All the Pieces Matter Read online

  Simon accepted a buyout, jumping full time to the staff of Homicide. Under Fontana and producer/writer James Yoshimura, he learned how to transfer his journalistic skills into writing for television. It was Fontana who mentored Simon, telling him that a writer becomes a producer in order to protect his words. Some of the cast and crew dreaded whenever Simon arrived on set. They knew they would be pelted with questions, and they tried avoiding eye contact with him. “It was questions with wardrobe,” said Jeffrey Pratt Gordon, who worked in the art department of Homicide before acting as Johnny “Fifty” Spamanto in The Wire’s Season 2. “It was questions with the cinematographer. He was asking everybody questions, and a lot of the times that he asked the questions is right when we’re sort of in the middle of doing stuff. What’s this guy poking around for? What’s this guy always asking questions about?” It was only years later that he surmised Simon had been educating himself in every aspect of filmmaking. Still, television did not entirely appeal to Simon. He had left the newspaper but remained an arguer, one ready to rail against the status quo. The Washington Post tried hiring him, and he mulled over the offer. It was not until Fontana showed him something else that he had been working on, a pilot for a prison drama shot for HBO named Oz, that Simon visualized television as a worthwhile megaphone. Oz painted a grim world where the initial concerns would not consist of who won and who lost or cleanly separate the bad guys from the good guys. Simon contemplated whether something like The Corner could be adapted for television. Through Fontana, he gained an audience with HBO. He pitched them on what would have been The Wire, telling Burns, “If HBO’s interested in this world, we could write a fictional show.” The HBO executives Chris Albrecht, Anne Thomopoulos, and Kary Antholis looked at one another. “Just do the book,” Antholis said. “Just do the characters in the book. You have six hours. It’s a miniseries.” HBO, Simon thought, would need a black writer associated with the project. He floated the possibility of attaching David Mills. The name appealed to the executives but left no place for Burns. Instead, Simon asked Burns to begin outlining the fictionalized world. “I didn’t like what happened because David was not forthcoming,” Burns said. “He believed he needed a black writer on the show. They wanted me to do another script as if there was going to be seven episodes instead of the six, which was totally not going to happen. They took me out to a restaurant and they fumbled through this, ‘We were thinking about this and that,’ and I’m thinking to myself, You guys, there would be no Corner, because David wasn’t going to go out there by himself. I was more than happy to go out because I liked the experience. I liked to do things like that. David waited until it was safe to go out.”

  The decision to commit to The Corner, recalled Chris Albrecht, HBO’s chairman and CEO, came down to a choice between Simon’s project or an adaptation of Taylor Branch’s work on the civil rights movement. He took scripts from both on a cross-country plane ride. Albrecht opened The Corner first. Oh man, that’s so depressing, he thought. No one is going to want to watch this. He picked up Branch’s scripts. He found them entertaining, but his mind wandered back to The Corner, wondering what would happen next. He picked it up again and sifted through the next few pages. This is too intense, he thought. It’s just so intense and so raw. The same scenario played out a few more times. As worthwhile as the Taylor Branch project was, anybody could do that, he finally decided. Only HBO could do The Corner.

  The gamble paid off. With Charles “Roc” Dutton directing the six episodes, the miniseries aired in 2000 and received critical acclaim, four Emmy nominations, and a Peabody Award. “Assuming the perspective of its characters, the series avoids clichés and condescension; the performances are remarkably free of the cheap mannerisms actors often resort to when playing addicts,” a New York Times review of the miniseries stated. “But the insiders’ view is still undermined by the tone of a cautionary tale. The fact that the series makes a plea to understand the characters’ humanity, rather than a judgment about them, doesn’t make it less didactic.” Seeds had been planted. Simon possessed juice with HBO. He pivoted to pitching his next project. “I couldn’t bring Ed [Burns] on The Corner,” Simon explained. “I had to bring Dave Mills, and I was happy to work with Dave Mills, but I felt bad for Ed. I said to Ed, ‘This is what The Corner’s going to be. Maybe we’ll have a shot doing something bigger if The Corner turns out okay.’ And sure enough, after The Corner was completed, but not yet broadcast, they turned to me and said, ‘That turned out really good. Do you have anything more?’ ”

  “As a matter of fact…” Simon replied.

  It still took convincing for The Wire to get off the ground, though. HBO had started making its mark with original programming through shows such as Oz, The Sopranos, and Sex and the City. HBO had wisely left cop shows that opened and closed cases within the confines of an hour for the networks. “The journey through this one case will ultimately bring viewers from wondering, in cop-show expectation, whether the bad guys will get caught, to wondering instead who the bad guys are and whether catching them means anything at all,” Simon wrote in a memo to Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss, the president of HBO’s entertainment division, in June 2001. Strauss purchased the pilot and asked for the scripts of two additional episodes before finally greenlighting the project.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I covered [the Williams case], so I had it in my head, and I did those articles, and that’s how I met Ed Burns. We had it in our heads. There was something unsatisfying about the case, because once they got Melvin [Williams] a lot of years, the two prosecutors who were on that case, actually in real life, they both were promoted off. They were the two guys who were going to bring the wiretap case into court.

