Pandora's Box, page 7
Kessler co-wrote that season’s finale with Chase, called “Funhouse,” in which Big Pussy joins the fishes, after Tony asks him, with characteristic delicacy, “Why are you making me do this, you fat, fucking, miserable piece of shit?” “Funhouse” was nominated for an Emmy on July 21, 2000. Afterward, according to Kessler, Chase called him into his office, and told him, “It was time to end our relationship, I had lost the voice of the show, even though the last thing we had written was that episode, and we were working on stories for Season 3. My heart sank and I started to sweat. When I asked him if he had been feeling this way, why didn’t he tell me? He said, ‘Oh, you’re right, I probably should have told you sooner, but do you want another chance?’ And I said, ‘Yes, of course I want another chance.’ I would’ve done anything to stay on the show. He said he would think about it.”94
Kessler went back to Manhattan—he was living in Soho—and sat down on the curb in front of his building, his head in his hands. His brother Glenn asked him what was wrong. “I just burst into tears and said that I think I was just fired. Then my cell phone rang. It was David calling to ask me for advice on the scene that he was writing for Tony, with no mention of what had just happened forty-five minutes earlier.”95
That sounds like the behavior of a sociopath but, explains Coulter, Chase was proprietary to a fault. “He guarded the keys to the kingdom assiduously. Success for him was a long time in coming, and this was the most important thing that had happened in his career. He was going to fight tooth and nail to defend it. Did he sometimes step on the credit due other people? Maybe. He just wanted to make damn sure that this was his vision, and that people knew it.”96 Chase did give Kessler a second chance, but fired him for real a few months later.
The Sopranos happened, or at least an important part of it did, in the writers’ room. Winter recalls, “Once in the third year we needed something really horrific to happen to [Tony’s daughter] Meadow and her roommate.” He continues, “I said, ‘Once I was on the subway and I saw a homeless woman who had a skirt made out of a garbage bag. As she got up, the skirt fell off, and she had The Daily News stuffed up the crack of her ass.’ That image always stayed with me. I thought, ‘Of course, we’ll never use that.’ David said, ‘That’s perfect.’ I was like, ‘Wow! There’s no limits!’”97
Chase had an FBI guy filling them in about the idiosyncrasies of mobsters. “He told us about fucking those girls with a broom,” recalls Green. “We used a lot of that shit. He told us about the attitude of mob guys toward cunnilingus.”98 Burgess explains, “There was one episode where Tony needed to get something on Uncle Junior [Dominic Chianese]. I said, ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen to him?’ Well, shit. Tony finds out that Uncle Junior ate pussy.”99
The script meetings were grueling, from ten in the morning to seven, eight in the evening without much in the way of breaks. If, on a good day, the writers’ room rang with laughter, on a bad day, it was a hellhole of competitiveness and backbiting. Chase could be the funniest guy in the room when he wanted to be, but he was no treat to work for when he was in a bad mood. He played favorites, pitting the writers against one another.
The writers felt free to argue with Chase—within limits. “David is a person with a lot of rules,” says one source. “And, so, if you’re not careful, he’s gonna hate you.”100 There was an issue of respect, a line they couldn’t cross. No one could say, “David, that’s the stupidest idea I ever heard, go back to film school.” Green was supposed to be careful around him, not to say this, not to say that. But tact was not one of the arrows in her quiver, and for reasons best known to herself, she couldn’t resist pushing his buttons. She would say things that she knew she shouldn’t. Once, during a Writers Guild panel the discussion turned to the notorious “College” episode. Yes, it was based on Chase’s college tour with his daughter. But where was the hook? Another writer, Frank Renzulli, was the one who suggested that Tony stumble on a rat in witness protection. Like a lot of great ideas, everybody thought it was theirs, and said so, including Chase. Green, however, contradicted him, saying it was Renzulli’s. Later, Burgess asked her why she had goaded him, knowing it was going to piss him off. She replied that she said it because it was true. The moment passed but, as Burgess put it, “Nobody forgets where they buried the hatchet.”101
3
Deadwood and Its Discontents
HBO followed up The Sopranos with Deadwood, which was killed abruptly, creating such a storm that no one noticed Netflix, a start-up that was sending DVDs by snail mail.
