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The rest of my conversation with David Simon
I recently had the good fortune to interview David Simon, the creator of “Homicide,” “The Wire” and “Treme,” in advance of his appearance at the Austin Film Festival, where he will receive the 2010 Outstanding Television Writer award.
Our interview was long and comprehensive, but on some days space is tight in the Statesman and the story, which you can read here, had to be trimmed.
Below is a more complete version of our conversation. The first question and answer appear below, the rest can be found after the jump.
You’re a newspaperman. How did you get into television?
“I was a police reporter in Baltimore for the Baltimore Sun, and they let me into the Homicide Unit after I’d been there about five years. They let me in in 1988 and why they did I don’t know. The Police Commissioner actually died before I had a chance to sit down with him and ask him why he’d agreed to do it. I like to think it was fairly pure — he’d been a homicide detective earlier in his career and he’d told people it was the most enjoyable posting he’d had. So it may have been as simple as that. But for whatever reason, you know, the vote against me in the Unit was three detectives in favor, 33 against. But the Police Commissioner let me in and I wrote a book about the year in this Homicide Unit.
“And then there was this fella named Barry Levinson, an A-list director from Baltimore whose company bought the book and made it into a television show. And then they came to me and said, ‘Do you want to try your hand at writing a couple of scripts?’ I got together with one of my college friends who worked with me on the college newspaper, David Mills. He was the guy who, on the college newspaper, was always — on Thursday nights or whatever, Wednesday nights, whenever they were on — he would stop putting out his pages, you know? He would walk out of the shop — we had like a 2 a.m. deadline — because he wanted to watch ‘Hill Street Blues’ or ‘St. Elsewhere.’ He was a devoted fan of television drama and I was not. I didn’t watch that stuff regularly or with any degree of awareness. So when they offered me this opportunity, I went and got him, since he actually knew the form. Armed with, you know, some existing ‘Homicide’ scripts and David’s knowledge of television, we wrote a script and it won the WGA Award, the Writers’ Guild award, that year.
“And so David immediately left the Washington Post and said ‘You’re nuts, I’m going to Hollywood.’ I said, ‘No, you’re nuts. That’s a good job. Don’t quit that job.’ I stayed at the paper and worked on a second book, ‘The Corner,’ and then, at some point, my newspaper started going down, the way a lot of newspapers started going don — chain-owned newspapers around the country.
“And this was before the Internet and before the real nosedive. These were the buyouts that were kind of the victory lap of all the surviving morning monopoly dailies, you know, that were chain-owned and people on Wall Street figured out that if you put out a weaker paper with, uh, less reporters, less news hole and less coverage, you could make more money.
“So it was that period of the nineties and I sort of saw the writing on the wall. I was not happy with the management of the paper and, so, they were offering me a job on this television show. And I took it kind of as a lark thinking, well, I’ll learn this new skill set and maybe it’ll help me do ‘The Corner’ as a miniseries and that’ll sell more books. ‘Cuz my commitment was to ‘The Corner’ as a book at that point. But I thought, I’ll go back to the Washington Post or I’ll find my way to a better paper. That was the plan. And that was still the plan until I looked up and I’d been doing television for about eight, nine years.
“And so people, these poor kids come up to me and they’re, like, ‘How do you get into television?’ and I’m like, ‘well, first write a book and then find an A-list director who buys it and makes it’ and they just look at me and they go, ‘Oh, God … you’re no help,’ you know. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying there was no plan. I had no plan.”
Read (much) more from Simon, including why TV is his preferred medium, the future of ‘Treme,’ if and how TV can effect change, how he feels about being an “entertainer” and what he’s going to do with his $500,000 MacArthur Foundation grant, after the jump.
Why do you think that television is such a good medium for your stories?
“I aspired to being a newspaperman and to an extent that that includes writing books about what’s on your beat, uh, an author. But my sensibility was in prose. I like movies; I like going to them, but I was no student of film. When I first took the job on ‘Homicide,’ I thought the guy standing next to the cameraman turning a knob was helping him hold the camera. It had to be explained to me ‘no, that’s the guy pulling focus.’ I found it incredible that the guy not looking through the camera was focusing it. I found that to be absurd. So that’s the degree of knowledge I had about filmmaking.
