Ed Burns article in the NY Times

giftgrub

Found this very good piece on Ed Burns in the NY Times website

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/arts/television/06wils.html?em&ex=1215489600&en=9fa71d8f4a4416b9&ei=5087%0A

BEER cans on the roof: the Baltimore detectives ended their long days with a couple of cold ones in the parking lot and then threw the empties on top of the station until the pile grew so high that a boss ordered a police helicopter to fly past and blow them all back down.

That was two decades ago, but to viewers of “The Wire,” the throwing of the cans is recent history, an on-screen ritual as familiar as sitting down to dinner was on “The Sopranos.” And like many details from the five seasons of “The Wire” it was harvested from the life of Ed Burns, the cop turned schoolteacher turned screenwriter and co-creator of the show.

Mr. Burns, now 61, put his can-throwing days behind him years ago. Now he is more likely to throw bird seed here outside his new home, a structure so eco-friendly that the power bill in April was $32.65.

“It’s a good place,” Mr. Burns said of this rural retreat, where he sits and remembers his old lives for new TV shows. “It’s peaceful. It’s a good place to write.”

It has been more than 20 years since Mr. Burns, then a detective, met David Simon, then a young police reporter for The Baltimore Sun, sharing a handshake that neither man could have imagined would lead to a book and three television shows — and counting — for HBO.

Their latest project, and their first set outside of Baltimore, is “Generation Kill,” a seven-part mini-series that will have its premiere next Sunday. Based on the 2004 book of the same name by Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with a Marine battalion, the series follows a group of marines as they race, crawl, shoot and wisecrack their way north through Iraq. The show’s portrayal of the marines and the invasion, as seen from Mr. Wright’s seat in a bullet-riddled Humvee, was spot-on to me, a reporter who had been embedded with a different Marine unit during the same weeks in March 2003.

Mr. Burns agreed, with a little polite reluctance, to a rare interview in anticipation of the show’s premiere. Throughout the run of “The Wire” he let Mr. Simon do the talking to the press; his most recent in-depth interview was in 2006, on the NPR program “Fresh Air.”

“I’m something of a loner,” he said. “I have all these stories going around in my head, so I spend time with them.”

He spoke for hours over the occasional barks of his two big dogs, Max and Kima (the latter named for a detective on “The Wire”), in a living room littered with books and a sparsely decorated home office. Mr. Burns and his wife, Anna (he has a son and a daughter from a previous marriage, and she has one daughter), bought the land where they now live five years ago, but they have been living in the house for only six months. It sits at the end of a winding, unpaved road.

“There’s a rumor he’s up there with a barbed-wire compound with hounds he can release,” said Mr. Simon, who has yet to visit.

But though Mr. Burns may prefer a degree of solitude and anonymity, he is far from a recluse and is open and generous with his time and stories, which tend to veer from the short and the simple. A question about his wedding date is answered with a long aside about the Zapatistas, the Mexican rebels who stormed cities and communities in the Chiapas region in an overthrow attempt on Jan. 1, 1994. It is unclear whether he remembers the uprising because it occurred on his wedding day or vice versa. “Anyway, that was the date,” he said.

And though he repeatedly insists that “The Wire” was not about him, calling the show a giant collaboration among himself, Mr. Simon and a stable of writers, there is no question that the show was able to open doors to two Baltimore bureaucracies — the police and the schools — only because Mr. Burns was carrying the keys.

Born in 1946 in the Govans neighborhood of Baltimore, Mr. Burns attended Catholic schools. “We were kind of wild,” he said of himself and his brother, Michael. “We kept getting hit by cars. We were running, as kids would do, and we’d get whacked. People didn’t drive fast, or maybe kids were tougher, but my parents became alarmed and moved us out to the suburbs.”

He joined the military and spent a year in Vietnam working with the Kit Carson Scout program, which used former Viet Cong fighters as translators and guides. In a way the scout was Mr. Burns’s first informant of many.

He came home and, armed with a degree in history and a minor in philosophy from Loyola College in Baltimore, improbably joined that city’s police department in 1971. He was assigned to the tough Western District, then the wide-open battleground of drug dealers.

Why? “I really didn’t see myself working in offices and things like that,” he said. “I thought at that time police work was the way to go. You get to help people.”

But the job had its frustrations. “I thought some of these guys should be good,” he said of his fellow officers. And he was struck by the inability of the homicide unit to solve cases, which he blamed on old-fashioned, one-case-at-a-time investigation techniques. So he scooped up 12 open case files that all made some mention of the same Baltimore drug gang and brought them to his boss.

“I’ll give you 12 murders,” he told him. “It takes about a year, year and a half to bring down a good organization.”

Mr. Burns worked on cases in ways that had not been tried in Baltimore, using wiretaps not just on private telephone lines but on public pay phones and placing hidden cameras inside drug distribution hubs. “He was one of the first to recognize you have to go for the head of the organization,” said Lt. Terrence Patrick McLarney, 55, a fellow detective at the time. “He kind of invented what is today our meat and potatoes.”

Mr. Burns talks with pride and fondness of those cases, recalling every detail of this arrest, that wiretap recording. Many characters on “The Wire” are drawn from people he knew on either side of the law, like the drug dealer Avon Barksdale (played by Wood Harris) and the reformed addict, Bubbles (Andre Royo). “I’ve seen hundreds of Avons,” he said. “You knew how they would act. I’ve had tons of informants. I knew the real Bubbles.”

But his disillusion with the way crime was addressed only grew. “It was painfully clear that they were not going to change the way they were doing things,” he said. “The Police Department was into the numbers game. We were going in different directions.”

