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#91
General JFC / Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Last post by Sven2 - May 23, 2019, 01:22:13 PMDavid Milch's Third Act, continued
My conversations with Milch, which took place in his garage office and on the telephone, have been edited for clarity and concision.
Singer: What do you want to be the focus of our conversations?
Milch: To the extent that this sort of thing is appropriate, a focus on the illness. . . . While writing the screenplay for "Deadwood: The Movie," I was in the last part of the privacy of my faculties, and that's gone now. I was able to believe that— You know, we all make deals, I suppose, in terms of how we think about the process of our aging. It's a series of givings away, a making peace with givings away. I had thought, as many or most people do, that I was in an earlier stage of givings away than it turns out I am. It's kind of a relentless series of adjustments to what you can do, in particular the way you can't think any longer. Your inability to sustain a continuity of focus. And those are accumulated deletions of ability. And you adjust—you'd better adjust, or you adjust whether you want to or not.
Singer: From my own experience with serious illness, though it's been nothing like what you're going through, I've found that my capacity for denial has helped.
Milch: Denial, I think, is a sort of ongoing operative procedure—you try and proceed as if you're capable, as if you weren't ill. And then begin making concessions to the fact that you are. . . . Things that you can't remember any longer, in particular—it's like shifting the gears of the engine of a car, except to the extent that it absolutely isn't. You just move through the day experiencing a series of awarenesses of what's gone in terms of your capacities. And there are physiological consequences. I've been describing, I guess, mental consequences, but there are absolute physical limitations that you live into, increasingly. I never thought I'd be quoting a Paul Simon song, at least not in public, but "Hello, darkness, my old friend." There's an experience you have as every day goes on of what you're no longer capable of and . . . it's an accumulation of indignities. At a more fundamental level, it's an accretion of irrevocable truths: this is gone, and that's gone. And you try to restrict the induction of self-pity, which is one of the complications of the illness. Apart from what's gone because of physiological change, there's a change of spirit. You awaken and inventory where you are on this day in terms of what you can't do, what you can't think.
Singer: When you wake up in the morning, is there a process that you're aware of—an inventorying—that you weren't experiencing five years ago?
Milch: Absolutely. As I say, it's a series of takings away. And there's a subsidiary category of shame, at not being able to do things.
David Milch on the set during the filming of "Deadwood: The Movie" with Timothy Olyphant, who plays Seth Bullock.
Photograph by Rita Stern Milch
Singer: Why shame?
Milch: It's self-imposed. More than anything else, one would like to think of oneself as being capable as a human being. The sad truth, imposed with increasing rigor, is you aren't. You aren't normal anymore. You're not capable of thinking in the fashion you would hope to as an artist and as a person. Things as pedestrian as not being able to remember the day. Sometimes where you've been. There have been a couple of times when I haven't been able to remember where I live. And then there are compensatory adjustments that you make in anticipation of those rigors, so that you can conceal the fact of what you can't do. It's a constriction that becomes increasingly vicious. And then you go on.
Singer: I'm sitting here listening to you, and you're describing what you're describing, and there is to me an immense irony: this is the same mind that I've known for as long as I've known you.
Milch: That's a blessing of this conversation, and I'm concentrating and thinking as hard as I can. I'm asking for the grace and dignity of a lucid cogitation. I'm asking of my faculties, such as they are, in whatever diminution they are, to meet you fairly.
I'm different recognizably, unmistakably, from one day to the next. I'm capable of things on one day that are absolutely beyond me. Down to things as rudimentary as sometimes where I live. One tries to adjust to those rigors and disciplines as they reveal themselves, as the day unfolds. At one level—the level of vanity, I suppose—there's a shame that shows itself as anger, an anger that is quickly internalized as unfair to the disciplines or ambitions of the exchange in which I'm involved at that moment. And I try to adapt to that because it's a distraction from what the invoked purpose, the proper purpose, of that exchange is. Sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. At a rudimentary and humiliating level, I'm incapable of lucid discourse. That's no fun.
Singer: Once you realized this was happening to you, did you say to yourself that there was anything you needed to do to memorialize what was happening? Any way of tracking this? Especially with you, given your hyper-alertness to all that's around you, but also your ability to pull back from whatever is immediate and contemporary and go to a place—say, Deadwood—where your characters exist.
Milch: I think that is the chief blessing of art, the opportunity to organize one's behavior around a different reality. It's a second chance. You pray to be equal to it, equal to its opportunities. We both know that some days you're better at that than others. In my case, there's a continuing unfolding discovery of the limitations of that vision.
I'm thinking of playing catch with my son, Ben, teaching him to play catch. The particular kind of reverence that you feel for that process, for what you know it will mean to him. To catch the ball and to throw it back right, and to know that I'm proud of him. The opportunity to do those things is transferrable to the artistic process as well—the process of passing on, for better or worse, as well as one can, what you've learned. And blessing him on the voyage that he'll begin. Those are special and particular opportunities that are given an artist.
Singer: You once told me that you try not to think about writing when you're not writing. Did that mean that writing was easy for you, and did that change when you were working on this new film?
Milch: It's not a self-conscious process. I try to think of an interior logic to things. Exploring that interior and kind of walking around inside it. And, for better or worse, finding things as I go, which instruct me how to proceed, so that it's a kind of exfoliating logic that I'm pursuing. You have to be content when a path that you're pursuing turns out not to be rewarding. It's a journey in that sense.
Singer: We're talking about your creative process and mental process pre-Alzheimer's, correct? And you didn't have a time during the production of the movie where that changed?
Milch: No. I think not. It's variable from moment to moment, but over all there's a dynamic to the process that you try to be disciplined in pursuing.
Singer: "Discipline" is the word you use more than anyone I've ever known. It seems deeply inculcated in your approach to learning and writing. You've said that Robert Penn Warren used to discuss certain disciplines. Does it derive from that?
Milch: Yeah, it does. I recall vividly experiencing a sense of being privileged as Mr. Warren would pursue the logic and emotion of his thoughts—the respect that he had for the discipline of that pursuit as organizing the exchange between us. That was universal with him. There was something holy about it. The street version of it is "Don't fuck with this." It was a beautiful experience to be in the presence of that searching out.
He was a teacher, but he was also always a searcher. He was respectful in sharing the pursuit and you felt you mustn't fail to bring anything but your best attention and respect for the transaction. You had the feeling that there were two spirits residing in a holy place. And there was an absolute lack of self-consciousness to the process. A mutual absence. You felt that you must suppress everything irrelevant or distracting.
Singer: I wonder whether there's an overlap between that sort of profound respect and the recognition you came to later, in A.A. meetings, about a higher power.
Milch: Yes. You had in his presence an effect of a continuous unfolding. It wasn't so much an unfolding of a truth as it was of a passion, or that there was some higher power that had become present as a result of a shared effort. And the presence needed to be acknowledged or the exchange could not be understood. The great blessing of Mr. Warren's presence was a rising up in one's heart of the desire to acknowledge that shared experience.
An encounter in January. Rita has joined us. Milch's Alzheimer's is complicated by long-standing cardiac difficulties.
Milch: I'm not feeling very well just now. I've got an amount of pain and my faculties aren't very good. It's in my chest.
Singer: Do you know what it's about?
Milch: No.
Singer: This is completely organic?
Milch: It's not an anxiety disorder. It's like somebody's got his fist on your chest.
Singer: One of the things we haven't talked about is fear. Do you have fear?
Milch Yeah. You need some? It's a consequence of something pressing hard on your chest. It's a kind of intrusive, dominant state of being. The pain is coercive and distracting to an extent that it's hard to think of anything else or bring one's concentration to anything else.
Singer: Does that mean you're not reading very much?
Milch: Yes.
Singer: What about listening to music?
Milch: Mostly I've been chronicling my grievances.
Singer: When your family, including your granddaughter, was around over the holidays, was that a relief?
from: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/david-milchs-third-act
My conversations with Milch, which took place in his garage office and on the telephone, have been edited for clarity and concision.
Singer: What do you want to be the focus of our conversations?
Milch: To the extent that this sort of thing is appropriate, a focus on the illness. . . . While writing the screenplay for "Deadwood: The Movie," I was in the last part of the privacy of my faculties, and that's gone now. I was able to believe that— You know, we all make deals, I suppose, in terms of how we think about the process of our aging. It's a series of givings away, a making peace with givings away. I had thought, as many or most people do, that I was in an earlier stage of givings away than it turns out I am. It's kind of a relentless series of adjustments to what you can do, in particular the way you can't think any longer. Your inability to sustain a continuity of focus. And those are accumulated deletions of ability. And you adjust—you'd better adjust, or you adjust whether you want to or not.
Singer: From my own experience with serious illness, though it's been nothing like what you're going through, I've found that my capacity for denial has helped.
Milch: Denial, I think, is a sort of ongoing operative procedure—you try and proceed as if you're capable, as if you weren't ill. And then begin making concessions to the fact that you are. . . . Things that you can't remember any longer, in particular—it's like shifting the gears of the engine of a car, except to the extent that it absolutely isn't. You just move through the day experiencing a series of awarenesses of what's gone in terms of your capacities. And there are physiological consequences. I've been describing, I guess, mental consequences, but there are absolute physical limitations that you live into, increasingly. I never thought I'd be quoting a Paul Simon song, at least not in public, but "Hello, darkness, my old friend." There's an experience you have as every day goes on of what you're no longer capable of and . . . it's an accumulation of indignities. At a more fundamental level, it's an accretion of irrevocable truths: this is gone, and that's gone. And you try to restrict the induction of self-pity, which is one of the complications of the illness. Apart from what's gone because of physiological change, there's a change of spirit. You awaken and inventory where you are on this day in terms of what you can't do, what you can't think.
Singer: When you wake up in the morning, is there a process that you're aware of—an inventorying—that you weren't experiencing five years ago?
Milch: Absolutely. As I say, it's a series of takings away. And there's a subsidiary category of shame, at not being able to do things.
David Milch on the set during the filming of "Deadwood: The Movie" with Timothy Olyphant, who plays Seth Bullock.
Photograph by Rita Stern Milch
Singer: Why shame?
Milch: It's self-imposed. More than anything else, one would like to think of oneself as being capable as a human being. The sad truth, imposed with increasing rigor, is you aren't. You aren't normal anymore. You're not capable of thinking in the fashion you would hope to as an artist and as a person. Things as pedestrian as not being able to remember the day. Sometimes where you've been. There have been a couple of times when I haven't been able to remember where I live. And then there are compensatory adjustments that you make in anticipation of those rigors, so that you can conceal the fact of what you can't do. It's a constriction that becomes increasingly vicious. And then you go on.
Singer: I'm sitting here listening to you, and you're describing what you're describing, and there is to me an immense irony: this is the same mind that I've known for as long as I've known you.
Milch: That's a blessing of this conversation, and I'm concentrating and thinking as hard as I can. I'm asking for the grace and dignity of a lucid cogitation. I'm asking of my faculties, such as they are, in whatever diminution they are, to meet you fairly.
I'm different recognizably, unmistakably, from one day to the next. I'm capable of things on one day that are absolutely beyond me. Down to things as rudimentary as sometimes where I live. One tries to adjust to those rigors and disciplines as they reveal themselves, as the day unfolds. At one level—the level of vanity, I suppose—there's a shame that shows itself as anger, an anger that is quickly internalized as unfair to the disciplines or ambitions of the exchange in which I'm involved at that moment. And I try to adapt to that because it's a distraction from what the invoked purpose, the proper purpose, of that exchange is. Sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. At a rudimentary and humiliating level, I'm incapable of lucid discourse. That's no fun.
Singer: Once you realized this was happening to you, did you say to yourself that there was anything you needed to do to memorialize what was happening? Any way of tracking this? Especially with you, given your hyper-alertness to all that's around you, but also your ability to pull back from whatever is immediate and contemporary and go to a place—say, Deadwood—where your characters exist.
