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Work here... => General JFC => Topic started by: Sven2 on April 02, 2014, 02:20:04 PM

Title: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on April 02, 2014, 02:20:04 PM
David Milch Extends Overall Deal With HBO

By NELLIE ANDREEVA
Wednesday April 2, 2014 @ 10:23am PDT

EXCLUSIVE: There are few relationships between a network and creator that have been as enduring as the one between David Milch and HBO. Now it has been extended with a new overall deal, which will keep Milch exclusive to HBO in television for two more years, bringing his tenure at the pay cable network to 14 years. Milch has been at HBO since 2002, when he embarked on developing his first project there, cult drama Deadwood, and under an overall deal since 2005. The relationship has yielded five pilots, three of which — Deadwood, John From Cincinnati and Luck – went to series. Milch's most recent project at HBO was drama pilot The Money, about hbo45__130924185923-275x112wealth and corruption among the super elite, which focused on an American mogul and patriarch (Brendan Gleeson) who wields power and influence to expand his media empire and control his family. HBO opted not to go forward with the pilot, co-starring Nathan Lane and featuring Ray Liotta and John Carroll Lynch, but the network remains very much in the David Milch business. He has other projects in the works, including a feature-length adaptation of a William Faulkner novel.

from:
http://www.deadline.com/2014/04/david-milch-extends-overall-deal-with-hbo/ (http://www.deadline.com/2014/04/david-milch-extends-overall-deal-with-hbo/)
Title: Re: Mr.Milch and HBO news
Post by: SaveJFC Admin on April 03, 2014, 01:07:37 PM
Great news that HBO is not abandoning Milch!  And great new topic.  Thank you for keeping us up-to-date on all things Milch!
Title: Re: Mr.Milch and HBO news
Post by: sven on May 13, 2014, 03:07:31 PM
David Milch Talks New Boss Tweed Show

By Vulture Editors

At this weekend's inaugural Vulture Festival, David Milch sat in conversation with our TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz. Over the 90-minute discussion, Milch talked about his Emmy-winning work on Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue as well as his years as showrunner on HBO's Deadwood. Milch also discussed at length, for the first time, a new dramatic work he is writing for HBO — "I'm working on a bunch of shows ... But this one that I've brought a sample of is about Boss Tweed, who was a political figure in the late 19th century, ran Tammany Hall here in New York City, and was a thief of prodigious dimension. He was also very fat." Milch then read a chunk of script, starting with a very Milchian moment of Tweed in jail, writing a letter:

    "I'm an old man, broken in health and cast down in spirit. As to the charges standing against me, through unpublished statements, I've received some assurance that the vindication of principle and purifying of the public service are purposes you would have me serve. Recognizing further resistance as a futility, offering unqualified surrender and supplicating mercy, I herewith submit my testimony."

from:
http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/vulture-festival-david-milch-talks-new-show.html (http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/vulture-festival-david-milch-talks-new-show.html)
Title: Re: Mr.Milch and HBO news
Post by: sven on May 13, 2014, 03:11:37 PM
David Milch eyes 19th-century New York politics for new series

by Alexandra Richmond on May 13, 2014 at 10:45 am

Here's a reason to go to an arts festival: To hear David Milch read from his new script about Boss Tweed, the "boss" of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that helped "fix" things for certain people in city and state politics in the 19th century.

David Milch, creator of Deadwood and one of the smartest and most creative people creating television today or ever, blew people's minds at Vulture Fest when he brought out pages to read, during an on-stage interview with Matt Zoller Seitz. He called Tweed "a thief of prodigious dimension. He was also very fat."

An excerpt:

    Milch then read a chunk of script, starting with a very Milchian moment of Tweed in jail, writing a letter:

    "I'm an old man, broken in health and cast down in spirit. As to the charges standing against me, through unpublished statements, I've received some assurance that the vindication of principle and purifying of the public service are purposes you would have me serve. Recognizing further resistance as a futility, offering unqualified surrender and supplicating mercy, I herewith submit my testimony.

I am herewith on the edge of my seat.

Milch rarely gives interviews, but is known for his no-bullshit frankness. Back in 2007 at the New Yorker fest, Vulture wondered if Milch was the best or worst dinner party guest ever  as he pointed out "the fallacy of the dichotomy between cable and network (basically, everyone's selling something: on network, it's soap in the commercials, on HBO, it's upper-middle class values, "the same bullshit The New Yorker's selling"); the reason Jews are overrepresented in Hollywood (he asked the panel who there was Jewish; four out of five — including Milch — raised their hands, with Moore the odd man out) and how the "seeming doubleness" of Jewish life makes Jews perfect for the entertainment biz; the inadequacies of HBO in general, including a classic jerk-off hand motion — which is weird, since the channel aired (and, yes, killed) Deadwood and the indecipherable John From Cincinnati; and the David Milch mystique. "When they buy me, they know what they're buying," he said. "'Oh, David Milch, he's nuts.' And that's what I'm selling." He also slagged the clip they'd shown from Weeds, basically dismissed House, and slammed the petit bourgeois sensibilities of, yes, The New Yorker."

Milch said all that while at the New Yorker Fest. Which is the only reason to go to a fest: to hear your hero tear the world apart.

from:
http://www.technologytell.com/entertainment/43663/david-milch-eyes-19th-century-new-york-politics-new-series/ (http://www.technologytell.com/entertainment/43663/david-milch-eyes-19th-century-new-york-politics-new-series/)
Title: Re: Mr.Milch and HBO news
Post by: Sven2 on May 26, 2014, 09:36:30 AM
Vulture Festival Video: Writer David Milch Talks Deadwood, Boss Tweed


Our inaugural Vulture Festival kicked off with an interview that contained more than a few surprises. Our TV critic, Matt Zoller Seitz, interviewed one of modern television's most towering talents: David Milch. Over the course of a literate and engaging conversation, Milch revealed behind-the-scenes secrets about his most famous project, Deadwood, discussed his days as a fraternity brother to George W. Bush, and capped it all off with an exclusive reading of script pages from his as-yet-unproduced series about legendarily corrupt NYC mayor Boss Tweed.

Watch the video in the link below

from:
http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/david-milch-boss-tweed-deadwood-seitz-vulture-festival-video.html (http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/david-milch-boss-tweed-deadwood-seitz-vulture-festival-video.html)
Title: Re: Mr.Milch and HBO news
Post by: Sven2 on June 18, 2014, 02:09:39 PM
THAT IS NOT ABOUT HBO, BUT THE FORMER MILITARY CHANEL, NOW 'AMERICAN HEROES'. IF YOU HAVE IT IN YOUR CABLE LINEUP,  READ THE NEWS BELOW.
American Heroes Channel Announces Six-Part Docudrama Series 'Gunslingers' (Exclusive)

Kurt Russell and "Deadwood" creator David Milch provide commentary on the Old West-centric series, premiering July 20.

6/17/2014 by Ryan Gajewski

American Heroes Channel is saddling up for the new six-part docudrama series Gunslingers, providing the real story of the Old West's most infamous icons.

Following the success of such recent TV oaters as History's 2012 Hatfields & McCoys miniseries, Gunslingers incorporates reenactments with factual commentary. Each episode will highlight a different legendary figure, including Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Jesse James and Wild Bill Hickok.

The premiere episode, airing Sunday, July 20, is entitled "Wyatt Earp: The Tombstone Vendetta." The episode features commentary from actor Kurt Russell, who played Earp in the 1993 film Tombstone. Subsequent episodes include commentary from Deadwood creator David Milch and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford author Ron Hansen.

"Gunslingers captures all the edge-of-your-seat drama of a classic Hollywood Western, but layers in all of the true facts from these legends that echo throughout history," said Kevin Bennett, general manager of American Heroes Channel.

Among the actors who will reenact scenes include All My Children veteran Walt Willey, who portrays Wild Bill. The series is executive produced by Chris Cassel.

"American Heroes Channel is proud to bring viewers a very different style of documentary series—told from the unique P.O.V. of the icons themselves—to bring new life to the timeless frontier sagas that continue to captivate audiences," Bennett added.

Gunslingers premieres Sunday, July 20 at 10 p.m.

FROM:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gunslingers-american-heroes-channel-announces-712626 (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gunslingers-american-heroes-channel-announces-712626)
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on June 19, 2014, 02:35:43 PM
 Vulture TV Awards: The Year's Best Villain Is Breaking Bad's Walter White

    By David Milch




You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in all of television's kingdoms more heinous than Joffrey Baratheon. Or more devilish than Frank Underwood. Or more politely chilling than the eponymous Hannibal. For these characters, villainy is as much a vocation as avocation: Joffrey is a teenage tyrant; Frank is a scheming politician; and Dr. Lecter a sinister shrink. When villainy is a job requirement, why not delight in it?

But there is nothing inherently villainous about your mild-mannered chemistry teacher — the one who took a medical leave when he developed lung cancer. He's so nice, after all, and his family is so sweet. He's just like you and me, and we're not so bad. Are we? Walter White's transformation into the monster Heisenberg is compelling because he does bad things for good reasons. We might even do the same, if pushed far enough. We see a little of ourselves in him, and that's precisely why we should fear him most.

In the final season of Breaking Bad, Walter has completed that transformation and quit the business of blue meth. He's already shot, stabbed, poisoned, and bombed anyone who threatened his burgeoning empire. He's made more money than his family could ever need.

