All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

In the interest of streamlining memories and anecdotes, I’ve removed many of the hitches that we all use in speech (“you know,” “um,” and “like”). Those occasions are rare, though, and I believe the spirit and meaning of every conversation is preserved. Each quote from an actor is offered with his or her character’s name and occupation. Some of the characters’ job titles changed as the show advanced; for example, Councilman Tommy Carcetti became Mayor Carcetti. In those instances, the characters are introduced with the job titles for which they are most well known.

Understand that there’s that humanity there, and she’s a living example of why the show tapped into people’s psyches and why the show has created an examination of policy, an examination of the influence of art changing people’s lives in a practical way at universities across the nation.

Williams conducted most of his business through his number two, a consigliere named Lamont “Chin” Farmer. Farmer orchestrated both a simple and intricate communication system involving the use of beepers. He also headed a print shop and took business courses at a community college, à la Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell.

Simon’s book editor, John Sterling, suggested that the proper follow-up to Homicide would be observing a drug corner in Baltimore for a year and depicting the story’s previously undocumented other side of addicts.

It was Fontana who mentored Simon, telling him that a writer becomes a producer in order to protect his words.

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.

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.”

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?’ ”

Wow!!!!!!!!

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.

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.

At the end of my little monologue, Chris turned to me and he pointed and said, “You better be right.” For three weeks, I would wake up every three hours and all I could see was the end of that finger pointing at me, saying, “You better be right.”

But McNulty is more of an expression of David, with the divorce and that kind of stuff. What McNulty did, as far as pressuring the police department to establish a unit to go after gangsters, was what I did. His personal life and stuff like that—that wasn’t my personal life. I’m sort of a homebody.

I was a little like, “I don’t want to go.” My manager, being the great manager she was at that time, was like, “You’re broke, motherfucker. You ain’t got no money. They didn’t offer you the role. You got to go audition. How about you go there, so people in the television world can see if you can act? If you book it, then you can turn it down, if you want to.”

ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): That’s just the way it goes until you get deeper into the process. The beginning of the process is a total crapshoot. You’re just trying everything out, and then it starts to makes sense, because the quality of the actor starts to adhere more closely and strongly to specific qualities in the role. But in the beginning, you just don’t know.

Good life advice

I got deeper into understanding not about the addiction, but about the person. I started looking at myself like, What do I do? One day, I was in New York and I was going somewhere and I saw these people standing outside smoking cigarettes. I think it was one of those zero-degree days. I was like, “What the fuck would make somebody come outside and smoke a cigarette outside in the cold?” I started going, Wait, you know what? They do whatever it takes to get that fucking nicotine. That’s the same thing as Bubbles getting his heroin fix. What do I do every day? I found out. I started studying myself. When I come in the house, no matter what back then, I would turn on the TV. That’s the first thing I would do. I would drop my keys, turn on the TV, then go about my business. I was like, Why? Why do I turn on the TV? Then I made a list of things I do every day. I always drink Coca-Cola. I was a Coca-Cola fiend. I didn’t like water. I was horny. I was trying to make love to my wife, or my lady at the time, every day. For about thirty days, I didn’t do any of that. When you go in your house like day seven and you don’t turn on that TV, you start fiending. You’re like, Damn, I just want to see a commercial. I just want to see who won the game, the Knicks or something. I couldn’t turn on the TV. I’d be pacing around the living room trying to think about, What if I turned on the TV just once and turn it off real quick? I started building this need and writing down how I act when I’m ...

Inside the acting mind - fascinating

SONJA SOHN (DET. SHAKIMA “KIMA” GREGGS): Like most black folks who grew up in underserved areas, I did not have a positive view of the police. For me, that was my main obstacle to playing a cop at the time. I had to get over my own sort of early traumatic interactions with the police and what I had experienced. My early interactions with the police in my childhood were never positive, and that had affected me more deeply than I had imagined going into the show. I realized for me to play this character, I had to have some understanding of the motivations of good cops and what the motivation was for a good cop to become a cop. Kima was the good cop. She’s the moral compass of the police. For me to embody that, truthfully, as an actor, I have to be willing to understand that that kind of cop existed and how that kind of cop came into being.

