the wire

Started by pete, February 14, 2007, 01:40:51 AM

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AntiDumbFrogQuestion

CigsAndRedVines:
Television has had a creative renaissance in the last decade with a lot of other filmmakers of your generation working in the medium. Do you have any favorite TV shows? And do you have any interest in working in other formats (television or mini-series perhaps)?

P.T. Anderson:
I've day-dreamed a lot about making something long form, sure. It would be a thrill and challenge to tackle something so spread out. It's usually at some point in writing when you think, "what if i just didn't try and contain this story and really let it loose....." thoughts drift to mini-series, long form HBO stuff, etc.......but it's usually followed by a brain-freeze and "naaaah." Maybe someday. TV shows? old Larry Sanders, Curb Your Enthusiasm. anything on TCM. I miss Twin Peaks. I still need to watch The Wire, which (i know, i know) everyone says is the greatest thing ever.


Proof that even the Greats need to be told what-for now and then

Sleepless

Life on the Set of The Wire
How Bunk, Kima, Freamon, and McNulty blew off steam in Baltimore.

This article is adapted from Brett Martin's Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos to Mad Men to Breaking Bad.

By the time the fourth season of The Wire rolled around, it had already become a cocktail party cliché to say that the show operated like "a Dickens novel." In many ways, this was totally apt, considering the show's serialized nature, its liberal political conscience, and its sprawling canvas. But David Simon found his literary reference point centuries earlier—centuries, even, before Shakespeare. The Wire, he said, was essentially a Greek tragedy.

"The ancients valued tragedy, not merely for what it told them about the world but for what it told them about themselves," he said. "Almost the entire diaspora of American television and film manages to eschew that genuine catharsis, which is what tragedy is explicitly intended to channel. We don't tolerate tragedy. We mock it. We undervalue it. We go for the laughs, the sex, the violence. We exult the individual over his fate, time and time and time again."

In his Baltimore version of Olympus, the roles of gods were played by the unthinking forces of modern capitalism. And any mortal with the hubris to stand up for reform of any kind was, in classical style, ineluctably, implacably, pushed back down, if not violently rubbed out altogether.

"That was just us stealing from a much more ancient tradition that's been so ignored, it felt utterly fresh and utterly improbable," he said. "Nobody had encountered it as a consistent theme in American drama because it's not the kind of drama that brings the most eyeballs." It was possible in this time and place because, in the new pay cable model, eyeballs were no longer the most important thing.

Yet The Wire was also inescapably modern; its characters operated based on real, idiosyncratic psychologies, refusing to be pushed around like figures on a board. Sometimes they surprised even their creators. One passionate argument in the writers' room was about a major moment in Season 1's next-to-last episode, "Cleaning Up": the execution of the young drug slinger Wallace by the tougher, only slightly older thug Bodie Broadus. Just before shooting his friend, Bodie hesitates, gun shaking. Ed Burns, the co-creator of the series, raised an objection: The Bodie we had seen to that point, he argued, was the very incarnation of a street monster, a young person so damaged and inured to violence by the culture of the drug game that he would never hesitate to pull the trigger, even on a friend.

"It didn't go with the character. Bodie was a borderline psychopath almost. I was like, 'We're leading the audience down this path, and now this guy is backing off?' That's fucked up. That's bullshit," he said, remembering his feelings on the scene.

In future seasons, though, Broadus would emerge as the drug game's answer to the rogue detective Jimmy McNulty: a soldier who tries to make his own way and ends up ground down by the system. His death would be unexpectedly poignant. All of that, Burns granted, was set up by his unexpected moment of humanity in Season 1.

"What it did was it allowed for a wonderful dynamic that went on for four seasons. It brought out a lot of comedy that psychopaths don't have," he said. "It was a learning curve for me. Originally I just didn't like it because you don't pull punches like that with the audience. Now, when I think about it, I think, 'This is cool. This is something that allowed for another dimension.' It worked. It worked fine."

***

Such debates were only one aspect of what became, as The Wire's scope grew to encompass more and more of Baltimore, an intimate, complicated, ever-evolving dance between the demands of reality and of fiction. And if that creative tension was a constant theme in the writers' room, it was also an everyday reality for the actors who brought the show's characters to life.

