S1 Ep6: David Simon, bringing "Homicide A Year On The Killing Streets" to the screen.

[00:00:15] Welcome to Homicide Life On The Set, a podcast about the Emmy Award-winning television show Homicide Life On The Street with myself Chris Carr and Susan Ingram. We are joined by author and journalist David Simon, author of Homicide A Year On The Killing Streets.

[00:00:38] David shares with us the journey of writing the book and then its later adaptation. On today's show, we are joined by David Simon and David was the writer of the book, Homicide Year On The Killing Street that led to the TV show Homicide Life On The Street.

[00:01:21] And there's a whole interesting process that we dive into today about how that came to be. Susan, how are you doing? Hey, good. This was really a terrific interview I thought. But he gave such, it was like a lesson in the progression of how a piece of art,

[00:01:42] how a book from a writer who wasn't a book writer initially becomes a book writer. And then the process of it being turned into teleplays and his progression as a writer who knew nothing about television is mentored through the process by many people,

[00:02:04] obviously starting with Tom Fontana. And now it's this prolific, incredibly successful television writer and producer. But there was so much insight into that, starting with even how the book came about, the anecdote about how the book came about.

[00:02:21] And then the whole developmental process. It was, I just think it was a terrific interview for anybody, but also for anybody who is thinking of making that leap from journalism or is a journalist and wants to be a television writer.

[00:02:40] Of course, he stumbled into like probably the best, one of the best, most creative and not just creative, but open to mentoring people team that probably exists. Yeah, indeed, indeed. No, honestly, I thought it was a really deeply fascinating interview

[00:03:00] and I hope those listening out there feel the same. And I'm very grateful for David for taking the time to chat with us. Thanks to him. He was so candid and open and humble

[00:03:10] about the process and grateful about the process that homicide life on the street was for him. Yeah, yeah. It comes across very strongly there. Well, without further ado, let's get into the

[00:03:21] episode and this is David Simon. David, welcome to the podcast. It's wonderful to have you on here. Oh, I'm glad to be here. I'm glad you're doing it. You obviously need no introduction. So we're going to, we're just going to go straight in.

[00:03:54] I would love to know a bit about your time at the Baltimore Sun before joining the show Homicide Life on the Street and you're on the beat for about 13 years. And obviously it then led to your excellent book, Homicide Year on the Killing Street. So I was

[00:04:07] wondering if you could just talk to us a little bit about like being at the Baltimore Sun and how that book came to be? Yeah, I famously never got promoted. That was the joke about

[00:04:17] me at the Baltimore Sun. I came on and one of the first things they would do as an entry-level thing with reporters was to put you on the night police beat. But you were effectively covering

[00:04:28] crime and then you would run the districts and you would, you would, you were basically reactive to whatever was happening between the hours of four and 12, you know, five nights a week. I did that for a couple years. I got promoted in one small sense,

[00:04:41] which was they found that I could write cleanly and fast in that newspaper style. And so they started to give me rewrite shifts on the weekends. They would make me the late rewrite which paid like a 5% bump off of scale. And other people would dictate from phone booths

[00:04:58] to you and you would put it together when news was breaking. But other than that, I was completely reactive and it taught me to write fast and clean. But it also taught me the city in that

[00:05:08] you know, I was a suburban white kid from Montgomery County, Maryland, you know, from the DC suburbs. And suddenly I was thrust into a city with a lot of crime and it was a majority black city. And

[00:05:19] you know, in some respects it grew me up. It showed me a world that was culturally, socially, politically different than my own. Voices were different than my own, not just folks in the

[00:05:30] street and people with black and brown skin, but Irish cops, you know, Italian cops. The world of a Western District death sergeant was as distant from my own background as somebody, you know,

[00:05:42] living in the 1200 block of North Thuram Street. So I got to learn the city in ways that many people do not. And I got to appreciate voices other than my own. Yeah, then at some point I never got promoted. After they give you that beat of police,

[00:05:59] after you show you can do that for a while, then they say, oh, well now we'll send you to a county bureau for two years or three years, you'll go cover Howard County or some suburb. And then if

[00:06:08] you do that well enough, hey, well, maybe we'll take you back downtown and you'll cover a more dignified beat like medicine or, you know, what are you interested in courts or maybe federal court or they'd send you to Annapolis to cover the state legislature. I just stayed

[00:06:24] covering crime. I took to it so well. And of course, they needed me around the rewrite desk that they never quite promoted me. And the mistake there was that I just got more and more interested

[00:06:34] in the details of the beat. And eventually I figured out I'm going to write a book about death investigation if they'll let me into the homicide unit. And they did. They somehow did. Right. How much of a leap was that from your journalism writing to writing nonfiction?

[00:06:52] Well, it was all nonfiction, I hope. Or they shouldn't have had me as a reporter. But there was a structural leap. It happened in stages in that I started writing magazine articles for the Sunday magazine. And I wrote three or four narrative magazine articles about

[00:07:07] issues that interested me or stories that had come to pass. And those were effectively the equivalent of chapters in what, you know, once you teach yourself to write a magazine article,

[00:07:18] you're at least on the road to maybe writing a book. If you think about it, you're not writing that formulative newspaper style of a police said yesterday story. You're now trying to tell a

[00:07:31] story with the beginning of middle and an end. You do that 20 times in a row in sequence and you might have a narrative account that you could call a book. So that started. I started writing magazine articles. And then I mean, the critical moment for me was Christmas 1985.

[00:07:48] I wrote a very light, if I do say so myself, deft column about Christmas in the homicide unit. I went up there with a bottle of liquor mostly to thank them for answering the phone

[00:08:01] in the middle of the night when you're on the four to 12 shifts and they've got a double murder and you're trying to get information and your deadlines coming up. So you had to you had to finesse those guys a little bit. They were always, you know, they preferred

[00:08:15] to answer their own questions rather than to leave it to the PIO, to the press officer, because they could hold back certain details that were critical, you know, the caliber of the murder weapon things that only the murderer would know that if they held them,

[00:08:29] particularly in an indoor murder where, you know, they controlled the access to the crime scene, they had more information going into interrogation should they ever develop a suspect. So you would barter with them and you would, okay, I don't need the caliber, but where was he shot,

[00:08:43] you know, specifically? And they would try to hold that back, you know, but you would play these games. And so it was always a finesse dynamic with the homicide detective. So I went

[00:08:53] up this Christmas and I carried a bottle of Zegrums up there and some mixer and we sat having drinks and I stayed in the unit after that until the early morning hours. And they caught

[00:09:04] like some minor stuff, but mostly it was a quiet Christmas. And I wrote it about Christmas in the homicide unit. You can imagine the snidely, ironical about that. And it came out, it cracked them up

[00:09:16] because they didn't realize I was going to do it. I just, I told them at the end of the night, you know, don't be surprised if I write something up about you guys on Christmas.

[00:09:24] Then I did it. But while I was up there, a detective named Bill Lansey, the late and wonderful Bill Lansey, a very charming man, older detective, he said something. We were telling old stories. He said, man, if anyone ever got up here and took

[00:09:38] down the shit that we say and do, they'd have a goddamn book. And he said that that was 85 Christmas. A little while after that in 87, we went on strike. The newspaper went on strike.

[00:09:51] And I was pretty pissed off. The newspaper turned out to be as we suspected, incredibly profitable at that time. And yet to fatten us up for a Wall Street buy, the people who

[00:10:02] were there were cutting our medical and they were trying to show, diminish the power of the union and diminish the cost of the newsroom because they were fattening us up for to be purchased by a

[00:10:14] newspaper court. And we were. So I came back from the strike looking, I don't want to give up the job. I mean, it was, I'd been hired at a college to be a very notable newspaper in America that

[00:10:25] I would call the sun maybe top 15 in the country in terms of quality newspaper. But I wasn't really feeling like working for these people dead on the way I'd been doing.

[00:10:35] And so in the contract, it said, you know, if you have a book project, if you have a special project, you can ask for after a certain number of years, you could ask for a leave of absence.

[00:10:43] So I asked the police department if they'd let me into the homicide unit to write Bill Lanzi's book. And they said yes. And I took the leave of absence. That was 1988, January 1st.

[00:10:53] And when he said that, was it a light bulb moment at the time? Or was it a light bulb moment two years later when you were ready to jump? It was something I put in my back pocket because

[00:11:03] I thought, wow, if I, how would they, I wonder how they'd let me in. And if I could I write that up? But I didn't do it right away. And I was working on a project, a very long term project for the

[00:11:15] paper about a famous narcotics trafficker in Baltimore, little Melvin, little Melvin Williams. Sure. That ran in January, January 87. So I had to get that out of the way and

[00:11:25] had to clear the decks. And I think I needed to also sell the book. Once I got in, I needed to sell the book to a publisher and get money to live on. So it took a little time to do all the

[00:11:36] logistics, but incredibly they let me in. Wow. I don't know if they would have done it a year later. I don't know if they did it a year earlier, but that window, the police commissioner at

[00:11:45] the time who considered my proposal was named Ed Tillman. And he'd been a homicide detective earlier in his career. And he, you know, when people asked him why he did it, because the people in the homicide unit, the commanders there were opposed to my joining,

[00:11:58] or joining to my following Moran. But Ed Tillman said, well, he told this to Dick Lanham, who was the CID commander. And I think secretly was a little bit delighted that the book was ongoing. I later became friendly with Lanham. Lanham said that Tillman told him being

[00:12:16] a homicide detective was the best years of his career. I think he was very innocent about it. I think he would like to have read the book. I hope he did. The fact is that by the time,

[00:12:27] I think the first drafts went to the department, I think he was very ill. He developed a brain tumor. He died shortly thereafter. So I never had a conversation with Ed Tillman directly about

[00:12:36] what he thought about the manuscript or. Good legacy for him though. Well, I don't know. I mean, when we did the wire, we named the middle school. We named the middle school where the kids went in season four. We named it for Ed Tillman. Oh, nice.