  The wiretap case never went forward. They did the raids. They made them push up the raids, so they could put some dope on the table. They weren’t similar in scope or history or anything, but Melvin was similar as an avatar to Avon [Barksdale]. And Stringer [Bell] was Lamont “Chin” Farmer. Chin only got seven years federal back when there was parole. So, Chin went and did two or three years and was out and Chin was really the mastermind. Chin was like command central and [Williams’s lieutenant Louis] “Cookie” Savage got like twenty. They all got it over separate charges, but they never did the overall conspiracy case because the prosecutors had been promoted out of it.

  So, the whole elaborate case Ed had, really elaborate—it involved the codes and beepers and all that—it never got presented properly. Ed knew more about it than had ever been explained or that I could even do in the articles. It was a lot of fun to construct that, and at the same time, also using the sense that Ed had at the end of that case, which was, we did not give Chin enough time. Chin’s coming back, man. Seven years. Ed looked upon who was responsible for moving that level of drugs, with that much scope, and Melvin got plenty of time and Cookie got a significant sentence, but Chin was the guy who they just sort of glanced at. That’s sort of written into the ending [of Season One], where they leave Stringer on the street.

  That seemed the right tonality for the show, the idea that for all of the elaborate police work, it just doesn’t matter. The critique of the drug war was everything can be replaced. Everything is endless. The dysfunction of this thing goes on.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I said I’d help him. I was teaching then, and I stayed teaching for the first year. I would just come in and work on the story with him. Then, I thought, You’ve been a cop and a teacher. I wrote The Corner and I got twelve dollars and ten cents in the bank. It’s about time to cash this in. So, I did.

  CHRIS ALBRECHT (CHAIRMAN AND CEO, HBO): David [Simon] came in and said that he wanted to do the most detailed, most realistic look at a police wiretap investigation that’s ever been done. When I read the first script, it was really hard to know how that was going to play itself out, because, obviously, you’re not looking at the whole breakdown, the whole investigation. Since the pitch was that, then it’s like, “Well, is this really
what we’re going to get?”

  CAROLYN STRAUSS (PRESIDENT, HBO ENTERTAINMENT): This is a relationship business. You start your relationship with David [Simon] on one and then it keeps. You realize that, “Oh, this is real special.” Yeah, you can watch The Corner and Homicide and go, “Oh, yeah. I like this,” but then, when you start to talk to him and listen to him, you go, “This is a special guy.”

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): We wrote together sometimes. Sometimes we did it on the phone. It wasn’t difficult to create the story. The story was easy to create. The characters were composites of a lot of cops that I knew and that David knows, so that was pretty easy to make the story.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Everybody has an expectation that much of American television is about redemption and about affirmation. We were trying to make a show that was basically an argument of dissent. It was political dissent. It was saying our systems are not functioning. Our policies are incorrect. We’re not going to find a way out of this unless we stand back and take stock and turn one hundred eighty degrees from what we’ve been doing, particularly in regard to the drug war and inequality that we were depicting.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): The first season was all about how difficult it was to get a wire. We used the retrograde idea of using pagers. It flowed very easily. There were a few glitches along the way, but it flowed really easily storywise. That doesn’t mean it flowed easily in the writers’ room, but it certainly flowed easily in the storyline.

  CAROLYN STRAUSS (PRESIDENT, HBO ENTERTAINMENT): When we read the story, the document that outlined the first season, that’s when we knew that it would be great. David’s very capable of that kind of story with The Corner and Homicide. Here, this was just taking all that and really taking that story out.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): The one thing you weren’t able to pull through a keyhole in The Corner—The Corner becomes six hours about this broken nuclear family and the culture of addiction, what it’s like to try to live in a drug-saturated neighborhood when the drug problem is involving your family. It’s a very microcosmic view of the drug culture, the drug war. You can see a straining to get anything about policy, about why this is so fucked up. Whatever little bit we could was in the interviews in the beginning and the end that [director Charles] “Roc” Dutton did. That was the only place where anybody would stand back and be asked a question about anything macro. And that was really us trying to take the arguments against the drug war that were in The Corner and squeeze them into a format that really didn’t have any place for it.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): It was set up that Baltimore would become a character. The first season, you saw two institutions, the drug institution and the police department. The same problems from mayor all the way down. I like that sort of way of looking at things.

  Alexa L. Fogel originally stumbled into becoming a casting director. She knew little about casting when she worked as an assistant to the artistic director of an Off-Broadway play when the casting director abruptly left. Fogel assumed that person’s duties and eventually rose to the peak of the profession, showing an adept skill for blending actors with scripts, and casting Oz for Tom Fontana. She worked with television producer Nina Noble prior to The Wire and joked, “I was probably the only casting director they knew.” Yet, David Simon knew the show would be in capable hands with Fogel sifting through actors for roles. Fogel worked in conjunction with award-winning casting director Pat Moran, whom Simon has described as a “mad genius” in deftly handling Baltimore casting. Indeed, The Wire became known for its dynamic range of actors, while avoiding Hollywood’s better-known stars. Many actors were recycled from recognizable series such as The Corner (Clarke Peters, Maria Broom, and Delaney Williams), Oz (J. D. Williams, Seth Gilliam, and Lance Reddick), and Homicide (Peter Gerety, Robert Chew, and Jim True-Frost). Fogel also successfully pushed for two relatively unknown British actors, Dominic West and Idris Elba, to land prominent roles in The Wire.

