Difficult Men Quotes

“Me gusta la gente que dice lo que piensa, piensa lo que dice y hace lo que dice que va a hacer.”
― Brett Martin, Hombres fuera de serie: De Los Soprano a The Wire y de Mad Men a Breaking Bad. Crónica de una revolución creativa (Ariel)

“Not only these were new kinds of stories, they were being told with a new kind of formal structure. [...] The result was a storytelling architecture you could picture as a colonnade - each episode a brick with its own solid, satisfying shape, but also part of a season-long arc that, in turn, would stand linked to other seasons to form a coherent, freestanding work of art. [...] The new structure allowed huge creative freedom: to develop characters over long stretches of time, to tell stories over the course of fifty hours or more, the equivalent of countless movies.”
― Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

“In some circles, to not have seen The Wire had become a shocking breach of social protocol.”
― Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

“The whole environment was toxic. People were terrified. I remember thinking, ‘If I ever get my own show, it will not be this way.”
― Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

“I probably did come off as an arrogant asshole,” he said. “But you had to be. We were bucking a system. And the reason I slept fine at night, despite having all these terrible wars and knowing how resentful they must have been, was that it was in the show’s best interest and, ultimately, the network’s best interest. I always felt that part of my job was protecting them from themselves.”
― Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

“Mike Post [the prolific TV-theme composer] used to say, ‘Everybody is an expert on two things: their jobs and music.’ The same is true of television,” said Stephen J. Cannell, one of the most successful writer-producers of the seventies and eighties. “Why? Because we’ve all watched so damned much of it. It’s like saying, ‘I fly first class all the time. I think I could land this thing.”
― Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

“«Mira El mito de Sísifo de Albert Camus», prosiguió el supuesto misántropo. «Parece que la vida no tiene sentido, pero tenemos que comportarnos como si lo tuviera. Tenemos que comportarnos unos con otros como personas que intentan amar.»”
― Brett Martin, Hombres fuera de serie: De Los Soprano a The Wire y de Mad Men a Breaking Bad. Crónica de una revolución creativa (Ariel)

“«Lo peor que nos han dado los franceses es la teoría del autor», dijo rotundamente. «Es una basura. Uno no hace una película solo. Implicas a gente para que aporte su trabajo. Haces que la gente esté a gusto en su puesto; haces que la gente hable.»”
― Brett Martin, Hombres fuera de serie: De Los Soprano a The Wire y de Mad Men a Breaking Bad. Crónica de una revolución creativa (Ariel)

“«Los héroes son mucho más adecuados para el cine», dijo Alan Ball. «A mí me interesa más la gente real. Y la gente real está jodida.»”
― Brett Martin, Hombres fuera de serie: De Los Soprano a The Wire y de Mad Men a Breaking Bad. Crónica de una revolución creativa (Ariel)

“«Cannell me enseñó que el héroe puede hacer muchas cosas malas, puede cometer toda clase de errores, puede ser vago y parecer tonto, siempre y cuando sea el tipo más listo de la habitación y haga bien su trabajo. Eso es lo que les pedimos a nuestros héroes.» En otras palabras, Jim Rockford era un antecesor de Tony Soprano.”
― Brett Martin, Hombres fuera de serie: De Los Soprano a The Wire y de Mad Men a Breaking Bad. Crónica de una revolución creativa (Ariel)

“to [David] Simon and his partner, Ed Burns, The Wire was explicitly a piece of social activism. Among its targets, large and small, were the War on Drugs, the educational policy No Child Left Behind, and the outsize influence of money in America's political sytem, of statistics in its police departments, and of Pulitzer Prizes at its newspapers. The big fish, though, was nothing less than a capitalist system that Burns and Simon had begun to see as fundamentally doome. (If Simon was a dyed-in-the-wool lefly, Burns practically qualified as Zapatista; by ex-cop standards, he might as well have been Trotsky himself.) In chronicling the modern American city, Simon said, they had one mantra, adapted from, of all sources, sports radio personality Jim Rome: "Have a fucking take. Try not to suck."
Neither Burns nor Simon would ever seem entirely comfortable acknowledging the degree that The Wire succeeded on another level: as beautifully constructed, suspenseful, heartfelt, reasonant entertainment. [...] "It's our job to be entertaining. I understand I must make you care about my characters. That's the fundamental engine of drama," Simon said dismissively. "It's the engine. But it's not the purpose". Told that The Wire had trascended the factual bounds that, for all its good intentions, had shackled The Corner, he seemed to deliberately misunderstand the compliment: "I have too much regard for that which is true to ever call it journalism." The questioner, of course, had meant the opposite: that The Wire was too good to call mere journalism. As late as 2012, he would complain in a New York Times interview that fans were still talking about their favorite characters rather than concentrating on the show's political message.”
― Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

“as another television veteran put it, “This isn’t like publishing some lunatic’s novel or letting him direct a movie. This is handing a lunatic a division of General Motors.”
― The Penguin Press, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

“In what must surely be considered one of the great lost scripts of history (or a Saturday Night Live sketch), Chase brought his usual sensibility to a trial run, having Kevin discover The Catcher in the Rye and start smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and conversing with the shade of Holden Caulfield.”
― Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad