David Simon: But there will be others who see it as just rhetoric and they see the advantage of being hard on these issues. Until we basically as a society reckon with this institutionally and systemically, it doesn’t matter how good the individual is or how many you have, until we actually pass change the laws, and I’m not talking about legalizing, but decriminalizing, making this a health and mental hygiene matter rather than a law enforcement matter, would be a long day’s journey for us. But, we’ve tried to do it by virtue of a few rational individuals getting hold of the problem and trying to be a little bit sane about it. In Obama’s second term, Eric Holder told all the US attorneys around the country to not bring in drug cases unless they had a reason to bring in a drug case, unless it involved violence or cartel. There were exceptions, but basically he said, “Let’s stop filling federal prisons, at least, with drug defendants.”
David Simon: And they did that, of course in the second term, because if they did it in the first term, somebody would’ve counter programed them politically. They did it in the second term, but of course, they were followed by Trump and Jeff sessions who wanted to lock everyone up for marijuana. So, everything was countermanded because they didn’t actually uphold the laws. And to be fair to that administration, they didn’t have the votes in Congress to change the laws. But, these things, they’re an overlay to not only create social control on the people who don’t have by the people who have, but they’re also there to disenfranchise people. Because, of course, everybody with a drug conviction has a felony conviction and they can’t vote. People like Sessions, they understand the validity of this politically for their purposes. And, you’re not fighting a moral battle here over a moral issue of drugs, that’s not what this is about, it’s not about whether people take drugs or they don’t take drugs. It’s about what can we do politically with a wedge issue they can advantage us politically,
Geri Cole: Man. There’s so much, there’s so much, there’s so much. Yeah. Yeah.
David Simon: I sound like a broken record on this stuff, but it’s-
Geri Cole: No, but it’s-
David Simon: It’s the one thing I wanted to argue with The Wire and why we came back with this piece. And, if you’re asking me if we’re any closer to a systemic change in this country, I’d say no.
Geri Cole: Wow. So, let’s actually talk a little bit about your background because you came from journalism. I read that you became disillusioned with journalism and that’s sort of what led you to become a novelist and then a screenwriter. Can we talk about that period?
David Simon: I had the opportunity open up to me, which is to say, I wrote one book. I spent a year in a homicide unit in Baltimore following a shift in detectives and Barry Levinson, the film director, he bought it and he turned it into the NBC show Homicide that was on in the ’90s. And that’s where I learned to write a little bit of television, they gave me a couple scripts, and then at a certain point, my newspaper, which had been bought by a chain, we used to be locally owned when I started working there and, at first a seemingly benign chain, the LA times Mirror, but then eventually it started becoming less and less benign, and finally it became hell. Even before it became hell, even when it was just starting to become a process of retrenchment and they were having [inaudible 00:30:24] reporters, I started to find some of the journalism to be completely, the people from out of town who were running my newspaper, it felt like there was less of an organic belief in the process of journalism and more of a let’s put together a very simple and two dimensional outrage and over-report it and see if we can win a prize.
David Simon: That became the operate model at my newspaper, that sort of prize grubbing. There was a particular formula to it that I felt great contempt and my reporting had become something that was going in the other direction, it had become very people oriented, I started to spend time in places where I was doing a lot of hanging out journalism, not just from the book, but I was on the way to… And, by this time, I had reported The Corner, I was still waiting to publish it, but I had reported The Corner in ’93. So, my feeling of what journalism could be was changing and my feeling of what journalism was happening in my paper was very different and they offered a buyout to anybody who had 12 years or more. So, I had a year’s salary if I left and Homicide offered me a job.
David Simon: So I ended up working for TV, but did I think I was going to become a TV writer, TV producer? No. I thought, I’ll do this for a couple years and I’ll learn this skill and they’ll pay me, which would be kind of fun, I’ll know something new, and then I’ll go to a better newspaper, I’ll try to get on the Washington Post, and I actually had an offer from the Washington post and I’ll probably do that after I finish writing The Corner. The Corner was published in ’97, HBO, by then, had agreed to do The Corner as a mini series. So, I was like, okay, I’ll do that. And then after The Corner aired and did well for them, they said, “You got anything else?” And, Ed Burns and I, who had written the corner, Ed was a former detective and former school teacher in Baltimore who felt about the drug war as I did, we started writing the pilot for The Wire.
David Simon: And somewhere, about eight, nine years later, I had to admit, maybe I’m not going back to this. And it was really that accidental. I kept saying, I’m a journalist, but I’m doing this for a while and then, at some point, I had to admit, I’m probably going to keep doing this for as long as HBO lets me. I developed the interest in it and the skillset. I regret leaving reporting at some points, but at other points, I do not.