  The characters were composites drawn from real-life inspirations and often consigned names recognizable in Baltimore lore. To muddle things up further, Jay Landsman read for the role of Jay Landsman, but did not land the part, which went to Delaney Williams. Instead, Simon eventually awarded the real Jay Landsman the role of Lt. Dennis Mello, a figure who, in real life, was the first black man to reach the rank of captain in the Baltimore Police Department. “I was honored to play Dennis Mello, the real Dennis Mello,” Landsman said. “Tell me that’s not acting. I’m a white guy playing a black guy. That was real acting.” The casting largely split the actors into opposing groups: the Barksdale organization, headlined by Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), Elba’s Stringer Bell, D’Angelo Barksdale (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.), and Wee-Bey Brice (Hassan Johnson), versus the wayward police unit charged with building a case against it, which featured West’s Jimmy McNulty, Reddick’s Cedric Daniels, Clarke Peters’s Lester Freamon, Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn), and Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce).

  Many of the show’s actors remained blissfully unaware for some time that their roles had been sourced from real figures. It was months before Williams, for example, realized that a real Landsman existed. Simon preferred that the doppelgängers not meet their inspirations. “They were going to be who they were going to be and it can sometimes fuck an actor up,” Simon explained. “They start embracing things that you’re not writing. Better to have them be rock solid in who they think that character should be and chase that.”

  To solidify the show’s production, Simon solicited the addition of two trusted figures in Nina Noble and Robert “Bob” Colesberry. Both had proven themselves while working with Simon on The Corner. Noble was no frills, having developed a reputation of landing a show under budget, an enviable trait in any producer. While she came recommended to Simon for The Corner, Colesberry originally arrived forcefully from HBO’s Kary Antholis, who wanted to add a visual producer. Simon immediately distrusted the quiet Colesberry, concerned that he would be more meddler than anything. His opinion changed once he watched the first cuts of The Corner. Colesberry would advance to play the small recurring role of Det. Ray Cole and also to direct an episode of The Wire. “I thought back to that first meeting with Bob Colesberry and realized I did not want to put anything to film ever again without him,” Simon later wrote in Rafael Alvarez’s The Wire: Truth Be Told. “For something that began as a shotgun wedding, it was turning out to be quite a marriage.”

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): [Wendell Pierce] came in and just nailed [his audition]. He was really pissed off. He had gotten in an argument with a cab driver. It was one of those sort of trying-to-hail-a-cab-while-black moments in New York, and he came in and he was steaming. He was harried, like a bear who’d hit the hornet’s nest. He had to focus on the scene, and he was apologizing for what he thought was a bad read, but it had that air of Baltimore—put-upon workaday—homicide detective. As soon as he came in and read, it was like, “That’s our Bunk.”

  WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): It was weeks later, maybe even a year later, while we were shooting, that David said, “You know, when you came in, it was not your reading that got you the part. You just came in and you were bitching and complaining about this taxi driver and that was the thing that got you the gig, because you’re so much like Bunk.” I was kind of indignant about it all, but in my own way, I guess. The fact that I would bring it up in the middle of a major audition shows some gumption on my part.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): We talked to Ray Winstone [about playing the role of Det. Jimmy McNulty]. I was not convinced, but he was very hot at the moment, and HBO wanted us just to consider Ray Winstone. So, we went to the Toronto [International] Film Festival, where he was. This was September 2001. We showed him the script, and I was concerned about the accent, that he would not be able to turn the corner. It’s so East End. But I’d seen Sexy Beast, the movie, and I thought, Well, the camera loves him, and he’s gruff. We left Toronto, and he was thinking about it
. Then 9/11 happened, and he couldn’t get home for like two weeks. The planes were all grounded. He just went straight back. He was like, “I am not.” There was something traumatic about that, and we never heard from him again.

  I thought John C. Reilly could be a different McNulty, certainly not the same, but I thought he could carry all of the excesses and vices of McNulty in a different way. I’ve loved his work in a lot of stuff. I was on the phone with him. It was three weeks before Halloween, because I was in a corn maze with my kid, Ethan, who would have been like seven, six. So, I’m trying to keep up with my kid, who’s running around like a madman in this maze, and that’s when John C. Reilly called me back. I really couldn’t take the call. I talked to him for maybe five minutes, and I said, “Hey, listen, can I call you back? I’m in a corn maze with my kid.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah. Call me back.” In the time between when he called me and when I called him back, he stopped taking calls. He later told Dom [West] that his wife was like, “We are not moving to Baltimore.” I never actually talked to him more than those five minutes to even talk to him about the role.