But with Hank and Jesse finally at odds with him, he still has things left to do. Though he doesn't wear the porkpie hat, he uses the different facets of his persona to manipulate those closest to him. He's Mr. White, the genteel teacher, when he has to convince Jesse to change his identity for everyone's protection. He's the helpless cancer victim and loving patriarch when Hank finally realizes the truth about his brother-in-law. His time is running out, Walter promises, and a pointless prosecution for a dying man will only harm his family. When those approaches fail, Walt is the brutal drug lord who plots to kill Jesse, implicates Hank in his own crimes, and leaves his wife bloodied and sobbing in front of their home after kidnapping their infant daughter. He turns his family against itself. In doing so, he reshapes the world around him so that everyone breaks bad.

Marie, never the bastion of sanity, Googles untraceable poisons when Walt doesn't follow her recommendation of suicide. Skyler eschews her own husband's moral standards and tries to convince Walt to finally murder Jesse. Even Walter's other protégé, Todd, is merely an extension of him. He adopted the brutality of his Uncle Jack and the Opie attitude of "Mr. White." When Todd and the Aryans leave Hank in a desert grave, torture Jesse, and murder Andrea, who is only guilty of unwittingly playing the pawn, it's not in spite of Walter, but because of him.

And then, in the wake of fleeing Albuquerque, Walter refuses the opportunity to save Skyler by surrendering to the police, claiming that he wants to ensure his family receives the remainder of his money. In reality, he can't accept that his empire has perished.

When Walter finally admits that he did it all — the meth, the money, the murders — because he liked it, because it made him feel alive, that vanity motivated him more than charity, it reflects how our own ostensible altruism is often just the lie we tell ourselves to excuse our dirtiest deeds.

He does attempt redemption. He comes out of hiding to ensure Skyler isn't punished for his crimes. He kills the Aryans and rescues Jesse. He succeeds at providing Walt Jr. with roughly $9 million. But he achieves these small acts of contrition through violence, or at least the promise of it. He's already doomed, and he shows how far each of us can fall.

Was Walter White the best villain on television this year? You're goddamn right.


from:
http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/vulture-tv-awards-david-milch-best-villain-walter-white.html (http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/vulture-tv-awards-david-milch-best-villain-walter-white.html)
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on October 09, 2014, 04:16:07 PM
David Milch Talks Pimping, His Latest Project

8:00 AM PST 10/09/2014 by Austin Siegemund-Broka

David Milch has thrown some typewriters out the window in his writing career.

"The guys at St. Elsewhere used to take half an hour off between 2:30 and 3. They were on the floor below us [the Hill Street Blues writers at NBC]," he told Carlton Cuse, showrunner of A&E's Bates Motel and FX's The Strain, in conversation at The Hollywood Reporter's Power Showrunners luncheon on Wednesday. "They'd see if a typewriter had come down, and then they'd go back to work."

It's not the only quirk of his writing process, the prolific writer and creator told showrunners in attendance, including Matthew Weiner (AMC's Mad Men), Howard Gordon (Showtime's Homeland, FX's Tyrant), Jason Katims (NBC's Parenthood and About A Boy) and Noah Hawley (FX's Fargo). He produces material dictating — "It allows you to stay in the moment a little bit more" — while lying down. As for actually typing? "No, I've never done that," he said.


But it's a well-functioning method for Milch. In the 30-plus years since he began penning scripts for Hill Street Blues, his career credits include co-creating ABC's NYPD Blue and creating HBO's Deadwood, and he's won four Emmys. Here are the highlights of his conversation with Cuse at THR's luncheon:

Why he writes for television: Milch studied literature at Yale under poet, novelist and critic Robert Penn Warren. Then he went to law school, from which he was expelled. "I was falsely accused of shooting the lights out of a police car. I don't know how they got the idea it was I and not someone else," he told Cuse. "That was it for my law career, and then I went to the Writers' Workshop in Iowa."

Why not write poetry or fiction afterward? "You want to be heard, and it was my sense that [television] was a medium, in which one could be heard," he said. "I also need to be working hard all the time." He argued he wasn't suited for the experience of a feature writer, which includes "interludes in which you're not occupied." Said Milch: "I tend to wind up in jail."

Where Deadwood started: "Deadwood was a show set in Rome at the time of St. Paul. I worked on it for about eight months, and then it turned out they were doing a show about Rome [HBO's Rome]. For me, what engaged my imagination was the idea of an organizing principle that shaped an entire society. In the case of Rome in the time of St. Paul, it was the idea of the cross. It was revolutionizing the way people lived, and when it turned out there was a show about Rome, I decided to use gold as the organizing principle instead of the cross and set it on the frontier. It wasn't that much of a—well, I guess on one level it was a pretty big change," he said.

He later elaborated, "I think that to a large extent, what we're looking for as we live is something that will suppress our ego like that, that will make us feel part of something larger than ourselves."

"The best pimp in the world is the one that doesn't need the pussy": Cuse credited the line to Milch, then asked him to elaborate. "It's like that ego suppression thing. If you need the pussy, you're a trick. If you don't, you could be a cab driver, but you could also be a pimp," Milch said, adding, "Forgive my language."

On visiting sets: "I think it's disrespectful to go onto a set without some clear idea of what your intentions are, because then you're hanging the director out to dry. My process is very disempowering to the director anyway, so it's essential that you be respectful. Once we've sort of found the scene, I have to get out of there, because you don't want to split the actor's idea of who's in charge."

His next script: Cuse said he'd just read Milch's latest pilot, which the writer finished just days ago. It's entitled Big City, and it centers on William "Boss" Tweed, the head of the Tammany Hall political machine that controlled 19th-century New York City politics. The pilot is populated with historical figures, including tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt and women's rights reformer Susan B. Anthony, Cuse said. "I read the script thinking, 'Oh my god, this show is absolutely the next great thing from you'," he added.


Said Milch: "I'm no rose. I have been around a while, and you never know when something is going to be the last thing you do. You want to harbor your resources and try not to make a mistake." So why Tweed? "This guy, in addition to being a crook, had the gift of society. There was nobody, even the people he put in jail, who didn't have great affection for William Tweed."

The book he reads over and over: Milch said he rereads the poetry and literary criticism of his late mentor Warren. Then he recited a poem of Warren's, "Moral Assessment," from memory, to applause from the crowd in the room.

from:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/thrs-power-showrunners-2014-luncheon-739471?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thr%2Fnews+%28The+Hollywood+Reporter+-+Top+Stories%29 (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/thrs-power-showrunners-2014-luncheon-739471?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thr%2Fnews+%28The+Hollywood+Reporter+-+Top+Stories%29)
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on December 11, 2014, 01:40:48 PM
David Milch Sets Sale From Martha's Vineyard

by Mark David
December 2, 2014

President Obama vacations there, while Carly Simon presides over a sprawling compound and Meg Ryan owns a rustically luxurious barn-like home. Yes, children, it's blissfully removed and drop-dead gorgeous Martha's Vineyard. Other high-profile homeowners on the historic island, just off the southern coast of Cape Cod, include (but are not limited to) Spike Lee, David Letterman, Ted Danson and longtime television writer and producer David Milch, who has his compound near the island's port community of Vineyard Haven up for grabs on the open market with an asking price of $8,950,000.

The four-time Emmy-winning police-procedural patriarch — among other professional achievements, he wrote for "Hill Street Blues" before he created, with Steven Bochco, the much-decorated and long-running "NYPD Blue" — stands to double his dough on the sale of the estate. Property records show Milch and his wife, Rita, purchased the almost painfully picturesque, 22-acre waterside spread in early 1996 for $4 million.

A wheel-rutted dirt drive passes a tree-ringed tennis court as it winds deep into the densely treed multi-residence property that contains, per listing details, a total of eight bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. Hand-stacked stone walls and mature perennial gardens divide the circular drive and parking area from the shingled, Cape Cod-style main house that was originally built in 1880, and reworked in the 1970s to include an architecturally decadent, double-height glass wall in the main living area with long, northwestern sunset views.

In addition to the rambling and roughly 5,500-square foot main house, the grounds include a secluded writer's studio, a spacious, separate and self-contained guesthouse charmingly dubbed the Barn, and a two-story beach cottage set on the edge of the shallow pond that separates the bulk of the compound from the property's 300 feet of pristine sandy shore.

The listing is represented by Judy Federowicz of Coldwell Banker Landmarks Real Estate who told this property gossip that with their children grown they don't use the compound as much as in the past and it's time to pass the compound to another family.

from:
http://variety.com/2014/dirt/real-estate/david-milch-sets-sale-from-marthas-vineyard-1201365519/ (http://variety.com/2014/dirt/real-estate/david-milch-sets-sale-from-marthas-vineyard-1201365519/)
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on February 17, 2016, 03:07:18 PM
Deadwood Creator David Milch Has Lost $100 Million to a Gambling Addiction

By Jackson McHenry


David Milch, the man behind groundbreaking television series like Deadwood and NYPD Blue, earned $100 million across his decades-long career in Hollywood, but, according to The Hollywood Reporter, nearly all of it has been consumed by bets at the racetrack. According to one lawsuit, Milch lost $25 million between 2000 and 2011 due to gambling alone. The lawsuit also reveals that he is now $17 million in debt. "He's in debt to the IRS," a friend said. "He's doing what he can, but it's hard for him and everyone close to him." Milch is currently on a $40 a week allowance from his wife, Rita.