The fateful meeting with Mr. Simon took place in the early 1980s, when Mr. Simon was researching a project for The Sun, where he was a police reporter. Mr. Burns ended up trusting him, and thus began a decades-long collaboration during which Mr. Burns’s role shifted from guide to collaborator.

He retired in 1991 after 20 years on the force, just as Mr. Simon approached him with an idea that would probably repulse most retired detectives: spending a year on the streets of a drug-infested ghetto, chronicling the lives of the users and the dealers — the very people he used to lock up — for a book that became “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood” in 1997.

The cover carried both men’s names, and for Mr. Burns it was the first time he’d written anything except affidavits and a couple of technical articles for journals. “It wasn’t that monumental,” he said. “You had in the back of your mind that if you screwed up, David would be there.”

But he didn’t rush to get an agent, wasn’t directly involved in the “Corner” mini-series and returned instead to public service, this time as a geography teacher in a middle school. He liked the energy he got from coaching his kids, he said, and his wife was working, so they could afford his small salary; “we weren’t starving to death.”

In his first class, 13 of the some 220 students had been shot — two of them twice. “They don’t graduate,” he said. “It’s tough.” He taught for seven grueling and rewarding years that showed him the flip side of his life as a cop, “being with kids and seeing the problem from a different perspective,” he said, “trying to understand the drug culture, the impact of the drug culture and our responsibility for creating this culture.”

But then Mr. Simon swooped in again, this time with the idea for “The Wire,” and Mr. Burns left teaching to sign on as a story editor. (“For somebody who never made money, it was like, ‘Whoa, I can have a few dollars,’ ” he said about getting his first paycheck for the series.)

“How did he learn it?” Mr. Simon recalled. “I gave him a bunch of scripts. ‘Homicide’ scripts, ‘Corner’ scripts, showed him the dynamic. One thing about Ed is you don’t have to show him anything twice. This is a guy who devours any idea he encounters.”

For Mr. Burns, who believes most Americans think starting a wiretap is as simple as one guy in a cop show saying as much to another, “The Wire” was an opportunity to “get it right,” he said. He conceived the morbid arc for the fourth season, in which killers working under the drug dealer Marlo Stanfield dump bodies in boarded-up row houses. “Police work has come to be about numbers,” he said. “This was a twist on it. This was Marlo doing his part. ‘If I don’t have murders, then they won’t come.’ ”

Mr. Burns also came up with a mystifying split second in a third-season episode: a shot of William A. Rawls (John Doman), a hard-line deputy commissioner, during a scene that takes place in a gay bar. The moment was never revisited or explained. “It would have been a nice twist to have Daniels, who is in line to be commissioner, have him discover Rawls’s fatal flaw and choose to ignore it,” he said. “And have Rawls cut him down. We laid the mine. We just never stepped on it.”

And yet for all the praise “The Wire” garnered, Mr. Simon said, Mr. Burns finished every season “absolutely frustrated and convinced we had ruined the show.” But then he would come around. “He would put the tape in, in the end, and I’d hear from him a month afterward. ‘No, actually, that was really good in the end.’ ”

Mr. Burns said he was surprised by all the attention “The Wire” received from policymakers who were piqued by the show’s gritty civics lessons — the very sort of people, he said, who more or less ignored him when he worked in the public sector.

“The irony is that you have to be somebody before anybody listens to you,” he said. “I wasn’t an expert when I was an expert, and now that I’m not an expert, I’m an expert. It’s kind of curious.”

HBO took “Generation Kill” to Mr. Burns and Mr. Simon a few years ago. Mr. Burns’s time in Vietnam attracted him to the material, which he said captured the universal traits of men at war. “What is similar is the way people act, men in close quarters,” he said. “It’s always us against them. The us becomes ever, ever smaller, and the them becomes the whole world.”

There were similarities to “The Wire,” as well, like the discord between the rank and file and the commanders. But Mr. Burns’s role was different this time, no longer subject or creator but instead an adapter and a filmmaker. “In the case of ‘The Wire’ Ed was more of the diagnostician,” Mr. Simon said. “He was the guy who had lived these events. In ‘Generation Kill,’ like me, he’s become more of a clinician. He was a filmmaker trying to deliver someone else’s vision.”

“Generation Kill” follows a string of recent films about Iraq that have tanked at the box office, but he doesn’t seem worried. “It’s like ‘The Wire,’ ” he said. “I think the trick is getting someone to watch it.”

His next projects include a feature film about a true but unlikely romance between Donnie Andrews, a Baltimore holdup artist who robbed drug dealers (and inspired the character Omar Little on “The Wire”), and Fran Boyd, a crack addict who recovered with his help and married him last year (and was also a character in “The Corner”).

After that Mr. Burns hopes to make, with Mr. Simon, a period mini-series about the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886, when the police, trying to break up a labor demonstration, were struck by a bomb that killed seven officers and sent four wrongfully convicted defendants to the gallows. With its troubled police department, corrupt city officials and compromised press, the incident has echoes of “The Wire.” But Mr. Burns sees it in broader strokes:

“We’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a working man,” he said. “There was a flush of money, and we’ve forgotten our roots. These stories have a power because it’s when men stood up.”

He considered the often bleak worldview of “The Wire,” with its overarching theme that no matter what a person does, it will never be enough to stop the city from grinding over him. “I’m not a fatalist,” he said. “I’m very optimistic. In America, before we notice things, things have to become bad.”

godtabh

Great read