William Zantzinger’s business card says he is an equal opportunity realtor. DS [hr] From The New Yorker, January 26, 2009 Reprinted with permission. In February of 1963, twenty-four-year-old William Zantzinger, armed with a toy carnival cane and wrecked on whiskey, made a spectacle of himself at the Spinsters’ Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. He was a drunken country mouse in the big city, at a time when the notion of racial equality had barely shown itself in the neighborhood of his father’s tobacco farm. When the hotel’s black waitstaff was slow to serve Zantzinger another drink, he yelled racial epithets at Hattie Carroll, a barmaid and a fifty-one-year-old mother of eleven, and he rapped her on the shoulder with his cane. She became upset, then collapsed and died of a stroke. Bob Dylan read about the case in the newspaper. He wrote the magnificent “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” with the paper splayed on the table of a Seventh Avenue luncheonette. Zantzinger was...
Author - David Simon
Two Americas: A primer for Europeans
On the heels of The Wire becoming a hot ticket on British television, The Guardian asked me for a curtain-raiser on season five — the media season — with a Baltimore dateline in their Sunday edition. By this point, it had become clear that The Wire was something of a phenomenon over there; American dystopia plays better the farther one travels from America, apparently. And too, it had become clear that many viewers in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe were content to believe that The Wire was representative of the urban U.S. in its entirety. Moreover, some of them were expressing a good bit of schadenfreude in this. So in The Guardian, I tried to walk the line between affirming what I thought was truthful in The Wire and making clear the geographic limitations of the drama. Not sure it worked at all, or that anyone took the point. But in my mind, at least, it boiled down to an interior stance: We can say this shit about ourselves. And at times, we will. But fuck you...
Green sheet: Terry McLarney rates the intern
Behold the wit and wisdom of Det. Terrence Patrick McLarney, philosopher-king and comic provocateur of the Baltimore Police Department: Green sheets are the semi-annual performance evaluation forms undertaken for all officers by their direct supervisors. Halfway through 1988, the year I spent as a police “intern” following one homicide shift, I walked into roll call to find a completed green sheet in my mail box. My listed duties: “In-house armchair quarterback. Kibbitzer.” It scans poorly so allow me to quote some of the best parts: “…Intern Simon generally shows up to work though his schedule remains something of a mystery. He is an avid reader and since he has no actual function or responsibility he has become quite adept at telling the rest of us what is going on around here.” “Intern Simon never acts as O.I.C. as there are others more qualified. He has been observed in the company of females on several occasions. However, the...
Justifiable
Published in Sports Illustrated Reprinted with permission. In their series’ five years on NBC, the producers of Homicide: Life on the Street have used police tape to cordon off fictitious murder scenes on streets and back alleys all over Baltimore. But the show had never tried to stage a crime at the city’s best- known setting: Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The idea that Peter Angelos, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, and the Maryland Stadium Authority would permit Homicide to portray some grisly murder there, made-for-TV or not, seemed hopelessly far-fetched. But in what producers David Simon and Jim Yoshimura describe as a moment of “pure, unencumbered genius,” they jiggered the plot so that the ballpark brass not only embraced the idea but also happily allowed Orioles pitchers Armando Benitez and Scott Erickson to make cameo appearances. In this season’s second episode, which is to air on Friday, the victim and the killer are both obnoxious men with thick Long Island accents...
The Wire’s Final Season and the Story Everyone Missed
From the Huffington Post, March 17, 2008 Reprinted with Permission Well now, it’s been a week since The Wire‘s final episode and a certain calm has descended, leaving a little less agita and a little more reflection. A moment for one last question: That wasn’t too vicious, was it? Sure there was a fabulist and, yeah, he snatched the big prize. Couldn’t resist, sorry. That was a bit beyond the historical reality; at the historical Baltimore Sun, he was a mere Pulitzer finalist. And okay, the city editor, the honorable fellow, the one for whom journalism was an ethos, he got slapped down and thrown to the copy desk. We did that, too, because hey, to criticize such a newsroom culture did indeed carry those risks in Baltimore. Share this:FacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint
From Time Magazine: End The Drug War
by Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon and William F. Zorzi Jr. From Time Magazine, March 17, 2008 Reprinted with permission. We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire – our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster – tell us they’ve invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama. These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas – separate and unequal – and if the drug war has helped...
