“Jesus fucking Christ, Simon. Listen to you. You’re like one of these fuckin’ defense lawyers who get you on the stand and start asking if it’s true, Detective Waltemeyer, that you fucked some broad in 1929. Who gives a fuck? McLarney was on a scene and he didn’t give a fuck about your fuckin’ deadlines. So just go fuck yourself and tell your newspaper to go fuck itself and stop bein’ a fuckin’ lawyer with us.”
I looked over to see McLarney giggling, hiding his face in his sport-coat.
“A whole year up here,” Waltemeyer concluded, “and you’re still nothing but a prissy bitch.”
Ah, normalcy.
And it might’ve stayed that way had not Barry Levinson bought the book and metastasized the thing into an NBC drama, turning our small, self-contained world upside down. Suddenly, Edgerton was some proud, fully intellectualized peacock of a detective named Pembleton. And McLarney was bald with a funny mustache, and obsessed with the Lincoln assassination. And Worden was that actor-whatshisname-the one that got fucked in the ass in Deliverance. And Garvey? Damned if they didn’t give Rich Garvey red hair and tits. He was a woman, for Chrissake.
For me, Homicide: Life on the Street was a strange stepchild at first. I admired the drama and the craft of it-and to the detectives themselves, I actually defended the show’s willingness to fictionalize their world as a necessary license for long-form storytelling. I was certainly happy to have the book rediscovered; well before the NBC show ended its run, a quarter of a million copies were sold. But, in truth, I was ambivalent.
After reading the first three scripts, I wrote a long memo to Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana in which I explicated the intricacies of various investigative techniques and legal requirements. No, you cannot search a suspect’s domicile for a weapon because a detective dreamed that the gun was there. Probable cause is a required element for any affiant to obtain a search-and-seizure warrant signed by a circuit court, and so forth and so on and furthermore, et cetera, et cetera…
Nonfiction boy, Fontana called me after that, and not with any particular fondness.
I went to the set a couple times during filming, standing around like any other tourist. The detectives themselves would occasionally show up, usually with wives or girlfriends who wanted to meet Danny Baldwin or Kyle Secor. A few took the gig of technical advisor, sitting by the video monitors and offering advice when asked, and sometimes, to the chagrin of the film company, when not.
A special moment in this regard belongs to Harry Edgerton, who, upon witnessing Frank Pembleton-his television alter ego-order a Scotch and a milk at a bar, shouted, “Cut.”
Barry Levinson turned to look at his technical advisor as if to examine a new species. Assistant directors and junior producers scurried to immediately right the wrong.
“But there’s no way I would drink something like that,” Edgerton said to me later. “Scotch and milk? Seriously, Dave, people I know are gonna see that and what are they gonna think?”
Eventually, Gary D’Addario-a man of demonstrated tact and discretion-became the solitary advisor and, in time, played the role of a tactical commander in the cast. And, as the novelty of filming wore thin, the other detectives drifted away. So did I, feeling, as all authors probably do on a film set, entirely beside the point.
To be fair, one of the producers, Gail Mutrux, had asked if I wanted to try my hand at writing the pilot for the show. Ridiculously ignorant of the money involved, I had declined, telling Gail-who first read Homicide and brought it to Levinson’s attention as possible television fare-that she should get someone who knew what he was doing, if only to give the project a fighting chance. I would, if they wanted, take a later script, writing only when a template for the show was established.
Fontana and Levinson obliged. And that later script, which I cowrote with David Mills, a friend from college newspaper days, proved so relentlessly dark and unsparing that NBC executives declined to allow it to be shot during that first season of the drama. It was only a year later, during the truncated, four-episode run of season two, that it was filmed, and then only because Robin Williams had agreed to star in the guest role.
I still have my first draft of that script-replete with Tom Fontana’s notes in thick red ink. Our scenes were long and the speeches longer, and the descriptive sections were marred with the kind of camera direction that denotes an amateur effort. Once Tom and Jim Yoshimura got done adding additional scenes for the guest star-and cutting dialogue for other characters-maybe half of the script could be credited to Mills and me.
I thought this a personal failure-even after the episode won the Writer’s Guild of America writing award-and I took the opportunity to remind myself where it was I actually belonged. Back at the Sun, working my beat, I began planning that second book, a year in the life of a West Baltimore drug corner. Mills, however, left his gig at the Washington Post for Hollywood, and after hiring on at NYPD Blue called back to assure me that any freelancer who, on a first script, manages to get half his words into an episode, is doing fine.
So after a second Homicide script-this one filmed with few changes-I jumped. It helped that my newspaper-once a good, gray lady of venerable, if somewhat hidebound traditions-had become the playground of a couple carpetbaggers from Philadelphia, two tone-deaf hacks for whom the apogee of all journalism was a five-part series that declared “The Baltimore Sun has learned” in the second paragraph, then offered a couple overreported pages of simplistic outrages and even more simplistic solutions.
There was a Pulitzer fever to the place, and a carefully crafted mythology in which no one knew how to do their job until the present regime brought tablets down from Sinai. I returned from my research on The Corner to a depressed and depressing newsroom, moreso after a series of buyouts began driving talented veterans to other newspapers. Eventually, cost-cutting and out-of-town ownership would all but destroy the place, but even by the mid-nineties, there was enough intellectual fraud and prize lust at the Sun for me to realize that whatever I had loved about the Sun was disappearing, and that, in the end, the artifice of television drama was, in comparison to the artifice of a crafted Pulitzer campaign, no longer a notable sin.
I hired on with the stepchild, and Tom Fontana and his crew taught me how to write television to a point where I was proud to work for the man. And when The Corner was published, I was ready, with Mills, to tell that story on HBO.
As for the detectives, most accepted The Corner as a legitimate story, fairly told. Following a shooting one day at Monroe and Fayette, Frank Barlow actually came across the yellow crime-scene tape to chat with me about old times and ask how the new project was going-an act of fraternization for which I had to explain myself for days afterward to touts and dealers and dope fiends. But other detectives regarded the second book as something of a betrayal-a narrative written not from the point of view of stalwart Baltimore police but in the voice of those they were chasing.
By the early nineties, that chase had turned brutal and unforgiving. Five years after I reported Homicide, the cocaine epidemic had overheated Baltimore’s drug economy and transformed the inner city. Where once there were a couple dozen drug markets, now there more than a hundred corners. And where once the city’s homicide unit had to work 240 slayings a year, suddenly they were contending with more than 300. The clearance rate slipped a bit, the bosses got nervous and, eventually, they panicked.