David Simon

Published Jun 10, 2013, 4:00 AM

David Simon cut his teeth as a crime reporter for The Baltimore Sun. When the newspaper industry began to collapse, Simon started writing for television. The Wire was born, and Simon hasn't gone back. Simon has a much larger platform now for sharing his strong opinions on the U.S. war on drugs, but he admits he still misses reporting.  

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. Some critics called The Wire the greatest television show of all time. It ain't nothing like they make it out to be. The HBO series explored Baltimore's drug scene and the corruption of the city's social, governmental, and media institutions. How many years you're thinking we've been doing this same ship. Fans of The Wire seemed most attached to its authentic characters, people like Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, the Greek who smuggled drugs and humans, middle schooler Dukie Weims, drug kingpin, prop Joe. State your name for the record, Omar Devon Little and of course Omar, And what is your occupation occupation? What exactly do you do for a living? Mr? Little? A rip and run you arrives drug dealings. When you ask David Simon, the show's creator and my guest today, which character he loved writing most, he invariably answers Baltimore. Baltimore looms large in Simon's life. He got his start as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Simon wrote Homicide, A Year on the Killing Streets about his time spent with the Baltimore Police Homicide Unit, and then he created The Corner for HBO, a mini series based on his book about the open air drug market in West Baltimore. You might assume David Simon grew up in Baltimore in a family with a tradition of law enforcement. He didn't. He was raised in Washington, d c. In a family where the tradition was words. My father was a professional jew by which I mean he was the pure director for ben a Birth, which is like a Jewish service organization, and he did that for thirty years. Argument was a way of of communicating. I mean, rhetoric was prized in my household. Simon's father had wanted to be a journalist, he had studied it in college, but with a growing family, he opted for the security of public relations. His son, David, inherited his dad's passion for newsprint. You know, once he saw that I was interested in newspapers as a teenager, he was like throwing like Swope and Damon Runyon and like, you know, watch what he does here. And and then once I got involved with the son, he threw Mankan at me. And so I was reading old guys, you know who A kind of newspaper style that isn't even allowed anymore, you know, and so I'm not sure man can can get published. David Simon wrote for his high school paper in Bethesda, Maryland, and continued writing in college. I worked on the college paper at Maryland, and uh, I sort of wrote my way onto the Sun. Um. I was a stringer for a year and sort of paid thirty bucks a story. And I had so many buyolines that the unions have sort of had to formally complain. And so, you know, you gotta hire him if he's writing this much like a hundred violins. And the Metro editor told the union quietly, look, when he graduates, we're gonna hire him. So uh and they did. You know, I didn't have to do the three or four years in Rono or like a smaller market paper to get to a major Metro daily. I got lucky. And that's what were you writing those hundred by lines when you were at the school. I was still trying to get out of you know. By the time I finished editing the Diamondback, which was a broadsheet five days a week paper at Maryland, I had maybe sixty five credits. I failed out, so many times I was the editor, so I failed out two semesters in a row, just for last. You're a professional newspaperman who was hiding in a college basically, you know what. I try to say that to my father, but he had he pissed away the the Yeah, you know, I'm not sure he bought it. But um I got in. So I still had to get a degree. Even after I finished editing the paper. You know, I was. I was on a five year plus summer plan. But what do you write about? And while I was there, I became their stringer. I don't know that I was looking. You know. It wasn't like I had the world as my oyster and I could have chosen a day. As soon as I got hired at the Sun, it was like, understood, that's where I'm going, you know. But I didn't know Baltimore at all. I mean, I Baltimore was one of those places I drove through to go visit relatives in New York and you'd like drive that, you know, the Harvard Tunnel and auto graveyards and you know, rusting peers, and you'd think, you know, my god, you know, you take a wrong turn if you end up here, you know, but you began at the Sun in no later than that, So in any three, you started the Sun and you developing a very deep understanding of Baltimore slowly, I'd say the first few years, I was just trying to figure out how to do reporting. Um what'd you write about in the beginning? Well, the same thing I wrote about at the end. Uh. I never read the joke because I never got promoted. I was a police reporter. I started as a night police reporter, which was very reactive. You know, you come in at four pm and you leave it to you know what, it's all what happened yesterday, police said, police said, police said. And eventually I would have graduated to covering crime as an issue or the drug policy stuff as issues. But I never really got out of the crime game. Did your attitude towards the police and policing evolve over the time that you were the reporter? Yeah, I mean I learned to respect good policing and I still do. Um And eventually I learned that, UM, I had to move away from the singular point of view of the cops because it's very easy when you're a reporter in the beginning to embrace who's giving you information. So if you're covering the courts, you know, you're listening to lawyers, and if you're covering the station house, the cops, you're going to. You know, it was much more accessible to go to the Western District and have their version of events than to go to the fourteen hundred block of Carrollton and talk to the neighbors who you know, didn't trust the Baltimore Sun to begin. I mean, it was a predominately black city and most of the crime