Clearing a Space
David Milch is the genius behind shows like 'Deadwood' and 'NYPD Blue,' with fundamental insight into the crooked workings of humanity, and the human soul
by Tedd Mann
July 01, 2022
Clear a space," David Milch would say, and the script coordinator or the assistant assigned to transcribe Milch's dictation would hit the return on the keyboard at their desk, creating a blank space on Milch's monitor, empty of all words and images and any trace evidence of prior creations.
Milch has a chronically bad back. He lies on the floor as he works, surrounded by annotated script pages and printouts of the current draft of his work in progress, weaving stories in and out of each other in midair. He performs this work before a silent audience of aspiring writers; paid interns, for payroll purposes.
Milch is a friend and professional colleague I've had the good fortune to work with many times over the last 40 years. He has written and produced hundreds of hours of popular dramatic entertainment, initially for broadcast TV, later for the cable network HBO. Milch's shows, like NYPD Blue, which he created with Stephen Bochco, and Deadwood, were popular and commercially successful, but they were even more influential than their popularity would suggest, often appealing to those who don't normally watch popular media. I loved working with David, not only because he was a line-level genius, but because of his insight into the crooked workings of humanity, which he understood fully, with love.
There's no guarantee of popular success for writers, especially writers of genius; writing is a calling, a vocation. For some, it's a curse. It's not a choice, except for the hobbyist. In David Milch's case, his survival depended on the work, and the work depended on prayer.
Other writers and journalists often asked Milch about his "process," or writer's methodology. Writing is a mixture of craft and inspiration around which professional writers often construct elaborate superstitious rituals, just as athletes frequently do. Milch always replied truthfully that his "process" was his reliance on prayer.
Prayer is indispensable to Milch in his work and in his life. Milch works every day, and he prays every day. His sense of the possibility of a world beyond the one we see on an everyday basis is essential to his art, and to his judgments of men. Even his memorably foul-mouthed demystifying creations like Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue or Al Swearengen from Deadwood, who were so often taken as Milch's own alter-egos, were in constant conversation with the beyond. Inventing characters, he knew whether the soul of a man had passed through previous transmigrations or whether it was one of the "new souls."
As a result of birth, his genius, and despite, or because of his sexual abuse, Milch was destined for a top spot in the mirror world. He might truly have run nations, operated vast covert financial networks, made and broken lesser men. He could have created and captured industries. The kingdoms of the world were on offer, in line with the capacities that were his birthright, and which had been nurtured in him by the traumas and other advantages of his upbringing. Instead, Milch felt called to the work that would save his life, and which benefit our world in ways most of us are unable to really see.
David Milch's father was a prominent Buffalo physician—a surgical innovator, the respected and successful head of his department at the principal hospital of that then-thriving upstate city. Milch's mother was, according to her son, politically progressive. During his childhood, she was occupied with the improvement by education of the lot of working people; as head of the Buffalo school board, she was preoccupied with that task.
Many of Dr. Milch's patients were "successful Buffalo businessmen" who had prospered greatly in prohibition, and after WWII, were actively engaged in the modernization of bookmaking, loan sharking, prostitution and new gambling enterprises in Havana, Cuba, and later, after Cuba's revolution, with building Las Vegas. Milch recalls his childhood home as often filled with convalescing gangsters under Dr. Milch's care. He also noted that their delicate cardiac conditions often correlated with congressional hearings on organized crime, which the convalescent wiseguys watched with much amusement, their comments providing an education for the young boy in the ways of the real world. "I had one great-uncle we had to visit outside territorial waters on a boat off Florida," he recalled. "There were certain members of the family who would never be seen in public with my dad—not because he objected, but because they didn't want to screw him up."
In 1950s Buffalo, the rackets were a career so lucrative, open and accessible to all, that the work was, if not respectable, a lesser disgrace than being poor. When Meyer Lansky said, "We're bigger thant US Steel," he was being modest. If you were part of the world of OC, the mirror world, by birth or elective affinity, you knew cops and crooks were not opposite poles of a moral continuum, but rival predators. (Anyone familiar with the horrendous Whitey Bulger case in Boston will recall how the FBI partnered with Bulger's criminal faction to wipe out the previously dominant Italian mob.)
