Author Topic: Ed Burns: The Psychology Of The Wire  (Read 163 times)

Elano

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Ed Burns: The Psychology Of The Wire
« on: March 14, 2008, 07:24:41 AM »
When The Wire had its final curtain call on March 9th, many believed it signified the end of an era. No other show had gone through the depths of poverty, politics, education and the drug game like The Wire. Something as simple as a “cop show” became the dramatic reflection of our country and the dirt beneath Lady America’s fingernails. Five seasons, 60 episodes, characters coming and going with a cult following who wept when the final credits rolled.

All good things must come to an end. But The Wire was beyond good. It was phenomenal.

Ed Burns spent much of his 20 years in the Baltimore Police Department as a detective in the homicide unit. After that, he found himself as a teacher in the Baltimore public school system. These experiences, coupled with David Simon’s tenure as a journalist, were the blueprint for what many call the G.O.A.T. of television series.
But how do two older white men take their experiences on the other side of the dope game and deliver a story that is so compelling and so real? How was the character of Omar created? How could HBO sit and watch main characters get knocked off without a moment’s notice? The Sopranos had Tony while The Wire had Baltimore – a city being your main character?  That's unheard of, but much of The Wire's workings were unheard of for a television show. And that's when Ed Burns begins to speak...
And this is the Psychology of The Wire.

You and David Simon have a history together. What brought you two to the idea of creating an unconventional cop show where the lines between good and bad are severely blurred?
Ed Burns: It was basically David Simon’s (co-creator) idea of trying to go beyond the stereotypes by using a conventional vehicle, which we had a lot of knowledge of, and then to look on the other side like in the first season and say “You know, institutions are alike.” The police department and the drug world are amazingly alike. At the same time we tried to humanize the show by fleshing out characters that are normally backdrops or stereotypes. That’s what we set out to do and it was great fun.

How did you two coerce HBO into a show that could possibly be too difficult for the average person to follow because of the attention to conversation over the course of the series rather than utilizing flashbacks to lay background?
EB: Well, in the first season they were much like the mother hen. They looked over scripts and gave us lots of notes. They saw the logic and HBO is willing to take a chance on the unconventional. I think what happened with us was that we weren’t unconventional enough in the sense that we were labeled a “cop show,” and that didn’t really go with what HBO was thinking. It took HBO a while to realize that it’s not a cop show and it’s something different. It’s a show about a city. When that understanding came, the doors started opening and they understood what was going on. It was a gradual process for us too. It’s not like we had all five seasons in our head. What we did have, and primarily what David wanted to do, was to use what we had – our experiences, our understanding from reporting and police work in The Corner – to cast people in a new light. In a light of what they are pretty much like rather than the stereotypical light. And to show the struggles that they have are similar to the struggles of anybody.

Did you always know from the beginning that there would be no “star” of the show? Was that a conscious decision to make sure the wire isn’t built around an individual?
EB: Yes. It wasn’t going to be about Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West). McNulty was certainly one of the driving forces – if not the driving force – of the first season. Because of how McNulty’s character was crafted as we were giving out the police expertise, you don’t see McNulty much as a “street cop.” He sort of becomes a force of nature as other people were taking up the banner (of police work) and we had to show what they do and how they do it – the Bunks, the Freemans, the Kimas -  you have to follow their story arcs too. It’s not like The Sopranos where basically it’s all about Tony.

There’s a certain appreciation with The Wire where two guys who have been on the opposite side of the drug game could create such non biased and compelling stories. How much research and going into the lives of these people did it take to cultivate these stories?
EB: The thing about story is that you need a lot of time. There’s a basic human element that goes with all stories and it’s about staying in touch with that human element so you can work the stories and intertwine them. This means that you are also spending an awful lot of time with them. When you’re supposed to be thinking about your wife’s conversation at dinner, you are thinking about Wallace. You keep doing this and keep working at it because certain things just come to you. But what makes the really good stuff come is the amount of work you put into it. To get to the third season and see Avon (Wood Harris) and Stringer (Idris Elba) hugging each other after they each betrayed the other in their own way, we didn’t have that going in. That was an organic process that came with the story. And as we stayed with the story it became clear that this would be a powerful moment.

The Wire has taken risks (knocking off Bell mid-season, ridding itself of Avon Barksdale, killing Omar mid episode) that conventional shows would never attempt. What kind of flack did HBO give your team when these ideas were put across?
EB: HBO, by the third season, was definitely on board. The logic (in killing Stringer Bell) is that Stringer’s story came to an end.  And if you are servicing a story, you can’t punch a hole in the story and try to make this guy go on. All the forces were coming at him. He fought the good fight and he was the reformer on the criminal side. He was Ellis Carver’s (Seth Gilliam) opposite. And as Carver had to be put down, as we do in sort of the middle class way by being relieved of duty, in Stringer’s world they do it with a bullet. It made absolute sense to do this. To do anything else would have been betrayal of the story. It’s all about the story. If you dedicate it to a character, then that character takes predominance over the story and you lose the logic of what you are working on.