Milch: I think that is the chief blessing of art, the opportunity to organize one's behavior around a different reality. It's a second chance. You pray to be equal to it, equal to its opportunities. We both know that some days you're better at that than others. In my case, there's a continuing unfolding discovery of the limitations of that vision.
I'm thinking of playing catch with my son, Ben, teaching him to play catch. The particular kind of reverence that you feel for that process, for what you know it will mean to him. To catch the ball and to throw it back right, and to know that I'm proud of him. The opportunity to do those things is transferrable to the artistic process as well—the process of passing on, for better or worse, as well as one can, what you've learned. And blessing him on the voyage that he'll begin. Those are special and particular opportunities that are given an artist.
Singer: You once told me that you try not to think about writing when you're not writing. Did that mean that writing was easy for you, and did that change when you were working on this new film?
Milch: It's not a self-conscious process. I try to think of an interior logic to things. Exploring that interior and kind of walking around inside it. And, for better or worse, finding things as I go, which instruct me how to proceed, so that it's a kind of exfoliating logic that I'm pursuing. You have to be content when a path that you're pursuing turns out not to be rewarding. It's a journey in that sense.
Singer: We're talking about your creative process and mental process pre-Alzheimer's, correct? And you didn't have a time during the production of the movie where that changed?
Milch: No. I think not. It's variable from moment to moment, but over all there's a dynamic to the process that you try to be disciplined in pursuing.
Singer: "Discipline" is the word you use more than anyone I've ever known. It seems deeply inculcated in your approach to learning and writing. You've said that Robert Penn Warren used to discuss certain disciplines. Does it derive from that?
Milch: Yeah, it does. I recall vividly experiencing a sense of being privileged as Mr. Warren would pursue the logic and emotion of his thoughts—the respect that he had for the discipline of that pursuit as organizing the exchange between us. That was universal with him. There was something holy about it. The street version of it is "Don't fuck with this." It was a beautiful experience to be in the presence of that searching out.
He was a teacher, but he was also always a searcher. He was respectful in sharing the pursuit and you felt you mustn't fail to bring anything but your best attention and respect for the transaction. You had the feeling that there were two spirits residing in a holy place. And there was an absolute lack of self-consciousness to the process. A mutual absence. You felt that you must suppress everything irrelevant or distracting.
Singer: I wonder whether there's an overlap between that sort of profound respect and the recognition you came to later, in A.A. meetings, about a higher power.
Milch: Yes. You had in his presence an effect of a continuous unfolding. It wasn't so much an unfolding of a truth as it was of a passion, or that there was some higher power that had become present as a result of a shared effort. And the presence needed to be acknowledged or the exchange could not be understood. The great blessing of Mr. Warren's presence was a rising up in one's heart of the desire to acknowledge that shared experience.
An encounter in January. Rita has joined us. Milch's Alzheimer's is complicated by long-standing cardiac difficulties.
Milch: I'm not feeling very well just now. I've got an amount of pain and my faculties aren't very good. It's in my chest.
Singer: Do you know what it's about?
Milch: No.
Singer: This is completely organic?
Milch: It's not an anxiety disorder. It's like somebody's got his fist on your chest.
Singer: One of the things we haven't talked about is fear. Do you have fear?
Milch Yeah. You need some? It's a consequence of something pressing hard on your chest. It's a kind of intrusive, dominant state of being. The pain is coercive and distracting to an extent that it's hard to think of anything else or bring one's concentration to anything else.
Singer: Does that mean you're not reading very much?
Milch: Yes.
Singer: What about listening to music?
Milch: Mostly I've been chronicling my grievances.
Singer: When your family, including your granddaughter, was around over the holidays, was that a relief?
from: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/david-milchs-third-act
#92
General JFC / Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Last post by Sven2 - May 23, 2019, 01:15:12 PMDavid Milch's Third Act
By Mark Singer
May 20, 2019
David Milch, the television writer, lives with his wife, Rita Stern Milch, on a peaceful block in Santa Monica, in a cozy stucco bungalow camouflaged by a lush cottage garden. When they moved there, five years ago, from a much larger house a few miles away, where they had raised three children, Milch was about to turn seventy. A survivor of decades of serial addiction-recovery-relapse-recovery—and also of heart disease, childhood sexual predation, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolarity—he remained in command of prodigious gifts. Starting in the early nineteen-eighties, when a former college roommate who wrote for "Hill Street Blues" introduced him to Steven Bochco, the series' co-creator, and he began writing for the show, too, Milch earned a reputation as one of the most original and intellectually fluent figures in the history of episodic television. In 1993, Milch and Bochco created "NYPD Blue," a radical reinvention of the prime-time network police drama. He went on to create several shows of his own, among them the sui-generis Western "Deadwood," for HBO.
Before Milch went to work in Hollywood, he taught writing at Yale while collaborating on a two-volume anthology of American literature with the critics Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, who had been a mentor to Milch when he was an undergraduate there, in the mid-sixties. Reading Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Twain, James, and Faulkner in such depth helped Milch create complex television characters whose voices were each marked by singular diction. His dialogue was suffused with psychological subtext and literary allusion. In Hollywood, his work ethic was undeviating: he showed up every day. He believed, and still believes, that any time spent thinking about writing is wasted except when one is in a room writing. He quotes Billy Wilder: "The muse has to know where to find you." He also became known for nurturing aspiring writers. Writing and teaching, Milch thought, should be "a going out in spirit."
I first met Milch in 2004, while reporting about him for this magazine, during the filming of the second season of "Deadwood." The show, which is regarded by Milch, and by many critics, as his best work, was set in the Dakota Territory in the eighteen-seventies. The town of Deadwood had been at the center of the Black Hills gold rush, one of the last of its kind in the Lower Forty-eight. He began writing the pilot episode only after having spent two years digesting biographies and historical accounts of mining, the Indian wars, territorial politics, whorehouse and gambling protocols, rudimentary systems of justice, and criminality mundane and monstrous. Deadwood, built on land stolen from the Lakota Sioux, had attracted exiles, fugitives, optimists, gamblers with nothing to lose, bloody-minded opportunists, cynics, and seekers who had come to try their luck, or to escape bad luck, in terrain that lay largely beyond the reach of the law.
The real people depicted in "Deadwood"—among them Wild Bill Hickok; his murderer, Jack McCall; Calamity Jane; Wyatt Earp; and Al Swearengen—are greatly outnumbered by Milch's fictional characters. Through three seasons of labyrinthine story lines, an ever-rising body count, boundless scheming and exploitation, and a profusion of depravity that sometimes abruptly transmuted into tenderness, Milch's dialogue transformed the frontier demotic into something baroquely profane. In an early episode, a prospector named Ellsworth, having breakfasted on a few shots of whiskey, declaims to no one in particular, "I may have fucked up my life flatter 'n hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker, and workin' a payin' fuckin' gold claim, and not the U.S. government sayin' I'm trespassin', or the savage fuckin' red man himself or any of these other limber-dick cocksuckers passin' themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me."
By design, Milch wrote "Deadwood" under a gun-to-the-head deadline, regularly composing dialogue the day before a scene was to be shot. Milch is the only writer I have ever watched, at length, write. I sat in a dimly lit, air-conditioned trailer as Milch—surrounded by several silent acolytes, of varying degrees of experience and career accomplishment—sprawled on the floor in the middle of the room, staring at a large computer monitor a few feet away. An assistant at a keyboard took dictation as Milch, seemingly channelling voices from a remote dimension, put words into (and took words out of) the mouth of this or that character. The cursor on the screen advanced and retreated until the exchange sounded precisely right. The methodology evoked a séance, and it was necessary to remind oneself that the voices in fact issued from a certain precinct of the fellow on the floor's brain.
In June, 2006, at the start of Season 3, HBO announced, unexpectedly, that there would be no Season 4. Instead, the network said, Milch would bring "Deadwood" to a conclusion with a pair of two-hour movies. Within months, it became evident that even this was not to be. Rather than being permitted a meticulously conceived dénouement, "Deadwood" just stopped. It came as a gut punch to everyone associated with the series. "Deadwood" devotees never abandoned hope that it might someday return, but the more time passed the less likely a revival seemed. The show had sinned by failing to rack up the boffo audience numbers sufficient to convince HBO that it would become a sensation, like "The Sopranos," which was winding down after six seasons.
Still, the studio's faith in Milch never wavered. It just wanted him to focus on more potentially lucrative projects, and persuaded him to create a new series, "John from Cincinnati," set in a California surfing community, a collaboration with Kem Nunn, a novelist whose books can be found in the surf-noir section. It lasted only one season, a consequence generally attributed to a plot-coherence deficit. In the years that followed, Milch remained fiercely industrious. He created "Luck," set at the Santa Anita Park racetrack and starring Dustin Hoffman, which was shut down in its second season after multiple horses died during filming. Milch also made a pilot—the only episode shot—for an HBO series called "The Money." (Milch described it to me as "King Lear meets Rupert Murdoch and family.") Two other HBO projects never progressed beyond the pilot-script stage: adaptations of Peter Matthiessen's novel "Shadow Country" and "Island of Vice," a history of Theodore Roosevelt's tenure as the police commissioner of New York City. Earlier this year, HBO's "True Detective" aired a new episode written by Milch and Nic Pizzolatto.
Milch's career earned him a fortune—more than a hundred million dollars from "Hill Street Blues," "NYPD Blue," and "Deadwood" alone. This made possible both a history of philanthropy and promiscuous nondeductible one-to-one largesse. Several years after I published my Profile, as Milch was writing early episodes of "Luck," he called and tried to persuade me to work on the series. I reflexively declined the offer. He kept at it, and I kept demurring. At last, he said, "Let me just send you some money." To Milch I owe the strange pleasure of once upon a time hearing myself say, "Please do not send me money."
Unfortunately, this tendency to treat money as something to be gotten rid of also fed a gambling compulsion, which controlled Milch as unremittingly as heroin, alcohol, and pain meds once did. A 2015 lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, filed by Rita Milch against David's former business managers, revealed that between 2001 and 2011 he lost almost twenty-five million dollars betting on horses and football. (The lawsuit was settled out of court.) Only when Rita learned—from the business managers, in 2011—of their calamitous finances did David's gambling cease. They owed the Internal Revenue Service five million dollars. Both their houses—in Brentwood and on Martha's Vineyard—went on the market. Rita sold much of her jewelry. The bungalow in Santa Monica is a rental.
In late 2013, while Milch was in New York, filming the pilot for "The Money," he began having episodes of confusion and erratic memory. These symptoms coincided with severe anemia, which required blood transfusions and surgery, and Rita wishfully assumed that, once his problem was addressed, the memory issue would soon resolve itself. Instead, other ominous signs emerged: more than once, David called her to confess that he couldn't remember where he had parked his car. He found himself searching in vain for familiar names and words. When their older daughter, Elizabeth, got married, in the winter of 2014, she sensed that her father was overwhelmed by the prospect of having to interact with a crowd and deliver a toast. Never before had Milch minded being the focus of attention. Now he seemed tentative, almost frail. He was depressed and increasingly anxious, decidedly not himself. In early 2015, he was given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. For such a cerebral man, it was an especially crushing verdict.
For most Alzheimer's patients, there's a distinct emotional demarcation between the before and after of receiving the diagnosis. Although Milch accepted the validity of the diagnosis, he refused to capitulate to it. He knew that continuing to write was imperative for his survival—that stopping would, more than anything, hasten the process of his ceasing to be his most intrinsic self. His finances presented a different imperative. As his creditors awaited satisfaction, HBO, thankfully, continued to provide him with work. In late 2015, Milch submitted his adaptation of "Shadow Country." The studio passed on it, but opened a different door: reboots had become fashionable on TV, and HBO was now amenable to revisiting "Deadwood" in a film.