Whether it was born of institutional transparency or overwhelmed disorganization, the Baltimore Police Department extended an open-door policy to The Wire's actors, many of whom were brought down for educational ride-alongs. Even for those who regarded themselves as reasonably savvy about urban realities, it was a shocking experience.

"I'd grown up in housing projects, but it wasn't blocks of boarded-up houses and naked babies in the arms of 25-pound heroin addicts," said Seth Gilliam, who played Sgt. Ellis Carver. He and Domenick Lombardozzi (Herc) were assigned to a ride-along with a notoriously gung-ho narcotics officer who went by the nickname Super Boy. On one ride they found themselves crouching in the back seat during a firefight. "I'm thinking, 'My head isn't covered! My head isn't covered! Am I going to feel the bullet when it hits me?'" he remembered.

Wendell Pierce, who played Bunk Moreland, and John Doman, the formidable Major Bill Rawls, and Dominic West (McNulty) were in another group. "We went to shootings and stabbings. There was a guy with a knife still in him. Another guy who got shot, and the cop was still trying to take him downtown for questioning," Doman said. "All of us were like, 'This is unbelievable.'"

Far from most of their homes and families in New York, Los Angeles, or London, the cast spent a lot of time hanging out together. At least two social groups developed. The first centered on the townhouse that Clarke Peters, who played Lester Freamon, had bought after Season 1. Peters was an erudite, 50-year-old native New Yorker. He had left the United States as a teenager for Paris, where there were still the remnants of a great black American expat community. Within weeks of arriving, he'd met James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and the blues pianist Memphis Slim, among others. When the musical Hair had come to France, he'd worked as one of the production's costume designers and eventually joined the cast. He'd settled in London, acting mostly in the theater, but he had history with David Simon, having played the avuncular junkie Fat Curt in Simon's first HBO series, The Corner.

In Baltimore, Peters' house became a kind of groovy bohemian salon for an older set of cast and crew members that included Doman, Jim True-Frost (who played Roland Pryzbylewski), and others. Several ended up renting rooms in the house. Peters, a strict vegetarian, would cook elaborate group meals. There was a piano and impromptu jam sessions fueled by red wine and pot smoke. For those seized by the after-hours impulse to watercolor, there were canvases on easels set up in the basement. Among its habitués, the house was called "the Academy."

Meanwhile, a rowdier scene existed among the younger cast members—untethered, far from home, and often in need of blowing off steam. This social group was centered on the Block, the stretch of downtown East Baltimore Street populated by a cluster of side-by-side strip clubs (and, in semi-peaceful détente across the street, BPD's downtown headquarters). The cast of The Wire became legendary visitors to the Block, with a core group including West, Gilliam, Lombardozzi, Pierce, Andre Royo (Bubbles), J.D. Williams (Bodie), and Sonja Sohn (Kima)—holding her own among the boys in one of many on- and off-screen parallels.

"We finished shooting at like 1 o'clock and, you know, normal places close at 2, so we'd go down to the Block, just to feel the energy," said Royo. "The owners of the clubs would come out; the girls would come out. It was like we were heroes. The local heroes." At a cast and crew softball game, Royo hired a limousine and a team of strippers to act as cheerleaders.

West, predictably, attracted his share of female attention, professional and otherwise. "A man could live off his leftovers," Pierce would say. All were champion drinkers, and things had a way of getting out of hand. Gilliam took especially poorly to being approached while enjoying himself off duty.

"He could be an angry drunk in a minute," Royo said. "If somebody would be like, 'Oh, you those guys from The Wire,' Seth would be like, 'I don't know what happened to manners, but we were talking.' And these were guys who weren't used to being talked to like that. Who had already humbled themselves to come over." Yelling and pushing would often ensue, though usually not more, thanks to omnipresent bouncers. "Sonja would always have her eye on one of the bouncers and could give him a look. She's a sexy little chick, so they'd make sure she was comfortable."

Gilliam and Lombardozzi, the show's onscreen Bert and Ernie, shared a large apartment in Fell's Point. They hosted epic evenings of beer and video games, including Madden Football tournaments pitting "Good Guys vs. Bad Guys," cops against the drug dealers. The games would run until 5 or 6 a.m., when half the players would have to depart for an 8 a.m. call. (Peters, the refined bohemian, articulated the cast's generation gap after hearing Lombardozzi brag about a particular Madden move he'd pulled off the night before: "He's going, 'Yeah, man, what you do is push x, x, y, x, y, y ...' I'm thinking, 'What the fuck? This is how they spend their free time?'")