Were you wrestling with the idea of killing Omar’s character? Many people came to love Omar but others thought that his time was up.
EB: To follow the logic of the fourth season. You had to have Michael (Tristan Wilds) step up and Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) step up and fill the boots of Bubs (Andre Royo) and fill the boots of Omar (Michael K Williams). Omar had to step offstage. Dennis Lehane was the writer who really put forth the idea of not waiting until the ninth or the tenth episode to kill Omar. We did it in the eighth episode. We did it quick so the audience and Omar would have no sense of it. That’s the way these guys get killed. There’s no rhyme or reason to it a lot of times. You are just on the wrong corner at the wrong time and catch a bullet.

I’ve read somewhere that Omar wasn’t initially supposed to last as long in The Wire as he had. Did that grow organically to keep him around?
EB: What Omar gave us was the mythological character if you will. He was the one above the institutions. He was what we all wanted to be. He was free of the ties that bind. The ties that bind him down were of his own making and his own personal way of being. He’s always out there. There was no thought of doing him in until we were very close to the end. He was too compelling. His relationship with Bunk and the two worlds that you see in George Pelecanos’ episode in season three are the contrasts of how two guys who went to the same high school end up. Omar was Omar. He became one of these characters that you just knew how to write for.

He is indeed an amazing character. Was he based off an individual that you dealt with in the past?
EB: He’s not based off of one individual. Here’s a little bit of the police world for you. If you go and “work a neighborhood”, you need information and that’s the name of the game. Everything that the police are doing today in places like Baltimore is wrong. It’s not getting information. As you start to talk to people, the person who is most vulnerable is the drug stick up guy. Because he carries a gun, it’s that simple. When I was doing what I did - before the feds came in with the 15 year minimum mandatory for handgun possession if you’ve had two priors convictions - back when I was involved in the late '70s and early '80s when you got maybe two or three years for the same crime. It wasn’t like you had this incredible wall that you had to get over with the judges. So you would seek these guys out and lock them up for the pistol, you make a deal with them and you stick with your side of the deal. It’s amazing. These guys always stuck to their side of the deal.There was this thing where you could actually go to them with nothing hanging over them and they would help you out.  Because in a sense, the ones that I know, they despised their addictions. They despised the drug dealers. There was a hatred there. If they understood that you were going after bad guys, they had people that would give you information right out of the blue. They would just call you up.
One of the guys I met was very soft spoken. He was a ferocious stick-up guy but he had a very gentle way of being. You would never ever expect him to be one of these guys. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these guys, but if you are watching a drug corner and you see all the guys take off and maybe thirty seconds around the corner comes a guy. This was the type of guy you wouldn’t expect the corner boys to take flight from. He was just a very gentle and quiet guy. But he didn’t play. He was amazing in that gentleness and sincerity, which became the seeds to Omar. Then we sprinkled in guys that I knew to create the character. Michael K Williams did an unbelievable job portraying that character

I’m one of those guys that holds weekly Wire discussions when an episode wraps up. Much has been said about Kenard being the one that kills Omar and some have gone back to season three when Omar’s stickup girl Tosha got killed while attempting to take a stash house and citing that it was Kenard who was the main child yelling “I’m Omar…” Was this purposefully down to set the stage?
EB: After the fact. A lot of the stuff is after the fact.

But you guys did see this and tied it all together?
EB: Yeah. And Kenard (Thuliso Dingwall) was a great kid! When he read for his part, I wrote a little speech for him that never made it into the show. It was a little too much. But the kid read it, and nobody else every came close. There was no question that he was going to be Kenard.

With that being said, some of the actors in the show had no prior acting experience but they turned out to do so well. I know part of it is that they do speak the language of the streets and many come from there. But were you shocked by anyone individual’s performance on camera?
EB: Shocked in a good way. You take the chances with these guys in a sense that you are asking them to carry this thing that’s in your head and you have hopes for. You really want them to come across. I don’t know if I’ve ever told this story. The first scene Michael had on The Wire was the love scene where he kisses his boyfriend. And that was not scripted – the kiss. What was kind of interesting to me was that the prop master walked up to Mike and he gave him a sawed off shotgun. Mike looked at the shotgun like it was some foreign object and said to the prop master “How do you open something like this?” I said to myself “Oh my God, what have we done here?” So the prop master explains how to do it and Mike does it. The director says “Okay, let’s go!” You would have thought that when he stepped onto set that his father had given him a shotgun when he was a baby. He was that comfortable. That’s incredible. Or when you are talking with Jamie Hector (Marlo Stansfield), who is one of the most spiritual guys you will ever meet. And you are talking about some very heavy aspect of culture and society. And you say “Okay Jamie, let’s go!” And you watch him step up and become Marlo. He becomes Marlo without any noticeable change of facial structure. There’s no detecting the tiny movement of the muscles in the face. Yet this guy you were talking to is suddenly this unbelievable sociopath. Snoop (Felicia Pearson) obviously blew us away. They all stepped up on the job.

