All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

Jay Landsman,

“Bop Gun,” guest-starred Robin Williams

purchased in 1986 by the Times Mirror Company. Buyouts cut into the depth and experience of the newsroom. Simon felt that the new top editors placed an unwarranted emphasis on claiming journalism prizes

Fogel worked in conjunction with award-winning casting director Pat Moran, whom Simon has described as a “mad genius” in deftly handling Baltimore casting.

Jay Landsman read for the role of Jay Landsman, but did not land the part, which went to Delaney Williams.

Ray Winstone.

Wendell Pierce,

deliberated opening theme songs for weeks before Tom Waits’s “Way Down in the Hole” beat out John Hammond’s iteration of “Get Behind the Mule.”

Blind Boys of Alabama recording the initial rendering.

Maj. William Rawls

Snot Boogie

The Wire of both cinematic beauty and that play with the line between that and photojournalism, documentary filmmaking. Those two are combined almost like [William] Friedkin and The French Connection. I was a visual artist.

VINCENT PERANIO (PRODUCTION DESIGNER): I picked the right neighborhoods. I know Baltimore. I’ve lived here all my life. I’m not afraid of any neighborhoods. I’ve been down every alley in this city. So, pretty much, when David talks about places, I know what he’s talking about. The story is about more West Baltimore than East Baltimore. East Baltimore is different than West Baltimore, even though there’s a lot of crime in both. East Baltimore is the typical row houses. There are blocks and blocks of these row house façades. It’s very graphic. And it’s even more graphic in that there’s no trees in that part of the city. It’s just cement, asphalt, and brick. That’s all you see, and when you walk in the alleys, it’s jungle. I love that contrast, and I love the bleakness of it. Also, I like the lighting. In so many vacant houses where we were filming, we’re filming in a natural light or making it look like natural light, because it didn’t have electricity. Actually, some of the lighting to me was almost like a painting from the past, like from the seventeenth century, a Rembrandt look about it, the darkness of the house and the sunlight searing through the boarded-up windows. I think the show was bleak and beautiful in the way that looking at ruins in a ruined civilization are.

a shadowy figure named Omar, who robbed drug dealers.

Television had never seen a character as full of multitudes as Omar Little, depicted brilliantly by Michael K. Williams. The role was the first major gig for Williams, a native of Brooklyn’s East Flatbush, who had dropped out of school to pursue a dancing career. Omar wore a duster and a bulletproof vest, carried a .44 Magnum, and whistled “The Farmer in the Dell” as he stalked the streets, ringing fear in the neighborhood. Yet, he nurtured out-of-luck mothers, refrained from cursing, attended church with his grandmother, and showed a caring, tender touch with his gay lovers. As inconceivable as it sounds, Omar, too, was sourced from real-life inspirations.

“They all lived by something, and they hunted drug dealers. That’s what they hunted. Donnie [Andrews], he was ferocious. Ferdinand [Harvin], this guy was amazing. He gave me a call one time, and says, ‘You want to hit this house.’ We got a search warrant, hit the house. It’s three guys who are in their fifties. You don’t see many guys in their fifties with shoulder holsters, with .45s in the shoulder holsters, at a table. It was a substantial amount of drugs on the table, but we didn’t find all Ferdinand said was in there. “I went outside, and I called him up. I said, ‘We can’t find it.’ He says, ‘I don’t understand you. Every time I been at their house, I find everything.’ I said, ‘Ferdinand, I can’t put a gun down a guy’s mouth. I mean, I’m willing to talk to the guy, but I can’t do that.’ ”

MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS

and it was Omar, Michael, the guy who played his love interest, and Lance Williams, who played Bailey—and he goes, “Man, you guys know how to make it work.” He goes, “Man, I wish I would have known in the beginning that you were going to bring it to where you were, because I would have made you kind of like my Wild Bunch.” I was like, “What do you mean Wild Bunch?” He looked at me and said, “You never watched the Western The Wild Bunch?” I was like, “No.” That was probably the first and only homework that David gave me. He told me I was to go watch The Wild Bunch and another Western because he wrote Omar’s duster, the Wild, Wild West, and the standoff with Brother Mouzone and Omar in the alleyway—those are an old-school Western thing.

Look at what Omar became, and look what it did for Michael’s career. Pretty amazing stuff. I really think that we were, perhaps, the first two men of color to have a kiss on national television.

No, Ed don’t take no shit. She had to bow down and play her position, but when it was all said and done, before them cameras rolled, she came up behind me and patted my shoulder. She said, “Find a way to give us both what we want.” No pressure. No fucking pressure at all. All I know is when you go back and look at that scene where Omar says, “Omar don’t scare,” and you look in his eyes, whatever you see there, that is me trying to give them both what they felt they needed to see. I’ll never forget that.

George Pelecanos kept popping up in conversations David Simon was having.

Simon read Pelecanos’s book The Sweet Forever. Simon took the suggestion as needling. He owed Antholis late scripts for The Corner

Simon and Pelecanos finally talked at the funeral of a mutual friend. The pair, standing next to each other, believed that the friends and family of the deceased bookstore owner would gently place the first layer ...

Man, not only is he a good writer, he’s funny. Dark and funny.

Jim Yoshimura

David says, “Hey, Jim, Pelecanos got thirty percent. He’s complaining.” And David said, “That’s pretty good, to get thirty percent your first time.”

If somebody goes exactly where they say they’re gonna go always, human beings aren’t like that. The Chekhovian model of character is people don’t say exactly what they mean. They say what they think other people want to hear or what they want to hear themselves. They don’t say exactly what they’re thinking.

