Episode 698 - David Simon
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuck wads?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:How's everybody doing?
Marc:I'm back from my Midwest jaunt.
Marc:My dates.
Marc:My dates in the Midwest.
Marc:I will tell you about those.
Marc:And we can either... I'm pretty sure I remember my speculations.
Marc:I think they were pretty close.
Marc:They were pretty fucking close.
Marc:Today on the show, the amazing David Simon is here.
Marc:Not a guy you hear talking a lot, but what an amazing talent.
Marc:This guy created The Wire.
Marc:Homicide, Life on the Street was based upon his book.
Marc:He's done Treme.
Marc:He did this thing called The Corner that some of you might remember.
Marc:Generation Kill.
Marc:And he started as a journalist.
Marc:And it was a fascinating conversation.
Marc:So that is coming down the pike towards you, into your head, right through these headphones that you're wearing, or however you're doing it, your computer, your speaker.
Marc:Perhaps you're listening on a pair of old Klipsch horns, nice and loud, on a vintage couch.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:That's on you.
Marc:All right, before I get too caught up in whatever, I need to tell you what we did.
Marc:We relaunched our site.
Marc:We relaunched WTFpod.com.
Marc:It's now powered by Squarespace.
Marc:Go check it out.
Marc:You can listen to the show there.
Marc:Search for anyone who's ever been on the show there.
Marc:You can sign up for the newsletter there.
Marc:You can buy merch.
Marc:You can check my tour calendar.
Marc:It's all there, all right?
Marc:And it's beautiful.
Marc:If you're wondering where the comments are, well, we don't have comments anymore.
Ha!
Marc:Sorry, unfuckable hate nerd army.
Marc:Sorry.
Marc:Go do some agenda-driven trolling somewhere else.
Marc:I recently had a run-in with the SS slash anti-Semitic division of the unfuckable hate nerd army.
Marc:It was pretty exciting stuff.
Marc:Pretty sad.
Marc:Pretty vapid.
Marc:Pretty disappointing as an American.
Marc:But anyways, back to the point.
Marc:You can basically on the site...
Marc:You can still do everything.
Marc:If you really want to comment, the link to our Facebook page is there.
Marc:And I look at that and people look at that.
Marc:That's basically the fan page for the show where we post the episodes.
Marc:So you can still do that there.
Marc:And it's just the way it's going to be.
Marc:And it was actually really the way it was on the old site anyway.
Marc:So you can still comment on Facebook and use the link on the new site.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Pretty exciting.
Marc:It looks fucking cool, man.
Marc:It really looks cool.
Marc:So I'm back.
Marc:I'm back.
Marc:Let's go over it.
Marc:I had a pretty amazing time doing shows in Iowa City at the Mission Creek Festival.
Marc:It was pretty amazing.
Marc:And in Lincoln, Nebraska, also a great show.
Marc:Kansas City turned out to be pretty amazing.
Marc:It was a big hall, as they say.
Marc:It was a big old theater.
Marc:But we got about 800 people in there.
Marc:And what they did is the balconies were black.
Marc:That's what they say.
Marc:They just erased the balconies.
Marc:They were just hanging over all of us as an absence of people that would have had an amazing time.
Marc:Isn't it nice that I'm framing it like that?
Marc:But here's what goes down.
Marc:Here's what happened.
Marc:I flew in.
Marc:I flew into Iowa City or just outside of Iowa City, whatever airport that is.
Marc:Took the little plane, the little one where you just, just you and a few other people trying not to act nervous, looking at the scenery, looking what we're flying into, the great expanse, the space that is the middle section of this country.
Marc:But I got there.
Marc:Checked in with the people, met Lisa Persky, the actress and now amazing photographer who was there at the festival touring with her photographs of New York from the 70s.
Marc:Persky came up to me out of nowhere and just said, Sharpling sent me, told me to call you Sharky.
Marc:So Sharpling, I guess, has a...
Marc:uh nickname for me but she took me over to her show where she was going to give a talk because this mission creek festival is pretty big festival kevin smith was there today after me and uh introduced me to terry zweigoff that was cool maybe i can get him in here someday and then the show is at this uh this beautiful little theater there the englert
Marc:Packed it out.
Marc:I guess it was about 800, 900 people.
Marc:And I knew.
Marc:I told you what was going to happen.
Marc:I knew it was my first day out doing the long thing.
Marc:And I did almost two hours.
Marc:Just improvised.
Marc:Did new shit.
Marc:Mostly new shit.
Marc:Very little old shit.
Marc:So stuff is coming together.
Marc:We had a great time at the show.
Marc:And then I got in the car the next day.
Marc:and drove to Lincoln, Nebraska, driving from Iowa City to Lincoln, Nebraska.
Marc:I mean, you would think, I mean, some people sort of poo-poo the Midwest and the flatness, but I thought it was glorious.
Marc:I live in Los Angeles.
Marc:Just to be on a highway and moving, like fast, like driving properly on a highway was a tremendous luxury because I live in this fucking place where you can never do that ever.
Marc:So it was beautiful.
Marc:And I wonder why people complain about it.
Marc:Like, you know, people complain about the Midwest sometimes that it's a difficult place to live, but it's just a different way of life.
Marc:I mean, I found it very meditative to be driving through the flatness.
Marc:And there were moments where I was like, what could people here be upset about?
Marc:This is beautiful.
Marc:I feel my brain breathing.
Marc:But then you start to really look at it like, wow, there's really nothing out here.
Marc:Oh, boy.
Marc:God, this is bleak.
Marc:And then you got to get back to like, look at this beautiful space.
Marc:Whoa, man.
Marc:What's going on out there?
Marc:What's going on in that farmhouse?
Marc:That can't be good.
Marc:Yeah, that's the big city paranoia creeping in when you're kind of overstimulated constantly by noises that might be gunshots.
Marc:It's easy giving a little space to become incredibly suspicious of a farmhouse.
Marc:Man, everything evil that's ever existed has got to be going on in that farmhouse.
Marc:Probably not.
Marc:Probably just a farmer sitting there having coffee, looking despondent, waiting for the plant or whatever they call the sowing of the fields.
Marc:Perhaps being bitter about the other guy's fields that he sees just down the way or just past his acreage.
Marc:Thinking like that guy, he doesn't fucking know how to grow corn.
Marc:I assume there's some farmer bitterness around.
Marc:So I drove down to Kansas City.
Marc:And I was excited about Kansas City because I wanted to eat barbecue because that's I use as excuse to eat barbecue.
Marc:That's a barbecue town.
Marc:So I put it out there in the world.
Marc:Where should I go get barbecue?
Marc:And I literally did it right when I got to the hotel in Kansas City.
Marc:There was a bunch of options.
Marc:Oklahoma Joe's, Kansas City Joe's, whatever the Joe's was, they were closed.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Gates.
Marc:I didn't feel like going to Gates.
Marc:I've been there years ago.
Marc:It's not bad.
Marc:Q39, a lot of people said, but it looked a little she-she to me.
Marc:I'm sure it's very good food.
Marc:I wanted some dirty fucking KC barbecue, and Arthur Bryant's, the original Arthur Bryant's, was about a mile and a half away.
Marc:And I went to that place, and I got a meat tray, got some burnt ends, got some pulled pork, and I got some fucking Kansas City ribs, a little bit of coleslaw with that amazing sauce, and some white bread and pickles, and it was fucking spectacular.
Marc:Sure, there's prettier food, but is that what you want from barbecue?
Marc:Or you want to go where there's a bunch of pictures on the wall of people that have been there?
Marc:You could say it's a tourist attraction, but who cares?
Marc:It's not really.
Marc:It's the same place it's always been.
Marc:And there it was.
Marc:And that sauce was tangy and had a little punch to it.
Marc:It's fucking spectacular.
Marc:I think it's still in my intestines.
Marc:So Kansas City, I was concerned, as you knew, as you know.
Marc:But the space was huge and beautiful.
Marc:That Midland Theater, it was great.
Marc:It was beautiful.
Marc:Beautiful old theater.
Marc:All the theaters that I was in were built in the 20s.
Marc:And it must have seated about 2,200.
Marc:But I sold 800, and that's good for me.
Marc:That's about what I get in a nice small city.
Marc:And the people are excited.
Marc:I did some full-on neurotic improv.
Marc:And I did a lot of new material, did a few old classics, not even that old, just from the special, and met a few people outside, and it was fun.
Marc:Did a few photos.
Marc:All in all, good trip, and I feel good about myself.
Marc:I feel good about the Midwest, and I feel good about America and Americans.
Marc:i'm serious it's easy to judge when you don't go it's just there's a little more space it's a different way of life but the people are great people and we have good shows and i ran into another kid some kid i knew from saying some kid comes up to me he's like you know do you know who i am and i'm like holy shit yeah i do your mark i used to live in the house with me in somerville in davis square 30 years ago this kid that was a housemate of mine from 30 years ago was there
Marc:We didn't even get along that great when we were living together.
Marc:He was kind of an oddball.
Marc:But man, it was great to see him.
