Mr. Media Interviews by Bob Andelman
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Bob Balaban, RECOUNT, BERNARD AND DORIS, actor, director: Mr. Media Audio Interview REWIND
(Mr. Media is on vacation this week, so we're rewinding to some of the podcast's earlier, most popular interviews to catch up new listeners!)
No matter what role he’s in, Bob Balaban always makes an impression, from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind to playing the President of NBC on “Seinfeld.” And the same is now true of his work as a director, in Bernard and Doris, starring Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, now showing on HBO. He's also in another new HBO film, Recount.
Click on the BlogTalkRadio Audio Player to listen to this interview!
open separate window
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
No matter what role he’s in, Bob Balaban always makes an impression, from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind to playing the President of NBC on “Seinfeld.” And the same is now true of his work as a director, in Bernard and Doris, starring Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, now showing on HBO. He's also in another new HBO film, Recount.
Click on the BlogTalkRadio Audio Player to listen to this interview!
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Bernard Lafferty, Bob Balaban, Doris Duke, Elizabeth Taylor, Harry Potter, HBO, Ilene Maisel, Peggy Lee, Ralph Fiennes, Steven Spielberg, Susan Sarandon, tobacco heiress
¶ 6:19 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Monday, April 28, 2008
David Simon, THE WIRE, HBO show creator: Mr. Media Audio Interview Rewind
(Mr. Media is on vacation this week, so we're rewinding to some of the podcast's earlier, most popular interviews to catch up new listeners!)
Today, it’s January 26, 2007, and I am sitting across from David Simon, creator of the critically-acclaimed and Peabody Award-winning HBO series, The Wire. We are speaking at The Inn at the Bay in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Simon spent the last week working with students at Eckerd College. The fiftieth episode and fourth-season finale of The Wire aired just a few weeks ago, and the fifth season goes into production in March, so Simon is hopefully enjoying a vacation of sorts.
I am an admitted late-comer to The Wire, having seen my first episode just last September in a New Jersey hotel room. I was struck by the show’s tension and extraordinarily tight script and character development, which has often been overshadowed by better-known HBO shows, such as The Sopranos and Deadwood. If you like those shows and you haven’t already caught The Wire, you should consider it assigned viewing. Fortunately, the first season of The Wire is now airing on the BET channel, so us late-comers can start catching up.
If you haven’t seen The Wire, you may still be familiar with David Simon’s work. A former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, he is the writer that the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce no doubt loves to hate, having co-authored (with Edward Burns) the Baltimore-based book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood, and the subsequent HBO series, The Corner, and providing the inspiration and a number of scripts for the Baltimore-based NBC show, Homicide: Life on the Street. Another of his Baltimore-based true crime books, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, was the basis for Homicide.
Today, it’s January 26, 2007, and I am sitting across from David Simon, creator of the critically-acclaimed and Peabody Award-winning HBO series, The Wire. We are speaking at The Inn at the Bay in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Simon spent the last week working with students at Eckerd College. The fiftieth episode and fourth-season finale of The Wire aired just a few weeks ago, and the fifth season goes into production in March, so Simon is hopefully enjoying a vacation of sorts.
I am an admitted late-comer to The Wire, having seen my first episode just last September in a New Jersey hotel room. I was struck by the show’s tension and extraordinarily tight script and character development, which has often been overshadowed by better-known HBO shows, such as The Sopranos and Deadwood. If you like those shows and you haven’t already caught The Wire, you should consider it assigned viewing. Fortunately, the first season of The Wire is now airing on the BET channel, so us late-comers can start catching up.
If you haven’t seen The Wire, you may still be familiar with David Simon’s work. A former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, he is the writer that the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce no doubt loves to hate, having co-authored (with Edward Burns) the Baltimore-based book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood, and the subsequent HBO series, The Corner, and providing the inspiration and a number of scripts for the Baltimore-based NBC show, Homicide: Life on the Street. Another of his Baltimore-based true crime books, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, was the basis for Homicide.
DOWNLOAD THE MP3; LISTEN HERE.
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.
CLICK HERE TO READ A TRANSCRIPT OF THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW!
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.
CLICK HERE TO READ A TRANSCRIPT OF THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW!
Labels: Baltimore, David Simon, HBO, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, The Wire
¶ 8:31 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Bob Balaban, "Bernard and Doris" HBO film director: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1
No matter what role he’s in, Bob Balaban always makes an impression, from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind to playing the President of NBC on “Seinfeld.” And the same is now true of his work as a director, which you’ll discover when Bernard and Doris, starring Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, debuts on HBO on February 9th.
BOB BALABAN AUDIO!
Click to open separate window
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Tell us a little bit about Bernard and Doris. This is the story of Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, and her butler, but maybe you can define it a little more.
BOB BALABAN: Doris Duke, as some people may remember, was known most of her life as “the richest little girl in the world.” Her dad had hundreds of millions of dollars. She inherited a lot when it was a lot to have a hundred million dollars, and by the time she died in 1993, she had managed to amass $1.3 billion, which, in those days, was a lot of money. Now it’s pocket change.
Doris was sort of famous for not ever finding a guy who would ever love her for herself. When you have that much money and you’re a lady, it’s not always the easiest thing. I suppose if you’re a man, it’s not all that easy anyway cause everybody wanted something from her.
Later in her life in 1987, an Irish butler named Bernard Lafferty came to work for Doris Duke. He had worked for Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Lee and was thrilled to come and work for this sort of famous, exotic creature, Doris Duke, who was known for being rather eccentric and generous in many ways, certainly with her foundation. And the two of them bonded. When Doris Duke died in 1993, she left this young, alcoholic, itinerant Irish butler guy, fairly uneducated, basically in charge of her $1.3 billion fortune.
We made a movie, starring the brilliant Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, in which we imagined what might have transpired behind closed doors during the six years that Bernard came to work for Doris Duke that would enable this very unlikely fellow to get to that trusted point in Doris’ heart where she would entrust him with so much of her beloved fortune. We have made a story of how this relationship came to be. It’s kind of a quirky love story between two unlikely people.
ANDELMAN: I’m very interested to know how you were sold on a biographical film in which, right up front as we watch it, we’re told, “Some of the following is based on fact.” I just love that.
BALABAN: Well, thank you. First of all, the legal department of HBO was thrilled that I wanted to put that in the front of the movie. It helps, somebody thinks. But truthfully, they’re two real people, and we did attempt to, more or less in a broad sense, place these two characters in a real context. Doris Duke did have a house in New Jersey. Bernard did come to work for her. In a general sense, many of the things biographically that we say about the two of them are true based on my non-extensive knowledge of the two of them, which is mostly headlines in newspapers and public record. But this is an internal journey of an emotional relationship between two people, so we wanted to be very clear that, as we made that journey, this was something we posited. This was something we invented. Something did happen between the two of them, but we made it up as to what really happened.
ANDELMAN: As I watched, I kept thinking of this line, and I think it’s from an Elvis Costello song – “Some of my lies are true.”
BALABAN: I love that you thought of that. And that may very well be true in this case.
ANDELMAN: Now, with something like this, I’m thinking that Doris Duke would be considered a public figure -- and so she would be in play -- but what about Lafferty? He was hired by a public figure. He never asked to be a public figure, and, of course, he’s passed away now.
BALABAN: Yes, and he has no relatives. You’re talking about legal issues possibly with somebody who was a real character?
ANDELMAN: A little bit, yeah.
BALABAN: Basically, there’s nothing that we say about him that you wouldn’t have learned from going to the library and looking up a lot of newspaper headlines. And there’s also nothing libelous or scandalous about the way we present it.
ANDELMAN: I have to say it’s a very entertaining film.
BALABAN: I like that. You didn’t have to say that as you were saying that.
ANDELMAN: I just gotta call it like I see it. It’s funny. It’s the kind of thing where, if my wife had described it to me Saturday and said okay, I want to go out and see this movie tonight, I would say, “Naah, isn’t there like a Jackie Chan comedy or something?” But I watched it, and I was very entertained. And I think one of the things that really struck me about it, your lead actors, of course, Susan Sarandon, Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes, this is not the guy from Schindler’s List. This is certainly not the guy from the Harry Potter movies.
BALABAN: One of the things I love so much about Ralph in this movie is he’s utterly unexpected, does nothing in it that you’ve ever seen him do before, and manages to make the most complex character, who’s sort of simultaneously very, very creepy and sort of adorable and vulnerable and strange. I agree with you. I haven’t seen him do anything like this. I haven’t seen anybody really do anything like this.
ANDELMAN: It was very interesting to see him, eyes down, for so much of the, at least for the first half of the movie. He’s in that butler, servant type of mode, and I just keep thinking, “Okay, when is he going to burst out?” And appropriately, he did not. That’s the whole thing. That’s what makes it such an amazing performance, I think.
BALABAN: His character kind of blossoms. This is a journey that these two people make is basically a journey to opening up to each other, which did in our movie takes a couple of years for this to happen. Fortunately, the movie is only 106 minutes long so you won’t have to watch it for several years. But the journey that they make is not an Indiana Jones journey where they travel by bus, truck, and camel to get to an exotic location. The exotic location to which both characters are journeying is each other’s hearts. And it’s a twisted path, and it’s a difficult one, but it had to be very measured on both of the actors’ parts, for Susan as well. She just barely pays attention to this fellow for about the first 12 or 14 minutes of the movie so that when she finally looks at him, you realize that she’s had hundreds of servants in her long and exotic and rich life, but there’s something about this guy that is causing her to pay attention in a way that she hasn’t done before. And that’s the beginning of her journey. And in Ralph’s case, you point it out very accurately. He can barely look at the woman. When he starts being able to say a direct sentence to her and look her in the face, you can sense something flowing back and forth between the two of them because they’re great actors, and they’re very good at telling an emotional story.
ANDELMAN: I think I read that Susan described the film also as a love story, which is certainly what I thought while I was watching it. But it’s not, in any way, a love story where these two fall in love, and they live happily ever after. It’s not so much a romantic love -- more of a devotional one.
BALABAN: Yes. I would say, if we were playing at your local multiplex, it would say, “A different kind of love story, the love that dare not speak its name.”
ANDELMAN: I don’t know if we should go that far!
BALABAN: Well, we would if we wanted to get more people into the audience.
ANDELMAN: At what point in the process did you sign on? I think I read it was before Susan and Ralph…
BALABAN: I shuttle about between being an actor, a director, a writer, and a trash collector. My friend Ilene Maisel, who is an executive at New Line Cinema, a brilliant producer person in her own right, sent me the script. She knew the person who wrote it, I believe, had come across it, and just sent it. She was in London, and she said, I think you might find this thing interesting,” which I did. The script has gone through many incarnations since that point. We chose to make the movie on the East Coast so the movie can’t begin the way it used to begin, which is Bernard Lafferty arrived in a Tour of the Stars bus as they were saying, “… and on the left is where Doris Duke, the billionaire heiress, lives…” And we got to explain Doris’ background through the loudspeaker of the tour bus. We couldn’t do that cause we made the movie as if it were in her estate in New Jersey.
I was, from the beginning, struck by the compelling nature of this needy, needy woman who could never find anybody to love her and this butler, who himself felt unworthy and unlovable, and yet their stations in life were so different. Sexually they were so different, and yet something happened between the two of them to drive them together. And I thought even if she had never been a real character, this would have been a very interesting story.
I gave the movie to Susan Sarandon. She loved the idea of playing this kind of character. We discussed literally making sure that the movie we would eventually make was much more an internal journey and much more about an emotional ride between these two characters and therefore, focusing much more on the two of them and their path to, as you and I are talking about it, falling in a kind of love. And then we decided that Ralph Fiennes would be the only person we’d like to make the movie with, and Ralph felt the same way about us.
I went around and found $500,000, and these two “A”-tier actors decided to make this very brave decision to come and be in a movie with nothing to support it except two wonderful performances. We had no money. We barely had a location. We couldn’t find shoes. And yet we had a very wonderful working experience making this thing. Maybe that’s why. It was so pared down. It was so essential about the two of them and their two characters.
ANDELMAN: Let’s talk a little bit about the budget on the film. I want to point out that this was not commissioned by HBO. It was acquired by HBO after it had been made, right?
BALABAN: HBO does that occasionally. Yes, we made an independent movie with Kevin Spacey’s company, Trigger Street Independent, that had raised $2 or $3 million to make a certain amount of $500,000 movies. This, they decided to make one of them. We were on our way to the Toronto Film Festival to look for a buyer at which point Colin Calendar from HBO saw the movie, loved it, said, “I’d love to take you off the market,” and we paused. We went, “Well, gee we could get bought up by Spinning Films Independent if we go to Toronto.” I sat down at that point and discussed this with Susan and Ralph and all of our people and said, “I think this is an opportunity to have two fantastic performances seen by a number of millions of people as opposed to in a little theater on the Upper East Side with 65 people a day seeing it for about three weeks. And we could also pay back the wonderful people who had come and helped us make this movie for no money. I thought that’s kind of a winning combination. Let’s do it,” and we did, and HBO bought it, and here we are.
ANDELMAN: I think we need to talk more about that budget. It’s $500,000, I think you said.
BALABAN: Yes. It ended up, if we were being exactly exact, a few dollars more but substantially less than a million.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
No matter what role he’s in, Bob Balaban always makes an impression, from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind to playing the President of NBC on “Seinfeld.” And the same is now true of his work as a director, which you’ll discover when Bernard and Doris, starring Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, debuts on HBO on February 9th.
Click to open separate window
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Tell us a little bit about Bernard and Doris. This is the story of Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, and her butler, but maybe you can define it a little more.
BOB BALABAN: Doris Duke, as some people may remember, was known most of her life as “the richest little girl in the world.” Her dad had hundreds of millions of dollars. She inherited a lot when it was a lot to have a hundred million dollars, and by the time she died in 1993, she had managed to amass $1.3 billion, which, in those days, was a lot of money. Now it’s pocket change.
