All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

JERMAINE CRAWFORD (DUQUAN “DUKIE” WEEMS): I wasn’t old enough to even watch the show. I had no idea what I was getting into. I was just super excited to be cursing, and my mom was okay with it.

Ed pulled me out. He’s kind of sitting there, kind of just thinking. He said, “Less is more. Remember that for the rest of your life. Anything that you apply. With Michael, especially this character, less is always more. The less you do, the more everybody will feel it. Because we’re so prone to seeing so much. With acting, with life, whatever. We’re so prone to seeing so much more. But when there’s less, the mystery behind it, it leaves people guessing. It feels so much more. So, just remember that when you’re going back into this room and you’re reading those lines. Less is more.”

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): Here’s the secret to teaching, [as] with anything else: If you blame yourself for the mistakes, you can only get better. If you blame the outside world, the kid, the person you’re working with, if you blame them, you’ll never get better. So, you’re, Why did I fuck that up? What can I do better? If that’s the driving energy, you come to the next day revved up and ready to go, Let’s see if this works.

When you’re in the middle of doing something that long—it’s five years—it’s easy to think, I’m not seeing it.

ANWAN GLOVER (SLIM CHARLES): Getting up every day with my older brother, he was in it, in the street life. In my neighborhood, getting up as a little kid, one day, going to school, saw a dead body by the trash can, get out of school and the dead body’s still right there, with the yellow tape. I know how to adapt to those different situations, and then on The Wire, the last episodes, my little brother was murdered. And I had to shoot those scenes with me coping with my mom pulling her hair out, and producers and the writers are like, “Anwan, do you want to sit back for a minute?” I said, “Na, I’ve gotta keep pushing. I can’t take no time back.” Because I probably would have went crazy. But they were always in my corner with everything.

They go about their own way. But it was one of those things where I think you saw Chad’s character trying to be more than that through Michael. He saw himself in Michael, the good and the bad. He wanted to do what he could to try to keep him from the bad. But there are some things that are inevitable.

JERMAINE CRAWFORD (DUQUAN “DUKIE” WEEMS): Because me and Julito are so cool now, I can say this, but we fucking hated each other. Oh my God, we hated each other. But it was so crazy because the dynamics of our characters was really our real dynamic. It was just kind of by circumstance. Like, me and Tristan were very close immediately, and he was kind of always like a caretaker. Julito was always talking shit. Maestro was just like, “Aw, whatever. I’m here.” We were literally our characters. You have no idea. But I think it was at the end of Season Four, Julito and I started to develop a really dope friendship, and to this day we keep in touch, got kids, speak, and we’re really fond of each other.

SANDI MCCREE (DE’LONDA BRICE):

When art imitates life to the extremes

In one such moment, he tells Omar that “a businessman such as myself does not believe in bad blood with a man such as yourself. It disturbs the sleep.”

Top 5 under rated line

Chew died of heart failure in 2013 at the age of fifty-two. “I don’t think Robert Chew realized how good he was,” said S. Robert Morgan, who played Butchie on the show. “I really don’t. He was spectacular. What you have to understand is that what you saw in Prop Joe was so far from what Robert Chew really is. He is the most soft-spoken, understated person I have ever met.”

JERMAINE CRAWFORD (DUQUAN “DUKIE” WEEMS): Tristan and me, Maestro, and Julito, we wanted to see the sex scene with Sonja Sohn, Kima, so we watched that. Other than that, that’s the only thing I saw of the show before shooting.

JULITO MCCULLUM (NAMOND BRICE): We snuck and watched it, and we were like, “Oh…okay.” It was cool. We had met Kima. We met pretty much all the cast members, but we didn’t know who they were, so we didn’t really know their characters. Then when we saw that. Yeah, it was a good time.