Marc:And we hung out and we talked for like an hour.
Marc:And then after the show, we got some pie, talked some more, caught up, did a little nostalgia thing.
Marc:It's weird.
Marc:You know, you have memories, but you got to blow the dust off him sometimes.
Marc:Get back in him.
Marc:Sort of like, you know, blow the dust off and climb back into your memories full on emotionally connected and just and just get a sense of who you were and what you are now and and feel the warmth of those those old mistakes and those old happy things.
Marc:It was good, man.
Marc:It was good.
Marc:All right, so right now it's my pleasure to share with you my conversation with David Simon.
Marc:I need you to know he was one of those guys.
Marc:There's only been a few.
Marc:Right when he walked into this garage, he picked up that old K guitar and it was like he was meeting a new friend.
Marc:That's a good way to start with me.
Marc:Anytime.
Marc:Anytime you come in and pick up guitar, I'm like, all right, I know a little bit about this guy now.
Marc:All right, this is me and David Simon.
Marc:I like the fact that at some point, you know, that was the thing for you, playing guitar.
Guest:It's like the thing for every teenager.
Marc:No, not really.
Marc:Some guys go sports, some guys go stupid, and then other guys, you know, they do music.
Guest:You know, if I could have done anything that wasn't derivative, like that wasn't a learned riff from somebody else.
Marc:But you got to start there.
Guest:I never got past that.
Guest:I mean, you know, I can string riffs together, but I cannot do the...
Guest:The thing of truly improvising.
Guest:My sons can play jazz piano.
Marc:Well, jazz is a whole different level, but what were you playing, blues mostly?
Guest:Yeah, blues and sort of blues rock, mostly blues.
Marc:Yeah, I think we're, how old are you, 54?
Guest:Yeah, 55.
Marc:So we're about the same age.
Marc:So you were in college when you played guitar?
Guest:You started when you were a kid.
Guest:Yeah, I started when I was like 12.
Marc:Yeah, me too, right?
Marc:What was your first album?
Marc:weirdly i think my first might have been the beatles second album oh really yeah i don't know why and then i remember having a roll over beethoven yeah that roll over beethoven was like that was it the chuck berry beginning yeah i like like learning that was the most important thing in my life and i didn't learn until high school and it's pretty simple i know you too
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I love Chuck Berry.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was a big deal to me to learn that stuff.
Guest:But the Chicago Blues stuff is what sort of caught me very early.
Marc:The older stuff for the Muddy and Callum Wolfe?
Guest:No, the electric classic five-member band, Little Walls.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:That was my shit.
Guest:And I found them largely the usual route through the Rolling Stones credence.
Guest:And I was, you know, I just could never, I could copy stuff, but I could never bring any insight to it musically.
Guest:You know, I mean, I was just always thinking.
Guest:I was in my high school jazz band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was always like a half a measure behind the band.
Guest:You know, like, oh, shit.
Guest:They meant flat at 7th, 9th.
Guest:Yeah, I couldn't.
Guest:I couldn't play shells.
Guest:But my son can't.
Guest:I mean, he plays guitar and piano, and he's relentless.
Guest:Has he needed a band?
Guest:He actually, he's in college now and he's been playing, he's been fronting, not fronting, he's not the frontman, he's the keyboard player and kind of one of the arrangers and songwriters for a Stax Volt.
Guest:Oh yeah?
Guest:11 piece Stax Volt.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, in Boston.
Guest:And, you know, they're coming to the end of their run because they're all getting ready to graduate.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:So it's like, but I think he's going to go into music.
Marc:So that's a proud thing, like when the son kind of picks up and does something amazing that you wanted to do.
Guest:Yeah, well, it's in the tradition because my dad wanted to be a newspaper reporter.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I don't know that by osmosis, I chose that to sort of please him, but it happened.
Marc:Well, what was the first thing that compelled you to do that?
Marc:I mean, when did your dad do... He never did any journalism or he did?
Guest:No, he did briefly.
Guest:He was the managing editor of the paper at NYU, a journalism major.
Guest:Right.
Guest:What year?
Guest:So that would have been back a bit.
Guest:30s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Late 30s.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he graduated and went to work.
Guest:He was, I think he had a brief, he was a stringer I know for the Hudson County Dispatch and he was freelancing in New York, around New York and trying to get picked up on a paper and
Guest:And then the war.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he went into the army.
Guest:And when he came out of the army, my brother was born in 46 pretty quickly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he needed to get- Make money.
Guest:Yeah, a little bit more than you could be for being a newspaper.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:So he went into PR.
Guest:But he ended up being a public relations guy and dealing with reporters.
Guest:There were reporters over my house all the time.
Guest:What did he PR for?
Guest:A Jewish service organization named B'nai B'rith.
Guest:I know B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai B'nai
Guest:bar mitzvah yeah yeah you know suburban jewish yeah yeah yeah like when when did you see the cohen brothers movie yes serious man serious yeah you're like isn't that the most familiar thing you ever saw in your life i'm watching it i'm thinking this is a documentary you know this is a goddamn documentary and it was just so beautifully you know it's the story of job yes yeah right it's so
Guest:So beautifully rendered that I'm watching it and I'm thinking, oh my God, right down to the- Oh, that's amazing.
Guest:You know, right down to the, you know, going to- Yeah.
Guest:You need to go to Hebrew school like, you know, when you're 12 or 13.
Guest:It's just like you can't bear it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, just, you know, where's my marijuana?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I was a terror to Hebrew school teachers.
Marc:I mean, it was like it wasn't real school, so you might as well, you know, just push the buttons of the teachers.
Marc:That just was the worst.
Guest:Well, it was just that you'd sort of burned out.
Guest:You'd done the whole... I wrote a piece in Sports Illustrated last year.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know if you saw this, but...
Guest:There was a baseball player in my youth who was Jewish for the Washington Senators when I was growing up, Mike Epstein.
Guest:He actually played for Oakland.
Marc:All I heard about was Sandy Kovacs for my entire life.
Marc:He's the only Jewish baseball player.
Guest:There weren't many, so you gathered around them.
Guest:But to have this power-hitting first baseman...
Guest:playing for my terrible local team.
Guest:He was such a hero to me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I actually had the moment of praying to God in the men's room, in the men's room, the boys' room of Rock Creek Forest Elementary School saying, dear God, if you let Epstein hit a home run right now, I will never skip Hebrew school again.
Guest:And he jacked one into the upper deck in right field.
Guest:And I remember, I can still see my face like cheering in that oxidized, screwed up mirror.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I did it.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:What did I just promise God?
Guest:Because, of course, I was skipping Hebrew school two weeks later.
Guest:Now you've got to get on the straight and narrow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So after that, Epstein got traded to Oakland, and then the whole team moved and became the Texas Rangers.
Guest:So clearly, the Old Testament God was not going to be appeased by my performance.
Guest:If you've ever tried to read a few pages of Talmud, and I have, because it's such an interesting dynamic of like, hi, we're going to basically treat this like a legal text.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we're going to try to figure out the Torah and figure it out down to majority opinions, dissenting opinions, dissenting on dissent.
Guest:And you read it and you realize, my God, this is thousands of years of...
Guest:arguing of my dinner table of arguing of of like five jews seven opinions yeah yeah so you get yeah it was heated when you grew up um yeah but like art but never malevolent argument was sport my brother said it best argument was sport was just the two of you uh no i had i had a sister she passed away sorry cancer
Guest:Um, but there were three of us and I was much younger.
Guest:My brother is 14 years older than me.
Guest:My sister was 10.
Guest:So I was the kid.
Guest:And so like a lot of the arguments were flying over my head, but you absorb this stuff.
Guest:Mostly politics or what?
Guest:Yeah, politics.
Guest:I mean, I, I, I have distinct memories of being eight years old and hearing the fury at the table in 1968.
Guest:Uh, you know, my sister was about the war.
Guest:Yeah, my sister was for Kennedy, my brother was for McCarthy, and my father was for Humphrey.
Guest:All Democrats.
Guest:Well, listen, it was gradations of liberal.
Guest:Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Gradations of Jewish liberal, of New Deal Democrat.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And that was my childhood.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And did you find... When did your interest become sort of engaged about it?
Marc:Because what did you do when you went to college?
Marc:What did you study when you were playing guitar?
Guest:I started as a journalism major.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I wanted to be a newspaper reporter from, I guess, 13, 14.
Guest:I sort of became interested in it.
Guest:Just because of your dad or something else?
Guest:It was just in the ether of my house.
Guest:It was floating around.
Guest:I mean, we took three newspapers...
Guest:We took the Times on Sunday.
Guest:We took the Washington Post, Washington Star.
Guest:We discussed current events.
Guest:We discussed the writers in the paper.
Guest:Really?
Marc:Your family was that engaged, that sophisticated.
Marc:It's nice.
Guest:It was basically a three-bedroom rancher where there were wall-to-wall bookshelves on about three rooms.
Guest:My father was not somebody who...
Guest:He had a depression sort of sensibility about the world when it came to haute cuisine.
Guest:Oh, come on.