was rooted in the in the black community. And so I'm a white guy who grew up in the suburbs, So I got almost no skill set when it comes to but you know, there's an awful lot you can accomplish by just coming back and showing you know, showing up is a little bit of the battle, and then being willing to ask a stupid question, when do you finish writing for the Sun? You stopped when up. Yeah, the paper was going in a bad direction. It was the beginning of what was happening in newspapers, but it was not. And you mentioned that there were limitations put on you in the work you were doing. What were those what they valued in journalism, I had very little regard for and what I valued um, I wasn't unable to convey to the importance of it to them. I mean we were speaking different languages. The guys who came in once we were brought up by the chains, and it wasn't that they wanted mediocre things. It was that they actually had deep ambitions, but they were sort of the prize culture ambitions. Five part series The Baltimore Sun has learned it's better if it's unsourced, even if the source would go on the record. It makes it sound like we did more work. I mean, there was like almost a formula, and I was much more interested in how the city actually works or doesn't work, and that stuff is complicated, and like if you're trying to slice off a five part series or three part series of outrage in order to win a prize, you have to discard the stuff that is maybe going the other way, or it makes the issue complicated. I mean, one of the editors that The Sun who became predominant when I when I knew it was time to leave. He'd won one a couple of Politzers in Phildelphia, and one of them was for and I'm sure they were very good stories, but but one of them was very literally it was the canine unit of the police department. The dogs are biting too many people. They're biting more people than in other cities. And I'm sure the series has its merits, but not everything is you know, the real issues facing American cities are and if we can just get the dogs to stuff by, you know, It's like I was much more interested in why isn't the drug word? Yeah? Yeah, like you know, why why are we doing the same things over and over again? And having lesson what did you think was wrong with Baltimore? What do you think we're Baltimore's biggest problems? Nothing that isn't wrong with most of the urban American policy at this point, which is but I mean one of the more more fundamental problems was they were committed to a national drug probably and that is just incredibly destructive. And now we would if you stop in ninety five you said this when you took the buy out from them, and then and then were you a television person, you would television and watcher you he did you end up? It was a mistake. It's really been a hilarious mistake. One of my dear friends who died while we were working on Tremay was David Mills, and we worked on the college paper together. And I remember being on a college paper and this is the time of Hill Street, Blues and st Elsewhere in those shows, and I could admire the craft of those shows and see that something sort of fresh was happening. But I was, you know, I was in my early twenties, and I wasn't hanging around to watch. I can never get in front of the television set on the right night, so I caught a little of it here and there. But David and we'd be rolling the paper at ten o'clock at night, and it's like, you know, we're just trying to get the pages out to get them printed, and David would like, go hold on, I gotta go watch Hill Street. And he'd go into the office and sit down with a little black and white TV and watch it as if it mattered. And we tease him and be like you, some people like Dave, the page isn't gonna roll about. Bless them, right, God blessed them. So I was not. I watched sports and I watched uh reruns a Bilco and Honeymooners with my dad. You know. It was like a sharing experience, you know, that's it. The newspapers had primacy in my house. It was just back when people got more than one paper, right, we got The Star Morning in an evening, Washington Star, Washington Post Times on Sundays. So when you leave the Sun, what do you do? Well? I had a bunch of opportunities there. I mean, I was working on a second book. I'd written a book called Homicide and when I was a reporter, and it was a nonfiction narrative of a year I spent in the homicid Haughton Mifflin once, I said, the police depart in Baltimore was letting me into the homicide unit for a year. That access sort of guaranteed that I was going to get some kind of advance that I could live on. Well, I researched the book, and so there was a little bit of an auction small, you know, enough that I got enough to live on and uh took a year's leave of absence from the paper when the unit wrote. The book came out in ninety one and Barry Levinson, the filmmaker from Baltimore, he bought it and he was looking to make a show at NBC and and they they made Homicide, and it was this weird step child. Because I was I went back to the Sun. I didn't think much of it. No, no, I mean I just sold him the book. And my brother Daniel did that show. That's right, of course, and we had we were gonna get there eventually. Yeah, so that this this this step child from my book is existing and I go back to being a reporter. Gail Matrix offered me the chance to write the pilot, and I said, maybe wisely, maybe not wisely, because I didn't know what the hell I would have been doing. I said, get somebody who knows what they're doing to do this. I'm a I'm a newspaperman. But maybe unwisely when I saw the per episode royalty that went to that guy, you know, and I said, once you have some scripts together, send me so I'll see the template. Maybe I'll try to write one in the head. Yeah, we wrote one late in first season, and it was so dark and so depressing that NBC wouldn't make it. The show starts starts running, and and I wrote this one script with David Mills, Like when when they gave me the assidement and they said, yeah, I take a script. I said, well, I don't know TV from Adam, but David loved this stuff, and so I called him up. He was at the Washington Post at the time. We've gone on to different newspapers, and I said, how you