“Long-form is what I do best. You know, I’m working on some screenplays for features and they’re their own — I’m struggling with them because they are their own dynamic. They are much more the equivalent of short stories than novellas or novels. And long-form narrative is something I actually got to the point of doing when I did the books, which were both a year in the life immersion journalism. And so the idea of stretching a character and having the drama be in small, but accumulative moments is something that — that’s my sensibility to begin with.
“Now the problem in most of television — and the only reason I’m still here is premium cable, because they had to get rid of the advertising dynamic, for a variety of reasons. I mean, on a basic level, it’s kind of hard to write something seriously and then stop every twelve minutes so they can sell you iPods and, you know, Lincoln Continentals and blue jeans. You know, the ‘act in, act out,’ you know, come to an artificial dynamic so that they don’t walk away, uh, when they go to the bathroom or go to the refrigerator. That’s not really a grown-up medium in which to tell stories. It’s a very effective medium, but only if you’re an advertiser, not if you’re a storyteller.
“But the other thing was that the economy of scale was such that when advertising was the basis for television revenue, before premium cable, it was the writers’ job to — it was elemental that you had to keep the maximum number of eyeballs watching every show because that’s how advertisers can be charged the maximum amount by the networks. So you couldn’t write anything that was idiosyncratic or a little bit confusing or dark or even tragic. Because tragic, a certain number of viewers are going to turn away. Dark. Angry. Political. You’re going to lose people. Television storytelling was basically gratification in order to keep them there for the advertisers. The ads were the point. You were serving the advertisers. Even if you weren’t consciously trying to do that as a storyteller, inevitably you were forced to do it because of the Nielsens.
“‘Homicide’ fought to stay on the air. We had like a 14 share, 13 share most years. That would be an epic hit now in the fractured land of network television today. But at the time we were vulnerable to not getting picked up every year because we were not pulling 17s and 18s and 22s. Which shows that we’re a lot less dark and a lot more gratifying and, you know, solved the case every week and had more car chases and gunfights and women with big (breasts). They gave the viewer what the viewer wanted. And, in doing so, they kept the viewer.
“Well, premium cable, by creating this big tent where, you know, if some people come to HBO or Showtime because they like this show or that show and they stay, they don’t have to watch every show They just have to — in order for the economic model to work, they just have to pay their $17.95 or $12.95 or $15.95 a month and you win. So I don’t need everybody to watch ‘The Wire’ or ‘Treme.’ I just need to bring enough new people into the HBO tent that I can still call myself an asset in their system. And when you don’t need to bring everybody in the tent, you don’t have a low common denominator. And so now all of a sudden television, which has been a juvenile medium since its inception, can now be grown up.
What about basic cable channels such as AMC and FX? They have some shows that manage to get a lot of critical acclaim even with the restraints of commercial television.
“I probably shouldn’t be drawn into talking about other programming. There’s other programming that I admire and there’s other programming that is much admired and sometimes they’re the same and sometimes not but I probably shouldn’t be talking about other people’ shows.”
Then let’s talk about ‘Treme.’ What’s going to happen next season? Are you going to introduce any new characters?
“A couple of new characters, because the story has to shift to other dynamics in post-Katrina New Orleans. It’s going to follow, I think, understandably, the second year after the storm, second year, year-and-a-half after the storm. You know, when we came back first we were three months out. We probably left it at a point of 9 months out from the storm. We’re probably going to be picking it up at about 18 months after the storm.
“There were different things going on in New Orleans in that period, in 2006, 2007. There was a lot of adrenaline and a lot of hunger to get back in the initial months after the storm. In some ways, the second year was harder than the first. In many ways, the second year was harder than the first. Crime came back beginning in the spring and summer of ’06 and it came back dramatically, to the great shock of people in the immediate months after the storm who had suddenly found themselves in a city without its usual crime problem. The drug corners had been dislocated. In many ways, much of the crime had gone to Houston, Baton Rouge. Other places. When it came back, it came back with a vengeance and became a backdrop against ordinary life that was incredibly debilitating for people.