For the next two years, Milch worked through drafts of a story that was both new and old. Last summer, HBO green-lighted the script. The movie begins ten years after the last scene of Season 3. Characters who avoided a violent demise in the series return to Deadwood in 1889, as North Dakota and South Dakota join the Union. Extraordinarily, nearly all the surviving members of the original cast—Powers Boothe and Ralph Richeson had died—agreed to reunite, and shooting began in October, at the Melody Movie Ranch, thirty miles north of Santa Monica, using sets based on those from the series. The film will première on HBO on May 31st.
Five days a week, Milch commutes twenty-five yards along an arbor-shaded path that extends from the back of his house to a converted garage, where he writes until it's time to break for lunch. Before he developed Alzheimer's, he rose most days by 4:30 a.m., ready to work. He now shows up in the garage at nine-thirty or ten. Awaiting him are two writing assistants, Brittany Dushame and Micah Sampson, and frequently Regina Corrado, who worked on "Deadwood" and "John from Cincinnati" and returned, in 2017, to help him with the screenplay and whatever might follow. Another collaborator is his younger daughter, Olivia, who is now a successful screenwriter and director. (She co-wrote the script for "Ocean's 8.") Olivia, who lives in New York, flies to Los Angeles at least once a month. Recently, she told me, "My father and I first worked together in 2011, on an adaptation of Faulkner's 'Light in August.' Writing a scene with him was like learning to write a paragraph. That was my education in screenwriting. But Dave doesn't really write movies. He does long-form character development. I've always said that he writes novels set like plays, and shot like movies, that air on television. What he does is its own thing, but he definitely doesn't do three-act structure, where everything resolves itself by the end. Dave always says the emotional response of the character is the plot. I think about that ten times a day when I'm writing."
During the making of "Deadwood," the arc of a season, each consisting of twelve episodes, took shape over months of writers'-room conversations, all recorded and transcribed. Embedded in these gigantic texts were Milchian riffs of dialogue, which were pasted into scripts as the writing progressed. When a new episode was about to be shot, a staff writer would compose a first draft that provided the scaffolding for the wizardry I observed fifteen years ago, in the dark trailer. To everyone involved with making "Deadwood," it was a given that fixed in Milch's consciousness was a complete vision: context, character, motive, plot. Now he can no longer hold in his memory the full trajectory of anything that he writes.
These days, the workday begins with Milch, seated in a cushiony leather armchair opposite a desktop computer monitor, rereading the printout of a completed scene from the previous day or scrutinizing a new one written by, say, Corrado. As Milch scans and rescans what amounts to the scene's studs, joists, and walls, Dushame takes dictation. When things go well, the dialogue will have been planed, sanded, and smoothed by lunchtime. Every word of the final version sounds like Milch, undiminished.
This past winter, I went to Los Angeles twice to see him, in January and again in March. I didn't need anyone to explain that the work goes markedly better on some days than on others. Two projects were under way: an eight-episode bio-pic of Johnny Carson and a memoir that is to be published by Random House. The Carson project came to him from the production and management company Anonymous Content; HBO, per Milch's current contract, retained a right of first refusal. Between my two visits, HBO turned down the pilot script. It was a disappointment, but the project still had funding, and Milch continued working on it. Whenever he hit a snag on the Carson scripts, he turned to the memoir.
Rita organizes and oversees everything that Milch cannot do for himself. A doorway from the office leads to a large space that has long served as a painting studio for Rita, who has had careers as an artist and as an editor. On its floor are file boxes of source material for the memoir, including lecture transcripts, writers'-room transcripts of every series that Milch has worked on starting with "Deadwood," recordings of interviews that he's given, poetry and essays that he wrote in college—everything that hasn't already been shipped to Yale, where his papers will reside, at the Beinecke Library.
Last fall, as shooting was under way for "Deadwood: The Movie," I began talking regularly again with Milch. We spoke, by telephone, every other Saturday for about forty-five minutes, with Rita listening in and filling in blanks as needed. The American Alzheimer's Association identifies three stages of the disease's progression: early, middle, and late. Milch appears to be in the middle stage. This is characterized by a difficulty with organizing everyday tasks and remembering the events of one's personal history; social withdrawal; confusion about where one is or the day of the week; disruption of sleep habits; and an increased risk, if left unsupervised, of becoming lost. The Milch I observed fifteen years ago during the making of "Deadwood" was gregarious, physically strong, and prone to riveting discursive detours. During our recent time together, he spoke slowly and deliberately, and moved accordingly. At one point, I asked him whether, despite what Alzheimer's was stealing from him, it had given anything in return. The answer: a continuous sense of urgency.
"There's an acute sense of time's passage," he said. "Things are important. You don't want to be inconsequential in your perspective on things. I feel that with an increasing acuteness—that everything counts."
"Do you wake up to that feeling every day?"
"Yeah, I do."
Milch believes that time is ultimately the subject of every story. It is a conviction descended, ex cathedra, from Robert Penn Warren, in his spare masterpiece, "Tell Me a Story." For decades, in classrooms, writers' rooms, personal encounters, lectures, and interviews, Milch has cited its concluding lines:
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
to be continued:
By Mark Singer
May 20, 2019
David Milch, the television writer, lives with his wife, Rita Stern Milch, on a peaceful block in Santa Monica, in a cozy stucco bungalow camouflaged by a lush cottage garden. When they moved there, five years ago, from a much larger house a few miles away, where they had raised three children, Milch was about to turn seventy. A survivor of decades of serial addiction-recovery-relapse-recovery—and also of heart disease, childhood sexual predation, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolarity—he remained in command of prodigious gifts. Starting in the early nineteen-eighties, when a former college roommate who wrote for "Hill Street Blues" introduced him to Steven Bochco, the series' co-creator, and he began writing for the show, too, Milch earned a reputation as one of the most original and intellectually fluent figures in the history of episodic television. In 1993, Milch and Bochco created "NYPD Blue," a radical reinvention of the prime-time network police drama. He went on to create several shows of his own, among them the sui-generis Western "Deadwood," for HBO.
Before Milch went to work in Hollywood, he taught writing at Yale while collaborating on a two-volume anthology of American literature with the critics Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, who had been a mentor to Milch when he was an undergraduate there, in the mid-sixties. Reading Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Twain, James, and Faulkner in such depth helped Milch create complex television characters whose voices were each marked by singular diction. His dialogue was suffused with psychological subtext and literary allusion. In Hollywood, his work ethic was undeviating: he showed up every day. He believed, and still believes, that any time spent thinking about writing is wasted except when one is in a room writing. He quotes Billy Wilder: "The muse has to know where to find you." He also became known for nurturing aspiring writers. Writing and teaching, Milch thought, should be "a going out in spirit."
I first met Milch in 2004, while reporting about him for this magazine, during the filming of the second season of "Deadwood." The show, which is regarded by Milch, and by many critics, as his best work, was set in the Dakota Territory in the eighteen-seventies. The town of Deadwood had been at the center of the Black Hills gold rush, one of the last of its kind in the Lower Forty-eight. He began writing the pilot episode only after having spent two years digesting biographies and historical accounts of mining, the Indian wars, territorial politics, whorehouse and gambling protocols, rudimentary systems of justice, and criminality mundane and monstrous. Deadwood, built on land stolen from the Lakota Sioux, had attracted exiles, fugitives, optimists, gamblers with nothing to lose, bloody-minded opportunists, cynics, and seekers who had come to try their luck, or to escape bad luck, in terrain that lay largely beyond the reach of the law.
The real people depicted in "Deadwood"—among them Wild Bill Hickok; his murderer, Jack McCall; Calamity Jane; Wyatt Earp; and Al Swearengen—are greatly outnumbered by Milch's fictional characters. Through three seasons of labyrinthine story lines, an ever-rising body count, boundless scheming and exploitation, and a profusion of depravity that sometimes abruptly transmuted into tenderness, Milch's dialogue transformed the frontier demotic into something baroquely profane. In an early episode, a prospector named Ellsworth, having breakfasted on a few shots of whiskey, declaims to no one in particular, "I may have fucked up my life flatter 'n hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker, and workin' a payin' fuckin' gold claim, and not the U.S. government sayin' I'm trespassin', or the savage fuckin' red man himself or any of these other limber-dick cocksuckers passin' themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me."
By design, Milch wrote "Deadwood" under a gun-to-the-head deadline, regularly composing dialogue the day before a scene was to be shot. Milch is the only writer I have ever watched, at length, write. I sat in a dimly lit, air-conditioned trailer as Milch—surrounded by several silent acolytes, of varying degrees of experience and career accomplishment—sprawled on the floor in the middle of the room, staring at a large computer monitor a few feet away. An assistant at a keyboard took dictation as Milch, seemingly channelling voices from a remote dimension, put words into (and took words out of) the mouth of this or that character. The cursor on the screen advanced and retreated until the exchange sounded precisely right. The methodology evoked a séance, and it was necessary to remind oneself that the voices in fact issued from a certain precinct of the fellow on the floor's brain.
In June, 2006, at the start of Season 3, HBO announced, unexpectedly, that there would be no Season 4. Instead, the network said, Milch would bring "Deadwood" to a conclusion with a pair of two-hour movies. Within months, it became evident that even this was not to be. Rather than being permitted a meticulously conceived dénouement, "Deadwood" just stopped. It came as a gut punch to everyone associated with the series. "Deadwood" devotees never abandoned hope that it might someday return, but the more time passed the less likely a revival seemed. The show had sinned by failing to rack up the boffo audience numbers sufficient to convince HBO that it would become a sensation, like "The Sopranos," which was winding down after six seasons.
Still, the studio's faith in Milch never wavered. It just wanted him to focus on more potentially lucrative projects, and persuaded him to create a new series, "John from Cincinnati," set in a California surfing community, a collaboration with Kem Nunn, a novelist whose books can be found in the surf-noir section. It lasted only one season, a consequence generally attributed to a plot-coherence deficit. In the years that followed, Milch remained fiercely industrious. He created "Luck," set at the Santa Anita Park racetrack and starring Dustin Hoffman, which was shut down in its second season after multiple horses died during filming. Milch also made a pilot—the only episode shot—for an HBO series called "The Money." (Milch described it to me as "King Lear meets Rupert Murdoch and family.") Two other HBO projects never progressed beyond the pilot-script stage: adaptations of Peter Matthiessen's novel "Shadow Country" and "Island of Vice," a history of Theodore Roosevelt's tenure as the police commissioner of New York City. Earlier this year, HBO's "True Detective" aired a new episode written by Milch and Nic Pizzolatto.
Milch's career earned him a fortune—more than a hundred million dollars from "Hill Street Blues," "NYPD Blue," and "Deadwood" alone. This made possible both a history of philanthropy and promiscuous nondeductible one-to-one largesse. Several years after I published my Profile, as Milch was writing early episodes of "Luck," he called and tried to persuade me to work on the series. I reflexively declined the offer. He kept at it, and I kept demurring. At last, he said, "Let me just send you some money." To Milch I owe the strange pleasure of once upon a time hearing myself say, "Please do not send me money."
Unfortunately, this tendency to treat money as something to be gotten rid of also fed a gambling compulsion, which controlled Milch as unremittingly as heroin, alcohol, and pain meds once did. A 2015 lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, filed by Rita Milch against David's former business managers, revealed that between 2001 and 2011 he lost almost twenty-five million dollars betting on horses and football. (The lawsuit was settled out of court.) Only when Rita learned—from the business managers, in 2011—of their calamitous finances did David's gambling cease. They owed the Internal Revenue Service five million dollars. Both their houses—in Brentwood and on Martha's Vineyard—went on the market. Rita sold much of her jewelry. The bungalow in Santa Monica is a rental.
