What The Words Become
Jonathan Abrams, on David Simon leaving journalism and jumping full time to the staff of Homicide:
Under Fontana and producer/ writer James Yoshimura, he learned how to transfer his journalistic skills into writing for television. It was Fontana who mentored Simon, telling him that a writer becomes a producer in order to protect his words. Some of the cast and crew dreaded whenever Simon arrived on set. They knew they would be pelted with questions, and they tried avoiding eye contact with him. ‘It was questions with wardrobe,’ said Jeffrey Pratt Gordon, who worked in the art department of Homicide before acting as Johnny ‘Fifty’ Spamanto in The Wire’s Season 2. ‘It was questions with the cinematographer. He was asking everybody questions, and a lot of the times that he asked the questions is right when we’re sort of in the middle of doing stuff. What’s this guy poking around for? What’s this guy always asking questions about?’ It was only years later that he surmised Simon had been educating himself in every aspect of filmmaking.
This is another version of bad jokes told well.
Simon was not only learning how to write for television. He was learning the container television is created within.
Wardrobe. Camera. Sets. Actors. Timing.
The words matter.
But the container decides what they become.