been, how's it going. We're gonna write a TV script. We got about two weeks and so we hold up and we turned this thing in and about half of it was our stuff. It turned out to be an episode that Robin Williams was in. Um, they cast Robin Williams in the sort of the lead guest part, and once they cast him, they had to like give him more scenes. Um. So, uh, some of our stuff got tossed, but about half of our stuff of it was probably our our pages. So I thought we'd failed miserably. You know, if you're half rewritten on a newspaper, if if half your story isn't your words, if the rewrite man had to come behind you for that much, you know, you screwed up. So I was sort of ashamed and like, well, okay, I guess we didn't do what they wanted. But they came back and offers us another script. And so at some point there's this buyout from my newspaper on the table, and the newspapers going in the direction I don't admire, and they offered me a job in that window. So I wrote two scripts in the course of like a month, one for NYPD Blue and one for Homicide, and I admired both shows and and and they were both very fair offers. Tom Fontana said, I'll teach you how to do this, and you're gonna want to learn how to actually produce. Yes, he kept that promise with a Vengeance pretty much everything. One of the most successful TV writers you know, and I mean in the end, Tom was as good as his word in the sense of at first, all you're doing is writing, and you're just moving scenes, and you're you know, filling in, you know, but eventually set coverage and protecting the writing when it's on set and shooting, well, you want to make sure that you're getting the intention of the scene, because merely because it's a script doesn't mean it's it's it's headed for anywhere good. You have to protect it all at the same time giving the actors and the director a chance two make it their own as well. But you have to keep the core value of what the story is. And I've come to believe that, you know, if you have a good crew, if you have good actors, everybody's kind of a well sharpened tool, and if they know their business, they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do. But somebody has to look out for story as a whole and protect story as a whole, particularly in an intricate drama. That's some sets I've been on. The actors are better at keeping their eye on the story as a whole than the writers themselves. I've not found that, but that may be something that you and I were going to differ on to the end of time. Everybody has to settle for at certain points for eighty five or nine or even eight percent of your intention. As you go into the day's work, there comes that moment where you're fighting to get six and then then there's trouble then that it has to be resolved because that's not enough. But I mean, I think in some ways you have to leave room for everybody to be creative and and that it's that's a real thinks. I learned that. And then you know somewhere at about a year and a half, I was summoned to New York to sit by the Avid and watch what Tom did when he cut. And that was another education. You know, at a certain point you get sent to casting. You know there's a whole skill set of shore running that And when did that end? When did you walk away from Hamish? Homicide ended in so as homicide is winding down and you either sense that it's going to end, or didn't end abruptly, or you kind of knew it was coming. They I took the job with homicide, thinking I'll do this while I was working on a very complicated manuscript of of my second book, which was about a drug The year spent on the Drug Corner was a follow up to Homisi Corner. Yeah, a drug corner in West Bontimore. So were you was the wire something that you were cooking up while you were developing and or shooting and or posting and or debuting the Corner. A lot of people think the Wire came in the wake of the Sopranos, But when we wrote the Wire scripts for the first seas and we hadn't seen the Sopranos, we were we were writing in the absence of the Sprans. We were writing in the shadow of oz. Oz was the first time that HBO had ventured into this. Hey, we'll put it on TV and you've never seen it before on TV territory. So that was when I saw the pilot of ALS. I went to Tom and said, you know, you could do a show about a drug corner. And for reasons that you know are elusive to me. Now, Tom and Barry were joined at the hip, and Barry didn't want to do the corner. Uh, you know, he didn't want to send it up for series. I think Tom wanted to. But you know it was and I think to give that end up being a good thing for you. Yeah, I mean it ended up. Tom said a piece of it to Tom. Right at the time, I was like, oh, now I gotta walk into a room with an HBO without Yeah, but what happened Tom set the meeting up. What happened, Well, I got in the room and they had already read the book, which was a miracle by l A standards. You know, there wasn't a memo. Yeah, two or three people in the room had actually read the book, and I was trying to sell them the wire. Finally, Karrie and Tholis, who was the head of mini series at the time, said we just want you to do the book. Can you just do the book as the book is as a mini and I said, okay, you know better than nothing. So I was in the mini series business. The only caveat they had was, we happen to notice you're not black and you're a co writer who's ed Burn's former police detective on the corner. He's not black either. Can you get a black you know? Do you know any and I said, wow, there's this to get a black guy in here? Yeah? Can we can we make a marriage? Would you do well? I said, I said, you know, I thought. They said, well, you know I am. I know this guy, David Curtis Hall came sprinting a producer. I had Dave Mills in my pocket. I mean, we've been friends since college. So I said, I know this guy Mills. You know. Literally, they thought for the credibility of the series, you needed to have an African American. I don't think they'll deny it to this day. And they were nervous about presenting depictions of African Americans that were rooted in the in the underclass and probably very smartly, so right, and I don't blame them, you know, to television, you know. So who did you get again? Who was