Guest:Food was invented in 1945.
Guest:There's nothing you can show me.
Guest:He always felt like it was all game.
Guest:Was he able to enjoy things?
Guest:Yeah, but that's what I was going to say.
Guest:A hardback book, that's worth whatever you want to charge me for it.
Guest:A paperback?
Guest:Why would I want to own a paperback when I could own yet another hardback?
Guest:That was the house.
Guest:It was a house of argument and idea.
Guest:I'm grateful for it.
Guest:It was fun.
Marc:Well, it was interesting because Obama sat there.
Marc:I know.
Marc:I know.
Marc:And then I watched your- By the way, this chair?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Yeah, but he summoned you, right?
Guest:They didn't let me sit in his chair.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, you probably could have.
Guest:You just didn't ask.
Guest:I had to come out to Highland Park for that.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, good.
Marc:But I watched that thing.
Marc:It was a very interesting thing.
Marc:Do you know why that happened?
Marc:I know exactly what happened.
Marc:Let me just set it up a little bit.
Marc:So you were asked by the president to just have a conversation.
Marc:He wanted to pick your brain about drug policy in a way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it was a little bit of a stage thing in the sense of,
Guest:I can tell by the shots.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was this one-day conference.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I normally don't like to get involved in sort of government.
Guest:You can be conference to death and nothing ever happens.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But every now and then, this was... Because the sponsors were everybody from like Newt Gingrich to Donna Brazile, it was this truly bipartisan thing about trying to reduce the prison population.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And of course, that's been my thing for about 15 years.
Guest:Would you consider that your primary agenda?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If I have a specific thing that I've sort of focused on, it would be ending the drug war and trying to... I'm talking down the drug war every chance I get and trying to reduce the prison population and end zero tolerance and militarized policing and all that stuff.
Guest:I think it's been a disaster for the country.
Guest:Here comes this moment, and I really don't want to get involved, but they say, look, we have a real chance of doing this in the last two years of the presidency.
Guest:Why don't you do 10 minutes on a panel there?
Guest:And I reluctantly said yes.
Guest:And once I said yes to the group, which was sort of an adjunct of administration people...
Guest:This call came from the White House.
Guest:They said, instead of his usual remarks to the luncheon, you know, where he tapes six minutes, the president would instead like to have a conversation with you.
Guest:So figure out how to say yes, you know, or maybe even yes, sir.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But what were your feelings initially?
Guest:My initial feeling was if this is actually going to happen, I have to wear a sport coat and a tie.
Yeah.
Guest:And then my second thought was, my son's going to want to come with me to the White House.
Guest:And so he came down from college.
Guest:He's in college.
Guest:Were you excited to talk to the president, though?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, listen, I admire this guy.
Guest:I do.
Guest:I mean, I'm a lefty Democrat.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And I've said, and I think sort of the last eight years have borne me out, I think this is a good man and a wise man.
Guest:And I think he's in a rigged system.
Guest:And I think actually it was sort of surprising to hear him say that in the State of the Union.
Guest:He was basically saying, it doesn't matter.
Guest:It's not all about who we elect.
Guest:It's about what the system is at this point.
Marc:And also thinking about the fucking future.
Marc:I mean, it's like sometimes you see the kind of...
Marc:The lack of movement because of ideology, principles, and money where you're like, doesn't anyone realize that we're supposed to live on?
Guest:Well, Ed Burns, my writing partner on The Wire, he had a very good line about this.
Guest:He said, nobody plants olive trees in American politics, which is, I'm going to plant this tree and in seven years you might get an olive.
Guest:But if you want an olive, there's no other thing to do but plant the tree and be patient.
Guest:And there is no policy that is seriously considered by this country if it can't yield something before the next congressional election cycle.
Guest:It's so cynical.
Marc:And we have to assume that they may be morons, but they can't be that nihilistic.
Guest:I don't think they're morons.
Guest:I think the money has trapped them, which is to say the Supreme Court basically said, please...
Guest:purchase our government at whatever rate and whatever level of expenditure you wish.
Guest:He said that to Mass Capital.
Guest:And if you read this piece by Steve Israel in the New York Times, he's leaving and he's basically saying, good news, you'll be able to take my phone calls now in my district without me hawking you for money because...
Guest:You know, the hours that we spend just chasing the dollars so that we can throw $2 million into this race and they throw $2 million and then we throw another $2 million.
Guest:You know, what they've opened up, the Pandora's box of money, it's destroyed one of the branches of government.
Guest:The presidency is still the presidency.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, it's still a populist.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, get the votes, get the electoral cards.
Guest:The Supreme Court, whether you agree with these nine justices or not, it's still what it is.
Guest:Congress has just paid for it.
Guest:It's just bought.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's a money laundering operation.
Guest:It's been given over to capital.
Guest:And capital is there to preserve profit.
Guest:I mean, it's nothing more sociopathic than that.
Marc:And when you approach this creatively or with your projects...
Marc:You take these ideas.
Marc:I mean, you know, obviously the purchasing of the government and the prison industrial complex, you know, are sort of two sides.
Marc:It's part of that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, certainly the privatization of prisons.
Guest:Was it, you know...
Guest:I mean, the notion that the product could be human incarceration shows you the level of sort of psychic disease that can be applied.
Guest:I mean, capitalism is not a moral force.
Guest:How we ever mistook it for that.
Guest:It's sort of the opposite.
Guest:It doesn't mean that it's not the most effective way of generating mass wealth.
Guest:Right.
Guest:In the modern world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Clearly, it's demonstrated it's great facility for that.
Guest:But what you do with the money, that's the definition of society.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Or what you don't do with the money.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, this whole idea that privatization and the free market will find its level and the most moral thing will win out was retarded.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's ridiculous.
Marc:It's ridiculous.
Marc:What about greed?
Marc:I mean, it's one of the seven deadlies.
Marc:I mean, what do you think people do?
Marc:You ever get in an argument with a libertarian?
Marc:I try.
Marc:It's annoying.
Guest:I can't.
Marc:I don't have the patience for it or the skill set anymore.
Guest:There is no skill set.
Guest:There's no skill.
Guest:There's no skill.
Guest:But the one thing they always rely on is like invariably you'll start pointing out where like, look at what happened when you let capital address the system of incarceration.
Guest:They made human misery into a product and they went to Wall Street with it and they said, hey, we can guarantee you 3% growth next year.
Guest:That's 3% more of the population going to jail.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How do you do that?
Guest:Well, you got to make more nonviolent crimes jailable.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And mostly poor people, mostly people of color.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:It's insane.
Guest:And yet, they'll look at you and they'll go, oh, well, that's crony capitalism.
Guest:Like, wait a second.
Guest:Is there another kind?
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Tell me the society in human history that ever applied capitalism in some sort of benign way that wasn't mitigated by the society saying, look, here's our priorities.
Guest:Here's our moral standards.
Guest:Here's what we want to do.
Guest:Here's what we don't want to do.
Guest:Figure it out.
Guest:You know, the crony capitalism is like, no, no, no.
Guest:Once the markets get it pure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Pure markets.
Guest:You guys are batshit crazy, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think citizenship in some very basic ways.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you're talking to me about those wonderful watchwords of freedom and liberty, and there's not a corresponding sense of responsibility, all that is to me is it's just a recipe for an incredibly selfish culture.
Guest:On the other hand, if it's all responsibility and no freedom, that's tyranny.
Guest:But somewhere in the middle is something that, Jesus, the Athenians recognized it as being sort of a fundamental of the democratic state.
Guest:You know, you got to kick in and you got to kick in.
Guest:And, you know, if somebody down the road is getting the shit kicked out of them wrongly, you're marginalized even if you don't feel it.
Guest:Even if it's happening to somebody else a little lower on whatever the pyramid of pain is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:at the moment that you don't stand up for that guy it's closer to you right and that i mean it's just something that is so elemental and yet so many people don't stand up right right because it's a it's a the ideology is it's not it's not my problem yeah in fact he's different from me right well that's yeah even worse because that's that's loaded yeah you know not my problem is just selfish it's not my problem because he's different than me is is exclusionary racist yeah and and and and we're we're still living through those times
Guest:No, absolutely.
Marc:So when you go back to the career, because how do you like show business?
Marc:You good with it?
Marc:How do you like being a whore?
Guest:It's not bad.
Guest:It's not bad.
Guest:But do you really feel that?
Guest:The pay is okay.
Guest:I'm having a good run.
Guest:And for the most part, what I get to do is meaningful to me.
Guest:There are things that I have trouble getting made that would be even more meaningful at times.
Guest:I'm disappointed by the projects that can't find favor because they can't be maximized as entertainment.
Marc:Like, what is that?
Marc:But you did all right.
Marc:The last thing you did, Show Me a Hero, was relatively...
Guest:Improbable.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm grateful for that.
Guest:I don't mean to be... I'm not... I understand I occupy a very weird sinecure.
Marc:Well, you know what was interesting from my experience with The Wire, and it happened a bit with Treme, though I haven't had the follow-through with Treme, was with The Wire, which I obviously heard a lot about, and I didn't watch it when it was on, because what I would do is I'd watch it.