Milch, who started off as a writer for Hill Street Blues before creating the boundary-pushing NYPD Blue and, later, the critically beloved Deadwood, has not worked on a show since 2012, when the horse-racing drama Luck was canceled (his other effort, the surfer mystery John From Cincinnati, was canceled after its first ten episodes in 2007). Milch currently maintains an exclusive deal with HBO that is in talks to be renewed. He is working on an adaptation of Peter Matthiessen's novel Shadow Country, which is set to star Jeff Bridges, and developing a movie version of Deadwood. Rita Milch has filed a legal complaint against their business managers for not informing her of the full extent of her husband's losses. She is seeking $25 million in damages.

from:
http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/david-milch-lost-100-million-to-gambling.html

More detailed article on the same subject from Hollywood Reporter:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/david-milch-made-100m-gambled-866184

Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on February 24, 2016, 06:54:31 PM
Bart & Fleming: TMZ's Harvey Levin Faces New Yorker Scrutiny; Did David Milch Deserve THR Expose?
by Peter Bart and Mike Fleming Jr.

February 22, 2016 1:00pm

BART: It's Oscar time in LA, which translates into hell week for publicists but a moment of delicious opportunity for bartenders, hospital orderlies, hotel maids and all the other so-called "sources" who sell scandalous news items to the ubiquitous TMZ. The stars will be drinking and partying this week, and Harvey Levin, who presides over the gossip mayhem, will decide which scoops to air and how much to pay. Levin's empire daily reminds celebrities, and the rest of us, how appallingly our privacy has been invaded. The battle over Apple's privacy rules has exponentially expanded this debate to another level. But I also thank The New Yorker this week for reminding us how important, and intimidating, Levin's empire has become. The major media outlets publicly condemn Levin's practice of paying as much as six figures to his sleazy sources, but, as the magazine points out, he's landed stories like Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic rants, Ray Rice's elevator athletics, Donald Sterling's negotiations with girlfriends and other cultural milestones. And the sources have been amply rewarded. Is all this disgusting? Yes, but, as Levin proclaims, "most journalism about stars is built on a lie." And he's right. And Levin should be applauded for breaking through the walls that publicists have built around their celebrity clients.

FLEMING: I have grudging admiration for Levin, who has melded dogged journalism with under the table payments and turned it into a very profitable business model. Peter, we first met over the phone when you were a producer and I worked on a gossip column for New York Newsday and I believe my greatest contribution came when a friend told me that John McEnroe and Tatum O'Neal were either shopping for an engagement ring or getting a marriage license, I forget which. You've got to be a certain type of person to make a living at the expense of others. I didn't have that hardness in me, even then, and was never comfortable with it. But if you're going to do that for a living, you might as well be all in. The unapologetic Levin is certainly that. Along the way, his TMZ has exposed: the appalling racist rant of Donald Sterling that forced him to sell the Los Angeles Clippers because his mostly black players wouldn't play for him; that singer Chris Brown and football star Ray Rice used women as punching bags; that Mel Gibson's first instinct after being pulled over for drunk driving was to launch a verbal tirade against Jews. Out of the tabloids also came the revelation that married QB Brett Favre didn't live up to his carefully cultivated Norman Rockwell image by texting pictures of his naughty bit to a woman he fancied, and Bill Cosby's long string of accusations that he drugged and then had his way with dozens of women. None of this will ever be confused with the work that brought the Boston Globe reporting team a Pulitzer and led to the Best Picture candidate Spotlight, but there is a parallel here about exposing hard truths and pulling back the curtain on the worst behavior of people in prominence.

BART: But it's a disgusting process, isn't it? And who benefits and who loses? Was it really worth $250,000 to buy surveillance footage of Beyonce's sister, Solange, attacking Jay Z in a New York hotel elevator? That's what Page Six claims, anyway, and Levin never confirms or denies. He just enjoys — and plays God during the process. Levin decides which stars to exploit and which to protect. Some of the vids on Justin Bieber have never been aired. Like the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover of old, Levin believes his store house of undisclosed material provides great negotiating power for future stories.

FLEMING: Nicholas Schmidle's well researched New Yorker article Digital Dirt reported that Levin gave Bieber a pass for using the "N" word in a parody of a song because the kid was 16, and Levin gave him a break and didn't destroy his career for doing something stupid at that prime age of stupidity. Every journalist and publication makes judgment calls about which fights to pick, and any journalist who says they haven't benefited some way by pulling a punch isn't being honest. Horse trading is part of the game. As for Solange walloping her brother-in-law Jay Z, it got picked up, second hand, by every "legitimate" media outlet in the world, as has the battered face of Rihanna at the hands of Chris Brown, and the Ray Rice video, and any number of videos and audiotapes that somehow fell into the hands of TMZ, which has been such a conduit for scandalous stuff. I've been kind of riveted to the FX series The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story; it's remarkable how often the Kardashian children have shown up in the first few episodes. O.J. pal Robert Kardashian is the excuse, but I think the message is that the Simpson trial underscored the public's insatiable desire for celebrity scandal, and led directly to the rise of reality series, TMZ and the Kardashians.

BART: If Harvey Levin can pull back the layers of secrecy surrounding film and music celebrities, could he do the same for politicians? This may seem like a squalid question, but how much do we really know, for example, about Donald Trump? And could Harvey Levin help? TMZ tried to open a Washington outlet but then changed its mind. My question about Trump may seem frivolous, but consider the Trump empire: Forbes says he's worth $4.3 billion but, as The Economist points out, Trump doesn't run a publicly listed company or even a holding company grouping his assets, so little hard data is available. His core of executives consists of family members. He has not made his taxes public. While he likes to boast about his great career in the gaming industry, his holdings were dwarfed by Sheldon Adelson's (who's worth $26 billion) and Trump had to dump his Atlantic City losers. Trump is known for yelling and screaming at executives and rivals but no one seems willing to talk. Where is Harvey Levin and his army of "paid" sources? What could they tell us about the inner workings of the Trump empire?

FLEMING: Two grafs ago, you seemed to be looking down your nose on Levin, and now you want to turn him loose in D.C. like some truth crusader? I'm not sure pols have the currency to make such exposure financially worthwhile. The exception is if you've got a sex scandal on the order of Monica Lewinsky. Drudge Report is now a conservative aggregation empire, but don't forget Matt Drudge's site came to prominence with revelations about Lewinsky's semen-stained dress. It seemed tawdry, but it factored into impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton after he initially lied about the encounter.

BART: On another level, the mandate for secrecy in Washington was pointed up last week by the death of Antonin Scalia, whose history of bad health had been completely covered up for years. Even reports of Justice Scalia's death were so muddy that The New York Times sat on it for almost an hour after it was posted by other media. Had TMZ penetrated Washington, Justice Scalia's myriad secret trips to the hospital would have been disclosed by a receptionist or ambulance driver. OK, I'm not completely serious here, but it seems to me that Washington and Hollywood remain two totally contrasting worlds. We know more than we should about Hollywood, not enough about Washington.

FLEMING: I've got nothing for you on that last point. I did find it remarkable how Levin is minting money tapping the ferocious appetite for unvarnished celebrity revelations not only with a successful website and daily syndicated TV show (which I find un-watchable as kids stalk celebrities for airport sound bites) and a bus tour for tourists run by his partner, which actually gets celebrities to play ball and be viewed by gawking fans like zoo animals on a theme park safari tour. That is a better version of those maps to the star homes that have always been sold to tourists, and TMZ is a digital version of the old National Enquirer, with its shocking covers like the hospital shot of a near death Steve McQueen. You know how it's said that every great fortune probably began with a great crime? Well, it seems these days like tomorrow's general media celebrity tale began with yesterday's salacious gossip item on TMZ or one of these other sites. If so-called legitimate news media were really that horrified by what TMZ was doing, it ought not to pick up second hand all the scoops being generated. Frowning on Levin while taking the safe route by recycling footage attributed to TMZ so you don't have to pay to get the information or face the wrath of celebrity lawyers, well, that is hypocritical. And when they break a story about the tragic deaths of Michael Jackson or Whitney Houston, it's ghoulish, but every publication follows their lead. What does it say when a prestige magazine like The New Yorker devotes page after page to Levin's empire?

Peter, we just watched Deadpool break every superhero movie rule and gross half a billion dollars in two weeks. The public craves disruption. I'm not going to sit here and judge Levin and his TMZ army or any muckraker. One of my favorite magazines ever was the old Spy, which cleverly punctured the balloon of entitlement, and I laughed hard when the New York Post covered disgraced Subway pitchman Jared Fogle's prison sentence on child pornography with a front cover that suggested he "Enjoy a Foot Long In Jail." Many who get thumped deserve it, and the only problem I have is when paparazzi hound the children of stars. I recall an actor with kids once describing his daily reality of walking his kids into their school. Hulking, intimidating thugs with cameras, yelling at children in hopes they will look up and make a more salable picture subject. Those paparazzi, the actor said, form a semi-circle around their subjects so the backdrop behind the kids is clear. If they were photographing other hulking paparazzi screaming at children, they'd never be able to sell the pictures–even people who want prying photos might be appalled to see grown men screaming awful things at little kids who happen to be the progeny of movie stars. The rest of it? It's Chinatown, Jake, and celebrities do have the option of not misbehaving or photographing intimate moments and leaving them around the house. I won't judge Levin, but I don't have it in me to make a living at the expense of others. Deadline's policy is that if it relates to business, it's fair game. Staying out of personal lives makes it easier to sleep better at night.

BART: Another example of "knowing too much" relates to the Hollywood Reporter's exposure last week of David Milch's personal demons. Milch is a four time Emmy winner (NYPD Blue and Deadwood among others) who has managed to blow $100 million on his gambling habit and owes the IRS $17 million. The THR story is well-written and well-reported, but do readers really need to know the details of the poor writer's drug problems and financial misdeeds? He's a writer and writers are supposed to be crazy. At what point does an artist deserve privacy? TMZ might have given the story thirty seconds and moved on. THR's detailed analysis seemed at once good journalism – but a violation of privacy.

