Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (21 page)

Put more simply: “What I am demonstrating is that if it fails, it’s going to be
my
fault. And so that’s a guarantee of future employment for the people whose fault it isn’t.”

Whatever the underlying motive, there was a general feeling that the chaos could not be stopped, that to force Milch into more traditional, accountable ways of working would be to squash his creativity—and, not incidentally, the success of a highly rated show. “We were all his enablers. Enabling his bad behavior so we could get the show done,” Tinker said. “Mostly we didn’t know he was using again, we just thought he was crazy. But we would put up with his crazy behavior when we shouldn’t have, in order to keep the train moving down the tracks.”

Inevitably the process began to take its toll, first on Milch’s health—he suffered a series of serious heart complications requiring time off from the set—and eventually on his relationship with Bochco. As the show became a bigger and bigger success, Milch began to demand more and more money.

“It was a constant,” Bochco said. “Finally he came in one day and said, ‘I need more money,’ and I lost my temper. I said, ‘You’re already the highest-paid writer-producer in television. You’re making more in fees on this show than I am!’ And he went off on me and I went off on him and we were nose to nose, shrieking.”

That night, Bochco said, he was too upset by the fight to sleep. The next day, he called Milch into his office and said he couldn’t stand fighting with a friend and creative partner and had a solution: “I said, ‘Go back to your office, talk to your agent, and tell me everything you want. And I’ll give it to you. Whatever it is. So, think about it because you’re not going to hear the word
no
from me.’”

Milch left and, ten minutes later, was back. “I know what I want,” he said. Bochco readied a pen and paper to take down his demands. “He said, ‘Promise me that you’ll have lunch with me once a week.’ I said okay and he turned around and walked out. We never had another conversation about money ever again.”

Ultimately, though, Milch’s behavior began costing in the metrics that really mattered. “We went from half a million underbudget to a million and a half over,” said Tinker. Jimmy Smits, fed up with the strain of trying to prepare without a script, left the show. And the plots, inevitably, grew more and more incoherent. After the seventh season, Milch left the series. By that time, anyway, network TV had all but given up reserving a time slot for risky, prestigious adult fare, the equivalent of a movie studio’s Oscar-baiting Christmas releases. A few years later, that niche would have migrated to HBO. And so, naturally, had Milch.

• • •

C
arolyn Strauss claimed to have never heard the stories about David Milch when she and Chris Albrecht met him for lunch in early 2002. HBO was riding about as high as it ever would then, with
The Sopranos
having concluded its third season,
Six Feet Under
about to start its second,
The Wire
set to debut, and, with the exception of rumblings on a revived basic cable station called FX, little challenge anywhere on the dial.

For all his craziness, Milch had always played relatively well with suits. He could take notes, at least when he thought they made the work better. And he had been remarkably successful at pitching. While he was trying to make it as a literary writer, he said, editors had begun to sniff him out immediately. “I had such an immature relationship to that world, I’d just be out to steal the money. I didn’t like the people, I didn’t like any of that, so I enjoyed fucking them up a little bit. But by this time, I wanted to tell stories and they could sense that.” Besides, he said, he had a track record; we might not know what the hell he’s talking about, he imagined executives thinking, but “you throw a piece of meat in a room and after a period of time he comes out with a script.”

Even for those, such as Strauss and Albrecht, who had already weathered a David Simon statement of purpose, Milch’s pitch must have been a heady experience. The story was about Roman centurions, city cops, in the time of the apostle Paul, just after Christ’s death. That only began to suggest the underlying themes as Milch saw them.

As he later described it, he began with reference to the Christian existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, who said (in Milch’s paraphrase) that “an effective symbol partakes of the reality it represents.”

I was interested in the way that Christianity, which was originally based on the lived experience of Christ, came to be accepted more universally and how the symbol of the cross became the organizing principle, detached from the suffering body of Christ. And how that allowed a much more complicated and extensive social organization.

From there, he diverged into a piece of abstrusely metaphorical social biology:

I used the example of baboons: Baboons can only move in groups of forty-four because they have to be able to see the leader. If they can’t see the leader, it’s like the current has been turned off. The leader is in the center.