The pent-up energy that fueled all this revelry had a darker side. For many of the actors, particularly those working long night shoots on grim streets, production was both physically and spiritually exhausting. Royo found it especially difficult to play the sharp-eyed junkie, Bubbles. Royo's father had owned a Harlem clothing store, and he had taken special pride in his appearance, showing up for school in wing tips and double-breasted suits. He knew that the sight of him in filthy junkie gear caused his parents particular heartache—not just on sartorial grounds but because it was the type of role black actors were all too accustomed to finding as their only options. At his audition, in front of Simon and producers Clark Johnson, and Robert Colesberry, Royo voiced his concerns that Bubbles not be just another clichéd black junkie. "They just looked at me and were like, 'Oh, you don't know how we get down.'"

Still, Bubbles may have been more than a cliché, but it was a difficult character to play day after day. "My character's head space was not a pleasant one," Royo said. "I'd look at Idris? Nothing but bitches outside his trailer. Dom West? Nothing but bitches. Sonja? Dudes and bitches. Me? I'd have junkies out there. They fell in love with Bubbles. I'd go into my trailer and clean my shit off and come out and they'd look at me like, 'You're not one of us. Fuck you.' And then when I had the Bubbles garb back on, it'd be, 'Hey! What's up? Welcome back!' That's a head trip, man. That shit eats at you."

By the third season, he said, "I was drinking. I was depressed. I'd look at scripts like, 'What am I doing today? Getting high or pushing that fucking cart?'"

He was not alone. In the isolated hothouse of Baltimore, immersed in the world of the streets, the cast of The Wire showed a bizarre tendency to mirror its onscreen characters in ways that took a toll on its members' outside lives: Lance Reddick, who played the ramrod-straight Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, tormented by McNulty's lack of discipline, had a similarly testy relationship with West, who would fool around and try to make Reddick crack up during his camera takes. Gilliam and Lombardozzi, much like Herc and Carver, would spend the bulk of Seasons 2 and 3 exiled to the periphery of the action, stewing on stakeout in second-unit production and eventually lobbying to be released from their contracts.

Michael K. Williams, whose Omar was far and away the series' most popular figure (a GQ writer quipped that asking viewers their favorite character was "like asking their favorite member of Adele"), was so carried away by sudden fame that he spent nearly all his newfound money on jeans, sneakers, and partying. At the very height of his popularity, Williams found himself evicted from the Brooklyn public housing project he'd grown up in, for nonpayment. He and Royo were only two of many Wire veterans who said they sought help for substance abuse once the experience was over. This is not to mention those non-actor cast members brought from the real Baltimore into the fake one—among them Little Melvin Williams, the inspiration for Avon Barksdale, out of prison on parole and cast as a wise, battle-scarred deacon.

***

To be an actor on a series like The Wire was to live in a permanent state of anxiety, one's mortality (and unemployment) forever lurking around the next plot twist. On another show, death might just be the beginning of a long, fruitful run of ghost and dream sequences. But most actors in this Golden Age of TV understood that one of the period's signature tropes—that, as in life, anybody could check out at any time—had significant implications for their job security.

The situation turned actors into forensic critics, deep-reading every set of new pages for the slightest hint of impending doom. "Every time you read the script, you're looking for a hint: If too much of your story is being told, 'Oh shit, they're building it up. I'm gonna go,'" said Andre Royo. He and Michael K. Williams decided between themselves that one of their two characters, either Omar or Bubbles, was bound to buy it before the series ended. (Williams won that grim competition.) After a few seasons, Royo even developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome. He went to Simon and asked whether keeping Bubbles alive wasn't a disservice to the story's realism, given the usual life span of a junkie snitch.

"David looked at me and was like, 'Shut the fuck up,'" he said. "'I don't know what's going to happen, but I do know there has to be some hope or people aren't going to get out of bed in the morning.'"

