The Wire Season 4 DVD news and season 5 discussion

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ripweblo
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Post by ripweblo »

season 1 is on hbo on demand rite now
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KritiKal
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Post by KritiKal »

Apparently McNulty is drinking again :grin: That alone should result in a couple good episodes right there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFQVSvG5x54

Ran across him in some, what I'm sure was a shitty Sandra Bullock movie. He was drinking it that too. I started watching it until I heard him speak, that was a shocker. I'm guessing that's his normal voice?

service
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Post by service »

LONDON wrote:the wire is decent at all that, but I don't feel they show how feds really get down an that you know, the police are nasty, the don't show that side of it you know, police brutality, setting niggas up, getting niggas to shot work on the block for them an all that type of shit, fock the police, boy dem is disgusting, fuck em
LOL

what the fuck show are you watching? there is more brutality and corruption on the wire than on any other cop show i've ever seen.

JaH BLaZe
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Post by JaH BLaZe »

service wrote:
LONDON wrote:the wire is decent at all that, but I don't feel they show how feds really get down an that you know, the police are nasty, the don't show that side of it you know, police brutality, setting niggas up, getting niggas to shot work on the block for them an all that type of shit, fock the police, boy dem is disgusting, fuck em
LOL

what the fuck show are you watching? there is more brutality and corruption on the wire than on any other cop show i've ever seen.
you need to see more cop shows then holmes

PopeyeJones
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Post by PopeyeJones »

JaH BLaZe wrote: word omar little is a charismatic little baty boy

:grin: :grin: :wtf: :wtf: :grin: :grin:

bringinoutbangerz
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Post by bringinoutbangerz »

EDIT: COULD POSSIBLY CONTAIN MAJOR SPOILER I THINK

Kill an hour reading this New Yorker article on the Wire:
(posted to win back Icesickle's friendship)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007 ... table=true

Stealing Life
The crusader behind ג€œThe Wire.ג€
by Margaret Talbot
October 22, 2007

On a muggy August afternoon in Baltimore, trash scuttled down Guilford Avenue, the breeze smelling like rain and asphalt. It was the last week of shooting for the fifth and final season of the HBO drama ג€œThe Wire,ג€ and the crew was filming a scene in front of a boarded-up elementary school. Cast members had been joined by forty or so day playersג€”mostly kids from the neighborhood. Earlier, the episodeג€™s director, Clark Johnson, had been giving some of the kids the chance to say ג€œCut!,ג€ and theyג€™d bellowed it like drunks at a surprise party. Now, when Johnson yelled ג€œCut,ג€ the kids swarmed around a video monitor to look at themselves in the last shot, pointing and laughing. ג€œHe just said it was good,ג€ one kid complained. ג€œWhy we gotta do it again?ג€ Johnson, who was wearing what he called his ג€œlucky cowboy hat,ג€ stepped away to talk to one of the professional actors. Another manג€”a bald white guy, unprepossessing in jeans and a T-shirtג€”remained by the monitor, and he answered the kids: ג€œHey. Heג€™s the director. You donג€™t believe him? He kinda, sorta knows what heג€™s doinג€™.ג€ The bald guy was David Simon, the showג€™s creator: a former Baltimore Sun reporter who figured that heג€™d spend his life at a newspaper, a print journalist who has forged an improbable career in television without ever leaving Baltimore. The kids listened politely to Simon and ran back to their places.

Each season of ג€œThe Wireג€ has focussed, with sociological precision, on a different facet of Baltimore. The previous season featured a story line about the cityג€™s anarchic schools, told partly through the character of Roland (Prez) Pryzbylewski, a young cop turned schoolteacher. Simon recalled, ג€œOn the first day, the kids were all cutting up and yelling. It was like the first day of school. You know how they kicked the shit out of Pryzbylewski emotionally on the show? The kids were doing the same to the assistant directors. One poor A.D. was, like, ג€˜Please! This is too fuckinג€™ meta.ג€™ By the end of the year, we had a good crew of young actors, but in the beginning it was, as we say in Baltimore, like herding pigeons.ג€ While Simon was telling this story, Jermaine Crawford, a fourteen-year-old who joined the cast last season, came over to hug him. The scene being filmed would mark the final appearance of Crawford, whose character, Dukie, comes from a family in which all the adults are addicted to drugs or alcohol.