Marc:I'd be on HBO or whatever, and I'd watch an episode.
Marc:Then maybe a few weeks later, I'd watch another one.
Marc:I'm like, I have no idea what this show's about.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So, and I'm sure you've heard this a lot.
Marc:What happened to me was, you know, I started, I got all of them, you know, from Netflix and I just started at the beginning and then I couldn't do anything for three weeks.
Marc:Like I had to watch every one of them in order.
Guest:And we obviously didn't have a plan for that.
Guest:That was not our plan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I know, but there was no other way to watch it.
Guest:In a way, yeah.
Guest:I mean, the one thing you had going for it, if you had HBO, was they were showing it five times a week.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So if you miss it Tuesday, catch it Thursday.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But that being said, when I watched it the way I watched it, it was as compelling as reading an amazing novel or reading almost a nonfiction about these layers of society and the organization of hierarchies that
Guest:It turned out we were optimized for that.
Guest:But, you know, when we started doing the show, DVD box sets were not even a thing.
Guest:And downloads certainly were just a gleam in anybody's eye.
Guest:So we got lucky.
Guest:But I think that's true.
Guest:Like what I'm doing, I'm always arguing that, look, if you let us make it, it'll go on the shelf and people will find it.
Guest:People eventually, you know, they'll calm down about the fact that, you know, you actually have to, the music actually is part of the point of Tremendous.
Guest:And I mean, I love all my children kind of equally.
Guest:The Marines all found Generation Kill and turned people onto it.
Guest:Got some respect?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I think I keep executing at a pretty high level and I'm pretty happy with the material.
Guest:But I don't expect anything to find favor right away.
Guest:I expect it to get sort of good reviews by the people who have to attend to it professionally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then to go quietly slip below the waves and then word of mouth to kick it up, to ratchet it up.
Marc:Let's talk about this sort of the transition because, I mean, you were a real journalist.
Marc:A reasonable facsimile thereof.
Marc:But you believed in it.
Marc:Oh, I still do.
Marc:And your commitment to proper investigation and proper reporting, specifically in Baltimore and early on into the world that you were dealing with narco crimes, right, mostly.
Yeah.
Marc:That, you know, you were you know, you were on your way and you were as a young man in your 20s.
Marc:You you were going to be that guy.
Marc:I was going to grow old on the copy desk.
Marc:I mean, I wanted to be a newspaper and you loved it.
Marc:I loved it.
Marc:And so what ultimately began to disintegrate or fall apart for you to make the transition that you made?
Guest:Well, out-of-town ownership for my newspaper.
Guest:My newspaper got bought by the LA Times, which at the time- Is it Baltimore Sun?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At the time, they said, oh, you got bought by the good chain.
Guest:Thank God you didn't get by.
Guest:It wasn't Gannett.
Guest:It was the LA Times.
Guest:Right.
Guest:These people were good.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's what people tell themselves as Rome falls.
Marc:Right.
Marc:This is okay.
Marc:Hitler's okay.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:We'll just work with them.
Guest:We'll work with them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They're going to be fine.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Okay, they broke a few windows.
Guest:It's not going to get worse.
Guest:So, there was a little bit of... And at first, there was sort of a hands-off.
Guest:They were very touchy-feely at first with us, but slowly...
Guest:The management of the paper, you got the impression that they were from out of town and their sense of the city was not of a place that they were covering to be intelligent or comprehensive about what the actual problems were and address and explain anything.
Guest:They were chasing prizes.
Guest:They were like, if I can win two or three Pulitzers, then I'll get the bump and I'll go to another paper in the chain, I'll get out of Baltimore.
Guest:And so you would see this sort of prize culture taking over
Marc:It's also like this weird kind of selfish careerism.
Guest:Well, and it's not the stuff that readers actually either need or care about.
Guest:And so there was some hype stories and there was a guy making stuff up, the usual shit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Who you used as a basis for a character.
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:But the other thing was the stuff that I really valued, which was starting to become sort of very delicate narrative and the idea of trying to pull actual human-sized people through the keyhole of journalism and do these narratives where I wanted to make you care about a guy like Bubbles, who was based on a guy that... The fake guy lives down the street here.
Guest:Andre.
Marc:Andre Royal?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's been in here.
Marc:He lives a couple miles away.
Marc:Does he really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I have a hard time picturing him in L.A.
Marc:I really do.
Marc:It is difficult.
Marc:And when he came in here, it was just this ball of New York energy.
Marc:It was great.
Marc:I know.
Marc:His wife owns a restaurant, Natwater.
Marc:Oh, my goodness.
Marc:Yeah, he's doing good.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Say hi for me.
Marc:I will.
Marc:Say hi for me.
Marc:I will.
Guest:So, the real bubbles.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's like at a certain point, what I valued in journalism, what they valued was the Baltimore Sun has learned and as a result of an investigation, they're going to hold committee meetings and can hand us our prize now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was almost a formula to it.
Guest:It came out of Philly.
Guest:It came out of the Gene Roberts School of Journalism of this is how you win a prize.
Marc:You break it and then let it- And then for a year, you report about how important your reporting is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They were masters of that.
Guest:If you didn't do the follow-up reporting to say how great your reporting was and how relevant the Baltimore Sun was, they got mad.
Guest:They got mad.
Guest:And so I started looking at this.
Guest:I started feeling, you know, this is not – okay, we were a stodgy paper.
Guest:We were a little bit greater than the sum of our – or smaller than the sum of our parts, I should say.
Guest:But the Baltimore Sun was a gray thing.
Guest:Mencken used to say the morning paper.
Guest:He was on the evening paper.
Guest:He used to say we wrote like accountants.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's a little bit of truth to that.
Guest:But it was a very honest paper.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we used to sit around and argue about what was fair and what was right.
Guest:And sometimes when we didn't have the story, we spiked it.
Guest:What does that mean, spike it?
Guest:You know, you hold the story because you don't have it yet.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you'd have those debates.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, like, by the way, that's an unheard of dynamic with the internet now.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, there's nobody saying, you know what?
Guest:I only heard this from one person.
Guest:Maybe I should actually check it out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:It's going right up on Vulture.
Guest:It's going right up on...
Marc:And the weird thing is, is I don't think people, consumers or people can really tell the difference between anything that, you know, like where a story comes from or there's, there's no gauge and there's no rule to it.
Guest:No, I mean, you know, I knew we were in a brave new world when I was, at one point I looked at my Wikipedia entry and I was married to Howard Stern's ex.
Guest:Me.
Guest:I was.
Guest:I mean, it's another guy named David Simon.
Guest:Right.
Marc:How was that for you for the weeks that that was up?
Guest:Listen, I didn't much care.
Guest:I was amused by it.
Guest:My wife less so.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But on a really basic level, okay, this can happen now because, again-
Guest:it's the wild west and people can cherry pick the information that fits their ideology and run with it like it's the truth and that's how you get like these camps of thought that are you know based on garbage yeah and now listen journalists could do that but but usually there was a consensus within the newsroom when a guy was doing it too often and and
Guest:You know, to a greater degree.
Guest:Eventually somebody challenged him or eventually somebody spiked a story.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I mean, I saw it happen.
Guest:Some of the moments I've been most proud of in journalism were stories that didn't run.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that shouldn't have run.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So, you know, there is there came a point at which I was the newspaper that I had grown up at and that I loved.
Guest:had sort of ceased to be.
Guest:And what was replacing it, you know, what they regarded as valuable journalism, I had no regard for, and what I regarded as valuable.
Guest:It was time to go.
Guest:At about the same time, my first book had sold to NBC, and Barry Levinson and Tom... That was the homicide book?
Guest:Yeah, and they had come into town to film that show.
Marc:And did you reach out to Barry Levinson because he was a Baltimore guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The book came out here.
Marc:When did you have time to write the book?
Marc:Would you take a break?
Guest:I took a year's leave to go to the homicide unit.
Marc:Was that for the paper or just because you were like, I got to do something else?
Guest:It was both.
Guest:I mean, in the sense of we had just gone through a strike and I was sort of mad at management.
Guest:And I thought, you know, this would be good to sort of walk.
Guest:And you were a big union guy.
Guest:Yeah, I'm a big union guy.
Guest:So we were the most profitable we'd ever been at that point in time.
Guest:And they were cutting our medical because that's how they do.
Guest:And I was a little bit mad.
Guest:And at the same time, don't want to give up a daily newspaper job at a major paper.
Guest:you know for cause you know you get a book contract you can take a year's leave of absence right i went into the homicide unit in 88 uh to write the book um and write my first book uh but it was also you know it made me it obviously gave me a ton of sources in the police department yeah hang out in the hang out in the in the in the and they let you how long did it take to uh to sort of develop a trust amongst them 10 days oh yeah
Guest:They're so busy up there.
Guest:They're working, at that time, 240 murders a year.
Guest:Unbelievable.
Guest:They're so busy, the 36 guys up there, that it was like they had five days of wariness, five days of teasing me and torturing me.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then after that, it was sort of like- The test.