Geri Cole: Can we talk a little bit also about your process, what your writing process is like, if you have any sort of like rituals? Especially, because I feel like coming from journalism, which is a different skill set than sort of screenwriting, what skills do you feel like serve you best in screenwriting?
David Simon: Journalism allowed me to do a couple things that. And for one thing I can write in the loudest coffee shop because I used to write in newsroom, so I don’t need silence and you can slam doors loudly and you can have kids screaming behind me and I won’t budge. The other thing that journalism gave me was, I was a white, suburban kid from Silver Spring, Maryland, I grew up just over the district line and out of college, I got hired at The Sun after being their college stringer at University of Maryland, and they threw me under the police beat in a majority Black city. And so, between the Irish and Italian desk sergeants and neighborhoods that were predominantly Black, I had to learn to talk to people and listen to people whose cadences and whose realities were different than my own.
David Simon: And, I found that I had a decent year, I could hear how people talk and that’s not all just sort of racial diversity, a lot of it is cultural and class, and also the cohort of you how cops talk or later on how recon Marines talk or how school teachers talk. Every profession, every existence, has its own dialectic, its own idiom. And, I found that I was pretty good at acquiring it and holding it and hearing it. And, you would think that would be for a lot of reporters, they got to quote everybody, but I found that a lot of people were cleaning stuff up in their brain to make it sound like themselves and had to reproduce it, even fictionally. It would either come out stilted or it would… So, I found that I was okay writing different people and that was a skillset that was 80% of television writing is dialogue, 60% of its dialogue. The rest of it’s all structure, but dialogue’s a big deal, and so, that probably helped me.
David Simon: What’s different, I guess, is the structure, is the dramatic poise of piece, is the pace, every line having to justify itself, every scene having to justify themselves, you can’t go that far aside before you start to die. You can’t go miles out of your way for a joke, and also people don’t say exactly what they mean. Chekhov wrote whole plays in which people don’t say what they mean, and that’s how people are is they talk around what they want to say a great deal at the time. So, I found that I could basically reproduce worlds that I had seen or worlds that I had studied and at first it was just I had all these years on the street in Baltimore, I can do that. But, you give me Yonkers housing officials and city councilman and a political milieu that I never covered before and I’ll just talk to enough people or I’ll gather enough information or I’ll do it with context of my writing partner, we’ll do it together and away we go and I found that I was pretty good at that.
David Simon: So, that synthesis of the real is something that I took for granted when I was a reporter, but I don’t take it for granted now. It’s something that I just happen to be fairly decent at.
Geri Cole: I feel like listening and talking to people is I don’t think a part of everyone’s process, especially when you’re trying to write about something and/or a place very specific where you got to go talk to people there and listen.
David Simon: Right. And also, you really want to learn from people, you have to be the fool, you have to start out as the fool, which is a great interrogative technique of reporting. I came to it naturally, which is I was willing to be the butt of the joke, any situation, as long as you let me stay and take notes. and years later, the kid who was no longer a kid, but he’d been the main kid in The Corner, Deandre McCullough , he said to me, years later, when he was 30 and we were years past that project, that book, he said, “You know why I decided to talk to you?” because, at the time, he was 15 going on 16, and he was sort of a street kid and he was selling drugs on Vine Street. He said, “You were standing out there on Vine up at Monroe and, man, everyone was just twirling around you and it was all going on and you just looked so stupid and I just felt so sorry for you that I decided I was going to talk to you.” And I was like, “Well, that worked. I said, “DeAndre, did it ever occur to you that I was trying to look stupid because I was hoping you would talk to me?” And he just got quiet and then he just started laughing.
David Simon: But, there was a famous reporter for the New York Times, and earlier The Herald Tribune, named Homer Bigart, terrible stutter. In fact, his stutter was so bad that The Herald Tribune, when he was coming up, they thought he was an idiot, as people used to think about people with speech impediments and they wouldn’t let him be a reporter, he was a copy boy into his 20s. And, finally, they gave him a story, he turned out to be great and he ended up winning a couple quote surprises. Anyway, years later, he was writing on the business page of The New York Times, and the head of Exxon or some major company, is having lunch with punch Sulzberger, the publisher, and he says, “I can’t believe the idiot that you sent to interview me the other day, some guy named Bigart.” And Sulzberger raises an eyebrow says, “Oh, what happened?” He says, “He didn’t know anything. I had to explain everything to him.”
