'The Wire' Set to Start on HBO: Here's What Director, and Newspaper Editors, Had to Say About It Recently

By: Jennifer Saba (Note: This article first appeared last November. The new season for the HBO series begins Sunday. Earlier this week, the Baltimore Sun's TV critic criticized the newsroom angles in this coming season.) So far on the four seasons of the HBO television show "The Wire," creator David Simon has chronicled Baltimore's seedy drug trade, the vanishing opportunities for the working class, the machinations of city government, and the bleak education system with almost Dickensian detail. For the fifth and final season beginning on Jan. 6, Simon (who also serves as executive producer of the show) turns his gimlet eye to what he considers another local institution that should be held accountable, the media: specifically, The Sun.

For Simon, a former reporter at the newspaper, it's a logical step. "It's the last institution that ought to stand in the dock," he tells E&;P from his Baltimore office. "It's not just the media, but also us -- what we expect from our media, and what we don't expect."

The shrinking metro will play a realistic role in the show thanks to the cooperation of Editor Tim Franklin and Managing Editor Robert Blau, who allowed the Sun to be used in the series. But the show opted to build a set in a warehouse -- including a metro desk -- since the "Wire" would only be able to shoot at the real Sun late at night after the newspaper had closed.

Simon recalls approaching Franklin and Blau about access: "I said, 'Look, you are not going to love this, but it's going to be indicative of what is going on in the industry now and that's no secret to anybody, least of all the people in your newsroom."

The Sun, argued Simon, had earlier given the series "atta-boys" for realistically depicting the city. "I'm not going to do this without your permission," he told the editors. "You have an interest here, but I think if you don't do it, if you make us call it the Baltimore Light, you are going to look silly. You have embraced on your own pages that the show is a serious and relevant attempt to chronicle the city. You are part of that city, even though you are a private company."

He adds, "To their great credit, they swallowed hard and said, 'Do what you've got to do.' That is ballsy."

The producers were given only one constraint: They could not use the names of existing Sun employees. Former employees of the paper, however, make cameo appearances, including Simon's Sun editor Rebecca Corbett (now at The New York Times) and Bill Zorzi, a former Sun political reporter and now a writer for the show. And there are targets: Former Sun editor Bill Marimow's last name just happens to turn up in the character of a nasty police lieutenant, Charles Marimow.

Simon has repeatedly rejected the notion that Charles Marimow is modeled on Bill (who did not always see eye-to-eye with Simon at the Sun). "Listen, when I first started writing TV, I used to pick characters' names from my baseball card collection when I was a kid," says Simon. "Not everybody can be Smith and Jones. Everyone has to have distinctive names, so there are characters throughout my entire history based on people who I worked with. They existed and currently do exist on 'The Wire,' across the board."

The Sun is the ideal backdrop for Simon to wrap up the series, a final nod to the place he spent 13 years covering the Baltimore police department. (Twice during his tenure there, he took a leave of absence to write the book Homicide: Life on the Street and co-author The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. Both were made into TV series.)

Even though he left the industry in 1995, Simon has zero compunction about voicing his displeasure about the direction of newspapers, and it spills into the show. "There is great affection for the craft of journalism," Simon says. "There are absolute moments of tenderness of what journalism is and can be. And then there is a very angry critique of out-of-town ownership, of the prize culture within journalism and --how should I say this? The fact that the pond is getting smaller."

The story line will revolve around a city editor having to cover Baltimore on a shoe-string budget: "It's going to be struggling with a lack of resources, which the Sun is. Our point-of-view would be that of a good hard-working city editor, trying to do, I guess here I'm quoting Mr. Willes" -- the former Times Mirror CEO Mark Willes -- "trying to 'do more with less.' For most of my career while the Sun was shrinking, we were often told we were going to do more with less. That is the newsroom culture.

"You are going to see the city editor try and mobilize resources. Sometimes he will succeed elegantly and sometimes he will be thwarted by a culture that doesn't value how honestly and how carefully the newspaper covers its own city. It values whether or not at the end of the year someone can win a prize and exalt themselves."

Simon is not shy, and is in fact -- to borrow his description --incredibly ballsy about airing his grievances over the "prize culture" of newspapers, citing it as one reason why he left the Sun for good. That includes calling out editors and naming names -- and not just any names, but highly respected former editors John Carroll and Marimow (Bill, not Charles) -- more than a decade after his departure. Simon insists that the lust for winning Pulitzers and the desire for reporters "to cook it" in order to move to top-tier papers has been the ruin of the Daily Miracle.

"It was just about the f------ prizes," says Simon about Carroll and Marimow, both of whom came to the Sun during the early 1990s to head the newsroom. "It wasn't about if we were going to cover the city with more integrity. And that was the thing that really disappointed me."

Pulitzer winner Marimow, who is now editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, was silent on the issue until recently. "David Simon is truly obsessed. He reminds me of Captain Ahab and the pursuit of the white whale," he tells E&P. "I spent most of my career as a reporter, I grew up working with the best editors and the focus has been on public-service journalism. The purpose is not to win Pulitzer prizes, but to make a difference in the community. To say the motivation is to win prizes is untrue."

In 1999, Columbia Journalism Review rated the Sun as one of the country's top 10 papers, stating that the paper had dramatically improved and applauded its enterprise and community reporting.

Carroll wrote in an e-mail that the reason Simon left was that he found a better deal in books and TV -- "not an irrational decision." He says he delayed Simon's request for a merit raise by six months until the reporter, already writing books, could demonstrate that his primary commitment was to the paper. "He's been erupting periodically ever since," Carroll says. "David's apparently good at television work, but on the subject of the Baltimore Sun he's a bit of a screwball."

Marimow admits he has periodically watched the cable drama, but stopped after Charles Marimow was introduced to the series. Nor does he buy Simon's theory that he innocuously settled on the character's name: "That is utter bullshit! How could you take a name like Marimow? I have a daughter and son and a mother and a wife named Marimow and that is it!"

Simon's criticism of the industry could be considered as that of a man who loves newspapers -- he maintains a wistful, romantic notion of what they were and what they should be. The Sun was a place he says he expected to spend his sunset years, where as he imagined it, he would "grow old on the copy desk and bum cigarettes from younger reporters and lie about what it was like to work with [H.L.] Mencken and [William] Manchester."

The bloodletting of the newspaper industry, especially at big metros, is distressing to Simon, though he feels the injuries are self-inflicted: "What happened to newspapers is what happened to Detroit when the Japanese came in and kicked their asses. They weren't putting out a good car anymore, and we weren't putting out the product we could. That is a tragedy. If you were putting out a product 10 years ago that was essential and nobody could get anywhere else -- if they said, 'You know what, we're not going to give this away on the Internet ... '

There are two things I would emphasize," he concludes. "While speaking about the problems that the Sun finds itself in, there are people there who are doing really good work. And they are doing it under enormous pressure.

"The second thing, the 10 episodes demonstrate real affection for the craft. ... It's not an exercise in denigration for the sake of. We put everything we feel in there and the truth is, Bill Zorzi and I loved being reporters. And we loved being at the Baltimore Sun."