[00:12:52] I thought that was my way of saying thank you. And at the detective level, was there a level of trust? Because you covered them so often or just not really because you were journalist anyway?

[00:13:03] Not right away. I was at first, they were wary of me at first. And I was also a curiosity. You know, one of the things you do as a reporter in that instance is you make yourself

[00:13:12] into a little bit of the fool. You don't act like you know everything because you don't. But also you're willing to be the butt of the joke. And I found this to be incredibly effective on any story, but particularly where you're embedding with somebody and you're

[00:13:28] trying to get their trust is act like you're the idiot. Act like they have to explain everything to you and then they will. That is not unique to me when I talk to other reporters who would

[00:13:41] achieve journalistic penetration of other cohorts. I was talking years later to Evan Wright who wrote Generation Kill, which we made into a mini series. He was embedded with the Marines in the Second Gulf War with recon Marines and one of the lead units into Baghdad.

[00:14:01] And he endeared himself to them by being a complete idiot. And he was anything but a complete idiot. But he understood it's not my job to know everything now or to pretend that I do.

[00:14:14] And you know, they went from distrust in a matter of, you know, on his arrival to we don't give a shit. You're along for the ride and as long as you're willing to ride with us, we're not going

[00:14:24] to take the pen out of your hand and we're not going to hide. And that's what happened. Over time most of the detectives just ceased to be wary. I became furniture in some respects.

[00:14:35] And in other respects, I became what one of them Terry McLaureny, a man that I loved dearly, the philosopher king of the unit, the profane philosopher king of the homicide unit. He referred

[00:14:46] to me as he said, we were a bunch of bored house cats. And you he meant it in the sense of, you know, we're all sitting around the office with not enough to do or too much to do some

[00:14:56] days. And they threw a little mechanical mouse in. And he said, here play with this for a while. And after a while, we forgot you were writing a book. We just thought, look at this

[00:15:07] idiot today. I had so there were so many practical jokes. I was subject to a lot of teasing. And I didn't mind it at all. With every day I became more part of the furniture. Did any

[00:15:20] moments from that time really so stay with you even to this day? Oh, yeah, plenty of them. That year was like a, I mean, first of all, I learned to drink that year in a way that

[00:15:30] I never drank before since in life. I mean, you know, I mean, that was the only time I approached that moment where the next day drinking some hair of the dog became practical or elemental.

[00:15:44] Because because not only was I, you know, it's like, if I'm not following this guy around, I mean, they could all take days off, you know, oh, shit, I'm hung over. I'm not,

[00:15:52] but I would be out the next night with a different squad, you know, and, you know, not every night, but there were a lot of nights where it was like early relief came in. It's

[00:16:01] 1230. Let's go to Cabinos for an hour and a half, two hours. And, and then I'd be back at Cabinos the next night with another squad. And it was like, holy crap, you know, my liver must be three

[00:16:11] times its normal size. So there was that. And that led to a lot of hijinks and comedy. I remember various moments of just wonder at being in the room for certain moments, certain dramatic moments or certain comic moments. And, you know, I'm thinking, well,

[00:16:29] that's something I didn't expect to have in my book. That's, that's a moment that I couldn't have conjured in a million years. I wouldn't, I wouldn't have understood it had it been explained

[00:16:38] to me out of the room. That could be their interrogation room or on the street or, you know, in somebody's living room, moments of great delicacy, moments of, you know, Ryebald ridiculousness. It was a, it was a wonderful year. And there were

[00:16:52] moments of where I felt much the interloper and almost ashamed to be violating people's privacy. You know, I dressed the part. I looked like a detective, cut my hair, took the earring out of my ear or the suits from Macy's. I was probably the worst dress detective.

[00:17:09] Yeah, they were proud of the fact that they made it to plain clothes for me as a reporter. I never wore suits or ties as a police reporter, but all of a sudden I had to. Right.

[00:17:16] But there were other moments where I thought, thank God I was here because I now have something that nobody understood in the way that I'm going to make them understand it. It was, I was very proud of the year of reporting.

[00:17:27] Anytime during that time, did it occur to you that it would end up on screen or did that happen later when the publisher wanted to sell it the rights?

[00:17:36] Yeah, I'll tell you a story about that, which is I was offered a sum for the book as an advance. And then I was offered a little more by another publisher and my agent at the time

[00:17:50] who was not my agent for long after that. I mean, I turned out I had signed with, for lack of a better person, lack of a better description, the wrong person. But he said very casually, he said, well, this guy's giving you more money up front,

[00:18:04] but they want to have the dramatic rights with theatricals. I said, what are theatrical? Like I'm a reporter from Baltimore. I'm not thinking about TV shows. And he said, well, if it ever sells, if there was kinds of movie or anything,

[00:18:18] you would still have the rights to that. And I didn't think anything of that. I was almost ready to take the additional money. Both publishers, I got on phone conversations with them and the first one, the one who had offered more money

[00:18:29] but wanted the movie rights, told me about how he had his last couple of books. And I can remember they were like, wow, we just published this book by Bill Cosby. I thought, you're not talking to me about the kind of books that this is.

[00:18:42] This is a narrative. This is a year in the life. This is like one of the Tracy Kitter books, a process book. This is delicate. And he was just talking about stuff that I could sell. I'm breaking that for the break.

[00:18:53] I mean at the time. I was like, you can't sell Bill Cosby's or whatever in 1988 or 1986. Come on. So the other guy, John Sterling, for how it Mifflin got on and said, this is, I liked your reference to ball four, which was a process book about baseball.

[00:19:11] It was one of the seminal books of my childhood helped me understand journalism. He read what I wrote and he said, yeah, this is like one of the Kitter books or Soul of a New Machine was the one I think I referenced in my proposal.

[00:19:22] He understood what I was trying to do and I had a really dynamic conversation with John. And so I signed with John and somehow luckily kept the theatrical rights because I didn't think for a minute that anyone's going to buy this book and make it into anything.

[00:19:36] I wasn't of that world. I was a newspaper man. And that was it. So no, the answer is absolutely not. And then later when it happened, I was like, huh, okay. Yeah, go make a TV show. Maybe I'll sell more books. That's good.

[00:19:52] When you have actors, can we put their picture on the paperback? That'd be great. Thanks. I had no sense of, and I saw he had no sense of ever going to work and tell him. I was going to be a newspaper reporter for the rest of my life.

[00:20:05] And how long between that, the book, the publisher purchasing it to Barry Levinson finding it or it being sent to, you sent it to Barry. Is that what I heard? How did that happen? Yeah, well, at first they sent it to about 15 different filmmakers, but not Barry.

[00:20:23] Or no, they did. I'm sorry, they gave me a list of the 10 that they were sending it to. And I looked at them and I said, well, they all sound great. And that's great. Hey, this is my one contribution. What about Barry Levinson? He's from Baltimore.

[00:20:38] That's it. I'm sitting on the rewrite desk with Baltimore Sun talking to some guy in LA in the literary department of CAA. What about Barry? Oh, you want Barry on the list? Okay,

[00:20:49] we'll send it to Barry. So they did. So they sent it to Barry. And I will tell you there was one initial response that was pretty hilarious, which was, again, sitting on the Metro desk

[00:21:00] one night. I think I was doing night police reporting. And the phone rings and the rewrite man, David Eltland picks up, says, Simon, line two. I said, who is it? He goes, I don't know.

[00:21:10] So I pick up the phone. It's Bill Friedkin. And he says, I'm Bill Friedkin. I said, Bill Friedkin? And he goes, I directed French Connection and To Live and Die in LA. And I immediately said, Alvarez, I'm in the middle of a police round. Stop fucking with me.

[00:21:26] Because I thought it was one of my coworkers jerking my chain. Oh my God. Because they knew it. Like the book was, I was trying to sell it in Hollywood. I said, Alvarez, stop fucking with me. Because I thought it was him. I thought it was like,

[00:21:38] two days earlier that I had been having a conversation about how it wasn't selling, how the book wasn't selling in LA. Nobody was offering. So here's Bill Friedkin. At some point he went, no, this is Bill Friedkin. And is this David Simon? Friedkin had called

[00:21:52] the newspaper in the middle of the night. Like I'm supposed to be working, like how did he know I was working at like 10 30 at night? I guess it was, you know, 730 in LA. Because he's Bill Friedkin. Because he's Bill Friedkin. But like, at some point,

[00:22:06] he convinced me that he really had directed the French Connection and he had read, he had finished reading the book. And so for about 45 minutes, I thought, Bill Friedkin is going to buy my book and it's the next French Connection and I'm

[00:22:18] going to be standing next to Bill Friedkin. And this is so cool. And the call concluded with him saying, well, anyway, I really enjoyed the read. Thank you very much. And he hung up the phone and I like waited for him to call the agency or, you know,

[00:22:33] never heard from him again. He called just with a book review. He just liked the book and he said, I'm going to call this guy at the Baltimore Sun. That happened. And so I never

[00:22:44] talked to him again until years later. I was making trommé. It was years after homicide even. And I was down in LA and I was in a building down in New Orleans where all the

[00:22:53] production crews kind of work out from and he was down there to make a movie and I was working on trommé and we passed in the stairwell. And I said, and I recognized him. I said,

[00:23:03] oh, you're Bill Friedkin. I said, I'm David Simon. You read my book and I told him the whole story. I said, you know, I couldn't believe I thought that conversation was going

[00:23:12] to end with you saying, well, I'm going to option it. It's going to be a movie because I know it wouldn't have made a good movie. Yeah. He said, but it made a good TV show,

[00:23:19] right? I was, no, it's all fine. That actually happened. Oh, I talked to Bill Friedkin twice in my life once was that call on the Metrodesk and the next day was after long after everything. But then yeah, then a Gail Mutriks in Barry Levinson's

[00:23:36] in his shop had read the book and what I didn't know is Levinson was engaged with NBC to make a television show and they had passed on the idea of doing diner as a continuing series.

