Luke McManus meets the man behind The Wire
Never meet your heroes, runs the cliché, as they will inevitably disappoint you. Having recently met the man who created The Wire, I now know how wrong that is.
I work in the television business, and sometimes it can get you down. Last Sunday night I flicked through the four main Irish channels, and three of them were showing identikit "three judges pick holes in some poor divils singing" programmes. I flicked back and forth between the three channels and it was like watching the same programme continuously. Except Eoghan Harris was in one of them (yikes).
It didn't exactly make me proud to be a TV man. But luckily, there are shows like The Wire that make you realise that television still has tremendous untapped potential. As far as I'm concerned, The Wire's creative team are heroes.
When I met David Simon, I was surprised that he was so pleasant, humble and genuine. In person, he was as thoughtful as his work, and many of his interesting quotes didn't make my finished article.
So for all of you Wire obsessives out there, here's the complete transcript of the interview.
Photo by Feargal Ward
Is this your first trip to Dublin?
No, fourth or fifth.
When did you first visit the city?
I first visited Ireland in the early 1990s but the first time I came to Dublin had to be 1999/2000, something like that.
You've noticed some changes in the city?
Sure, who hasn't? The first time I came here it was a lot sleepier, I think the economic resurrection of the country had just started, everything was a lot cheaper. I remember walking on the Northside of the river, just feeling my way around, having that Baltimore sensation of "Uh-oh, maybe I walked down the wrong block here. I might lose my lunch money today." It seems like it's getting harder and harder to find that experience in Dublin.
Baltimore is your creative heartbeat, would you say?
It is for the purposes of The Wire and most of what I've done thus far, yeah it really has been. I was a crime reporter in Baltimore for 13 years on the Baltimore Sun, I got hired right out of college, loved it. Absolutely loved the job. Then during and after that I researched and wrote a couple of books, narrative non-fiction. One about a year in the life of a homicide unit (Homicide) and one about a year in the life of a drug-involved neighbourhood (The Corner), so all my journalism is rooted in Baltimore, I also live there, my family and friends are there. I'm vested in the city's history, present and future, just like anybody else living there. I've paid attention and you write what you know...
In shows like The Corner and The Wire you seem to have attempted to capture the entire
hierarchy of a city.
That's exactly what The Wire set out to do. To show how power and money route themselves, or fail to route themselves, in an American city. It really was a show about the interconnected tissue, or lack thereof, of American society. We tried to create a facsimile city. It's rooted in the real Baltimore, in the same way Balzac's Paris was rooted in the real Paris. I'm not comparing myself in terms of quality, but in terms of the attempt to acquire a city and use it in terms of storytelling it is what Tolstoy tried to do with Moscow, it's what Dickens tried to do with London. We have said, this is the palette, this is the canvas and the palette that we are going to be using. That doesn't mean that its true. In true in the way that fiction is sometimes true, but its also not true, in the way that fiction is always a lie. We have tried to depict the city, its problems and why we think Americans right now are having trouble solving these problems.
Do you think that Baltimore is an archetypal American city?
I do. I think in some ways to write about New York or LA or Chicago or Miami, they are too unique, even by climate or by culture. Then there are these...I don't want to call them generic, because they are each unique, and I know how much I love Baltimore for what it is. But there is a commonality of being postindustrial, once strong manufacturing centres that are now trying to find their way in the new millennium. So Baltimore is a stand-in for Cleveland or St Louis or Philadelphia or any number of cities through the East and mid-West. The rustbelt American city archetype.
You talked about realism and truth and one of the things that attracts people to The Wire is the incredible verisimilitude, the feeling that you are eavesdropping on reality. How much of a challenge was that and how did you achieve that?
One of the things that we used was something I would call the random quotidian. Which means that at any given moment someone is saying something that might be off point.
It might be revelatory of character, but it doesn't seem like its critical to the casework or the political argument being made. It might just be a small moment between two characters, and it leads to you to believe that you are in an ordinary moment. And you build a few of those up and then when you have the extraordinary moment it doesn't quite feel like melodrama.
The other thing is that we are not dealing with grandly sinister corruption, deviltry and evil. We are just dealing with competing ambition and competing priorities and diverging interests. If you look at the show carefully, a lot of what goes wrong goes wrong because people want different things for themselves. People want to get elected, people want to avoid paying, people want to make a few dollars more, people want to avoid bad publicity. It's really the mundane pain/pleasure of most human interaction – the maximum amount of pleasure and the minimum amount of pain. And those things are more interesting to me because ultimately it creates a web of practicality that results in something good or something tragic. Usually not good.
The show is structured like a Greek tragedy, we have stolen liberally from Sophocles and Euripides. Instead of Olympian Gods behaving badly, it's self-preserving bureaucracies behaving badly. In any event, individuals tend to get a lightning bolt in their rear-end every now and then. Is this reality? I don't know. It's storytelling, and the only thing I can say is that is does reflect the societal response to problems in my city, it don't think we are being unfair in terms of how the power that be address the America that we are building.