your Dave Mills? The guy from Calm He was Dave Mills is black, so um Dave Mills, and I said, And I walked out of the HBO building, you know, into Century City and I basically I got on my cell phone. I said, Dave, what are you doing for the next year? Dave, I need a black guy get over there. And he said, what do you mean what am I doing? I think he was on L A Law. He was, he was were doing episodes for L A Law at the time. That's fine. And I said, well, you're writing a miniseries based on the Corner and he goes, I am. I said yeah, and he goes, how did that come up? And I told him, you know, he was laughing his ass off. He said, all right, this is this will be good. So I ended up doing that and then I thought it was six it was six hours and it did okay. I mean, nobody watched it. Who you know, it's it's the underclass and it's America. You know, it's not like not like people were dying for it. I thought we did very well with it, was very true to the book. It was very honest with the book, which I cared about. So both projects, so those are linked to books. Yeah, and I'm thinking now I'm gonna go back and write another book, which you know, believe me, if my book editor, God bless him, John Sterling is listening right now, he's just you know, he just spit out a couple of teeth. But um, I'm thinking, I'm going back to books, and I'm gonna go to a newspaper and I'm gonna I'm going back to gonna go back period. Yeah, I'm going back and now the windows you know, now that I finished The Corner and Homicides over, it's a nice skill set to have learned. But I'm not looking for for I'm looking to go back and then the favorite words. I like. I like reporting, I love reporting, I like I like actually the time spent even on a fictional story, the time spent an interest. There's something about you, not that you have the answer that you like it a little less, Uh, Glitzie, were you getting kind of fatigued by that? And the East Coast guy and and I will tell a story on myself and George Palcanno is one of the novelist writers, a good friend of mine. We're we're in l A for UH. I think we're going to UH some meetings and and maybe an awards there. I'm in l A usually six days a year for meetings. George wanted to go to the I Vys. We got a reservation at the ivy, and of course we were down on the sidewalk for forty five minutes, you know, waiting, and then the beautiful hostess comes down and looks around and says, after they've taken every you know, every other you know actor and says, Pelican party, Pelican party. You know, I turned it, George, I said, we don't belong here. They just sat Ruth Westimer before us. Let's go home. I have very little patience for that stuff, not because it sounds arrogant, sounds like, oh, he's such a down to earth, you know, the Baltimore under his fingernails, and you know, you go out there and you realize it's not for everybody, No, it really is not. And and listen, there's a lot to love about the entertainment industry, especially when it goes well, and nobody's throwing the money back. When when the residual checks come to your mailbox, you don't throw them out on the ground and discuss thank you. Yeah, no one know what ever says no thank you. But I was supposed to write towards argument, like the stuff was supposed to be about something. Was it in the corner? Yeah? Yeah, I mean it was, and you were gonna go write another book about I think the next one was supposed to be. In my head, I wanted to do the working class. It was what what we what we canabalized for season two of The Wire. First I had asked um, I've made some quiet inquiries about going to beth Steel, the steel plant which was still sort of operating a skeleton shift um in Baltimore, but very big steel plant, and also the GM factory about whether they'd let me work in the line. You know, I can't help it. I'm from a different planet, which is journalism, and what I'm really interested in it even in making film, even as a filmmaker, is is the argument that can come as a result of the narrative. I certainly don't know you, but judging from your work Homicide and The Wire, and trema. You seem like someone who comes from a you know, a comfortable middle class existence and and and an educated background. The plight of the poor or something that gnaws at you. Correct, I'm interested in the story that has political import um and and that can say something fresh and worthy of argument. I'm not sure I ever sort of saw it as being socialism. Yeah. Well, and yet I would say my politics are to the left of the Democratic Party. I'm probably what in Europe would be called the democratic socialist. But having said that, I think I was very fair as a reporter. You know, some of poverty is about personal responsibility, and some of it is not. Some of it is systemic and a result of societal forces that are profound, and you can't ignore either. And I think the reporting in the corner and also some of the implications of the wire. People I know who liked the wire loved the wire. Well, it would, but that that came very late in the run, and it came as a result of things that I don't think we anticipated what you're uh, sort of power watching through whole seasons at a time, you know, once on demand and DVD sets became those things. Yeah, we were still locked into the Man and we hope they watched it on Sunday nights or in the rewatches. When we first came on the air, all that other, all the other platforms didn't exist, so we didn't know that it would have a long tail. And at the time, it was really about begging to let us finish the narrative. How many seasons of The Wire did you do? Uh? Five? How many episodes? Uh? Sixty? What did you learn before? I mean, and even though the collaboration with Tom in particular and with Barry was a good one. Now this is your house and this is your thing, the Wire is you and what did you what was your personal touch you wanted to put out? What were things you wanted to do that you weren't able to do before? I thought Homicide was an exceptionally good show, really well acted, and you know, well there was a TV drama nonetheless, whereas most people agree that The Wire was something that was much more bristled with authenticity. The dialogue. Well, I mean, what the Wire had going