In late 2013, while Milch was in New York, filming the pilot for "The Money," he began having episodes of confusion and erratic memory. These symptoms coincided with severe anemia, which required blood transfusions and surgery, and Rita wishfully assumed that, once his problem was addressed, the memory issue would soon resolve itself. Instead, other ominous signs emerged: more than once, David called her to confess that he couldn't remember where he had parked his car. He found himself searching in vain for familiar names and words. When their older daughter, Elizabeth, got married, in the winter of 2014, she sensed that her father was overwhelmed by the prospect of having to interact with a crowd and deliver a toast. Never before had Milch minded being the focus of attention. Now he seemed tentative, almost frail. He was depressed and increasingly anxious, decidedly not himself. In early 2015, he was given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. For such a cerebral man, it was an especially crushing verdict.
For most Alzheimer's patients, there's a distinct emotional demarcation between the before and after of receiving the diagnosis. Although Milch accepted the validity of the diagnosis, he refused to capitulate to it. He knew that continuing to write was imperative for his survival—that stopping would, more than anything, hasten the process of his ceasing to be his most intrinsic self. His finances presented a different imperative. As his creditors awaited satisfaction, HBO, thankfully, continued to provide him with work. In late 2015, Milch submitted his adaptation of "Shadow Country." The studio passed on it, but opened a different door: reboots had become fashionable on TV, and HBO was now amenable to revisiting "Deadwood" in a film.
For the next two years, Milch worked through drafts of a story that was both new and old. Last summer, HBO green-lighted the script. The movie begins ten years after the last scene of Season 3. Characters who avoided a violent demise in the series return to Deadwood in 1889, as North Dakota and South Dakota join the Union. Extraordinarily, nearly all the surviving members of the original cast—Powers Boothe and Ralph Richeson had died—agreed to reunite, and shooting began in October, at the Melody Movie Ranch, thirty miles north of Santa Monica, using sets based on those from the series. The film will première on HBO on May 31st.
Five days a week, Milch commutes twenty-five yards along an arbor-shaded path that extends from the back of his house to a converted garage, where he writes until it's time to break for lunch. Before he developed Alzheimer's, he rose most days by 4:30 a.m., ready to work. He now shows up in the garage at nine-thirty or ten. Awaiting him are two writing assistants, Brittany Dushame and Micah Sampson, and frequently Regina Corrado, who worked on "Deadwood" and "John from Cincinnati" and returned, in 2017, to help him with the screenplay and whatever might follow. Another collaborator is his younger daughter, Olivia, who is now a successful screenwriter and director. (She co-wrote the script for "Ocean's 8.") Olivia, who lives in New York, flies to Los Angeles at least once a month. Recently, she told me, "My father and I first worked together in 2011, on an adaptation of Faulkner's 'Light in August.' Writing a scene with him was like learning to write a paragraph. That was my education in screenwriting. But Dave doesn't really write movies. He does long-form character development. I've always said that he writes novels set like plays, and shot like movies, that air on television. What he does is its own thing, but he definitely doesn't do three-act structure, where everything resolves itself by the end. Dave always says the emotional response of the character is the plot. I think about that ten times a day when I'm writing."
During the making of "Deadwood," the arc of a season, each consisting of twelve episodes, took shape over months of writers'-room conversations, all recorded and transcribed. Embedded in these gigantic texts were Milchian riffs of dialogue, which were pasted into scripts as the writing progressed. When a new episode was about to be shot, a staff writer would compose a first draft that provided the scaffolding for the wizardry I observed fifteen years ago, in the dark trailer. To everyone involved with making "Deadwood," it was a given that fixed in Milch's consciousness was a complete vision: context, character, motive, plot. Now he can no longer hold in his memory the full trajectory of anything that he writes.
These days, the workday begins with Milch, seated in a cushiony leather armchair opposite a desktop computer monitor, rereading the printout of a completed scene from the previous day or scrutinizing a new one written by, say, Corrado. As Milch scans and rescans what amounts to the scene's studs, joists, and walls, Dushame takes dictation. When things go well, the dialogue will have been planed, sanded, and smoothed by lunchtime. Every word of the final version sounds like Milch, undiminished.
This past winter, I went to Los Angeles twice to see him, in January and again in March. I didn't need anyone to explain that the work goes markedly better on some days than on others. Two projects were under way: an eight-episode bio-pic of Johnny Carson and a memoir that is to be published by Random House. The Carson project came to him from the production and management company Anonymous Content; HBO, per Milch's current contract, retained a right of first refusal. Between my two visits, HBO turned down the pilot script. It was a disappointment, but the project still had funding, and Milch continued working on it. Whenever he hit a snag on the Carson scripts, he turned to the memoir.
Rita organizes and oversees everything that Milch cannot do for himself. A doorway from the office leads to a large space that has long served as a painting studio for Rita, who has had careers as an artist and as an editor. On its floor are file boxes of source material for the memoir, including lecture transcripts, writers'-room transcripts of every series that Milch has worked on starting with "Deadwood," recordings of interviews that he's given, poetry and essays that he wrote in college—everything that hasn't already been shipped to Yale, where his papers will reside, at the Beinecke Library.
Last fall, as shooting was under way for "Deadwood: The Movie," I began talking regularly again with Milch. We spoke, by telephone, every other Saturday for about forty-five minutes, with Rita listening in and filling in blanks as needed. The American Alzheimer's Association identifies three stages of the disease's progression: early, middle, and late. Milch appears to be in the middle stage. This is characterized by a difficulty with organizing everyday tasks and remembering the events of one's personal history; social withdrawal; confusion about where one is or the day of the week; disruption of sleep habits; and an increased risk, if left unsupervised, of becoming lost. The Milch I observed fifteen years ago during the making of "Deadwood" was gregarious, physically strong, and prone to riveting discursive detours. During our recent time together, he spoke slowly and deliberately, and moved accordingly. At one point, I asked him whether, despite what Alzheimer's was stealing from him, it had given anything in return. The answer: a continuous sense of urgency.
"There's an acute sense of time's passage," he said. "Things are important. You don't want to be inconsequential in your perspective on things. I feel that with an increasing acuteness—that everything counts."
"Do you wake up to that feeling every day?"
"Yeah, I do."
Milch believes that time is ultimately the subject of every story. It is a conviction descended, ex cathedra, from Robert Penn Warren, in his spare masterpiece, "Tell Me a Story." For decades, in classrooms, writers' rooms, personal encounters, lectures, and interviews, Milch has cited its concluding lines:
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
to be continued:
#93
General JFC / Re: DEADWOOD THE MOVIE
Last post by Sven2 - May 17, 2019, 06:33:52 PMRebuilding Deadwood, Plank by Plank
By Robert Ito
May 15, 2019
SANTA CLARITA, CALIF. — "Deadwood" is back for one final hello and goodbye.
Last November, more than a decade after David Milch's award-winning HBO series unexpectedly and maddeningly folded, Timothy Olyphant, as Seth Bullock, was once again in the center of the town's perpetually muddy main drag, having words — heated, profane, Shakespearean ones — with Gerald McRaney, the show's villainous George Hearst. From the balcony of the Gem casino, Ian McShane (Al Swearengen) glowered; offstage, Robin Weigert, the show's foul-mouthed, tenderhearted Calamity Jane, waited in the wings.
Against all odds, the producers were able to reunite nearly all of the show's principal cast for "Deadwood: The Movie," the show's much-delayed, much-anticipated finale. "I didn't think it was ever going to happen," Olyphant admitted later.
But if reassembling the show's enormous ensemble cast 13 years on was a herculean task, reassembling the town of Deadwood itself was no less knotty, or crucial. The series is named "Deadwood" after all — the locale is just as important as any single cast member, the story of its 19th-century gentrification intertwined with the rising and falling fortunes of its inhabitants. So the filmmakers needed to get the place right.
The good news: They got to return to one of the most memorable and beloved towns in the history of television. Although "Deadwood" ran for only three seasons, it was nominated for 28 Emmys, winning eight, and is now considered one of the greatest dramas in TV history (earlier this year, The Times declared it one of the "20 best TV dramas since 'The Sopranos'").
The bad news: They had to recreate much of it without blueprints, within four months, and on sets that had been taken over and rendered unrecognizable by other films and shows ("Django Unchained," HBO's "Westworld").
"We were still building things, even while we were shooting," the producer Gregg Fienberg said.
"Deadwood: The Movie," which debuts on May 31, is set in 1889, 10 years after the series left off, when civilization is coming to the town in the form of streetlights, fancy eateries and phone service (O.K., one phone).
So the primary challenge was to create a slightly modernized Old West, with updated streets and new buildings to reflect a decade's worth of progress while preserving the look and feel of the original Deadwood for its purist fans.
As with the original series, the film was shot on the Melody Ranch, a 22-acre film studio that has played host to Hollywood cowboys like Gene Autry (a former owner), Gary Cooper (who filmed "High Noon" here) and John Wayne ("Stagecoach").
When the producers and designers finally returned to the site last year, they discovered that most of the original buildings were still here — even many of the original props, including the Bella Union's craps tables and roulette wheel. Bullock's house, however, had to be rebuilt from scratch (it had been torn down by the "Westworld" crew), as did the interior of the updated, now-classier Gem ("No sleeping on the tables," one sign reads).
But when the designers went to consult the show's original blueprints, they were nowhere to be found. "The show was canceled so abruptly and everybody was so traumatized that nobody bothered to save them," said Maria Caso, the production designer on the series and the film.
Desperate, the designers painstakingly reviewed old episodes, often frame by frame, and tried to call back distant architectural memories. "We watched the show over and over to try to remember what we had built," she said.
Much of the reference material for the series and the film was provided by the curators and researchers at Deadwood History Inc., the umbrella organization for Deadwood's four museums. Over the years, Caso consulted them about everything including the price for a small glass of whiskey in 19th-century Deadwood (a nickel) and what Chinatown looked like.
"We actually had to hire a part-time researcher, Jerry Bryant, because the questions were so constant," said Mary Kopco, Deadwood History's executive director during the series's run. "He ended up writing a whole book on Al Swearengen based on all the questions we were being asked."
The extra effort seemed particularly necessary with a show like "Deadwood," Caso noted. "The audience, they check on everything," she said. "So we did a lot of research before we started drawing or building. We really wanted to recreate as many of the details as we could, just so it's true to history, and to honor that."
Of course, this being Hollywood, there is a certain level of artifice. Those gorgeous mountains and ponderosa pines are all added later by the visual effects department; the 40-foot logs brought in for Hearst's telephone poles are fake, because of continuing troubles with bark beetles, which have been killing California trees by the tens of millions.
As for all that mud and mountainous terrain in flat, drought-prone Southern California, "we brought in tons and tons of dirt, 50 or so trucks full, and constantly sprayed it down with water," Fienberg said.
And no, Kopco said, unprompted, none of the residents of Deadwood were feeding corpses to the town's hogs.
During a break in filming, Caso walked down Deadwood's main street, surveying her team's handiwork and pointing out landmarks. She noted the patchwork brick and stone facade of the Bullock and Star Hotel, which grew out of the hardware store the two men founded in the original series. (In real life, the hardware store partners eventually had a falling out; the hotel was named the Bullock Hotel.)
"Bullock and Star started to make this grand hotel with this beautiful stone, but then they ran out of money so then they started using a different stone, and then finally they switched to brick," Caso said of the historical men. "So we copied that."
In Deadwood's Chinatown, Caso revealed a 150-year-old "opium bed" they purchased for the show. Returning to the main street, she pointed out the town's butcher shop, its roof cluttered with piles of antlers. "They would butcher the deer and then throw the horns on top," she said of the butchers in Deadwood.
The town's fanciest restaurant, the Oyster Bay, offered bivalves of questionable freshness. "It took two weeks for the oysters to get from Providence to Deadwood," she said.
Caso then headed inside the Bella Union, the saloon formerly owned by Cy Tolliver (played in the series by Powers Boothe, who died in 2017). Unlike on most Hollywood shoots, where the exteriors are in one location and the interiors are built inside a studio soundstage miles or even states away, there are no false fronts in Deadwood. Walk off the street into any hotel or cat house in Deadwood — other than Swearengen's expansive, two-story Gem — and you're inside that hotel or cat house.