The Wire actors' anxieties may have been compounded by the fact that communication with actors wasn't always one of Simon's showrunning skills. "David had a problem about telling people how they were gonna die. He'd never just say, 'Look, you're gonna die.' There was always this weird energy," said Royo. Larry Gilliard Jr., who played D'Angelo Barksdale had been infuriated by how he learned about his early departure in Season 2: Simon had run into him on set and said, "You're going to love the stuff I wrote for you this episode." "Great!" said Gilliard. "I mean, it's probably your last episode ...," said Simon.

The lesson went apparently unlearned by the end of Season 3. By all accounts, the producers honestly meant to sit down and talk with Idris Elba about the timing and manner of Stringer Bell's death. Instead, that meeting never happened and he learned about it by reading the script—and subsequently hitting the roof. Making things worse was the script direction that had Omar standing over Bell's body and peeing on it, apparently a real Baltimore gang tradition. Elba headed to set and started telling fellow actors he wouldn't shoot the scene, enlisting some in his cause.

"He was pissed, man. And I got it, because, in effect, we were firing him," said George Pelecanos, the crime novelist who wrote the episode. "David and I went to his trailer and tried to talk him down. We said, 'This is the end of the character. We can't keep his story going; it's not logical. And this is exactly the way he would probably go out.'" Elba fixated on the urination. Omar wouldn't be peeing on him, Simon and Pelecanos said; he'd be peeing on a fictional character. "Not on my character," Elba told them.

Simon and Pelecanos could have invoked a favorite David Chase line when faced with similar protests: "Whoever said it was your character?" Instead, they cajoled and apologized until Elba relented. The death scene was shot at an empty Baltimore warehouse and wrapped at 4 a.m. On his way down a dark street to his car, Pelecanos heard pounding footsteps behind him and turned, cringing. It was Elba. "I just want to shake your hand," he told the writer. "It's just business."
He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

03

that was a really beautiful article.
i have been procrastinating on watching this series for a long time.
its very different than what i thought it was going to be. its very different than anything ive ever watched actually.
i didnt expect it to be this subtle. but im almost done and this article shed some really nice light on different things.
thanks for posting that.

Mel

HBO's 'The Wire' Will Be Remastered, Rebroadcast
via Variety

"The Wire" fans can start saying their favorite expletives: Creator David Simon's beloved drama about the gangs, police and other factions that make Baltimore tick is getting a facelift before a marathon viewing.

HBO has confirmed that is in the process of re-mastering the series that ran from 2002 to 2008 and starred Dominic West, Wendell Pierce, Idris Elba, Michael K. Williams and others. HBO had planned a September launch for the marathon, but the episodes are still in review. However, the cat got out of the bag in August when a viewer noticed a promo ad with the wrong premiere date for the marathon. The marathon's start date is still to be determined.

Binge-watching marathons of favorite programs are increasingly becoming popular promotional tools for networks. FXX is currently seeing ratings success with its non-stop Every.Simpsons.Ever. marathon. TVGN is trying a similar, but less intense, strategy by airing episodes of the original "Beverly Hills, 90210."
Simple mind - simple pleasures...

Drenk

A year ago I watched The Wire and didn't like it. It was like watching ants, I wasn't invested, I just didn't get it. I was watching it wrong.

I didn't enjoy it, but the show stated in my mind.

So I watched Season 4, again, a month ago, and loved it. Watched it in five days. They weren't ants anymore. They were humans treated like ants. Humans in a big machine, a town. It was tragic.

I'm watching season 3, now. Even if I didn't like the show, I knew that season 3 and 4 were the best, in my opinion, some scenes were...something...

This one, for example, between Omar and the Bunk, that I want to share.

Ascension.

Mel

Article is a bit too sensational for my taste, nerveless:

It's Official: HBO Is Remastering 'The Wire' in the Wrong Aspect Ratio
via Criticwire

Update: David Simon has posted clips showing "The Wire" in its original and remastered versions. See end of post.