David Milch walked into Chris Albrecht’s office in 2002. At the age of fifty-seven (he was born in 1945, the same year as Chase), barrel-chested and bespectacled, of medium height with dark hair and an olive complexion, he hardly stood out in a crowd. But his reputation preceded him. Despite his decidedly monochromatic appearance, it would be difficult to come up with a more colorful character. He was blessed with an original mind, an elephant’s memory, a gift for gab, and an uncommon facility with the written word.
These advantages had already made him a wealthy man. He was coming off an extremely successful network career that included writing for Hill Street Blues and, with Steve Bochco, creating NYPD Blue. According to The Hollywood Reporter, all told, he had made in the neighborhood of $100 million.1 Indeed, along with Tom Fontana, he was one of the threads that connected the late, great twentieth-century cop series to the shows of HBO’s prime.
As a young man, Milch attended Yale. He was a precocious scholar, with a penchant for delivering oracular monologues filled with gnomic nonsense as if he were defending a nonexistent dissertation before a panel of imaginary senior faculty. Try this one, quoted by Mark Singer in The New Yorker, in which he revealed an unexpected mystical-slash-spiritual bent: “We are all literally part of the mind of God and that our sense of ourselves as separate is an illusion. And therefore when we communicate with each other as a function of an exchange of energy, we understand not because of the inherent content of the words but because of how that energy flows.”2 As Tim Olyphant, who plays Deadwood’s Sheriff Seth Bullock, once put it, “Quite honestly, I don’t think I understand 50 percent of the stuff he’s saying. But when he’s done talking I think we might win a Nobel Prize.”3 Strauss called him “David Genius.”4
On the other hand, it seems that not only was he given to bipolar episodes, he fell prey to enough addictions—alcohol, heroin, and gambling—to have earned him a fellowship to a twelve-step program of his choice. In a moment of lucidity, he once spoke of himself as “impersonating a human being.”5 (Unfortunately, he is now stricken with Alzheimer’s.)
During his tenure at Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, it seemed like he spent more time in Vegas gambling than he did in the writers’ room. He was prone to infantile antics. He recalls, “At least one time I pissed in someone’s pencil cup. If Steven [Bochco] drove me home, there was also a good chance I was going to stick my bare ass out of the car.”6 Bochco was forgiving, because, Milch recalls, “He would never expect me to act with . . . integrity, that it would be like being mad at someone for the color of their eyes.”7 Robin Green, who once worked for him on a short-lived ABC show called Capital News, recalled, “The guys at the network loved his line of bullshit. The bottom drawer of the desk was full of money. He pissed in the potted plant in the corner of his office. There wasn’t anything offensive about it. He wasn’t mean. But he wasn’t fun. David Chase was fun.”8
In 2002, Milch pitched Albrecht and Strauss a cop show set in ancient Rome at a time when it was becoming Christianized. Hearing the word “Rome,” Albrecht stopped him. “That’s terrific, but we got one,” he said, referring to an upcoming HBO series.9 Albrecht wondered whether the setting could be moved closer to home. The destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, was still fresh, and he felt the audience needed comfort food, so it might be time to revive the Western. Little did Albrecht know that turning to Milch for comfort food was like asking Dostoevsky for comedy.
