All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

The first season on most shows are always hard, as you’re establishing so many different elements, and The Wire was somehow harder than most because of the complexities of the show: so many actors, shooting all on location in the real elements, etcetera.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): It was like the middle of America was hollowed out. The people who were watching the show were either in West Baltimore or North Philadelphia. They were in the places that the show was about, because they couldn’t believe there was a drama about their neighborhood. Or it was people who were like book people or whatever who had found it in a weird way, and that’s how it felt after two or three seasons. But, man, it took forever.

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.

FREDRO STARR (MARQUIS “BIRD” HILTON): Filming in Baltimore, that itself was an experience. 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. Me personally, coming from [the hip-hop group] Onyx, the hood knows me from Onyx, too, so it was like, “Yo, what’s up, Fredro?” I’m out there mingling with everybody. Being a part of the community, not just in my trailer, because of who I am as far as what I do in hip-hop.

J. D. WILLIAMS (PRESTON “BODIE” BROADUS): I’m from Newark, New Jersey, so we have a certain level of harshness or brutality, exposure to those types of things.

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.

J. D. WILLIAMS (PRESTON “BODIE” BROADUS): Baltimore closed down two o’clock sharp, and I mean sharp. So, I came outside of the club one night, not moving fast enough for the police or just not being where I was supposed to be. The police, they grabbed me, slammed me down into the gutter. I was dressed up. It was a nice suit, and they slammed me down into the gutter, put the ties on me, and threw me in the truck, and they held me there. That was two o’clock when they took me in, and I didn’t get out until about ten o’clock in the morning. I had to walk home. 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. That was my first year down here, so I had to learn Baltimore quick.

MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): I’m grown now. I can say that shit. I went. They took me out, man. They took me out. They let me see the strip clubs and be in that environment. We called it character development, character research. We would go down to some of the strip joints and have a good time. ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): Mm-hmm. That’s right. We’re playing these characters that you know were out and about in the streets and talking shit. It’s all part of the Method acting. We all logged it into research. We’re just doing research.

FREDRO STARR (MARQUIS “BIRD” HILTON): My niggas, Hassan, J.D., and I went down to Baltimore, and I hadn’t seen them in a while. We all blazed in my room. The whole floor smelled like weed, and HBO told me to move hotels. I did, and they blazed up the room again. I think that’s why I got wrote off the show real quick. I do think they probably thought I was a handful or maybe too much to handle. Maybe. I only did two episodes. Then they was like, “You’re going to jail,” or whatever. The writers wrote that because they were writing it every week, so they could have wrote that in: “All right, let’s just send him up to jail forever. He’ll come out of jail when Jesus comes home.” Something like that. I think maybe that might have played a part. Or maybe that was just the way they wanted Bird to be, a hit man, in and out. Back in the days—I’m not going to lie—I was just doing a whole lot of other stuff. It was on my part, not even thinking. Whatever. Fuck it. We’re going to blaze the hotel up. In corporate America, you can’t do that.

CLARKE PETERS (DET. LESTER FREAMON): We were given a stipend for each year, and it just seemed to make sense that, if the amount of money that you’re spending on rent is equal to the amount of money that you could be spending on a mortgage, what would you do? I am, after all, Lester Freamon. Follow the money, buddy.

NEAL HUFF (CHIEF OF STAFF MICHAEL STEINTORF): I was living with Clarke Peters and Reg E. Cathey on North Calvert. I basically took over Jim True-Frost’s room after he was gone. Reg E. would always get recognized in Baltimore when we were walking. They would kind of say, “Oh my God. I love you.” They would then turn to me and do a double take and go, “I hate you. I hated you.” If I’m ever recognized for The Wire, that’s generally the second sentence. “I fucking hated you, man.”