TRISTAN MACK WILDS (MICHAEL LEE): We all watched it and was like, “Holy shit.” Now, of course, I had already seen it, but I’m young. So, that’s one of the scenes that, when it comes up, my mom was covering my eyes. So, I really didn’t get how deep or how graphic it was. It was always funny. My mom is more okay with me seeing somebody get shot on the show than actually letting me watch people have sex, which I still talk to her about today. “Mom, I can watch Stringer Bell get killed, but I couldn’t watch Kima’s sex scene? I couldn’t do that? You wouldn’t let me?”

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I was at Hamilton Middle School. After the first year, our test results hovered between one percent and three percent. I went to the principal. She was an open-minded woman. I said, “I had this idea between the stoop kid and the corner kid.” She says, “First off, I don’t like those terminologies. Can we think of something else?” I said, “I just have something here for you: acclimated and unacclimated.” “How do we decide that?” I said, “It’s very simple. The kid that can sit in the chair, he’s acclimated, and if he can’t sit in the chair, he’s not acclimated.”

That’s where I saw the greatest tragedy, because all the kids coming into City College and Poly, the two magnet schools in Baltimore city—Poly is the math/science, and City is the humanities—the kids coming into City College, from kindergarten all the way through eighth grade, were straight-A students.

When they walked in my classroom, they couldn’t write. They didn’t comprehend what they were reading, but they were very, very quiet, and they went through eight years of middle school and elementary school being the good kids. We had lots of tears in the classroom, frustration. I went to the principal and said, “If we could do this, this, this, and this…” “We don’t do it. We don’t do that.” Most of the kids that graduated from City went to bullshit colleges and were home after six months, five months, because they were homesick. They were insecure. They didn’t have the skills. And that, to me, is a betrayal.

ERNEST DICKERSON (DIRECTOR): I found out later that the editorial staff freaked out when it saw the dailies because the camera was laying down on the ground beside him. First, we started off with the actor as he’s down on the ground, and then, as Chris’s foot starts to come down on him, we cut. Then we moved the real actor out and moved the dummy in. The editorial staff, they didn’t see the change, because the dummy looked that much like the real actor. All of a sudden, the foot is stomping him in the face and the mouth, and the head is jerking. They were freaking out because it looked like we were actually stomping the poor guy. It was a beautiful special effect. That articulated dummy that we made of him, it worked. Even they admitted that they had to cut down what I did. My cut was a little bit too much. I think it was longer with the stomping of the head. They shortened it. It was hard to watch.

On a very visceral level, I just thought it was really what it’s about. He’s literally leaving him in the dark and behind. That was a specific thing we talked to the cinematographer about. I wanted him to knock the lights down in the waiting room, but I wanted the hallway to be very vibrant, very bright.

Somebody brought up “What do you think is going to happen?” I said, “I think Bodie is probably going to get killed.” All of the kids looked at me like, How could you say that in front of The Wire? All of them almost threw up, had a heart attack, fell out their chair. It was ridiculous. David kind of looked at me, and David Simon is not like an overtly emotional person as far as I’ve known, but he just had this look on his face. It was kind of, not a surprised look, but he was intrigued, because he was like, “Go on.” I explained why and everything, and David said, “Well, you never know. It’s possible.”

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): We arranged that he was the keeper of the chess metaphor all the way through. He speaks about the pawns and everything, and then, on the corner, we killed him with a chess move, the knight coming up from behind.

Awesome description

CAROLYN STRAUSS (PRESIDENT, HBO ENTERTAINMENT): They were all really good, but if you put a gun to my head and said, “Pick your favorite season,” that fourth season to me was just killer. On a macro level, yeah, it was a big political statement, but on the micro level, watching those kids go through that, it was just killer. Not in a good way. It was a good way, but it was really so visceral watching that happen.

ERIC OVERMYER (WRITER): That summer, what I remember most is [Hurricane] Katrina, really, and being in Baltimore and wondering if my house was still there in New Orleans. Then, after Katrina, David and I started talking again about doing a show in New Orleans, which eventually became the seeds for Treme.

GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): It wasn’t really until Season Three that I felt like, This is pretty extraordinary, like we’re really doing something. And that’s where I think we hit our stride. I th...