Doing something that you don’t agree with

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Carolyn [Strauss] was the one who said, “That character has legs. Don’t kill that character so quick.” She was wounded and not killed at the end of Season One, and Carolyn made compelling arguments about the show going forward and the need for a strong female lead on the cop side, that we were short on female leads and that it was a perspective that could allow us things that we otherwise would not have.

David Simon and Bob Colesberry 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.”

(In real life, Ed Burns said he had told the state’s attorney, who went to a judge, that the police department should be more proactive in its investigations. “He called up the deputy commissioner, who in turn called my captain, who in turn screamed at me as I was walking out the door to go to work on that case,” Burns said. “Sure enough, at the end of the case we brought back, he was very, very happy, and then they tried to get rid of me.”)

BENJAMIN BUSCH (OFF. ANTHONY COLICCHIO): That first scene with Dominic West and Snot Boogie, you already knew the show got the street right. It was beautiful in its depiction of that space. The ugly alleys were fascinating. It was a strange combination in The Wire of both cinematic beauty and that play with the line between that and photojournalism, documentary filmmaking.

What was interesting is changing the performer from season to season. That wasn’t clear to me right away that that’s what was going on in David’s mind, and I’m not sure that he had that fully formed, either. He wanted the voice of the vocals to reflect the main theme of the content of the season. That’s why we have kids doing it, for example, on Season Four, when the focus of the storyline is what happens to the kids and how they get into the drug trade or how do they avoid it.

PETER GERETY (JUDGE DANIEL PHELAN): Bubbles just drove me nuts. I just thought, Where did they get this heroin addict? And then, the next week, there was a cast party in some bar in New York, and there was Andre Royo, who plays Bubbles, and he’s the sweetest guy. He’s just a really good actor, that’s all.

He gave me a handshake. At first, I didn’t know what he was doing. He’s just like, “They’re giving out testers.” Gave me a handshake and kept moving. When I looked at my hand, I had a little vial of some drugs. I was like, “Oh, shit. This is awesome.” I kid you not, walked in my trailer and sat there and pondered a little bit. This is one of the moments where I’m like this, If I really want to know how this feels, if I really want to be awesome in this role, maybe I should take this. See what it feels like. I did; I thought about taking it. Then I was like, Motherfucker, you’ll be good for one take and one take only. It will be over. You might fuck yourself up. Then it was like, If they find out you’re trying it, it might be all the love you got for your acting, that you’re not an actor. You copped out. You became a junkie. I didn’t take it, but I kept it for a little while.

SETH GILLIAM (SGT. ELLIS CARVER): I had to watch the show with the subtitles on, even though I had the script, to understand what was happening on it. I seem to recall the first episode that Dom Lombardozzi and I were watching, and figuring, Wow, this show is really slow and boring. I don’t know how long this is gonna last.

Somethings take longer to understand

ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): Nobody wanted to let HBO down. We wanted to be a hit show. We wanted to be big. We assumed we were going to be big because it was HBO. Everything they do is big. We were happy and even shocked that this is a big fucking cast. It’s a lot of black people. We haven’t seen this many black people on-screen since A Different World. This is awesome. We also were like, “This is really slow.” When we saw the pilot, we only had that little pilot testing. We thought that show wasn’t getting picked up, because it’s too slow. TV doesn’t move like this. Everybody in TV world, in La La Land, they know Law & Order. You catch the bad guy at the end. It’s all wrapped up. This is some slow-talking shit. They’re going to hate this shit. At the same time, we’re watching shit like The Shield. That shit is a hundred miles an hour. There’s action every five minutes on The Shield. We’re like, “This show is going to suck. They’re not going to pick it up. Hope everybody didn’t spend that money, because it’s over. It’s a one-episode job. Now back to the grind.” A lot of us felt that way. When the show got picked up, we were shocked. Truly.