The good thing about it is that for those first two years that we had it, we didn’t have a television. All we had was a radio, guitar, some painting, a couple of bottles of wine, a fireplace, and conversation. What had happened was that we wound up finding ourselves organically creating this little salon kind of society, where we would read books and sit down and talk. We spent our time like that. It was really very edifying. I really miss that.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I think Ed will confess he didn’t want to do the second season. He was like, “We just built this universe. We can do more with it.” And I’m like, “Yeah, and we will. But if we stay tight on the Barksdales second season, then the show is only going to be about the drug thing, and it’s going to veer into that us-against-them soap opera of a cop show.” I said, “We have a chance to build a city.”

To credit Ed, he fought and he fought and he fought. Then, the first moment that we started touring the port and talking to people and meeting the union guys, he was like, “This is great and I have ideas.” That’s Ed. You’ve got to lead him sometimes and go, “We’re doing this, Ed. I’m taking you by your shoulders. This is what we’re doing. I already sold it to HBO. Let’s make the best of it.” Then he goes in, and you turn around and he’s in the middle of its guts, chewing. That’s who he is.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Season Two, I knew I wanted to go to the death of work. Because where do these drug corners come from? They come from deindustrialization. Our economy no longer needs mass employment. The only factory in town that’s still hiring and is always hiring are the corners. You can see the need for it, to show the economy shrugging people off. But did I know they were going to be port workers? No. In fact, the first thing I thought of was, I wonder if they’ll let us do an assembly line. Because I had in my mind the Blue Collar movie with Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto and Richard Pryor. As it happened, the place that let us in to do a working-class movie was the port. It was state-run, and they were for the film industry and they wouldn’t let us into other factories, so it ends up being a port. Did I have an idea that we were going to do a working-class story? Yeah. And that we were going to have a guy as the local union president? Yeah. But did I think it was going to be the United Auto Workers at first? My first thought about it? That’s the adaptation that happens.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I had one question I needed to answer. I knew the story in my head. We went to the management. After they gave us the whole dog and pony show, I said, “Can you steal one of these things off the docks?” “No way.” Fuck. Then we went to the bar that night, where the longshoremen were. Same question, “Can you steal?” The guy says, “Which one do you want?” I said, “There we are.” That was the story. It was as simple as that. Everything flowed from that.

This is the world. This is how it works. This is a logical and rational outcome of this.

We probably finished four to five seasons with Ed feeling like we left stuff on the table that we couldn’t get to.

The Writers Room

I’ve learned to listen to him. Ed and I could argue for hours, and George would be the third guy who would spin it one way or the other. George was the third vote. If you swayed George, then you were probably right. If you didn’t sway George, it was time to rethink.

GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): Not in the sense that I went one way or the other. The one argument was about the chips in the phones. That went on for a week with the SIM cards.

You have to argue. The room has to be about argument. It has to be good academic arguing. It can get a little heated. You’re basically arguing a story.

ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): We didn’t see David Simon after the first season. He was in the room, the think tank. Ed Burns you saw every once in a while. He’ll come to set, but you didn’t really talk to him, because he was scary.

It’s really tiring to cry that much. You gotta work yourself into a pretty dark state, and you have to stay there to make it conceivable. We’re on Chris’s side. I have the choice whether or not I just remove myself from that dark space and feel like I don’t have to cry as much anymore. I was a pretty young dude, and I was like, Fuck that, this dude has shown me gratitude and respect. I think that there’s a better performance of me that didn’t get filmed because I was like, I want to give you the best version that I possibly can every time so you have something to react off of.

Sobotka says to Ziggy in a noble effort to rouse some fight and macho optimism, “You’re a Sobotka.” Ziggy answers “Fucked is what I am.” Gives me chills.

Then, the beautiful thing that happened is that Elijah, my son, ended up playing our son on the show.

When I look back on it, the whole skeleton, it laid out beautifully: the skeleton of Bunny’s arc and Bunny’s story, in just that one episode.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I knew a guy, his father was a preacher and he was very articulate. He got involved with a spin-off of the Panthers and he started robbing federal guards to get their equipment, which is not the brightest thing in the world. He got caught, but when I was talking to him, he was very focused, revolutionary-type ideas, very firm, and I thought, Maybe you can take that attitude, that strength, and take the discipline of one of [Louis] Farrakhan’s people and mold them into this guy and then, find an actor who could play that part. And we did.