And then a profane retelling of Bible lore:

Paul, who was the first guy the city cops in Rome arrested, for proselytizing, had an epileptic seizure and a vision. Paul had murdered the first of the apostles, St. Stephen, because he said if Christ is truly the Messiah, then this is the end of days. If this ain’t the end of days, he’s not the Messiah and these people are apostates. So he went out and organized the stoning of St. Stephen. The Pharisees said, “This guy is a little fucking crazy. You should go to Damascus. You’ll be strong in Damascus.” And on the way to Damascus he had a seizure, experienced Christ. What he then began to say was, ‘You don’t have to be a Jew. You do not have to be circumcised. All you have to do is confess Christ crucified and believe in his symbol.’ And so the separation of the symbol from the lived experience, now Christianity spread everywhere.

It was, in other words, a classic Milchian rap: funny, lyrical, part lecture, part hustle; designed to both flatter and intimidate the listener; so packed with ideas that it veered toward incoherent; but also, if one could grope his or her way through the allusions, the discursions, and the puffery, containing much deep and fascinating thought. This was Milch’s all but constant mode, often verging on self-parody. Talking with him, you could find yourself playing a kind of game in which you asked the simplest possible question—one calling for a yes or a no or some fundamental declaration of fact—to see if he would still find the answer by launching into a discussion of the Tao or Kierkegaard or St. Paul. Most often, he did.

The rap, one suspected, was equally that of a former wunderkind—one who at age sixty would, within ten minutes of meeting, still show visitors the elaborate acknowledgment to himself in R. W. B. Lewis’s 1991 biography of the James family—and of a genuinely unique and fertile mind. It also had a practical function. Who, in the face of such erudite and celestial musings, would be vulgar enough to press the point on crass, earthbound matters like, say, budgets or deadlines—or, for that matter, what was actually going to
happen
in a proposed show?

In any event, it is both a credit to Strauss and Albrecht and an indication of the strangeness of the moment in TV history that their response to Milch’s Roman centurions was, “That’s the best pitch we’ve ever heard. Unfortunately, we already have a show set in Rome in development. Have you ever thought about doing a western?” And it’s a credit to Milch’s supple, idea-based sense of narrative that he was able to say, “No problem.” If the Roman show was to be about civilization organizing around a common symbol—the cross—then why not substitute an equally potent “agreed-upon lie”: gold. Thus,
Deadwood
was born.

• • •

I
t was no surprise that HBO’s next act should be the western. After all, just as the auteur films of the sixties and seventies had done, the TV revolution began by inverting classic American narratives—the outlaw saga, the family drama, the cop show, and so on. In its violent, muddy revision of the ur-American myth of the frontier,
Deadwood
followed squarely in the tradition of Sam Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
, Robert Altman’s
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
, and others.

As if to underline the point, filming took place at the Melody Ranch Motion Picture Studio, an ersatz pioneer town in the Santa Clarita Valley, once owned by Gene Autry, where such figures as Roy Rogers, Tom Mix, Gary Cooper, and the cast of
Gunsmoke
had applied themselves toward inventing the myth of the American West. The set would be soaked down every day before shooting, to create the appropriately primordial slurry of mud, blood, and manure from which
Deadwood
imagined civilization lurching spasmodically to life. The pilot was directed by the great western director Walter Hill.

One of Milch’s great themes was the loss of religious ritual as the central organizing principle of the modern world—and what flows into that vacuum to replace it. Without the Church in any of its myriad manifestations, he seemed to feel, we are so many children in the wilderness, oyster spat drifting in search of something to attach to. This both was the subject of
Deadwood—
as the muddy community groped fitfully toward some kind of organization—and, to his mind, what explained the moment in history that allowed the show to exist, at the expense of what had once been the dominant mode of popular entertainment: film.

“The whole idea of going out to a movie was really a secularized version of going to church. And there was a certain expectation you brought to the movies which has taken all this time to be demystified,” he said. (Or perhaps still hadn’t been: David Chase still liked to invoke the idea of the movie theater as “cathedral,” long after multiplexes had become more like parking garages, at best.)

