During the writers’ meetings, Burns and Simon often finished each other’s sentences. They met in 1985, when Simon was covering the criminal career of Melvin Williams, and Burns was the lead detective investigating him. Burns had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Baltimore drug trade, a conviction that he was right about most things, and an autodidact’s intellectualism. When Simon first arranged to meet Burns, at a public library, he discovered him with a stack of books, including John Fowles’s “The Magus” and a volume by Hannah Arendt. “Once I found him, I didn’t let go,” Simon told me. After they finished writing Season Five of “The Wire,” they teamed up again on Simon’s next project for HBO: a miniseries called “Generation Kill,” based on the 2004 book, by Evan Wright, about a Marine platoon in Iraq. Simon recalled, “Ed used to drive the other cops crazy because he knew better at every point how to do an investigation, and then when he got the cases to court he would tell the prosecutors how to present them. He pissed them off. And when he was in the school system the assistant principals learned to hate him.” In the early days of “The Wire,” Simon said, he and Burns used to have “hellacious” arguments—he compared them to scenes from “a toxic marriage.” He continued, “I finally said to him, ‘I’m not going to abdicate. I always have to trust my own ideas in the end. I’ll pick the ones out of your sixty ideas that I think are going to work, and I’ll leave the others on the table.’ But there were also moments when he fought really hard for something and in the end I saw it.” Burns, Simon said, “always pushes me further than I would go on my own.” He is the show’s policy visionary—the one who, Simon half joked, “is only working in TV till somebody realizes that they ought to give him all the money to fix our social problems.”
Hei. Airwaves?
-b.
Engin ummæli:
Skrifa ummæli