But then, when I heard I got the part, I was excited, and first day on the set, I guess they were expecting some big entourage or something like that, but once they saw I was regular and accessible, it ran pretty smooth after that.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): You talk about a hero in the neighborhood. Holy smokes, and all my kids in school, all their notebooks, had that Wu-Tang Clan symbol. It was remarkable. You would have thought he was the Second Coming when he showed up.

METHOD MAN (CALVIN “CHEESE” WAGSTAFF): Fans were a little rambunctious. Like, in between shots, I would have to either stay inside if we were shooting inside or go inside my trailer when people left, because I would basically be signing autographs every time we yelled, “Cut.” So, yeah, it was a little crazy. They shot on location in Baltimore, so some of those streets they shot on were in real rough neighborhoods. One day, this family, they were just playing this music loud when we were trying to get our shot, and I remember the crew constantly asking if they could [turn it down] and they was just beefing like, “We ain’t doing shit. We live here. We ain’t gotta do shit.” So, I walk over there and I ask them politely, but I didn’t ask them at first. First, I started kicking it with them. “Yo, what’s up Method Man? Blah, blah, blah. What’s good? What’s good?” This, that, and the third. Then, I politely asked them if they could turn the music off while we get our shots off and shit. They were like, “Yeah, we’ll do that for you.” But don’t get me wrong. They had goons on the set that would shut anybody down that would try and cause problems on the set. It just so happened that, that day, I kind of stepped up and did it in a diplomatic matter, where nobody was offended.

Great story

The moment is one of the few times in the series that Levy, played by Michael Kostroff (the brother of Nina Noble), is flustered.

You had these conversations, and that’s what made Season Three big. You had two audiences who came together and started talking about this show and going, “This show is amazing. This show is not following TV standards. They can just go from any angle.” It’s all the same narrative. It’s about the community. I don’t think any other show at that time was doing it like that, just changing it all up. Because Season One or Season Two, there were no nominations. If you get a nomination or even if you win, it’s harder to change up. If it’s working for you, HBO might be like, “Don’t change nothing. Leave it like that and keep doing it.” [But] because we were still going under the radar, HBO was like, “Try and do something new. Try and figure it out. See if you can get nominated. If it ain’t bad, then do that.” It was David Simon’s and Ed Burns’s plan, but they didn’t get that much resisting in the changing.

I was crushed, because I love the show. Wendell Pierce said to me, “You got to fight for your job.” I was like, “Well, what am I supposed to do? I can’t become detective overnight.” I don’t think it was every script, but David would put a few random scripts with a famous line from a movie, and just for fun, you’d see if people would figure it out, and Wendell had figured one out and he gave me the answer. He said, “Go tell David you know what the line is.” I was really nervous, and I go up to David and I say, “David, there’s a line in one of the scripts that says, ‘Let’s go.’ And the other guy says, ‘Why not?’ Is that line from The Wild Bunch?” David does this double take, and he looked me up and down, he’s like, “Ha, well, how did you know that?” I was like, “Oh, I was just guessing. Am I right?” For a second I was like, Oh, my God. Okay, I’m going to make detective. He’s going to change the roles. He was so impressed. He said, “Somebody told you.” I was like, “No, no. I’m right. Oh my God. I’m right.” I never told him that story, that Wendell told me the answer. Maybe he’ll find out from this. Anyway, it didn’t work, and I was finished on Season Two, but as you know, I came back and was peppered in through the years.

So funny

Nobody do hood better then Wood Harris. That was the dude.

Their first “play date,” as Price later labeled it, arrived the night of the Rodney King verdict. They watched the unrest unfold from Price’s apartment, and the eternally curious minds then ventured to Jersey City to witness it firsthand. “Price had written tons of movie scripts in the same vernacular,” Simon said. “He was supposed to write The Wire. Before The Wire, if they had given him the charge to write a thirteen-episode cop show around a drug wiretap, he could’ve gone in and holistically written it.”