A Final Thank You To Those Who Watched
FROM HBO.COM On the occasion of airing The Wire’s last episode March 2008 A last thank you to those HBO subscribers who took the time and care to accompany us on this journey. The Wire arrived six years ago to little fanfare and modest expectation. It demanded from viewers a delicate, patient consideration and a ridiculous degree of attention to detail. It wasn’t for everyone. We proved that rather quickly. But episode to episode, you began to understand that we were committed to creating something careful and ornate, something that might resonate. You took Lester Freamon at his word: That we were building something here and all the pieces matter. When we took a chainsaw to the first season, choosing to begin the second-story arc with an entirely different theme and different characters, you followed us to the port and our elegy for America’s working class. When we shifted again, taking up the political culture of our mythical city in season three, you remained loyal...
A Newspaper Can’t Love You Back
Esquire, March 2008. Reprinted with permission. To this day, I can — if I suffer to think on it — stand apart from the moment, watching as I try to slip my own skin, to disappear myself. I have hair and forty less pounds. I’d pressed my pants for the first time all semester, even worn a tie, though I took it off in the car, thinking it made me look presumptuous. Shit, I am in that newsroom looking like the college kid I am, a fifth-year senior anyway, surrounded by the battle-hardened professionals of a delicate, precise craft. They know I am ridiculous. They’ve read it, in fact. At the four o’clock meeting in the conference room, there is revelry — at my expense no doubt. From my perch on the metro desk, I hear Phelps, the state editor, say something, his words followed by a burst of laughter. Fuck, shit, fuck. That week — my first as a Baltimore Sun stringer — I had done something remarkable. I had managed to declare that oral sex was no longer a crime in Maryland...
Down To the Wire
Almost six years after “the best show on TV” began, the man behind the series comes clean about why he did what he did. From Baltimore Magazine, Feb. 2008 Reprinted with permission. ART CREDIT: FRANK STOCKTON “We want to be out of The Wire business,” says the mayor of Baltimore, repeating the affirmation that began this call twenty minutes ago, stalling us in the Safeway parking lot on Boston Street. I am curbside at the grocery, caught between a cup of carryout coffee and an afternoon writer’s meeting, cellphone hard against my ear, playing liar’s poker with a politician. “You’re telling me a week before we begin shooting,” I explain again. “I’m happy to move the show out-of-town for season three, but I can’t do it now. You’ve waited too long to tell me.” Pelecanos stands beside me, listening to half a conversation, staring across the outer harbor toward the production office to which he can’t return. “Look,” I offer the mayor, “we’ve built our sets in the county and the...
Does the News Matter To Anyone Anymore?
From The Washington Post Sunday, January 20, 2008 Is there a separate elegy to be written for that generation of newspapermen and women who came of age after Vietnam, after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate? For us starry-eyed acolytes of a glorious new church, all of us secular and cynical and dedicated to the notion that though we would still be stained with ink, we were no longer quite wretches? Where is our special requiem? Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperback copies of “All the President’s Men” and “The Powers That Be” atop our Associated Press stylebooks. No business school called to us, no engineering lab, no information-age computer degree — we had seen a future of substance in bylines and column inches. Immortality lay in a five-part series with sidebars in the Tribune, the Sun, the Register, the Post, the Express. What the hell happened? I mean, I understand the...
Best Deleted Scene from The Wire Fifth Season
Reprinting with permission, The CityPaper, Baltimore, Sept 19, 2007 We received the below in an e-mail from The Wire co-creator/executive producer/writer David Simon on Labor Day, the Monday after shooting for the show’s fifth and final season concluded the previous Friday. It’s a four-page insert scene the writing staff intimated was coming on the penultimate day of shooting, adding more work to an already packed final production day. According to Simon, rumors of the additional pages started seeping from the production office to the set, instigating some minor grumbling about cramming yet more scenes into a final episode that Simon suggests is already about 50 percent longer than ordinary. But everybody reacted professionally to the schedule changes–assistant directors inquired about what the actors needed, production managers ordered additional film, cast members were told where they needed to be to work on dialogue. And then the pages arrived and as cast and crew...
Xmas Poem From The Sun Cop Reporters to Homicide, 1984
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Bunk’s Retirement Ticket
Every now and then a drawer or a file cabinet yields some small treasure. Reproduced here is my ticket to the retirement party of Oscar “The Bunk” Requer, a veteran of the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit who, yes, was the inspiration for the character that Wendell Pierce made his own over five seasons of The Wire. And yes, Wendell went with me to the party. Bunk squared, as it were. Share this:FacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint
Michael Olesker Is A Plagiarist? Who Isn’t?