Doris was sort of famous for not ever finding a guy who would ever love her for herself. When you have that much money and you’re a lady, it’s not always the easiest thing. I suppose if you’re a man, it’s not all that easy anyway cause everybody wanted something from her.
Later in her life in 1987, an Irish butler named Bernard Lafferty came to work for Doris Duke. He had worked for Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Lee and was thrilled to come and work for this sort of famous, exotic creature, Doris Duke, who was known for being rather eccentric and generous in many ways, certainly with her foundation. And the two of them bonded. When Doris Duke died in 1993, she left this young, alcoholic, itinerant Irish butler guy, fairly uneducated, basically in charge of her $1.3 billion fortune.
We made a movie, starring the brilliant Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, in which we imagined what might have transpired behind closed doors during the six years that Bernard came to work for Doris Duke that would enable this very unlikely fellow to get to that trusted point in Doris’ heart where she would entrust him with so much of her beloved fortune. We have made a story of how this relationship came to be. It’s kind of a quirky love story between two unlikely people.
ANDELMAN: I’m very interested to know how you were sold on a biographical film in which, right up front as we watch it, we’re told, “Some of the following is based on fact.” I just love that.
BALABAN: Well, thank you. First of all, the legal department of HBO was thrilled that I wanted to put that in the front of the movie. It helps, somebody thinks. But truthfully, they’re two real people, and we did attempt to, more or less in a broad sense, place these two characters in a real context. Doris Duke did have a house in New Jersey. Bernard did come to work for her. In a general sense, many of the things biographically that we say about the two of them are true based on my non-extensive knowledge of the two of them, which is mostly headlines in newspapers and public record. But this is an internal journey of an emotional relationship between two people, so we wanted to be very clear that, as we made that journey, this was something we posited. This was something we invented. Something did happen between the two of them, but we made it up as to what really happened.
ANDELMAN: As I watched, I kept thinking of this line, and I think it’s from an Elvis Costello song – “Some of my lies are true.”
BALABAN: I love that you thought of that. And that may very well be true in this case.
ANDELMAN: Now, with something like this, I’m thinking that Doris Duke would be considered a public figure -- and so she would be in play -- but what about Lafferty? He was hired by a public figure. He never asked to be a public figure, and, of course, he’s passed away now.
BALABAN: Yes, and he has no relatives. You’re talking about legal issues possibly with somebody who was a real character?
ANDELMAN: A little bit, yeah.
BALABAN: Basically, there’s nothing that we say about him that you wouldn’t have learned from going to the library and looking up a lot of newspaper headlines. And there’s also nothing libelous or scandalous about the way we present it.
ANDELMAN: I have to say it’s a very entertaining film.
BALABAN: I like that. You didn’t have to say that as you were saying that.
ANDELMAN: I just gotta call it like I see it. It’s funny. It’s the kind of thing where, if my wife had described it to me Saturday and said okay, I want to go out and see this movie tonight, I would say, “Naah, isn’t there like a Jackie Chan comedy or something?” But I watched it, and I was very entertained. And I think one of the things that really struck me about it, your lead actors, of course, Susan Sarandon, Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes, this is not the guy from Schindler’s List. This is certainly not the guy from the Harry Potter movies.
BALABAN: One of the things I love so much about Ralph in this movie is he’s utterly unexpected, does nothing in it that you’ve ever seen him do before, and manages to make the most complex character, who’s sort of simultaneously very, very creepy and sort of adorable and vulnerable and strange. I agree with you. I haven’t seen him do anything like this. I haven’t seen anybody really do anything like this.
ANDELMAN: It was very interesting to see him, eyes down, for so much of the, at least for the first half of the movie. He’s in that butler, servant type of mode, and I just keep thinking, “Okay, when is he going to burst out?” And appropriately, he did not. That’s the whole thing. That’s what makes it such an amazing performance, I think.
BALABAN: His character kind of blossoms. This is a journey that these two people make is basically a journey to opening up to each other, which did in our movie takes a couple of years for this to happen. Fortunately, the movie is only 106 minutes long so you won’t have to watch it for several years. But the journey that they make is not an Indiana Jones journey where they travel by bus, truck, and camel to get to an exotic location. The exotic location to which both characters are journeying is each other’s hearts. And it’s a twisted path, and it’s a difficult one, but it had to be very measured on both of the actors’ parts, for Susan as well. She just barely pays attention to this fellow for about the first 12 or 14 minutes of the movie so that when she finally looks at him, you realize that she’s had hundreds of servants in her long and exotic and rich life, but there’s something about this guy that is causing her to pay attention in a way that she hasn’t done before. And that’s the beginning of her journey. And in Ralph’s case, you point it out very accurately. He can barely look at the woman. When he starts being able to say a direct sentence to her and look her in the face, you can sense something flowing back and forth between the two of them because they’re great actors, and they’re very good at telling an emotional story.
ANDELMAN: I think I read that Susan described the film also as a love story, which is certainly what I thought while I was watching it. But it’s not, in any way, a love story where these two fall in love, and they live happily ever after. It’s not so much a romantic love -- more of a devotional one.
BALABAN: Yes. I would say, if we were playing at your local multiplex, it would say, “A different kind of love story, the love that dare not speak its name.”
ANDELMAN: I don’t know if we should go that far!
BALABAN: Well, we would if we wanted to get more people into the audience.
ANDELMAN: At what point in the process did you sign on? I think I read it was before Susan and Ralph…
BALABAN: I shuttle about between being an actor, a director, a writer, and a trash collector. My friend Ilene Maisel, who is an executive at New Line Cinema, a brilliant producer person in her own right, sent me the script. She knew the person who wrote it, I believe, had come across it, and just sent it. She was in London, and she said, I think you might find this thing interesting,” which I did. The script has gone through many incarnations since that point. We chose to make the movie on the East Coast so the movie can’t begin the way it used to begin, which is Bernard Lafferty arrived in a Tour of the Stars bus as they were saying, “… and on the left is where Doris Duke, the billionaire heiress, lives…” And we got to explain Doris’ background through the loudspeaker of the tour bus. We couldn’t do that cause we made the movie as if it were in her estate in New Jersey.
I was, from the beginning, struck by the compelling nature of this needy, needy woman who could never find anybody to love her and this butler, who himself felt unworthy and unlovable, and yet their stations in life were so different. Sexually they were so different, and yet something happened between the two of them to drive them together. And I thought even if she had never been a real character, this would have been a very interesting story.
I gave the movie to Susan Sarandon. She loved the idea of playing this kind of character. We discussed literally making sure that the movie we would eventually make was much more an internal journey and much more about an emotional ride between these two characters and therefore, focusing much more on the two of them and their path to, as you and I are talking about it, falling in a kind of love. And then we decided that Ralph Fiennes would be the only person we’d like to make the movie with, and Ralph felt the same way about us.
I went around and found $500,000, and these two “A”-tier actors decided to make this very brave decision to come and be in a movie with nothing to support it except two wonderful performances. We had no money. We barely had a location. We couldn’t find shoes. And yet we had a very wonderful working experience making this thing. Maybe that’s why. It was so pared down. It was so essential about the two of them and their two characters.
ANDELMAN: Let’s talk a little bit about the budget on the film. I want to point out that this was not commissioned by HBO. It was acquired by HBO after it had been made, right?
BALABAN: HBO does that occasionally. Yes, we made an independent movie with Kevin Spacey’s company, Trigger Street Independent, that had raised $2 or $3 million to make a certain amount of $500,000 movies. This, they decided to make one of them. We were on our way to the Toronto Film Festival to look for a buyer at which point Colin Calendar from HBO saw the movie, loved it, said, “I’d love to take you off the market,” and we paused. We went, “Well, gee we could get bought up by Spinning Films Independent if we go to Toronto.” I sat down at that point and discussed this with Susan and Ralph and all of our people and said, “I think this is an opportunity to have two fantastic performances seen by a number of millions of people as opposed to in a little theater on the Upper East Side with 65 people a day seeing it for about three weeks. And we could also pay back the wonderful people who had come and helped us make this movie for no money. I thought that’s kind of a winning combination. Let’s do it,” and we did, and HBO bought it, and here we are.
ANDELMAN: I think we need to talk more about that budget. It’s $500,000, I think you said.
BALABAN: Yes. It ended up, if we were being exactly exact, a few dollars more but substantially less than a million.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Bernard Lafferty, Bob Balaban, Doris Duke, Elizabeth Taylor, Harry Potter, HBO, Ilene Maisel, Peggy Lee, Ralph Fiennes, Steven Spielberg, Susan Sarandon, tobacco heiress
¶ 7:53 PM 3 Comments Links to this post
Bob Balaban, "Bernard and Doris" HBO film director: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2
(Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: The thing that’s interesting, and I think it’s important that people know that budget when they see the movie, it does not look like a low-budget movie. And I wanted to ask you how do you make a small-budget film about a billion-dollar subject still look like a million bucks?
BOB BALABAN: Well, thank you. Hopefully, it looks like $5 million, but a million bucks is a good way of saying it.
ANDELMAN: It was a joke.
BALABAN: I thought you were using the expression. When a million dollars seemed like a lot of money which, of course, it is, but it isn’t, you beg, you borrow, you get actors who usually make a large amount of money to be so interested to work together and to make this movie that they forego, that they defray all of their costs. You follow the John Sloss. He’s the wonderful lawyer/producer who has a company called Indigent, which makes a lot of very, very super-low-budget movies, and he came up with a formula. He said here’s what you do: “Just pay everybody a hundred dollars a day, have very low budgets for production design and art design in terms of things that you make or build or acquire, and give everybody who works on the movie, for the most part, a gross participation in the back end.” So the art department, head of the art department, got one point of the movie. It’s just simple. There’s no adjusted gross as they say in Speed The Plow. There is no net. And it’s a way of dealing with people fairly. If you make no money from the movie, then nobody makes any money, but if you have a windfall, then everybody participates in a fairly, accurately-scaled version of how much they should participate.
Now, having said that, we had Frankie Diago, a brilliant production designer who is a friend of Susan’s and of mine, do the production design. I knew that she could call in some favors. She’s worked a lot. She’s very successful. And I also knew that I could be helpful. So anybody that we knew who had things that we could use in the movie, I called them, and I begged them. Joe Aulisi, the costume designer, did the same thing. He’s done Susan’s wardrobe design for many Hollywood big-budget features. So when he called the costume house and said we need to construct a pad for Ralph Fiennes’ stomach so he doesn’t appear quite so thin in this movie. He was playing a character who should look a little chubby, and he drinks a lot. He probably has a beer belly. That alone, that item, probably would have cost the entire budget of the costume department if we’d had to pay the correct amount of money for it. So down the line, Chris Doff gave us silver. Fendi gave us furs. Vuitton gave us vintage luggage so that when you go into Doris Duke’s closet, if we didn’t have Vuitton, we would’ve had “Sportsack by Bob Balaban’s Closet” in Doris Duke’s closet. Bulgari was fantastic with the jewelry. They called and said, “We love it when Susan wears our stuff. She’s so loyal to us. Let us send you Bulgari jewels for her to wear during the movie.” And we said, “Thank you, but we can’t afford the guard to hold onto the jewelry, basically.” And they said, “Oh, well, we’ll send the guard.” So anytime Susan Sarandon wears anything by Bulgari in the movie, which is fairly frequently, there was a guard standing by who then took the jewels, put them in a vault, and went back to Italy or wherever he came from when it was over. We had to do a retake. We added a close-up of Susan on the staircase wearing a fabulous necklace. They had to fly back the necklace from Italy cause it was six months later, and we did the additional shot. That’s what happens sometimes when you work with established movie stars that are also beloved by a lot of the people that they’ve come into contact with.
I ran into a young man in the subway. Eric Gaskins came up to me: “I like your work, Bob.”
“Thank you so much. What’s your name?”
“Eric.”
“Eric, what do you do?”
“I’m a dress designer.”
“Hey, how’d you like to make a free dress for a movie star in a movie we’re making?”
And literally ten days later, he was there with Joe Aulisi sketching something. And a week after that, Susan Sarandon was tripping down the stairs in a fabulous-looking, vintage-looking 1989 ball gown that Eric had whipped up for us and given to us. There’s a full page in Vanity Fair of this dress in this month’s Vanity Fair where they give us our very lovely review. So that’s what we did down the line.
We worked with the mansion, Old Westbury Gardens, in Old Westbury, Long Island, which gave us the house to shoot in. We did have to pay them. It was our entire production design budget, but we deferred some of their costs, and they eventually made a reasonable amount of money considering how we did the entire movie in their house. Could never have done it otherwise. That was one of the reasons the movie looks rather nice. It is because we’re shooting in a place where the Phipps family used to live. They moved down in 1955, established their house as a trust for a museum, and that is how those particular rich people lived. And that’s where Doris got to live in the movie. It’s a beautiful estate. I recommend visiting it at any time. You can picnic in the garden when the weather’s nice.
ANDELMAN: I’m thinking now back to the film. There’s a lot of reference in the film to Doris’ global travels.
BALABAN: Yes.
ANDELMAN: But we never actually see her anywhere.
BALABAN: Yes. You figured it out. They write letters, and you hear about the fabulous places they’re going and buying and doing. And a couple of years pass during the movie as the servants basically take on and off the furniture guards from the furniture so it won’t get faded by the sun and various other conventions. I’m glad when I look back on it that we didn’t have the $20 million that you might have made the movie for. I probably would’ve been tempted to take the two of them traveling in India and Afghanistan or wherever it is they might have gone. Of course, even then you couldn’t go to Afghanistan too easily. I’m kind of glad we didn’t have that money, looking back on it, because it forced us, again, to concentrate on these two characters, which that’s what we have in the movie. We have great actors playing interesting parts, and there’s very little to get in the way, you could say.
ANDELMAN: In directing Susan and Ralph, how much do you actually direct people like this, and how much do you just kind of get out of their way?