“The realities of such things as the Road Home program and the insurance companies’ willingness to walk away from New Orleans — or desire to walk away from New Orleans — became utterly apparent. People sort of started to see the end game in ever getting the money sufficient to rebuild.
“And then the school system, such as it was, came back online finally and it did so in a way that is still confusing to people and led to some new opportunities to address what was one of the worst public school systems in America, but also almost a form of institutional tracking of children so that if your parents were aggressive and you were fortunate to get into one of the, um, better schools, one of the charter schools, you were doing better than before. If you were consigned to the recovery school district, in many cases, you were doing worse than before if such a thing was possible.
“So, there was a lot of dislocation and a lot of — in the initial months after the storm there was all of this sort of righteous anger and pride at the return. And while some of that remains, there was a level of exhaustion you felt here in ’06 and ’07 that we’re trying to capture. And whatever initial goodwill there was kind of dissipated. The media had completely gone away and a lot of people felt very much on their own.
“But there’ll be music.”
How many seasons would you like to see ‘Treme’ go? Did you have a plan for that?
“We sort of feel that it was five, because it would get you to some notable benchmarks, including the Super Bowl victory and BP. But again, it’s organic, you know? This is not ‘The Wire’ where we sort of sat down and said we want to say this in Season 3, this in Season 4 if we get this far. We’ve been more inclined to sort of let the characters be as people and the whole thing to be a sort of a singular allegory for where the country’s at rather than divide the dynamics … it’s more of a chronological piece than it is issue-based as ‘The Wire’ was.
“But having said that, I don’t think anyone had perspective on what they were going through until about 4 or 5 years out, they started to see that the city was — some of their worst fears as to what was going to happen with New Orleans did not come true, clearly. A lot of people expected the city either not to come back or to come back as a Disney version of itself and those things haven’t happened.
“But some of the worst-case scenarios have happened in terms of housing patterns and there have been real struggles in terms of political dynamic. But, all in all, what seems to have rescued the city was its culture. It wasn’t as if government stepped in and did everything that, you know, a healthy, problem-solving political dynamic ought to have done. It’s not as if there was a great economic need for New Orleans to be the largest city in Louisiana rather than Baton Rouge. There’s no manufacturing base here. The industry here is culture and tourism. And that stepped up, clearly; that was the engine that brought not only human beings back from Texas and Oklahoma and upstate Louisiana and everywhere else — Georgia — it brought the city back.
Your body of work addresses cultural concerns. Are you just trying to shine a light on these issues, or do you hope to actually effect change?
“I got into journalism with that change credo in my head because I got in — I went to college in the late ‘70s and I grew up in Washington so it was right after Watergate so I read those stories on a daily basis contemporaneously with their publishing. And, you know, Carl Bernstein had briefly worked at the student newspaper at Maryland till, you know, I think he had so many parking tickets he couldn’t go back. And they filmed ‘All the President’s Men’ in the neighborhood where I was going to high school. We want out to watch them shoot, it was — that stuff was in the ether when I grew up.
“Plus, my father had loved journalism. He edited his college paper and he wanted — he’d started to go to work for some of the, the Hudson County Dispatch, you know he was a stringer and he was going into it. And then the war and my brother came and he was in public relations the rest of his life. But taking, like four papers at home, you know, that kind of newspaper house without the newspaperman. And he took me to see ‘The Front Page’ when I was like 11 at Marina Stage in D.C. and that was it. I was (expletive), you know? That was it. I was oversold.
“So for me, when I first got into it, it was like, yeah, newspapers are like, not only are they sort of, like, romanticized, but the glory of them is now in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, they’re adversarial. They’re truly the fourth estate, if not a fifth column, and they take (expletive) from no one and once they print what’s right and what’s accurate, things will get better.