FLEMING: I would not have been proud to have my byline on that story. In my last days before ending a 20-year run at Variety, I was so conflicted with making the decision to join Deadline that my back went out. Bam. I hit the floor and could not get up. I was speaking with Milch and Michael Mann about the race horse drama Lucky that they'd just set at HBO. Milch was sympathetic to my sudden back flare-up; he suffered from back problems his whole life. I wrote the story, moved on, and two days later, Milch delivered to my house a back pillow, which really helped. This was the first time I'd spoken with Milch and I don't think we've spoken since and since I don't cover TV often, he gained nothing by doing this; he was being kind. Now, I recognize the guts it took to dig up and expose the famous writer's personal spiral, and it is certainly startling he lost that much money. I just didn't see it doing much for the greater good, though; no crime was exposed. THR profited at the expense of a fundamentally decent, flawed man. From those hacked Sony email documents on down, every journalist has to draw lines of decency in the sand in the digital age, only to cross them out and make new ones in order to stay competitive. It is impossible to imagine you will always feel good about every decision made under those conditions, when you look back.


from:
http://deadline.com/2016/02/harvey-levin-tmz-new-yorker-magazine-david-milch-1201707002/
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on February 24, 2016, 07:18:52 PM
Not surprisingly, even the article above, halfheartedly trying to defend the right of a celebrity to some level of privacy, is misrepresenting the facts. The number of "Mr.Milch's $17 million debt to IRS" travels from one article to another, perhaps because it sounds  more sensational than the actual $5 million.

"Segal then informed Rita that "she and David were approximately $17 million in debt — $5 million in unpaid taxes and penalties, $10 million in mortgages(...) and $2 million in fees to NKSFB and others". That is  the original text in the THR article.

--Sven2
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: SaveJFC Admin on February 24, 2016, 08:44:56 PM
Thank you for this correction, Sven!  In general, it has been bothering me that this personal problem of Mr. Milch is not able to stay private.  Now that I know that the facts have been misrepresented it's another reason why journalists (even if they are "just bloggers") should be held to fact-checking standards. 

I recently updated http://DeadwoodChronicles.com so it is now a WordPress site.  When I setup the blog I saw all the articles about Mr. Milch's debt and I specifically chose not to put any posts about it on the site.  It just seemed too... unseemly. 

OTOH, maybe it's the wake up call he needs to get help...  I wish him the best and hope that this news does not delay the Deadwood Movie that has been approved by HBO.
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on February 26, 2016, 04:10:03 PM
The thought of omitting the news did cross my mind, Save. However, nothing even remotely disrespectful to Mr.Milch had ever appeared on our site and never will. The facts of his financial troubles are widely publicized already and it seems appropriate to post it here, where we have a more or less current and representative collection of related info all in one place. (Not a Library of Congress, of course, a pity! :))

Besides, Mr.Milch is, unusually for a celebrity, open and painfully frank about his personal life. I watched a lot of his YouTube lectures and video recordings and can say it is at times uncomfortable to hear and sometimes simply heartbreaking.

We'll hope and wait for Deadwood!
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on February 26, 2016, 04:20:31 PM
Jeff Bridges Will Star in David Milch's Adaptation of 'Shadow Country'
Posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016 by Jack Giroux

Deadwood fans saw a slight flicker of hope last month for the long-awaited sequel to the series. Concluding David Milch's riveting series as an HBO film has been talked about for years, but it's finally seeming, oddly, more realistic as the years go by.

HBO programming president, Michael Lombardo, said they're just waiting on Milch to make it happen, and that he was currently busy with another project. That other project? Possibly an adaptation of Shadow County, starring Jeff Bridges, for HBO.

The Hollywood Reporter published a very in-depth piece about Milch's financial struggles and gambling addiction, titled "How the $100 Million 'NYPD Blue' Creator Gambled Away His Fortune." It's a bit odd reading that much about a stranger's personal life, but the piece does cover Milch's career highs and lows and what he's been working.

Briefly touched upon in the story (via Indiewire) is Shadow Country. Milch is writing an adaptation of Peter Matthiessen's epic period piece. Set in the 19th century, the story follows outlaw E. J. Watson.

Here's the book's synopsis:

    Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.

    Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson's wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."

From what I've read about Matthiessen's book, it sounds massive and well suited for HBO. Jeff Bridges, presumably, will play outlaw E. J. Watson. Admittedly, Bridges has starred in some disappointing films since winning an Academy Award for Crazy Heart, but he is Jeff Bridges, and you gotta be excited about the idea of him delivering Milch's dialogue.

The executive producer and writer's last two shows for HBO, John from Cincinnati and Luck, didn't quite connect with audiences. John from Cincinnati was probably a little too out there for some viewers, while the the gambling drama faced plenty of bad luck. Neither show lasted more than two seasons.

We're not sure when we'll see Shadow Country, but hopefully sooner rather than later.

from:
http://www.slashfilm.com/jeff-bridges-shadow-county-adaptation/


CORRECTION:

'Luck' and 'John From Cincinnati' each run for one season, not two, as the author states.
-Sven2
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: SaveJFC Admin on February 26, 2016, 04:47:34 PM
Quote from: Sven2 on February 26, 2016, 04:10:03 PM
Besides, Mr.Milch is, unusually for a celebrity, open and painfully frank about his personal life. I watched a lot of his YouTube lectures and video recordings and can say it is at times uncomfortable to hear and sometimes simply heartbreaking.

Points well taken. 

Quote from: Sven2 on February 26, 2016, 04:10:03 PM
We'll hope and wait for Deadwood!

Ditto!
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on April 25, 2016, 02:31:02 PM
This article doesn't reveal any major news about Mr.Milch, although it provides details of some of the recent changes in his personal and professional life.
Sven2

http://buffalo.com/2016/04/24/news/movies/breaking-free-of-his-demons-david-milch-stays-in-the-hollywood-game/

SANTA MONICA, CALIF. – David Milch points to a framed black-and-white photo of a man in a suit, clutching a rake, cleaning a pile of garbage.