for it was there was nobody to appease. There were no you know, there was nobody looking over your show. I remember when we pulled we had good numbers. We had okay numbers first season, we had even better number second season, and then third season the numbers though that was the first season the NFL started programming Sunday night football, So thank you, thank you, and then and then and then Desperate Housewives Chanel. So we were getting the crap kicked out of us. And I remember calling Caroline, thinking, man, they may cancel us. And I said, you know, what was the number last Sunday? And she read it back to me and I said, she said, I said, oh, man, and she goes, oh, come on, it's a cute little number. I don't want you thinking about numbers. That's astonishing. That's astonishing. So what did you want to do differently than they? What were some things you thought? I guess, yeah, that was where we got in on this. And I think the one thing I wanted to do is I looked upon homicides being twenty two. It was like a collection of short stories. You know, whenever I compare stuff to books, people think I'm saying, oh, the wires as good as Moby Dick or and I'm never saying that. I'm always just using books. As you know. Okay, homicide was dubliners. You know, it's all connected, but it's it's James Joyce's dubliners. These these delicately connected stories about a place and an ethos and and and you know, twenty two separate stories, and there's some storylines continue, but each story, you know, there's a fresh theme for each. It was short story writing, um in in a television sense, and I really wanted to see what would happen if you sort of apply the logic of a novel and so, like you like, stuff that happens in the first couple of chapters might stay relevant or or have the old style of TV, which is what we don't have now, which is now everybody wants a one off? Why are these police procedurals like n c I S and everything is so popular because you watch one episode and it's all, oh listen, yeah, I was. I was. I'm not sure that it doesn't present its own level of problems, but I have to say, you know, um, but it plays well into the binge viewing thing where if you're if you're gonna connect everything like a novel, and I can sit down on an afternoon and I can watch three hours of your show in retrospect. You have to have a certain number of viewers get to the end and start talking about it and say you gotta put them, you gotta go get the box that you gotta go watch all these um I look at these TV things as being a chance to have a discussion about something more than I wish these two characters would get together. I wish that, you know, I wish that he wouldn't have gotten killed. You know, I understand that the viewers experienced it that way, and they're not wrong. But man, if all you're doing is being entertaining, then I've sort of, you know, I don't know. I don't know that I can sort of like look sort of the ghost of my father in the eye at night and say, you know that leaving newspapers was that I'm anything but a apostate. In fact, David Simon has become increasingly vocal in his opinions about our country's drug war. He said he hoped the wire would move quote from the entertainment pages to the op eds unquote. Last year, Simon appeared in the House I Live in, Eugene Jarecki's documentary about drug policy in the US. We Are the jailingest country on the planet beyond Saudi Arabia, North Korea or China. Nobody jels the population that there ain't that we do, and yet drugs are purer than ever before, they're more available, there are younger and younger kids willing to sell them. It'd be one thing it was draconian and it worked. But it's draconian and it does work, and it just leads to war. Talk about Jarecki and how you met him, well, one of the things that the wire was clearly intended as is a critique of the drug war and drug probition. So I've been I spoke very bluntly about what I thought had gone wrong with the drug war, and at some point, you know, when people would call me and they'd say the magic words, which is, you know, I mean I'm doing a story or I'm doing a documentary I'm doing Can I interview you about the drug war? I always say yes, And in fact, in all the public speaking I do, I always come back to one of my fundamental arguments, which is that if you're if you're an American citizen and you believe in any kind of democratic ideal, uh, you might want to seriously consider jury nullification. If you're picked on a jury for a non violent drug offense of being one of those Americans who are you know, being you know, refusing to put another American in jail over drug prohibition, you're not helping solve the problem, um, and you're leading to it InCAR sort of American problem. Yeah, you're feeding the problem since I don't think there's any political leadership that's going to get there in advance of actual popular sentiment. I think it's very much like, for example, gay rights. You know, I think by the time the politicians line up, change is already inevitable. And so I think the drug war is the same thing. And that's how prohibition finally fell on its ass, which was that they couldn't find twelve Americans to put a thirteenth in jail for making bathub jail. So I always take the gig and I always argue for jury nullification, and it's happening in places like Baltimore. In a minute, David Simon and I reminisce about our worst Hollywood pitch meetings involving Abercrombie and Fitch models and the origins of the Chesapeake Bay, and I realized once again, I'm in the wrong place. This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to here's the thing, this is Alec Baldwin. The city of Baltimore is still a character in David Simon's life. He and his wife, writer Laura Lippman, lived there with their three year old daughter. He also has a nineteen year old son, but Baltimore no longer takes center stage in his work. Simon produced Generation Kill, an HBO series about the invasion of Iraq, and is working on the fourth and final season of Tremay, also for HBO, a drama that follows a neighborhood in New Orleans as it struggles to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Simon says working on Tremay made it and clearer to him what works and what