From Baltimore City Paper, Jan. 16, 2006 Reprinted with Permission IN THE SMALL NEWSROOM OF THE COLLEGE NEWSPAPER where I learned rudiments of craft, there was affixed to one wall a parody of Edgar Allan Poe, which began, “Once upon a deadline dreary . . . ” The author, an alumnus of the University of MarylandDiamondback, had butchered “The Raven,” evoking the gothic plight of a journalist trapped at a typewriter, trying to keep his work fresh as he exhausted new developments in the top few paragraphs and was reduced to recounting backstory. To conclude each stanza, the haunting voice came to him: “Rewrite the background, ever more.” “No,” wails the reporter, “I will not burden my tale with all that came before.” “Rewrite the background, ever more.” Funny enough when I first read it, but when I landed on the city desk of The Sun, that doggerel became prophetic. On the police beat, on general assignment, and especially on the rewrite desk, you were usually reacting to new developments...
‘The Wire’ loses a talented, trusted set of eyes
Behind the scenes, Bob Colesberry was a showbiz giant Appreciation, from the Baltimore Sun, Feb. 15, 2004 Reprinted with permission It was a shotgun wedding of sorts, with an HBO executive playing pastor. I was there to get a book that I had written, an account of a year on a Baltimore drug corner, made into television. I had another writer with me, a trusted college friend with experience in episodic drama. David Mills had worked a few years on NYPD Blue, just as I had a couple years under Tom Fontana on Homicide. And we had already hired a line producer who would help us put film in the can. So why was I being ushered to this New York office to meet another producer? Some studio type named Colesberry. A film producer, no less, from the world of big-budget features where everyone had a producer title, whether they did any work or not. He would probably ask for crane shots and try to rewrite scripts and screw up the casting and blow a hole in the budget. “Don’t commit to...
Murder, I Wrote
From The New Republic, September 1997 Reprinted with permission. I used to cover crime on the late shift in Baltimore for The Sun. It was a living measured, by and large, in four-paragraph installments. You’d call the cops, ask what was going on, and then, when they emitted a handful of facts about which body fell on which corner, you’d write it up briefly and send it to the night editor. West Baltimore, East Baltimore, lower Park Heights, Cherry Hill—the rowhouses and postwar housing projects were all decidedly similar, and, assuming the casualty was poor and black, the newspaper accounts were similar as well. “A 21-year-old West Baltimore man was shot to death yesterday….” “… police say the assailant fled on foot after the stabbing. No suspects have been identified.” “A 16-year-old Pimlico youth was found murdered ….” In four years, I manufactured about a thousand of those formulaic morsels. The bodies I wrote about were, for the most part, buried in a handful of...
The Reporter I: Cops Killers and Crispy Critters
Published in the Media Studies Journal of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University, this was an argument for a return to narrative as a means of humanizing crime coverage. I’d just published my first book and contemplating the second. At this point, though, this is a rather amusing artifact given how the argument for narrative led me, kicking and screaming, out of journalism entirely. At the moment you begin reading this, some poor bastard three years out of journalism school is sitting at a video-display terminal in a newspaper office somewhere in these United States, fingers darting on a keyboard. No doubt a cursor flashes through line after line of the same simple, tired equation: “A 17-year-old West Baltimore youth was shot to death yesterday in a murder that police say is related to drugs….” Or, perhaps: “The battered body of a 25-year-old Queens resident was found by police along the shoulder of a Long Island expressway….” ‘ Or: “A...
Busted: Confessing to Crimes of Fashion
This ran as an essay that accompanied photographs of “Homicide,” “NYPD Blue” and “Law & Order” actors dressed magnificently. My own attempts at the sartorial are no longer even comic to those who know me. In fact, the only hyperbole in the piece is that I gave Terry McLarney more credit for being anything more than a kindred soul. McLarney once confided to me that when he had to iron one of his own shirts, he only did the front: “With a sportscoat, that’s all they’re ever gonna see anyway.” DS FROM DETAILS MAGAZINE -1994 Reprinted with permission. Investigations Division: a cubicle containing two chairs, a couple of filing cabinets, and a government-issue desk. Behind that desk sits Colonel Richard Lanham, who is giving me official notice that the Baltimore Police Department will allow me to shadow a shift of homicide detectives for a year and then write a book about it. “With certain stipulations,”...