It's fair in one sense and unfair in another, as most storytelling is I guess.
There is a character in The Wire who goes against that stream though. Omar Little is almost like a superhero...
(Laughs) What he is, is unbeholden. Omar is not beholden to any infrastructure. Even Bubbles (addict/informant played brilliantly by Andre Royo), a free agent, is beholden to his own addiction. Omar is beholden only to his own logic of what is valuable in life. Set against the background of this very brutalising Greek tragedy he seems almost free from the rules of tragedy, thus far. although the people around him have not been free of those rules. There is a cost to living that way, he's been paying the cost since his lover was killed of episode 5 (of Series One). But to live outside the law you must be honest – Bob Dylan – and Omar is nothing if not honest about himself.
One of the finest characters in the show, with his uneasy marriage of cynicism and idealism is Tommy Carcetti. He is one of the most believable politicians I have ever seen on television.
Thank you, thank you. I like Tommy Carcetti!
I've been accused on doing a roman-a-clef of the real mayor of Baltimore – an ambitious white councilman who ran for Mayor and won. I've always been resistant to the idea that its that simple.
Sure, we used pieces of Martin O'Malley, we used pieces of other politicians, Sheila Dixon, Ehrlich – I'm naming a bunch of Baltimore politicians that have no meaning in Ireland. But that's what you do, you take what you know in life and you regurgitate it and you hope what comes out is even more interesting than reality. We've cheated a great deal, and added a great deal and we've spiced it here and taken out the spice there.
What remains is an affection for the craft of politics, what it is to negotiate that world. And I'd credit Bill Zorzi, one of our writers and one of the best political reporters for the Baltimore Sun for twenty years.
Aidan Gillen is a local boy, a Dubliner. It's amazing how he inhabits the role of Carcetti. How did you cast him?
We saw him doing a Beckett play on Broadway and he was magnificent and my partner Bob Colesberry who was visual producer of the show was all for casting him as Carcetti. We read him, we read a couple of other people.
I confess, I was intruiged by how he read, at that time he was still fighting the accent, but he was getting closer with every read. I went with Bob Colesberry's call. Bob passed away in surgery shortly before season three began, so it was Bob's last casting call. He really wanted Aidan, so there was no way I wasn't taking Aidan he would really have had to butcher the reads! But Aidan just brought it. You could see the thinking behind the mask, which was what you need in a politican. The only problem was, the mayor at the time, Martin O'Malley is not only Irish-American, but rather distinctly Irish-American! He plays in an Irish folk band, he quotes Yeats and Parnell (laughs). He is very proud of his heritage. So we had this Irish actor, but I wanted to remove him from the roman a clef, so Aidan, God bless you and your Dublin roots but you are playing Italian. Italian-American from the 1st ward.
You kept him Catholic at least.
Exactly, right!
Dominic West is someone who has spent a lot of time in Dublin; he was educated in Trinity. At the start of The Wire he seemed the lynchpin of the series...
At the end I think you will see the relevance of the character again, sometimes you have to back away in order to make a point, like the soft passage in a piece of music.
Dominic sent a tape of himself reading to no one. It was so funny. He couldn't get anyone to read with him, so he would read the lines and there would be this pause where he would seem to react to nothingness, then he would read another line. After Bob, myself and Clark Johnson picked ourselves up off the floor laughing we realised that with the reactions as well as the acting he was really bringing something as McNulty. So we called him over and then he read with Wendell Pierce (Dec. Bunk Moreland). The two of them – we realised that that was a dynamic that we had to have on the show.
He told us very early about his time in Dublin and in Trinity. Dominic often plays Jack the Lad, the scamp, a besotted youth, but I actually think he got a pretty good education here because every now and then I would make a literary reference and he's pick up on it and I'd be "Oh, you read that one too did you?" I've a feeling that he did go to a few courses in addition to whatever other, eh, meanderings he had here in this city.
Tell me about your other work?
I'm not working now because of the writer's strike, which I fully support. I'm not turning in work, I'm not having writers meetings, projects that were on the boards for development are at a standstill right now it's really pencils down, thats the way you have to play it.
We had virtually finished, I think we were four weeks short on a six months shoot of a miniseries about Iraq called Generation Kill, shooting in South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia. It's in conjunction with a British company, non-WGA so there was no stopping that project, the scripts were already done, it was on the boards. I'm continuing to finish that off, after much reflection, to allow it to air with 90 per cent of the work doesn't help the Guild, it doesn't acheive anything.