Guest:Yeah, and after they got through the five days of like batting me around like a mouse, the cats all had to go back to work.
Guest:And it was like, you know, then your furniture.
Guest:So that was actually, you know, the second book was a little longer for obvious reasons because we went to a drug corner to do the drug war.
Marc:Now, the first book, so it gets bought by NBC, was it?
Marc:Yeah, and I didn't take it seriously.
Marc:I mean, I was like, well, that's great.
Marc:How did it happen?
Marc:Who brokered it?
Marc:Your agent?
Guest:How does that get?
Guest:Yeah, it went to CAA.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they tried to sell it for feature and nobody was buying it.
Guest:For a film.
Guest:Yeah, nobody was buying.
Guest:It was too big, probably.
Guest:How are you going to render that?
Guest:Yeah, 600 pages.
Guest:And I don't know.
Guest:I'm on the rewrite desk at The Sun.
Guest:I'm working night shifts.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:What do I know?
Marc:And even when NBC buys, it doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Guest:Yeah, well, yeah, and it wasn't NBC.
Guest:It was actually Levinson's company bought it and took it.
Guest:He had a deal to make something for NBC.
Guest:I think he was going to make Diner, a one-hour drama.
Marc:Those were the choices?
Marc:Homicide or Diner?
Guest:Well, they didn't want Diner.
Guest:They didn't see the drama in that.
Guest:By the way, it might have been a great show.
Guest:Sure, it was a great movie.
Guest:But then he came back to them.
Guest:It was Gail Mutrix in his office, one of his associate producers, who read the book, handed it to him.
Guest:But I did have the one moment of saying, why don't you send it to Barry Levinson?
Guest:He's from Baltimore.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That was my big moment.
Guest:I could have just said, why don't you send it to John Waters?
Guest:He's from Baltimore.
Guest:That would have been a very different show.
Guest:Very different show.
Guest:John's a friend, but no, we sent it to the right guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then it goes in, and then they decide to make it, and how do they bring you in initially?
Marc:What is the offer?
Guest:At first, Gail actually said, do you want to try to write the pilot?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he said, do you take me for a fool?
Guest:I've never written anything.
Guest:I've never even written a- A script.
Guest:A one-act play for- Yeah, you're a reporter.
Guest:For a retirement party at The Sun.
Guest:I have nothing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, but you know what?
Guest:I do know the world.
Guest:Once you get a bunch of templates of several scripts by somebody who knows what they're doing, show them to me and I'll take a shot at one.
Guest:But even then, I thought of it as a lark.
Guest:And when they offered me a script assignment that first year, I called up my friend Dave Mills, who I worked on the college paper with.
Guest:He was a reporter at the Washington Post.
Guest:And he was always the guy who, when we were putting out the college paper, he would have to stop for an hour and stop writing headlines on his pages to go watch Hill Street Blues.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He was that guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, you follow this better than I do.
Guest:You want to take a shot at this?
Guest:And so we wrote a script in about two weeks.
Guest:And it was so depressing and so dark, a script, that NBC wouldn't make it.
Guest:And they spiked it, basically.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And second season, I think it was Mark Johnson, Barry's producer partner at the time, went and talked to Robin Williams, who had done Good Morning Vietnam, and showed him the script.
Guest:And Robin Williams wanted to do the guest spot of the husband whose wife is killed in front of him.
Guest:And at that point, NBC said, oh, yeah, no, that's fine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that was your script.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it won the WGA award.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like David Mills immediately like quit the post and went to Hollywood.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Came out here and just kept sending me notes that said, you know, you're an idiot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I didn't take it seriously.
Guest:And I went back and I reported the second book and I went back to the paper.
Guest:The corner.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:To you, you didn't take it seriously primarily because it was entertainment, right?
Guest:Yes, it was apostasy.
Guest:Bernie Simon did not raise me to be a TV writer.
Guest:He raised me to make a difference.
Guest:Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
Guest:Or be a pursuer of truth.
Guest:Something or write prose, you know, or, you know, basically, I mean, I used to go back.
Guest:I used to, when I was at the sun, those early years, I used to go back for, you know, Friday night dinner at my parents' house and we'd sit around and, you know, my brother is a significant, significantly smarter than I am.
Guest:He's a, he's a physician.
Guest:He's a medical researcher.
Guest:He's the head of the infectious disease department at Johns Hopkins University.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:My sister was a fine artist, a painter who was exhibited, you know, had a master's in fine art, taught, you know, legitimately, you know, meaningful artist.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm the newspaper hack.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we'd sit around the table and my dad would look, you know, my dad had nothing, you know, nothing to say about de Kooning to my sister and nothing to say about medical research to my brother.
Guest:And he would look at me and go, so you used a Jaron lead, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You seem to be leaning hard on the Jaron leads.
Guest:What is that?
Guest:What is that?
Guest:What is a Jaron lead?
Guest:It's like beginning with an ING word.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:The last three leads have been Jaron leads.
Guest:You're leaning a little hard on it, Davey.
Guest:This he knew.
Guest:This is what he could engage with.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:It was like, Dad, I'm going to become a TV writer.
Guest:That's my move.
Guest:Is he around?
Guest:Yeah, he saw it all happen.
Guest:He did.
Guest:He died about five years ago.
Guest:The Wire had started.
Guest:At that point, he was a little astonished about what I was doing.
Guest:He never got over the profanity.
Guest:He was a very gracious man.
Guest:It's hard for them to see through that.
Guest:When the book Homicide, when I showed him the gals and he went through the pages, he carefully edited out, even the ones in quotes, he edited out all the profanity.
Guest:And the one that I'll never forget, which made me, I loved him so hard when I read this page, a detective, it was actually my pro, somebody he was referred to as being pissed drunk.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he literally put in drunk to the point of urination.
Yeah.
Marc:He didn't understand the phrase.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And even if he did, it was like, we can get there another way and we can do it with dignity.
Guest:Just don't be a potty mouth.
Guest:And I'm like, Dad, I'm sorry I've been in Baltimore too long and the homicide unit has to sound like the homicide unit.
Marc:Did he let you off the hook?
Guest:I don't think he ever reconciled to... And the other thing is, my dad was from that era of... I grew up with Vietnam, with Watergate, with I.F.
Guest:Stone being a hero.
Guest:You expect a certain amount of lying from your government.
Guest:And the trick is, all governments lie, as Stone said.
Guest:The trick is to parse the ones out that are...
Guest:the most egregious and to and to correct the ones that are uh merely mistakes and to and to credit them when they actually tell the truth and and to be able to tell the difference and that's that's the job yeah but my dad was from an era where like he used to love it when i wrote feature stories that were like happy stories yeah i mean i remember my dad was doing freelance work into the 50s and 60s and
Guest:you know, one of his stories was like, his stories would be like, there were a lot of, the bridge they said couldn't be built, you know, about the Verrazano Narrows in New York.
Guest:It was like, you know, affirming, you know, he would have loved Stephen Ambrose.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:In fact, you know, I don't know if Stephen Ambrose, but like, can do.
Guest:Right, America can, you know, human.
Guest:And he loved the politician, like, you know, the stories he would tell were about like,
Guest:affirming stories about authority he wasn't authoritarian but he but he wasn't ignorant no not at all but he wanted to trust and he wanted to believe in the good of people and you have that some some I certainly feel like most people are good and I feel like even a lot of like I even have affection for like people who are in classes that everybody sneers at like the heroes that show me a hero for me are the bureaucrats they're bureaucrats
Guest:Um, so I have some of that, but, but my, my dad really like was worried even in the last years of his life.
Guest:At one point I was, I was arguing, I was writing some stuff that was very critical of police policy in Baltimore.
Guest:And, um, I remember him saying to me, he goes, the police are going to get mad at you.
Guest:And I was like, you know, yeah.
Guest:Maybe fools not to.
Guest:He goes, well, are you going to be okay?
Guest:I'm going to be like, yeah.
Marc:But was he worried about your personal physical safety on some level?
Guest:Or that there would be a comeback.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Yeah, he was worried.
Guest:He was worried for me.
Guest:Well, that's usually what parents do.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:But I mean, you know, I guess journalism had changed.
Guest:Journalism had become much more adversarial as a result of Vietnam.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Pentagon Papers, you know, Watergate.
Guest:And rightly so.
Guest:By necessity, it needs to be adversarial.
Guest:But my dad was, for somebody who wanted to be a newspaper reporter and who could write, he taught me a lot about writing.
Guest:He was a very good writer.
Guest:He nonetheless, the temperament of modern journalism, phoned from the lip of a mad dog, as Mencken once referred to it.
Marc:Well, he was like a New Deal guy, right?
Marc:Your dad?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Look what we did.
Guest:we rebuilt it we got people working and you know it's okay right well you know the the people that he loved were like he used to say to me at times can't you write more of the features you have such a nice light touch with features you know and i'm like yeah i can and sometimes i do but you know dad look i just pulled you know the grand jury information on clarence mitchell i know what they're investigating for and he'd be like you're not supposed to have clear uh grand jury information that's illegal i'm like
Guest:Yeah, isn't it great?