doesn't in television. Two things are still the great currency. And even in this golden age of television sex and violence, if you have hot people hooking up, then you've got one. Then you're spending one currency. And if you have to turn to the next page, and if you if you're blowing ship up and killing people, then you've got something else going for you. Well. The wire Um was what it was about, and it was something we wanted to tell a story about, but clearly it was it had the currency of being a gangster story underneath. Uh, you know, at least on the surface, that's what it was. It was a crime story and the corner was that and Generation Kill had Marines blowing shut up. You know, there have been very few television shows that that embraced the idea of real human beings on a real human scale. It's really hard to do. It's hard to keep people interested. I'm not saying Tram may succeeded in any grand way, because I think it's been a very quiet show and it has I'm hoping it will stand for what it is and people will find it. But we were not interested in being hyperbolic with the show. You know, we weren't interested in tarding it up, and we weren't interested in the violence that there is in the show. Is actually corresponds to the dynamic of violence in the city of New Orleans and and not more. It's really a show about the role of culture in bringing a city back and what it means to be live in a pluralistic society that is capable of creating pluralistic culture, which is what what better form for it than American music, roots music, jazz, blues whatever. You know, how many shows can you name that that are really you know, I mean maybe like the first couple of seasons of Northern Exposure or these shows that basically are are our studies of place and time and character. And you know, there there are people who at the moment they realized that you're not gonna that you know, no vampire is going to show up or or nobody's gonna be fucking you know, it's like waiter check please, you know. So, um, I never want to do one more pitch that I have to do in life that there are those meetings. I mean, I'm I'm I'm in this little cocoon of HBO, and I hope they take something that I'm interested in and we'll say yeah, but you know, it's not even worth talking about. I mean, you don't know how many things I don't know. I don't want to pick your brains, but I'm just saying, do you have it's not worth you know, until something gets a green light, it's just really not worth. But but I can tell you that, um, I did do the round Robin of like, I have an idea that I really care about, and I went to like all the little meetings with the production development companies and and you know, I remember telling one that very delicate true story of Baltimore that I really wanted to do as a small movie. Uh. And I remember having one meeting after another. In the last last time I actually uttered anything about it was I was at this movie over in one of the lots and at this meeting, and uh, they listen really intently, and I'm like laying it out with the character instrick. And then then this happened, and I knew this guy, and when he died, and you know, I'm bleeding out, and you know that they listened patiently for twenty five minutes, after which the guy says to me, have you ever thought about where the Chesapeake Bay came from here from Baltimore? I said, the Chesapeake Bay? He said, yeah, you know where the Chesapeake Bay came from. I said, well, it's kind of this long estuary. I think it was sort of where they think there's probably a meteor strike, you know, it's that sort of that's right. And I remember looking at him going and that's the story a meteor strike, and he nodded firmly, and I left thinking, what an idiot. You know, I can't believe I just wasted, you know, half an hour and there on a freaking more on cancel all the meetings. I'm just going home like the other studios all had meteor movies and this guy and I realized once again I'm in the wrong place. People sitting at a crab shack saying the meteors coming and got their bibs on a very sentimental and romantic Remember I was in a meeting one two years ago. This is many years ago, the mid nineties, and I thought, oh, the movie business is such a drag. It's so painful, and I was really had this crisis of faith. And I go to this meeting with some pretty big people of Morner Brothers Television and I say to this guy, um, you guys, what do you want to do? I said, well, I have an idea for a television show. I said, I want to I want to refurbish the FBI, the old Quinn Martin. I want to do the FBI and I wanted to be and I want to put together the most elite team of actors I can think of the greatest actors that I admire today. It's me and Andre Brauer and Treat Williams. And I had this list of all these really tough guys that seemed like FBI guys. I could throw a punch and shoot a gun and they just don't even move. And as a joke, as a complete joke, I said, or I'm like the Michael Conrad character in Hill Street Blues. I come up and do the the shape up in the morning and it's me and like six Abercrombie and Fitch models are my staff. And I sit there and say be careful out there, and they go out and have like crimes, and you know, every episode ends with every every episode ends with like like Team America and like two plastic looking gorgeous of people having sex. And the guy literally when he was now that show, I want to man, I mean, I'm not kidding. With an ounce of iron, he goes out that I want to make it. That's a great idea. Signed that one up. He let's do that FBI. So um. But one last thing, you have a child who's nineteen. What's he doing now? He's a college what's he Uh? He's a freshman, so I think he started, you know, because he got the bug. What bugs? No, he's actually a musician. He plays a jazz piano in a very high He hasn't even started yet and he wants to go back. Yeah, that's right, he um. So far that hasn't happened. Now the young daughter is a performer, or what's that like of you? Because I'm in the same boat. I got a seventeen and a half year old daughter and a baby coming. How's fatherhood for you? Well? Part two? Okay, let's be let's be honest. Do you feel it when you have to get up off the floor. It's easy to get down