It's about the Iraq war and this is an election year. I just feel like that story is paramount. So I'm doing the editing on that, the sound work, ADR without scripts. I think Generation Kill was some of the best journalism to come out of the Iraq war. Evan Wright, Rolling Stone embedded reporter with the 1st Recon Marine battalion wrote an amazing book on ground level combat, about the effect of war on these young men, these highly trained young men.
I don't think it's that overtly political, though you certainly see some of the dynamic that would happen later in Iraq, even occurring on the way into Baghdad, but it's mostly a story about what war does to young men. How it feels on the ground, I think Evan captured it beautifully. I would compare the book to Michael Herr's Dispatches, which I think was one of the best pieces written about Vietnam. Thus far it's the Dispatches of the Iraq War.
Politics is never far away from your narratives.
Not in The Wire: The Wire is very political.
But you manage to avoid earnestness, how difficult was that?
I have the jaded tone of a journalist, which is to say... I don't believe in crusades. I believe in putting whatever element of truth you can acquire out there so at least people can't say they didn't know. But I've never been one to believe that now that I've done that they'll pass a law, they will make things better. Our political culture and our social culture is too complicated for that. So I think in some ways just acquiring the story and telling it avoids the earnestness.
I've been very passionate about the people I've met in the course of doing journalism. I feel in love Gary McCullough this fella who was at the centre of The Corner who was struggling to get off heroin. When he died I was wrecked, I don't think I worked on the book for a couple of months. Just, you knew going into a book like that that things like that were going to happen. You say that in the abstract; but when you finally meet Gary, you get to know Gary, you get to love Gary and then Gary dies its very different.
I think there is a level of anger throughout The Wire which is almost a little bit shocking for American TV. So much of American TV is about stopping every twelve minutes to reassure you enough that you'll buy the new Buicks, new iPods, feminine hygiene products and whatever else. Then you tell a little more story, then we stop to sell you some more shit. To do that you need to be very reassuring in television as a medium. Cable television, premium cable, HBO has allowed us to throw that out and to just tell a story no matter how dark.
I believe, that for better or for worse, in some ways for the better, the American Empire is ending. The Wire is in some way a construct dealing with that. To say that is very disconcerting to some viewers which is maybe why we don't have many viewers! But we have enough for the show to have meaning.
It's not sentimental.There is sentiment, but it's not sentimental. It's angry, but not earnest, but maybe angry is close enough to earnest to get the job done.
I've seen you described as the angriest man in television. You don't seem that angry to me.
I don't want to say bad things about that guy, I think he's a fine journalist, he's the guy who wrote Black Hawk Down actually, Mark Bowden. But he's very good friends with the two gentlemen that he was defending. I think the point of the piece was to defend the editors of the paper from the time I was at the Baltimore Sun. I had a very different experience than he did with them. My experience of journalism informed season five of The Wire. That's what writers do, they take their fundamental experiences and regurgitate them and try to place them in a proper context.
I was very disappointed with what the world of journalism failed to accomplish in the 1980s and 1990s when the money was there, when the internet was not yet a factor. What we didn't build in order to make our product viable and smart and solvent and complex enough that it could be put out there on the internet and you could charge for it, or you could sell as much online advertising as offline, at rates that would allow you to continue to do journalism at that level.
The Baltimore Sun had 500 reporters, and published an evening edition, and zoned editions in all the counties. Now they just publish a morning edition and there's 300 people in the newsroom. And 300 people working as hard as they can, cannot cover a city the way 500 can.
And the moment newspapering, which let's face it, is the core value of high-end journalism, the web is a wonderful thing that provides a lot of illuminating commentary, but they are acquiring first generation journalism from the reporters at the mainstream papers and commenting on it – Slate and Salon and so on are not sending people to Fallujah. What's happened to American newspapers is frightening. Jefferson said that he would rather live in an America without government than an America without newspapers and I worry that his nightmare is about to become true.
The newspaper in my town is shrinking disastrously and when I was there there was an emphasis on doing self-contained journalism that might gain you a prize. Y'know a three or four part series with a limited scope of "Gotcha, here's the wrong, we are going to right the wrong." But that might be a very small piece of a much more profound problem. Efforts to raise these problems, with a reporting corps, a cadre of reporters that could address well, a lot of the things The Wire addresses, were non-existent. I really feel like journalism missed this window when the money was there. Now the money and the readers are going away and its very scary.
Having said this bluntly, having it impinge on some journalists who have notable reputations in the field, feeling that this is unfair and unwarranted, this critique. Then I'm "The angriest man in television."
It's really damning me with faint praise, I mean, how many other angry men in television are there? I mean if you think about it... dude, the rest of these guys are beside their kidney-shaped swimming pools with their cellphones talking about the next deal – any kind of anger makes me the angriest man in television.
The smuggest man in television, now that would be an insult...
