Bill Moyers interviews David Simon "Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. As we said before, economically, we don’t need those people; the American economy doesn’t need them. So as long as they stay in their ghettos and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay for a police presence to keep them out of our America."
posted by bitmage
on Apr 17, 2011 -
67 comments
The Wire's
Felicia ("Snoop") Pearson has been arrested as part of large scale drug raids
according to the Baltimore Sun.
Life imitates art, but in this case art had closely imitated life, as Pearson was not a trained actress, but grew up in tough Baltimore neighbourhoods and has a conviction for second degree murder for an act at the age of 14. However in recent years she had been involved in anti-violence campaigns and other work with young people.
posted by philipy
on Mar 10, 2011 -
101 comments
“You know what Miami gets in their crime show? They get detectives that look like models, and they drive around in sports cars. And you know what New York gets, they get these incredibly tough prosecutors, competent cops that solve the most crazy, complicated cases. —What Baltimore gets is this reinforced notion that it's a city full of hopelessness, despair and dysfunction. There was very little effort—beyond self-serving—to highlight the great and wonderful things happening here, and to indict the whole population, the criminal justice system, the school system.” —
Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, on the effect of
The Wire on Baltimore’s reputation.
[more inside]
posted by kipmanley
on Jan 18, 2011 -
119 comments
TV and Parables of Our Times: Speaking of Faith ( a weekly radio program about "religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas") looks at how tv deals with issues in contemporary life. A link to the main episode (MP3) is on the page along with various support media.
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Nov 18, 2009 -
6 comments
Bill Moyers Journal, April 17, 2009 From crime beat reporter for the BALTIMORE SUN to award-winning screenwriter of HBO's critically-acclaimed The Wire, David Simon talks with Bill Moyers about inner-city crime and politics, storytelling and the future of journalism today.
Sorry for the one link post.
posted by dougzilla
on Apr 21, 2009 -
23 comments
Blatantly jumping on the opportunity to create yet another thread on
The Wire, I'd like to remind you that
starting tonight, BBC 2 will air the entire series start to finish, an episode every weekday. First episode starts in a moment, at 11:20 PM UK time. Watch!
[more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Mar 30, 2009 -
64 comments
"
So I found out yesterday that the soundstage for "The Wire" still existed. I wasted no time in visiting it and was there almost less than 24 hours [sic].
It's one of my favorite TV shows ever and I had to see this before everyone ruined it. The building is also scheduled for demolition and they are going to build a super market on it." NOTE: LINK CONTAINS SPOILERS
[more inside]
posted by dersins
on Jan 7, 2009 -
79 comments
Pilot School. A nice collection of teevee show pilot scripts. Observe the embryonic state of many of the classics of the past few decades, including
Buffy,
The Wire,
Hill Street Blues,
Battlestar Galactica,
The Sopranos and
The West Wing.
[more inside]
posted by Bookhouse
on Nov 21, 2008 -
29 comments
'There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed' David Simon on
The Escalating Breakdown Of Urban Society Across The US
posted by fearfulsymmetry
on Sep 6, 2008 -
52 comments
Prior to his critically acclaimed program The Wire, creator Edward Burns wrote the HBO miniseries
The Corner, which also focused on the drug trade in Baltimore.
Charles S. Dutton, an African-American Baltimore native and former convict probably best known to most as TV's "Roc," was chosen to direct the miniseries.
Who Gets To Tell a Black Story?, part of a Pulitzer-prize winning
NYT series on race in America, examines Dutton's take on how to make a TV program which portrays a mostly African-American cast of characters, the struggles and differing perspectives of Dutton and Burns, and how race is portrayed in Hollywood.
[more inside]
posted by whir
on Dec 17, 2007 -
24 comments
Margaret Talbot's wonderful profile of David Simon, the creator of "The Wire." Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”
posted by geoff.
on Oct 15, 2007 -
34 comments