[00:23:48] So they said, what else have you gotten at that moment? I think Gail delivered her assessment of the book and then Barry read it and they sold that. Yeah. And the thing that's amazing to me is first of all, you know, you've heard this

[00:24:01] million times about fucking brilliant book. I mean, it's just absolutely brilliant. But also that it went so quickly from publication to screen. I mean, maybe that's not quick, but to me, it seems two years to take that incredibly dense and detailed material of your

[00:24:18] book and to pull out all the stories obviously and pull them all out all seven seasons. They started pulling out what they wanted for the pilot for the first season. Yeah. I mean, it was picking and choosing into maybe season three and four. I think they still had

[00:24:34] material in the book. Yeah. But they also created a lot of their own and it was an amalgam of everybody's idea of what the show could or should be and the book was only one element. I mean,

[00:24:46] you know, all that Jesuit stuff that they gave to Pendleton. That was all Tom and Yash. I think the development of stronger female characters had to do with Julie and Anya.

[00:25:00] I mean, I think in some respects it was an open tablet for a lot of different writers and their ideas. And I think the book was spinal if you want to, you know, I think it was sort of central

[00:25:12] to the spine of the drama. But at times I don't think it was entirely primary. Sure. There were elements that I saw introduced even in the first season that had nothing to do with

[00:25:25] Baltimore homicide unit that I had covered. And I was comfortable letting it go. I understood it was its own creation very early. The one problem I had, it's probably my problem as much as theirs

[00:25:36] was I was nonfiction boy. I was the guy who they would send me the scripts and I would occasionally give a note and say, you know, it can't work that way. And they would

[00:25:48] they would either take the note or they wouldn't. But I think I was always an irritant because I was, you know, I was interfering with purely creative imagery that they were enjoying. So yeah, in that process is they're developing it. They have your book you've passed it over,

[00:26:03] which I would assume at first might have been kind of scary, but maybe not to bury. But you pass it over on and before you're brought in to write Bob Gunn, was there any collaboration? Did they often come back to you? Not really. I mean, I would say

[00:26:18] they sent me the scripts. They had the courtesy of sending me the scripts and I gave notes, I gave careful notes on some particularly on the pilot and then I guess the next two or three.

[00:26:29] I mean, I remember the process as being sometimes it was helpful. Sometimes it led a guy to a better moment if they liked the note. And sometimes I was just throwing a hand grenade without knowing it. I mean, I remember one time I was trying to describe the

[00:26:48] Wadcutter bullets, the unique Wadcower bullets in the Lena Lucas murder that ballistic lead them to charge the suspect. And it's those were reloads that were, you know, reloads are like they're what they sound like. They're like reloaded bullets,

[00:27:03] we reloaded slugs that are like dumped back into casings for really cheap ammo. Sometimes they the projectile was facing backwards, that's firing a slug, you know, it basically was a very important telltale in that case. But it was very hard to describe

[00:27:18] what a bullet like that would look like. So I basically asked a guy for a couple of reloads. And he said, yeah, and he handed him to me and I mailed them to Paul Antonosia.

[00:27:29] And Paul Antonosia was like, who is this nut in Baltimore who's sending me bullets through the mail? You know, but I was just trying to help. That was true. That happened. But that helped. I mean, he's sort of right. Yeah, he was like, okay, Wadcutters now I know

[00:27:43] what a Wadcutter looks like. That's great. I love it. But there were other moments where I think it was just a hand grenade. But I hope it's helpful. But like, it was an episode earlier on where

[00:27:53] Kaye Howard has a dream that she could she found a gun in her suspects. In the person she suspected her person of interests bedroom or living I forget where she had the dream. She

[00:28:06] so they go and they kick in the door and do a search and seizure. And I had to very politely write a note that said, what a detective has a dream about is not probable cause and you need

[00:28:18] probable cause legal cause to write a search warrant. You have to have enough justification that you have to explain what it is in order to get a judge to say you can kick in the

[00:28:28] guy's door. And the fact that you had a dream last night isn't going to cut it. And so you know, sometimes it really was a little bit of sorry, nonfiction boy is here to

[00:28:37] oppress you, you know, ruin your moment. But that's that's about the extent that I was basically just a little bit of a bullshit meter and that's it. And I didn't try to get beyond that.

[00:28:50] And I mean, I should back it up and say that before they hired at Palo Tenozio, Gail Mitzvix asked me if I wanted to try the right pilot. And I said, and I think correctly,

[00:29:00] no, I don't know what I'm doing. I've never written a I've never written, you know, anything like a teleplay before and certainly haven't, you know, written any drama. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to paste that.

[00:29:11] And I said, no outright. And I said, you know what, get back to me when there's five or six or seven episodes and I can see what a template for this show is and how it works and what

[00:29:21] the characters are and what universe you've created. And then maybe I'll try my shot, take my shot. And that was Bob Gunn. So you were still at the sun when you wrote Bob Gunn, right? You were not staff yet till like season four or five, right?

[00:29:32] Yeah, I didn't join until the end of season four. Right. So what was that like? So I watched, I mean, obviously watched all the episodes in last year but then watched a bunch of yours in the last day or two.

[00:29:44] Did you know when you were writing it that Robin Williams was going to be the dad? I mean, didn't know anything. No, I got I got a call from Tom, he said, and Tom gave me it was a one paragraph beachy that just said,

[00:29:57] take this from a case all the way from the murder to death row. The guys are on death row. That was it. Really? Not not even specificity that it was a family visiting Baltimore, just that. Wow.

[00:30:10] Yeah, no, it was nothing. It was nothing specific. I rebelled on one thing which is, and again, this is nonfiction boy reacting. If I'm going to take you from a murder

[00:30:20] to death row, I'm taking you across seven years at a minimum. I mean, that's the levels of appeals involved in such a thing would be profound and delicate and go on forever.

[00:30:34] And so the idea that I was going to show you this guy actually being executed, which was the beachy, I backed away from that right away. The next thing I did was I called my friend Dave

[00:30:46] Mills. David Mills was an African American writer who was one of my closest friends who I worked on the college paper at Maryland with. He was a wonderful and brilliant journalist. He, at the

[00:31:01] time he was on the style section for The Washington Post. So we were both full-time newspaper people. But when we were in college, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere, that first round of really

[00:31:12] quality drama started showing up on television, hour-long drama that had a maturity to it that other TV did not. And David at the time was running both the Features page of the Student

[00:31:26] Newspaper. It was a daily in Maryland and also the Op-Ed page or the Ed page I should say. And he would sometimes pause in the middle of putting out the paper, daily paper,

[00:31:37] at 10 o'clock at night to watch these hours of TV. He'd pull out his little black and white TV and plug it in and watch at his desk. And we'd be like, David, come on man, write your headlines.

[00:31:47] We want to get out here. He's like, no, no, I'm not missing this. So I remember this. So I've been given an hour to write of television. I said, David, he said, wait a sec, you have an hour

[00:31:55] of a show by Tom Fontana and Barry Levins? I said, yeah, they're giving me an hour to write. And he said, that's insane. You know, and I said, well, I know that's why I'm calling you

[00:32:05] because you actually watch this stuff. Yeah. And I didn't follow it with the same degree of devotion that he did. So he said, yeah, I'll write it with you. So that was, we partnered on

[00:32:17] that first hour together, we wrote it in about two weeks, we took it to the point of them charging the shooters, but not we didn't take it to death row. And we didn't write it with

[00:32:27] Robin Williams at all in mind. In fact, our script is evenly divided between the POV of the shooters. And then and I guess the kid who did the shooting and the guys who they thought

[00:32:38] did the shooting, but you know, weren't actually the gunman. We're just in on the robbery and the family. And of course, once they got Robin Williams, they needed more for Robin Williams to do

[00:32:49] than the kids. So a lot of our stuff for the kids got cut and more for Robin Williams was added by Yash and Tom. Once they got Robin Williams to do the guest up, the episode as a guest

[00:33:01] star, that was transformative. So the amount of scenes we had for the for kid Funkadelic and the other kid and Tweety and all the characters, that went down. And so I'd say about half of

[00:33:13] that script in the end was still David and me. And half of it was the other writers. And we felt like therefore we had failed. You know, because in newspapering, somebody

[00:33:26] rewrites half your story, my God, you know, run on your own sword, you know, take a pike of a war and disembowel yourself. But what I didn't realize and what I would only realize when I became a

[00:33:38] producer rewriting other people was my God, you got half your pages are still you. Your writing is a freelance and you got half your pages past the writing staff. You did fine. But I didn't realize that at the time. I felt like we had fucked up.

[00:33:54] So was that when you were doing Bob Gunn? And I know unlike features that I've been aware, everybody should the writers off the set. Obviously, the writers were on the set

[00:34:04] a lot on homicide. Were you on the set before Bob Gunn or was Bob Gunn when you first came actually walked onto the set? And what was that like? I showed up a few days at the pilot just for raw curiosity. Like, oh my God,

[00:34:17] you guys are making a TV show out of my book. How am I not going and standing there and watching? And that was that was just pure tourism. I was happy to be a tourist.

[00:34:28] I went there. They hired some of the detectives to be onset consultants. I went them to watch the consult. Sometimes they fell into what was happening and they were helpful. You know, there was a famous moment where Harry Edgerton, who is the prototype for Pemberton,

[00:34:45] he watched his character order some sort of non-alcoholic nonsense drink at a bar. A glass of milk. Was it milk? Yeah. And he said cut. He actually, Levinson was directing. It was the pilot, wasn't it?