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David Milch is the genius behind shows like 'Deadwood' and 'NYPD Blue,' with fundamental insight into the crooked workings of humanity, and the human soul
by Tedd Mann
July 01, 2022
Clear a space," David Milch would say, and the script coordinator or the assistant assigned to transcribe Milch's dictation would hit the return on the keyboard at their desk, creating a blank space on Milch's monitor, empty of all words and images and any trace evidence of prior creations.
Milch has a chronically bad back. He lies on the floor as he works, surrounded by annotated script pages and printouts of the current draft of his work in progress, weaving stories in and out of each other in midair. He performs this work before a silent audience of aspiring writers; paid interns, for payroll purposes.
Milch is a friend and professional colleague I've had the good fortune to work with many times over the last 40 years. He has written and produced hundreds of hours of popular dramatic entertainment, initially for broadcast TV, later for the cable network HBO. Milch's shows, like NYPD Blue, which he created with Stephen Bochco, and Deadwood, were popular and commercially successful, but they were even more influential than their popularity would suggest, often appealing to those who don't normally watch popular media. I loved working with David, not only because he was a line-level genius, but because of his insight into the crooked workings of humanity, which he understood fully, with love.
There's no guarantee of popular success for writers, especially writers of genius; writing is a calling, a vocation. For some, it's a curse. It's not a choice, except for the hobbyist. In David Milch's case, his survival depended on the work, and the work depended on prayer.
Other writers and journalists often asked Milch about his "process," or writer's methodology. Writing is a mixture of craft and inspiration around which professional writers often construct elaborate superstitious rituals, just as athletes frequently do. Milch always replied truthfully that his "process" was his reliance on prayer.
Prayer is indispensable to Milch in his work and in his life. Milch works every day, and he prays every day. His sense of the possibility of a world beyond the one we see on an everyday basis is essential to his art, and to his judgments of men. Even his memorably foul-mouthed demystifying creations like Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue or Al Swearengen from Deadwood, who were so often taken as Milch's own alter-egos, were in constant conversation with the beyond. Inventing characters, he knew whether the soul of a man had passed through previous transmigrations or whether it was one of the "new souls."
As a result of birth, his genius, and despite, or because of his sexual abuse, Milch was destined for a top spot in the mirror world. He might truly have run nations, operated vast covert financial networks, made and broken lesser men. He could have created and captured industries. The kingdoms of the world were on offer, in line with the capacities that were his birthright, and which had been nurtured in him by the traumas and other advantages of his upbringing. Instead, Milch felt called to the work that would save his life, and which benefit our world in ways most of us are unable to really see.
David Milch's father was a prominent Buffalo physician—a surgical innovator, the respected and successful head of his department at the principal hospital of that then-thriving upstate city. Milch's mother was, according to her son, politically progressive. During his childhood, she was occupied with the improvement by education of the lot of working people; as head of the Buffalo school board, she was preoccupied with that task.
Many of Dr. Milch's patients were "successful Buffalo businessmen" who had prospered greatly in prohibition, and after WWII, were actively engaged in the modernization of bookmaking, loan sharking, prostitution and new gambling enterprises in Havana, Cuba, and later, after Cuba's revolution, with building Las Vegas. Milch recalls his childhood home as often filled with convalescing gangsters under Dr. Milch's care. He also noted that their delicate cardiac conditions often correlated with congressional hearings on organized crime, which the convalescent wiseguys watched with much amusement, their comments providing an education for the young boy in the ways of the real world. "I had one great-uncle we had to visit outside territorial waters on a boat off Florida," he recalled. "There were certain members of the family who would never be seen in public with my dad—not because he objected, but because they didn't want to screw him up."
In 1950s Buffalo, the rackets were a career so lucrative, open and accessible to all, that the work was, if not respectable, a lesser disgrace than being poor. When Meyer Lansky said, "We're bigger thant US Steel," he was being modest. If you were part of the world of OC, the mirror world, by birth or elective affinity, you knew cops and crooks were not opposite poles of a moral continuum, but rival predators. (Anyone familiar with the horrendous Whitey Bulger case in Boston will recall how the FBI partnered with Bulger's criminal faction to wipe out the previously dominant Italian mob.)
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