Back in September, when a bunch of websites prematurely ran with the news that HBO was running a marathon of a remastered version of "The Wire," there was lots of speculation about what that might mean, particularly when it came to dealing with the show's 4:3 aspect ratio in the widescreen era. Well, now we've got our answer. The remastered "The Wire" will be made available via HBO Go on December 26, with one full season a day airing on HBO Signature, and the whole thing will be available for digital purchase on January 5. And according to HBO:

The entire series has been beautifully re-mastered in 16x9 Full-Frame HD from more than 8,000 reels of original 35mm camera negative, allowing for a tighter fit on widescreen TVs and computer/tablet screens. The original negatives were scanned, edited, dust-busted and color-corrected with great care and attention taken to stay true to the look and feel of the original Standard-Definition 4x3 version.

Stripping away the PR-speak, that means HBO is reframing the entire show so that idiots won't complain that it doesn't fill up their flatscreens. They can spin staying "true to the look and feel" of the show, but David Simon and his crew made a deliberate artistic decision to stick with 4:3 even as other shows were going widescreen — even abandoning the process of "future-proofing" after the initial season. As director of photography David Insley explained:

"The reason the show has stayed 4x3 is because David Simon thinks that 4x3 feels more like real life and real television and not like a movie.... When the show started 2001 / 2002 they framed it for 16 x 9 as a way of future-proofing. Then a couple of seasons ago, right before Season 4 began shooting, there was a big discussion about it and after much discussion — David, Nina, Joe Chappelle, the Producers, the DPs — and we discussed what should be the style of the show. David made the decision that we would stay with 4x3."

According to a post on his blog, creator David Simon is on board with the remastering, which will undoubtedly give the show a significant boost in public profile. But it's still not "The Wire" as it was broadcast the first time around: As Simon writes, you can optimize the image for one aspect ratio and "protect" for another, but you can't do both. "I'm satisfied what while this new version of 'The Wire' is not, in some specific ways, the film we first made," he says, "it has sufficient merit to exist as an alternate version."

Perhaps, though it's unlikely, the Blu-rays due out next year will allow viewers to choose their own version of "The Wire," though this might be a good time to snap up the old DVDs, which feature the show exactly as it aired. After all, users of FX's Simpsons World were supposed to be able to view "The Simpsons" in its original aspect ratio, a promise that has yet to be fulfilled, months after the site's initial launch. But let's not pretend this is anything other than the modern equivalent of colorization or superfluous surround-sound remixes, undoing deliberate artistic choices so that audiences don't have to adjust their frame of reference — which is a substantial part of what "The Wire" spent five seasons fighting against.

Marlo
Update: Simon has now added clips to his blog showing scenes in their original and remastered versions. True to the forthright way he's handling the situation, he's posted one pair where he feels the remastering improves the scene, and one where he feels more substantial alteration was in order.

In a sequence from "The Wire's" second season, Simon writes that "the dockworkers are all that much more vulnerable, and that much more isolated by the death of their leader when we have the ability to go wider in that rare crane shot."

Note: The first set of clips contains a major Season 2 spoiler.

Original:



Remastered:



But in a scene from the pilot, Simon says, "the new aspect ratio's ability to acquire more of the world actually detracts from the intention of the scene and the composition of the shot. For that reason, we elected in the new version to go tighter on the key two-shot of Bey and D'Angelo in order to maintain some of the previous composition, albeit while coming closer to our backlit characters than the scene requires."

Original widescreen:



Altered widescreen:



Simon allows this is "an arguable trade-off," but it's great that he's giving viewers the tools to make an informed decision.
Simple mind - simple pleasures...

max from fearless

The Wire in HD by David Simon
03 Dec 2014 - Spoilers in the Clips

This tale begins and ends with a fellow named Bob Colesberry, who taught me as much as he could about filmmaking in the three or four years I was privileged to work with him. To those who knew Bob, it will provoke warm memories to say that he was not a language guy; he understood image, and story, and the delicate way in which those elements should meet.

Bob spent a too-short lifetime on film sets, working beside real filmmakers – Scorsese, Bertolucci, Pakula, Levinson, Ang Lee – helping to shepherd the ideas of many great directors and eschewing the limelight altogether for the chance. But, hey, if you don't believe me about how substantial his resume was, go to imdb right now and trace the arc of his career. That he ended up tethered to some ex-police reporter in Baltimore was pure forbearance on his part; for my part, I can just say I got very lucky.