"It's my wife's idea of my mind," he said. The debris, piled high and towering like a mountain, represents the past. The rake is twice the height of the man. "His instrument is more powerful than he is," Milch said.
Milch's instrument is writing. It, too, is more powerful than he, and it happens here in this small room inside a small blue house on a Santa Monica side street. This house is the office for Milch's company, Red Board Productions. It's nice, but nice as in modest, not glamorous. The house has white lattice trim. There's a picnic table on a patchy front lawn.
This is where Milch makes stories. This is his Hollywood.
It's not what you'd expect from the Buffalo native who created shows like "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood," the man who racked up dozens of awards and many tens of millions of dollars for his writing. Some of those awards – a plaque of his star from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a handful of Humanitas prizes, a pair of Peabody trophies, "the ones I didn't sell," Milch said – are in the next room over. So is a cream-colored couch with a yellowish stain. "This is a lovely sofa," said Milch, wearing a dark T-shirt and jeans. "I don't know what this is. Wax of some kind?"
The place has the feel of a startup production company, one started by a scrappy pair of young producers who scraped together some money, salvaged some furniture and masked their bare-bones operation with unbreakable self-belief.
But it's not. This is the headquarters of a 71-year-old Hollywood legend, a man who's widely considered to be one of the most celebrated writers in television history, a man whose creativity danced with demons to bring him to this place.
On the wall above the sofa are index cards with the names of characters from "Shadow Country," a novel Milch is adapting for HBO. Steps away, in the writing room, are stacks of treatments and scripts for a revival-to-be of "Deadwood," his acclaimed HBO series set in the lawless Wild West.
There's a painting, done by his wife, Rita Milch, with colorful splashes of greens and blues. It shows the Milches' estate on Martha's Vineyard, the place where they used to bring their three now-grown children. They don't go there anymore. That place, along with their Southern California mansion, was put on the market. Today, the Milches live in a Santa Monica rental home. They're in debt – $17 million of debt – according to media reports.
But they don't seem unhappy. They don't seem defeated.
"Today I'm blessed to be relieved of certain obsessions that have organized my behavior in the past," Milch said in his soft growl of a voice. "Is that adequately euphemistic?"
Milch is writing. He's teaching. And the only bets he's making are on his own creative muscles.
...
Growing up in the Delaware-Amherst area of Buffalo, Milch, a Nichols School graduate, was the second of two sons. His father, Elmer, was a physician; his mother, Mollie, served on the Buffalo Board of Education. Milch's family was close-knit, he said, but didn't spend a lot of time doing things together. The influence of his father ran deep. Elmer Milch, said his son, had three primary interests: his family, his profession, and horse racing.
David's older brother, Robert, embraced one of his dad's passions and became a doctor. David latched on to another: Horse racing.
Starting at age 6, David traveled with his father every August to the races in Saratoga. "He was kind of an elusive figure in my life," David said. "That was about the only thing we really did together."
On that first trip, Elmer Milch handed David a $20 bill and had the waiter run his little boy's bets. David won a third of his wagers that day, "but I kept all the tickets," Milch wrote in his 1995 book, "True Blue." Those early lessons in handicapping and wagering stoked what became a fiery obsession. As a wealthy television writer and producer, Milch became a horse owner and won two Breeders' Cup races. Milch was a big bettor, winning – and losing – loads of money. (He also parlayed his passion for breeding into an HBO series called "Luck," starring Dustin Hoffman. It was canceled in its first season after the deaths of multiple horses raised animal-welfare concerns.)
"I think that the interest in horse racing was very much of a permutation of my relationship with (my father)," Milch said, "so there was a driven-ness to it, and a compulsion that ... wasn't necessarily one of the best parts of my life."
Milch has battled a battery of demons: drinking, drugs, death.
He had a young friend in Buffalo named Almon – nicknamed "Judgey," after his grandfather, who was a judge. "He looked like Puck, like a clownish figure, a bit of a devil," Milch said. "Great grin, always looking for trouble, and it tended to find him."
Milch and Judgey drank. A lot. One night, Milch recalled, Judgey had a 106-degree fever and was standing by a second-floor railing. He leaned over and toppled, falling to the first floor and landing on his bottom.
"He got right up," Milch recalled, "and I had the sense at that moment that this guy was immortal. Nothing was going to take him."
Something did.
Milch doesn't recall all the details – he thinks this happened in Ithaca, "but I'm probably wrong" – but Judgey was killed in a car accident. He was 16.
Struggling to make sense of his friend's death, Milch coped by writing. He penned a story in which he imagined Judgey's family from the time of his death until his funeral. By the time he wrote the story, Milch was 19 or 20 and a student at Yale University. He decided to show it to one of his English professors, the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren.
"It looked like a very formed and conceived piece of work," Milch said. "It wasn't, but Mr. Warren saw something in it."
Warren took the young writer on as an apprentice of sorts, having him read drafts of poetry, and later involving him in a multiyear project studying the work of great American writers. After Milch graduated from Yale, Warren set up Milch with a teaching fellowship at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, where literary luminaries including Kurt Vonnegut were on faculty.
That time became a hazy period in Milch's history: He briefly enrolled in Yale Law School for a draft deferment, got mixed up with guns and drugs, ended up for a time in Mexican jail. "I was in a little trouble," Milch said, offering no details. "I was more or less in and out of trouble pretty continuously."
After his stint locked up south of the border, Milch ended up back in Iowa, where he studied for his master's degree and, according to a 2005 profile in the New Yorker, had a side job manufacturing dope. Following that, he returned to Yale, now as a teacher and still working with Warren. He met a young woman named Rita Stern, fell in love, and they married in 1982 – the same year Milch moved to Hollywood and began writing for the cop show "Hill Street Blues." He eventually became executive producer of the show, earning enough money to fly to Vegas every night to gamble, then jet back to California for work the next morning.
If "Hill Street" established Milch financially – according to that New Yorker profile, he earned $12 million on a three-year contract – his next big move etched his place in Hollywood history: With his former "Hill Street" boss Steven Bochco, Milch created the landmark cop show "NYPD Blue." Bochco ran production; Milch ran the writing. With edgy language – a Milch hallmark – and occasional nudity, the ABC series, which ran from 1993 to 2005, redefined network TV boundaries.
It also made Milch a fortune, one his demons would wrest away.
"Listen, where there's a will, there's a way," he said wryly at a 2006 Storytellers Series talk organized by the Writers Guide Foundation. "I have (lost) millions and millions of dollars. There is not an amount of money that a writer can earn that I can't blow."
Milch, with the slightest smile curving his lips, was talking about horse racing. His audience laughed. They probably thought he was joking, or at least exaggerating. He wasn't.
...
"How the $100 Million 'NYPD Blue' Creator Gambled Away His Fortune."
That February 2016 headline turned heads and dropped jaws. The Hollywood Reporter claimed that Milch, whom the publication estimated earned $100 million in his career, is $17 million in debt and on a repayment plan with the IRS.

It also claimed Milch, a race-track fixture, had lost $25 million gambling between 2000 and 2011. A lawsuit filed by Rita Milch against the couple's business managers Nigro Karlin Segal Feldstein & Bolno LLP claims she wasn't kept fully informed of his large withdrawals.
To prevent her husband from gambling, Rita Milch provides him $40 a week in cash.
The article also said the Milches put their Brentwood, Calif., mansion and Martha's Vineyard estate on the market, and sold personal items to raise money. (The Brentwood home sold in 2014 for $4.8 million.) They now live in a rental home not far from the house converted to an office for David's company.
In separate interviews with The News, both David and Rita Milch acknowledged the story was accurate. Rita Milch noted some of the figures were off, but declined to clarify them, citing ongoing litigation.
Though neither discussed the lawsuit in depth, both are open about David's struggles, which they say are in the past.
"All I do is work and be with my family," David said.
"That is true," Rita said in a separate conversation. "We have cleared away all the rest." Then, laughing softly she said, "Oh, Dave ... "
In a telephone interview, Rita's devotion to her husband is clear and unwavering. Asked why she fell in love with him many years ago, she said, "His mind, his sense of humor, and his generosity. Those are three pretty good ones, right there."
She laughed softly, and continued. "I've never met anyone else like him, that compares to him," she said. "Yeah, he's complicated and he can be difficult, but he's also wonderful and generous and sweet and to me, very touching. He just melts my heart."
Milch speaks of Rita in equally endearing terms. He says she raised their children – Elizabeth, 32, who works for Genius.com; Ben, 30, an artist; and Olivia, 27, a screenwriter – "pretty much on her own, and they've turned out wonderfully well."
"There's no question that had I not been blessed with that relationship," he said, "things wouldn't have turned out well."
Did his wife save him? Milch pondered the question for a beat.
"Sure," he said. "Sure. Not by grabbing me by the scruff of the neck, but simply by not participating, and judging as minimally as possible. So during momentary bouts of lucidity, I always saw what was possible, if only I'd stop."
...
Here's what's possible: Despite the financial tremors and attention on his personal life, Milch is still writing. Under his deal with HBO, the network sometimes tells him what to write. An example of that is the adaptation of "Shadow Country," a novel by Peter Matthiessen set in the 1900s about a land developer who is also a serial killer.
Milch also can pitch projects of his own creation, such as the revival of "Deadwood," likely to be released in one, possibly two, film-length installments.
Milch's unorthodox creative process is rooted in his long battle with obsessive-compulsive tendencies: He never touches a keyboard when he writes; it's a distraction. Instead, he sits in a black leather chair and verbalizes the script. One of his assistant writers, a muscular, tattooed man named Scott, types Milch's words from behind a desk. One computer screen faces Scott; another two are turned outward, toward Milch, who sees the script develop in front of him. He'll revise – and revise, and revise – until each sentence achieves perfection.
Earl Brown, an actor on "Deadwood," compared Milch's writing process to watching a piece of coal being compressed into a diamond. "I thought that was such a beautiful way to put it," said Rita Milch.
"It's kind of an intuitive process," Milch said. "I wish that it were more systematic, but it just isn't. Someone said, 'Man's accidents are God's purposes. We miss the good we seek, and we do the good we little sought.' You've just got to stay available to doing the good you little sought."
Here's what else is possible: Milch is still teaching and mentoring. Twice a week, sometimes more, actor Michael Harney, who worked for Milch on "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood," comes to the office with his 17-year-old son Dylan, who is autistic. Dylan writes and shares his work with Milch, who gives feedback.
The invitation to write was extended by Milch during a lunch with Harney. Milch asked the actor how Dylan was doing in English class, and Harney said, "He's doing OK. It's kind of standardized, how they're teaching it."
"Well, I can teach it," Milch said to Harney, who at first thought Milch was joking. But it was a serious offer.
"Bring him in," Milch said.
So Harney did, and soon began writing alongside his son in the room with the old couch and the awards that haven't been sold. Dylan writes about his observations and feelings. His father, who often has played the role of law enforcer on camera, has been working on poetry, short stories and screenplays.
Rita Milch said her husband does "some of his best thinking" when he's teaching. David Milch takes it further. He's his "best self," he said, when teaching.
"You want to be your best self, and that happens at least 2 percent of the time," he said. "But typically your best chance to be your best self is when you're teaching. It's because you respect yourself. So much of what we do is shame-based, and when you're teaching, you have the opportunity to answer to the best parts of your nature, so I'm always grateful for that chance."
For Harney, who's spent Dylan's entire life fighting for his son's "right to be heard, to be seen, to participate," Milch's interest has been life-changing.
"David never wrote him off," Harney said. "He just says, 'Hey man, what do you got? Keep going. What do you got? Keep going.' "
Which is what Milch does, too: He keeps going.

email: toshei@buffnews.com
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on March 29, 2017, 06:58:01 PM
True Detective Season 3: Can David Milch Fix This?

Deadwood creator David Milch's involvement in True Detective season 3 is news that we don't know how to process.

       HBO loves Davids.

And not David as in the concept of an underdog but literal Davids.

Davids have been behind some of the most successful series in the network's history. Each show in HBO's unofficial Holy Trinity was produced by a David. There's David Chase, who created and ran The Sopranos; David Simon, who created and ran The Wire, and David Milch, who created and ran Deadwood. That's not even to mention Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Each show and each David is an inextricable part of both HBO and TV history. Since the completion of each show, however, each David has had a different level of involvement with the network that helped put them on the map.

Chase still seems a little baffled that his whole "good television" thing actually took off and has spent his time either relaxing or trying to make movies. Simon has reteamed with the network multiple times in service of his own creative visions like Generation Kill, Show Me a Hero, and the upcoming '70s porn drama The Deuce.

It's Milch, however, who has the most interesting relationship with his former and now current employer. When his Western masterpiece Deadwood was prematurely canceled by HBO in 2006, he tried his hand at getting other series off the ground at different networks. In the end though none of them panned out and he resumed working with HBO.