Guest:He'd be like, no, no, give it back.
Guest:I'm like, no, I'm not giving it back.
Marc:He didn't want you to get hurt.
Marc:He didn't want me to get hurt.
Marc:It's a very Jewish parenting.
Marc:So from the beginning, were you creator of Homicide?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:They just bought the book?
Guest:They bought the book.
Guest:Paul Antonazio wrote the pilot script, and it was showrun by Tom Fontana with an assist from Barry.
Marc:Now, just for the sake of writers and people who are trying to do something relevant in television, I mean, what was the process of your education?
Marc:I mean, outside of being sent some spec scripts or some functioning scripts and writing with your partner?
Guest:partner you know i sent the scripts into tom and it came back with red ink and this works this doesn't oh my god what are you trying to do here you know this and you like tom uh tom's my mentor as far as a tv writer i i like him he kept every promise to me he was committed to um growing us yeah as as writers and producers he he he was thank god i went to work for him yeah so he taught you how to to to write an effective script and to be a showrunner
Guest:Yeah, and, you know, Jimmy Finnerty, his producing partner, taught us how to, the practicals of production.
Guest:And I worked under some very smart playwrights, you know, Jimmy Ashimura and Eric Overmeyer and Julie Martin.
Guest:So, you know, everybody I was working under was teaching me stuff.
Guest:One of the things they did was, I remember Jimmy Ashimura said, you got to read plays.
Guest:You know, that's how you, and, you know, I'd read some when I was in college.
Guest:You know, I'd read sort of the obvious ones.
Guest:I took a Shakespeare course.
Guest:You know, I'd read some Chekhov books.
Guest:But not enough.
Guest:And that was really good grooming.
Marc:In what sense?
Marc:What did you take from it?
Guest:You understand pacing and you understand how to bring people on and take people off of stage.
Guest:And it's not the same as TV.
Guest:I mean, the little words cut to make television and film a little bit different dynamic.
Guest:The blocking is obviously very different.
Guest:But in drama, every line, every word has to justify itself.
Guest:You can have an aside in a prose article and not completely die as long as you do it elegantly.
Guest:There's no asides in drama.
Marc:It's all got to serve the story.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you go aside from the story...
Marc:you have to know that you're doing it has to be incredibly measured and you have to get in and get out very fast and when you but you know when you have the time and the expanse of the wire you know at you know you know being lean is one thing but you also knew you had the you know this amazing arc of narrative right well that's what it gives you is is you know like
Guest:Homicide was a very well-written show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it was 22... Yeah, minutes, right?
Guest:No, I was going to say it was 45 minutes.
Guest:It was 22 episodes.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it was like basically a series of linked short stories.
Guest:Right.
Guest:If you treat a season of television, even a shortened season, like the 10 or 12 or 13 episodes of HBO, as one story, that's, you know, all three Godfather movies, including the...
Guest:including the bad one, aren't nine hours.
Guest:So now you can create a universe.
Guest:Now you can take a little bit more of a breath than you otherwise would.
Marc:And you knew that from going in.
Marc:You were like, great, now we can sort of spread it, open it up.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, it's the one thing when I was working on Homicide, I used to feel like, this episode was great.
Guest:I wish we could stay here instead of go do something.
Guest:you know yeah so there was the wire was an opportunity to do that well actually the miniseries and ed burns is somebody you knew from before ed was a cop he was a homicide detective and he became over time a source of information for me uh i met him he had done a wiretap case on a guy named little melvin melvin williams a huge drug dealer in bone where he just passed away in december melvin did
Guest:yeah and uh ed was one of the lead investigators in the case and i was assigned to do a a series of articles on melvin because his career had spanned decades and uh that's how i met ed and um just straight on this is a source of information and over time i came to really enjoy him he thought differently from a lot of the institutionalized police um uh by the way the
Guest:a lot of other police would have said yeah he's a fucking asshole but I loved him I thought he was a guy who was thinking in big circles about what they were doing he was a Vietnam vet he'd lost he'd been on that losing fight he was in the drug war he saw that as a losing fight he then went to be a school teacher after 20 years in the department he saw that battle in a middle school in Baltimore sort of close up
Guest:Um, he's an interesting cat and, uh, and that's how I, and, and at a certain point when, um, when I was ready to do the corner, I thought this is the guy to do it with because he already had the same doubts about the drug war.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the corner was how many episodes?
Guest:Oh, well, I mean, we did the book together.
Guest:We went to the, we went to, uh, Monroe and Fayette for a year in 1993.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then it was six, uh, sold it to HBO and it was six episodes.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And he was your production partner in that as well?
Guest:No, actually, at that point, he'd gone to teaching, if I'm remembering this correctly.
Guest:That was when he was working on... Because we had done the reporting after he got his teaching certificate and before he'd gone.
Guest:And to be blunt, HBO was really scared of doing that project with a white guy, two white guys who had written the book.
Marc:The corner.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it was a book about, you know, a predominantly African American community deluged by drugs.
Guest:It was a very, you know, it has its delicacies when it comes to political correctness and sensibility that they felt.
Guest:I didn't feel that really.
Guest:I mean, I felt the book was very humanistic and I didn't have a problem.
Marc:Well, they're going to be reactive no matter what.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Sensitive.
Guest:So I got in the room with them, and in the room it was clear they were asking me if I would be willing to have another writing partner, and I sort of saw where it was going.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, well, you know, I certainly would work on the scripts with Jimmy Ashimura, and I got a blank, you know, that doesn't help us.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:And I said, or David Mills, who was my friend from college, who had written my first script with.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At the time, he'd done a couple years on NYPD Blue, and he was working on L.A.
Guest:Law, and
Guest:And they said, you know David Mills?
Guest:I said, yeah, we went to college together.
Guest:He's one of my best friends.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Can you get David Mills?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Needless to say, David Mills is an African-American writer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So that was.
Guest:That's the way that works.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's why I did that without Ed Burns.
Guest:I did it with David Mills because that's the only way to get it done.
Guest:They needed the racial cover of knowing that.
Guest:It wasn't a quota hire because you're buddies with him.
Guest:I was happy to work with Dave Mills.
Guest:I told the whole story to David Mills and he was cracking up.
Guest:He goes, that's how I got the job.
Guest:I go, no, no, David, they also know, you know, they knew you by rep and by name.
Guest:As soon as I mentioned the name, he goes, I know, I'm just, I'm busting balls.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But, I mean, my friendship with David by then had gone well beyond sort of the racial dynamic.
Guest:Sure, of course.
Guest:But there was this moment of, oh, I get it.
Guest:You guys really need a black writer on this.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I found that in The Wire, what was interesting and amazing to me was really the one character at the end of it all that is actually transformed is Bubbles.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that, you know, at the end of it all, you know, the sort of, you know, the almost...
Marc:The real victim of drugs on a human level outside of, you know, the politics or the sales or anything else is the hopeless addict.
Marc:And, you know, and at the end of that whole thing, you know, Bubbles is kind of okay for then.
Guest:And not through any act of the war on drugs?
Guest:No, right.
Guest:You know?
Marc:Yeah, no, it was just that, like, the human story, like, to me, like, at the end of that, like, because it's a devastating...
Marc:period of time you spend in that world.
Marc:Right.
Marc:All of them.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And man, we needed to throw some honest hope.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the truth is you get to be about the age that Bubbles was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's when guys start coming out of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When they hit bottom and they're in their 30s.
Guest:You know, these guys who are in their 20s who get, you know, there's a reason that it's like the 10th or the 11th time you go to treatment.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That it finally sticks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you live.
Guest:Yeah, if you live.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And if you don't go to jail.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I mean, if the guys who truly make it stick in the end...
Guest:Their bodies are a little tired.
Guest:Their minds are a little tired.
Guest:They've been on the spin cycle for a long while.
Guest:When you're young and you're strong, you do your 28 days.
Guest:And around day 21, you start asking the guys coming in what the hot corners are and what the good product is.
Guest:And those are the guys who...
Guest:i know guys like bubbles sure who are clean now for 20 you know i mean george app's the guy who was blue in the corner he passed away regrettably um but uh he was he was clean for 20 years after really after he walked away from the shooting gallery that his house had become and he stayed clean and i was proud to know that man i mean it was a hero's journey yeah no i you know i i see a lot of it i'm being you know i'm clean myself
Marc:You know, I'm sober.
Marc:And, you know, just that, you know, I always get moved by those stories that, you know, that because understanding that struggle on a personal level and seeing what people go through with that without trivializing it, you know, because a lot of times people who do not have the compulsion or a family member or a friend who has gone through the hopelessness of that thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They don't get it.
Guest:It's like, well, just stop.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:You know, and, you know, listen, stopping.
Guest:Stopping is almost the least of the problems.
Guest:Like, okay, now I popped out at 28 days.
Guest:I feel clean.
Guest:I feel strong.
Guest:But I'm walking back to the same people, places, and things, as they say, in the rooms.