"It grounded the show and gave it a sense of realism that's difficult to get when you're always cutting from exterior to interior," she said.
For the cast, re-entering the Deadwood set felt like stepping back in time — to 1889, and 2006. "When we first started filming, I told a cameraman, 'That door should be closed!,'" McShane said. "It was like going back to exactly what I would have said 13 years ago, letting them know that Swearengen closed every door behind him because he didn't want any surprises."
On the second to the last night of shooting, cast and crew were saying their goodbyes, their faces illuminated by torchlight. Many remarked how emotional and bittersweet it was to be back in Deadwood; others, family members in tow, took one last long look at the town's main street. Few probably knew how much work had gone into researching the wallpaper, say, or making sure each period sign was accurate.
"All I can tell you is that it's a joy to be around," Olyphant said. "It makes you feel like you're a part of something really special because everything around you is so special. I can only assume it raises your game."
from:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/arts/television/deadwood-the-movie-hbo.html?em_pos=medium&ref=headline&nl_art=2&te=1&nl=watching&emc=edit_wg_20190517
By Robert Ito
May 15, 2019
SANTA CLARITA, CALIF. — "Deadwood" is back for one final hello and goodbye.
Last November, more than a decade after David Milch's award-winning HBO series unexpectedly and maddeningly folded, Timothy Olyphant, as Seth Bullock, was once again in the center of the town's perpetually muddy main drag, having words — heated, profane, Shakespearean ones — with Gerald McRaney, the show's villainous George Hearst. From the balcony of the Gem casino, Ian McShane (Al Swearengen) glowered; offstage, Robin Weigert, the show's foul-mouthed, tenderhearted Calamity Jane, waited in the wings.
Against all odds, the producers were able to reunite nearly all of the show's principal cast for "Deadwood: The Movie," the show's much-delayed, much-anticipated finale. "I didn't think it was ever going to happen," Olyphant admitted later.
But if reassembling the show's enormous ensemble cast 13 years on was a herculean task, reassembling the town of Deadwood itself was no less knotty, or crucial. The series is named "Deadwood" after all — the locale is just as important as any single cast member, the story of its 19th-century gentrification intertwined with the rising and falling fortunes of its inhabitants. So the filmmakers needed to get the place right.
The good news: They got to return to one of the most memorable and beloved towns in the history of television. Although "Deadwood" ran for only three seasons, it was nominated for 28 Emmys, winning eight, and is now considered one of the greatest dramas in TV history (earlier this year, The Times declared it one of the "20 best TV dramas since 'The Sopranos'").
The bad news: They had to recreate much of it without blueprints, within four months, and on sets that had been taken over and rendered unrecognizable by other films and shows ("Django Unchained," HBO's "Westworld").
"We were still building things, even while we were shooting," the producer Gregg Fienberg said.
"Deadwood: The Movie," which debuts on May 31, is set in 1889, 10 years after the series left off, when civilization is coming to the town in the form of streetlights, fancy eateries and phone service (O.K., one phone).
So the primary challenge was to create a slightly modernized Old West, with updated streets and new buildings to reflect a decade's worth of progress while preserving the look and feel of the original Deadwood for its purist fans.
As with the original series, the film was shot on the Melody Ranch, a 22-acre film studio that has played host to Hollywood cowboys like Gene Autry (a former owner), Gary Cooper (who filmed "High Noon" here) and John Wayne ("Stagecoach").
When the producers and designers finally returned to the site last year, they discovered that most of the original buildings were still here — even many of the original props, including the Bella Union's craps tables and roulette wheel. Bullock's house, however, had to be rebuilt from scratch (it had been torn down by the "Westworld" crew), as did the interior of the updated, now-classier Gem ("No sleeping on the tables," one sign reads).
But when the designers went to consult the show's original blueprints, they were nowhere to be found. "The show was canceled so abruptly and everybody was so traumatized that nobody bothered to save them," said Maria Caso, the production designer on the series and the film.
Desperate, the designers painstakingly reviewed old episodes, often frame by frame, and tried to call back distant architectural memories. "We watched the show over and over to try to remember what we had built," she said.
Much of the reference material for the series and the film was provided by the curators and researchers at Deadwood History Inc., the umbrella organization for Deadwood's four museums. Over the years, Caso consulted them about everything including the price for a small glass of whiskey in 19th-century Deadwood (a nickel) and what Chinatown looked like.
"We actually had to hire a part-time researcher, Jerry Bryant, because the questions were so constant," said Mary Kopco, Deadwood History's executive director during the series's run. "He ended up writing a whole book on Al Swearengen based on all the questions we were being asked."
The extra effort seemed particularly necessary with a show like "Deadwood," Caso noted. "The audience, they check on everything," she said. "So we did a lot of research before we started drawing or building. We really wanted to recreate as many of the details as we could, just so it's true to history, and to honor that."
Of course, this being Hollywood, there is a certain level of artifice. Those gorgeous mountains and ponderosa pines are all added later by the visual effects department; the 40-foot logs brought in for Hearst's telephone poles are fake, because of continuing troubles with bark beetles, which have been killing California trees by the tens of millions.
As for all that mud and mountainous terrain in flat, drought-prone Southern California, "we brought in tons and tons of dirt, 50 or so trucks full, and constantly sprayed it down with water," Fienberg said.
And no, Kopco said, unprompted, none of the residents of Deadwood were feeding corpses to the town's hogs.
During a break in filming, Caso walked down Deadwood's main street, surveying her team's handiwork and pointing out landmarks. She noted the patchwork brick and stone facade of the Bullock and Star Hotel, which grew out of the hardware store the two men founded in the original series. (In real life, the hardware store partners eventually had a falling out; the hotel was named the Bullock Hotel.)
"Bullock and Star started to make this grand hotel with this beautiful stone, but then they ran out of money so then they started using a different stone, and then finally they switched to brick," Caso said of the historical men. "So we copied that."
In Deadwood's Chinatown, Caso revealed a 150-year-old "opium bed" they purchased for the show. Returning to the main street, she pointed out the town's butcher shop, its roof cluttered with piles of antlers. "They would butcher the deer and then throw the horns on top," she said of the butchers in Deadwood.
The town's fanciest restaurant, the Oyster Bay, offered bivalves of questionable freshness. "It took two weeks for the oysters to get from Providence to Deadwood," she said.
Caso then headed inside the Bella Union, the saloon formerly owned by Cy Tolliver (played in the series by Powers Boothe, who died in 2017). Unlike on most Hollywood shoots, where the exteriors are in one location and the interiors are built inside a studio soundstage miles or even states away, there are no false fronts in Deadwood. Walk off the street into any hotel or cat house in Deadwood — other than Swearengen's expansive, two-story Gem — and you're inside that hotel or cat house.
"It grounded the show and gave it a sense of realism that's difficult to get when you're always cutting from exterior to interior," she said.
For the cast, re-entering the Deadwood set felt like stepping back in time — to 1889, and 2006. "When we first started filming, I told a cameraman, 'That door should be closed!,'" McShane said. "It was like going back to exactly what I would have said 13 years ago, letting them know that Swearengen closed every door behind him because he didn't want any surprises."
On the second to the last night of shooting, cast and crew were saying their goodbyes, their faces illuminated by torchlight. Many remarked how emotional and bittersweet it was to be back in Deadwood; others, family members in tow, took one last long look at the town's main street. Few probably knew how much work had gone into researching the wallpaper, say, or making sure each period sign was accurate.
"All I can tell you is that it's a joy to be around," Olyphant said. "It makes you feel like you're a part of something really special because everything around you is so special. I can only assume it raises your game."
from:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/arts/television/deadwood-the-movie-hbo.html?em_pos=medium&ref=headline&nl_art=2&te=1&nl=watching&emc=edit_wg_20190517
#94
General JFC / Re: DEADWOOD THE MOVIE
Last post by Sven2 - May 10, 2019, 12:26:30 PMTRAVEL: The Ultimate Deadwood Movie Viewing Party Can be Found in the Real-Life Town of Deadwood
by Chelsea Batten
A good Western is hard to find these days. I'm not talking about the futuristic takes on the genre like Westworld or graphic novel-style spinoffs such as The Preacher. I'm talking about an honest-to-God cowboy flick, where lone lawmen hold off an angry mob to ensure that the prisoner lives until his hanging at dawn. Where mustachioed men engage in fisticuffs accompanied by tinkly saloon pianos. Where life is a race against time before it's swept away by greed, rotgut whiskey, or scarlet fever.
Back in 2004, HBO premiered the beautifully written but regrettably short-lived series Deadwood, a gritty epic set in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The show was immediately greeted with critical and popular acclaim, but only the nerdiest fans knew that the series was based on the history of an actual place. The real-life gold rush camp of Deadwood, South Dakota, was even populated by legends of the American West such as Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, as well as foul-mouthed saloonkeeper Al Swearengen and reluctant sheriff Seth Bullock.
Back in 2006, the Emmy-nominated show's untimely demise was a shock to viewers. Despite having ratings on a par with The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, Deadwood drowned under the weight of its extravagant budget and unpredictable producer David Milch. The final episode was clunky and confusing, to say the least; HBO, more than likely aware of this, offered a vague promise to make a 2-hour feature film that would provide closure in the form of a searing (and historically accurate) showdown between two of the main characters. Alas, the film never materialized.
Until now, that is. Thanks to the persuasive magic of television's new golden age, HBO has finally made good on its long overdue promise. Deadwood: The Movie will premiere May 31 on HBO. If you're among the series devotees who have been awaiting this moment for more than a decade, you should definitely head to South Dakota for the best viewing parties in the country.
Hosted in the real historic town of Deadwood, the party centers around a screening of the film at the Deadwood Mountain Grand resort. Sip on cocktails inspired by Deadwood's glory days, don a wide-brimmed hat and fake mustache in the old-time photo booth, and geek out at re-enactments of historically based show scenes. Spend the hours before the screening at nearby iconic destinations such as Mount Rushmore, Badlands National Park, and Custer State Park. Afterward, hang around for a performance from Sacred Cowboys, a country-rock band led by actor W. Earl Brown who played Swearengen's scruffy sidekick Dan Dority.
If you want to really take it to the next level, you can opt for the Deadwood: Heroes & Villains customizable travel package. This three-night package includes perks such as:
Accommodations at select properties like the Historic Bullock Hotel, where you'll share space with the ghost of Seth Bullock, who built the hotel and is said to haunt its halls.
Visit to Mount Moriah Cemetery where Seth Bullock, Calamity Jane, and Wild Bill Hickock are buried.
Viewing of a re-enactment of the trial of Jack McCall. This event was an important hinge of Deadwood's first season, showing how the town dealt with the murder of the venerated Wild Bill Hickok by the cowardly, crooked-nosed McCall.
The Lawman's Patrol Walking Tour. Led by an actor playing the historically accurate version of Con Stapleton (a dim-witted card dealer in the show, but actually the town's first marshal), this tour will give you the historical lowdown on Deadwood's brothels and bars.
A ride on the Deadwood Stagecoach, the iconic conveyance that carried mail, gold, and ambitious adventurers all over the Old West. (We recommend bringing along an orthopedic cushion. Maybe also a neck brace.)
Tour of the authentic 1876 Broken Boot Gold Mine, where you can actually pan for gold without worrying about a Brom Garrett type of situation)
Tour of local history museums such as The Days of 76 Museum (honoring Deadwood's pioneers) and The Adams Museum and House where the town's influential business leaders used to gather.
Rejoice, long-suffering Western fans. As Al Swearengen would put it (in one of his less profane moments), your prospects have just improved.
