Résumé
Résumé
The definitive oral history of the iconic and beloved TV show The Wire, as told by the actors, writers, directors, and others involved in its creation.
Since its final episode aired in 2008, HBO's acclaimed crime drama The Wire has only become more popular and influential. The issues it tackled, from the failures of the drug war and criminal justice system to systemic bias in law enforcement and other social institutions, have become more urgent and central to the national conversation. The show's actors, such as Idris Elba, Dominic West, and Michael B. Jordan, have gone on to become major stars. Its creators and writers, including David Simon and Richard Price, have developed dedicated cult followings of their own. Universities use the show to teach everything from film theory to criminal justice to sociology. Politicians and activists reference it when discussing policy. When critics compile lists of the Greatest TV Shows of All Time, The Wire routinely takes the top spot. It is arguably one of the great works of art America has produced in the 20th century.
But while there has been a great deal of critical analysis of the show and its themes, until now there has never been a definitive, behind-the-scenes take on how it came to be made. With unparalleled access to all the key actors and writers involved in its creation, Jonathan Abrams tells the astonishing, compelling, and complete account of The Wire, from its inception and creation through its end and powerful legacy.
Critiques (4)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
Lovers of HBO's The Wire rejoice: journalist Abrams (Boys Among Men) delivers a comprehensive study of what goes into creating an acclaimed TV show. In what is essentially, aside from some contextual summaries, an oral history, Abrams displays his thoroughness, interviewing many of The Wire's actors (Idris Elba, Michael B. Jordan, and Dominic West to name a few) as well as the series' creators and writers, and even HBO's chairman. Abrams explores the creative decisions that set The Wire apart from other programs, among them creator David Simon's decision to have the series play out like a novel and the decision that no character would be a pure hero-all of the show's characters have many faults. Abrams's access to the show's players gives new insight, as when actor Andre Royo tells him: "People ask me what was the best character on the show. I always say Baltimore." Abrams indisputably has created a thorough examination of The Wire's conception, production, and lingering cultural afterlife. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Critique de Kirkus
An oral history of the acclaimed HBO police drama.After a five-year run, The Wire ended in 2008. Other than two Emmy nominations for writing, the show never garnered much critical acclaim. In this detailed history of the show, Bleacher Report contributor Abrams (Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution, 2016, etc.) writes that the series "is now celebrated as one of the greatest television shows ever made." Producers, writers, directors, and actors speak for themselves via the many interviews the author conducted. Along the way, Abrams includes commentary and behind-the-scenes reflections. There never would have been a show if not for David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun police reporter whose two nonfiction books, Homicide (1991) and The Corner (1997), covered the topics that The Wire would explore. Simon had worked with network TV before, but he felt HBO would be the best place for his edgy tale about Baltimore police officers and drug dealers that would focus on a wiretapping sting operation. Chris Albrecht, the CEO of the network, agreed: "We were trying to distinguish ourselves from what else was on television." Simon worked with co-creator Ed Burns to put together a mostly black, little-known ensemble of actors. The Wire's story was complex and slow-burning; like reading a novel, it "allowed its audience space to interpret"and pay attention. As Detective Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) said in the first season, "all the pieces matter." The creators drew on some of the best directors and writers, and Simon always gave detective novelist George Pelecanos "the penultimate episode of the season" in which "people got killed." Richard Price "really dug the characters," and novelist Dennis Lehane felt the show changed TV: it "pushed its borders a little further than where they'd previously been positioned."Filled with revealing information from the participants, intriguing tidbits, and show trivia, this compendium will have fans scurrying back to their DVD sets. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique du New York Review of Books
THE DIRECTOR DAVID LYNCH, of "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks" fame, is mournful over the probable demise of theatrical cinema. "Home systems could get really good," he suggests wistfully in his new book, room to DREAM (Random House, $32). "The other thing that could happen is, movies will be streamed directly to your phone, and that wouldn't be so good." Well, I'm here to tell Lynch that my children are already there; as they peer down into their luminous rectangles like Narcissus hovering over his reflecting pool, the tiny screen is eclipsing the big and small screens alike - the world revealed on a surface resembling a 3-by-5 index card. Not that Lynch need unduly worry about his talents becoming obsolete. As "Room to Dream," written with the Los Angeles-based critic and journalist Kristine McKenna, makes clear, his artistic Midas touch lately extends from film and television to painting and