Much of the new season, which will begin airing in January, will take place at a downsizing newspaper called the Baltimore Sun. Johnson, back at the monitor, began teasing Simon for giving so many of his old Sun colleagues small parts on the show. Among the dozens of people who have recurrent parts or cameos are Simonג€™s former editor, Rebecca Corbett, now an editor at the Times; the former Sun political reporter Bill Zorzi, now a writer for ג€œThe Wireג€; Steve Luxenberg, the editor who first hired Simon as a reporter at the Sun; and Simonג€™s wife, Laura Lippman, a crime novelist who used to be a Sun reporter.

ג€œIt was like a frat house the other day, with all your newspaper pals around here,ג€ Johnson told Simon. ג€œWhat, you think somebody in Iowaג€™s gonna be watching and go, ג€˜Look, honey, itג€™s Bill Zorzi!ג€™?ג€ Warming to his riff, he added, ג€œYou ever try playing off these people whoג€™ve never acted before? Somebody yells ג€˜Action,ג€™ and they stand here like thisג€ג€”he made a blank fish face.

Johnson is an actor as well as a director. He played a detective on ג€œHomicide,ג€ the NBC cop series based on Simonג€™s 1991 book by the same name, about murder in Baltimore, and in the new season of ג€œThe Wireג€ he plays Gus Haynes, a city editor who tries to hold the line against dwindling coverage, buyouts, and pseudo-news. In the season opener, Haynes provides a bitingly funny introduction to newsroom culture. He complains about a photographer who invariably gooses the poignancy of fire scenes by positioning a charred doll somewhere amid the debris. (ג€œI can see that cheatinג€™ motherfucker now, with his fucking harem of dolls, pouring lighter fluid on each one,ג€ Haynes fumes.) And he patiently explains to a junior reporter one of those house rules which arbiters of newspaper style cling to with fierce persnicketiness: a building can be ג€œevacuated,ג€ he instructs, but you cannot evacuate people. ג€œTo evacuate a person is to give that person an enema,ג€ one of the old-timers chimes in. ג€œAt the Baltimore Sun, God still resides in the details.ג€

The Sun allowed its name to be used on ג€œThe Wire,ג€ but stipulated that no current employees could appear in it; the newspaperג€™s offices have been re-created on the showג€™s hulking soundstage outside the city. This arrangement suited Simon fineג€”he bitterly accepted a buyout offer from the paper in 1995, feeling that it was squandering talent under new management. ג€œThe Wire,ג€ Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American societyג€”and, particularly, ג€œraw, unencumbered capitalismג€ג€”devalues human beings. He told me, ג€œEvery single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We donג€™t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? Itג€™s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarmג€”the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now itג€™s got three hundred. Management says, ג€˜We have to do more with less.ג€™ Thatג€™s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.ג€

Some of the dialogue from the fifth season is taken word for word from the Sunג€™s newsroom. Simon recalled, ג€œThere was this writer, Carl, who every day would eat the same thing for lunch: cottage cheese. One day, somebody walked by and saw him staring down into his cottage cheese, poking it with a spoon and saying to himself, ג€˜Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.ג€™ Thatג€™s in there.ג€