It is no exaggeration that Bob had to explain "crossing the line" to me a dozen times, often twice in the same day, before my brain could grasp a concept that first-year film students everywhere take for granted. If you go to the fourth episode of the first season of The Wire, and watch the camerawork on that long scene with Freamon and McNulty in the bar, you'll be a bystander to the moment when the linear word-brain that I drag to set every day was finally allowed a few rays of cinematic light, courtesy of a patient mentor.

"See what happens when we cross over and everything flips?" he explained for the thirteenth time. "If you see the move happen, you aren't disoriented, but if we were to cut that moment and then suddenly be on the other side..."

He paused, looked at me. Nothing. Dead crickets.

"So...the dialogue that they're saying when we cross the line and reverse on them – those words –we can't cut those. You good with that?"

"Yeah, I get it now."

"Right. Then we're good."

Huh. The next day, I sauntered up to Bob at the video monitors and, in my best deadpan, asked him yet again to explain crossing the line. He looked on me sadly as a terminal case, until I started laughing. No, I had finally learned something about the camera and the credit was his. I just couldn't resist pulling the man's coat one more time.

In telling that story on myself, I'm trying to make clear that while I might have learned to put film in the can in a basic way before the marriage to Mr. Colesberry, I had no claim to anything remotely resembling a film auteur. It was Bob who created the visual template for The Corner and The Wire both, and having died suddenly after the latter drama's second season, it is Bob who is remembered wistfully every time we begin to construct the visuals for some fresh narrative world. He would have reveled in Generation Kill, and knowing what I do about the visual palate that New Orleans offers the world, I am unsure that Bob Colesberry could have ever been pried from that city had he gone down there for Treme.

As devoted as he was to imagery and story, language was always a lesser currency in Bob's life; he often made his arguments elliptically, curling in sentence-fragment circles until he got to where he needed to go. You had to lean in and listen a little harder, but it was always worthwhile and he was usually correct when he got to his point. Once, at a TCA panel on The Wire, Bob answered a reporter's question in vague terms and at length. To lighten the moment, I tossed off a joke: "Now you can see why Bob's in command of the visuals." It was teasing and steeped in affection, but I regretted the remark as soon as I uttered it. Bob's contributions to the storytelling were profound, and though he laughed it off, I had been heedless. His claim on The Wire and what it was trying to do was genuine and elemental; for years, before and after his death, I wanted that moment back to exalt my friend and colleague.

So when HBO sent out some promo ads about a conversion of The Wire to HD and a 16:9 ratio a few months ago, I reacted not merely as David Simon, showrunner and ink-stained scribbler, but as David Simon, the medium for Robert Colesberry, professional filmmaker. WWBD. What would Bob do?

*          *          *

Well, for one thing, he would make sure to be included in the process.

Nina Noble and I were told a year ago that HBO wanted to experiment with taking The Wire, filmed in standard definition and a 4:3 ratio, to the new industry standards. We endorsed the effort, but after we last spoke to folks on the production side, we had expected to be shown some work recast in high definition and wider screen and to begin discussions at that point. Instead, we heard nothing until on-air promos for The Wire in HD began to be broadcast and packaging material for a fresh release of the drama was forwarded to us in Yonkers, where we are shooting our current HBO project.

No offense was taken, particularly when the production people explained that the transfer to HD had been laborious and ornate, and it was simply assumed that we were too busy with current production to dive into the process in detail. And, too, there was a further assumption at HBO that as a transfer to HD could provide a fresh audience for the drama, there was no real disincentive to an HD transfer of The Wire on any terms; if it could be done, they reasoned, it should be done.

And yet, I still had Bob Colesberry in my ear. Moreover, Bob's history with HD and a 16:9 ratio in regard to The Wire was a tortured one. His intentions, the limitations imposed on our production, and his resulting template for the drama were known to me, if not to the folks presently struggling with a retroactive transfer to HD and widescreen.

In fact, Bob had asked before filming The Wire pilot in late 2001 for a widescreen aspect ratio. He correctly saw television screens growing wider and 16:9 ratio becoming industry standard, and coming from the feature world, it was his inclination to be as filmic as possible. But, to be honest, The Wire was at its inception a bit of shoestring affair and expectations for the drama at HBO were certainly modest. Filming in letter-box was more expensive at the time, and we were told, despite Bob's earnest appeals, that we should shoot the pilot and the ensuing season in 4:3.