BALABAN: A lot of it is getting out of their way. A lot of it is spending some very quiet time before the movie begins “rehearsing”, but rehearsing isn’t, “How will I say this line?” and “Where do I stand?” and “What’s my motivation?” There is some of that, but rehearsing is really making two people feel comfortable knowing that there’s a short amount of time, and they’re going to live another person’s life. We talk about their relationship. We answer questions, the simplest things. “Oh, am I really going to be doing needlepoint? Let’s have a needlepoint person teach me how to do needlepoint today.”
In Susan’s case, a lot of it was, “What’s the inside of this woman like?” She wanted to be very careful that she didn’t simply present herself as the idea of a fabulously wealthy and eccentric person. That’s the thing I love about both of their performances. You could say, in three sentences, you could describe both of these characters, but it wouldn’t tell you anything about the complex way that both of them figured out to show you these people on screen. Susan could’ve done Joan Crawford, “No more wire coat hangers!” and there is an element of that to her character, but there’s so much else.
I liked what you pointed out. In the beginning, you think these two people are the stereotypes that you imagined them to be. And after five or ten minutes of looking at them, you go, “Wait a minute, there’s something else going on here,” because the two of them spent some time in rehearsal investigating the more complex nature of these people and not putting them into a stereotypical box in any way. So, yeah, directing them is getting them to do the movie, making sure they’re comfortable, answering questions, and as you’re shooting, being a little bit more flexible than you might be for a big-budget Hollywood movie. “Hey, I’d like to stand over there. Why doesn’t this thing happen? Could we, perhaps, approach this?” I call London, and five minutes later, we’d have, from our wonderful author, Hugh Costello, a new opening monologue for a scene. And it was a little more flexible, and I think that was helpful, too.
ANDELMAN: Speaking of acting, I want to use a couple minutes here before we have to go to talk a little bit about the wide variety to your career. As my wife was leaving for work today, I said I’m gonna talk to Bob. And in my mind, you are forever etched in my mind as Russell Dalrymple from “Seinfeld.” She said, “Close Encounters.” You’ve acted in these landmark films.
BALABAN: Well, the first movie I was in was actually the Midnight Cowboy, which happened to be the only X-rated movie ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. That was when I was about 20 years old, and I was going to New York University. So I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve been fortunate, not always, of course, but to be in a number of things that ended up being really interesting movies directed by wonderful, world-class, great directors like Steven Spielberg or John Schlesinger or Sydney Pollack or Sidney Lumet, some wonderful people.
ANDELMAN: Where are you going to go from here? You’ve directed a movie. It’s a wonderful movie to watch. You produced on Gosford Park. You’ve done all this acting. As you look ahead, and you think here’s my plan. What do you want to be doing?
BALABAN: I’d like to be directing more movies. I probably will write some more children’s books. I wrote a best-selling series of books for Scholastic called McGrowl. We sold two million copies. Really, I feel like I’m basically just beginning, the door is just beginning to open so there’s a lot of things I’m planning on doing. I have a movie that I’m hoping to direct this year called The Eustace Diamonds, based on an Anthony Trollope novel. Julian Fellowes did a wonderful version of the screenplay. I then hired him to write Gosford Park and won an Academy Award for Best Screenwriter. So we have that large mountain to hopefully climb this year. Like Bernard and Doris, it’s the story of mostly extremely wealthy and exotic people living in London, in this case in 1875. But unlike Bernard and Doris, we will actually have a few dollars with which to make some costumes and have some beautiful scenery, and it’s a great story. I do hope to make that this year. I just finished a movie, acting in, called Recount for HBO that will be on, I believe, in May about the Gore-Bush election in Florida and the hanging chad issues and everything else that went with that impossible and very unnerving situation. It’s really like a thriller when you see it.
ANDELMAN: Was there drama in that situation? I don’t recall it being all that serious.
BALABAN: I think you’re kidding.
ANDELMAN: I am kidding. (Laughs.)
BALABAN: It’s really a nail-biter even though you know exactly how it’s gonna turn out. It’s quite exciting, and Kevin Spacey is brilliant, as is Laura Dern and Denis Leary and Tom Wilkinson and John Hurt and Ed Begley, Jr. It’s got a wonderful cast, and it’s very exciting, and I’m in it also.
ANDELMAN: That was my other question: Are you going to be acting more or less?
BALABAN: You will see me in Recount next year or this year. And, yeah, I will as it fits in and as it arises. I’m very happy to have an ongoing acting career. I love sitting on somebody else’s set and not worrying when the scenery falls down, so to speak. I know it’s the end of the day, and I know there’s no overtime, and I know it’s starting to rain, and I’m not even anxious cause I’m just an actor here, and I’ll just sit around and have a great time. I love acting in other people’s movies. You learn so much by watching everybody direct other people, and you also get to meet a number of people. Part of my being a producer and a director is I have a good Rolodex, and I’ve really had some lovely times with a massive amount of actors. So if I’m casting a two-line part in a movie, that’s sometimes the hardest thing you can do, I can kind of roll back in my mind, “Who did I love last year who came in and said hello?” And we can have that person, and also occasionally, I am fortunate enough to work with some people who are famous enough to get movies made, and well, we got to know each other cause we spent nine months together on the Isle of Wyte last year.
ANDELMAN: In Bernard and Doris, it’s a very small cast. I didn’t see you that I noticed. I didn’t see you walk through any scenes or in background. Are you in there anywhere?
BALABAN: I’m sorry?
ANDELMAN: Are you in any scenes? Are you in the background or anything?
BALABAN: You might catch me in a reflection in a window somewhere, but it wasn’t on purpose.
ANDELMAN: Well, where I was leading with that is is there anything that ties together the movies that you work on behind the scenes? Is there any common thread, any mark of Bob Balaban?
BALABAN: I’d like to think that we all had a pretty good time working together. From the actors to the crew to the craft service people, I’d like to think that it was a harmonious experience. And it’s not always, but we do our best.
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: The thing that’s interesting, and I think it’s important that people know that budget when they see the movie, it does not look like a low-budget movie. And I wanted to ask you how do you make a small-budget film about a billion-dollar subject still look like a million bucks?
BOB BALABAN: Well, thank you. Hopefully, it looks like $5 million, but a million bucks is a good way of saying it.
ANDELMAN: It was a joke.
BALABAN: I thought you were using the expression. When a million dollars seemed like a lot of money which, of course, it is, but it isn’t, you beg, you borrow, you get actors who usually make a large amount of money to be so interested to work together and to make this movie that they forego, that they defray all of their costs. You follow the John Sloss. He’s the wonderful lawyer/producer who has a company called Indigent, which makes a lot of very, very super-low-budget movies, and he came up with a formula. He said here’s what you do: “Just pay everybody a hundred dollars a day, have very low budgets for production design and art design in terms of things that you make or build or acquire, and give everybody who works on the movie, for the most part, a gross participation in the back end.” So the art department, head of the art department, got one point of the movie. It’s just simple. There’s no adjusted gross as they say in Speed The Plow. There is no net. And it’s a way of dealing with people fairly. If you make no money from the movie, then nobody makes any money, but if you have a windfall, then everybody participates in a fairly, accurately-scaled version of how much they should participate.
Now, having said that, we had Frankie Diago, a brilliant production designer who is a friend of Susan’s and of mine, do the production design. I knew that she could call in some favors. She’s worked a lot. She’s very successful. And I also knew that I could be helpful. So anybody that we knew who had things that we could use in the movie, I called them, and I begged them. Joe Aulisi, the costume designer, did the same thing. He’s done Susan’s wardrobe design for many Hollywood big-budget features. So when he called the costume house and said we need to construct a pad for Ralph Fiennes’ stomach so he doesn’t appear quite so thin in this movie. He was playing a character who should look a little chubby, and he drinks a lot. He probably has a beer belly. That alone, that item, probably would have cost the entire budget of the costume department if we’d had to pay the correct amount of money for it. So down the line, Chris Doff gave us silver. Fendi gave us furs. Vuitton gave us vintage luggage so that when you go into Doris Duke’s closet, if we didn’t have Vuitton, we would’ve had “Sportsack by Bob Balaban’s Closet” in Doris Duke’s closet. Bulgari was fantastic with the jewelry. They called and said, “We love it when Susan wears our stuff. She’s so loyal to us. Let us send you Bulgari jewels for her to wear during the movie.” And we said, “Thank you, but we can’t afford the guard to hold onto the jewelry, basically.” And they said, “Oh, well, we’ll send the guard.” So anytime Susan Sarandon wears anything by Bulgari in the movie, which is fairly frequently, there was a guard standing by who then took the jewels, put them in a vault, and went back to Italy or wherever he came from when it was over. We had to do a retake. We added a close-up of Susan on the staircase wearing a fabulous necklace. They had to fly back the necklace from Italy cause it was six months later, and we did the additional shot. That’s what happens sometimes when you work with established movie stars that are also beloved by a lot of the people that they’ve come into contact with.
I ran into a young man in the subway. Eric Gaskins came up to me: “I like your work, Bob.”
“Thank you so much. What’s your name?”
“Eric.”
“Eric, what do you do?”
“I’m a dress designer.”
“Hey, how’d you like to make a free dress for a movie star in a movie we’re making?”
And literally ten days later, he was there with Joe Aulisi sketching something. And a week after that, Susan Sarandon was tripping down the stairs in a fabulous-looking, vintage-looking 1989 ball gown that Eric had whipped up for us and given to us. There’s a full page in Vanity Fair of this dress in this month’s Vanity Fair where they give us our very lovely review. So that’s what we did down the line.
We worked with the mansion, Old Westbury Gardens, in Old Westbury, Long Island, which gave us the house to shoot in. We did have to pay them. It was our entire production design budget, but we deferred some of their costs, and they eventually made a reasonable amount of money considering how we did the entire movie in their house. Could never have done it otherwise. That was one of the reasons the movie looks rather nice. It is because we’re shooting in a place where the Phipps family used to live. They moved down in 1955, established their house as a trust for a museum, and that is how those particular rich people lived. And that’s where Doris got to live in the movie. It’s a beautiful estate. I recommend visiting it at any time. You can picnic in the garden when the weather’s nice.
ANDELMAN: I’m thinking now back to the film. There’s a lot of reference in the film to Doris’ global travels.
BALABAN: Yes.
ANDELMAN: But we never actually see her anywhere.
BALABAN: Yes. You figured it out. They write letters, and you hear about the fabulous places they’re going and buying and doing. And a couple of years pass during the movie as the servants basically take on and off the furniture guards from the furniture so it won’t get faded by the sun and various other conventions. I’m glad when I look back on it that we didn’t have the $20 million that you might have made the movie for. I probably would’ve been tempted to take the two of them traveling in India and Afghanistan or wherever it is they might have gone. Of course, even then you couldn’t go to Afghanistan too easily. I’m kind of glad we didn’t have that money, looking back on it, because it forced us, again, to concentrate on these two characters, which that’s what we have in the movie. We have great actors playing interesting parts, and there’s very little to get in the way, you could say.
ANDELMAN: In directing Susan and Ralph, how much do you actually direct people like this, and how much do you just kind of get out of their way?
BALABAN: A lot of it is getting out of their way. A lot of it is spending some very quiet time before the movie begins “rehearsing”, but rehearsing isn’t, “How will I say this line?” and “Where do I stand?” and “What’s my motivation?” There is some of that, but rehearsing is really making two people feel comfortable knowing that there’s a short amount of time, and they’re going to live another person’s life. We talk about their relationship. We answer questions, the simplest things. “Oh, am I really going to be doing needlepoint? Let’s have a needlepoint person teach me how to do needlepoint today.”
In Susan’s case, a lot of it was, “What’s the inside of this woman like?” She wanted to be very careful that she didn’t simply present herself as the idea of a fabulously wealthy and eccentric person. That’s the thing I love about both of their performances. You could say, in three sentences, you could describe both of these characters, but it wouldn’t tell you anything about the complex way that both of them figured out to show you these people on screen. Susan could’ve done Joan Crawford, “No more wire coat hangers!” and there is an element of that to her character, but there’s so much else.
I liked what you pointed out. In the beginning, you think these two people are the stereotypes that you imagined them to be. And after five or ten minutes of looking at them, you go, “Wait a minute, there’s something else going on here,” because the two of them spent some time in rehearsal investigating the more complex nature of these people and not putting them into a stereotypical box in any way. So, yeah, directing them is getting them to do the movie, making sure they’re comfortable, answering questions, and as you’re shooting, being a little bit more flexible than you might be for a big-budget Hollywood movie. “Hey, I’d like to stand over there. Why doesn’t this thing happen? Could we, perhaps, approach this?” I call London, and five minutes later, we’d have, from our wonderful author, Hugh Costello, a new opening monologue for a scene. And it was a little more flexible, and I think that was helpful, too.
ANDELMAN: Speaking of acting, I want to use a couple minutes here before we have to go to talk a little bit about the wide variety to your career. As my wife was leaving for work today, I said I’m gonna talk to Bob. And in my mind, you are forever etched in my mind as Russell Dalrymple from “Seinfeld.” She said, “Close Encounters.” You’ve acted in these landmark films.
BALABAN: Well, the first movie I was in was actually the Midnight Cowboy, which happened to be the only X-rated movie ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. That was when I was about 20 years old, and I was going to New York University. So I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve been fortunate, not always, of course, but to be in a number of things that ended up being really interesting movies directed by wonderful, world-class, great directors like Steven Spielberg or John Schlesinger or Sydney Pollack or Sidney Lumet, some wonderful people.
ANDELMAN: Where are you going to go from here? You’ve directed a movie. It’s a wonderful movie to watch. You produced on Gosford Park. You’ve done all this acting. As you look ahead, and you think here’s my plan. What do you want to be doing?