It was an interesting process. They have six characters. “What’s the theme this year? What institution are we going to focus on?” In Season Three it was Hamsterdam. “Okay, so, what’s the overall arc for Omar? What’s the overall arc for the Barksdales? What’s the overall arc for the mayor’s office? McNulty, etcetera, etcetera.” For an overarching meeting in Tarrytown, you can’t get too intimate. You can’t ever get to a point in an overarching meeting to say, “Well, in Episode Six this is what happens exactly.” Because even right before you write Episode Six, you’re still gonna be off, because you’ve still gotta [consider] what happened in Five. Every time you write, there’s a good chance some of your stuff is gonna go an episode later under another guy’s name and stuff from the episode previous is gonna be shoved into yours. It’s sort of an assembly line. The story trumps the author.

GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): Nina controls all the stuff, like where you stay. She tried to book us into a hotel up there that didn’t have liquor, didn’t have a bar, and we promptly booked ourselves into a different hotel. That’s one thing I remember. She might dispute it, but I have brought it up with her recently. I’ve never forgotten that.

We did find a place where we could drink at night, even though it was kind of in, to me, the boonies. For all I know, it’s a nice place, but it looked like just a hotel sitting on a bunch of land. We also played handball, and Richard Price was very competitive.

RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): Mainly what I remember from Tarrytown is it was like the most anti-Wire setting in the world. It was a corporate events hotel. Everyone’s having motivational meetings and bonding sessions for their sales corps, and stuff like that. We’re sitting there going, “Well, who’s Omar gonna fuck this year? Yeah, I think a Barksdale is gonna die.” Everybody else is studying the acronyms for success and getting on the links. We’re sitting there killing people in Baltimore. I remember, at one point—I used to play a lot of racquetball—I wound up on a court with Burns and Pelecanos, but I didn’t bring any shorts, s...

Richard Price is probably the sharpest, quickest, funniest guy you’ll ever meet. When he gets on a roll, there’s no story. He’ll have you on the floor laughing. He’s just amazing.

GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): All these people are writers, so they’re pretty vain, and they all think that their ideas are the best ideas. And they all think that they’re the best writer in the room, which is as it should be. There’s dealing with the personalities and kind of pushing your ego aside, because, after a while, since everybody gets to know each other, it’s not so polite. It’s like, “That’s a stupid idea. We’re not going to do that.” All those types of things that you thought you put behind you back in high school.

DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): Richard is the reason I’m a writer. He’s foundational. No matter how many times we’ve hung out, worked together, chatted each other up, I can never feel comfortable around the guy. It’s fucking embarrassing because I’m a pretty social dude, good at putting people at ease, but Richard must think I need Adderall because I simply can’t chill around him. I was fourteen when I read The Wanderers in the basement of my house in Dorchester, and the world was fundamentally altered between when I picked that book up and when I put it back down. And to follow his writing for my very first teleplay twenty-odd years later—that was just too daunting to contemplate. So, I blocked it out. I read the notes on his episode, saw where he was going with it, and then just put my head down and banged out my ep’.

DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): We were trying to break a transition in an episode once, where McNulty and Greggs needed to gather the information necessary to figure out Bubbles’s whereabouts. We’d been at it for a couple hours, just banging on the box, and it was turning into a time suck, all over this minor transition. So, I said, “I know it’s not pretty, but what if we just have McNulty and Greggs happen across a CI [confidential informant] and ask where Bubbles is? And the CI says, “The soup kitchen on such and such?” So, Ed Burns, who hates anything that smells even a little bit like it was something he ever saw on a shitty network cop show, leans back and folds his arms and stares across the table with a kind of bemused contempt. And he says, “In twenty years as Bal’more police, I never, not once, just happened to come across a CI who was conveniently in possession of the location of another CI on the other side of the city. I mean, who is this guy, fucking Huggy Bear?” And there was much snickering and pained looks of pity and commiseration for me and my dumbass idea. And for the rest of the week, Ed called me Huggy Bear or Starsky or Hutch. The takeaway there was: Don’t cut corners, even if it’s a lot harder not to. Taught me more about how to write good TV than just about any lesson I can think of.