music; like Patti Smith (and possibly nobody else), Lynch apparently gets up in the morning and makes art in one medium and another right up until bedtime. "Room to Dream" is, as the introduction observes, "basically a person having a conversation with his own biography." McKenna turns in an impressively industrious and comprehensive account of Lynch's career, larded with insightful quotes from dozens of people whose lives have intersected with his - after each chapter of which Lynch offers, at similar length, his own impressionistic and free-associative commentary. The portrait that emerges is that of a protean talent who has pungently projected the nightmares of his unconscious into his creative work but who is impressively at peace with his personal demons. While Lynch's signature artistic mode is hectic, psychotic mayhem punctuated with bewitchingly off-angle perspectives on the American ethos and mythos, those who have worked with him unanimously praise the generosity of spirit and Zen composure that reign over his sets and shoots. The book only lightly covers this aspect of Lynch, touching briefly on his deep commitment to Transcendental Meditation - he offers only that "when I started meditating the anger went away." Instead we sense a certain emotional coldness; in the wake of several marriages, with children, Lynch observes that "relationships are like films, and people come and they go." His onetime paramour Isabella Rossellini volunteers that, with scarce prior indication, Lynch "left me with a phone call telling me he never wanted to see me again" - a diktat that crushed her, she says. Still, " Room to Dream" is an absorbing glimpse into a compulsively creative soul whose credo might as well be, as he writes at one point: "I love the logic of dreams. Anything can happen and it makes sense." HOMEY DON'T PLAY THAT! The Story of In Living Color and the Black Comedy Revolution (37 INK/Atria, $28), by David Peisner, places another flinty character front and center. It's a capacious account of the seminal Fox variety show "In Living Color" and its place in the larger context of modern African-American culture. The show's mastermind, Keenan Ivory Wayans, had kicked around the Los Angeles comedy scene for a decade and collaborated on a couple of films ("Hollywood Shuffle," "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka") when Fox, the then-fledgling and decidedly flimsy "fourth network," persuaded him to come back to his native New York City and launch "In Living Color" in 1990. It was instant landmark TV, winning an Emmy Award just five months in, and it launched the careers of everyone from Jamie Foxx and Jim Carrey to Jennifer Lopez (who, as a "fly girl," got a couple of minutes per episode to make an impression as a hip-hop go-go dancer choreographed by Rosie Perez, among others). Wayans is a canny cultural button-pusher who drove his stable of writers to the edge and over, routinely keeping them after midnight and expecting them back first thing in the morning. The comedian Ali Wentworth, who came to the show toward the end of its five-year run, tells Peisner: "I had a pit in my stomach every single day.... It was a really cold, destructive place to work." Steve Oudekerk, who had known Wayans in Los Angeles, says that his reaction when he came on to write for the show was: "My gosh, you've become Colonel Kurtz. What happened?" On the other hand, when the writer Robert Schimmel's son was dying of cancer, Wayans sent him home and told him to come back when he was ready and able. According to Schimmel's brother and co-writer, Jeff, Wayans told the stricken father, who was worried about his livelihood and benefits, "You're not fired, you're not quitting, everything is here for you." "In Living Color" compulsively punctured the envelope of acceptable taste, trashing shibboleths of political correctness and race consciousness in every dimension. It's impossible to forget, even a quarter-century later, Foxx's drag routine as Wanda, the woman with an unrealistic opinion of her pulchritude. The flamboyantly gay pair portrayed by Damon Wayans and David Allen Grier in their "Men on... " skits was almost beyond the pale - but, Peisner reports, "the sketches were so popular that they were played in loops in gay bars around Los Angeles." At Howard University, Keenan's younger brother Marlon heard a professor deride his brother's TV triumph as a "minstrel show" - thereby linking it accurately, if unreflectively, to one of the most fascinating traditions in American entertainment. In truth, much of what made "In Living Color" must-see TV probably couldn't be broadcast in today's woke and mindful era - but that's what made it so memorable. Peisner's narrative fully honors the show's uniqueness, and meticulously lays out how it came undone. By the beginning of the fourth season, Wayans was constantly butting heads with Fox suits who were obsessed with toning the show down. At one fraught moment, when executives wanted a line changed in an episode, they came looking for the master tape, and at Wayans's behest the producer hid it in a drop ceiling. Wayans soon left the show altogether, and it collapsed after one more halfhearted season. Let us take a moment to marvel at the irony that shows like Wayans's helped keep Fox's fragile network franchise alive until it could take flight in the Newt Gingrich era as the vehicle for what's now known, in shorthand, as Trump TV. An even more improbable tale is on offer in Matthew Polly's BRUCE LEE: A Life (Simon & Schuster, $35), apparently the first noteworthy treatment of its subject - and a definitive one at that. Polly, a onetime Rhodes scholar and a martial arts maven who spent two years