BALABAN: I’d like to be directing more movies. I probably will write some more children’s books. I wrote a best-selling series of books for Scholastic called McGrowl. We sold two million copies. Really, I feel like I’m basically just beginning, the door is just beginning to open so there’s a lot of things I’m planning on doing. I have a movie that I’m hoping to direct this year called The Eustace Diamonds, based on an Anthony Trollope novel. Julian Fellowes did a wonderful version of the screenplay. I then hired him to write Gosford Park and won an Academy Award for Best Screenwriter. So we have that large mountain to hopefully climb this year. Like Bernard and Doris, it’s the story of mostly extremely wealthy and exotic people living in London, in this case in 1875. But unlike Bernard and Doris, we will actually have a few dollars with which to make some costumes and have some beautiful scenery, and it’s a great story. I do hope to make that this year. I just finished a movie, acting in, called Recount for HBO that will be on, I believe, in May about the Gore-Bush election in Florida and the hanging chad issues and everything else that went with that impossible and very unnerving situation. It’s really like a thriller when you see it.
ANDELMAN: Was there drama in that situation? I don’t recall it being all that serious.
BALABAN: I think you’re kidding.
ANDELMAN: I am kidding. (Laughs.)
BALABAN: It’s really a nail-biter even though you know exactly how it’s gonna turn out. It’s quite exciting, and Kevin Spacey is brilliant, as is Laura Dern and Denis Leary and Tom Wilkinson and John Hurt and Ed Begley, Jr. It’s got a wonderful cast, and it’s very exciting, and I’m in it also.
ANDELMAN: That was my other question: Are you going to be acting more or less?
BALABAN: You will see me in Recount next year or this year. And, yeah, I will as it fits in and as it arises. I’m very happy to have an ongoing acting career. I love sitting on somebody else’s set and not worrying when the scenery falls down, so to speak. I know it’s the end of the day, and I know there’s no overtime, and I know it’s starting to rain, and I’m not even anxious cause I’m just an actor here, and I’ll just sit around and have a great time. I love acting in other people’s movies. You learn so much by watching everybody direct other people, and you also get to meet a number of people. Part of my being a producer and a director is I have a good Rolodex, and I’ve really had some lovely times with a massive amount of actors. So if I’m casting a two-line part in a movie, that’s sometimes the hardest thing you can do, I can kind of roll back in my mind, “Who did I love last year who came in and said hello?” And we can have that person, and also occasionally, I am fortunate enough to work with some people who are famous enough to get movies made, and well, we got to know each other cause we spent nine months together on the Isle of Wyte last year.
ANDELMAN: In Bernard and Doris, it’s a very small cast. I didn’t see you that I noticed. I didn’t see you walk through any scenes or in background. Are you in there anywhere?
BALABAN: I’m sorry?
ANDELMAN: Are you in any scenes? Are you in the background or anything?
BALABAN: You might catch me in a reflection in a window somewhere, but it wasn’t on purpose.
ANDELMAN: Well, where I was leading with that is is there anything that ties together the movies that you work on behind the scenes? Is there any common thread, any mark of Bob Balaban?
BALABAN: I’d like to think that we all had a pretty good time working together. From the actors to the crew to the craft service people, I’d like to think that it was a harmonious experience. And it’s not always, but we do our best.
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Bernard Lafferty, Bob Balaban, Bulgari, Doris Duke, Eric Gaskins, Gosford Park, HBO, McGrowl, Ralph Fiennes, Recount, Steven Spielberg, Susan Sarandon, tobacco heiress, Vuitton
¶ 7:52 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
BREAKING BAD and DEADWOOD Star Anna Gunn Live on Mr. Media, Fri., Jan. 25, 1 p.m.
Join the lovely Anna Gunn this Friday, January 25, at 1 p.m. for a live Mr. Media interview on BlogTalkRadio. Gunn is currently co-starring with Bryan Cranston ("Malcolm in the Middle") on the critically acclaimed new AMC TV series, "Breaking Bad."
"Deadwood" fans will remember Gunn from the HBO series for her portrayal of Sheriff Bullock's wife and Deadwood's prim and proper school marm, Martha.
Call in and ask Anna Gunn your questions about either of her hit shows. The number is 646-595-3135.
Don't miss these other upcoming, exclusive and live Mr. Media interviews:
1/29/2008 1:00 PM - Brian Alexander, AMERICA UNZIPPED author
2/14/2008 1:00 PM - Sara Zarr, SWEETHEARTS, STORY OF A GIRL novelist
2/15/2008 10:00 AM - Alberto Ibargüen, THE KNIGHT FOUNDATION, chairman and president
Join the lovely Anna Gunn this Friday, January 25, at 1 p.m. for a live Mr. Media interview on BlogTalkRadio. Gunn is currently co-starring with Bryan Cranston ("Malcolm in the Middle") on the critically acclaimed new AMC TV series, "Breaking Bad."
"Deadwood" fans will remember Gunn from the HBO series for her portrayal of Sheriff Bullock's wife and Deadwood's prim and proper school marm, Martha.
Call in and ask Anna Gunn your questions about either of her hit shows. The number is 646-595-3135.
Don't miss these other upcoming, exclusive and live Mr. Media interviews:
1/29/2008 1:00 PM - Brian Alexander, AMERICA UNZIPPED author
2/14/2008 1:00 PM - Sara Zarr, SWEETHEARTS, STORY OF A GIRL novelist
2/15/2008 10:00 AM - Alberto Ibargüen, THE KNIGHT FOUNDATION, chairman and president
Labels: AMC TV, Anna Gunn, Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston, Deadwood, HBO, Malcolm in the Middle, original series, Timothy Olyphant
¶ 9:24 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Monday, December 31, 2007
David Simon, "The Wire" creator: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2
(Return to Part 1)
ANDELMAN: Let me ask you this, and this is a basic piece of business, but now I came to the show very late, and I think part of the reason I came to it late was the name. I just couldn’t get my arms around The Wire, so I want to ask you for people who might hear this or read this or haven’t seen it, can you give us kind of the Evelyn Wood breakdown of what the show is about and where the name The Wire came from?
SIMON: Sure. The Wire is a double entendre of sorts. It specifically refers to the electronic surveillance methods used by the police to try to undermine and take apart a criminal organization. In the first season, it would have been a drug organization, the second season, it was a smuggling organization, and so forth, but that’s more the literal reason for the title. The title really refers to almost an imaginary but inviolate boundary between the two Americas, between the functional, post-industrial economy that is minting new millionaires every day and creating a viable environment for a portion of the country, and the other America that is being consigned to a permanent underclass, and this show is really about the vagaries and excesses of unencumbered capitalism and what that has wrought at the millennium and where the country is and where it is going, and it is suggestive that we are going to a much more divided and brutish place, and I think we are, and that really reflects the politics of the people making the show. It really is a show about the other America in a lot of ways, and so The Wire really does refer to almost a boundary or a fence or the idea of people walking on a high wire and falling to either side. It really is sort of a symbolic argument or symbolic of the argument we are trying to make.
ANDELMAN: And is it a show of villains, anti-heroes, or something in between? The lines are never quite clear on people.
SIMON: Well, that’s by intent. I feel that a lot of American television, particularly in the cop show milieu, we came on the scene as presumably HBO’s answer to the cop show. That’s how we were initially marketed, and I think we weren’t willing to argue the point because our ambitions, which were different, were not credible until we had been on for a couple of years, but originally, we came as a cop show, and cop shows are exactly rooted in good and evil in the Sipowiczes and Joe Fridays and Pembletons of the world, and by the way, I wrote for Homicide, that’s how I learned to do television after they made my first book into the NBC show. Some of that is very well done and not without meaning. However, it does beg a certain question as to what our compulsion is about these sorts of hour-long morality plays and why they are the preponderance of what we absorb as our entertainment, and The Wire is fairly uninterested in good and evil. It regards its characters as being, it’s more sort of social determinist. I guess to follow it all the way back, most American drama on television is rooted in the Shakespearean tradition of the angst of the individual and his own conscience and his own struggle against himself. If you took at Tony Soprano or Al Swearingen and these other shows, there is a lot of Hamlet, there is a lot of Macbeth in their construct, and we are really stealing from older, less traveled tradition, which is that of the Greeks, and The Wire is really constructed as Greek tragedy, except we, post-moderns, have a hard time believing in Olympian gods that hurl lightning bolts and hit us in the butt and are indifferent to our morality or our desires or just basically jealous and whimsical and playful with humans, with mortals. But if you supplant the idea of those old Greek gods with post-modern institutions, with the police department, with the drug organization, with government, with the union, with the Catholic Church, with Enron, you start layering over the institutions that determine how individuals are going to be served by or serve society. Now you have some really indifferent gods, and so we are stealing from Euripides and Socrates and Aeschylus. Those are the guys.
ANDELMAN: Now let me ask you. You speak very elegantly, very philosophically about your program, but it’s also a program that’s full of, it’s very violent, it’s very tense. That can almost be paralyzing. I spoke to my wife this morning, and I was describing The Wire, which she has resisted watching, and I said, you know, there have been times where she has watched The Sopranos, and she has gotten to the end and said, I can’t watch that again for a couple of weeks. It’s just too much. I am overwhelmed. Have you gotten that response from…
SIMON: From some people. I think once people get three or four episodes in, they can’t help but watch. To that, I would just suggest, to go back to the Greeks again, Oedipus kills his father and sleeps with his mother; Antigone dies a horrible death for asserting her own demands of individuality and dignity. Don’t even get me started on Medea! Tragedy and violence and a look at the, if you get later into the dramatic tradition, a look at the profane in life is elemental to what we demand of drama. It’s almost a requirement of some serious drama to address themselves to the most basic human impulses. I don’t know how to make a show about nothing, and I certainly don’t know how to make a show about sort of a light-hearted romp through the end of the 20th Century, which, by virtue of the body count alone, has to be regarded as a failed century. There is a lot to be angry about, and there is a lot to be concerned about, and there is a lot to address ourselves to. And again, that’s the impulse behind the show. We are not saying dirty words to be naughty, and we are not showing any more nudity than we feel that is warranted under the construct of the story, if it’s required for the characters to be in the world they are in, and we are not using any more violence than would otherwise be necessary to address the plot. So I am not sure it’s that violent a show, and I am not sure it’s that profane a show as people say, and I am not even sure it’s that sexualized a show. I think it’s a combination of, it feels like these are real people in this situation, and if that’s the case, if people are disturbed by some of the stuff that happens in the given hour, they ought to be.
ANDELMAN: In terms of story, when people watch most TV shows, it doesn’t have to be sitcoms or even network dramas, but you have this expectation that at some point, all of these story lines will cross somewhere, and yet, that hasn’t really happened that much on The Wire.
SIMON: I think toward the end sometimes, but it’s a very delicate web. Usually, by the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth episode, you start to see connections, stories that seemed disparate actually are headed toward each other, but having said that, we are willing to go longer and further with disparate story lines than any show, I think, before it. The ambitions of the show require that. I think, if you ask me what we are trying to do, we are not trying to do a cop show, we are trying to depict an American city. That’s a big thing, and we are trying to show how power and money route themselves through the modern city-state and why that city-state can’t solve its problems and maintain itself against its problems. That’s a lot to bite off and chew, and so we have to go far afield, and we have to trust in viewers’ ability to stay with the show.
ANDELMAN: Are there particular aspects of the story line that have changed over time in ways that you didn’t anticipate, either because maybe you are watching a character, and you are going, you know, this character should go this way in this…
SIMON: In the writer’s room, there is always a sense of discovery about what a character’s outcome should be or how they should get from point A to point Z. There is always a sense of discovery on the part of writers there, but the unique thing about the show is that we have known since, I think, the end of season one what the five, if we got five seasons, we had to beg for a couple of them, but if we got five seasons, we had five distinct themes we wanted to address. We knew what they were, we knew in order what they would be, we knew where we needed to place our characters at the beginning and the end of those themes, and we know how the show is supposed to end after this last season that we are about to start production on. That’s been a struggle to stay on that path because it’s always a struggle to follow a plan as opposed to just winging it, but it’s also been quite liberating because the nature of most TV shows, when they are designed as entertainment and not designed as specific stories about things, is that if a TV show finds success with one character or one romance or one theme, their job, the show owner’s job in Hollywood is to stay on that and keep repeating those moments that please viewers and to keep the show running for as long as possible, and our sense of what we wanted to achieve has been pretty rigorous. And we have said to ourselves, just because people love Omar or love Stringer Bell, the characters serve story, and we are really intent on executing the story that we conceived in the beginning. So it’s never about sort of appeasing the viewership and keeping the show afloat for as long as possible. When you try to keep a show afloat for as long as possible, you are eventually dishing out a thin gruel of old moments that you have already played for all they’re worth and just trying to sustain your audience. And we have sort of written without awareness of the audience.
ANDELMAN: So as you go into a fifth season, you are going into this planning on this being the final season.
SIMON: Yes. Absolutely.
Bob: There is no nine extra episodes to come at the end?
SIMON: No. I don’t think we have the… Again, we are not the money machine that some other shows are, and I don’t expect HBO to come begging us for another season, but actually, this last season, the fourth season, the one that dealt with the educational theme, the audience grew quite dramatically. Something happened. I would guess it was just people finally caught up to the show. They had the DVDs out there in advance, all seasons in advance of season four, and that was the first time they managed that, and I think the on-demand function, which became incredibly popular on HBO, helped people find the show, so it was sort of available in more platforms, and something clicked.
ANDELMAN: How has it kept going where Rome and Carnival and even Deadwood now have fallen before it?
SIMON: We’re cheaper.
ANDELMAN: That’s pretty straight-forward.
SIMON: We film in Baltimore, and that’s certainly part of it. Rome cost more than $100 million to make. You have the same number of hours of The Wire for maybe a third of the cost, and we are always under budget. We always turn a little bit of money back in almost as a good faith gesture. That earns you a certain amount of contempt in Hollywood, where everybody always goes over budget, but I learned television production, and Nina Noble, the other producer, she learned it at the foot of Tom Fontana and Jim Federdine. These are guys who played by the same rules. Tom said to me a long time ago, it’s not your money, so going over should not be a point of pride, and we have always been responsible, and by keeping the show’s budget in some proportion, I think it made it easier for them to say, “Okay, these guys, they say they can execute for x amount of dollars, let’s give them another season.” Practical economy of Hollywood.