Guest:And my life has still got the holes in it it had when I went down this path.
Guest:So, I mean, the work just begins once you get sober.
Marc:Yeah, because somehow or another you have to get to that point, however you're going to do it.
Marc:To where the obsession, you're relieved of the obsession.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Where it doesn't become the thing, you know, the first thing you go to and then you can't stop the hunger for it.
Guest:Right.
Marc:That's a tricky bit of business.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It really is.
Guest:And, I mean, I came to admire a lot of those guys.
Guest:And, you know, people like the younger guys, I mean, of the kids that we followed in that rec center for The Corner.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:one of them is out of jail now, and he's working a job.
Guest:He's got a forklift operator, and he's doing okay, and he's got a girlfriend, and he's coming up on 40, and I have hopes, Dante.
Guest:Last I heard from him when we talked, he was doing good.
Guest:And another kid who never went to the corner, he was like a stoop kid, never left the stoop.
Guest:He did great.
Guest:He moved out to the camp.
Guest:But everybody else, they're gone.
Guest:They're gone, man.
Guest:Um...
Guest:can you keep in touch with these guys yeah i mean the ones who are alive most of them are not alive right um what what can what how do you check in with them and what compels you to sort of stay on top of their lives um well i mean i fran became a friend yeah deandre's mother became a friend and and uh and she's clean and she moved her family over the city line up in northeast and
Guest:And my kid grew up with DeAndre's kid.
Guest:They were born about the same year, and they know each other.
Guest:I mean, it's been an honor to know her.
Guest:It's broadened me.
Guest:It's not like, oh, no.
Guest:It's not that.
Guest:I know her whole family, and she's been doing good for so long that it's her nieces and nephews
Guest:Never saw her.
Guest:Or going through college.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:She survived all of her... She has an older brother who's clean, and everybody else is gone in the family.
Guest:Fucking brutal, man.
Guest:Yeah, she's ended up being the rock.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so, you know...
Guest:Not only would I want to support that just to support it, but I've come to really enjoy her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So there's that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And some of it, it's been hard to keep up with people.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Once they're in the wind, I mean, I heard about RC passing away.
Guest:Which one is RC?
Guest:RC was one of DeAndre's friends from the rec center and from the drug corner.
Guest:And he died maybe three or four years ago, maybe three years ago.
Guest:And I heard about it two weeks late.
Guest:I mean, somebody came up to me in the market and said, did you hear about RC?
Guest:I was like, oh, no.
Guest:You know, last I'd heard, he'd gone to stay with his mother's people in New Jersey.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:And I guess these are people you spend a year with on some level.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, listen, I stayed in touch with some of the detectives.
Guest:You know, I mean, to this day, I regard Terry McLarty as a philosopher.
Guest:He's still in the force.
Guest:I regard him as a philosopher king.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Every time he opens his mouth, I feel like writing it on a cocktail napkin because he's so funny.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, it's amazing, those kind of guys, right?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, he's just... So, I mean, I don't think... The trick is not detaching.
Guest:To write that stuff, you've got to love your characters.
Guest:You've got to love the people you're writing about.
Guest:Genuinely love them.
Guest:The trick is not going native.
Guest:The trick is putting in the good and the bad.
Guest:It's being honest about... And being respectful.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, if you're being granted access, write the whole human being.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you can do that...
Guest:You know, not everybody, the detectives didn't like everything in the book.
Guest:But they got it.
Guest:They got it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the same thing happened on the corner.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And with Treme, was that sort of a departure?
Marc:Was that a different world for you?
Marc:You know, what kind of pulled you into this?
Guest:I wanted to write something that affirmed for the city.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For the idea of the American city being this pluralistic multicultural phenomenon that not only do we have to master it, it's our future.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's urbanity.
Guest:It's the world's future.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We either got to master it and love it and triumph with it or we're shit out of luck.
Guest:The society is... And so I was a little bit taken aback that people watched The Wire, which was specifically about the parts of my city that got left behind.
Guest:It wasn't about Roland Park or Mount Washington or Federal Hill or the neighborhoods that are of the viable America.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:You know, the schizophrenia right now between the haves and have nots in this country has only been accelerated.
Guest:And so I was astonished to see people watch the show and go, man, Baltimore is a mess.
Guest:And why don't they just move?
Guest:Why don't they just leave?
Guest:And go where?
Guest:Camden, New Jersey?
Guest:Go where?
Guest:D.C.?
Guest:You think this is unique to Baltimore?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But there was that kind of callow response on the part of some people as if they were looking at something that was an aberration rather than the actual stratification of our culture.
Guest:So I thought, you know what?
Guest:The contempt that I'm hearing, the implied contempt from people who are living out in some gated community somewhere for the lives that other Americans are living...
Guest:It made me mad.
Guest:And where can you go, to be honest about an American city that has the same problems as Baltimore, which New Orleans clearly does, but nonetheless has its culture out in the street.
Guest:The culture is demonstrable.
Guest:They literally parade with it every Sunday.
Guest:And not only that, it's given these great cultural gifts to America.
Guest:I mean, jazz comes from about eight square blocks of...
Guest:back of town yeah and um i i i found i found that an argument for the city was actually necessary after the wire and that that was tremay was an opportunity and you saw and you you moved through the music too yeah the music that was the music became portal in
Guest:Certainly, we try to do stuff with comparable visual arts and culinary stuff, but the music was a metaphorical means of saying, this doesn't happen without people of color, without white people, without... Jazz only happens in this country.
Guest:It doesn't happen in West Africa.
Guest:It doesn't happen in Europe.
Guest:It happens from the...
Guest:you're a musician, you'll know this, from the pentatonic scale with a flatted third and a flatted seventh, which is a West African dynamic, and from instrumentation and musical logic that is distinctly European.
Guest:The reason that jazz bands probably got their kick
Guest:at the time they did was all the bands coming back from the spanish-american war right dumping their instruments all the military bands dumping their instruments when the boats hit the docks you know you could pick up everything from a sousaphone to a trombone yeah nothing yeah and and so all of a sudden you know literally within five yeah buddy bolden within three four years yeah
Guest:using you know uh was he a cornet was he was a cornet yeah he was a cornet player never recorded yeah everyone just says oh mythological being you should you should have heard buddy ball in play but you can't and then you get to uh to louis and from him right yeah yeah yeah yeah so i mean you know it it only can happen because we're the wonderful mutts we are right culturally and um and it's a triumph of our of our of our pluralism and so
Guest:It was a great metaphor for arguing for the city.
Marc:And with Generation Kill, because it seems that you cover very intensely and very powerfully these struggles.
Marc:And what brought you initially to deal with the military?
Guest:That one came from HBO.
Guest:HBO had optioned the...
Guest:First the Rolling Stone article and then the book by Evan Wright.
Guest:And Carrie Antholis, who had been the exec on the corner, on the miniseries side, sent it to me and said, what do you think?
Guest:You know anybody for this?
Guest:And he was trolling and I put the hook right in my mouth.
Guest:That book I thought was some of the most honest journalism to come out of the war.
Guest:And to me, it was a great critique of young men at war and what we ask of the modern military culture and the warrior culture that sustains it.
Guest:Because it's no longer the volunteer army.
Guest:It's not the army of Vietnam.
Guest:Those young men wanted to be there.
Guest:They had trained for it.
Guest:It was...
Guest:It was what they do.
Guest:The new army.
Guest:Yeah, it was what they do.
Guest:It is a volunteer army.
Guest:It's an absolute volunteer army.
Guest:And it's not like they're getting just people who can't, I can't find a job, so I got to go in the army.
Guest:That's the myth.
Guest:They were getting all kinds of people who wanted to be...
Guest:Basically, you know, a warrior class who seek this life and this structure and this commitment and this journey.
Guest:And, like, you know, our notion that, like, this is the fallout from a bad economy is a little indulgent on our part.
Guest:When you actually, like, look who those guys were.
Guest:Now, of course, that was a recon unit, a marine recon unit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then the other thing that you could play against that, and fairly so because it was the truth, which was they went with a very two-dimensional idea of what the war was and wasn't.
Guest:And then once you get on the ground and they started going towards Baghdad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Maybe it was a little more complicated.
Guest:There was an incredibly good tactical plan to capture Baghdad, and they did magnificently.
Guest:The strategic plan beyond that of what to do with it once you had it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Still unclear.
Guest:Still unclear.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Still unclear.
Guest:And other people got to that in different ways.
Guest:I mean, if you read Rick Atkinson's book, I mean, he famously quotes Petraeus as saying, you know, explain to me how this ends.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because a lot of people, a lot of people couldn't see it.
Guest:But to see it dawn on a lot of these very competent 21, 22, 23-year-old, I mean, those guys, the squad leaders, some of them 23 years old, calling in airstrikes on their own because they were that capable of small unit tactics.
Guest:Right.
Guest:These were not stupid guys, and they were absorbing what was happening before their eyes as they moved into Baghdad and as they acquired this society without sufficient numbers or credibility or authority to do anything but see it go bad.
Marc:Well, what happens now?