[00:35:01] I think it was because I wasn't on the first season. So I didn't see that. Yeah, I think that's the pilot. I mean, you'd have to check it. But I think it was the pilot Harry Edgerton actually said cut. He was like, he saw it happening. He said,

[00:35:13] no, cut. I would never drink. He was just like he was so invested that it was like, no, cut. It's like you said Barry Levinson was directing and you yelled cut. That was that was legend. He made himself legend at that moment. But you know, Gary Deidario,

[00:35:29] who had been the shift lieutenant and sort of understood the process of command internally as he would as a shift lieutenant. He became he was the guy who became the permanent

[00:35:42] consultant on the show. Yeah, second miser and then bumped up to me the SWAT. He was a SWAT team leader. Yeah, that's great. He was terrific. He Gary is a gracious man, a wonderful. Yeah,

[00:35:53] a really gracious, smart, charming man. You know, we used him as an actor in the wire and because the wire did not carry the same favor with our mayor as homicide did. After he appeared

[00:36:05] in episodes singularly, he and we cast him as a grand jury prosecutor. And it was a totally neutral scene. We would not have made Gary criticize the mayor. We wouldn't put him in a,

[00:36:15] I mean, it was a different show. We were criticizing the drug war. So we were going to be more at odds with the establishment than homicide. But we didn't put Gary in the position of issuing Jeremiah ads against the existing administration or anything like that. But

[00:36:28] the mayor at the time, O'Malley saw him on camera. And Gary at that point was a major and served at the district commander and he served at the pleasure of the police commissioner.

[00:36:40] And they fired him. Oh man, they fired that was that was the that was I was an incredibly shocking thing. It was very, very petty. Yeah. But yeah, they he was compelled to I mean, he retired. He

[00:36:52] had time and he retired. That was really remarkable. I was in a diner probably back in the fall or the spring. And there's a guy in the diner with his wife that looked exactly like Gary.

[00:37:05] I mean, exactly like him. And so when I got to leave, I went up and said, excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but are you Gary D'Dario? And there was this long pause and he looked at me

[00:37:15] and he said no. And I thought, you know, it might have been him and his cop instincts were to say no. Maybe yeah, who wants to know? Exactly. He wants to know. And I always wondered if that

[00:37:26] was really him. David, if I may, I've got one question I really wanted to ask you because I'm quite fascinated by the writing side of homicide. So you mentioned you mentioned online that Tom and James Yashimori and other writers are kind of like the show's architects and they

[00:37:39] could have schooled you when you joined the show for writing in later seasons. What did they say to you about how to approach the writing? Was there anything specific that kind of stood out

[00:37:49] to you? Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you the break in. And when I say half the pages of Bob Gunn, my first episode made it. It wasn't like it made it verbatim, because the truth

[00:38:00] was we overwrote everything. You know, we wrote like prose writers, like writers who understood the pacing of prose and in prose, every paragraph has to justify itself. That's probably the way to say it in screenwriting or playwriting. Every line has to justify itself. It's somewhere

[00:38:21] halfway between poetry and prose. Cadence matters. Brevity matters. The fact that people talk in a fragmentary way when you're trying to make them real, they don't talk as insolulically very often. That they're often interrupted, that the people don't say what

[00:38:39] they, the chicovi, the logic of a check off play, people don't say what they mean. They say what they want to be heard saying. And what they're really thinking is sometimes obscured. These elemental truths to writing a screenplay are not as evident in writing

[00:38:55] prose. Now, as somebody who's writing narrative nonfiction, I was well aware that I had a good ear. I understood how detectives talk and I could get quotes down. You know, I mean, this is nonfiction. So I'm getting quotes down the way they're said, and I'm not making the

[00:39:08] quotes false. So at least I'm being trained in how people really talk because I'm using quotes in prose. But pacing and making every line justify itself rather than merely every paragraph was something I had to learn over time. So I turned in that first script and

[00:39:27] Tom would get to an overwritten page. Tom's notes, you know, I mean, I saved some of them. I saved that whole script because it was, it's a wonderful artifact of my life.

[00:39:37] Tom would get to a page that just had all this long explanation, you know, or an eight inside baseball detective stuff. And he would just draw Z's. He would have like a little caricature of himself. He would draw like a little cartoon version of Tom

[00:39:52] with his eyes closed and just Z's down the page. It was good editing in a way. Yeah, absolutely. So I said about a prose. I was on a journey of can I get stuff through Tom

[00:40:07] without him realizing that I was clearing the room? And that was helpful. Yash said to me, start reading plays. He said, did you read any plays in college? Or, you know, I said,

[00:40:19] yeah, I took Shakespeare and, you know, we read, I think I read a couple O'Neill's and Ibsen, he said, read Chekhov. Read Chekhov in Pirandelli. And he handed me a book of Pirandelli. I said, well, you know, I'll get Chekhov. And I took that up. I was like,

[00:40:37] okay, he's right. I'm writing. And remember, most people writing at that show, not all of them, but you know, Tom and Yash and there were more, but they'd all had it. Eric Overmire. Eric Overmire. They all began as playwrights, not as tell playwriters. They began

[00:40:57] as on the stage. And that's how they took to looking at certain episodes as being a good episode is not only continues the stories you have and the themes you have, but it's thematic unto itself. And it has a certain number of acts and has to deliver

[00:41:13] unto itself. And that's where my education began was, oh, I better read some more of the plays that I stopped reading when I left school. Even at the time I was going to the Shakespeare

[00:41:24] Theater and I was somebody who loved going to the theater, but you know, I made sure to see more. You know, Tom again, Tom had his sensibilities and you know, you either figured them out. He allowed a lot of independence and it's why a lot of homicide

[00:41:41] episodes turned out distinct and different. And as a showrunner, he gave you a leash and it was a long leash. And there's I have a lot of respect for everything he taught me, not just about

[00:41:53] what works and what doesn't and what, you know, what a good drama does, but what you do on set, what you do with how you deal with actors, how you cast, how you, you know, the first of

[00:42:05] everything that I got a chance to do was under Tom. You know, he is my mentor when it comes to television writing. I've had really good mentors my whole career. I had Rebecca Corbett, who went on

[00:42:16] to be a great editor at the New York Times and you know, Pulitzer level. She was my night editor. John Sterling was a wonderful book editor. And then I had Tom, you know, sort of the Uber

[00:42:26] guy sitting the pace. And he's magnificent in a lot of ways. There were moments where I felt like my, I had a delicate like twist on humor. Like I couldn't get it past Tom. And

[00:42:41] one of the ones was, I don't know if you guys saw on the wire, but there was one thing that I used it as the as the cold open on I think the fourth episode, which was they're trying to move a desk

[00:42:52] in the office and trying to get it into an inner office. And as it turns out, I used it as a metaphor for you know, the people in the unit are fighting themselves there at cross purposes.

[00:43:01] So two of the guys come in and they assume wrongly that they're trying to get the desk in the office. It's halfway in and two of the guys assume they're trying to get it out. And so they

[00:43:10] fight each other. And you know, and we played it for laughs, but it was also a metaphor for what was going on in the unit. And so I saw it. I had an episode where that they were fighting

[00:43:19] in the I had an episode like that and I used it as the teaser in a homicide episode. And Tom just wrote ZZZZZZ like what is this? I started to write a memo explaining it as metaphor

[00:43:31] and then I realized, look, you lost them. You had your chance. You lost Tom. So years later. I was at a party with Tom and I said, you remember this teaser and he didn't,

[00:43:45] it was just it was one page of many. I said, yeah, no, you wrote Z's all the way down the page. And I said, I used it. It worked. Let's just say he was routinely right about so much

[00:44:01] that when I actually thought he was wrong, I savored it. And it's interesting when you talk about the emphasis on reading plays because it struck me again. Anytime I watched the show, it strikes me how good it is. But just the last couple

[00:44:15] days where I rewatched like seven or eight episodes and, you know, I'm thinking Shakespearean, I'm thinking biblical. But also even with the Shakespearean and the biblical, it was real. It never felt false. That's what I think is so you mentioned earlier, the episodes being unique.

[00:44:36] And that was one of the things that really struck me. I would be a little bit more delicate with it and say, when it was real, it was real. You have to remember, I'm the guy that sat in the homicide unit. And I was the guy who's the

[00:44:50] police reporter for 13 years. So yes, saying it felt real, not that it was real. Right? There are moments where there are moments where it completely leaves the page of sure of, I mean, you know, even in the later season, it's not like it's not like they

[00:45:04] I mean, I remember giving a note to Tom where there was a moment where is it Kellerman or Lewis? I can't remember. One of them is just in a state of emotional distress and they've had a

[00:45:14] case and they've had it's one of those existential deaths where somebody threw a bowling ball off of overpass and killed somebody. And so they're sitting at the end of the pier looking down

[00:45:24] at the water. And he throws the bowling ball in the water. And I just I got the script and it was it was such a wonderfully written moment. But I had to be nonfiction boy and say,

[00:45:36] that's evidence. They're going to need that. That's evidence. I understand I understand it's a beautiful moment. And Tom Tom understood it was a beautiful moment. But he took the note and basically they throw the bowling ball in the water. And I think it's Lewis says to

[00:45:53] Kellerman or I think I have this right but he says he says to him, says, you know, that's evidence, you know, we're gonna have to send the divers, we're gonna have to go get that. He had that dialogue. So I mean, there were there were moments that were

[00:46:06] one of the things that I think liberated the show was it was not trying to be a pure police procedural. It was trying to do something different. Right. It was very different from NYPD Blue in that respect, which was very much centered around the POV of actual detectives

[00:46:21] and actual casework. I think homicide had aspirations elsewhere. Yeah, it always felt more about life itself. They were talking about life whilst investigating death that was always part of the read of homicide. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Do you remember on something sacred,

[00:46:39] which was the priest killings when at the end they're trying to get the kid that knew who the perpetrators were to talk but he didn't want to turn his buddies in? That kid was a great