The Deadwood: Heroes and Villains travel package is available starting May 25 and runs through September 2, 2019. Prices start at $303 and vary depending on lodging and activity preferences.
from:
https://www.themanual.com/travel/deadwood-movie-viewing-party-south-dakota/
by Chelsea Batten
A good Western is hard to find these days. I'm not talking about the futuristic takes on the genre like Westworld or graphic novel-style spinoffs such as The Preacher. I'm talking about an honest-to-God cowboy flick, where lone lawmen hold off an angry mob to ensure that the prisoner lives until his hanging at dawn. Where mustachioed men engage in fisticuffs accompanied by tinkly saloon pianos. Where life is a race against time before it's swept away by greed, rotgut whiskey, or scarlet fever.
Back in 2004, HBO premiered the beautifully written but regrettably short-lived series Deadwood, a gritty epic set in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The show was immediately greeted with critical and popular acclaim, but only the nerdiest fans knew that the series was based on the history of an actual place. The real-life gold rush camp of Deadwood, South Dakota, was even populated by legends of the American West such as Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, as well as foul-mouthed saloonkeeper Al Swearengen and reluctant sheriff Seth Bullock.
Back in 2006, the Emmy-nominated show's untimely demise was a shock to viewers. Despite having ratings on a par with The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, Deadwood drowned under the weight of its extravagant budget and unpredictable producer David Milch. The final episode was clunky and confusing, to say the least; HBO, more than likely aware of this, offered a vague promise to make a 2-hour feature film that would provide closure in the form of a searing (and historically accurate) showdown between two of the main characters. Alas, the film never materialized.
Until now, that is. Thanks to the persuasive magic of television's new golden age, HBO has finally made good on its long overdue promise. Deadwood: The Movie will premiere May 31 on HBO. If you're among the series devotees who have been awaiting this moment for more than a decade, you should definitely head to South Dakota for the best viewing parties in the country.
Hosted in the real historic town of Deadwood, the party centers around a screening of the film at the Deadwood Mountain Grand resort. Sip on cocktails inspired by Deadwood's glory days, don a wide-brimmed hat and fake mustache in the old-time photo booth, and geek out at re-enactments of historically based show scenes. Spend the hours before the screening at nearby iconic destinations such as Mount Rushmore, Badlands National Park, and Custer State Park. Afterward, hang around for a performance from Sacred Cowboys, a country-rock band led by actor W. Earl Brown who played Swearengen's scruffy sidekick Dan Dority.
If you want to really take it to the next level, you can opt for the Deadwood: Heroes & Villains customizable travel package. This three-night package includes perks such as:
Accommodations at select properties like the Historic Bullock Hotel, where you'll share space with the ghost of Seth Bullock, who built the hotel and is said to haunt its halls.
Visit to Mount Moriah Cemetery where Seth Bullock, Calamity Jane, and Wild Bill Hickock are buried.
Viewing of a re-enactment of the trial of Jack McCall. This event was an important hinge of Deadwood's first season, showing how the town dealt with the murder of the venerated Wild Bill Hickok by the cowardly, crooked-nosed McCall.
The Lawman's Patrol Walking Tour. Led by an actor playing the historically accurate version of Con Stapleton (a dim-witted card dealer in the show, but actually the town's first marshal), this tour will give you the historical lowdown on Deadwood's brothels and bars.
A ride on the Deadwood Stagecoach, the iconic conveyance that carried mail, gold, and ambitious adventurers all over the Old West. (We recommend bringing along an orthopedic cushion. Maybe also a neck brace.)
Tour of the authentic 1876 Broken Boot Gold Mine, where you can actually pan for gold without worrying about a Brom Garrett type of situation)
Tour of local history museums such as The Days of 76 Museum (honoring Deadwood's pioneers) and The Adams Museum and House where the town's influential business leaders used to gather.
Rejoice, long-suffering Western fans. As Al Swearengen would put it (in one of his less profane moments), your prospects have just improved.
The Deadwood: Heroes and Villains travel package is available starting May 25 and runs through September 2, 2019. Prices start at $303 and vary depending on lodging and activity preferences.
from:
https://www.themanual.com/travel/deadwood-movie-viewing-party-south-dakota/
#95
General JFC / Re: DEADWOOD THE MOVIE
Last post by Sven2 - April 26, 2019, 06:44:29 PM #96
General JFC / Re: DEADWOOD THE MOVIE
Last post by Sven2 - April 26, 2019, 06:13:10 PMSundown on Deadwood
David Milch, battling Alzheimer's, finally finishes his TV Western.
By Matt Zoller Seitz
"Deadwood creator David Milch says he always had faith that his HBO Western would someday get to wrap up its story, even as more than a dozen years have passed since its surprise cancellation in 2006. But he also had doubts. Only when the cameras started rolling on Deadwood: The Movie — a TV movie set ten years after the show's last episode — could he exhale. "Let's just say that the exigencies of the business threw up a series of roadblocks over the years," says Milch, walking along the main thoroughfare at Melody Ranch Studios on a cold December night, his wife, Rita, by his side. "Somehow, they were all surmounted."
When the sun goes down on Melody Ranch — a Newhall, California, production facility that has hosted many film and TV Westerns — a sense of isolation creeps in. You can hear the wind rustling in the wooded hills, and every now and then a coyote yelps or an owl hoots. It's easy to imagine that this outdoor soundstage, with its temporarily dormant camera tracks and arc lights, is truly the place it pretends to be: a dirty, lawless camp that became a town in a territory that's now on the cusp of becoming a U.S. state (South Dakota), its populace more civil than when the series was canceled but still wild at heart. Horses are tied to hitching posts. Their handlers hang nearby, checking texts and griping about the storms that have just pounded Southern California. The rain flooded the interiors of most key locations, sparing only the Gem Saloon, where Deadwood's legendary gangster, pimp, and all-around power broker Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) holds court.
That's where the Milches are headed. It's the second-to-last day of the shoot, and they're filming a scene with Swearengen; his disabled housekeeper and ward, Jewel (Geri Jewell); and his former employee and sort-of consort, Trixie (Paula Malcomson).
Milch is here to watch, not interfere. He was a notorious micromanager during Deadwood's original run, ordering reshoots if he didn't like the way a scene was playing and dictating new dialogue from the sidelines for the cast to repeat. McShane has spoken of top-to-bottom rewrites being handed to actors just before the cameras rolled, the pages still hot from the copier.
This time, Milch is entrusting the day-to-day execution to his collaborators, among them the director Daniel Minahan, a series veteran, and his co–executive producer Regina Corrado, who started out as a writer on the series in 2005.
But his serenity is also the by-product of a greater urge to let go and accept what life has in store, even if it's not what he asked for.
It's here that we come to the matter of David Milch's Alzheimer's diagnosis.
Milch started to worry that something was amiss five years ago, when he and his friends and relatives noticed more instances of "imperfect recall and tardy recall and short temper. I became more and more of an acquired taste," he says. The writing process became harder too. There was, he says, "a generalized incertitude and a growing incapacity." About a year ago, Milch got up the nerve to have a brain scan. The news was not good.
"As best I understand it, which is minimally, I have a deterioration in the organization of my brain," he says. "And it's progressive. And in some ways discouraging. In more than some ways — in every way I can think of."
The cast and crew of the film and past participants in the show all declined to discuss Milch's condition, though they're aware of it. Milch himself seesaws between curiosity, bitterness, and incredulity, along with a rueful fatalism at the realization that his own father probably had Alzheimer's as well. "That was a while ago, and the diagnosis was not as sophisticated or specific, but in retrospect, he exhibited all the symptoms of the illness," Milch says. He is also moved to remember the deterioration of his mentor at Yale, Robert Penn Warren, whose poetry Milch reads on set to inspire the cast and crew. "He was not well toward the end of his life," he says. "He was every day encountering subtle differences in his condition. But there was an unflinching dignity in the way that he carried himself and a bravery and kindness."
As best I understand it, which is minimally, I have a deterioration in the organization of my brain. And it's progressive.
Milch's diagnosis is the ultimate humbling, having arrived at the tail end of 13 years of harsh reminders about the limits of control. For a self-described "degenerate gambler" who struggled with addiction throughout the first half of his adult life, Milch has had an incredible artistic run. He attended Yale to avoid the draft but was expelled after being accused — falsely, he says — of destroying a police car's siren with a shotgun. He became an assistant there (for Cleanth Brooks and Warren, among others) and later a lecturer, then drifted into television, winning an Emmy, a Writers Guild Award, and a Humanitas Prize for his first produced script, the 1982 Hill Street Blues episode "Trial by Fury." The creator of that cop drama, Steven Bochco, brought Milch along to his biggest success, NYPD Blue, a broadcast-network series that was groundbreaking for its language, violence, and nudity. Milch was an executive producer and writer for the show for seven seasons. The 2004 debut of Deadwood, a town-based Western in the vein of My Darling Clementine and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, was a new artistic pinnacle and the first drama on which he was entirely in control.
It was downhill from there. Deadwood was supposed to run for at least four seasons but got canceled after three owing to a financial dispute between HBO and co-producer Paramount (which owned the international rights) as well as HBO's increasing exasperation with Milch's improvisational production methods and declining ratings. His follow-up, the seaside parable John From Cincinnati, ran just one season. There would be more attempts at series: Some never got past the pilot stage, including The Money, a family drama about a superrich media clan, and the '70s cop drama Last of the Ninth. The HBO racetrack drama Luck got axed early in season two after a series of horse deaths; it had been green-lighted despite HBO's skittishness when Milch agreed to cede control of the filmmaking to executive producer Michael Mann. Milch then wrote six episodes of a historical drama about Boss Tweed but shelved it when there were no buyers. And a couple of years ago, it was reported that Milch was joining the third season of Nic Pizzolatto's HBO crime drama, True Detective, but it turns out the extent of his involvement was exaggerated. "Nic had written the first few episodes and came to David for advice and guidance, and they worked together on what became the fourth episode," says Rita Milch. "But then Nic continued on his own."
Behind the scenes, Milch's life was just as troubled. In 2016, it was reported that he had gambled away a fortune, accumulated $17 million in debt and had to put his houses up for sale. The details came from a lawsuit Rita had filed against her husband's business managers, alleging they had kept her in the dark about the financial damage his gambling had caused. (The matter was settled out of court.) Asked about their fiscal status today, the Milches decline to get into specifics. "It was an awakening, shall we say," Rita explains. "We've come back from it. We're obviously scaled back now, but otherwise life is the same."
When his Alzheimer's symptoms appeared, Milch had been working for years on what would become Deadwood: The Movie. Rumors had been swirling since the show's cancellation that he was trying to get it going again as a series or a package of two movies. But Rita says there was only ever the one film and that "all the rumors about other stuff earlier probably just came out of people really wanting more Deadwood."
The biggest obstacle was figuring out how to reassemble one of the largest recurring casts in TV history years after key actors had moved on. William Sanderson (E. B. Farnum) sums up his own skepticism by quoting Timothy Olyphant (Seth Bullock): "I can't get the whole cast to a barbecue in my backyard — how are we gonna do this?" The script's running time allayed fears of getting tied down, but the toughest gets were Deadwood's closest equivalents to leads, who had all moved on to other successful projects: Olyphant (Justified and Santa Clarita Diet), McShane (American Gods and the John Wick franchise), and Molly Parker (House of Cards). Once they signed on, the impossible became possible.
The film's tightly focused nature might've made it feel like a final summation even without the extra-dramatic frame of Milch's Alzheimer's, which is insinuated in fleeting exchanges — as when Brad Dourif's Doc Cochran asks Al what day it is and he mistakenly says Tuesday when it's Friday. The tale is suffused with a melancholy acceptance of the passage of time and the certainty of aging and death. These heavy themes were a relief to the actors, though: W. Earl Brown, who returns as Dan Dority, Al's right-hand man, says his first reaction on reading the script was "relief, not just because it was a beautiful piece of work but because the fact that it was set ten years later meant I wouldn't have to dye my hair and go to the gym."