there and play with you when they're two years old, But you know, it's different than it was when I in my thirties and now I'm now in my early fifties, and when I get down on the floor, it's like get the Derek to get me up because you feel it in the knees all of a sudden. It's like, man, you you don't realize you can actually lay there and watch Mary Poppins over and over again. You're fine, right? My wife says that I think very very aptly that um, when when you're younger and you're parenting, you can go without sleep, you can be physically exhausted. You have work. Yeah, yeah, you have stamina you didn't know you have because you're young. When you're older, hopefully if things have gone a little bit right and you're an older parent, you've got enough money so that you can there's there's somebody there to help you with six or five or four hours of childcare a day. Because man, I definitely feel like I'm in my fifties so well as my friend Michael Lally, the poet said to me, who had a son later in his life, he said, it's great. I said, you had a kid. You were like right around my age. He said yes, I said that was it. Has it been every you hope it would be? He said, yes, it's great. It changed my life and reprioritize my life. I'm really I was so ready for fatherhood. I think I'm a good dad. I have a great relationship with my son. He said. There's only one thing I I remind people who are my age to keep in mind, and that is, when your kid goes to college, make sure that they attend a university where the commencement is held at a wheelchair accessible facility. That's the Oh nothing I remember, and I'm trying to keep that in mind. I fear the future in some respects. But on the other hand, you know, once once you go across the threshold, I know no giving it back, and I wouldn't if I could. Well, my last question for you is you because to me, the wire was about an authenticity which is often missing from television drama, which you know, they've got their formula, they've got their eatings and everything. They they've got their recipe that works for them, but yours speaks to makes me think you're ripe to make movies? Do you ever want to make movies? Well, the writer's not you know, get the writer off the set. You know. It's the reason they had that the writers in charge in television in drama anyway, is the need for continuity, the need for character continuity. You know, you can't fire the Son of a Bitch because episode eleven follows from episode ten, you know. And so I've had a few bites of the apple and I've written some things that you know, and I think, listen, it's also I'm not saying that what if they gave you the script, and you know we're in the age of the fully realized writer director. Everywhere I turn around, they say, you know, Evans going to be directing the script. I know what I'm not good at and and you don't want to I see shot compasses. I mean I would do a very pedestrian job of directing. I understand how to turn the camera around. I understand like what you need to leave with in order to have coverage. But the really creative and elegant directors I've worked with, they have a skill set that I don't have. It's very interesting for you, and I feel the same way. I really respect it when when they didn't care enough right when they right when they when they I understand what I'm watching a performance that isn't working because it's not getting the intention of the seen or because I don't leave in something either the background or the actor, or if something's not working, I know it's not working, but how to solve the problem. Sometimes, Um, you know, I can be diagnostic, I can't be prescriptive when it comes to a camera. I would watch some of the greatest cinematographers and I would say, truly that probably the most gratifying part of my film work was to be around these highly gifted, monastic men. I but the first time I showed up, you know, like one minute I was a rewrite man and crime reporter for the One More Sun, and the next moment I was working for this show homicide and my paychecks were coming from NBC. And I go to set for the first day and I'm looking around and I don't even know what stupid question to ask. And it was like three weeks into going to set and seeing them do it that at some point I said, you know, what's what's boots over there? You know, the guy's name is Booth? I said, what's he doing turning that knob next to the camera, and H Henry Broumel actually remember, turned to me and said, he's focusing the camera. I looked at him like, I said, you mean the guy who focuses the camera, isn't the guy looking through the camera. How does that work? Like you know, that can't possibly work. People are unprepared for how collaborative film, right exactly, and so respect the depths, you know, and I do, which is to say, I kind of want to have the story turn out. I don't want to put my name on something where the story, you know, you went in with the script you believed in and you came out with dreck. But at the same time, so I kind of don't want to relinquish control, but I have to acknowledge features is very difficult doing the television series doing thirty Rock, where we shot, you know, a hundred and twenty something episodes. We were there hour after hour after hour. My version of so Long as you Know was they'd say to me, do you mind if we move the camera. We're going to move the camera over here, so when you turn, we need you to lean on your left leg. And I would look at them. I mean, I did it a thousand times. I say, I really don't care what you do because change in this moment. I'm gonna stand here and say this line. Oh you want me to lean on my left leg? Great, that's my why I really don't care. I don't know. I don't have anybody hits the market. I have to admit it. But you know I watched that show. I have to say I am a fan of that show. My wife turned me onto it years ago, and it's just the reason that that show is so unique in terms of comedy is it It does something that you haven't seen since, like the Howard Hawks comedies. And it's funny. But it's operating at a speed that I would call his girl Friday speed the lines, rapid fire, don't wait, yeah, don't wait, don't wait. It's like, you know, we're not waiting for the laughter. We