[00:46:50] actor. But and what they decide to do, they take them out of the box and they take them to the morgue and they show them all the dead bodies and Pendleton is very dramatic and

[00:46:59] shoving the kid's face up next to the dead people and then they lock him in the cooler. And then they take him to and I don't remember where we shot this, but they take him to

[00:47:09] some beach in the city, you know, some area where you can look out over the bay. So it goes from this horribly. I wrote that. I wrote the thing about the bay and I don't

[00:47:18] remember that being the priest killing. Was that the priest killings? Because I was on that episode. It was part two of the priest killings, something sacred because he was trying to get

[00:47:29] yes, you were in part two. So I watched part two. You gotta help me. It's been two decades. Three decades and I know I don't remember everything either. So the thing that really

[00:47:42] struck me was going from that grisly darkness to taking the kid out to the bright, beautiful bay and the water and the kid, the sympathy that you get for the kid at the end when he looks out

[00:47:56] at the water and says, is that the ocean? Yeah, I wrote that. I wrote that line. You did write that. Well, that's why I watched it. And they said, well, they said, no, that's just the bay,

[00:48:04] the ocean's bigger. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. I wrote that. Yes, and it was absolutely beautiful. That boy, he was a good actor. I'm forgetting the name of the actor now. It's

[00:48:16] shame. Avery Kid Waddell, who apparently now is also producing. It's funny to look at these kids and then 30 years later they're all grown up and they're producing. But that moment, the contrast

[00:48:28] between the dark and the light but also the sympathy I forgot. Yeah, go ahead. I also remember that I used an old blues song by Blind William MacTell, which was You Gotta Die, an old spiritual

[00:48:45] where he plays on the 12th string guitar. It's like from the 1930s, I think. Yeah, absolutely. I used that and I think I used another similar song by John Mooney, which I was in heaven, sitting down. I was basically mining old country blues. And that was a question

[00:49:03] you got to write in, you got to make suggestions for music because I always wondered if that was laid later that the writers didn't know what was going to be laid over it or you made suggestions.

[00:49:14] I think it went both ways. Sometimes they would leave holes and the music supervisor would find something appropriate. Sometimes you would write a song in and you'd hope it cleared. If it didn't clear, the music supervisor might find something else or you might have

[00:49:26] a second suggestion. Sometimes they would look at your suggestion and say, how about this instead? It was pretty democratic, but I took particular pride. And from the very first, I mean in Bob Gunn, when you're with the stepmom or whoever was raising the shooter

[00:49:45] and you're in her house, she was listening to a Sonny Boy Williamson song Don't Start Me Talking. And I put that in the script and it cleared and it ended up in the show. Yeah. I mean, I took particular pride in my musical choices for the show.

[00:50:02] And a lot of them made it and some of them didn't, but I took pride in it. Yeah. But yeah, I remember that whole sequence and yeah, took them to the morgue and you know what I didn't remember? It's amazing. I didn't remember what the murders were,

[00:50:15] that it was the priest murders. I didn't remember any of that. I just remember I remembered how they break the kid as they show him death and then some element of the world,

[00:50:24] of the larger world beyond his own existence. Yeah, that was, that worked. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't. Yeah. And he didn't want to snitch. So that's why they went so deep and trying to get him to

[00:50:38] talk. And also in a way trying to save his life too, whether they did or not, I don't know, but the realization that that sparked on that kid's face and that scene was just terrific, really beautiful stuff.

[00:50:53] Yeah. I enjoyed it. We shot that out at North Point over on one of the beaches. Oh, that was North Point. No. What's that? It's like down Fort Howard down the end of that pencil. Yeah. Somewhere down the other.

[00:51:08] And I know we talk about your being the journalist boy or the nonfiction boy and making suggestions and obviously having to come to that realization. I have to let some things go. This is fiction. They've created characters that are not the real detectives. They're characters

[00:51:22] in the show now. But were there moments, whether it was the scripts you wrote or scripts others wrote that you felt like rang particularly true in their characterizations of the detectives? Even if it wasn't specifically, you know, Edgerton or...

[00:51:37] Yeah, there were many moments that I thought, oh, that I'm glad to see that. That's that's real. Sure. And some of them had nothing to do with my book. I mean, sometimes people would find moments that I thought, yeah, I mean, all of the characters were,

[00:51:51] they were more philosophical than a lot of the real cops. A lot of the real cops were very practical. And that's true of all crime fiction. I mean, in this sense, a lot of people who cover police or who do that job of death investigation or

[00:52:06] cover it truly know that many, many cases are made with an absolute indifference to motive. But motives, the why people kill is what makes it interesting. Except the why you figure out who

[00:52:20] killed who often you sometimes you don't even know why. So it's all about opportunity. It's about, you know, physical evidence, witnesses, opportunity. And then who lies to you and who doesn't in the interrogation room or in the witness rooms. And sometimes,

[00:52:37] you know, the fact that somebody had a reason to kill somebody is utterly irrelevant. It's, you know, here's the gun. Here's two people who saw him do it. He's on the street. Oh, look,

[00:52:46] you got some video and it goes to court. You never know why. And so, you know, the great lie of detective fiction of crime fiction is the detective has to find out why this person was

[00:52:56] killed or comes to the crime scene and lifts up the blanket and looks at the young vibrant now dead beautiful victim who shouldn't be dead and says, oh, you know, my God, what a waste. What a tragedy. First of all, there's no blanket. They don't lift it up.

[00:53:15] They walk up, they look at the body and that's the day's work. And it's like, oh, okay, here we go. And unless it's a child or, you know, if it's a usual, you know, it's the usual

[00:53:25] player. Okay, you know, where's he hit? And you delved into that when Bob Gunn when Kay Howard, Melissa Leo's character, she chases the why down to the end. And even when he tells her what happened, it's empty. Exactly. The why still exists. It didn't answer the question.

[00:53:46] Right. He doesn't know why he pulled the trigger. And she can't explain why it was him and whether or not the, you know, the irony of that was if it had been kid Funkadelic, the guy who

[00:53:57] was the sort of the more of a grown up, the more professional he wouldn't have gotten flustered. Right. As the robbery didn't go exactly according to Hoyle. He would have probably not shot the gun. Right. And he says I've done 300 stick ups and I've never pulled the trigger.

[00:54:14] Right. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was, you know, it makes sense, except it doesn't make sense for the, you want, you want it to be a, you want, you want a moral equation and it was denied.

[00:54:23] There is no moral equation. You know, it's just a gun. It's just a kid at a gun. Yeah. I mean, the moment in that episode where to what you were saying before about, is there a moment I

[00:54:33] thought was, is when they're all sitting around the office and they're overheard by Robin Williams, by the father and they're talking about how much overtime they're going to make on the case, which is a very normative conversation in any homicide unit.

[00:54:48] When you catch a murder of a taxpayer, of a citizen, you know, instead of it being a drug player or, you know, somebody who doesn't rate or it's in a zip code where nobody gives a

[00:54:58] shit, you catch a tourist right by the new stadium and suddenly that murder matters. And not only matters to this, to the civic order matters racially and economically, you know, but it also matters in terms of how much the department is going to let you run with the

[00:55:17] case and earn overtime. You know, as they say in the homicide unit, first as the cases are red, then they're green, then they're black. And so being able to play that conversation that I had heard 100 times on television where I'd never heard it before on network television

[00:55:33] was a great delight to me. It was like, you know, I knew if you were a homicide detective anywhere in the country and you heard Bo Felton talk shit about how much overtime he's

[00:55:40] going to make on a case, you were like, oh, somebody knows how we do. You know, I knew that was going to sell to anybody who knew the reality of it. You know, so when you had an opportunity to

[00:55:50] do that, it felt good for me anyway. And the flip side of that scene, when he takes, when G takes Robin Williams into his office explains them why you don't want Bo Felton to be sympathetic. You want Bo Felton to chase down the murder coldheartedly

[00:56:07] to find the person not, and I loved it when he said you do not want him to grieve. Was that a conversation you also had heard or was that something that came of explaining it in

[00:56:19] the show? No, I actually never heard anyone have to explain it. I just understood it from having been in the unit a year. Nobody actually was that philosophical about it. But I totally understood this. I understood it because one of the detectives who was,

[00:56:33] I don't want to say he's a racist, but he was certainly one of the least racially advanced of the detectives. He had the least regard for the social cultural differences between his existence and most of the people he was policing and most of the victims he caught.

[00:56:51] I mean, I don't think he caught a white victim that whole year. And he nonetheless was utterly intent on giving every single case his absolute best in solving every single case and avenging the murder on a professional basis. He probably had the least amount of empathy

[00:57:10] for the people lying there dead, but I watched him walk into every household and talk to every family and relative and deal with each case. And if you were lying there dead in West Baltimore and you weren't a particularly important case to the civic firm in Baltimore,

[00:57:28] you were just some black 22-year-old lying there on the sidewalk with a detective looking down on you. You'd want that guy looking down on you and maybe not somebody else who was more racially or socially enlightened. One thing didn't have anything to do with the other.

[00:57:47] Just like, it wasn't like he was setting the universe right or avenging anybody he particularly cared about. Those emotions were not... What was guiding him was, hey, you killed somebody. I caught the case. It's between you and me, asshole. I'm going to catch you.

[00:58:04] It was just professional. And I think he would be... If I probe... I did probe him on it. In his own way, he had candor about that. So yeah, that was de-explaining something that I had

[00:58:18] internalized from watching these detectives for a year and watching all their cases go to court. But I was writing it out of my own head. I never heard a detective have to... They'd be explaining something they all knew to each other. And that, of course,

[00:58:32] didn't have happened. Why do you think the show has remained relevant since it retained interest 30 years later? Because obviously, there's been a lot of debate about why it's not streaming. And I feel like this show is so relevant to now. I was watching Shades of

[00:58:48] Grages yesterday and it felt like it could have been made after the death of... Sorry, the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Yeah. Oh, I mean, I think it's trapped by all the music.