There was trepidation, too. "Our speed is the slow telling of the tale, you know?" Malcomson says, relaxing after the end of a shooting day in the Gem on a 19th-century love seat atop a sawdusted stage. "We've got a lot of plot and a lot of things to pack into two hours, so it's sort of like we have to develop a bit of a different muscle for this."
But only a bit. Storytelling as remembrance was always at the heart of Milch's fiction. The show was forever contrasting the polished, neutered first draft of history, as penned by newspaperman A. W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones), with the carnal, booze-soaked, dope-addled, money-grubbing reality taking place in the gambling parlors, opium dens, brothels, and Chinatown alleyways, where corpses were fed to pigs owned by Al's counterpart, Wu (Keone Young). The season-two opener was even titled "A Lie Agreed Upon" after Napoleon's (perhaps apocryphal) formulation explaining what "history" really is. Deadwood's only immutable realities were birth, death, love, and grief. The dead lingered in the minds of citizens, who visited their graves and spoke to them or sat silently in the margins of raucous celebrations, remembering the ones who couldn't be there.
In retrospect, the show seems to have been building toward this bittersweet, multivalent conclusion. Like many episodes of the series, Deadwood: The Movie is about the tension between wanting things to change versus wishing they could always stay the same. It's also about the resonating power of loss. Scenes and subplots reckon with past traumas, including the assassination of Wild Bill Hickock and the murder of one of Swearengen's sex workers.
The nature of the project meant also that every shooting day was likely to contain both a reckoning with time and a professional farewell.
"You walked on the set, everybody was the same again, except they were older," McShane says. "But this time, when you finished a scene with them, you were actually saying good-bye."
And here they come: more good-byes witnessed by the Milches, who are seated behind Minahan at a bank of monitors. The scene finds Jewel helping an exhausted Al get ready for bed as Trixie moves through the room. It's not an action-packed moment by HBO drama standards, but it's the final scene McShane and Jewell will play before wrapping both this production and (as far as anyone knows) their performances as these characters.
The filming is complicated by the blocking, which requires the sometimes physically unsteady Jewel to sit on the edge of Al's bed, and by the requirement that she sing "Waltzing Matilda," a song she can't seem to memorize despite having nailed the scene's spoken dialogue. "Fuck that!" she exclaims, laughing. "What a hard fuckin' song!" At one point, flustered, Jewell falls off the bed, eliciting gasps from the cast and crew.
"Oh!" Milch cries. Rita's hand reaches for his shoulder as if to prevent him from falling next. "It's okay," she says quietly.
"I've fallen and I can't get up!" Jewell ad-libs as she is helped to stand upright, and the set echoes with laughter.
Jewell, McShane, Malcomson, Milch, and Minahan pull the scene apart and rejigger it to make it work. McShane takes the lead, reassuring Jewell that this is no big deal — that everyone has trouble remembering, that they'll all get through it together. "Let's go again, luv, yes?" McShane asks Jewell after they've collaborated on solutions between takes, whereupon Minahan rolls the cameras again and again. Two hours later, they're done, and the production applauds a wrap for both actors.
"What you witnessed tonight was heroic," Milch says to a visitor afterward. "I hope you remember it. I hope you tell people about it."
He says he's going to continue writing despite his new difficulties, because that's what he does, though he's not volunteering details about any future projects beyond an as-yet-untitled autobiography. Rita says the silver lining in all this is that her husband's job requires him to routinely participate in memory-strengthening exercises that most other people encounter for the first time in Alzheimer's therapy. "I compare it to a musician who can still play and has access to the memory of how to do that and is still able to exercise his talent," she says. "The brain is David's most exercised muscle."
Deadwood: The Movie will air on May 31.
From: https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/david-milch-deadwood-movie.html
David Milch, battling Alzheimer's, finally finishes his TV Western.
By Matt Zoller Seitz
"Deadwood creator David Milch says he always had faith that his HBO Western would someday get to wrap up its story, even as more than a dozen years have passed since its surprise cancellation in 2006. But he also had doubts. Only when the cameras started rolling on Deadwood: The Movie — a TV movie set ten years after the show's last episode — could he exhale. "Let's just say that the exigencies of the business threw up a series of roadblocks over the years," says Milch, walking along the main thoroughfare at Melody Ranch Studios on a cold December night, his wife, Rita, by his side. "Somehow, they were all surmounted."
When the sun goes down on Melody Ranch — a Newhall, California, production facility that has hosted many film and TV Westerns — a sense of isolation creeps in. You can hear the wind rustling in the wooded hills, and every now and then a coyote yelps or an owl hoots. It's easy to imagine that this outdoor soundstage, with its temporarily dormant camera tracks and arc lights, is truly the place it pretends to be: a dirty, lawless camp that became a town in a territory that's now on the cusp of becoming a U.S. state (South Dakota), its populace more civil than when the series was canceled but still wild at heart. Horses are tied to hitching posts. Their handlers hang nearby, checking texts and griping about the storms that have just pounded Southern California. The rain flooded the interiors of most key locations, sparing only the Gem Saloon, where Deadwood's legendary gangster, pimp, and all-around power broker Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) holds court.
That's where the Milches are headed. It's the second-to-last day of the shoot, and they're filming a scene with Swearengen; his disabled housekeeper and ward, Jewel (Geri Jewell); and his former employee and sort-of consort, Trixie (Paula Malcomson).
Milch is here to watch, not interfere. He was a notorious micromanager during Deadwood's original run, ordering reshoots if he didn't like the way a scene was playing and dictating new dialogue from the sidelines for the cast to repeat. McShane has spoken of top-to-bottom rewrites being handed to actors just before the cameras rolled, the pages still hot from the copier.
This time, Milch is entrusting the day-to-day execution to his collaborators, among them the director Daniel Minahan, a series veteran, and his co–executive producer Regina Corrado, who started out as a writer on the series in 2005.
But his serenity is also the by-product of a greater urge to let go and accept what life has in store, even if it's not what he asked for.
It's here that we come to the matter of David Milch's Alzheimer's diagnosis.
Milch started to worry that something was amiss five years ago, when he and his friends and relatives noticed more instances of "imperfect recall and tardy recall and short temper. I became more and more of an acquired taste," he says. The writing process became harder too. There was, he says, "a generalized incertitude and a growing incapacity." About a year ago, Milch got up the nerve to have a brain scan. The news was not good.
"As best I understand it, which is minimally, I have a deterioration in the organization of my brain," he says. "And it's progressive. And in some ways discouraging. In more than some ways — in every way I can think of."
The cast and crew of the film and past participants in the show all declined to discuss Milch's condition, though they're aware of it. Milch himself seesaws between curiosity, bitterness, and incredulity, along with a rueful fatalism at the realization that his own father probably had Alzheimer's as well. "That was a while ago, and the diagnosis was not as sophisticated or specific, but in retrospect, he exhibited all the symptoms of the illness," Milch says. He is also moved to remember the deterioration of his mentor at Yale, Robert Penn Warren, whose poetry Milch reads on set to inspire the cast and crew. "He was not well toward the end of his life," he says. "He was every day encountering subtle differences in his condition. But there was an unflinching dignity in the way that he carried himself and a bravery and kindness."
As best I understand it, which is minimally, I have a deterioration in the organization of my brain. And it's progressive.
Milch's diagnosis is the ultimate humbling, having arrived at the tail end of 13 years of harsh reminders about the limits of control. For a self-described "degenerate gambler" who struggled with addiction throughout the first half of his adult life, Milch has had an incredible artistic run. He attended Yale to avoid the draft but was expelled after being accused — falsely, he says — of destroying a police car's siren with a shotgun. He became an assistant there (for Cleanth Brooks and Warren, among others) and later a lecturer, then drifted into television, winning an Emmy, a Writers Guild Award, and a Humanitas Prize for his first produced script, the 1982 Hill Street Blues episode "Trial by Fury." The creator of that cop drama, Steven Bochco, brought Milch along to his biggest success, NYPD Blue, a broadcast-network series that was groundbreaking for its language, violence, and nudity. Milch was an executive producer and writer for the show for seven seasons. The 2004 debut of Deadwood, a town-based Western in the vein of My Darling Clementine and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, was a new artistic pinnacle and the first drama on which he was entirely in control.
It was downhill from there. Deadwood was supposed to run for at least four seasons but got canceled after three owing to a financial dispute between HBO and co-producer Paramount (which owned the international rights) as well as HBO's increasing exasperation with Milch's improvisational production methods and declining ratings. His follow-up, the seaside parable John From Cincinnati, ran just one season. There would be more attempts at series: Some never got past the pilot stage, including The Money, a family drama about a superrich media clan, and the '70s cop drama Last of the Ninth. The HBO racetrack drama Luck got axed early in season two after a series of horse deaths; it had been green-lighted despite HBO's skittishness when Milch agreed to cede control of the filmmaking to executive producer Michael Mann. Milch then wrote six episodes of a historical drama about Boss Tweed but shelved it when there were no buyers. And a couple of years ago, it was reported that Milch was joining the third season of Nic Pizzolatto's HBO crime drama, True Detective, but it turns out the extent of his involvement was exaggerated. "Nic had written the first few episodes and came to David for advice and guidance, and they worked together on what became the fourth episode," says Rita Milch. "But then Nic continued on his own."
Behind the scenes, Milch's life was just as troubled. In 2016, it was reported that he had gambled away a fortune, accumulated $17 million in debt and had to put his houses up for sale. The details came from a lawsuit Rita had filed against her husband's business managers, alleging they had kept her in the dark about the financial damage his gambling had caused. (The matter was settled out of court.) Asked about their fiscal status today, the Milches decline to get into specifics. "It was an awakening, shall we say," Rita explains. "We've come back from it. We're obviously scaled back now, but otherwise life is the same."
When his Alzheimer's symptoms appeared, Milch had been working for years on what would become Deadwood: The Movie. Rumors had been swirling since the show's cancellation that he was trying to get it going again as a series or a package of two movies. But Rita says there was only ever the one film and that "all the rumors about other stuff earlier probably just came out of people really wanting more Deadwood."
The biggest obstacle was figuring out how to reassemble one of the largest recurring casts in TV history years after key actors had moved on. William Sanderson (E. B. Farnum) sums up his own skepticism by quoting Timothy Olyphant (Seth Bullock): "I can't get the whole cast to a barbecue in my backyard — how are we gonna do this?" The script's running time allayed fears of getting tied down, but the toughest gets were Deadwood's closest equivalents to leads, who had all moved on to other successful projects: Olyphant (Justified and Santa Clarita Diet), McShane (American Gods and the John Wick franchise), and Molly Parker (House of Cards). Once they signed on, the impossible became possible.
The film's tightly focused nature might've made it feel like a final summation even without the extra-dramatic frame of Milch's Alzheimer's, which is insinuated in fleeting exchanges — as when Brad Dourif's Doc Cochran asks Al what day it is and he mistakenly says Tuesday when it's Friday. The tale is suffused with a melancholy acceptance of the passage of time and the certainty of aging and death. These heavy themes were a relief to the actors, though: W. Earl Brown, who returns as Dan Dority, Al's right-hand man, says his first reaction on reading the script was "relief, not just because it was a beautiful piece of work but because the fact that it was set ten years later meant I wouldn't have to dye my hair and go to the gym."
There was trepidation, too. "Our speed is the slow telling of the tale, you know?" Malcomson says, relaxing after the end of a shooting day in the Gem on a 19th-century love seat atop a sawdusted stage. "We've got a lot of plot and a lot of things to pack into two hours, so it's sort of like we have to develop a bit of a different muscle for this."
But only a bit. Storytelling as remembrance was always at the heart of Milch's fiction. The show was forever contrasting the polished, neutered first draft of history, as penned by newspaperman A. W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones), with the carnal, booze-soaked, dope-addled, money-grubbing reality taking place in the gambling parlors, opium dens, brothels, and Chinatown alleyways, where corpses were fed to pigs owned by Al's counterpart, Wu (Keone Young). The season-two opener was even titled "A Lie Agreed Upon" after Napoleon's (perhaps apocryphal) formulation explaining what "history" really is. Deadwood's only immutable realities were birth, death, love, and grief. The dead lingered in the minds of citizens, who visited their graves and spoke to them or sat silently in the margins of raucous celebrations, remembering the ones who couldn't be there.