studying hand-tohand fighting at the legendary Shaolin Temple in China, frames Lee's story as the tale of a global soul who often seemed like a visitor from the future. Born in San Francisco to parents with careers as stage actors, Lee returned with them to their native Hong Kong and became a child star in the local film industry at age 6. Banished to America by his father after he was kicked out of secondary school for flagrant hooliganism, Lee waited tables in a Chinese restaurant, taught freelance dance classes, founded a kung fu club, attended the University of Washington and ended up in Los Angeles juggling his prowess in the fighting world with a serendipitous acting break that won him the role of Kato in the "Green Hornet" television show. Fascinating narrative threads proliferate. Lee was a Champion dancer in 1950s Hong Kong at the time of the Lindy hop and the cha-cha. Barely more than one-half Chinese (he also had English and Dutch Jewish forebears), he suffered from reverse racism that puts one in mind of Bob Marley's similar tribulations as a half-English youth in Jamaica. The membership of Lee's American fight club also broke all manner of traditional cultural and racial barriers. While upholding and developing a kung fu style that was (unusually) credited as the invention of a female fighter, Lee incorporated tactical elements from Okinawan, Korean and Japanese traditions - and even from his study of fencing - into the discipline he evolved. And his favorite song, which he repeatedly asked a co-star to play on the set of "The Way of the Dragon," was "Guantanamera." While the book makes clear that Lee took his marriage vows less than seriously, he remained devoted to his supremely grounded American wife, Linda. And he by all accounts had a ferocious sense of humor. One anecdote he told about life as an Asian-American: "One day, 1 was mowing my lawn when an American walked by and asked me how much 1 charged for the service. 1 said to him, '1 am doing this for free, but when I'm done cutting the grass, Em going to sleep with the woman inside the house.' " Lee died mysteriously but, Polly convincingly concludes, from mundane and unscandalous causes, in a girlfriend's apartment on the eve of the release of "Enter the Dragon," the Hollywood feature that would make him a legend and would have been his entree to spectacular global stardom. A different kind of prophetic pathos accrued to the HBO series "The Wire" after Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore in 2015, which led to civil unrest that drew the attention of the entire nation to the manifest injustices of life in that city's most blighted neighborhoods. The show, which never became a big hit in real time during its run from 2002 to 2008, has since become recognized as something of a gold standard for gritty, hyperreal storytelling on the small screen. The journalist Jonathan Abrams's ALL THE PIECES MATTER: The Inside Story of The Wire (Crown Archetype, $27) is an obvious labor of love - a comprehensive oral history of the show, stitched together from oodles of interviews with everyone involved in its creation. Conceived by the investigative reporter David Simon and the former police detective Ed Burns, "The Wire" explored the deep, racially charged dysfunction of Baltimore's institutions - the police force, the seaport economy, the public school system, the city government and the local media - in some 60 episodes that attracted the first-class writing talents of Richard Price, George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane, and launched or turbocharged the careers of brilliant actors from Domenie West and Idris Elba to Wendell Pierce and Michael B. Jordan. The book captures all of these voices and many more in a pointed and granular revisiting of the debates they engaged in as the series evolved and took on many edgy themes and subplots. At one point, we learn, a robber fleeing the local police stumbled onto the show's West Baltimore set and, seeing so many people uniformed in blue, threw himself down in surrender - only to learn later that he might easily have barreled on through the set and eluded his pursuers. So does life imitate art. Yet another brand of precocity marked the pathbreaking work of Ernst Lubitsch, a director whom the silent-film star Mary Pickford imported to Hollywood from Berlin when he was just 20 years old. He didn't end up doing much for her career, but - in the estimation of the film historian Joseph McBride, whose tome how did lubitsch do it? (Columbia University, $40) makes a comprehensive and enthusiastic (if overstated) case for his importance - "Lubitsch virtually created the romantic comedy genre," "countering American puritanical hypocrisy with European sophistication." In films like 1940's "The Shop Around the Corner" (remade as "You've Got Mail" in 1998 by Nora Ephron) and 1943's "Heaven Can Wait" (remade in 1978 by Warren Beatty), Lubitsch, according to McBride, "with all his tolerance for what is usually considered human misconduct or aberration," explored "how men should treat women and how women should treat men." The title of McBride's book ("a critical study, not a biography," as he notes) is adapted from a question that the director Billy Wilder posted on the wall of his office - "How would Lubitsch do it?" Wilder and other filmmakers including Peter Bogdanovich revered Lubitsch as the progenitor of the kind of smart, soignee entertainments that they aspired to bring to the big screen. In a supremely ironic twist, McBride and Bogdanovich appear as supporting actors in the long-awaited Orson Welles valedictory feature "The Other Side of the Wind." That film, delayed for decades, is at the center