Without missing a beat, Milch said, “Don’t go anywhere, I got even a better idea.” As he recalls, “I made up essentially the same show, except set in the Dakota Territory, and instead of it being about the cross, it was about gold.” Rather than the Christianization of the Roman Empire, in other words, it would be about the gilding, read “civilizing,” of the historic Deadwood. He further explained, “It’s a Western in the same sense that NYPD Blue was a police drama.” In his Television Academy Foundation interview, Milch explained, “Any show that is ambitious, is meant to transcend itself. Transcend its own conventions . . . there’s always the feeling that something else and more is going on.”10
Just as Chase and Simon deglamorized the mob and the police, respectively, Milch would deglamorize America’s march to the Pacific. Milch had given the perfect answer: Chase and Ball’s “subtext,” the holy grail of the cable revolution. Moreover, although Deadwood is miles removed from personal shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, in many ways it was just as close to home. His forebears would have been comfortable in Deadwood. Milch’s dad, a doctor, removed bullets from his gangster patients and introduced his son to booze, pain-killers, and, above all, the track at the tender age of five, turning him into “a degenerate gambler”—his father’s words.11
Deadwood turned into one of the best shows of HBO’s golden age. Milch claims that Albrecht was scared to death of it. As Tom Fontana puts it, “Success breeds fear as much as failure does. And that’s what happened at HBO. They became afraid that they weren’t going to find the next Sopranos.”12 Be that as it may, Albrecht greenlit the pilot and, as was his wont, left Milch alone. Milch felt, “I am very lucky that I have had any kind of employment at all—if they ever knew what’s going on in my head, not only would I be unemployed, I would be institutionalized.”13
The series might have been based on a real town, but it was no ordinary town. Deadwood was an imperfectly civilized sprawl of shacks and broken-down buildings that housed the prospectors and adjacent riff-raff who joined the fabled Black Hills gold rush of 1876. Its reputation for lawlessness was earned honestly. Illegal from the start, it was settled by squatters on land that had been granted to the Lakota people. Explains Milch, it was a “criminal enterprise, and it acknowledged itself as a criminal enterprise.”14 There was at least one murder every day. There were two hundred men for every woman, hence bars and brothels were its Starbucks, one on every corner. At its height, Deadwood’s five thousand souls included a who’s who of western legends like Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, and Wild Bill Hickok, who had the bad luck to meet his maker there.
Deadwood’s Deadwood is little more than a vast pigsty, where humans rut in the muck of their own making, a redolent soup of vomit, blood, piss, shit, and putrefying flesh. Its main products are gold and corpses, the latter conveniently disposed of by feeding them to ravenous pigs that carry a symbolic burden. The town is a Petri dish for disease and a magnet for every bottom feeder west of the Mississippi—and some from east of it as well. Traditional authority figures are either absent or compromised. There is no minister or place of worship, while the doctor is sick, racked by a tubercular cough, and the sheriff is an on-again, off-again lawman, mostly off-again. The closest Deadwood gets to a real authority figure is Al Swearengen, memorably played by Ian McShane. Swearengen is a killer and whoremonger by inclination and occupation, of whom someone says, “When he’s not lying, he’s the most honorable man I know.” He runs the opium trade out of his establishment, the Gem Saloon, a full-service purveyor of booze and women.
To Milch, civilizing the frontier meant “how people improvised the structures of a society when there was no law to guide them.”15 That was, after all, the core preoccupation of the genre, the best example of which, perhaps, is John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The show’s language was essentially the vernacular of the gutter marginally elevated by iambic pentameter, lending it a Shakespearean inflection. While, as Milch puts it, his sentences were “so soaked with obscenity as to bleach out the expectation that civility could be expected,”16 on the other hand, in lawless Deadwood, language itself became an instrument of civilization. “I wanted to show,” Milch continues, “that people come to govern their own behavior as much through language as through law.”17
The scripts virtually rained expletives. Counting the number of times “fuck” was uttered became a parlor game, but it was a thankless task. The answer? An estimated 2,980 times over the course of three seasons, occurring at the rate of 1.73 times per minute. The profanity might have seemed spontaneous or improvised, but it wasn’t. It was all on the page. “Put one fuck in the wrong place, and you’re fucked,” as McShane liked to put it.18
Milch shot the pilot in October 2002. Production of the series proper began in August of the following year. Getting McShane on board was not easy. He lived in England and had never heard of Milch, but he was seduced by the profane poetry of the script. Olyphant recalls, “You would read something and just crack up because [of] how far it pushed the boundaries of what you thought was OK to do on television.”19 Example: In one scene, Swearengen spends several graphic, jaw-dropping moments trying to get an adequate blow job, complaining bitterly to no one in particular that the “stupid fucking mutt . . . who sucks my prick” has changed her “entire fucking mouth pattern . . . Her technique’s fucking awry,” finally accusing her of altering “the level of your suction.”
“Maybe if I got on my knees?”
“You’re the cocksucker, change the fucking angle.”