As a producer, he had been soft-spoken, subtle, and discreet, Simon wrote in an appreciation of Colesberry for The Baltimore Sun: “He made his points after everyone else in the room had already had their say. Bob could back you into a better idea and convince you that it was probably your own. And he was forever pathfinding through the forest of overgrown ego that flourishes on any movie set.” Thorson, Simon, and Noble privately spread some of Colesberry’s ashes on the set during the first day of filming Season 3. The writers wrote in a wake for Det. Ray Cole, the minor character Colesberry played on the show, in the third episode of the season. In it, Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams) delivers a eulogy peppered with tributes to Colesberry and his work on films such as Mississippi Burning and After Hours.

We were either at a bar going to the party or leaving the party and going to a bar, and I remember walking down the street and Andre Royo got a call, and as we were walking and talking, he was on the phone. He hangs up and says, “Guys, I’ve got some bad news.” We all stop on the corner in New York, and he said, “Colesberry just passed away.” I got chills on my arms now. We all just stood on this New York street corner with jaws on the ground, like, “Holy shit.” It was like the carpet ripped out from under you.

KAREN THORSON (PRODUCER): I know that David Simon was deeply wounded, had lost a friend, but he felt alone out there making the show. His mother told me that several years later. In fact, it was not too long ago, maybe three or four years ago. I was sitting with Mrs. Simon and she said that David really mourned the loss of Bob and was worried that the show wouldn’t go on without him, but as you can see, it took a different turn and it worked out all right.

KAREN THORSON (PRODUCER): Joe Chappelle came on board as a director-producer type and was helpful. He definitely had his own aesthetic. It was different than Bob’s, but he brought some good ideas to the show. I do think that the visual style definitely changed, and I don’t think we were quite as adventurous because we were wounded. We had talked about going to widescreen and that we were going to do that Season Three, and we just didn’t do it. We didn’t do a lot of bigger changes because we were wounded, and if we didn’t have to fix something, we had to do so much healing, why add to the burden?

Michael K. Williams met Felicia “Snoop” Pearson in a bar and encouraged her to come to The Wire’s set. The show’s creative forces urged her to leave behind a past of illegalities for acting. In an Entertainment Weekly column, Stephen King labeled Pearson, “perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series.” PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

Eventually, George Pelecanos pulled me to the side one day and gave me some advice. He said, “Look, I think you can do this and I think you can be great at this, but it’s not going to happen if you don’t talk to David about letting him know you want to direct.” Self-promotion has not necessarily been one of my strong suits historically. That was way outside of my comfort level, but at the same time, for him to take the interest and give me some advice, I kind of got to at least act on it. I proceeded to have a fairly awkward conversation with David and Nina, expressing my desire to direct. Neither one of them committed to anything. Truth be told, I don’t know if that conversation had anything to do with it at all, but [I got a chance to direct] when they finally got their pickup for Season Four.

AIDAN GILLEN (MAYOR THOMAS CARCETTI): I remember Bill Zorzi’s eyes kind of out on stalks when I walked into the room, the writers’ room, off the plane from London to start as Carcetti. I looked more like Ziggy than Carcetti—big mop of hair and scruffy clothes, etcetera. Someone said, “Get this man’s hair cut and get him down to Brooks Brothers immediately.” I was Bill’s responsibility, and I knew he was going to be writing on the political strand. He took me on a crash course tour of local politics over the next few days. I had lots of questions, as I wasn’t familiar with the American local government scene. He led me through it with great knowledge and wry wit. He filled me in on lots of local political characters and lore, where you’d eat, what sandwich you might have. He’d been a political writer at The Baltimore Sun, just as David Simon had been a crime writer, and I knew I was in good hands.