ANDELMAN: Now, episode fifty, the last episode of the fourth season, “Final Grades,” it felt like it could have actually wrapped up the series. There were a lot of things that were wrapped. There were a lot of things that were covered. We saw….
SIMON: Although they did just pull about seventeen bodies out of some row houses.
ANDELMAN: Right.
SIMON: I think that would have been the pregnant issue. I mean, listen, you never know if you are going to get cancelled, so you try to have some sense of resolution to every season, but the one thing that is different about HBO is they have never cancelled a show in the middle of its run, so you always know you are going to get to the last episode of your season. Whether you are going to get the renewal again at the end, that’s always an open question. It is television. Nothing is guaranteed. But we did feel like we left this one a little more open than maybe… I felt season three with the end of the Barksdale story was the one where we were probably the most vulnerable to somebody saying, “Well, it’s tidy, let’s call it a day.” I think there is more to be said on the theme of Marlo and those bodies in the houses, but ultimately we had one last theme, and we pitched it to HBO. We are going to slice off one last piece of this simulated city we built and address ourselves to that, and I think that will end it.
ANDELMAN: That’s interesting, because I felt like I got some closure, because it’s these people who are still alive, not the seventeen who were on that long piece of paper………
SIMON: I think it was actually twenty-two by the end. I am trying to remember the dialogue.
ANDELMAN: Okay. Yeah. It left me feeling satisfied. I knew that, obviously, lives go on and series, the characters theoretically go on, but I felt, okay, if it stops there, I feel pretty satisfied. But it’s even better to know it goes on.
SIMON: I think that’s exactly what Chris Ulbrecht was saying when he was contemplating whether or not to give us the next season, that if he had to end it here, he felt there was enough resolution at the end of the four. I blanched at that. I wasn’t quite in agreement with him, but he felt that he could hang his hat on it, there was enough resolution at the end of four.
ANDELMAN: What will be your involvement in season five, and are you working on anything to follow The Wire?
SIMON: My involvement is the same as all the other seasons, executive producer along with Nina Noble, dealing with all facets of production and working on the writing with Ed Burns, who is the other lead writer, and we have Richard Price, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, you know, remarkable novelists who are committed to writing for the show. And we will execute one last season, I think probably ten episodes, I don’t think we need twelve to finish, and then put it to bed. And then move on to something else. I am involved with some other projects for HBO, and they may or may not go. I was involved in adapting a book called Generation Kill by Evan Wright. He was an embedded reporter with the First Marine Recon unit in Iraq during the invasion, and I think he wrote what is one of the great pieces of war reporting to come out of Iraq and in a great metaphorical piece for the tragedy there, and I am trying to adapt that as a mini-series for HBO. It’s written, and we are sort of waiting for the decision on HBO as to when to go on it.
ANDELMAN: So your next project will not torture the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce?
SIMON: Apparently not, not unless Baltimore can dress itself up as Baghdad, but Baltimore can be a lot of things. I have to say, Baltimore, there have been some brushes with the mayor and with some civic boosters, but the truth is, they have been very professional about it, and if you want to have a film industry anywhere, you cannot start dictating terms to the storyteller and saying, we only want a certain kind of story; we are happy to film that. But the film industry exists in places like New York and L.A. and larger markets regardless of story. Nobody reviews story in New York, and the Law and Order franchise alone I think has killed more people in Manhattan in a given year than are actually killed in Manhattan in a given year. Whereas, I think what disturbed some people in Baltimore is that this is really aggressively taking on such issues as the viability of the drug war, the education system, the death of unionized labor…
ANDELMAN: Political corruption…
SIMON: I think in some ways, the fact that it is so attenuated from the real is what bothers people, and I can’t help that. It’s like you are asking me to pull punches now that I can’t pull, but having said that, I think Baltimore would be more stressed out about it if we were from Hollywood and we just sort of landed in their city and said, all right, we are now going to be hyper-critical of you guys, having parachuted from another world entirely.
ANDELMAN: Or how would they feel if you were shooting “Baltimore” in Toronto?
SIMON: Right. The truth is, you can say anything is anything, and if it’s fictional, nobody can stop you, but I mean, the truth is, it shouldn’t be a bargain over the dollars for filming versus the city’s image. Some people put it that way. I never cast it that way. The way I cast it is, we are from here. I live in south Baltimore, and I am committed to staying in Baltimore as a citizen, and if you don’t think that I have the legitimacy to comment on where our city is going and what we are facing, okay, but you are going to have a hard time stopping me, because it’s genuine, it’s not motivated by any sense of cynicism about place or about… And I am not from somewhere else, I am from Baltimore, so what else would I write about?
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All Rights Reserved.
ANDELMAN: Let me ask you this, and this is a basic piece of business, but now I came to the show very late, and I think part of the reason I came to it late was the name. I just couldn’t get my arms around The Wire, so I want to ask you for people who might hear this or read this or haven’t seen it, can you give us kind of the Evelyn Wood breakdown of what the show is about and where the name The Wire came from?
SIMON: Sure. The Wire is a double entendre of sorts. It specifically refers to the electronic surveillance methods used by the police to try to undermine and take apart a criminal organization. In the first season, it would have been a drug organization, the second season, it was a smuggling organization, and so forth, but that’s more the literal reason for the title. The title really refers to almost an imaginary but inviolate boundary between the two Americas, between the functional, post-industrial economy that is minting new millionaires every day and creating a viable environment for a portion of the country, and the other America that is being consigned to a permanent underclass, and this show is really about the vagaries and excesses of unencumbered capitalism and what that has wrought at the millennium and where the country is and where it is going, and it is suggestive that we are going to a much more divided and brutish place, and I think we are, and that really reflects the politics of the people making the show. It really is a show about the other America in a lot of ways, and so The Wire really does refer to almost a boundary or a fence or the idea of people walking on a high wire and falling to either side. It really is sort of a symbolic argument or symbolic of the argument we are trying to make.
ANDELMAN: And is it a show of villains, anti-heroes, or something in between? The lines are never quite clear on people.
SIMON: Well, that’s by intent. I feel that a lot of American television, particularly in the cop show milieu, we came on the scene as presumably HBO’s answer to the cop show. That’s how we were initially marketed, and I think we weren’t willing to argue the point because our ambitions, which were different, were not credible until we had been on for a couple of years, but originally, we came as a cop show, and cop shows are exactly rooted in good and evil in the Sipowiczes and Joe Fridays and Pembletons of the world, and by the way, I wrote for Homicide, that’s how I learned to do television after they made my first book into the NBC show. Some of that is very well done and not without meaning. However, it does beg a certain question as to what our compulsion is about these sorts of hour-long morality plays and why they are the preponderance of what we absorb as our entertainment, and The Wire is fairly uninterested in good and evil. It regards its characters as being, it’s more sort of social determinist. I guess to follow it all the way back, most American drama on television is rooted in the Shakespearean tradition of the angst of the individual and his own conscience and his own struggle against himself. If you took at Tony Soprano or Al Swearingen and these other shows, there is a lot of Hamlet, there is a lot of Macbeth in their construct, and we are really stealing from older, less traveled tradition, which is that of the Greeks, and The Wire is really constructed as Greek tragedy, except we, post-moderns, have a hard time believing in Olympian gods that hurl lightning bolts and hit us in the butt and are indifferent to our morality or our desires or just basically jealous and whimsical and playful with humans, with mortals. But if you supplant the idea of those old Greek gods with post-modern institutions, with the police department, with the drug organization, with government, with the union, with the Catholic Church, with Enron, you start layering over the institutions that determine how individuals are going to be served by or serve society. Now you have some really indifferent gods, and so we are stealing from Euripides and Socrates and Aeschylus. Those are the guys.
ANDELMAN: Now let me ask you. You speak very elegantly, very philosophically about your program, but it’s also a program that’s full of, it’s very violent, it’s very tense. That can almost be paralyzing. I spoke to my wife this morning, and I was describing The Wire, which she has resisted watching, and I said, you know, there have been times where she has watched The Sopranos, and she has gotten to the end and said, I can’t watch that again for a couple of weeks. It’s just too much. I am overwhelmed. Have you gotten that response from…
SIMON: From some people. I think once people get three or four episodes in, they can’t help but watch. To that, I would just suggest, to go back to the Greeks again, Oedipus kills his father and sleeps with his mother; Antigone dies a horrible death for asserting her own demands of individuality and dignity. Don’t even get me started on Medea! Tragedy and violence and a look at the, if you get later into the dramatic tradition, a look at the profane in life is elemental to what we demand of drama. It’s almost a requirement of some serious drama to address themselves to the most basic human impulses. I don’t know how to make a show about nothing, and I certainly don’t know how to make a show about sort of a light-hearted romp through the end of the 20th Century, which, by virtue of the body count alone, has to be regarded as a failed century. There is a lot to be angry about, and there is a lot to be concerned about, and there is a lot to address ourselves to. And again, that’s the impulse behind the show. We are not saying dirty words to be naughty, and we are not showing any more nudity than we feel that is warranted under the construct of the story, if it’s required for the characters to be in the world they are in, and we are not using any more violence than would otherwise be necessary to address the plot. So I am not sure it’s that violent a show, and I am not sure it’s that profane a show as people say, and I am not even sure it’s that sexualized a show. I think it’s a combination of, it feels like these are real people in this situation, and if that’s the case, if people are disturbed by some of the stuff that happens in the given hour, they ought to be.
ANDELMAN: In terms of story, when people watch most TV shows, it doesn’t have to be sitcoms or even network dramas, but you have this expectation that at some point, all of these story lines will cross somewhere, and yet, that hasn’t really happened that much on The Wire.
SIMON: I think toward the end sometimes, but it’s a very delicate web. Usually, by the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth episode, you start to see connections, stories that seemed disparate actually are headed toward each other, but having said that, we are willing to go longer and further with disparate story lines than any show, I think, before it. The ambitions of the show require that. I think, if you ask me what we are trying to do, we are not trying to do a cop show, we are trying to depict an American city. That’s a big thing, and we are trying to show how power and money route themselves through the modern city-state and why that city-state can’t solve its problems and maintain itself against its problems. That’s a lot to bite off and chew, and so we have to go far afield, and we have to trust in viewers’ ability to stay with the show.
ANDELMAN: Are there particular aspects of the story line that have changed over time in ways that you didn’t anticipate, either because maybe you are watching a character, and you are going, you know, this character should go this way in this…
SIMON: In the writer’s room, there is always a sense of discovery about what a character’s outcome should be or how they should get from point A to point Z. There is always a sense of discovery on the part of writers there, but the unique thing about the show is that we have known since, I think, the end of season one what the five, if we got five seasons, we had to beg for a couple of them, but if we got five seasons, we had five distinct themes we wanted to address. We knew what they were, we knew in order what they would be, we knew where we needed to place our characters at the beginning and the end of those themes, and we know how the show is supposed to end after this last season that we are about to start production on. That’s been a struggle to stay on that path because it’s always a struggle to follow a plan as opposed to just winging it, but it’s also been quite liberating because the nature of most TV shows, when they are designed as entertainment and not designed as specific stories about things, is that if a TV show finds success with one character or one romance or one theme, their job, the show owner’s job in Hollywood is to stay on that and keep repeating those moments that please viewers and to keep the show running for as long as possible, and our sense of what we wanted to achieve has been pretty rigorous. And we have said to ourselves, just because people love Omar or love Stringer Bell, the characters serve story, and we are really intent on executing the story that we conceived in the beginning. So it’s never about sort of appeasing the viewership and keeping the show afloat for as long as possible. When you try to keep a show afloat for as long as possible, you are eventually dishing out a thin gruel of old moments that you have already played for all they’re worth and just trying to sustain your audience. And we have sort of written without awareness of the audience.
ANDELMAN: So as you go into a fifth season, you are going into this planning on this being the final season.
SIMON: Yes. Absolutely.
Bob: There is no nine extra episodes to come at the end?
SIMON: No. I don’t think we have the… Again, we are not the money machine that some other shows are, and I don’t expect HBO to come begging us for another season, but actually, this last season, the fourth season, the one that dealt with the educational theme, the audience grew quite dramatically. Something happened. I would guess it was just people finally caught up to the show. They had the DVDs out there in advance, all seasons in advance of season four, and that was the first time they managed that, and I think the on-demand function, which became incredibly popular on HBO, helped people find the show, so it was sort of available in more platforms, and something clicked.
ANDELMAN: How has it kept going where Rome and Carnival and even Deadwood now have fallen before it?
SIMON: We’re cheaper.
ANDELMAN: That’s pretty straight-forward.
SIMON: We film in Baltimore, and that’s certainly part of it. Rome cost more than $100 million to make. You have the same number of hours of The Wire for maybe a third of the cost, and we are always under budget. We always turn a little bit of money back in almost as a good faith gesture. That earns you a certain amount of contempt in Hollywood, where everybody always goes over budget, but I learned television production, and Nina Noble, the other producer, she learned it at the foot of Tom Fontana and Jim Federdine. These are guys who played by the same rules. Tom said to me a long time ago, it’s not your money, so going over should not be a point of pride, and we have always been responsible, and by keeping the show’s budget in some proportion, I think it made it easier for them to say, “Okay, these guys, they say they can execute for x amount of dollars, let’s give them another season.” Practical economy of Hollywood.
ANDELMAN: Now, episode fifty, the last episode of the fourth season, “Final Grades,” it felt like it could have actually wrapped up the series. There were a lot of things that were wrapped. There were a lot of things that were covered. We saw….
SIMON: Although they did just pull about seventeen bodies out of some row houses.
ANDELMAN: Right.