The Wire has done a great job of breaking down how and why America's various institutions have failed us my question is, How do we fix this shit?
EB: This might sound naïve. The only way you can fix this is to change the philosophical underpinnings of who we are as a people. What I mean by that is that in the 20th century, the human species took two gigantic steps. After World War II the idea that there was a white superiority was no longer valid. People of color were now equal. Now this didn’t happen everywhere but the idea was out there. Very shortly after that, in the 60s, the idea of women being equal became a basic. It’s often times denied. I think this century is going to be more profound. We have to decide if human beings, per se, are valued and have intrinsic value. Or are we going to hold to what we are holding to now that the productive human beings. And those who are not productive have no value and we can do without them when we want. It’s in that decision that we have to make up our mind .
When you have presidential candidate that’s talking about the idea of change. The change that I’m hoping that he’s talking about is in the way that we perceive things. It’s not fighting for health care or fighting for better schools or anything like that because none of that is going to happen until we make that decision. And if we make the right decision then the paradigms have been set up. The Republicans, the Democrats, the rich, the poor are going to shift. For democracies to work you need the unrest of the underclass. That has to happen. Since we demonize the underclass with drugs and criminality. Their voice has been muted. You don’t have that ferment that we had during the labor movement from like 1870 or the social ferment we had in the early '60s and '70s. We only have one side of the coin which is the wealthy with all their connections, pulling all of the strings, and there’s nothing to hold them in check because there’s no other side of the scales trying to balance them off. Not that it’s ever equal you know?
If you put a gun to a rich man’s head he’s going to give you some money. But if you don’t put a gun to him, he’s not going to come off of his money and that’s what Franklin Roosevelt figured out. He said “you know we have a chance of tumbling into a communist or socialist state we have to do something,” and that energy that came out of the new deal carried us well into the late '50s and early '60s. That was chipped away and changed. Then we went to this whole idea of globalization and the free market economy and we forgot where we came from. Ronald Reagan said it best. In 1981 he said we fought a war on poverty and we lost and we haven’t talked about poverty ever since, except for Hurricane Katrina. It’s been 20 years and we just ignored it. I think people will stand up because we have a history of people standing up. I think as things become more desperate and as George Bush who is our face of America as we look into that mirror and see his face and what that face has done. It’s created a certain ire that might be enough to shock us into doing the right thing for a change. That’s just me.
 

CRAFTY

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Re: Ed Burns: The Psychology Of The Wire
« Reply #1 on: March 15, 2008, 06:05:13 AM »
Are there any spoilers in this interview? I haven't watched Season 5 yet...
 

The Homey Darren

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Re: Ed Burns: The Psychology Of The Wire
« Reply #2 on: March 15, 2008, 03:23:04 PM »
Are there any spoilers in this interview? I haven't watched Season 5 yet...

Yeah.

Great interview man thanks. It kinda reinforced the Wire as better than The Sopranos in my mind. Definently on of HBO's best endeavors

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Re: Ed Burns: The Psychology Of The Wire
« Reply #3 on: March 22, 2008, 07:18:39 PM »
^^LMFAO  at The Wire being better than  The Sopranos.   I mean the Wire is sick,  it's a great show,  it's better than pretty much everyhing else but comparing it to Sopranos!?!?!?!  Sopranos will be remembered forever,  it's beyond legendary.  How The Godfather is looked a now is how The Sopranos will be looked at in 30 years,  hands down the best television series of all time without a close second.
 

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Re: Ed Burns: The Psychology Of The Wire
« Reply #4 on: March 22, 2008, 09:06:46 PM »
The Wire is better than the Sopranos, son. Sopranos was a great show but The Wire is better.
 

eS El Duque

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Re: Ed Burns: The Psychology Of The Wire
« Reply #5 on: March 23, 2008, 04:27:46 PM »
^^LMFAO  at The Wire being better than  The Sopranos.   I mean the Wire is sick,  it's a great show,  it's better than pretty much everyhing else but comparing it to Sopranos!?!?!?!  Sopranos will be remembered forever,  it's beyond legendary.  How The Godfather is looked a now is how The Sopranos will be looked at in 30 years,  hands down the best television series of all time without a close second.

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