The network hosted the one and only season of Milch's bizarre, mystical surfer drama John from Cincinnati. Then some years later they gave another crack at a Milch show in horse racing drama Luck. Luck was well received but was canceled early due to safety concerns for the horses.

Stories from the Deadwood set sound more like C.I.A. experimentsTechnically no HBO show that Milch has produced has ended its run of its own accord, which is relatively uncommon for the pay cable network. And to go along with his shows' volatile history, Milch is known to be a volatile, interesting personality as well. Stories from the Deadwood set sound more like C.I.A. experiments to test what actors will tolerate rather than production of a TV show.

Just take in some of this batshittery from a 2006 Slate article about the set of Deadwood.

    "'Apes beat their chests so they don't have to fight 24 hours a day,' Milch says, before veering into a discussion of the place of hyperbole in the oracular tradition of the American frontier and the role of language in 'muscling up' for the rugged work of mining—as well as how profanity helps create a sense of vagabond community among those with a threadbare, uneducated grasp of the language."

    "It adds up to a sly and historically accurate end-run around those who would complain that a fuck is still a fuck. Keith Carradine (Wild Bill Hickok) reveals that Milch even composed an FCC-worthy treatise on the subject should HBO executives have needed it in a legal defense. The lesson to any would-be TV provocateur: Do the research."

Or check out this AV Club interview with legendary character actor Stephen Tobolowsky about his time on Deadwood:

    "And he said, 'Just so you know, we're not shooting what we just rehearsed.' And I said, 'We're not?' And he said, 'No. In fact, you're not gonna shoot today at all.' And I said, 'Okay,' and they sent me home. And I ended up doing, like, nine shows that season. And three shows the third season. And you never knew what you were doing. You had to go out at dawn to rehearse, because David liked to shoot with natural light. So you rehearsed in the dark at 5 a.m. in pitch black," Tobolowsky said.

    "You rehearsed with the director of the show, and then David would come in and see the rehearsal. And then he would throw something to the director like, 'Maybe instead of doing the scene this way, we could do it during a cattle stampede.' Or, 'Stephen? Why don't you do that scene, but instead, do it as if you were a bird.'"

    "And I said, 'What?' 'You know, a bird. With wings.' And I said, I know what a bird is, David, but I don't know exactly what you mean.' He said, 'Just when you do it, pretend you have wings and could fly and squawk. Do whatever you want to be a bird.' And he would throw these little things at you. We never knew what we were doing."

Tobolowsky goes on to say that he broke down crying on the set of Deadwood twice because he was so happy and overwhelmed with the beauty of the art they were making.

Milch is the platonic ideal of a tortured genius for television. He's strange off-putting, difficult yet undeniably brilliant and in complete creative control. He's like if Ernest Hemingway was raised on Perry Mason, Star Trek and The Twilight Zone.

In short, he's everything that True Detective's Nic Pizzolatto wants to be.

The first season of True Detective is undeniably cool. Even those who didn't like it (misguided as they may be) can't deny that it had an intriguingly creepy aesthetic all its own.

In that sense, it perfectly mirrored the personality and temperament of its showrunner. HBO put a lot of trust in Nic Pizzolatto and for one season at least were rewarded. The short story and novel writer with little TV experience was shockingly up for the task of writing and producing 8 hours of prestige television.

Pizzolatto is clearly a guy who believes in the mystic power of writing. He's highly educated in many forms and mediums of the craft and seems to be under the (possibly mistaken) belief that it's the coolest profession in the world. I mean look at this guy.

He dresses like an assassin who kills people through sheer dirty looks while zooming by them on a motorcycle. Writing is fucking cool in Pizzolatto's world and his sheer infectious joy for the art form made all the grad school level psychobabble in True Detective season 1 exhilarating. It also made True Detective season 2 one of the most frustrating and at times laughable seasons of TV in recent memory.

I can't confidently say what went wrong in season 2 of True Detective. On its surface it has many of the same features as the first season. It's a dark noir mystery with some cultish and mystical overtones and strong, let's say masculine acting from big stars.

But it sucks.

The difference between brilliance and downright sucking must be thinner than we all realize. And Pizzolatto comes across as such a passionate, confident writer that maybe a little overconfidence coming off of season one was the small amount of sand in the machinery to completely throw off the whole operation. How else does one explain lines like "never do anything out of hunger, not even eating" as anything other than overconfidence.

Now HBO is going to try to rescue Pizzolatto's tenure at the network by bringing in the only other writer on Earth as equally confident, bull-headed, brilliant, headstrong and downright "writerly" as Pizzolatto: David Milch.

David Milch and Nic Pizzolatto is a match made in heaven, hell, and seedy earthbound heroin den. Moreso than any two showrunners I can recall in recent history: Pizzolatto and Milch are true believers. They're believers of the written word, art and above all the creative superiority of their own minds. They're remarkably similar in approach but remarkably different in the ways they've succeeded and failed.

Milch is one of HBO's aforementioned mythical Davids. And he's never produced a show for the network that was outright bad. Each of his three biggest achievements (Deadwood, John from Cincinnati and Luck), however ended before their time. This is due to a combination of little popular appeal from viewers and undoubtedly also Milch's occasional overzealous artistic behavior. There's a reason why Brett Martin's excellent modern TV retrospective book Difficult Men is called Difficult Men.

Pizzolatto on the other hand has known both highs and lows that Milch never experienced. The first season of True Detective was HBO's most-watched freshman series at the time. It captured the collective unconsciousness more than anything Milch, or almost anyone else for that matter, ever achieved. Season two, of course, was crap - another experience Milch knows nothing about.

Pizzolatto knows the extreme highs and extreme lows while Milch just knows boring old semi-anonymous sustained excellence. Each, however, knows obsessive, controlling, all-consuming creativity.

That's why the introduction of Milch into Pizzolatto's True Detective universe is going to be one of the more fascinating TV experiments of our time. Do the two cancel out each other's weaknesses or highlight them? Does their shared passion for creative excellence produce an excellent season of TV or burn out everyone involved so hard that we get another season two?

Regardless of the outcome, HBO has shown that the era of the Davids is far from over.

from:
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/true-detective/263268/true-detective-season-3-can-david-milch-fix-this
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on May 23, 2019, 01:15:12 PM
David 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:
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on May 23, 2019, 01:22:13 PM
David 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
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on May 23, 2019, 01:38:40 PM
David Milch's Third Act, continued

Milch: Yes. Our grandchild has adopted toward me a sort of casually pleasant tone—she calls me Dave—and she pats my wrist sometimes. And I amuse her. She thinks I'm funny. It's just happening. I think it's like "He doesn't mean me ill, so he must mean me well."

Singer: Do you think you're at an early stage?

Milch: No.

Singer: When do you think you were?

Milch: I couldn't pinpoint it. Maybe three months ago.

Singer: Do you think there's been an acceleration in the rate of loss?

Milch: Yes.

Rita: The past six months have been hard. I've gone to some meetings of a support group for caregivers, and I heard nothing hopeful in those meetings.

Singer: Is there anything you've been able to draw upon, David? Is there comfort in the past?

Milch: I feel the past falling away and the attachments of regret for what wasn't done or was done badly or was done without sufficient sympathy, and it was for that reason that our granddaughter's visit was such a redemptive and compelling occurrence. Everything is an adventure for her and a delight and a surprise, an opening up, and that's a big gratification.

Singer: I've never thought of you as a sentimental person, but maybe I misread that. How would you characterize yourself?

Milch: As an unsentimental person.

Singer: Right. So, when you talk about loss, sadness, are those sentimental feelings or objective realities?

Milch: Objective realities. There's increasingly little to hold on to. A kind of relentless deterioration, and that's disconcerting.

Singer: I'm so sorry this is happening. . . . And, now that I've said that, I feel like an idiot. When people tell you they're sorry, what's your response?

Milch: "Thank you." It depends on who I'm talking to and what the ambitions of the conversation are. In a lot of ways, it feels like you're living a dream, with those relentless aspects.

Singer: Tell me what in your earlier life, if anything, gave you any sense of anticipation of what aging would be like. In the brain of a twenty-two-year-old, in particular a twenty-two-year-old male, the parts that recognize risk and danger are not as fully developed, and so it becomes this Darwinistic matter. We do catch up, if we're lucky and we haven't killed ourselves first. In your twenties, you were living hard and fast. Did you ever think, I might kill myself inadvertently?

Milch: I thought I might die inadvertently in the process of doing what I was doing. You know, I assembled a number of stupidities, which took up a lot of my time. I remember Mr. Warren used to say to me, more than once, "How much of a goddam fool can you be?" And I used to devote a portion of every day to assembling evidence in support of this argument.

Singer: That question from him was not a chastening question?

Milch: Oh, yes, it was.

Singer: Did he ever try to do more than that? Was he ever paternal, and did he say, "Goddammit, cut that shit out"?

Milch: He often remarked, "Understand, David, I don't give a good God damn who writes and who doesn't."

Singer: I remember you telling me that—that if you were going to fuck it up that wasn't his problem.

Milch: Yes.

Singer: Can you actually say now that you would rather you had lived differently during that period?

Milch: Sure. When you know that you could have done something with a fuller heart, with a more open spirit, that's an occasion for regret, and the regrets do tend to pile up. But there's nothing to be done. That's the predicate of regret. And so you kind of build around it, and do the best you can to learn some useful way to proceed.

Singer: Have you talked to other Alzheimer's patients?

Milch: No.

Singer: When do you think you knew that this was going on? What told you that?

Milch: It was an irrefutable and obtrusive fact. There were lapses which were inexplicable otherwise.
"Let's just agree to disagree on everything except the dog."