SIMON: I think that would have been the pregnant issue. I mean, listen, you never know if you are going to get cancelled, so you try to have some sense of resolution to every season, but the one thing that is different about HBO is they have never cancelled a show in the middle of its run, so you always know you are going to get to the last episode of your season. Whether you are going to get the renewal again at the end, that’s always an open question. It is television. Nothing is guaranteed. But we did feel like we left this one a little more open than maybe… I felt season three with the end of the Barksdale story was the one where we were probably the most vulnerable to somebody saying, “Well, it’s tidy, let’s call it a day.” I think there is more to be said on the theme of Marlo and those bodies in the houses, but ultimately we had one last theme, and we pitched it to HBO. We are going to slice off one last piece of this simulated city we built and address ourselves to that, and I think that will end it.
ANDELMAN: That’s interesting, because I felt like I got some closure, because it’s these people who are still alive, not the seventeen who were on that long piece of paper………
SIMON: I think it was actually twenty-two by the end. I am trying to remember the dialogue.
ANDELMAN: Okay. Yeah. It left me feeling satisfied. I knew that, obviously, lives go on and series, the characters theoretically go on, but I felt, okay, if it stops there, I feel pretty satisfied. But it’s even better to know it goes on.
SIMON: I think that’s exactly what Chris Ulbrecht was saying when he was contemplating whether or not to give us the next season, that if he had to end it here, he felt there was enough resolution at the end of the four. I blanched at that. I wasn’t quite in agreement with him, but he felt that he could hang his hat on it, there was enough resolution at the end of four.
ANDELMAN: What will be your involvement in season five, and are you working on anything to follow The Wire?
SIMON: My involvement is the same as all the other seasons, executive producer along with Nina Noble, dealing with all facets of production and working on the writing with Ed Burns, who is the other lead writer, and we have Richard Price, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, you know, remarkable novelists who are committed to writing for the show. And we will execute one last season, I think probably ten episodes, I don’t think we need twelve to finish, and then put it to bed. And then move on to something else. I am involved with some other projects for HBO, and they may or may not go. I was involved in adapting a book called Generation Kill by Evan Wright. He was an embedded reporter with the First Marine Recon unit in Iraq during the invasion, and I think he wrote what is one of the great pieces of war reporting to come out of Iraq and in a great metaphorical piece for the tragedy there, and I am trying to adapt that as a mini-series for HBO. It’s written, and we are sort of waiting for the decision on HBO as to when to go on it.
ANDELMAN: So your next project will not torture the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce?
SIMON: Apparently not, not unless Baltimore can dress itself up as Baghdad, but Baltimore can be a lot of things. I have to say, Baltimore, there have been some brushes with the mayor and with some civic boosters, but the truth is, they have been very professional about it, and if you want to have a film industry anywhere, you cannot start dictating terms to the storyteller and saying, we only want a certain kind of story; we are happy to film that. But the film industry exists in places like New York and L.A. and larger markets regardless of story. Nobody reviews story in New York, and the Law and Order franchise alone I think has killed more people in Manhattan in a given year than are actually killed in Manhattan in a given year. Whereas, I think what disturbed some people in Baltimore is that this is really aggressively taking on such issues as the viability of the drug war, the education system, the death of unionized labor…
ANDELMAN: Political corruption…
SIMON: I think in some ways, the fact that it is so attenuated from the real is what bothers people, and I can’t help that. It’s like you are asking me to pull punches now that I can’t pull, but having said that, I think Baltimore would be more stressed out about it if we were from Hollywood and we just sort of landed in their city and said, all right, we are now going to be hyper-critical of you guys, having parachuted from another world entirely.
ANDELMAN: Or how would they feel if you were shooting “Baltimore” in Toronto?
SIMON: Right. The truth is, you can say anything is anything, and if it’s fictional, nobody can stop you, but I mean, the truth is, it shouldn’t be a bargain over the dollars for filming versus the city’s image. Some people put it that way. I never cast it that way. The way I cast it is, we are from here. I live in south Baltimore, and I am committed to staying in Baltimore as a citizen, and if you don’t think that I have the legitimacy to comment on where our city is going and what we are facing, okay, but you are going to have a hard time stopping me, because it’s genuine, it’s not motivated by any sense of cynicism about place or about… And I am not from somewhere else, I am from Baltimore, so what else would I write about?
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All Rights Reserved.
Labels: Baltimore, David Simon, HBO, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, The Wire
¶ 1:17 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Monday, October 15, 2007
"Cranky Old Dude": Mr. Media Interview Classic
Originally published July 28, 1997
I hate getting old.
Oh, it's not the crow's feet at the edge of the eyes or the bags under them. It's not the sagging of some parts, the inner tube effect of others or even the occasional forgetting of details, dates or names.
What I hate about aging is being forced by the media, of all things, to reach opinions that reinforce a creeping conservativism in my view of the world.
The latest example of this is Home Box Office. HBO once the gold standard in pay cable channels, it just keeps on sinking lower and lower. Pretty soon we won't call the bottom the "gutter," we'll refer to it as HBO.
Have you experienced any of HBO's current late-night summer programming? The grisly, animated violence of "Spawn"? The jaw-dropping atrocities and language of the prison drama "Oz"? The crude, crass and over-the-line sound and video of hookers and their johns in "America Undercover: Hookers at the Point II: Going Out Again"?
This isn't another rant about showing objectionable programming during hours when kids will watch. While I'm sure plenty of teens find ways of watching this stuff even if their parents know to object, I'm just personally offended.
Boundaries -- imagined and real -- are being crossed every day and not just on HBO, of course. The word "tits" may be uttered in an upcoming episode of ABC's new drama, "Cracker," according to Entertainment Weekly. On the other hand, when Penthouse recently trumpeted its boldness in publishing photographs of actual intercourse, nobody blinked. Then again, this is the same magazine whose much ballyhooed "alien autopsy" pictures were swiftly discredited.
The days of seeing bare backsides -- even Dennis Franz's -- seems almost quaint now, by comparison.
What I object to is having my generally liberal social views pressed by such issues and finding I'm not as open-minded and likely to say "whatever" as I thought.
Where was the line and when did HBO cross it? I can't say exactly, but it was somewhere between hidden cameras in its "Taxicab Confessions" series, which I admired, and wiring hookers so we could hear them urging on their clients' erections in the backseats of parked cars. Or maybe it was the difference between the jokes about certain sex acts on HBO's award-winning "Larry Sanders Show" and the same acts being carried out behind glass in first episode of "Oz."
These shows demonstrate the useless news of TV ratings. HBO was warning viewers of potentially offensive program content long before the networks ever felt the need, tipping us off about language, sexual or violent content. But that turned out to be a Trojan horse for slipping all manner of graphic smut into our living rooms.
Ratings only work if you catch them at the very beginning of a telecast and, ironically, if they are as specific as HBO's. They aren't repeated -- with rare exception -- during the course of a program, although networks have no shame in slipping their logs in the corner of the screen.
And please don't give me the broadcast vs. cable standards argumen, that people choose to pay for cable programming, whereas the free broadcast networks are everywhere. Cable TV is far too prevalent now for that.
I think there's a place for Time Warner, which owns HBO, to telecast and make money on these programs, just as I know I can always change the channel when I see something that offends my own sensibilities. My own mother-in-law, a Czech-born, card-carrying Republican, has watched every program I've mentioned here and has no problem with any of them, unlike myself. I just don't think good old HBO is the right place. It's time to split the channel's wares into two channels, one well-rounded assortment of pedestrian fare that won't making new Time Warner Vice Chairman Ted Turner -- or me -- squirm, and the other a clearly labeled, adult-oriented network.
If you've seen these shows, you know I'm not being prudish. And let me say, I have always enjoyed much of HBO's other adult-oriented fare, including "Real Sex," and "Sex Bytes." Bad "B" movies with thin plots and gratuitous nudity don't offend me either. But these new shows cross my personal line -- a line I didn't know I even had until HBO forced it upon me.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Originally published July 28, 1997
I hate getting old.
Oh, it's not the crow's feet at the edge of the eyes or the bags under them. It's not the sagging of some parts, the inner tube effect of others or even the occasional forgetting of details, dates or names.
What I hate about aging is being forced by the media, of all things, to reach opinions that reinforce a creeping conservativism in my view of the world.
The latest example of this is Home Box Office. HBO once the gold standard in pay cable channels, it just keeps on sinking lower and lower. Pretty soon we won't call the bottom the "gutter," we'll refer to it as HBO.
Have you experienced any of HBO's current late-night summer programming? The grisly, animated violence of "Spawn"? The jaw-dropping atrocities and language of the prison drama "Oz"? The crude, crass and over-the-line sound and video of hookers and their johns in "America Undercover: Hookers at the Point II: Going Out Again"?
Boundaries -- imagined and real -- are being crossed every day and not just on HBO, of course. The word "tits" may be uttered in an upcoming episode of ABC's new drama, "Cracker," according to Entertainment Weekly. On the other hand, when Penthouse recently trumpeted its boldness in publishing photographs of actual intercourse, nobody blinked. Then again, this is the same magazine whose much ballyhooed "alien autopsy" pictures were swiftly discredited.
The days of seeing bare backsides -- even Dennis Franz's -- seems almost quaint now, by comparison.
What I object to is having my generally liberal social views pressed by such issues and finding I'm not as open-minded and likely to say "whatever" as I thought.
Where was the line and when did HBO cross it? I can't say exactly, but it was somewhere between hidden cameras in its "Taxicab Confessions" series, which I admired, and wiring hookers so we could hear them urging on their clients' erections in the backseats of parked cars. Or maybe it was the difference between the jokes about certain sex acts on HBO's award-winning "Larry Sanders Show" and the same acts being carried out behind glass in first episode of "Oz."
These shows demonstrate the useless news of TV ratings. HBO was warning viewers of potentially offensive program content long before the networks ever felt the need, tipping us off about language, sexual or violent content. But that turned out to be a Trojan horse for slipping all manner of graphic smut into our living rooms.
Ratings only work if you catch them at the very beginning of a telecast and, ironically, if they are as specific as HBO's. They aren't repeated -- with rare exception -- during the course of a program, although networks have no shame in slipping their logs in the corner of the screen.
And please don't give me the broadcast vs. cable standards argumen, that people choose to pay for cable programming, whereas the free broadcast networks are everywhere. Cable TV is far too prevalent now for that.
I think there's a place for Time Warner, which owns HBO, to telecast and make money on these programs, just as I know I can always change the channel when I see something that offends my own sensibilities. My own mother-in-law, a Czech-born, card-carrying Republican, has watched every program I've mentioned here and has no problem with any of them, unlike myself. I just don't think good old HBO is the right place. It's time to split the channel's wares into two channels, one well-rounded assortment of pedestrian fare that won't making new Time Warner Vice Chairman Ted Turner -- or me -- squirm, and the other a clearly labeled, adult-oriented network.
If you've seen these shows, you know I'm not being prudish. And let me say, I have always enjoyed much of HBO's other adult-oriented fare, including "Real Sex," and "Sex Bytes." Bad "B" movies with thin plots and gratuitous nudity don't offend me either. But these new shows cross my personal line -- a line I didn't know I even had until HBO forced it upon me.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: America Undercover, HBO, Home Box Office, Larry Sanders Show, Oz, Real Sex, sex acts, Sex Bytes, Spawn, Taxicab Confessions, Ted Turner, Time Warner
¶ 10:39 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Michelle Borth, "Tell Me You Love Me" actress: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1
The ironic thing about Michelle Borth’s role as Jamie, a woman whose fiancé won’t commit to monogamy in the new HBO series "Tell Me You Love Me," is that she is the kind of sexy, intoxicating woman that could probably drive the best-intentioned married man to cheat on his wife.
MICHELLE BORTH: Well, that’s a huge compliment. Thank you.
ANDELMAN: How was this show pitched to you, and what was your first reaction to it?
BORTH: It was pitched to me about three years ago, during pilot season, and it was very much what you would think. It was proposed to me as this really graphic show, and that that was something I should know before going into it. And I was like, “Okay, well, let me read it.” And I read the pilot, and I was floored. I was really floored by it because I personally really connected with the character Jamie on a personal level that I was like, “Someone is following me around and writing my life because this is my life.” So I went into the audition for this project with wanting it moreso than I think anything I’ve ever auditioned for in the past before that.
ANDELMAN: It seemed like, looking over your resume, that it was quite different from anything you had done before.
BORTH: It is. It absolutely is. I haven’t actually done much TV work. I’ve worked quite a bit and have been in the low-budget indie/horror/sci-fi genres, which are great. But this is actually more along my speed and what I really would like to do. This kind of show, on this kind of network, specifically, is a dream come true for me and I think for any actor, but for me, specifically, it was a dream come true.
ANDELMAN: Well, you mention right at the top there that it was presented to you as a very graphic, sexual show.
BORTH: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: Did you have any hesitation with that?
BORTH: Of course. Initially, I did when I had the first conversation with my agent. The way that it was presented I was like, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know how I feel about that.” Because, even in the films that I’d done, I’ve done one topless scene prior to any of this, and I was like that’s it, I did my one, I’m not doing anything more. So I was like oh, no, but after reading the pilot, it was just so smart and so beautifully written. Something, like you said, I’d never read anything like that. I haven’t read a movie script or a pilot or anything even close to what I read. It automatically then didn’t become an issue. And that’s the truth. It honestly was not an issue to me from that point on.
ANDELMAN: It’s funny. Ten years ago, I probably wouldn’t have even thought to ask you this, but here I am. I’ve got a daughter going on 11. My view of some of these things, I notice, has changed, and I think, my goodness, how would I feel if my daughter was portraying a character like that on screen? You said you did one topless scene. This is, for people who haven’t seen it yet, this is way beyond a topless scene.