In Deadwood, South Dakota, outside the “churches” of the law and country, in Indian territory, the most potent religious symbol in 1876 was yellow and glittery and found in surrounding streams. “The agreement to believe in a common symbol of value,” as Milch put it, “is really a society trying to find a way to organize itself in some way other than, say, hunting or killing.”

The man who understood that fact most of all, the man at
Deadwood
’s
center, was the most “anti” of all HBO’s antiheroes—Al Swearengen, the greedy, profane, grasping, murderous, all but prehistoric proprietor of the Gem saloon and whorehouse.

“While I agree with you that gold is worth $20 an ounce, my gift is not for prospecting, because I don’t like water freezing my nuts,” Swearengen said in the vulgarized, bordering-on-Elizabethan voice that closely mimicked his creator’s. “But I will bring you women, and to the extent that we agree on the value of the gold, then a woman sucking your cock or doing one or another thing is worth gold in the amount of X, Y, or Z.”

Milch added, “And that’s how the town of Deadwood”—and, by extension, society—“is born.”

Swearengen was played by Ian McShane with a ferocity that must have shocked an older generation of British viewers who knew the actor as a kindly, crime-solving country antiques dealer on the long-running series
Lovejoy
. (Equal cognitive dissonance would have greeted Americans had the role gone to Milch’s reported first choice, Ed O’Neill, best known as Al Bundy on
Married . . . with Children.
)

Pitted against Swearengen—and those elements of Swearengen in himself—was Timothy Olyphant’s Seth Bullock, a former Montana marshal pulled reluctantly into the same role in
Deadwood
. Bullock was precisely the kind of character—the taciturn, duty-bound, unflinching lawman—who would have automatically been the hero of the films or TV shows previously made at Melody Ranch. Yet in keeping with the rules of the new TV, it was almost possible to forget he existed.

Swearengen and Bullock, like many of
Deadwood
’s characters, were historical figures into which Milch breathed his particular brand of life. So was Wild Bill Hickok, who arrived in Deadwood in the show’s pilot, the very picture of ruined, worn-out American celebrity. Even those familiar with the historical record—and, by now, the tendencies of HBO series—were shocked to see him gunned down at a poker table in the fourth episode, the death as sudden, brutish, and inglorious as Omar Little’s would be in
The Wire
a few years later.

Around the central characters was arrayed a panoply of grotesque and damaged souls: the East Coast girl, cosseted in privilege and a morphine habit, until perversely blossoming in Deadwood’s primordial soup; the epileptic preacher; the shattered doctor, clinging to his sense of duty; the whores sold as little girls and now doing the same to others, an entire citizenry of lost, orphaned, and brutalized children—including Swearengen himself. All, despite the lofty rhetoric about Gold, God, and other capitalized Big Ideas, were caught up in the same affairs that consumed the characters in
The Sopranos
, or
Six Feet Under
, or
Rescue Me
:
death and love, parenthood and power, loss and longing, and, above all, the search—usually frustrated—for some form of human connection, down in the muck.

• • •

W
ith the reduced pace of twelve episodes instead of twenty-two, the limits of shooting on the ranch, and a sober Milch (he claimed to have been fully clean since 1999), the
Deadwood
set wasn’t as frantic and insane as
NYPD Blue
’s had been. But the process was no less bizarre. Once again, cast and crew would gather, many days, with little sense of what they would be shooting. The director Ed Bianchi showed up for his first assignment on
Deadwood
and found himself wandering the sets for two days. On the third, he had lunch with Milch, who asked how things were going. “I said, “To tell you the truth, I’m a little anxious. I’ve been here for two days now and I haven’t seen a script.’ He said, ‘Oh, I can’t help you with that.’ That was his little joke.” Nevertheless, Bianchi—who also directed multiple episodes of
The Wire
—agreed to sign on as a producer for season two. “He does write scripts late, but what makes it okay is that he’ll sit down with you and tell you what the story you’re going to do is. Then he writes that same story. He knows what he’s going to do, he just hasn’t put it on paper yet. He’s totally functional.”