Singer: We've talked about having your granddaughter here, the pleasure of that. But what about the things that gave pleasure from before, the aesthetic pleasures?

Milch: The world gets smaller. You're capable of less work and you have to learn to accept that—that's a given of the way you have to live. And that's a sadness. But it's also true that a focus comes to your behavior which is productive.

Singer: Elaborate upon that.

Milch: (after a long pause): I'm having a good deal of pain.

Rita leaves to get him some water. He's sitting in an armchair, looking away from me, as if I've left the room.

Singer: Can I ask what you're thinking right now?

Milch: I'm wondering if I'm going to be able to tolerate this discomfiture.

Singer: Can you read things you've written in the past?

Milch: No.

Singer: Would you pick up a new novel and read it now?

Milch: It's not likely.

Singer: Is that because the hours in the day you're able to focus are diminished?

Milch: To some extent. But more so I feel the constriction of possibility, what I'm able to undertake responsibly. I have only a certain amount of energy.

Singer: Do you feel like you're in a race?

Milch: Yes.

Singer: You're racing to finish this memoir?

Milch: More so a larger enterprise, of which this is just a part.

Singer: Can you be more specific?

Milch: I'm trying to make work, the undertaking in general, coherent. To restore a dignity to the way that I proceed, and it's a demanding process. You're tempted to . . . toss it in. Just to quit.

Singer: Before this, were you someone who had preoccupying fears?

Milch: No.

Singer: And now what is it you're afraid of, if you could identify it?

Milch: I intuit the presence of a coherence in my life which I haven't given expression to in an honorable fashion.

Singer: So this is an opportunity. Is that what you're saying?

Milch: Yes.

Singer: The rush to get to work, that inner necessity to make something. You still have that? Do you wake up every day with that?

Milch: Yes.

Singer: Did you feel during the "Deadwood" movie shoot that anyone regarded you as diminished?

Milch: I don't think so.

Singer: Do you think about the future?

Milch: In a very constricted way. I have disabused myself of any thought of a normal future, but I allow myself a provisional optimism about the possibilities of what time I will be allowed. And I'm determined to experience what life will allow me. I know I have a short while possible to me, but I don't want to constrict or profane that with recrimination or a distorting bitterness. And I permit myself a belief that there is possible for me a genuine happiness and fulfillment in my family and the work I do. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the May 27, 2019, issue, with the headline "Hello, Darkness."

   
from:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/david-milchs-third-act
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on March 09, 2020, 06:59:09 PM
'Deadwood' and the Mortal Hope of "Sold Under Sin"
We're all going to die, so let's dance while we're alive.

Valerie Ettenhofer
    March 9, 2020

The first time I watched Deadwood's "Sold Under Sin," I was acutely aware of the tenderness of my new tattoo, fresh but healing. During my latest watch-through, just this week, I found myself subconsciously focused on my own persistent cough, measuring the feeling in my chest against the news' incessant coronavirus outbreak warning signs.

It is impossible not to think about one's body when thinking of Deadwood, because more than controlling Cy Tolliver or ruthless George Hearst or any number of self-professed scoundrels, the unbeatable villain of David Milch's masterpiece Western series is the human body and all its vulnerabilities. Don't let the cowboy boots fool you; Deadwood has as much medical drama and body horror as it does Western ethos. Years before both Milch and his most beloved mouthpiece, Al Swearingen (Ian McShane), began grappling with dementia, the series was already preoccupied with the ways in which communities — even lawless ones like the real-life town the series is based on — must react to failings of mortality. To the inevitability of blood on the floor.

And blood there is. While Milch's series is most remembered for its eloquent, labyrinthine language — the series puts a near-Shakespearean spin on the foul-mouthed men of the wild west — the script of the first season finale is most often punctuated by terse threats and patent reminders of life's fragility. A throat is unceremoniously cut. A delicate white napkin is unfolded to reveal a handful of glistening, bloodied teeth. A beleaguered stranger interrupts a heroic military story to reveal that he and his fellow soldiers ate their horses to survive.

Episodes earlier, the settlement of Deadwood had a plague of its own, and while the town was overwhelmed by swiftly spreading sickness and scarce resources, it was a crisis that outed some men and women as cowards, others as helpers, and yet more as beholden to capitalistic self-interest. Deadwood's social microcosm, it's clear, has only become more relevant with age. As the first season comes to a close, post-plague and with the death of Wild Bill Hickok already far in the rearview, we as viewers know which townsfolk we're rooting for, but we've also learned that death in the West can be as unpredictable and dangerous as a drunken stranger at a card table.

Early on, Deadwood set itself up as a kind of Hobbesian period drama about a place where life could be, as the philosopher said, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Yet almost immediately the show disrupts its rough exterior by introducing a cast of characters who are sympathetic, funny, and often outright loveable. Milch forgoes neither the hard reality nor the kind one, regularly allowing us glimpses of humanity — or at the very least good manners — from even the worst the town has to offer. "Sold Under Sin" is an episode rife with mud and blood, but it also lays bare the beating heart of the series with satisfying moments, like Seth and Alma's (Molly Parker) consummation and Seth's acceptance of the law badge, that reward our love for this burgeoning town.

Also in this episode, Al finally dispatches the local reverend (Ray McKinnon), who had been deteriorating as a result of a brain tumor for some time, his suffering a sort of unbearable yet steady background noise to the show's foregrounded local politics. To some, Al's act — the smothering of a man who was already gasping for breath in the throes of his pain — may appear to be a metaphorical extinguishing of innocence, a killing of the only god the camp knew. Yet it's also a twisted act of mercy, bringing tears to Al's and his henchman's eyes alike. Al's a stubborn man, unafraid of a fight, but he knows the body can't be bested.

Later on, Al himself will be beset by kidney stones and, petrified by the pain, will have to witness those around him unable to easily decide on the best course of action. Years after Deadwood aired, Cinemax's Steven Soderbergh-directed series The Knick would go on to address the terrors and moral dilemmas of developing healthcare systems more directly, often with an even bleaker approach. But in 2004, under the guise of a gunslinging Western, David Milch wouldn't let us forget the endless fragility of our lives, and the gutting decisions everyday people must make that could either save or end them.

If the hopeful heart of Deadwood is ever fully visible, it's during the short final scene of the first season finale. Doc Cochran is perhaps the series' best supporting character, carrying the throughline of logic during any emergency, woefully bearing witness to the existential pain of the sick, and keeping a sliver of fury-tinged optimism alive, all thanks to an indelible, lovely performance by Brad Dourif. Doc's constant commitment to his job often goes unnoticed by the more lofty-minded businessmen of Deadwood, as when Al makes an offhand joke about the reverend and Doc grounds him with a boldly shouted curse. No one makes an enemy of the doctor, because everyone needs him, and when it comes to beating that biological villain, he knows more than the rest of the town combined.

Meanwhile, Jewel (Geri Jewell), the Gem Saloon's disabled cleaning woman, is one of the series' most winning presences even as she's one of the town's least valued. People around the saloon often don't really see her, or if they do, they see her as less than others, but her emotions come easily and often skew toward happiness. To the audience, she's easily one of the characters most worth rooting for.

As Deadwood's major players argue and scheme and shoot one another dead in the streets, Doc makes Jewel a leg brace that will make her more comfortable. And as "Sold Under Sin" comes to a close, Jewel decides to dance. She gets Doc to join her, and their exchange closes out a near-perfect first season while others in the Gem look on. "Say I'm as nimble as a forest creature!" She commands Doc, not hesitant to move despite his warnings that her mobility may fail. "You're as nimble as a forest creature," he answers warmly. "No," she corrects him, "say it about yourself!" As the music plays us out, their bodies are working as well as they ever will. They're happy. In Deadwood, as in reality, death may be inevitable, but life is there, too, just waiting to be shared
.

from: https://filmschoolrejects.com/deadwood-sold-under-sin/




Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on October 17, 2020, 04:23:11 PM
'Deadwood,' 'NYPD Blue' Creator David Milch Talks About Living With Alzheimer's

by Malina Saval

Oct 16, 2020 10:15am PT

From his work on the iconic, Golden Globe-winning 1980s cop drama "Hill Street Blues" to creating such TV series as "NYPD Blue," "Deadwood" and "Luck," four-time Emmy Award-winning David Milich has been an iconic figure in the biz. Milch is battling Alzheimer's, a ravaging brain disease for which there is no cure. From his residence at a care facility in Southern California, Milch describes his experience:

"I'm 75 years old and I was diagnosed about a year and half ago," says Milch. "It's a slow unfolding as you become aware of the compromising of your faculties. And that becomes increasingly dramatic and distressing. And finally, you can't turn your back on it any longer — that's been the story with me. [It's] forgetfulness of all different sorts, which compromised my ability to meet my daily responsibilities. Finally, there comes a period where you're fighting off what is clearly a change and you have to, if you're going to be responsible and meet the concerns that other people are beginning to show, you have to encounter all of that.

It's an increasingly distressing sequence of events, but finally there's no turning your back on it. You kind of fight a rear-guard action. You look at it as a series of accumulating skirmishes where you look at the challenges for the given day and your hope is to be able to get through without acknowledging what is privately an undeniable fact. It's a demoralizing accumulation of irrefutable facts.