We believe this show got picked up—or I believe this show got picked up—because I just thought HBO is making so much money.

DEIRDRE “DEDE” LOVEJOY (ASST. STATE’S ATTY. RHONDA PEARLMAN): I had done one day on the pilot, and Dominic is literally lying on top of me; we’re completely naked. He’s got the little bag that covers the male parts, and I’ve got the pasties on; they’re covering the female parts. He is lying on top of me, and he says, “Oh, this is weird. Last week, I was on top of Renée Zellweger.” He had just shot the movie Chicago. I was like, “Oh, thanks for that. That was really helpful to me.”

As inconceivable as it sounds, Omar, too, was sourced from real-life inspirations. During his days on the force, Ed Burns found that stick-up artists roamed independently and often maintained their own set of rules, while providing accurate information. He cultivated several into his best sources. Donnie Andrews, one of the primary inspirations for Omar, positively transformed his later life, becoming a consultant on The Wire.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): Omar is a composite of five or six guys that were my informants who were gun slingers. Each one brought a little something to the Omar character, and it became the present character.

This guy, Anthony Hollie, he was extremely soft-spoken, very gentle, and a ferocious gunslinger. I mean, ferocious. He had a buddy that he always hung around with, who was a younger guy. That might have been in the back of my head. His buddy was beaten to death by the drug dealers, and Anthony retaliated. That scene of the body slung across the car—that’s probably how David and I came up with that, just by going over his story. Anthony and Donnie [Andrews], when they were on your side, it was a one hundred percent. It was no games. They didn’t play games. They trusted you implicitly, and I trusted them implicitly. They were solid. A lot of the other guys you would never turn your back on, but that’s how that happened.

Anthony never cursed, never raised his voice. He came out of his house one Sunday morning and there must have been six or seven guys waiting for him. If you go down the street, you can still see the pock marks, the bullet holes, where they shot, and that was a true violation, because he went to visit his mother. That was Sunday; he was supposed to have a break. Didn’t ha...

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): [Avon and Stringer] are not Melvin [Williams] and Chin [Farmer]. They start from that starting point, but then you’re grafting into all these different guys that you knew or heard stories about. There’s elements of [Maurice] “Peanut” King. There’s elements of Will Franklin. The characters become ten different guys, and then the actors become themselves. Th...

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.

If you know Ed, you know that Ed don’t take no shit. You ain’t going to work. 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.

The Wire allowed its audience space to interpret. It would not fully explain scenes, instead leaving viewers pondering the meaning of them for episodes, and sometimes seasons, at a time. One early moment hammered that methodology home. In real life, Ed Burns and Harry Edgerton had worked the murder of Dessera Press, who had been dumped by one of Williams’s lieutenants, Louis “Cookie” Savage. In retaliation, she had threatened to turn Savage into the state’s attorney. A gunman killed her, firing from outside a glass window. Through that case, Burns and Edgerton unearthed Savage’s connection to Melvin Williams.

WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): I think it’s an example of one of the best displays of my acting in the whole series. I tell folks, “Study that if you want to study what intent is,” because everyone understood exactly what we were doing at every moment, even though we were using just that one word or [a] variation thereof. That was one of the best-acted scenes that I did on the show. The one thing they cut out that I regret is we said, “Fuck. Fuck me. Mother fuck. Fuckity fuck,” all of that. Then we were [being] watched the whole time by the super. “Fuck. Motherfucker. Fuck.” We go outside and we find the casing, and the super says, “Well, I’ll be fucked.” They cut that out, though. I was like, “Oh, man, they should have left that in.”

How could a white man adequately tell a story so intimately linked to the experience of blacks?