Geri Cole: It’s like basically The Usual Suspects, the way it was playing…
David Simon: Right, right.
Geri Cole: Playing the idiot.
David Simon: It’s a powerful technique. You don’t know how many reporters I worked with who didn’t want to be the fool. They didn’t want to ask the question they didn’t already know the answer to, which is no way to report.
Geri Cole: Mm. Oh, wow. That’s a good and interesting tip. Also, I’m curious, because I feel like we’re running out of time, so I do want to make sure to get to a few other specific questions. But, I feel like you deal with such heavy topics and like the dramas, do you have to like do anything to sort of lift yourself back out of, after immersing yourself in this world or in sort of these issues, how do you…
David Simon: I do the same thing, I watch the game, which isn’t so much help because I’m an Oriole fan and they have… And, I hang with my kids and I watch old movies and try to get to the gym. I do the same things everyone else does when they’re trying to… Listen, I trained as a reporter, my natural inclination is to go try to find a story on the fault lines.
Geri Cole: Mm.
David Simon: Where society has its fault lines. So, I’m always looking for trouble, in that sense. Would I like to do other kinds of writing? I’m not sure I could. I like to think I’m a funny guy and that I could write a half hour and it would be really funny, but I don’t think so. My son writes comic pieces and he’s been published for them and he’s funnier than I am, he’s just funnier than I am and I have to finally admit it. I guess the one tone that I man have managed to achieve, almost as a, how should I describe it? It’s basically just a small bit of performance art that I do when I’m waiting for them to move a light, there’s a 40 minute delay on set or when I’m stuck waiting for 15 minutes for my kid to get out of school so I can pick her up and take her to the doctor and I’m stuck there, is I get on my phone and I yell at trolls and bots or whoever on Twitter seems like a fun target.
David Simon: People take that persona as me, which I also sort of weirdly enjoy that they think I’m everybody’s bete noir. But, really, I’m doing it for comic effect. So many years ago, because of the way I write drama or journalism, that is somebody, very cynically I think, said I was the angriest man in television. And I thought about that and I said, “The second angriest man in television is Cold Water Canyon on a house on the side of the hill looking over LA, got a kidney shape pool and he’s screaming into his phone because his residual checks are late. What is the angriest man talking? But, I took it to heart in one way, which is I can at least personify that guy for comedy, for the sense of. But do I take that seriously? I do not. I do the same things everyone else does to have fun.
Geri Cole: Do you ever, though, in also dealing with this material and because you said are attracted to stories on the fault line, are you ever scared? Because I remember, actually, I was going to Towson while you were shooting The Wire and I remember hearing people like this is not a set, they are shooting in these very dangerous neighborhoods.
David Simon: And, we had some stuff happen near where we shot in The Wire and we had some stuff happen a little bit near Homicide, but Homicide we stayed pretty close to Fell’s Point, we shot most of that stuff over in Southeast. Jimmy Finnity, the line producer, wouldn’t let us go into the sections of Baltimore where we shot a lot of The Wire. I didn’t feel that way when we were filming, no. Filming is a different dynamic and you come with your calling card and people want to know why you’re there. There were times reporting where I felt like, man, I’m kind of out over my skis here. There were times where I needed to go talk to someone face to face in the high rise projects, back when Boulder ran highs, the Murphy homes or the Terrace or whatever.
David Simon: And, you sort of gauged it like, Well, on the run in, nobody’s going to know if I’m a social worker or a cop. I’ll probably be able to, but I hope the elevator’s working. I don’t want to have to go up that stairwell because that north stairwell was rough and there were calculations you made as a reporter. And, when I was reporting The Corner, we got robbed and it was wasn’t pleasant, but what do we expect? Ed and I were two white guys and we were standing on Fayette Street after dark with Gary McCullough and we looked like we were there to buy drugs. The only confusing moment for the people robbing us was that, each of us had $2 in change and they couldn’t figure out why we were down there if we didn’t have any money, so we disappointed them and that was it.
David Simon: But, by and large, I don’t want to act like I covered Beirut or something. You go to these neighborhoods and most people are they people and they’ll talk to you or they won’t, but either way, as long as you explain your mission, most people were pretty benign about it. And even, when Ed and I went up to that drug corner to write that book, we told everybody what we were doing and I passed out paperback copies of my first book. And, we later found them all water logged in the shooting gallery and stuff. But it was a way of saying, we’re not cops and we’re not lying and we’re really just trying to write a book about the drug war from the ground up and this neighborhood. And, most people, if not right away, because there’s a certain amount of distrust, but most people over time, if you keep doing the same things every day and saying that’s what you’re doing, most people are pretty benign about it.