[00:59:00] In fact, I know it is because I know that Gail has had conversations with NBC. And NBC, I think it's NBC and whoever's got the overseas rights, is it free mantle? I'm not sure. You'd

[00:59:14] have to check. But they're trying to free up the music. The problem is, is it was made prior to streaming becoming the paradigm. And they didn't negotiate the music rights for all the future

[00:59:28] of where it was going with streaming. They negotiated it for VHS and ultimately for DVDs which followed the idea of individualized delivery. But streaming, you had to have asked for future technologies and I don't think they did. And I know this because my first piece for HBO,

[00:59:48] The Corner, I think the contract work is similar. And that's why you can't find The Corner on the streaming channels. Because I think the music... We used music throughout The Corner and it's tied up there. And the thing about homicide is that music was carefully cut in.

[01:00:04] It was beautifully added in and you can't just sub in something generic and have it work. I mean, you can but it'll be shit. And so I think ultimately that's a problem they're going to have to solve. But if you didn't stay with... If it's not streaming anywhere,

[01:00:18] why would it stay relevant? People are not putting VHS tapes or DVDs into the machines the way they once did. But it is relevant. When you watch it, it is relevant. And would you chalk that up to

[01:00:31] the writing or the fact like when we'd asked that Tom, Tom Lafton said because nothing's changed in 30 years. But it feels as if it could be on the air now and not except for maybe a hairdresser

[01:00:43] or a cell phone that's not there. It feels very current. Yeah, certainly it was ahead of its time in terms of launching itself into a multicultural, multi-racial world. Tom once pointed out to me

[01:00:56] that there was a moment where four characters of differing ranks were all discussing a case and they all happened to be black. The detective was black. It was Louis. The homicide commander, Giordello is black. The major, Barnstable was black. And the deputy commissioner. I can't

[01:01:14] remember who he was at the time, was black. And they're all sitting there talking about a case and nobody's white, which represents a plausible political hierarchy in a city that was at the time 60% black. But homicide was doing it without comment, without getting it to S in the

[01:01:31] air about oh my God look where the black shirt. No, it wasn't it. It was just it was the Baltimore show and they did Baltimore demographically correct. So they caught a post-racial America. Not that America is post-racial. We'll never get there but they caught an

[01:01:46] America further along in its racial dynamic than almost anything on TV at the time. So I mean, I look at that stuff. I think, you know, wow, you guys are really ahead of your time. You caught

[01:01:56] that and that's beautiful. Yeah. And I think the way it was shot also was ahead of its time and that makes it feel current as well. Yeah. Yeah. I think so too. I mean,

[01:02:07] you know, it feels documentarian, particularly the early years. I mean, I think we laid a lot more track later on. Not that I understood any of this when it was happening. I had to be

[01:02:16] taught all of it. When I showed up on set the first time, somebody showed me them filming and I said, what's the guy standing next to him doing pulling that knob? And they said he's focusing the camera.

[01:02:28] And I said, wait, the guy looking through the lens doesn't focus the camera. Exactly. Who are you people? Don't you know how a camera works? Anybody off a set would not know that. And I always try to impart that. That is an

[01:02:40] amazing, ridiculous skill that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. It's an incredible skill. And how much is done at that time without lasers, I think it was just... No, no, no lasers. No. Yeah. It was, I mean, you know, if you really had to guess,

[01:02:55] if you were really in that guesswork moment on the lens, they might take out the tape measure. But generally speaking, if your person knew his business, it was like, no, I know that's 15 feet. I know that's 18 feet. There was a lot for me to learn.

[01:03:08] You know, I didn't go to film school, but I learned it. And it's not like I could, I'm not ready to direct. I could direct crudely now. I could, you know, turn the camera around.

[01:03:19] But I don't know what lens does what. Even now, you don't feel like you could do it? No. I mean, a director brings something. Really? 30 years later? I mean, I could, you know, you need me to shoot an insert scene,

[01:03:30] you know, or you need me to shoot like a little simple bridge scene with two detectives talking. Oh, I'm fine. I can, you know, I could do that. But a director brings something to the work. Interesting. And certainly, certainly your director of photography does

[01:03:42] in terms of consistency and overall theme. Yeah, absolutely. But you know, what I did learn was I learned very quickly when something isn't working. I can tell you now why. I can tell you what we're not doing. If the camera is not doing what it needs to do,

[01:03:57] I can speak in a negative and say make it positive. Right. I learned that I knew that second season of the wire. It was after homicide. It was after everything I internalized everything they tried to teach me on homicide.

[01:04:09] My second project for HBO, the guy who was the director producer, Bob Colesbury passed away tragically in surgery between seasons two and three showed up on set season three. I now have to I can't just be the ears. I have to be the eyes because Bob's not there.

[01:04:27] And a director was showing me a shot that he thought could play a whole scene. And I realized the camera was doing something the camera shouldn't do. And I described it and somebody said to me, oh, Truffaut Hitchcock. And I said what?

[01:04:43] And they said, oh, the Truffaut interview, you know, his interview with Hitchcock. Famous interview. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, the camera has to, the camera can't anticipate, can't know more than the viewer should.

[01:04:55] And I knew that. But I knew it not because anyone had explained it to me. I knew it because it bothered me when the camera did that. I now see I'm stood enough in video village to understand when something's going wrong.

[01:05:08] And so then I because of that, I read the interview. I said, oh, yeah, no, this makes sense. Yes. I have it on my shelf. I should go revisit. Truffaut Hitchcock. Yeah. It's like, oh, yeah, they know what they're talking about.

[01:05:21] But they're you know, it's like Bob Colesbury, you know, fourth episode of the wire he elected to cross the line in a bar room scene, go behind the bar with

[01:05:28] two guys talking. And he had to explain crossing the line to me and he had to do it with ketchup bottles and, you know, at lunch, ketchup bottles and, you know, whatever and salt shakers.

[01:05:38] And I had to come back to him the next day and go now explain it again because I lost it. You know, it didn't come naturally. But then again, that was the thing they sent you to set.

[01:05:48] At first, you're just there to make sure they say the lines right, you know. But after a while, you're there to protect the script in terms of the visual as well.

[01:05:57] And you need to learn. And that was the great thing is, as I said, Tom and Barry and basically all of them, they basically were training people to do their jobs. That was unique.

[01:06:09] I mean, there are lots of shows in LA and New York where they don't even want to send you to set in that respect because they don't want to create competitors. They don't want you selling

[01:06:19] your own show three years later, four years later, not with Tom and Barry. They were raising us to be producers. And it was a great gift. And not just me, but Anya and Julie and Tom

[01:06:31] and Yash and Eric over. We all were being raised no matter how senior or junior you were to be show runners. And it was a great gift. And it was incredibly gracious. Some people in the writer's room like Darrell Wharton and Joy Lascaux who were in the office

[01:06:49] that came up, wrote screenplays and then came up and were also mentored into the process. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Joy was my assistant on the wire. She was my first assistant and she wanted to go into directing and she made the transition to being a director.

[01:07:05] And I mean, I took that as continuing responsibility on my own work, which was Tom did this for me. So if I can show you all the aspects of production and get you closer to making your own stuff, that's my job. I don't care about the competition.

[01:07:20] Of course, I had the luxury of doing it at a time when the streaming exploded. They were taking so much content. It was like the more the merrier. But yeah, Tom was doing it when there were only

[01:07:29] three networks. He was still trying to raise you up to be... I mean, I remember, I thought there was no greater and easier job than being a story editor. You weren't responsible for anything except moving pages and going to set and making sure the pages were upheld.

[01:07:45] I remember being at a staff dinner at... I think it was Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. Tom all took us for steaks and whiskey, his wild turkey appetizer. And we were all happily drunk

[01:07:57] in one of the back rooms and Tom was saying, and now I'm going to make you into producers. And Anjali and I were like going, no, no. No, we don't want to. We're fine. And he's like,

[01:08:09] oh no. You want to truly protect your writing? You must come with me. And he was acting like he was leading us into Death Valley. But in truth, he was training us to do the job. It was a great

[01:08:22] gift and very gracious. So many people have said that that show, I mean, unbidden by us asking, have said that that show was the best experience of their careers. And I think a lot

[01:08:35] of it was, one, the attitude that you rolled into, which was let me teach you, but also you had mentioned earlier the idea of freedom. There was a freedom in the writer's room,

[01:08:46] but there was also a freedom on the set for the way the show was created, which made it really exciting for everybody that had come from traditional either traditional feature filmmaking or traditional television, that it was something different and interesting and exciting and

[01:09:01] engaging. I mean, obviously we only remember the good stuff. But there was a lot of good stuff. And everybody has said how much that show meant to them and how much they learned and that it

[01:09:12] was the best experience of their careers, which has really been, this has been cool to hear. I think so. Yeah, I will also say the other thing you taught me, and this was a Jim

[01:09:22] Finnerty thing as well as Tom, and I have to credit Jim, the great and legendary Jim Finnerty, the money isn't yours. And I was surprised at how endemic overspending and going over budget

[01:09:35] was in this industry. The overages are sort of assumed on a lot of shows, and certainly in films. I mean, films are rating the wardrobe, everyone grabbing what they want from the wardrobe trailer when a film ends because what the hell? On a continuing show,

[01:09:53] one of the reasons homicides stayed on the air with modest ratings for as long as it did was, all the money went on screen and they never went over. And they did not waste money.