Finely tuned as Simonג€™s ear is for the newsroom, it is perhaps even better calibrated for the street corner and the precinct, having been sharpened by thirteen years of daily crime reporting. Viewers of ג€œThe Wireג€ must master a whole argot, though it can take a while, because the words are never defined, just as they wouldnג€™t be by real people tossing them around. To have ג€œsuctionג€ is to have pull with your higher-ups on the police force or in City Hall; a ג€œredballג€ is a high-profile case with political consequences; to ג€œre-upג€ is to get more drugs to sell. Drugs are branded with names taken from the latest news cycle: Pandemic, W.M.D., Greenhouse Gas. ג€œThe gameג€ is the drug trade, although it emerges during the course of the show as a metaphor for the web of constraints that political and economic institutions impose on the people trapped within them. And, in one memorable neologism, a penis is referred to as a ג€œCharles Dickens.ג€

Because Simon and his primary writing partner, Ed Burnsג€”a former Baltimore homicide detective who was once one of Simonג€™s sourcesג€”are both middle-aged white men, people tend to assume that the dialogue spoken by the drug dealers and ghetto kids is ad-libbed by the black actors on the show. In fact, one of the showג€™s writers was always present on the set, keeping the actors on script. A single dropped word was noted and corrected. Gbenga Akinnagbe, the actor who plays a drug dealerג€™s henchman named Chris Partlow, said, ג€œThis is Davidג€™s domain. He gets the streets of Baltimore better than we do.ג€ The novelist Dennis Lehane (ג€œMystic Riverג€), whom Simon hired to write several scripts, agrees: ג€œWhen you hear the really authentic street poetry in the dialogue, thatג€™s David, or Ed Burns. Anything thatג€™s literally 2006 or 2007 African-American ghetto dialogueג€”thatג€™s them. They are so much further ahead of the curve on that.ג€

The showג€™s departure from Hollywood formulas may be nowhere more palpable than in its routine use of nonactors to fill the minor roles. No other television drama, it seems safe to say, features an actor whom one of the showג€™s lead writers helped put in prison with a thirty-four-year sentence. That is Melvin Williams, a Baltimore drug kingpin whom Ed Burns nabbed in a wiretap investigation in 1984; Simon reported on the case for the Sun. Williams plays the part of the Deacon, a community leader both savvy and wise. The former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, an advocate of drug decriminalization, has a small role as the cityג€™s health commissioner; the character works with a police commander who creates an experimental zone, which the street kids call Hamsterdam, where drug users wonג€™t be arrested. The former Republican governor of Maryland Robert Ehrlich shows up as a state trooper on the governorג€™s detail in a scene where the Democratic mayor of Baltimore comes to Annapolis to ask for a bailout. People whom Simon reported on appear in cameos as city clerks, drug counsellors, corner boys, hired muscle. ג€œThese jokes donג€™t impair anyone elseג€™s viewing,ג€ Simon explained. ג€œBut when Kurt Schmoke advocates for drug decriminalization as the city health commissioner, thereג€™s an extra kick for the locals. But hereג€™s the other thing: these are faces you donג€™t see on television, the faces and voices of the real city.ג€

Simon is an authenticity freak. He said, ג€œIג€™m the kind of person who, when Iג€™m writing, cares above all about whether the people Iג€™m writing about will recognize themselves. Iג€™m not thinking about the general reader. My greatest fear is that the people in the world Iג€™m writing about will read it and say, ג€˜Nah, thereג€™s nothing there.ג€™ ג€

Near twilight, Simon headed over to the location for the next scene: a parking lot under the highway that is directly across from the Baltimore Sun building. There the crew had set up a small, pretend encampment for homeless people. Cars rattled along the highway above, like marbles in a chute. The parking lot reeked, authentically, of urine.

Filming on city streets in marginal neighborhoods carries its peculiar risks and rewards. On one occasion, a car involved in a high-speed chase smashed into one of the actorsג€™ cars, and everybody had to dive out of the way. Another time, a man got shot yards away, staggered onto the set trailing blood, and was treated by the showג€™s medic. Once, a man pressed a package of heroin into the hands of Andre Royo, the actor who plays the sympathetic junkie and police informant Bubbles, saying, ג€œMan, you need a fix more than I do.ג€ Royo refers to that moment as his ג€œstreet Oscar.ג€

That night, the streets were a little quieter, but there was still the circus-comes-to-town bustle of a location shoot. The blue lights of an ambulance and a police car, which were featured in the homeless-people scene, pulsed in the darkness. Simon stood in the middle of it all, and crew members ran up to him with the smallest of questions: Do you like the way theyג€™ve laid out the sleeping bags? What about the way the ambo and the squad car are positioned?