Marc:What are you working on?
Guest:Uh, I'm working on a piece that should be commercially viable for the first time in my life.
Guest:Uh, it's about porn.
Marc:And, and you say that like, I mean, what do you mean commercially?
Marc:You're doing fine.
Marc:What do you, now you want to see?
Guest:No, I mean, I mean, I could actually have a hit.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:The truth is I'll, I'll fuck it up.
Guest:It's, yeah, I'm making a show about, uh, the rise of the, of the sex industry, uh, after, uh, from 72 to 86.
Guest:When, when, uh,
Guest:In that window of community standards only applying, until the Miller decision in 73, there was this window that basically they drove a truck through, which was hardcore pornography became a legitimate industry.
Guest:And the sex industry exploded out of the shadows, and sort of ground zero for that was Times Square.
Guest:So it's about Times Square, and about when Times Square went to hell from 72 to about 86.
Marc:Did you read the Friedman book, The Tales of Times Square?
Marc:Yeah, I did.
Marc:I've read everything.
Marc:Well, that one essay, which they cover a little in Boogie Nights, the transition from the quarter machines to video, was from the booves to the home.
Marc:Marty Hodes.
Guest:Marty Hodes, yeah.
Guest:Pretty amazing.
Guest:Yeah, and that moment of...
Guest:of, oh my God, I just pulled $10,000 in in four days.
Guest:I got to carry it all to the bank in bags.
Guest:But yeah, I mean, what happened, to me, it's a story about capitalism.
Guest:And again, what we were talking about earlier, which is you think that capitalism is going to point the way to a better society, that the markets will show us the way untethered to any sort of moral imperative of what's right and what's wrong and who gets used and what happens to labor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:the people who were the labor for this stuff the you know particularly the women of course um you know the pioneers of this brave new industry uh were fairly well brutalized if not you know on camera uh if not the on-camera people um there was a whole sort of subculture that they were coming out of which was you know the pimps and the hookers and the massage parlors up and down 42nd street and
Guest:It's interesting when there's no overt industry and then suddenly there it is.
Guest:It's, you know, here it is.
Guest:It's the Wild West.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Write your own rules.
Guest:And that's what we're trying to capture.
Guest:So you hear me say that and you realize, my God, this guy's going to shoot a show about porn and, you know.
Guest:It's going to be the most unsexy thing in the world.
Guest:It would take David Simon to ruin a show about porn and make it unfun.
Marc:Well, I mean, but no, I think that's the right way to do it.
Marc:Because I don't think we look at it like that.
Marc:And I think it gets, you know, and obviously I've watched porn.
Marc:I understand porn.
Marc:And I'm sort of constantly amazed at the complete pornification of our culture.
Marc:Right.
Marc:To the point where, like...
Marc:I remember vaguely in the 80s that there was a commission put in place, some sort of moral miscommission to sort of limit this stuff.
Marc:And at some point, it was just like, nope, it's going to be everywhere.
Marc:And it's going to be accepted.
Marc:And it's going to completely change.
Guest:It's changed the demeanor of sex.
Guest:Of sex, of how we talk.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, it really did.
Guest:And of course, the people who were first in the door, which would have been like the mob in New York, which bankrolled a lot of the shit, the mafia.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And a lot of the people in sort of New York culture, there are not that many survivors.
Guest:There are some survivors, but man, the attrition rate was pretty heavy because it wasn't like anyone was looking out for anybody.
Marc:Well, the guys who were at the top making the money, they looked at the people who were in the movies and the women primarily as disposable, and there was plenty of them.
Guest:Well, actually, and they did that so badly that it all moved to the San Fernando.
Guest:It came out here because in some ways you needed even the backwash from the entertainment industry.
Guest:to handle even to handle even fuel it to handle even the the okay it it might be degrading but it doesn't have to be that degrading as what was happening in new york and we got camera guys out here and we got guys who can make room right we have there's plenty of willing people right but i mean like if you look at the sort of the mob's ability to actually run a functional business yeah these are guys who like you know you hand them a casino and they bust it out yeah yeah you know it's like they they when you here print money print your own money no i'd rather steal for myself you know
Guest:They, they're, they've always been short term guys.
Guest:So where do you take it up to?
Guest:Uh, just 86 when, um, when the same cops that were being paid off for 14 years kicked in the doors.
Guest:Um, and that was, you know, Koch and it was, it was the HIV outbreak and he needed to be egalitarian about what he was closing.
Guest:He needed to close the bath houses down in the village genuinely for, you know, they had a health crisis, but he did not want to be perceived, um, for various political reasons, you know, practically as being anti-gay.
Guest:And so he needed to kick in the doors of a lot of massage parlors and stuff up on 42nd Street, even though there wasn't an outbreak associated with the heterosexual sex industry.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:Sure, there was some stuff on the screen.
Marc:So you do the classic David Simon multi-tiered levels of the capitalist culture and political culture all the way down to the two on the bed.
Guest:And you try not to critique porn by making porn.
Guest:Right.
Guest:If we make it, if we film this thing and it's too prurient, then we're assholes.
Guest:And if we're too Puritan, if we're standing on high and judging people for the sake of judging them, we're too Puritan.
Marc:You're pretty good at balancing.
Guest:Yeah, this one you've got to land on the fence.
Guest:And who's involved, actor-wise, producer-wise?
Guest:James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal, two of our leads.
Guest:It's a very deep cast.
Guest:Oh, great.
Marc:And when are you going to run for office?
No.
Marc:When does that happen?
Marc:When do you realize?
Marc:That's the Faustian deal, David.
Guest:At that point, the ghost of my father really starts to spin.
Guest:I mean, that's too much Faust.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's way too much Faust.
Marc:All right.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, I'll hold you to that to some degree.
Marc:You have no desire.
Guest:No, no, no, no, no.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:Mencken said famously that reporters live the life of kings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I used to say that about myself when I was making union scale and working at the Baltimore Center.
Guest:I felt that way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, why would I descend, like running for city council?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Are you kidding me?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I have this, I have, I'm on, I'm on this, I'm on this exalted level.
Guest:I'm a city reporter.
Guest:I'm the truth.
Guest:I know it's bullshit, but it felt real to me.
Guest:I don't think it is bullshit.
Guest:It felt that way.
Guest:Okay, the paycheck's bigger and this weird sinecure at HBO lets me do TV, but the truth is I don't feel... I feel as if I've not taken so many steps away from my original intent in doing this kind of TV that I have to... Make the compromise where your soul would hurt.
Yeah.
Guest:Or where I woke up one day and said, oh my God, I have to go in the call room and I got to raise $10,000 in $4,000 increments.
Guest:I'm sorry, $100,000 in $4,000.
Guest:The other thing I'm working on right now is a show about Capitol Hill with Carl Bernstein and some other people.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:How's he doing?
Guest:He's Carl.
Guest:He's Carl.
Guest:Did you like Spotlight?
Guest:I loved Spotlight, yeah.
Guest:That's good, right?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I introduced the film in D.C.
Guest:and on a panel in D.C.
Guest:It's been a long time since someone captured the thrill of reporting.
Yeah.
Guest:Any film that has a minute and a half, maybe even two minutes, maybe even two and a half minutes, I really would love to time it with just guys looking through the Catholic directory, finding names and putting them in an Excel spreadsheet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When that's your action sequence, you got me.
Guest:You're in my wheelhouse.
Guest:What else do you watch?
Guest:Anything?
Guest:Sports.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:TV shows?
Marc:Movies.
Guest:Yeah, mostly movies.
Guest:I don't watch...
Guest:TV shows in real time when people say to me oh you should see this this was great you know then I'll go get all of them sure it's hard to make the time until somebody tells you yeah well right I mean there's just so much out there now that I need I need somebody in the business to say no they did something good here you should pay attention to this
Marc:Well, you keep doing good things, man.
Marc:It was great talking to you.
Marc:It was great.
Guest:Thanks for having me out here.
Guest:And here I am in Obama's chair.
Guest:And your wife's happy.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:My wife was very impressed to know I was doing this gig.
Marc:I can't believe that.
Guest:No, yeah.
Guest:Well, I hope we did good.
Guest:She'll let me know.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And I'll let you know.
Guest:All right.
Marc:That's a fucking solid guy, that David Simon.
Marc:Solid, smart, righteous in a good way.
Marc:Creates great shows.
Marc:It was a privilege to talk to him.
Marc:And again, go to the new WTFPod.com.
Marc:Enjoy.
Marc:I will be doing some...
Marc:weekly shows at the Tripany house here in LA where they have a parking lot.
Marc:It'll probably be like a $5 ticket that benefits the theater.
Marc:And you can watch me, uh, ramble through material with, uh, reasonable expectations and, and, uh, in a nice intimate space.
Marc:So go check the calendar for that stuff.
Marc:And what else?
Marc:Enjoy, enjoy.
Marc:I get play guitar.
Marc:I'm hurting my ears though.
Marc:I'm hurting my ears with the guitars.
Marc:I do not know how to mic properly.
Marc:Boomer lives!