[01:10:07] And they treated the money like it's not ours. It's not ours to take. It's ours to preserve so that we can go back to NBC and say, give us another year, you know, we'll spend the money,

[01:10:17] you know, we won't go over, you know, we won't, you know. And I mean, Nina Noble, who has been my partner, my producing partner since the corner for now it's 150 some odd hours of HBO, we've never

[01:10:31] gone over. And I think the only time I've had a budget overage was and not to blame the European people, but it really had more to do with when they changed the money for an overseas production

[01:10:43] generation kill. But other than that, you know, we didn't lose the money on set. It's all on the screen. It's just as a matter of they didn't change it into rands, South African rands, when they should have, they delayed and the dollars, you know, the dollars went down,

[01:10:57] the rands went up. But other than that, we've always come in under and handed the money back at the end of every season makes it a lot easier to keep approving shows that don't,

[01:11:07] that aren't hits, you know, right? And homicide wasn't a hit when it was on the air. That was an ethic that doesn't exist everywhere in the industry. And in fact, I found how rare it is to meet people who say they're going to make a show for

[01:11:22] so much and then make a show for so much. So speaking of those shows, is there any any of your projects now? David, you want to mention you want to talk about obviously done

[01:11:31] a million really popular things since homicide? Anything you want to talk about? No, I think you guys are doing homicide and I think homicide deserves greater attention than it's now receiving largely because of the streaming problem. I think if they solve that, that show is going to be

[01:11:45] rediscovered in a profound way. Yes, I hope so. But you know, I don't need to pump other stuff right now and that now's the time to actually acknowledge this show broke an incredible amount

[01:11:55] of ground. You know, one of the things that Henry Bermel, the late Henry Bermel who was writing for the show and was also a wonderful part of it, the later seasons especially,

[01:12:05] one of the things Henry said to me was you're part of a great tree now. And I said, what is that tree? He says the MTM tree. You know, he says we all came out of Mary Tyler

[01:12:14] Moore's production company, you know, which had its origins in Hill Street and St. Elsewhere and LA. So many people came out of that and then started their own shows and then trained

[01:12:26] other people to make drama that can matter a little bit and could make a grown up television. And now you're part of that tree. So go sprout some twigs. You know, I mean, and as I said, I understood that innately even though I wasn't a consumer

[01:12:43] of a lot of television, I understood it from having seen some episodes of both Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere to know, oh, they're doing smarter things with television now, much smarter than they had been. You know, it's not just all Mannex and Ironsides,

[01:12:56] it's grown up stuff. And I knew enough about that to say, to call my friend David Mills at the start of my engagement with Homicide the Show and say, do you want to write an episode

[01:13:08] of this with me? Because he's the one who watched it every Wednesday and Thursday night and wouldn't miss it. And he understood where this thing was going. I mean, the idea of,

[01:13:16] I remember when he went in the room with me and I was like, I was meeting this guy with long hair and a bad mustache and beard. And oh, this is Tom Fontana. This is the guy

[01:13:24] running. And I was like, okay. He came out of the room going, we just had a conversation with Tom Fontana. That was him. That was Tom. It was a hero to him. I remember he wanted to discuss

[01:13:38] the only time, the first time he saw it, like a bare ass on television, on network television, it was a guy walking in a hallway way down deep in a hallway who had like the open

[01:13:49] end of his hospital gown. They were walking him to like, back to his room. And he said that was the first time you saw a bare ass on American television. That was, was that St. Elsewhere? He's like, Tom Fontana did that. Yeah, St. Elsewhere. Yeah,

[01:14:04] Tom Fontana did that. He was meeting a God. I was meeting a guy who was running a show based on my book who seemed pretty smart and was giving me an assignment. So funny.

[01:14:15] David was like, I'm meeting a God. And that's, thank God I started my career with him because I miss him. I miss David Mills a lot. Yeah. Wow. And David then went off and tried to do his own

[01:14:30] TV and had some success and got, he went to NYPD Blue. He worked on LA Law. He did a mini series of his own. And then he was working on Treme when he passed away, very

[01:14:41] sadly. But he wrote an episode late in Homicides Run that is one of my favorites. It was the one that started Charles Durning as a retired detective. Oh, Finnegan's Wake, yes.

[01:14:55] Comes back to solve old open case of a young child murdered in the, it was based on a real case in Baltimore, the Clairstone case, which I sent to David and then he wrote that character

[01:15:06] based on his father, his own father. Really? His own father was a retired man. And it's fascinating because the character Durning we wrote as being racist and being from that earlier era of Baltimore and being sort of fundamentally flawed in some ways. But David's

[01:15:22] character, his father was of course African American and not at all. And yet David was able to, he wrote that character so lovingly and it was his own father. And I think that case was nominated for a Humanitas Award. That episode. Yeah, it's a great episode.

[01:15:41] David loved the show and continued to love the show even as he worked elsewhere in the industry. But enough. Enough, David. Well, David, thank you. Thank you so much for your time. It's been brilliant. Yeah, this has just been terrific. All right. Well, thanks. Thanks and thanks

[01:15:58] for including me and thanks for doing the other guys first because again, they mentored me in that show. They really did. Thank you. Thank you. Absolutely. So that was David Simon and

[01:16:28] my goodness, what an interview. I was just listening back to that and I was really sort of blown away. I mean, for me, it comes across a little bit. I was a bit nervous to be honest.

[01:16:37] It's, you know, he's one of the, you know, honestly, he's one of the, considered one of the sort of TV gods these days. And I was very nervous going into all of that. And I was just so glad from a technical perspective, we didn't have any like

[01:16:50] problems because I was worried the internet would wig out at some point during that interview. And thankfully it all held together perfectly. So was there anything that you sort of took away

[01:16:59] or stayed view from the interview? Well, I think, I think I mentioned this in the intro a little, but I can get more specific about it now after, after the interview. It was so great to have

[01:17:11] his candid opinion and often very humble opinion about how he knew nothing before he walked onto a set. And I love the anecdote where he said, what's the guy doing next to the camera

[01:17:24] during the knob? You know, it was like, he's focusing the camera. Like, what do you mean? What do you mean the camera, the guy that's not looking through the cameras, focusing the camera? I can realize that when I first studied film, because I came from

[01:17:41] Sixth Form College, which is senior high, we did something called media studies and we trained on video. And obviously video cameras have autofocus and you focus it yourself. And it was only until I trained on film that I realized, oh, focus pulling is an entire job

[01:17:55] of its own is amazing. So yeah, it's a very important job too. Yeah. And that's just he was really, he was really candid about his naivete about, you know, film television production. And like I mentioned in the intro, what a great lap to land in,

[01:18:11] you know, with Tom Fontana and the writers that Tom mentored into writing and producing and his openheartedness and bringing people into the business that he obviously mentored people who he recognized talent in. Yeah.

[01:18:29] Yeah. But I you know, I love that that and also some of the anecdotes were so good that the anecdote about, you know, taking the bottle down to the homicide unit at Christmas and spending

[01:18:42] the night with those guys and having the germ or the idea of the book pop out of his having been there and and and hanging out with him. I really want to find that article. I was trying to

[01:18:55] Google it and I couldn't find it just yet but trying to hunt it down because it kind of reminded me of the beginning of Anthony Bourdain's book, Kitchen Confidential, because that started with an article that obviously struck a chord and led to a book.

[01:19:09] And obviously David had the same kind of experience this article. Yeah, you know, his time on the Christmas at the homicide unit just sounds fascinating. So I know there was an episode in the first season about Christmas and the homicide unit. I have no idea whether

[01:19:24] there's any relation to the article or not. They're my memory of that episode they wanted silly bits in it. We're like a Santa falls through the ceiling or something. Exactly, a Santa. I think I'm remembering a drunk Santa is what I'm thinking maybe he picked him up

[01:19:41] and figured out how to get up into the ceiling to try to escape and he falls through the ceiling tiles on to whose desk was that at the time? I can't remember. It's been a while since

[01:19:53] the scene that one but yeah. So no, it'd be interesting to try and find the article see if there are any parallels to that episode and that article but I think I'd be one to really

[01:20:03] check out. And I also absolutely love the William Friedkin story. Oh yeah. He's working. Bill Friedkin. He's working the rewrite desk and Bill Friedkin calls it two in the morning. I mean, you know, and then he's like, you know, all of a sudden he's fucking with me,

[01:20:20] you know, how long it took him to convince him? He really was really freaking. And then at the end for him to say great book and hang up. No intention of making it into a movie. And then you could just, you could just see the

[01:20:34] wheels turn, you know, like what must have been in David's head like, oh my God, like standing on the stage getting his Oscar. Right? Because he's writing a Bill Friedkin movie and then years later than he is here, he is a well known television writer and

[01:20:51] producer on Tremay and one of all weird circumstances bumps into Bill Friedkin in an elevator and recounts the story to him. And then once again, a great punchline of it wouldn't have made a good movie, but it made a good television show.

[01:21:08] That was just the happen that's the happenstance, you know, that has come out in many of our interviews of how people got to places and and the things that happened in them along the way that could have not very easily not happened. Indeed. It's kind of fun.

[01:21:27] Yeah, and having, you know, William Friedkin call him up is such an alien experience for David back then. So you would instantly think that somebody's messing with you. It's like if you suddenly got a phone call from the president of America or something,

[01:21:41] like hopefully the president on line one for it, you'd be like who the hell's, you know, take quite some convincing really. The guy that directed the French connection is calling me at work at two in the morning like what how does that even this is great?

[01:21:56] It's just a great, that's a great story. It is brilliant. I also like along with Tom's mentoring, you know, which obviously David early on was asked to write the pilot. He's like, I don't know what I'm doing now. I'm not going to do that, which also I thought

[01:22:12] was amazing. Because I think many people, even if they don't know didn't know what they were doing would have said yes. And whether they've been able to do a good job or not is another

[01:22:21] question. But but then you know he comes on later in you know in the later seasons as a full time staffer and also consulted his funny stories about, you know, his wanting to impart his journalistic and his homicide unit knowledge into things that were the minutiae

[01:22:38] of things that you know aren't going to be in the script was good. But also I thought it was telling and and and good advice for any writer that's trying to make the switch from narrative either narrative long form nonfiction or narrative fiction into writing teleplays that Jim

[01:22:55] Yasha Moore said to him, read plays and read these specific plays because plays are much more much more similar to how you write a teleplay or screenplay because you have to get to what's

[01:23:12] happening in much fewer words with much I mean there there's no you look at a script. There's very, very little narrative description. It might be a little a sentence, you know introduction of a character and what they're like. But they're very,

[01:23:26] very short on narrative descriptions of what's happening who people are why they're there how they feel that has to come across in the words of the script. And so, you know, pointing him to like read some of these awesome classic playwrights.

