More Milch

QUESTION: I work for a homeless newspaper, and I encounter a lot of writing by people who are mentally divergent. In your years of self-confessed madness and drug abuse, did you have any moments of clarity?

MILCH: Once I was burying myself in Mexico . I had sold my passport to some criminals, and I got drawn further in by steps, as these things usually happen. There was a lunatic chemist who contracted a stomach ache, and a consort of his named Yum-Yum decided to treat it with an enema. Turns out he had peritonitis and she killed him. We were all down there illegally, so I was digging this guy’s grave, and I tossed the body in. I figured I should grab his ID just in case I eventually decided to do the right thing and contact his relatives, and found my own passport that I had sold six months before. That was a moment of clarity, but thanks to liberal amounts of chloroform, it didn’t last.

(from here, photo from here)

Difficult Men

I enjoyed this book.  (A sequel about Amy Sherman-Palladino etc.?)  Here are a few items of interest.

David Chase talking about what he learned from Stephen J. Cannell:

“Cannell taught me that your hero can do a lot of bad things, he can make all kinds of mistakes, can be lazy and look like a fool, as long as he’s the smartest guy in the room and he’s good at his job.  That’s what we ask of our heroes.”

Cannell:

“I’m not a mogul, I’m a writer.  I write every day for five hours.  If that doesn’t make me a writer, what does?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7vo9cJhsXQ

And here’s a good tidbit:

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood [the book] was finished three years after the project began.  (“Simon was very heavy into fantasy baseball one of the years,” Burns said by way of explaining why it took so long to write.)

There’s some great stuff about how cool Clarke Peters is.

Peters was an erudite, fifty-year-old native New Yorker.  He had left the United States as a teenager for Paris, where there were still the remnants of a great African American expat community.  Within weeks of arriving, he’d met James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and the blues pianist Memphis Slim, among others.

While Peters was running basically a salon in Baltimore, Herc and Carver were playing video games all day and going to strip clubs.

David Milch does not disappoint:

The actor Garret Dillahunt, who first played Wild Bill’s killer and then the character Francis Wolcott, was given and asked to study 190 pages of biographical material about a sixteenth-century heretic named Paracelsus.

(Paracelsus:

Later, talking about John From Cincinnati:

“My understanding of the way the mechanism of storytelling works is [that] any story is constantly appending specific values to the meanings of words, and of the actions of characters.  And the fact that story uses as its building blocks words or character that the audience believes it has some prior recognition or understanding of, is really simply the beginning of the story, but not its end.”

Um, yeah no shit duh. 

Say what you will: for my money, the opening sequence to JfC is the best ever in TV history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrWZlh7DnBE

Dick Wolf

Many amazing things in this book:

I have to thank the Chennai office for recommending it.  Two of the more amazing quotes come from Dick Wolf:

Dick Wolf: Most dramas make my skin itch because they give you personal stuff with a soup ladle.  When you go into work and look around your office, how many of your colleagues’ apartments have you been in?  Ours is a workplace show.  All we’re interested in is what happens in the eight or ten hours when the characters are actually at work.

There’s also no time.  That’s why there are no establishing shots, no driving shots, no people walking into buildings.  Each half of the show is the equivalent to a normal hour cop show or legal show.  You’re essentially doing an hour’s worth of content in half the time.

I grew up on N. Y. P. D., the original, and Naked City.  Naked City is much more the prototype for Law & Order than anything else on TV.  The best pictures about conflict are the ones that almost look like news.  Like The Battle of Algiers.

Later, Dick Wolf weighs in on the contractual disputes at Friends.  The Friends cast all banded together to negotiate their contracts, and the result was they got huge amounts of money.  Dick Wolf would’ve handled it differently:

Dick Wolf: When they made the Friends deal, the $100,000 apiece [per episode] deal, I was pretty upset.  What I would have done was come out the first day, say I was disappointed the cast had chosen to negotiate in the press, and I had the unpleasant news that Matt LeBlanc wouldn’t be on the show next year.  I guarantee that you’d never have gotten to a second name.