Paula Malcomson plays Trixie, Swearengen’s favorite hooker. They proved to be a good team. “The first time I saw Ian giving a speech,” she says, “I just thought, ‘Oh my God . . . this is the bar.’”20 In one scene, Trixie gets roughed up by a customer and shoots him. McShane recalls, “I take her up to my room and I say, ‘You can’t do this, much as they abuse you.’ We’re rehearsing, and we’re trying to figure out, ‘What’s Swearengen going to do to her?’ Is he going to beat her up? He’s a pimp, after all. David, who was watching, said out of the blue, ‘You know Ian? I think you got to grab her cunt.’ And Paula, who is game, said, ‘Absolutely. Absolutely.’
“Of course, you couldn’t say that now. They’d have an internal investigation. An intimacy expert would be hired. They’d ask, ‘Did anybody get offended by that?’ You’d say, ‘Fuck no, man.’ That sort of set the template for the entire show, that you could actually do anything, be anything, say anything, and you backed each other up.”21
In another outré scene, Trixie aims to exact a pound of flesh from George Hearst, father of William Randolph Hearst, who tries to borrow, buy, or steal all the gold strikes in and around Deadwood, and whose men have killed Trixie’s friend. Gun in hand, she strides down the street, shirt boldly unbuttoned, bare breasts swaying in the breeze. It’s a nervy scene for an actress to do, and today it plays into the red pill backlash against feminism evident in HBO’s The Idol, but then it felt like taboo-busting, and Malcomson recalls, “Maybe some other actors might have said, ‘Well, do I have to bare my breasts? Is that necessary?’ But I thought, Trust the writing. And give it a whirl, to see if it works as opposed to sitting, going, ‘Well, should I or shouldn’t I?’ You have to pull up your skirt and jump off whatever cliff you’re being asked to jump off. You couldn’t half-ass it with David. You had to really go for it. I feel like he made an actress out of me.”22
If Swearengen wasn’t getting his urethra drilled to expel stones in his bladder, his finger was being chopped off. The scripts are chock full of casual violence, as well as racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Asian slurs that, as McShane again observes, you could never get away with today. “Hair-curling” doesn’t do them justice. “I won’t fuck Chinese,” says one local lowlife. “You can’t deny it is off-puttin’ how those Chinese girls’ quiffers don’t run quite plumb . . .” One character says to another, “You talk like you take it up the ass.” A favorite epithet is “cunt-licker.” The torrent of profanity was the verbal music that accompanied scenes of pain, savagery, and humor.
And of course, there was that arc, that allows cable characters to evolve season after season. One of the many reasons Swearengen was such a great role is that he is a complex character who changes. As McShane puts it, “You couldn’t keep killing people and feeding them to the pigs. Civilization was going to come. Power and money were going to win in the end, especially in a capitalist society. When Hearst came to town, Swearengen couldn’t fight him. So he had to create his own victories within that system until the system could be changed, and that’s what Milch was writing towards.”23
According to Logan Roy—oops, that’s Brian Cox, who plays Jack Langrishe, an impresario, actor, and manager of a traveling theatrical troupe that enters the show in the third season, and was supposed to be integral to the fourth season, which never happened, “The thing about Al is, he starts off as someone who doesn’t give a fuck for anybody. Then he begins to get this sense of Deadwood as being an entity in itself and being something quite extraordinary.”24 And finally, Milch, “So even against his will, he comes to be a builder, and however grudgingly, he winds up holding meetings in his bar as they vote on creating civic institutions.”25 Swearengen was another good-bad guy, like Tony Soprano or Stringer Bell.
The gold rush in the Dakota Territory provides a good metaphor for the streaming wars, although today’s prospectors go by names like Netflix, Disney+, Max, and Amazon Prime Video, et al.
In 1995, while Albrecht was venturing into uncharted territory with HBO’s scabrous series Oz, a rail-thin young man named Reed Hastings embarrassed himself by appearing in a photo on the front page of USA Today jauntily posed next to a flaming red Porsche—his own—having just sold his start-up, Pure Software, for $750 million. He was “venture capitalist catnip,” according to Marc Randolph, who had a number of start-ups under his own belt and later partnered with Hastings. “He’d made a lot of people rich.”26