all kind of huddled up at one point. I mean it was unspoken, but we said, we really have to play this fast, right, and it's slow down it it's it has the same level of of rapid fire banter as any as the best sort of carry Grant Rosalind Russell type. You know, the speed at which team is good. Well, it really works and it's unique. There's so much that is is so much more careful and languid, and so is to my taste, less funny. Just I like it to be fair. I look forward to seeing what you do next. I can't wait. Let me think that movie thing I think you can make, you know, listen, may be back to you about that. I got a proposal for about Yeah. I got an idea. Tell your son to go to film school and the director is your son, and he wouldn't dare touch your script. Believe me that he'd be out of the will in two years. I mean, that's a that's a recipe for At some point I was working on my wife is a novelist. And at some point George Paulcanos, the guy I worked with routinely, We're looking at a project and he says, you know, we really need a good, strong female writer. And I said, you know, why don't you ask Laura to come into the writer's room on this? And I said, you know, why don't you just call the lawyer now you want? You know, I'm gonna be in the writer's room. You know, George, you know how badly we treat each other. You know, can you imagine trying to do this with somebody? You know? And uh, he's been persistent, but like that, you know, there has to be something. There has to be some you know, every child should go off and find their own joy and they should not be burdened by and and you know he can he can play felonious monk to death. And he's nineteen. I said that I can't figure out how, how what how he's doing his quarters seventeen and a half. And and you try to explain this to them, and it's all right. I say, I say, you're gonna turn around at my age and you're gonna be realized that you postponed doing certain things to be happy. And I say to my daughter, now, I said, you don't postpone that journey or that consideration of what makes you happy, because because I'm doing this, and it doesn't always make me happy. When I'm doing in this business, it's a job. Sometimes it does well. The trick in this business is knowing when you're no longer at least if you're if you're operating as a writer. This may not be, but I think it's probably true for an actor too, But when you're no longer doing work, that is that the journey itself is interesting. And when you're doing work, that is, you're saying either the same thing that you've already said before, or you're saying the same thing to no purpose, like well, okay, this is this is what they're paying me for today. It's like that's the point at which you know it's time to do something else. And it's like the one thing that David Mills told me and he died. You know, a guy who I wrote my first script with came with me on Trema was producer and Tremay and he he died of of an aneurism before the show came out. It was on set collapsed. I mean, I missed him to this day. But he's he told me something. He said, he goes the only reason that you're he he went out to l a full bour and tried to get a network show development deals and he went through the whole route. He's the amazing thing is and he told me, don't lose this is you are okay if they come to you and say that, you know, it's all been very nice, but nobody watches your ship and and we're we're gonna go somewhere else, and you know, we're done with you. And it's like at no point, like you know, if somebody has a hit with a courtroom show, everyone's running around trying to figure out how to do a courtroom show. If everyone is a medical show, because you're the only guy in this freaking end street, that basically is okay if they throw you off, if the plate spins and you fall off the plate. And I've always had that in the back of my pockets, like the wandering Jew of you know, I got a bag packed when when there's no longer a place for what I'm trying to do. It's okay. It sounds like in one sense that a show business career. And I mean, although the shows were not you know, you're not, uh, these television shows haven't been these juggernauts, let's say, like would not by any means no, but but but no but but that aside, I mean, but I'm saying that doesn't matter. I mean that they've been very well regarded and very well respected people to people, but I love the wire. It's like hashish to them. I mean, they love this thing and been for you. You have this. It seems very healthy attitude because this was all an accident anyway, right, I feel like I'm on borrowed time since the moment I got into this industry. This is not where you were sailing your ship to beginning, And I feel I feel the guilt of an apostate who has had a marvelous run, you know, since he left the religion. So I'm it's okay. If if HBO were to come to me and say we're never making another hour with you, and you know, and you know, good luck and God bless, I'd still cross the street to give him a hug if I saw him coming the other way three years later, and if I never worked. It's like this has been something that was totally unexpected, that it happened at a time where newspapers were collapsing all around me. It was just fortuitous, you know, because there was a part of me that was really torn when this started happening. To this day, I missed reporting. So it's okay whatever happens. There are a lot of people in this industry that, you know, staying on top at any cost, and and they'll find themselves telling stories they don't actually care about because that's the story that somebody else wants. And that, to me is like a journey to hell. So and I can see how it happens. And let's face it, you know, there's a lot of money in this industry, so it can happen. But man, the only thing healthy he said, He said, you've got a lot of unhealthy ship in your head, Dave. But the one thing said was, you know, is that you're okay if it ends. M h. It's highly unlikely that end is coming anytime soon. But until David Simon creates his next series, fans will have to settle for rescreening episodes from their boxed sets. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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