At which point, Bob set about to work with 4:3 as the given. And while we were filming in 35mm and could have ostensibly "protected" ourselves by adopting wider shot composition in the event of some future change of heart by HBO, the problem with doing so is obvious: If you compose a shot for a wider 16:9 screen, then you are, by definition, failing to optimize the composition of the 4:3 image. Choose to serve one construct and at times you must impair the other.

Because we knew the show would be broadcast in 4:3, Bob chose to maximize the storytelling within that construct. As full wide shots in 4:3 rendered protagonists smaller, they couldn't be sustained for quite as long as in a feature film, but neither did we go running too quickly to close-ups as a consequence. Instead, mid-shots became an essential weapon for Bob, and on those rare occasions when he was obliged to leave the set, he would remind me to ensure that the director covered scenes with mid-sized shots that allowed us to effectively keep the story in the wider world, and to resist playing too much of the story in close shots.

Similarly, Bob further embraced the 4:3 limitation by favoring gentle camera movements and a combination of track shots and hand-held work, implying a documentarian construct. If we weren't going to be panoramic and omniscient in 4:3, then we were going to approach scenes with a camera that was intelligent and observant, but intimate. Crane shots didn't often help, and anticipating a movement or a line of dialogue often revealed the filmmaking artifice. Better to have the camera react and acquire, coming late on a line now and then. Better to have the camera in the flow of a housing-project courtyard or squad room, calling less attention to itself as it nonetheless acquired the tale.

In the beginning, we tried to protect for letterbox, but by the end of the second season, our eyes were focused on the story that could be told using 4:3, and we composed our shots to maximize a film style that suggested not the vistas of feature cinematography, but the capture and delicacy of documentarian camerawork. We got fancy at points, and whatever rules we had, we broke them now and again; sometimes the results were a delight, sometimes less so. But by and large, Bob had shaped a template that worked for the dystopian universe of The Wire, a world in which the environment was formidable and constricting, and the field of vision for so many of our characters was limited and even contradictory.

Bob Colesberry died during surgery while we were prepping season three of the drama. A short time later, HBO came to us with news that the world was going to HD and 16:9, as Bob had anticipated. We could, if we wanted, film the remaining seasons of  The Wire in HD and widescreen. But at that point a collective decision then was made to complete the project using the template that we had honed, the construct that we felt we had used to good effect to make the story feel more stolen than shaped, and to imply a more journalistic rendering of Baltimore than a filmic one.

Just as important, we had conceived of The Wire as a single story that could stand on its own across the five seasons. To deliver the first two seasons in one template and then to switch-up and provide the remaining seasons in another format would undercut our purpose tremendously, simply by calling attention to the manipulation of the form itself. The whole story would become less real, and more obviously, a film that was suddenly being delivered in an altered aesthetic state. And story, to us, is more important than aesthetics.

We stayed put and honored what we had already created. As I believe Bob would have, at that late point, stayed put.

*          *         *

And now comes HBO with the opportunity to deliver the story to a new audience.

To their great credit, once we alerted HBO production executives to our absolute interest in the matter, they halted the fall HD release and allowed us to engage in detail. And over the past several months, looking at some of what the widescreen format offered, three things became entirely clear: First, there were many scenes in which the shot composition is not impaired by the transfer to 16:9, and there are a notable number of scenes that acquire real benefit from playing wide. An example of a scene that benefits would be this one, from the final episode of season two, when an apostolic semicircle of longshoremen forms around the body of Frank Sobotka:



Fine as far as it goes, but the dockworkers are all that much more vulnerable, and that much more isolated by the death of their leader when we have the ability to go wider in that rare crane shot:



But there are other scenes, composed for 4:3, that lose some of their purpose and power, to be sure. An early example that caught my eye is a scene from the pilot episode, carefully composed by Bob, in which Wee Bey delivers to D'Angelo a homily on established Barksdale crew tactics. "Don't talk in the car," D'Angelo reluctantly offers to Wee Bey, who stands below a neon sign that declares, "burgers" while D'Angelo, less certain in his standing and performance within the gang, stands beneath a neon label of "chicken."

