on the cutting room floor: at various points, the plot included Omar kidnapping Poot, the hapless Everyman corner boy, and, as disturbing, Herc wooing Beadie Russell.

The squeeze wasn’t felt just by writers. A character with less screen time can’t complain, but that character’s corresponding actor may need some significant ego massaging. In season two, Seth Gilliam and Domenick Lombardozzi found themselves in a position almost precisely parallel to that of their characters, Carver and Herc: relegated to the sidelines of the action—which meant shooting mostly second unit with Bob Colesberry—and increasingly frustrated. “We would bitch and moan and complain. It got to the point where we were calling our agents, ‘Get us off this fucking show,’” Gilliam said. “I told Dom, ‘I feel like George Steinbrenner signed me because I used to be a guy who beat the Yankees. And now I’m sitting on his bench just so I don’t beat them.’”

Eventually, a meeting was set up with Simon. “We told him, ‘We’re very frustrated.’ He’s like, ‘That’s great. Frustration is good.’ We say, ‘Yeah, but we’re
really
frustrated.’ He’s like, ‘Your characters are frustrated. You have to use that. But trust me, in season three you guys are gonna have a lot more to do. Season three is gonna be great. I’m still developing it, but all I know is Herc and Carver are gonna have a lot more stuff to do. And for right now, frustration is good.’”

Burns was never entirely convinced that the real estate spent on the political story line was worth it. “You could have played it a lot of ways without going all the way up to the mayor. It takes up an awful lot of room. And we’d tend to get stuck on whether O’Malley did something or not.”

Pelecanos, though, was a convert. “The kicker was, once I saw what we did, the political thread kind of made the show whole, took it to another level,” he said. “Up until that point, you didn’t understand how things connected, why there was a breakdown in the system. To me, that’s what made it. David was right all along.”

• • •

T
here were two other major arcs to be plotted out that season. Years before, while doing their reporting for
The Corner
, Burns and Simon had found themselves one evening on West Baltimore’s Vine Street. “The sun was coming down, there was this redness in the sky. And somebody must have had some good shit out there because everybody on the street was fucked up except David and me,” Burns remembered. “And David says, ‘You know, if we could put ’em all here, it’d be great. This is what they ought to do. Put them all in one place, so the cops can do their job and the neighborhood can breathe freer.’”

The result was a fascinating, if credulity-stretching, thought experiment: What would happen if drugs were legal? This plot, too, required the introduction of a new character: veteran police captain Bunny Colvin, who had made a brief appearance in season two. Fed up with the endless cycle of petty drug violence in his district, Colvin decides single-handedly to establish a free-trade zone—“Hamsterdam”—in which dealers may operate with impunity as long as they don’t impose on the rest of the neighborhood.

“‘We’re all good liberals here,’ we thought. ‘Let’s put our money where our mouths are. Really see what would happen,’” said Pelecanos. “We didn’t want to push an agenda that said this was going to solve all the city’s problems.” Far from it, in fact. In constructing Hamsterdam, the writers followed the experiment to its logical, and apocalyptic, conclusion. By the end of the season, Bubbles wanders through a free zone that has turned into a Hieronymus Bosch painting: fires burning, bodies in doorways, women being raped, children running in unsupervised packs. To get the scene right, said Pelecanos, “we shot for two days straight, just to make sure everybody looked really fucking tired.”

Said Burns, upon seeing the final scene, “All we did, basically, was take the walls off the houses in Baltimore. That’s the shit going on inside.”

• • •

F
inally, season three would both refocus on the Barksdale regime and chronicle its ultimate downfall, accompanied by the rise of the “New Avon,” as Pelecanos’s notes from Tarrytown had it. (Later, he added the name of the “New Avon”: Marlo.) And, as important: “Stringer Bell—Killed by Omar or B. Mouzone.”

To be an actor on a TV show during the Third Golden Age was to live in a permanent state of anxiety, one’s mortality (and unemployment) forever lurking around the next plot twist. For some, death was just the beginning of a long, fruitful run of ghost and dream sequences. Most, though, understood that one of the period’s signature tropes—that, as in life, anybody could check out at any time—had significant implications for their job security. Even James Gandolfini admitted that he didn’t sleep entirely easily knowing that Tony’s fate lay in David Chase’s hands.

The situation turned actors into forensic Kremlinologists, deep-reading every set of new pages for the slightest hint of impending doom. “Every time you read the script, you’re looking for a hint: if too much of your story is being told, ‘Oh shit, they’re building it up. I’m gonna go,’” said Andre Royo. He and Michael K. Williams decided between themselves that one of their two characters, either Omar or Bubbles, was bound to buy it before the series ended. (Williams won that Pyrric victory.) After a few seasons, Royo even developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome. He went to Simon and asked whether keeping Bubbles alive wasn’t a disservice to the story’s realism, given the usual life span of a junkie snitch.

“David looked at me and was like, ‘Shut the fuck up,’” he said. “‘I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know there has to be some hope or people aren’t going to get out of bed in the morning.’”

The Wire
actors’ anxieties may have been compounded by the fact that communication with actors wasn’t foremost among Simon’s showrunning skills. “David had a problem about telling people how they were gonna die. He’d never just say, ‘Look, you’re gonna die.’ There was always this weird energy,” said Royo. Larry Gilliard Jr., who played D’Angelo Barksdale, had been infuriated by how he learned about his early departure in season two: Simon had run into him on set and said, “You’re going to love the stuff I wrote for you this episode.” “Great!” said Gilliard. “I mean, it’s probably your
last
episode . . . ,” said Simon.

The lesson went apparently unlearned by the end of season three. By all accounts, the producers honestly meant to sit down and talk with Idris Elba about the timing and manner of Stringer Bell’s death. Instead, that meeting never happened, and he learned about it by reading the script—and subsequently hit the roof. Making things worse was the script direction that had Omar standing over Bell’s body and urinating on it, apparently a real Baltimore gang tradition. Elba headed to the set and started telling fellow actors he wouldn’t shoot the scene, enlisting some in his cause.