Geri Cole: Because I do want to also ask you about, you were saying getting The Wire crew back together, you have some frequent collaborators and George Pelecanos, I feel like I’m saying that wrong and Ed burns. What do you look for in your collaborators and what do you think sort of makes these partnerships so successful?
David Simon: I keep not hiring TV writers. If you grew up anywhere in America and you said, “I want to write for television,” I weirdly don’t trust you. That’s not fair, it’s not fair, there’s probably great people who write for television, but I don’t look for people who can write a spec script based on a show that they think I want to read. I’m usually looking for people who have an area of expertise in what we’re writing about and then I say, “You come into my writer’s room, I’ll give you a script or I’ll give you a piece of a script, if you’re not ready for a whole script, but what I really want to have is your voice in the room.” So, sometimes that’s a frequent collaborator and sometimes it’s, with George, if it’s about urbanity or policing, I can always rely on George, he’s got those voices from the work he’s done as a novelist in DC.
David Simon: But on this project, we really needed somebody like D. Watkins. And, when we were doing The Deuce, which was about misogyny and the male gaze, sexual quantification, it couldn’t be a bunch of guys in the room, we needed to talk that room with women. So, everybody from Megan Abbott to bringing up Stephanie DeLuca as a new writer and we very much wanted to have a dialectic that was men and women in that room, it wouldn’t have worked otherwise. So, you’re bringing people in A, for the cohort they represent, but B maybe they have some specific knowledge. When we did Treme, so Lolis Elie and Tom Piazza, Mari Kornhauser, people like that, but you bring people on who know New Orleans, who lived in New Orleans.
David Simon: Eric had lived there for years, Eric Overmeyer, and I had visited routinely for two decades, but that wasn’t enough, we needed people who had soaked in it, and then you hire a ton of consultants, as well. So, I’m always looking for people who actually know the material and then it’s, “Give me that and I’ll show you how to write a script and maybe you’ll be interested in TV writing. But, either way, if you struggle with the script, I can fix those things. What I can’t fix is the lack of interior knowledge of the subject matter.” It’s probably terrible, as an employer of TV writers, I say this on a WGA podcast. That said, at times we’ve hired people who felt that they were right for a project, who felt like they could help us advance stuff and they were writing television already and they’ve turned out fine. So, maybe I just need to lose my inherent bias towards either journalists or people who’ve lived the event.
Geri Cole: I think that’s super encouraging to hear and I would imagine it is for a lot of folks who may listen to this podcast. And it’s one of the things that I’ve always believed, as well, where that every experience you have is valuable. All that time that you’re not sort of living this dream as whatever you think your ideas of your life is as a TV writer, that time somehow not valuable because you’re not in a sort of living…
David Simon: Lived experience. By the way, there’s a reason that I think a lot of sitcom riders, who write half hour comedy, are in their 20s. They’re really quick, they’re really funny, they they’ve got their pulse on the current wit of the culture and they can sit in a room and come up with the best possible joke for the best possible moment they can banter and they’re fast. And, I think rooms are populated by people in their late 20s and early 30s, whereas a lot of drama, it’s written by people who’ve had some loss in life. It’s hard to write drama if you’ve not suffered real loss and had some doors closed on you and made the inevitable mistakes of life. That makes it really much easier to write drama and write character and characters going through stuff. So, I think it’s sort of quite natural that a lot of drama rooms are a little bit older, at least mine are. It’s just people have fucked up more.
Geri Cole: So, with that, I guess, is there any lesson, hard won lesson, we’ll say, that you appreciate now that you really wish you had appreciated earlier?
David Simon: I think I’ve gotten better about shop, I’m writing for a visual medium. I came into this business, obviously no film school, I came in as a newspaper reporter who was given a chance to write for a television show. And the first time they sent me to set, I didn’t know that the guy who was turning a knob next to the camera was focusing the lens he wasn’t looking through. I found that to be so profoundly insane for about a week that somebody was focusing the camera without looking down the lens and that was a separate job to pull focus. Now, I certainly didn’t know about lenses, I didn’t know what a French over was, I didn’t know anything. And, once I started doing my own stuff, I had Bob Colesbury the late Bob Colesbury, who basically took care of that stuff for me. And, that poor man, if he explained to me crossing the line once, he explained it 10 times. Salt shakers with ketchup bottle here, when the camera moves this way, if you do this, you have to show yourself. And I’d be like, “Got it. I got it.” And then I’d come back two days later and go, “Bob, explain it to me again.”