[01:23:43] I think very valuable lesson there for screenwriters including myself. I think if anything, my people of my generation are a bit under read in those areas. And I've certainly read many of scripts over the years by screenwriters. And you can tell that they're too influenced by other movies.

[01:24:02] And I think that's a common problem that I think, yeah, David's advice makes a lot of sense and also I think because David came from the reality of homicide investigations of his

[01:24:13] time as a journalist I think that truly informs his writing as well and really helps this show the episodes he worked on and his advice. Well, his book inspired the shows that's what

[01:24:25] grounded it. And I think that's why this show has that realistic feeling even though he does say in his interview with us that obviously it feels real but it's not real because there is this fine line between artistic license and reality. But I think that that groundedness

[01:24:41] just gives it that sense of authenticity which I find other shows, especially more recent shows are lacking. So I feel like a lot of writers are more divorced from the reality of the topic they're writing about than they once were. Obviously my opinion there. But

[01:24:57] it's yeah, it was really great to listen to David's advice on that because you know for me I've got my own little struggles with trying to create stuff that has this sort of realistic feeling and is

[01:25:07] somewhat informed by reality but at the same time is still a piece of entertainment and a piece of art that's supposed to mean something deeper than just the surface read. And I think that's what I loved about homicide is its philosophical nature. So yeah, lots of food for

[01:25:21] thought with that one. And also you were talking about the mentorship thing. David mentions the legacy of Mary Tyler Moore's company which led to St. Elsewhere. That was interesting. I never heard anybody else I don't think say that maybe Tom mentioned it. Yeah. And I think

[01:25:40] that's truly fascinating. And you know, the stories we've heard about sort of Tom, he is this sort of mentor figure and you know, I sort of now Tom and I seem to follow each other on

[01:25:51] Instagram. So I see what Tom's up to and he's been working on like a short film with some would appear to be sort of like film students from a particular area of things. And Tom

[01:26:02] just comes across as a very kind of giving in kind of personally wants to in there's an expression about sending the elevator back down. I can't remember who came up with that expression, but a lot of people when they reach the top forget sometimes

[01:26:16] about the legacy of who's going to come next and help people. And Tom does very much come across as a person who really does help and inspire people. So it's nice to hear that. And obviously David very complimentary about about Tom there and his sort of mentorship. And

[01:26:33] the other funny thing as well, like it was one or two little stories about where Tom would reject a lot of things David had written like you put like snoring Zed Zed a little cartoon himself snoring. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. And occasionally David would disagree

[01:26:49] and eventually David got to bringing that table joke into the wire and it worked. And he kind of said to Tom, Hey, this worked. Yeah. That's really funny. It's funny. I had an editor God bless him Baxter. Hello Baxter at the newspaper. I was out for 13

[01:27:08] years and we were in the same time it was a tiny little newspaper office and we were in the same office together and I would pitch him stories sometimes and I liked to cover politics in

[01:27:19] the general assembly. I don't know why I did maybe because the minutiae of the bills and things and I would pitch him a story and it wasn't interested. He wouldn't even turn around. I would just hear him say snore.

[01:27:34] It was like, okay, I guess I'm not following up on that story. So I thought that was funny when he talked about that. I also back to what you were talking about about, you know, the, I'll use the big word, the verisimilitude of homicide because it was

[01:27:51] based on the real people in the real place witnessed by the person who then was involved in the creation of the show. And I do think sometimes I used to watch more cop shows than I do now,

[01:28:05] but and you know, forgive me every person out there that writes a cop show. But I do get the sense that there is a lineage of I'm writing this show because I watched a lot of other cop shows

[01:28:19] and I watched a lot of other cop movies that I liked and I'm emulating that as opposed to, you know, and a lot of it also is how often, I mean, he knew how lucky he was that in that moment

[01:28:32] somebody said yes to him having access. You know, and it wasn't just access to go interview a cop or two. It was, I mean, you think about the access to be embedded with them for a year

[01:28:44] and that there were some people in the command chain that were not happy about it. But how many people are able to do that, especially I would say even more now because cops are under the microscope more now than they were 30 years ago.

[01:29:04] So that you know, you know, that being said, there may not be many if any opportunities for other writers to do what he was able to do when he did it and also for them to become

[01:29:15] so comfortable with him. And I love the story about, you know, you play the fool and you know, not like technically the fool, but like I'm not going to go in there and act like I'm somebody

[01:29:24] special. Like I know what you're doing. Like I know anything about anything. I'm just here. And if you want to make jokes at me and make me the butt of, you know, your community of cops, then that's what it's going to take. And that's what they would do

[01:29:38] with a Greenhorn cop too probably right? They would have a little more reticence about, I'm sure about a journalist being in the middle of them because most people are about general. But that the whole dynamic of that is, if you really break it down is quite

[01:29:57] amazing that he had that opportunity. And I thought it was interesting that, you know, when we asked, I think I said, are there where their particular scenes or particular scripts or parts where you really felt it rang truly true, it rang true. You know,

[01:30:13] obviously knowing that it's fiction, knowing that it's a drama. One of the things I loved what he said was there were some points particularly that were not taken from the book that were not taken from the original source material that had developed from the

[01:30:30] writer's knowledge of that world. And then put it into a script that were true, not true in the journalistic sense, but true to the place and the emotion and, you know, true to the world of

[01:30:46] that, you know, of the homicide detectives, but not part of something that had been witnessed or written by him. I thought that was really telling too about how hard the other actors who did not write the book, who did not hang out with the cops 24 seven, how well

[01:31:03] they integrated their minds into that world and were able to write it even without it being original source material. I thought that was interesting. Yeah, yeah, indeed. And in fact, the story behind the writing of Bob Gunn was a pretty interesting sort of behind the scenes

[01:31:22] because obviously quite a lot was taken out when Robin Williams came in after the fact and also David put his foot down about he didn't because originally the intention was to have

[01:31:31] the story from the crime through all the way to death row. And David points out well that would take seven years and you know, it's not going to work in a 45 minute or 50 minute episode. So

[01:31:43] even then he, you know, would know when to push back because that's the thing when you're a bit should we say green behind the ears and all that and faced with hey, I've got

[01:31:53] potentially got a career in entertainment and stuff is very easy to be a bit too agreeable and not push back sometimes on certain things. And so and then a bit like with the odd interview of Reed Diamond, he pushed back on some of the intentions with his character

[01:32:09] and it led to you know, a better show and some really good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And there's been one or two comments from that episode where people have sort of agreed that redoing that did

[01:32:18] lead to a better experience and stuff. And maybe in later seasons, there wasn't enough push back and it led to some storylines that didn't quite work so well that you know, may have been intended

[01:32:28] for that kind of with the original interpretation of Reed's character. So yeah, some really great stuff there. So no, I'm just, you know, so please we managed to pull this off. You know, real, really great. I feel very grateful. And you know, thank you again, David, for your

[01:32:42] time on this show today has been brilliant. Yeah, thanks, David. It was it was terrific talking to you. And I really appreciate it at the end, you know, we ask everybody at the end

[01:32:50] when we remember to plug whatever they're doing, like you got something going on or you're working on something, you know, you have a production you want to talk about. And for him to turn it back

[01:33:00] on us and say no, the focus should be on this. And I'm so glad you guys are doing it. That was that just blew me away. It was like, wow, the depth at which people have the depth of

[01:33:11] feeling that people have for this show just continues to blow me away. I mean, I knew it, you know, but the interactions we've had with everybody along the line that have had that kind of depth of feeling for the show has really just been an amazing touching gift

[01:33:30] for us because we're hearing it unbidden and sort of like, yeah, I didn't know that was what people were gonna say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed. Terrific, terrific stuff. Thanks, David. Yes, thank you, David. And, you know, thank you everybody out there for listening. And if you

[01:33:49] enjoy this podcast, obviously please many things you can do. First of all, please write a review on your podcast Apple reviews help kind of juice the algorithm and help the show appear in people's feeds and make it more likely people will spot the show. Second of all,

[01:34:06] don't forget to sort of follow us on social media. So we're are we are on Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads and Instagram. And it's just at Hummyside pod. Because it wouldn't let me make a longer

[01:34:18] username than that. But there we go. But you'll find us all on the social media there. And please, you know, retweet the enjoying the episode. Please share it with friends. And I'm really enjoying interacting with some of you in the comments and things. It's been

[01:34:30] really great. So yeah, it's lovely to sort of eat meet a lot of people who are fans of the show. And it's been quite touching seeing how Hummyside has touched different people and

[01:34:41] as something I think we talked about, we'd like to explore with our kind of coffee room chats are going to expand on that a bit later on, maybe later this year. And it's just been really nice hearing the stories like how Hummyside inspires some people to go

[01:34:56] into law enforcement is inspired them to become a defense attorney, somebody else became a judge and so on. And it's just very interesting to see that. And so, thank you very much for sharing all those stories and telling us about how the show

[01:35:13] touches you. So we really appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. And coming up our next episode, we have a chat with some of the sound guys who had an incredibly, incredibly challenging job on Hummyside Life on the Street. So have a listen

[01:35:30] and then we have some surprises coming up after them. So keep listening and we'll keep turning out these amazing conversations with people. It's just been terrific. Yeah. So thank you very much for listening and thank you very much for your enthusiasm

[01:35:46] and we will catch you on the next episode. Take care. Take care.