Right. I mean, the angriest man in television? The angriest man in Maryland, the angriest man on the East Coast maybe! Gimme something! Throw me a fricking bone here. There is something funny about that, it's about a small and personal dispute about some fellas who are really not the main point of the story but there are a lot of people who would like to make them the point of the story because it takes the onus off the more fundamental problems in newspapers right now.
Did you find it hard to keep perspective and distance when writing the newspaper storyline in Season Five of The Wire?
In some ways my sense of newspapers is romanticised in this one way – I loved them. I just love it, those were 13 of the best years of my life. I was crazy for it when I came out of college, crazy when I was in high school. I love journalism and it think that is reflected in it. Ultimately it was as personal to me as the school story (in Season Four) was to Ed Burns, as passionate as he was about the frustrations he felt, what happened to his programmes and his initiatives and how frustrated he was by the school bureaucracy, it's as personal as Bill Zorzi feels about politics and about how Rafeal felt about the dying of the port.
In a sense that it is part of what drama is – what you love, you express love for, what you have contempt for, you express contempt for. I'm not sure that the nodding analytical journalist tone of "On the other hand... there is this argument to be made"... that might lead to a very good op-ed piece in the New York Times but it certainly doesn't lead to good drama.
The Wire is fiction and it is one person's take – well actually half a dozen people's takes – but at any given moment it is one guy, sitting at a typewriter, writing a scene it is one person's idea of what is dramatic, what has meaningful, what is relevant to the story. Much like any other work of fiction, literature or film.
Of course, it's personal. The school series would haven't been the school series if it wasn't personal to Ed, the politics wouldn't have been what it was if it wasn't personal to Bill. And journalism is very personal to me.
At the end of the run of series five there's a lot of good journalism depicted along with the bad journalism, by the end of the run, I imagine a lot of reporters who have done the job at newspapers, maybe not bloggers, y'know I think they hold newspapers in contempt, but people who worked at newspapers will say at the end "Well, that was an elegy, that was an elegy for what we did, what we should still be doing."
At least I think so. But hey, let somebody else come along and argue with me.
The big political narrative in this city over the past decades has been the intersection of politics, planning and developers. It's a theme you obliquely refer to in The Wire.
It's a backdoor thing. Where we've showed it is how the drug money routes itself back into the legitimate economy, how you launder it, where it goes to. Actually we are going to be dealing with that a little more directly in series five to an extent. Money is the mother's milk of politics in America, and elsewhere, in any democracy, anywhere you have elections. Property is one of the most fundamental opportunities to make money in any society, if there's a dollar to be made, if you can buy something for five cents and sell it for 10 cents, there is somebody who will figure out how a way to sell it for 15 cents or buy it for two cents. That's the great game, and money routes itself and you can gain any advantage by manipulating the system, by jinking the statistics, by cheating.
The game referred to as "The Game" in The Wire [drugdealing] is just a subset of a greater game. Very tellingly the drug dealers in The Wire refer to the game they know as "The Game", but there are other games, and there's games within games, everybody is in play.
I mean, go back to the foundation of any dynastic economic entity and you'll find someone gaining advantage in a notably crude way. By that In the oil industry, real estate, the land grab that went on in Manhattan as they tried to figure out where the subway lines were going, where the stops were going to be and the billions that were made, even at that time, on the basis of those maps. It was hilarious.
We have a couple of options for a Metro route here in Dublin and funnily enough the route they chose includes a stop near Bertie Ahern's constituency office.
Listen, wherever you go – there you are.
This area has changed quite a lot recently [The Liberties near James's Street around the Guinness Storehouse]. I've been around here before actually. I was walking back to the city centre from Kilmainham and it started to rain so I hailed a cab. The taxi driver said it wasn't a good area for walking in and I said that it didn't look too bad to me.
So he asked me where I was from, and I said Baltimore and he said "Oh fucking Christ, now I understand." and then he started talking about how horrible Baltimore was. So I asked him had he been there and he said, "No but there's this show on the TV called Homicide..."
Do you ever feel guilty about that?
It's not my job to worry about that, but hey, I live there, I didn't move away, obviously I'm vested in the city getting better.
Tell us about what interested you in a project set in New Orleans?
What they are doing to that city is fucking it up. Bastards. Because you know what, what made New Orleans great was the poverty. I'm not saying you need the poverty, but you definitely need the poor people. I'm not saying you keep them poor, but you can't throw out the black folk. A bunch of white guys living in condos? Pretty soon there'll be no brass band tradition, pretty soon there will be no Mardi Gras Indians, pretty soon the town is going to be Disney.
Do you think you will get to make your show about it?
I would love to.
Have you any interest in making movies, are they on your to do list?
I don't really have a list. It's hard to crack, I've done film scripts before and they never gets made.
What remaining ambitions do you have?
Everybody's gotta work. You gotta do something else, find new stories. I dunno. I don't want to do a cop show again. I'll just find other stories that interest me.
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