“And, very quickly, the guys who really were hewing to that and writing their stuff — they called it impact journalism — I grew to have real contempt for. I found the stories to be increasingly manufactured and shaped; complicated dynamics within society were minimized. You looked for an easy villain. You pounded on the villain and then you kept reporting for a year and then you could send it to a prize committee and then in January you didn’t give a (expletive) anymore, you were onto the next piece of impact journalism. There was something inherently false in it and eventually, my paper, there was one guy in particular who was making it up. Trying to have it, trying to get the Governor to — it was like, the gamesmanship of it.
“And so somewhere along the line, I’d say a third of the way into my newspaper career I stopped saying anything about changing anything or fixing anything. And instead, the only thing I could hang my hat on was ‘Okay, it’ll be enough to go find a story that nobody knows in its totality or in its nuance and bring it back to the campfire and tell it. And that’s it. That’s what you get. That’s the reward; the story is its own reward. (Expletive) the prize culture and (expletive) the faux impact of journalism. Tell an honest tale, tell it completely and with all the relevant nuance. Don’t cheat the story. And that was it.
“I think that’s the only thing I’ve taken from — well, it’s one of the things that I’ve taken from the reportorial ethos that I’ve managed to maintain. That’s all I had left at the end. That and sort of, um, a notion of that the only interesting, uh, the only thing that makes journalism an adult game is the ‘why,’ you know? Who, what, when, where, how — a really smart 14-year-old with a phone and a notepad can get that much. I’m being hyperbolic. But the ‘why’ — why did this happen, why does it keep happening, why is this indicative of anything — why is what makes journalism an adult game. And in some ways its what makes all storytelling really and adult game. That level of complication is something that, it’s what makes it really interesting. So those two things, I think, are the byproducts of journalism and they’re there in the television.
“But whether the television’s going to fix anything? Listen, if ‘The Wire’ was overt about one thing it’s that the drug war is a fraud, a sham, an amoral campaign against our own underclass. It’s a betrayal of a lot of the things we believe ourselves to be, I think, as Americans. And yet, we are secure in prosecuting the drug war now as when ‘The Wire’ started airing. There’s been no impact. So, I don’t … that’s not where … once you start trying to shape the story to have the maximum amount of impact, the story’s becoming corrupted. You’re pulling punches that you need to throw and you’re over-punching at things that don’t need to be hit quite so hard and pretty soon your story is bullshit.
Is it tough for you to balance your storytelling with the reality that you have to be an entertainer?
(Laughs). “Yeah, I carry that one with a certain degree of shame. Except you have to be entertaining. People must be entertained by the characters and they must be at least interested enough in the story to follow it where you want to go, to have your say. These are requirements. Now, the dynamic is, on HBO again, I don’t need everybody to find every character fascinating and I don’t need to give them so much that they love because the audience, you know, smarter people than me have compared, you know, sort of mass audience to being like kids. You know, if you ask them what they want, they’ll say dessert every time.
“I like dessert.”
“No, no, why don’t you eat your vegetables?”
“No, give me dessert.”
“But you sort of have to get them there, you have to get enough of them there so that you have an audience. If nobody’s watching, you know, they’re not going to give you $30 or $40 million to make another season of whatever you’re making. This kind of storytelling in this medium requires a heavy investment on somebody’s part, so you’d better bring somebody to the table. But nobody’s gone longer in TV than I have without having attracted a mass audience. I’ve made a career out of people not watching me.
You don’t need to be ashamed of entertaining people. There’s something noble in entertaining people, right?
“Well, I don’t know. I much preferred to be in another game when that game seemed like it was going to be a little bit nurtured by its own industry. And when it wasn’t, I felt like I’d cut off my right arm when I left. I mean it really felt like this is, I can’t believe I’m here. I can’t believe I’m writing television scripts.