They have a roundabout way of avoiding certain truths.

And then there are different outcomes. Sometimes that makes for the best moments in drama and also the most interesting moments in...

John Doman

Martin O’Malley, threatened to pull permits to shoot for the show’s second season. “We want to be out of The Wire business,” O’Malley said, according to Simon. And that conversation arrived before the start of a story thread featuring an ambitious white mayor inspired, in part, by O’Malley’s political rise.

Ed Norris, the police commissioner handpicked by O’Malley, occasionally played a detective by the same name on The Wire. “Show me the son of a bitch who can fix this department,” he once demanded on the show—he might as well have delivered a wink to the camera along with the line—“and I’ll give back half my overtime.”

Once O’Malley then became governor, he was not interested in funding this industry,

“By choosing a real city, we declare that the economic forces, the political dynamic, the class, cultural, and racial boundaries are all that much more real, that they do exist in Baltimore and, therefore, they exist elsewhere in urban America,”

soon reflected a working-class mentality. Michael Potts (Brother Mouzone) once stood in the rain during a shoot. An overeager wardrobe assistant asked to hold an umbrella over him. Potts tried refusing her. He felt odd, but finally acquiesced after she insisted several times. Soon, Potts spotted Noble signaling to someone and that person beelining toward him. “Nina says for you to hold your own umbrella,” Potts recalled the crewmember saying. “We don’t do that stuff. That’s LA stuff.” The show stayed away from Hollywood.

I had an idea. In my mind, I’m not scared to go in any hood. I know what a hood looks like. I ask my boys about what Baltimore’s like. They were like, “Baltimore is a place where you sell drugs, and you get more bang for your buck if you go to Baltimore.” When I went there, it fucked me up. When I got to Baltimore, I took the Amtrak. I got to the neighborhood. I started seeing where we were shooting. I started looking around.

that time, I don’t know what the mayor was doing, but at this point, when we got there in 2001, there was these big billboards that said, “Believe. Keep Trying,” weird subliminal messages saying, “Don’t Give Up.” It looked like something out of A Clockwork Orange or some shit. I was like, “What’s happening?” I saw this half a building torn up and somebody coming out the building locking the front door. I’m like, “What the fuck are they locking the front door for if the other half of the building is rubble?”

I was like, This place, they don’t care. It is what it is. That just broke my heart. That just made us feel like you don’t want your world to end up like this, where nobody gives a fuck anymore. That’s what Baltimore felt like.

People start feeling like, They’re talking about Baltimore. We matter. This is our show. They started taking a little sense of pride.

“We don’t like your show because you’re showing the bad parts of Baltimore.” At least they were talking. Before, they were just not giving a fuck. Now they’re fighting for it.

The people are the most honest people. There’s no lying in the people. It’s just that, at one point or at some time, it was a forgotten city. They got John Waters. You had rich characters coming from Baltimore, Tupac [Shakur], you got one of the greatest performing arts schools there. It didn’t feel like it was being talked about. Nobody was giving it a look. Now, all of a sudden, it’s starting to get a look because The Wire was giving it so much attention that we felt the city was starting to care more.

Baltimore is one of the, I would say, less financial cities. It’s broke out there. Everything is torn down. It’s not a lot of businesses. I don’t know about now, but when they shot The Wire, it was like living in the past. It was kind of like a third world country to me, almost. Just cracks on the sidewalk. When you come out your trailer: bums, crackheads, gangsters, all by your trailer.

It was kind of like, Wow, this is very real out here. They picked an ill place to shoot this shit. They could have shot on set somewhere that look like the hood and put fake crack vials on the floor and busted glass on the floor, but that was all real. When I got thrown on the floor in one of the scenes—I was coming out of the store—glass was by my face. It was like, “Hold up, let’s shoot the glass.” It was real. Like, Oh, this shit is ill.

It was just all very, very real. You really immersed yourself into the culture. It was not always a very pleasant environment to be in. The houses that we would shoot in, where characters would shoot up in, you would step on syringes and vials and everything. It was there. Everything was just real.

DOMENICK LOMBARDOZZI (DET. THOMAS “HERC” HAUK): We were shooting once, and two blocks over, you see cop cars flying and gunshots, kind of simulating what we were doing. It was just happening two blocks over for real.

So, being in Baltimore and in that environment, it wasn’t something that was strange. It wasn’t foreign. The dialect, being around it a little bit more, they might move a little different, talk a little different. You’ve been in one hood, you’ve kind of sort of been in them all. Some are different than others, but for the most part, poverty is poverty.

My point in that story was about how the police, particularly Baltimore police, at that time, how they just respond without thinking and with force. It could’ve turned really ugly and really dangerous really quickly. Thank God it didn’t. I’m sure that type of occurrence was common, if it’s not still common now.

VINCENT PERANIO (PRODUCTION DESIGNER): The strip club [filmed in Season One], I have to say is a real strip club about two blocks from my house, but I never really frequented. We scouted for that. We found the most urban one, on Eastern Avenue, what is called the Ritz in reality, and we really liked it. They were really game to let us film there, and the thing is, we knew we would be filming there several times. So, it’s different than just a one-time thing. They really have to want to put up with you. And part of it was we were going to spiff it up a little, add some lights and decorate it a little. So, we filmed at the strip club. While we were filming at the strip club, the owner got charged federally with money laundering and was put in jail, and the FBI took over the strip club. So, for the next six months—because of course we weren’t finished with the season—we had to deal with the FBI as our landlords.

FREDRO STARR

Reg E. Cathey