of a dispute this year between the Cannes festival, which disqualified for competition any work produced for streaming services, and Netflix, which sponsored the Welles film and protested the Cannes decision through a festival boycott. We can only hope that when the film is finally seen, it lives up to "the Lubitsch touch" of complex human comedy and high spirits. The most rewarding volume of this season's crop of books about the moving image may be space odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece (Simon & Schuster, $30), the filmmaker and writer Michael Benson's engrossing, immersive examination of the long path to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's masterpiece of science fiction cinema, "2001: A Space Odyssey." The pair's fraught but hugely fruitful relationship forms the backdrop of this astonishing tale of obsessive genius at work. Kubrick, a jazz drummer in high school, hung out occasionally with Artie Shaw; when Kubrick mentioned that he was looking for a science fiction writer, it was Shaw who pointed him toward Arthur C. Clarke and his classic novella "Childhood's End." In the course of Benson's narrative, Clarke - a closeted gay man trying to keep his complicated menage of variously involved men and women financially afloat in Sri Lanka - becomes increasingly dependent on Kubrick to pull "2001" together for release (for Clarke can't deliver his novel and hit payday until the story is conclusively worked out). Kubrick, just as desperately, repeatedly fends off both Clarke and a growing host of studio executives who are equally antsy to see their multimillion-dollar investment somehow materialize under the guidance of their eccentric, secretive auteur. We learn early on that some of the very first footage shot consisted of the hallucinatory "Star Gate" sequences that come at the climax of the film, in which the astronaut Dave Bowman approaches the Jupiterian moon of Charon in his landing pod. These - being created well before any computer-generated imagery techniques existed - involved experimenting for long hours with high-intensity lights and fast film speeds over huge tanks of noxious, noisome chemicals in "an abandoned brassiere factory on 72nd Street and Broadway" that Kubrick rented for the undertaking. The elaborate sets for the space station scenes, constructed at studios outside London, involved a whole other saga of trial and error and ingenious invention. "'2001' never had a definitive script," Benson reports. "Major plot points remained in flux well into filming." The details of the climactic confrontation between Bowman and the murderously insubordinate HAL-9000 computer aboard the space station were improvised on the fly over the course of a few days. The film was received by critics as an unmitigated disaster. "Its first screenings were a harrowing ordeal, with audience reactions at the New York premiere including boos, catcalls and large-scale walkouts," Benson writes. "Most of the city's leading critics dismissed the film, some in personal and humiliating terms." Clarke, stunned, slunk out at the premiere's intermission. " Later, he recalled overhearing another comment emanating from the seated phalanx of MGM executives: 'Well, that's the end of Stanley Kubrick.'" The redoubtable New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael dumped on it as "monumentally unimaginative ... trash masquerading as art." Kubrick reportedly spent a sleepless night ruminating endlessly about where it had all gone wrong, and eventually trimmed 19 minutes before the film opened wide. But then something uncanny happened: Young people flocked to theaters across the country and embraced it wholeheartedly, and it became a box-office triumph. The film opened the same week that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and it was no doubt still on screens across America when Bobby Kennedy was murdered two months later. In the midst of national chaos and mayhem, "2001" felt like a stiff shot of cold truth. "Put simply," Benson writes, "it changed how we think about ourselves." When the prehistoric killer ape flings his bone club in the air and it morphs into a space station to the serene, reassuring strains of "The Blue Danube Waltz," 1 can tell you that one little boy's mind was utterly and thoroughly blown in the darkness of a small-town movie theater. But just try explaining to your kids that this kind of emotional experience is simply not accessible via an iPhone screen. All that is solid melts into air. BEN DICKINSON is a freelance writer and a former books and film editor at Elle magazine.
Critique du Library Journal
With the premiere of The Deuce on HBO, interest in the work of David Simon has been reignited, and The Wire is his magnum opus. Journalist and author Abrams (Boys Among Men) delves deep into the show's creation and enduring legacy through interviews with the actors, writers, and producers who brought the show to life. Whether it's Dominic West reflecting on the allure of his character Detective James McNulty or actor Michael B. Jordan discussing the lasting impression of being in an ensemble cast of primarily black actors, Abrams underscores the indelible mark the show has left on actors and audience alike. Weaving all the interviews together is the enduring connection between the city of Baltimore and the creators of the show, a city that David Simon and the writers of The Deuce recently visited for inspiration. -VERDICT Building upon Rafael Alvarez's The Wire: Truth Be Told, the author further underscores the reasons why the show is often referred to as the greatest of all time.-Joshua Finnell, Hamilton, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.