BORTH: Absolutely. It’s absolutely difficult. It’s not a show that I am pushing my father or my brothers to watch because I think it might be awkward for them as family members. But, in general, I think that it’s a big deal because there hasn’t been anything that’s been this true to life on TV at all, especially primetime TV, and HBO is known for raising the bar and setting a new precedent. And I think that this goes along the lines of anything else that they’ve done. “The Sopranos” was an extremely violent show and showed things that you wouldn’t be able to show on basic cable and stuff like that. And we’re just doing the same thing with a different context. We’re now dealing with sex which, in America, I’m realizing now that we’re a little sexually repressed. So I think it rubs people the wrong way.
ANDELMAN: How do you think America will be after a season of “Tell Me You Love Me”? Will we be less repressed, or will the people who are repressed want to be more repressed and the people who aren’t want to be more exposed?
BORTH: How do I feel? Well, first off, I think people are gonna be, I hope not, but I think people might be a little disappointed when they initially watch the show and realize that it’s not a big porn fest. That it is actually a really smart, intelligent show, and sex is a part of it because we’re dealing with intimacy of relationships and all of that. So I think that the HBO audience is a smart audience, and the show is slow-paced, and there’re no bells and whistles. There’re no big booms or music or fast cuts that it’s gonna take a certain audience to watch it, but once they do, the storylines will pick up where maybe the sex drew people in. I think the storylines are gonna draw people in, and so the people who watch it just for the sex I think will be disappointed because it’s not just about that. And the people who I think maybe will get offended, just don’t watch it. Don’t watch it.
ANDELMAN: I have to say, in defense of the sex scenes, that, if you like to watch a movie or TV and check out the sex scenes, the ones in the first two episodes are pretty intense.
BORTH: We come in with a bang. We’re coming in with a bang. I would say probably the two most graphic episodes of the entire season are the first two. Absolutely. So, yes, we’re coming in with a big bang.
ANDELMAN: You mentioned other HBO shows. It kind of reminded me of the opposite of an older HBO show, “The Mind of a Married Man.” It’s not a comedy. It’s a drama, and it’s more like, except for your character, “The Mind of a Married Woman,” although when we meet you, you’re on your way to becoming a married woman.
BORTH: Right. I actually just got HBO. I needed to get HBO. So I haven’t seen that show, but viewing the lives is really voyeuristic. You feel like you’re there going through these problems with these couples. And what I think is great about the show is that it’s so universal, and it hits every demographic that pretty much, if you’ve been in a relationship and you’re an adult, you’re gonna be able to relate to one of them. There’s gonna be one of the relationships that’s gonna draw you in and say, “Ah, I know that, I know that and I have said that before.”
ANDELMAN: Are you or have you ever been married?
BORTH: No, I am not married, and I have never been married. I have not been in a relationship in four years.
ANDELMAN: So you’re even a little separated from where Jamie is.
BORTH: I am. The thing about Jamie, though, that was difficult for me and what initially drew me in, what I said earlier about the pilot, was just a lot of the pain and heartache that she has in her relationship with Hugo and the breakup with Hugo and all of that is something that I have experienced. So, for me, as an actress, what was difficult was all that baggage that you dealt with and put away, I had to pull out and open up and live it for six months so that wasn’t fun. That wasn’t great. I’m like I spent a lot of time and hard work getting over all those issues, let’s go on back out and play in it again.
ANDELMAN: Michelle, I have to ask, maybe you’ll tell me, maybe you won’t, how old are you?
BORTH: I just turned 29.
ANDELMAN: Oh, that’s amazing. I would’ve guessed 22, 23.
BORTH: Thank you very much. You know what though, I will say this much. I auditioned for this show on my birthday, on my 26th birthday. So this has been a very long process filming the show. It’s been about a year since I shot it, and it’s been two years since I shot the pilot. So the first episode you actually watch is the pilot. We shot that over two and a half years ago. So I am younger.
ANDELMAN: And do you guys know yet if you’ll be picked up for another season?
BORTH: We don’t know because the show hasn’t aired yet. So we don’t even know what the response or the ratings are gonna be like, and they haven’t told me anything specific. They can’t because there’s no guarantee.
ANDELMAN: Usually, they have a sense of this.
BORTH: Yeah, but HBO’s track record because they can, they have the ability to, they give shows a chance. I can only think of one show in the past that didn’t get past the first season, but they usually give them two or three seasons for people to start to settle into it.
ANDELMAN: Right.
BORTH: I would be really surprised if we didn’t have a second season, honestly.
ANDELMAN: Well, let me come back to the characters for a minute. Most of the married couples in the show seem likely, at this point, to stay true to one another, although perhaps, tempted by other fruit. And that kind of allows the actors in those relationships to build intimacy with one another. But Jamie and Hugo, they seem doomed from the start, leading me to think that you’ll be getting physical with, perhaps, a series of actors or, for all we know, actresses, in search of the right mate. And so I wondered, does that make the role and your job tougher than maybe some of the other actors on the show?
BORTH: Oh my God, absolutely, absolutely! The one thing that was difficult, specifically, is that throughout the entire shooting of the episodes, everyone’s got their partner. As an actor, you’re working with the same person over and over and over again. You build that trust. You build that stability. You build that chemistry with that other actor. And little things like right now, like interviews, when you do interviews, a lot of the couples get interviewed together, and so they bounce off one another. And what’s been difficult for me is that because of my storyline and Jamie going in and out of relationships to try to find what she’s looking for, I’ve had to do this journey on my own, not only as the character but as Michelle Borth. And it’s a little frightening because number one, this is my first big anything, especially my first TV show, so having to go through all of this by myself and figuring it out all myself is ironic to me because it parallels my character on screen. But it is, it’s difficult. I would like to have had Luke, say, go through all of that with me and do it as a team like the other couples and the other actors got to do. But that wasn’t the case. But it’s been a great learning experience. Had to do it trial by fire.
ANDELMAN: I have to ask you so I guess this is a man’s question, I don’t know. There’s a scene with you and the actor who plays Hugo in the car, which is pretty intense and pretty graphic. How do you start and stop where the acting and the human being begins and ends in a scene like that?
BORTH: That’s actually a really good question because I thought about it, and I don’t really know how to answer it. You have to distinguish your work from personal, absolutely, and although Luke and I did develop quite a strong relationship, and it made those scenes a lot easier to do because we had this really great chemistry in real life. So I think that just shows even more on screen. But it’s acting, and I feel like in whatever technique or however people work, I substitute people. So in that scene, I’m thinking of someone else. I’m bringing someone else into that scene in my mind.
ANDELMAN: And thank you for thinking of Mr. Media in that scene. I appreciated that. I could see that.
BORTH: I was! I was thinking about you in that scene, which is why it was so intense. But you have to. You have to distinguish, otherwise you’re gonna find yourself in really awkward, weird situations which happens a lot on sets. I kind of understand now why people who work together tend to date afterwards. Just reading magazines and watching “Extra” and stuff like that, I get it because you spend a significant amount of time with that person and, especially with what we’re dealing with on this show and that close and that intimate, you do develop that relationship off-screen. I think you have to in order to bring it on-screen, but it is all for the sake of the work and for the job, and that’s it. And then you come home and let it go.
CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING!
©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
The ironic thing about Michelle Borth’s role as Jamie, a woman whose fiancé won’t commit to monogamy in the new HBO series "Tell Me You Love Me," is that she is the kind of sexy, intoxicating woman that could probably drive the best-intentioned married man to cheat on his wife.
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.
MICHELLE BORTH: Well, that’s a huge compliment. Thank you.
ANDELMAN: How was this show pitched to you, and what was your first reaction to it?
BORTH: It was pitched to me about three years ago, during pilot season, and it was very much what you would think. It was proposed to me as this really graphic show, and that that was something I should know before going into it. And I was like, “Okay, well, let me read it.” And I read the pilot, and I was floored. I was really floored by it because I personally really connected with the character Jamie on a personal level that I was like, “Someone is following me around and writing my life because this is my life.” So I went into the audition for this project with wanting it moreso than I think anything I’ve ever auditioned for in the past before that.
ANDELMAN: It seemed like, looking over your resume, that it was quite different from anything you had done before.
BORTH: It is. It absolutely is. I haven’t actually done much TV work. I’ve worked quite a bit and have been in the low-budget indie/horror/sci-fi genres, which are great. But this is actually more along my speed and what I really would like to do. This kind of show, on this kind of network, specifically, is a dream come true for me and I think for any actor, but for me, specifically, it was a dream come true.
ANDELMAN: Well, you mention right at the top there that it was presented to you as a very graphic, sexual show.
BORTH: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: Did you have any hesitation with that?
BORTH: Of course. Initially, I did when I had the first conversation with my agent. The way that it was presented I was like, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know how I feel about that.” Because, even in the films that I’d done, I’ve done one topless scene prior to any of this, and I was like that’s it, I did my one, I’m not doing anything more. So I was like oh, no, but after reading the pilot, it was just so smart and so beautifully written. Something, like you said, I’d never read anything like that. I haven’t read a movie script or a pilot or anything even close to what I read. It automatically then didn’t become an issue. And that’s the truth. It honestly was not an issue to me from that point on.
ANDELMAN: It’s funny. Ten years ago, I probably wouldn’t have even thought to ask you this, but here I am. I’ve got a daughter going on 11. My view of some of these things, I notice, has changed, and I think, my goodness, how would I feel if my daughter was portraying a character like that on screen? You said you did one topless scene. This is, for people who haven’t seen it yet, this is way beyond a topless scene.
BORTH: Absolutely. It’s absolutely difficult. It’s not a show that I am pushing my father or my brothers to watch because I think it might be awkward for them as family members. But, in general, I think that it’s a big deal because there hasn’t been anything that’s been this true to life on TV at all, especially primetime TV, and HBO is known for raising the bar and setting a new precedent. And I think that this goes along the lines of anything else that they’ve done. “The Sopranos” was an extremely violent show and showed things that you wouldn’t be able to show on basic cable and stuff like that. And we’re just doing the same thing with a different context. We’re now dealing with sex which, in America, I’m realizing now that we’re a little sexually repressed. So I think it rubs people the wrong way.
ANDELMAN: How do you think America will be after a season of “Tell Me You Love Me”? Will we be less repressed, or will the people who are repressed want to be more repressed and the people who aren’t want to be more exposed?
BORTH: How do I feel? Well, first off, I think people are gonna be, I hope not, but I think people might be a little disappointed when they initially watch the show and realize that it’s not a big porn fest. That it is actually a really smart, intelligent show, and sex is a part of it because we’re dealing with intimacy of relationships and all of that. So I think that the HBO audience is a smart audience, and the show is slow-paced, and there’re no bells and whistles. There’re no big booms or music or fast cuts that it’s gonna take a certain audience to watch it, but once they do, the storylines will pick up where maybe the sex drew people in. I think the storylines are gonna draw people in, and so the people who watch it just for the sex I think will be disappointed because it’s not just about that. And the people who I think maybe will get offended, just don’t watch it. Don’t watch it.
ANDELMAN: I have to say, in defense of the sex scenes, that, if you like to watch a movie or TV and check out the sex scenes, the ones in the first two episodes are pretty intense.
BORTH: We come in with a bang. We’re coming in with a bang. I would say probably the two most graphic episodes of the entire season are the first two. Absolutely. So, yes, we’re coming in with a big bang.
ANDELMAN: You mentioned other HBO shows. It kind of reminded me of the opposite of an older HBO show, “The Mind of a Married Man.” It’s not a comedy. It’s a drama, and it’s more like, except for your character, “The Mind of a Married Woman,” although when we meet you, you’re on your way to becoming a married woman.
BORTH: Right. I actually just got HBO. I needed to get HBO. So I haven’t seen that show, but viewing the lives is really voyeuristic. You feel like you’re there going through these problems with these couples. And what I think is great about the show is that it’s so universal, and it hits every demographic that pretty much, if you’ve been in a relationship and you’re an adult, you’re gonna be able to relate to one of them. There’s gonna be one of the relationships that’s gonna draw you in and say, “Ah, I know that, I know that and I have said that before.”
ANDELMAN: Are you or have you ever been married?
BORTH: No, I am not married, and I have never been married. I have not been in a relationship in four years.
ANDELMAN: So you’re even a little separated from where Jamie is.
BORTH: I am. The thing about Jamie, though, that was difficult for me and what initially drew me in, what I said earlier about the pilot, was just a lot of the pain and heartache that she has in her relationship with Hugo and the breakup with Hugo and all of that is something that I have experienced. So, for me, as an actress, what was difficult was all that baggage that you dealt with and put away, I had to pull out and open up and live it for six months so that wasn’t fun. That wasn’t great. I’m like I spent a lot of time and hard work getting over all those issues, let’s go on back out and play in it again.
ANDELMAN: Michelle, I have to ask, maybe you’ll tell me, maybe you won’t, how old are you?
BORTH: I just turned 29.
ANDELMAN: Oh, that’s amazing. I would’ve guessed 22, 23.
BORTH: Thank you very much. You know what though, I will say this much. I auditioned for this show on my birthday, on my 26th birthday. So this has been a very long process filming the show. It’s been about a year since I shot it, and it’s been two years since I shot the pilot. So the first episode you actually watch is the pilot. We shot that over two and a half years ago. So I am younger.
ANDELMAN: And do you guys know yet if you’ll be picked up for another season?
BORTH: We don’t know because the show hasn’t aired yet. So we don’t even know what the response or the ratings are gonna be like, and they haven’t told me anything specific. They can’t because there’s no guarantee.
ANDELMAN: Usually, they have a sense of this.
BORTH: Yeah, but HBO’s track record because they can, they have the ability to, they give shows a chance. I can only think of one show in the past that didn’t get past the first season, but they usually give them two or three seasons for people to start to settle into it.
ANDELMAN: Right.
BORTH: I would be really surprised if we didn’t have a second season, honestly.
ANDELMAN: Well, let me come back to the characters for a minute. Most of the married couples in the show seem likely, at this point, to stay true to one another, although perhaps, tempted by other fruit. And that kind of allows the actors in those relationships to build intimacy with one another. But Jamie and Hugo, they seem doomed from the start, leading me to think that you’ll be getting physical with, perhaps, a series of actors or, for all we know, actresses, in search of the right mate. And so I wondered, does that make the role and your job tougher than maybe some of the other actors on the show?