“But, you know, one thing I will say is that the camaraderie of the film set is as good as the camaraderie of the newsroom. And I didn’t think I’d ever say that. I mean, the newsroom at its height, was, ‘You mean we get to it around with our feet on the desk, reading the paper every morning and laughing and (expletive) and talking about, you know, the world at large and drinking coffee? And we don’t have to do anything until about 11:30 and then we’d start putting out calls? They’re paying us to do this job?’ When it was good, it was great. Much like sex, when it was good it was great. And much like sex, when it wasn’t so good it was still okay. Newspapering was a lot of fun, and I thought, when I went to the entertainment industry, that was it for the wit of people, of the world’s best iconoclasts and cynics sitting around in a room and talking. But wherever you go, there’s a lot of smart people and some of them are pretty funny. So that wasn’t as dislocating as I thought it would be.”
You were just awarded the MacArthur ‘genius grant,’ which comes with $500,000. Some of the other recipients were a type designer and a stone cutter. While that amount of money might go a long way for a type designer, what does it mean to somebody who has to work in Hollywood dollars?
“I’ve given this a lot of thought. I started thinking from the moment I got the call, because my first inclination was — I think I even told the lawyer when she first told me — the first thing I blurted out of my mouth was ‘listen, the honor is a really big deal and it’s going to help me sort of maintain some degree of argument on behalf of stories that, you know, might not otherwise be able to sustain themselves in L.A.; that’s really valuable to me. The money is — I’m in that category of “all of his projects are well-funded.” Or, so far they’re all well-funded. And so why don’t you very quietly take the money and, you know, give it to number 24 on your list?’
“There was a little part of me that said this is bad karma. And when I talked to the MacArthur people, they said, ‘Look — we’ve been in this business longer than you have. Shut up and think about it for a while.’ They were more polite than that, but basically they said ‘Shut up and think about it.’ And the more I did, the more I realized there are place where projects, before they get the green light, when they’re on the drawing boards, when they’re not getting …
“Research, for example, is a big part of what we do when we plan stuff and there’s very little research money that is offered by Hollywood. They basically figure, you’re a writer, you sit down and you start typing. So, to go somewhere and, you know, to look at the source material and talk to people and get a feel of the thing is all unfunded. And, invariably, we’re bringing writers in on projects and the writers can only sustain themselves for so long.
“That’s where this money can actually, you know, I mean, I’ll give you an example: Ed Burns has been passionate about wanting to do a film or a miniseries on the rise of labor and, in particular, on the haymarket in Chicago, which is sort of a key moment in the labor-capital dynamic. In terms of the American experiment, it’s key, understanding haymarket. And he’s right. And it’s an amazing story with amazing characters.
“But you say haymarket in L.A. and there’s nothing. It doesn’t have any resonance. It’s a lost — tragically, it’s a lost dynamic in American history at this point, the rise of labor, because we’re all living through the decline of labor. To quote John Lewis (sp?) you know, ‘the future of labor is the future of America.’ Sadly, he was right.
“But to get somebody to do a labor story now, and particularly a labor story from the 1880s, 1890s? Good luck. So that could be a project that we actually have to proceed with on spec. And that’s where the money, you know, doing some stuff on spec to get it to the point where somebody can consider buying and shooting it — that might be what we try to do.
“And on the other hand, if I can’t find homes for it like that — because that seems to be in keeping with what the MacArthur fellowship was trying to be — you’re absolutely right. To put on one of these things, it’s not enough money to film your own network series, but it’s too much money to not do something meaningful with, so I think at the point of research and writing, it can help sustain writers who are working without a green light and without a budgeted project.
“And I think that’s where we’re going to put it to use along with, I think, we’ll pass some of it through to charity because, you know, at points there are a lot of causes consistent with what the message of ‘The Wire’ and other things were that if we can’t find a good use for it in the development of a project — if it’s backing up and we can’t spend fast enough — we’re going to pass it through.”
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By Marc Fort
October 24, 2010 4:03 PM | Link to this
Mr. Simon is my literary hero.
The Wire is as important as Shakespeare's King Lear. Art is supposed to have a message, and Simon uses the medium of television better than any other to reveal the tragedy of the human condition.
...such an inspiration!