Gone are the days when Simon, who was a writer on ג€œHomicideג€ but didnג€™t run the show, couldnג€™t get Johnson to say something he didnג€™t think his character would say. Back then, Simon lacked suction. As Johnson waited for the lighting crew to finish setting up, he and Simon reminisced about how Johnson had repeated one ג€œHomicideג€ speech over and over, purposely dropping a line that Simon had written. Simon recalled the episode: ג€œThat was ג€˜Scene of the Crime.ג€™ Episode 421. Possibly 422.ג€ Now Simon is the court of last resort. The actor Tom McCarthy, who plays a reporter, came over to ask a question about the upcoming scene. McCarthy pointed out that his character was supposed to be coming back from a City Council meeting that had run late into the night. Would he really put a quarter in the parking meter at that hour, as the script indicated? ג€œHell, yeah,ג€ Simon said cheerfully, inviting McCarthy to take a closer look at one of the nearby metersג€”they were in effect twenty-four hours a day.

ג€œYouג€™re right,ג€ McCarthy said. ג€œYouג€™re right.ג€ With a mixture of admiration and irritation, he added, ג€œGee, itג€™s great to have you on the set!ג€

ג€œThe Wireג€ d

admiral
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Post by admiral »

incredible article - thanks for posting it

Icesickle
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Post by Icesickle »

Just skimming through what you posted...I saw an article in the NY Times a few weeks ago about Simon's next show being about New Orleans musicians...great material for him.

I'll get around to reading the whole piece in a little bit.

BRAZ
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Post by BRAZ »

is there a major spoiler in the article?

Willie B
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Post by Willie B »

BRAZ wrote:is there a major spoiler in the article?
no.
just that its going to be about the media; the press.

Tariq's Dilemma
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Post by Tariq's Dilemma »

admiral wrote:incredible article - thanks for posting it
Finding out who the deacon was in real life is :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh:

admiral
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Post by admiral »

Tariq's Dilemma wrote:
admiral wrote:incredible article - thanks for posting it
Finding out who the deacon was in real life is :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh: :ohsh:
dude looks so unassuming and nice

bringinoutbangerz
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Post by bringinoutbangerz »

DudleyDawson wrote:
BRAZ wrote:is there a major spoiler in the article?
no.
just that its going to be about the media; the press.
I guess I thought the whole "Kid who plays dukie hugs Simon because it is his final scene on the show" meant that he will be killed, neglecting the fact that this is the final season of the wire and shoots aren't chronologically done, etc.

Icesickle
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Post by Icesickle »

That's one of the the best pieces of investigative entertainment reporting, if there is such a thing, that I've ever read. Thanks a lot for posting that BOB.

Tariq's Dilemma
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Post by Tariq's Dilemma »

FYI for anyone that didn't read it, the show is starting in January, not Feb.

:cheers:

FAZER
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Post by FAZER »

The fact that some of the actors on the show are people who Burns put in jail, and Simon wrote about, gives me hope that there are cops and journalists out there that get it. They understand their role in serving the public. They didn't just throw them in prison and leave, they stuck around, they were there as these people turned their lives around. It gives so much more meaning to an already incredible show. Hands down my favorite show on television.

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Philaflava
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Post by Philaflava »

just started watching it. almost done season one...now i'm thinking about coping 3 & 4 cuz only 2 is On Demand.

Killa Cong
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Post by Killa Cong »

I slept at first, but I think season two is the best.
I'm sure that if you have patience they will put at least season three up on demand after they have two up for a while. Gearing up for the season four dvd release.

Overall, this is probably my favorite show of all time.

January isn't soon enough.
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