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AFF panel: A Conversation with David Simon
Much-admired television dramatist David Simon (“The Wire,” and “Treme,” “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “The Corner,” “Generation Kill”) sat down Saturday at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel with moderator Robert Draper for a discussion of Simon’s career.
Just a few hours earlier, Simon had been given his latest accolade, being granted the Outstanding Television Award from the Austin Film Festival.
I have written a lot about Simon lately. You can read my Oct. 17 American-Statesman interview with the writer here, and a longer transcript of our interview can be found here.
In this post, I’m just going to hit on highlights of Simon’s conversation with author Draper, who is also a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and National Geographic and a correspondent for GQ.
- Simon did not seek out the police beat, it’s simply what was assigned to him at the Baltimore Sun, at which point he just tried to get as good at job as he possibly could.
- Newspapers, Simon said, react when people of note are killed or someone is killed in the wrong zip code. He claimed that most people took that as ‘that’s the way news works.’ But it seemed to him to miss what was really going on in Baltimore, where the culture of drugs had devalued black and brown life. The extraordinary thing, he said, was how routine the violence had become.
- Simon dismissed criticism that some of his characters dialogue has been difficult to understand. “My fear as a writer,” he said, “is that people living the event will read what I wrote and say this guy is a fraud. That fear has served me really well in terms of writing dialogue.” Authenticity is crucial to Simon. “Anything worth writing about in a narrative way is worth getting right.”
- When he was 11- or 12-years-old, Simon read Jim Bouton’s baseball biography, “Ball Four.” “It’s not only a great book about baseball,” he said, “it’s a great book about America … he was a marginal player and he basically took notes for a year. It was beautifully written as sort of a diary of a baseball player. It’s not only about him and his baseball team, it’s about America changing in the 1970s.” Bouton made the players in the book palpably human in a way they never were when they were just baseball cards and stats, Simon said, calling it “revolutionary.”
- On New Orleans residents: “Their nuances have nuances.”
- Simon called network procedurals and reality crime shows including “Cops” “the indulgence of our most fascistic impulses.”
- The former journalist said that seeing the argument for the Iraq war disintegrate so quickly was “really shocking.” He claimed it was as if the administration was saying that the truth no longer mattered, that they’d moved past it.
- The great thing about HBO, Simon said, is that “you could dissent.” He claims the pay cable network was initially afraid of “The Wire” because they thought it was a cop show, and broadcast networks did cop shows. HBO feared that viewers would say “that’s not HBO, it’s TV.” He penned a memo to HBO bigwigs telling them that it would be the end of the beginning for them to do something firmly in the broadcast network wheelhouse. But if they could take a form that the networks owned and subvert it, it would be successful.
- SImon reiterated what he’d told me earlier about ratings not being as important for HBO shows. But he added that his shows generally have a good shelf life beyond their initial runs. “The Wire” sells more DVDs now, he said, than when it was initially on the air.
- “Treme,” Simon said, “is an argument for the American city.” He talked about how small-town values were being pushed at the Republican Presidential Convention, but called the push for a return to a Norman Rockwell-esque vision of America “absurd,” noting that America is becoming more urban and multicultural every day. He joked about the sanitization of Manhattan, saying the only place anyone would get mugged there is in a four-star restaurant.
- Simon says New Orleans, the setting for “Treme,” breathes culture in a way a lot of city’s don’t.
- Music plays a big part in New Orleans andSimon talked about the difficulties of incorporating so much music into a series. It’s difficult to leave so much of it out because it’s so good, he said, but he insisted that the music must either be advancing the narrative or the story must be moving while the music plays in the background. “If the storytelling is stopped during the music,” he explained, “you had better not stay with it for more than 45 seconds.”
- Full versions of many “Treme” musical numbers are available on iTunes, Simon noted. Since they were released after the season, they are not selling well and some of the proceeds go to charity.
- Simon said that while it’s not fair to judge fan (and initial critical) reaction as harshly as he does, he is “generally disappointed” in online commentary of his work.
- “The ugliest part of writing is being alone,” Simon said, calling the craft “an act of sheer bravado and vanity.” He questioned why he should be the one who gets to stand up in front of the campfire and tell us his story. “Me holding court is effrontery even if I get away with it and I know that,” he said. “The ones who don’t know that are the dangerous ones. “
- Simon claims he did not do well at anything academically after the 7th grade, when he discovered girls.
- His father once told him that you learn to write by reading other writers. Journalists, he said, have stopped reading, claiming they read what’s in their own papers or on their own beats. It’s the same in Hollywood, he added, where smart people differentiate themselves by reading aggressively and widely.
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