In retrospect, the show seems to have been building toward this bittersweet, multivalent conclusion. Like many episodes of the series, Deadwood: The Movie is about the tension between wanting things to change versus wishing they could always stay the same. It's also about the resonating power of loss. Scenes and subplots reckon with past traumas, including the assassination of Wild Bill Hickock and the murder of one of Swearengen's sex workers.
The nature of the project meant also that every shooting day was likely to contain both a reckoning with time and a professional farewell.
"You walked on the set, everybody was the same again, except they were older," McShane says. "But this time, when you finished a scene with them, you were actually saying good-bye."
And here they come: more good-byes witnessed by the Milches, who are seated behind Minahan at a bank of monitors. The scene finds Jewel helping an exhausted Al get ready for bed as Trixie moves through the room. It's not an action-packed moment by HBO drama standards, but it's the final scene McShane and Jewell will play before wrapping both this production and (as far as anyone knows) their performances as these characters.
The filming is complicated by the blocking, which requires the sometimes physically unsteady Jewel to sit on the edge of Al's bed, and by the requirement that she sing "Waltzing Matilda," a song she can't seem to memorize despite having nailed the scene's spoken dialogue. "Fuck that!" she exclaims, laughing. "What a hard fuckin' song!" At one point, flustered, Jewell falls off the bed, eliciting gasps from the cast and crew.
"Oh!" Milch cries. Rita's hand reaches for his shoulder as if to prevent him from falling next. "It's okay," she says quietly.
"I've fallen and I can't get up!" Jewell ad-libs as she is helped to stand upright, and the set echoes with laughter.
Jewell, McShane, Malcomson, Milch, and Minahan pull the scene apart and rejigger it to make it work. McShane takes the lead, reassuring Jewell that this is no big deal — that everyone has trouble remembering, that they'll all get through it together. "Let's go again, luv, yes?" McShane asks Jewell after they've collaborated on solutions between takes, whereupon Minahan rolls the cameras again and again. Two hours later, they're done, and the production applauds a wrap for both actors.
"What you witnessed tonight was heroic," Milch says to a visitor afterward. "I hope you remember it. I hope you tell people about it."
He says he's going to continue writing despite his new difficulties, because that's what he does, though he's not volunteering details about any future projects beyond an as-yet-untitled autobiography. Rita says the silver lining in all this is that her husband's job requires him to routinely participate in memory-strengthening exercises that most other people encounter for the first time in Alzheimer's therapy. "I compare it to a musician who can still play and has access to the memory of how to do that and is still able to exercise his talent," she says. "The brain is David's most exercised muscle."
Deadwood: The Movie will air on May 31.
From: https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/david-milch-deadwood-movie.html
#97
General JFC / Re: Poetry Almanac
Last post by Sven2 - April 15, 2019, 04:00:19 PMWild Swans
I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock the door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying!
--Edna St.Vincent Millay
.
I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock the door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying!
--Edna St.Vincent Millay
.
#98
General JFC / Re: Linc Stark - Luke Perry.
Last post by Sven2 - March 14, 2019, 12:42:30 PMIn Praise Of Luke Perry's Quietly Excellent Turn on 'John From Cincinnati'
By Sean Malin
@cinemalins
Mar 7, 2019
If you had never seen Luke Perry before – as I hadn't when David Milch's much-hyped first series after Deadwood, the quasi-Christian surfer epic John From Cincinnati, premiered on HBO in 2007 – you might be shocked to learn that he was not just the profoundly expressive character actor behind one of the show's semi-villains, Linc Stark.
As the greedy owner of Stinkweed USA, a pro-surfing gear company and agency that presaged websites like The Chive, Perry was quietly excellent: unscrupulous and conniving, yet soulful and empathetic, often in the same scene. His Stark was something of a fox in a henhouse, a promoter who ate the souls of his loose-hanging wards, including former surf prodigy Butchie "The Beast" Yost (Brian Van Holt) and Butchie's son, Shaun (Greyson Fletcher).
When John From Cincinnati was cancelled after its first season, I was stunned; when Perry was not nominated for an Emmy for his supporting performance (not to take anything away from the wonderful Bruce Greenwood, who was also snubbed), I was angry. The role had turned Perry into both a household name – in my house, at least – and the face of douchebaggery par excellence. To this day, it occurs to me that he went unrewarded for the role simply because people were still shaking off the brain-fry they experienced seeing the sweet, appealing Dylan McKay squeal with avarice as the predatory Linc.
Only after the series ended did I learn that Perry's past work as an actor – Buffy, Beverly Hills, 90210, The Fifth Element – was famous. I was born in the early '90s, too young to watch any of those projects in their time, and can honestly say I'd never heard of him. It was simply by coincidence that the early days of my parents' Sex and The City-inspired HBO subscription coincided with my own late-night exploration; in those years, I'd stumble on little curiosities, Tell Me You Love Me one night and Little Britain USA the next. Those were days of heady, eccentric programming on the network – and John From Cincinnati was emblematic of this new direction (until it wasn't.)
As history has noted, John From Cincinnati was always a peculiar show: slow, ruminative, a little confused tonally. It was a heritage saga and a Christ parable, a place piece and a screed against child labor, a show about the poor and about the wealthy. Even David Milch, its creator, had problems categorizing it: "Ostensibly it is about a family of surfers who seem to have become more and more disassociated from themselves and from good surfing," he told the New York Times.
Perry stood outside of and atop the ensemble. He was not a member of the Yost surfing clan, nor was his stunt casting as successful as, say, that of Ed O'Neill as the quirky bird-owner Bill Jacks. 7 years after the 90210 finale, the role of Stark allowed him to shave off any residual charm he had left on his external character and burn it. If Linc ever smoldered in the show, it was with disappointment and internal fury, never with the seductive warmth that had made Perry famous in the previous decade.
Appropriately, after the HBO show was cancelled a day after airing its first season's finale, Perry became something of an actor reborn. Eulogies continue to mention that he was a teen heartthrob, but in that simple label is a disrespectful omission of the nearly 20-year career Perry had after 90210. Perry was willing to turn the joke on himself in Community and Raising Hope just as he was showing up in dramas produced by Terrence Malick and Mario Van Peebles. One of his final roles will be in Quentin Tarantino's next movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And although I've never seen it, I know that Riverdale was a big success for him, that his career never went the expected places, and that he continued to explore what it meant to be a colossal star right up until his tragic death earlier this week at the age of 52.
Still, he'll forever be remembered first in my mind for bringing John From Cincinnati down from its pedestal of the surrealistically religious into the world of the sublimely human. His face was beginning to weather then and his hair was dyed a chlorine-tinted blonde – the face of a middling surfer gone to seed. But it was a beautiful face, and the one I will always summon when I think of him.
from:
https://decider.com/2019/03/07/luke-perry-john-from-cincinnati-cult-corner/
By Sean Malin
@cinemalins
Mar 7, 2019
If you had never seen Luke Perry before – as I hadn't when David Milch's much-hyped first series after Deadwood, the quasi-Christian surfer epic John From Cincinnati, premiered on HBO in 2007 – you might be shocked to learn that he was not just the profoundly expressive character actor behind one of the show's semi-villains, Linc Stark.
As the greedy owner of Stinkweed USA, a pro-surfing gear company and agency that presaged websites like The Chive, Perry was quietly excellent: unscrupulous and conniving, yet soulful and empathetic, often in the same scene. His Stark was something of a fox in a henhouse, a promoter who ate the souls of his loose-hanging wards, including former surf prodigy Butchie "The Beast" Yost (Brian Van Holt) and Butchie's son, Shaun (Greyson Fletcher).
When John From Cincinnati was cancelled after its first season, I was stunned; when Perry was not nominated for an Emmy for his supporting performance (not to take anything away from the wonderful Bruce Greenwood, who was also snubbed), I was angry. The role had turned Perry into both a household name – in my house, at least – and the face of douchebaggery par excellence. To this day, it occurs to me that he went unrewarded for the role simply because people were still shaking off the brain-fry they experienced seeing the sweet, appealing Dylan McKay squeal with avarice as the predatory Linc.
Only after the series ended did I learn that Perry's past work as an actor – Buffy, Beverly Hills, 90210, The Fifth Element – was famous. I was born in the early '90s, too young to watch any of those projects in their time, and can honestly say I'd never heard of him. It was simply by coincidence that the early days of my parents' Sex and The City-inspired HBO subscription coincided with my own late-night exploration; in those years, I'd stumble on little curiosities, Tell Me You Love Me one night and Little Britain USA the next. Those were days of heady, eccentric programming on the network – and John From Cincinnati was emblematic of this new direction (until it wasn't.)
As history has noted, John From Cincinnati was always a peculiar show: slow, ruminative, a little confused tonally. It was a heritage saga and a Christ parable, a place piece and a screed against child labor, a show about the poor and about the wealthy. Even David Milch, its creator, had problems categorizing it: "Ostensibly it is about a family of surfers who seem to have become more and more disassociated from themselves and from good surfing," he told the New York Times.
Perry stood outside of and atop the ensemble. He was not a member of the Yost surfing clan, nor was his stunt casting as successful as, say, that of Ed O'Neill as the quirky bird-owner Bill Jacks. 7 years after the 90210 finale, the role of Stark allowed him to shave off any residual charm he had left on his external character and burn it. If Linc ever smoldered in the show, it was with disappointment and internal fury, never with the seductive warmth that had made Perry famous in the previous decade.
Appropriately, after the HBO show was cancelled a day after airing its first season's finale, Perry became something of an actor reborn. Eulogies continue to mention that he was a teen heartthrob, but in that simple label is a disrespectful omission of the nearly 20-year career Perry had after 90210. Perry was willing to turn the joke on himself in Community and Raising Hope just as he was showing up in dramas produced by Terrence Malick and Mario Van Peebles. One of his final roles will be in Quentin Tarantino's next movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And although I've never seen it, I know that Riverdale was a big success for him, that his career never went the expected places, and that he continued to explore what it meant to be a colossal star right up until his tragic death earlier this week at the age of 52.
Still, he'll forever be remembered first in my mind for bringing John From Cincinnati down from its pedestal of the surrealistically religious into the world of the sublimely human. His face was beginning to weather then and his hair was dyed a chlorine-tinted blonde – the face of a middling surfer gone to seed. But it was a beautiful face, and the one I will always summon when I think of him.
from:
https://decider.com/2019/03/07/luke-perry-john-from-cincinnati-cult-corner/
#99
General JFC / Re: Linc Stark - Luke Perry.
Last post by SaveJFC Admin - March 06, 2019, 12:47:56 AM
#100
General JFC / Linc Stark - Luke Perry.
Last post by Sven2 - March 05, 2019, 12:13:58 PMLinc: (to Shaun) You know, I was a grom just like you once, always in the water. Totally stoked 24/7. I felt like I was tapping into something bigger. And I'll tell you, a lot of people can paddle out there and get that rush, but to be able to give them a taste of it just by watching, no, that's something different. And I never had that. Not like you...and your dad...and your grandpa. But I could see that people would pay to see those who could do it. And I made some money. And I made some mistakes. Your dad, Butchie, was one of them. I was young, and he was changing the sport. All I could see was that him being a bad boy was good for business. I thought the image was the thing. What I see now, what it's taken me years to see, is the thing itself–that's the thing. And I don't have to show them any more than that.
Mitch: To get them to buy the thing that you want to sell them.
Linc: Well, what if I'm selling them the thing for itself?
Mitch: To get them to buy the thing that you want to sell them.
Linc: Well, what if I'm selling them the thing for itself?
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