That shot composition was purposed, and clever, and it works better in the 4:3 version than when the screen is suddenly widened to pick up additional neon to the left of Bey:



In such a case, the new aspect ratio's ability to acquire more of the world actually detracts from the intention of the scene and the composition of the shot. For that reason, we elected in the new version to go tighter on the key two-shot of Bey and D'Angelo in order to maintain some of the previous composition, albeit while coming closer to our backlit characters than the scene requires:



It is, indeed, an arguable trade-off, but one that reveals the cost of taking something made in one construct and recasting it for another format. And this scene isn't unique; there are a good number of similar losses in the transfer, as could be expected.

More fundamentally, there were still, upon our review, a good hundred or so scenes in which the widening revealed sync problems with actors who would otherwise have remained offscreen, or even the presence of crew or film equipment. These scenes, still evident in the version that HBO originally intended to broadcast several months ago, required redress. The high-definition transfer also made things such as Bubbles' dental work, or certain computer-generated images vulnerable; other stuff held up pretty well in the transfer.

This is no poor reflection on HBO's initial efforts. In traversing 60 hours of film, the HBO production team had done a metric ton of work painting out C-stands and production assistants, as well as solving a good many sync problems. They felt they had protected sufficiently to air the drama in HD and widescreen several months ago. However, for myself and Nina – examining even a small portion of the whole and finding light flares and sync issues that could be better corrected – we were confirmed in our need to slow the process and take a last, careful look.

Unfortunately, as we have spent the fall in production for HBO, there was no chance we could find time enough to attend to a complete review of the entire series. That fell to a film editor in whom we place great trust and who knows the The Wire well from his service to it over the years. Matthew Booras took the notes and concerns of the surviving filmmakers into an editing suite and began making hard decisions about what we might live with, what we might improve, and which choice did the least violence to the story when a scene became vulnerable. Narrowing the workload for Nina and myself, he made it possible for us to focus on the handful of essential problems in every episode. The hard work here on our part should actually be credited to him.

At HBO, Rosalie Camarda managed the synthesis of our late notes with the film edit, and long before Matthew weighed in on the remaining problems, Laurel Warbrick capably performed the lion's share of the transfer, going scene by scene through the cuts and resizing and painting away problems throughout. The two then worked with Matthew, Nina and myself on the remaining issues, and we are grateful for their patience and commitment to the process.

At the last, I'm satisfied what while this new version of The Wire is not, in some specific ways, the film we first made, it has sufficient merit to exist as an alternate version. There are scenes that clearly improve in HD and in the widescreen format. But there are things that are not improved. And even with our best resizing, touchups and maneuver, there are some things that are simply not as good. That's the inevitability: This new version, after all, exists in an aspect ratio that simply wasn't intended or serviced by the filmmakers when the camera was rolling and the shot was framed.

Still, being equally honest here, there can be no denying that an ever-greater portion of the television audience has HD widescreen televisions staring at them from across the living room, and that they feel notably oppressed if all of their entertainments do not advantage themselves of the new hardware. It vexes them in the same way that many with color television sets were long ago bothered by the anachronism of black-and-white films, even carefully conceived black-and-white films. For them, The Wire seems frustrating or inaccessible – even more so than we intended it. And, hey, we are always in it to tell people a story, first and foremost. If a new format brings a few more thirsty critters to the water's edge, then so be it.

Personally, I'm going to choose to believe that Bob Colesberry would forgive this trespass on what he built, and that he, too, would be more delighted at the notion of more folks seeing his film than distressed at the imprecisions and compromises required. If there is an afterlife, though, I may hear a good deal about this later. And in consideration of that possibility, I'm going to ask anyone who enjoys this new version of The Wire to join me in sending five or ten or twenty dollars to the following address:

The Robert F. Colesberry Scholarship

Tisch School For The Arts

New York University

721 Broadway, 12th Floor

New York, N.Y. 10003

As I've made clear, I've messed with a Bob Colesberry template here, and the man, when passionate, spoke in long coils, building slowly and inexorably to a summation. And yes, eternity is a long fucking time. So if you've long wanted The Wire in HD, unass a bit of coin for a scholarship that honors Bob and supports future filmmakers in his name. You'll be doing me a small, karmic solid.

David Simon

Baltimore, Md.