BORTH: Oh my God, absolutely, absolutely! The one thing that was difficult, specifically, is that throughout the entire shooting of the episodes, everyone’s got their partner. As an actor, you’re working with the same person over and over and over again. You build that trust. You build that stability. You build that chemistry with that other actor. And little things like right now, like interviews, when you do interviews, a lot of the couples get interviewed together, and so they bounce off one another. And what’s been difficult for me is that because of my storyline and Jamie going in and out of relationships to try to find what she’s looking for, I’ve had to do this journey on my own, not only as the character but as Michelle Borth. And it’s a little frightening because number one, this is my first big anything, especially my first TV show, so having to go through all of this by myself and figuring it out all myself is ironic to me because it parallels my character on screen. But it is, it’s difficult. I would like to have had Luke, say, go through all of that with me and do it as a team like the other couples and the other actors got to do. But that wasn’t the case. But it’s been a great learning experience. Had to do it trial by fire.
ANDELMAN: I have to ask you so I guess this is a man’s question, I don’t know. There’s a scene with you and the actor who plays Hugo in the car, which is pretty intense and pretty graphic. How do you start and stop where the acting and the human being begins and ends in a scene like that?
BORTH: That’s actually a really good question because I thought about it, and I don’t really know how to answer it. You have to distinguish your work from personal, absolutely, and although Luke and I did develop quite a strong relationship, and it made those scenes a lot easier to do because we had this really great chemistry in real life. So I think that just shows even more on screen. But it’s acting, and I feel like in whatever technique or however people work, I substitute people. So in that scene, I’m thinking of someone else. I’m bringing someone else into that scene in my mind.
ANDELMAN: And thank you for thinking of Mr. Media in that scene. I appreciated that. I could see that.
BORTH: I was! I was thinking about you in that scene, which is why it was so intense. But you have to. You have to distinguish, otherwise you’re gonna find yourself in really awkward, weird situations which happens a lot on sets. I kind of understand now why people who work together tend to date afterwards. Just reading magazines and watching “Extra” and stuff like that, I get it because you spend a significant amount of time with that person and, especially with what we’re dealing with on this show and that close and that intimate, you do develop that relationship off-screen. I think you have to in order to bring it on-screen, but it is all for the sake of the work and for the job, and that’s it. And then you come home and let it go.
CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING!
©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Ally Walker, Cynthia Mort, graphic sex, HBO, intercourse, male full frontal nudity, male genitalia, Michelle Borth, Mr. Skin, MySpace, Playboy, sexy, Tell Me You Love Me, The Sopranos, Wiccan
¶ 5:50 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
Michelle Borth, "Tell Me You Love Me" actress: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2
(Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: One of the things that I know people have talked about a lot about the show is the male full frontal nudity, which, even in movies, you don’t see that, and that seems to bring that other element to the show that makes it seem that much more graphic because you’re really not used to seeing that.
MICHELLE BORTH: I think that’s the whole point, though. I think it’s really interesting that that’s been like a big fuss because I almost want to say to the men, “Oh, boo hoo, are you feeling exploited? I’m sorry!” I think it’s funny that people are shocked by it because we’ve seen frontal nudity from women. We’ve seen topless scenes and all of that. I like the show. I like that we’re bringing that to the screen. I think that it wouldn’t do the show justice if we just favored one gender. The show is about the truth of relationships, and it doesn’t favor specifically to the men audience by giving you lots of T & A. I love that because that’s not what the show is about. It is not about the sex and the nudity and all of that because a lot of the sex, number one, is unsexy sex. It is not sex that turns you on. It is awkward, and it’s weird. And maybe showing male genitalia will reinforce the whole point. People are comparing it to pornography, but it’s not. It’s about showing an authentic relationship, and I’m glad that we’re doing it because I think we should be.
ANDELMAN: But, Michelle, at the same time, you’re right, fair is fair. We’re gonna see female nudity; we should see male nudity. But because we’re so unused to seeing it, it seems like seeing that penis, at times, makes the sex seem that much more real even if it’s not “happy” sex. I think that’s the part of it that makes it more surprising to people when they see it because it’s like, “Wow, that guy’s not covered up there. That doesn’t look as simulated as that movie I saw in the hotel.”
BORTH: No. You are absolutely right. And I think that the reason for that is it will pull you out of the moment and pull you out of the scene, I think, if you cut to a lamp during a sex scene. The show is very voyeuristic. You’re watching people go through all their troubles. You’re watching them in the bedroom. You’re watching them in the therapy room. We don’t cut away at the awkward moments. We don’t pan to something else when you’re not supposed to see something, so you’re right. It does make it more real, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do for the show, and that is to make you feel involved with these characters and to live and breathe with these characters. And it doesn’t take you out of the moment. So I think that it does justice for the scenes.
ANDELMAN: Now, you said that you’re 29. You’re not 22 or 23, which is what I guessed from just watching, so you seem more confident and more secure in your sexuality and who you are. That’s got to make it easier for you to do something like this.
BORTH: Absolutely. I am. I am really comfortable with sexuality and nudity. I think it’s just kind of the way that I was raised, just really liberal. And I am just comfortable with myself. My mom did a good job. I’ve got great self-esteem. This doesn’t say that it wasn’t completely nerve-wracking doing them. It absolutely was. It’s not easy. It’s not easy getting naked and being in scenes in front of a room full of people. Oh my God, it’s terrifying. I don’t care how confident or how great you think you look, you’re nervous. Once I initially got over the nerves in doing it, it’s like riding a bike, after the first one you’re just like oh alright, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s get naked. Let’s do it. Yeah, then absolutely then it’s fine. But I also thought it was really essential to really own the confidence because that is Jamie’s whole deal. She is this really sexually confident woman and individual. She uses it as a crutch for so many different things, and if I didn’t portray that, I wouldn’t be doing her character justice. I had to.
ANDELMAN: As we’re talking, the show is still a few days away from airing for the first time. Are you nervous about the potential loss of privacy that may take place if the show catches on? Even if the show becomes a minor hit, people are gonna see you in a completely different light.
BORTH: I never even thought about that. I honestly didn’t think about that. No, no I’m not. If it happens, yeah, then fine, great if people notice me. I think people are gonna have their own opinions. I know some people are gonna judge me and whether or not I’m gonna get heckled or people are gonna be mean to me, I don’t know. I think that I prepared myself for all of it because I’ve been with this project for so long and after the TCA’s and the big stir of the sex, I was like, “Alright, this is gonna be a big deal. I need to prepare myself for anything that’s gonna come because there’s gonna be good and there’s gonna be bad and, whatever it is, I’m just ready for it.” So, yeah, I think that maybe I’m ready for it. I hope so. I think I’m ready for the good and the bad.
ANDELMAN: A few weeks ago I interviewed the editor of Playboy for Mr. Media, and we were talking about how, over the years, many actresses who are looking to break out or change the world’s perception of them posed for Playboy. I wondered if this was the kind of thing that would have kind of the same effect or if that might even be the effect that you might be looking for.
BORTH: I would say no. For me personally, I don’t feel I need to have to justify. No, I don’t. I didn’t do it for any other reason than I thought it was a great show and a great character and a great job on a great network.
ANDELMAN: Let me ask a little bit about you. We’ve talked an awful lot about sex. I think I’ve talked to you more about sex this afternoon than I usually talk to my wife about it in a month. Where are you from? Why did you want to become an actress?
BORTH: I’m from New York, and I don’t really know why I wanted to become an actor. Now, in hindsight, I would’ve been like, “No, don’t do it! I don’t advise it!” I think it was because it was the only thing that, for me, it was an outlet for me that I couldn’t find anywhere else that allowed me to express myself. I was a little out of control as a teenager, and I did some bad things. I found acting to be that outlet that allowed me to express my anger and my pain and my hurt and my fears without having to do anything bad, without having to be bad, or do anything bad. It was just an outlet that I finally found. I was like, “Oh, my God. This makes me feel good. It feels right. I’m good at it, and I’m not breaking any laws.” So that’s why.
ANDELMAN: And you mentioned brothers. How many siblings do you have?
BORTH: I have two younger brothers. Two younger brothers, yeah, and they’re back in New York.
BOB ANDELMAN: Okay.
(Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: One of the things that I know people have talked about a lot about the show is the male full frontal nudity, which, even in movies, you don’t see that, and that seems to bring that other element to the show that makes it seem that much more graphic because you’re really not used to seeing that.
MICHELLE BORTH: I think that’s the whole point, though. I think it’s really interesting that that’s been like a big fuss because I almost want to say to the men, “Oh, boo hoo, are you feeling exploited? I’m sorry!” I think it’s funny that people are shocked by it because we’ve seen frontal nudity from women. We’ve seen topless scenes and all of that. I like the show. I like that we’re bringing that to the screen. I think that it wouldn’t do the show justice if we just favored one gender. The show is about the truth of relationships, and it doesn’t favor specifically to the men audience by giving you lots of T & A. I love that because that’s not what the show is about. It is not about the sex and the nudity and all of that because a lot of the sex, number one, is unsexy sex. It is not sex that turns you on. It is awkward, and it’s weird. And maybe showing male genitalia will reinforce the whole point. People are comparing it to pornography, but it’s not. It’s about showing an authentic relationship, and I’m glad that we’re doing it because I think we should be.
Michelle Borth Clips on YouTube
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ANDELMAN: But, Michelle, at the same time, you’re right, fair is fair. We’re gonna see female nudity; we should see male nudity. But because we’re so unused to seeing it, it seems like seeing that penis, at times, makes the sex seem that much more real even if it’s not “happy” sex. I think that’s the part of it that makes it more surprising to people when they see it because it’s like, “Wow, that guy’s not covered up there. That doesn’t look as simulated as that movie I saw in the hotel.”
BORTH: No. You are absolutely right. And I think that the reason for that is it will pull you out of the moment and pull you out of the scene, I think, if you cut to a lamp during a sex scene. The show is very voyeuristic. You’re watching people go through all their troubles. You’re watching them in the bedroom. You’re watching them in the therapy room. We don’t cut away at the awkward moments. We don’t pan to something else when you’re not supposed to see something, so you’re right. It does make it more real, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do for the show, and that is to make you feel involved with these characters and to live and breathe with these characters. And it doesn’t take you out of the moment. So I think that it does justice for the scenes.
ANDELMAN: Now, you said that you’re 29. You’re not 22 or 23, which is what I guessed from just watching, so you seem more confident and more secure in your sexuality and who you are. That’s got to make it easier for you to do something like this.
BORTH: Absolutely. I am. I am really comfortable with sexuality and nudity. I think it’s just kind of the way that I was raised, just really liberal. And I am just comfortable with myself. My mom did a good job. I’ve got great self-esteem. This doesn’t say that it wasn’t completely nerve-wracking doing them. It absolutely was. It’s not easy. It’s not easy getting naked and being in scenes in front of a room full of people. Oh my God, it’s terrifying. I don’t care how confident or how great you think you look, you’re nervous. Once I initially got over the nerves in doing it, it’s like riding a bike, after the first one you’re just like oh alright, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s get naked. Let’s do it. Yeah, then absolutely then it’s fine. But I also thought it was really essential to really own the confidence because that is Jamie’s whole deal. She is this really sexually confident woman and individual. She uses it as a crutch for so many different things, and if I didn’t portray that, I wouldn’t be doing her character justice. I had to.
ANDELMAN: As we’re talking, the show is still a few days away from airing for the first time. Are you nervous about the potential loss of privacy that may take place if the show catches on? Even if the show becomes a minor hit, people are gonna see you in a completely different light.
BORTH: I never even thought about that. I honestly didn’t think about that. No, no I’m not. If it happens, yeah, then fine, great if people notice me. I think people are gonna have their own opinions. I know some people are gonna judge me and whether or not I’m gonna get heckled or people are gonna be mean to me, I don’t know. I think that I prepared myself for all of it because I’ve been with this project for so long and after the TCA’s and the big stir of the sex, I was like, “Alright, this is gonna be a big deal. I need to prepare myself for anything that’s gonna come because there’s gonna be good and there’s gonna be bad and, whatever it is, I’m just ready for it.” So, yeah, I think that maybe I’m ready for it. I hope so. I think I’m ready for the good and the bad.
ANDELMAN: A few weeks ago I interviewed the editor of Playboy for Mr. Media, and we were talking about how, over the years, many actresses who are looking to break out or change the world’s perception of them posed for Playboy. I wondered if this was the kind of thing that would have kind of the same effect or if that might even be the effect that you might be looking for.
BORTH: I would say no. For me personally, I don’t feel I need to have to justify. No, I don’t. I didn’t do it for any other reason than I thought it was a great show and a great character and a great job on a great network.
ANDELMAN: Let me ask a little bit about you. We’ve talked an awful lot about sex. I think I’ve talked to you more about sex this afternoon than I usually talk to my wife about it in a month. Where are you from? Why did you want to become an actress?
BORTH: I’m from New York, and I don’t really know why I wanted to become an actor. Now, in hindsight, I would’ve been like, “No, don’t do it! I don’t advise it!” I think it was because it was the only thing that, for me, it was an outlet for me that I couldn’t find anywhere else that allowed me to express myself. I was a little out of control as a teenager, and I did some bad things. I found acting to be that outlet that allowed me to express my anger and my pain and my hurt and my fears without having to do anything bad, without having to be bad, or do anything bad. It was just an outlet that I finally found. I was like, “Oh, my God. This makes me feel good. It feels right. I’m good at it, and I’m not breaking any laws.” So that’s why.
ANDELMAN: And you mentioned brothers. How many siblings do you have?
BORTH: I have two younger brothers. Two younger brothers, yeah, and they’re back in New York.
BOB ANDELMAN: Okay.