David Simon: But there came a moment where, after Bob had passed away, Season three of The Wire, in fact, where I realized I was looking through the monitor, I was on set, and I realized I had a problem with camera movement and I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain what the problem was. So, I had to sort of sit there with the director and say, “No, no, no, I need coverage and you have to go in and you can’t use that shot.” And he said, “Why not?” It was this shot, it was a low shot through the weeds of these guys, long shot in the alley and they’re planning their strategy for how they’re going to jump out on this drug corner. And, the three guys were squatting and their drawing a play with a stick in the mud, kind of like the way kids would do with football play. And one of them was standing over them and he is looking down, and then he has a funny line and the camera went up to catch his funny line. And it bothered me and I didn’t know why it bothered me, except it just felt incredibly false.
David Simon: And then, finally I realized, how did the camera know that he was about to be funny? It’s one thing if the camera gets there late after the line starts, but how did the camera know that the guy standing up was going to be funny? So, it raised up and caught the line. Can’t do that. The camera now knows more than it should and it knows more than the viewer, so the camera becomes a lie. And, when I realized what I was bothered by, the DP came up to me afterwards and she said, Hitchcock trafo.”. And I said, “What?” I hadn’t read Hitchcock, but, that’s how the camera’s supposed to move. But it’s there rules to it. And there’s there’s [inaudible 00:52:56] to it and there’s an economy of scale and a reality to what the camera can and can’t do if it’s going to be part of the storytelling that I had to learn.
David Simon: And, I made no effort to learn it until Bob was gone, the guy who was my right hand, visually, in my early projects, had passed away and then I had to learn it by scratch. But, I’ve gotten better at it and you’re not looking at somebody who’s about to say, “Oh, I’m ready to direct” or anything like that. I still don’t know my lenses, but what I do know is I can look through the monitor and I can tell you if we’ve covered a scene properly. And, listen, for the guy who was the night police reporter at The Baltimore Sun, that’s a journey.
Geri Cole: I want to make sure to get to one question that I always like to ask everyone who comes on the podcast and that’s a question about success. Because I feel like, in creative professions, success can feel elusive or the idea, the feeling, of success when something looks like success, it may not actually necessarily feel that way. So, I’m curious about how you define success for yourself and how that may evolved over time.
David Simon: I consider myself successful because they’ve let me do the projects I want to do consistently. And I’m grateful to HBO, in particular, where I’ve been now for 24 years, I’ve been working with them 24 years. I’ve probably got the longest run of any of their showrunners at this point. And they let me do what I want to do, they give me the resources to do it and I’ve never felt the success of having a hit or a big audience, and if I wanted those things, I should be designing different shows. Shows should not be attempting to do what they do, and they should be attempting to do other things that they fail to do. So, a long time ago, I abandoned certain metrics for success and I retained only one, which was, Can I do the next thing? Can I connect on the show that I actually am interested in?
David Simon: And, it extends at this point to such improbabilities as HBO gave me money to do six hours on federal housing policies in Yonkers, New York. Hyper segregation and public housing, that was the topic that HBO actually let me write a mini series on it. They let me write another mini series on the rise of fascism as an allegory for Trump using a Philip Roth novel from the 1940s. And, I am really grateful for the [inaudible 00:55:35], I don’t think a lot of people in television have been granted that kind of latitude or forgiveness. Since I don’t produce Emmys, I don’t produce viewers, people find the shows after they’re on the air, people finding Treme now. But, I’m grateful because I got to do what I wanted to do so far and it’s been a long enough run that if at some point HBO came to me and said, “Kid, we took our best shot with you, you’ve given us 150 hours of TV and nobody seems to watch it when we first broadcasted, so I don’t know what we’re doing here,” shook my hand and sent me out the door, I’d still cross the street to thank them, it’s been a long run. But that’s the only way I can define it.because the other metrics by which people are successful in television, I’m not particularly good at, but I haven’t had to be.
Geri Cole: Wow. Well, I think that’s a beautiful place to end. Thank you so much for your time.
Geri Cole: That’s it for this episode. OnWriting is a production of the Writers Guild of America East and is hosted by me, Geri Cole. This series was created and is produced by Jason Gordon. Tech production and original music by Taylor Bradshaw and Stock Boy Creative. Our associate producer and designer is Molly Beer. You can learn more about the Writers Guild of America East online wgaeast.org and you can follow the Guild on all social media platforms at WGAEast. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and rate us. Thank you for listening and write on.