But she’s right, the characters themselves, as individuals, were entitled to a certain figure of dignity at points. Some of them, anyway. As it should be. Even in a rigged game, people don’t cease to be human, and the human heart doesn’t stop beating. But at the time that I said it, I think we were arguing past each other. She was talking about characters, her character, other characters, and I was talking about the systems that we were depicting. I think the system part of the show was more in my head, and Ed Burns’s head, than in the people who were being asked to depict the world. Because it has to be. You’re asking them to be in the moment, and human beings in the moment, we all live as we live. We’re not constantly standing back and going, “Let me have my omniscient moment of seeing the whole.”

Actors are particularly susceptible to seeing the world powerfully from the point of view of their characters. It’s what their job is. You never tell an actor who’s about to do a bad thing, “You’re a bad guy.” I’m always telling my actors when they’re about to do something bad or something morally transgressive, “You’re a good guy. This is a bad moment, but you’re a good guy.” Because unless you’re a total sociopath, which very few people are, the people doing bad things are still people, and the people having noble moments are still people, and the next moment they’ll do a bad thing. I think, in some ways, we weren’t even applying the terms in the same way. But I do remember butting heads with her. Because she’s a progressive, optimistic person, and I’m a progressive, pessimistic person.

I remember him saying organizations can’t be reformed, but people can.

The things that reform systems are trauma. Great trauma. Nobody gives up status quo without being pushed to the wall.

I believe that politically. The great reformations of society are the result of undue excess and undue cruelty.

Over time, the name of the novelist George Pelecanos kept popping up in conversations David Simon was having. Kary Antholis, the HBO executive, originally recommended that Simon read Pelecanos’s book The Sweet Forever. Simon took the suggestion as needling. He owed Antholis late scripts for The Corner and interpreted the earnest recommendation as a prod to him to hurry. 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 of dirt on the grave in traditional Jewish burial fashion. Instead, a backhoe jumped to a start and began piling dirt onto the plot. “Is this traditional?” Pelecanos asked, turning to Simon without a trace of a grin on his face. “Is this traditional for you guys?” “He cracked me up,” Simon recalled. “He just slayed me. I was no good for the rest of the day. I was like, Man, not only is he a good writer, he’s funny. Dark and funny. I sought him out after that.”

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): My wife and I [had] just started dating then. My wife’s a novelist, and she was a contemporary of George’s. She’d been on me to read George. She goes, “You should read Pelecanos. He’s interested in the same stuff. His heart is where your heart is.” And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s from DC.” I had that Baltimore [thing], like, “I’m sorry, those are the lawyers who come to the Orioles games and sit there on their cell phones for five innings. Fuck those guys.” And I’m from DC originally, so I had sort of like [a] Baltimore chip on my shoulder. So, I hadn’t pulled one of his books up.

He’s a macro guy. If you say to me, go write a book about the drug war’s failure, it would probably intimidate me. I’m more of a micro guy. I like to dig into the characters in the individual scenes and dialogue. But David knew what the big picture was.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I said it to Michael, “People are going to remember Wallace. Wallace is going to bother them for a long time after the whole show is forgotten. You’re going to work. You’re going to have a career. You did great with this.” They all look at you like, This is the last job I’ll ever get. You can never convince them enough.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I gave him the Wallace scene because, at that point, I had read three or four of his novels, and his violence was never gratuitous. It was always on a human scale, and it had a narrative tension that was that of a novel. So, I always knew that those things would always have heart. And I thought he was the best person to chase that stuff. That was “use what you have.” To have a novelist’s sense of tension when it comes to violence is really picture perfect.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): It was Pelecanos who wrote that murder scene, and I didn’t like it. We made Bodie a psychopath, and psychopaths don’t hesitate. It was great for the character growing. I won’t deny that. It was great for the actor—really gave him a stretch. He turned out to be a great actor, but to me, it didn’t follow the logic of who the kid was. You create a psychopath, there’s no moral sense of having him not pull the trigger.

Interesting

Give the job to that cat. I want to live to play another day.