At a certain point you make so many adjustments to conceal or circumvent the effects of the illness. And then, if you are to retain any sort of dignity, you have to acknowledge that you've changed. And if you're going to keep your dignity you have to make adjustments to the disease, and that takes up more and more of your conscious life and emotional life. I'm grateful that I'm part of a family which has been generous and brave in trying to help me. I try to work every day, to write. Each day is about coming to terms yet again with the compromising facts of your condition, and you finally get to the point where you have to make concessions to what's going on with you. And you try to embrace your families, the concessions that they've made or are trying to make. In some ways you could describe it all as an accelerating pace of compromise.

I live in a facility which is organized around the recognition of and adjustment to what is happening and what is continuing to happen. And you just learn to live with it, as best you can. It's an accelerating deterioration. [For me], it's about being a continuing part of the community, trying to be a source of support and strength as long as you can to your family. And doing it all as you live into the recognition of the concessions that you have to make increasingly, day after day."

from:
https://variety.com/2020/tv/spotlight/deadwood-nypd-blue-creator-david-milch-brave-battle-alzheimers-1234807100/
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on April 21, 2021, 01:53:23 PM
An old article, from 2019, interesting by wide reaching, if maybe a little capricious, parallels.
Sven2

"A Continuous Unfolding": D-Day, David Milch, García Lorca, and the Return of "Deadwood"

By Stuart Mitchner

Tell me a story of deep delight.
— Robert Penn Warren

On the heels of the controversially rushed, truncated final season of Game of Thrones, HBO has released Deadwood: The Movie, the final chapter of David Milch's "story of deep delight," the series brought to an equally untimely and even more unfortunate end in 2006.

While the distinguished novelist/poet/critic Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) may seem an unlikely godfather for such a work, the depth of his influence is made clear in Mark Singer's recent New Yorker article, "David Milch's Third Act." Anyone who has kept faith with Deadwood during the long wait for this moment should read Singer's piece, as well as Alan Sepinwall's outstanding appreciation in Rolling Stone. Far more significant than the revelation that Milch has Alzheimer's is what Singer's profile shows about how the lessons Milch learned from his mentor at Yale have given Deadwood the literary magnitude that sets it apart from other HBO masterworks like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Game of Thrones.

Referring to Warren, Milch says, "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 felt that you must suppress everything irrelevant or distracting.... 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 ....The great blessing of Mr. Warren's presence was a rising up in one's heart of the desire to acknowledge that shared experience."

"Kubla Khan"

When Singer asks whether Alzheimer's "had given anything in return," Milch speaks of "a continuous sense of urgency ... an acute sense of time's passage." His suggestion "that time is ultimately the subject of every story" leads to a quote from Warren's poem "Tell Me a Story," lines that Milch has cited over the years "in classrooms, writers' rooms, personal encounters, lectures, and interviews":

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.

The last two words echo in the "deep romantic chasm" of one of the most famous poems in English, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." As he transcribes his laundanum dream, Coleridge hears "an Abyssinian maid/Singing of Mount Abora," and imagines his "deep delight" could he revive "Her symphony and song." In the opening stanza of Warren's poem, he recalls hearing the "great geese hoot northward" when he was a boy in Kentucky. Though he could not see them, "there being no moon/And the stars sparse," he "heard them." The experience of being involuntarily receptive to wonder and mystery, as expressed in Coleridge's visionary dream, similarly informs Warren's haunting line, "I did not know what was happening in my heart," which also evokes the wonders Deadwood achieves in its most poignant and powerful moments. Right now I'm thinking of the night scene near the end of the movie when Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) and Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens) look up in "deep delight" at the slow magical fall of snowflakes as Milch concludes his "story of great distances and starlight."

In Walks Lorca

García Lorca is here because today, June 5, is his 120th birthday. So capacious is Milch's vision that it's possible to imagine an American incarnation of the Spanish poet walking down the muddy main street of Deadwood sometime between the shooting of Wild Bill and the snowy starlight Jane and Joanie delight in a decade later. Lorca would have a guitar, as he did when he was a student in Granada playing and singing Spanish folk music and making a name for himself before becoming a famous poet and playwright. There's a Deadwood ambiance in the "Gypsy Ballads," where "Rider and horse appear/With a long roll of the drum" and "Light like a deck of cards,/Hard and glossy and white,/Cuts in the brittle green/Horses rearing in fright." Or Lorca might sing of the "lunatic afternoon" in which "Angels of black took wing/To the far air of the West." He ends "Afternoon's Last Light" singing, "O unarriving Night,/Object of fear and dream,/How long the slanting sword,/How deep the driven wound!"

D-Day

Until Deadwood changed the dynamic, I was working on a D-Day sequel to last week's celebration of Whitman and Memorial Day, which ended with me smoking a Camel from the pack found on my bellygunner uncle's body after a freak training accident in February 1944. But for that, he might have been in one of the B-17s scouting the skies over Omaha Beach three months later.

Following the theme of cigarettes as a shared sacrament in films and fiction as well as real life, and guessing that Lorca must have been a smoker, I cast a line into the cyberstream and came up with Leslie Stainton's Lorca, A Dream of Life. It turns out that on the night of his arrest by Nationalist forces on August 16, 1936, Lorca was given a carton of (would you believe?) Camels by a friend. He was wearing "dark gray pants and a white shirt with a tie loosely tied around the collar" at the time, and when he demanded to know why he was beng arrested, he received a one-word answer, "Words."

Two nights later Lorca was handcuffed and driven to a small building six miles from Granada with a schoolteacher and two bullfighters known for left-wing politics. The poet offered the last of his Camels to a young guard who was on duty that night, asking if he could have a newspaper and "more tobacco." After humoring Lorca with smalltalk, the guard told him that they he and the other three were going to be killed. The sun had not yet risen when they were shot beside a stand of olive trees and buried in a nearby ravine.

In his introduction to The Poet in New York and Other Poems (1940), José Benjamin presents Lorca's murder as "the purest and clearest example of the martyrdom of an entire people."

"He Didn't Suffer"

Among the items the U.S. Army Air Force sent to my mother, along with the cigarettes and his dog-tag, was a large glossy photograph of a B-17 like the one my uncle died in, along with a letter to the effect that "he didn't suffer," and a handsome Citation of Honor signed by the commanding general of the Army Air Forces. The citation declares that "his sacrifice will help to keep aglow the flaming torch that lights our lives," so that "millions yet unborn may know the priceless joy of liberty." It ends: "We who pay him homage, and revere his memory, in solemn pride, rededicate ourselves to the fulfillment of the task for which he so gallantly placed his life upon the altar of man's freedom."

The Citation of Honor doesn't give my uncle's full name, which was Robert E. Lee Patterson, in honor of his grandfather, a Confederate general who served with Lee. His other grandfather, C.A. Davis, played the fiddle with Bat Masterson's band in Dodge City. I like to think he was with them when they performed in Deadwood at Al Swearengen's Gem or maybe Cy Tolliver's Bella Union. I still have the fiddle.

Telling the Story

The two characters from Game of Thrones I can imagine showing up in Deadwood are Jerome Flynn's earthy, wisecracking sellsword Bronn and of course Peter Dinklage's Tyrion Lannister, whose wit and eloquence qualify him to sling words with the likes of Ian MacShane's Al Swearengen. In the rushed conclusion of Game of Thrones it's left to Tyrion to tie up the labyrinth of loose ends in an uncharacteristically stilted speech: "What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags? Stories. There's nothing more powerful in the world than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it."

As David Milch shows throughout Deadwood and most movingly in his interview with Mark Singer, it's the way you tell the story that counts. In quoting Milch on the influence of Robert Penn Warren, I found myself taking out lines (see the ellipses) for the sake of moving things along, not realizing that Milch was holding forth in the style of one of his characters. That said, I'll restore a characteristic omission. Speaking of his mentor, Milch says, "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."

When Singer, in his frank but delicate probing of Milch on how he deals with dementia, refers to his "ability to pull back from whatever is immediate and contemporary and go to a place—say, Deadwood—where your characters exist," Milch says, "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."

In Deadwood: The Movie, David Milch and his cast and crew are more than equal to the many unfolding opportunities.

from: http://www.towntopics.com/wordpress/2019/06/05/a-continuous-unfolding-d-day-david-milch-garcia-lorca-and-the-return-of-deadwood/
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on February 04, 2022, 01:56:00 PM
David Milch to Address Gambling Addiction, Alzheimer's Diagnosis in New Memoir

The 'Deadwood' and 'NYPD Blue' creator's autobiography, 'Life's Work,' will be published by Random House on Sept. 13, 2022.
By Seth Abramovitch
February 1, 2022 10:32am

David Milch, the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning writer and creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, will trace his bumpy personal journey in Life's Work, a new memoir set to be published by Random House on Sept. 13, 2022.

The book, from a "noted heroin and gambling addict," a statement from Random House says, features "a ferocious mind [grappling] with the bewildering effects of Alzheimer's by looking back, making what sense he can of a life of addiction, recovery, loss and creation, abuse and life-saving kindness, and the increasingly strange present and future he now faces."
Milch, 76, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2019 after he began to notice "imperfect recall and tardy recall and short temper" in himself. The diagnosis led him to dial back his involvement in the then-filming Deadwood movie.

A 2016 Hollywood Reporter cover story detailed how Milch, a former English literature professor at Yale, lost approximately $100 million to a crippling gambling addiction. He was a regular at Santa Anita racetrack — the location of his ill-fated HBO series Luck, canceled after one season following the death of three horses used in the series.

In the 1980s, Milch battled what he once told an MIT communications forum was a "bitter" heroin addiction.

"From the writer whose work changed our understanding of what television could be, this is a memoir about the transformative power of art, effort, collaboration, and family, and what holds on as you lose it all," says Random House.

from:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/david-milch-memoir-gambling-alzheimers-1235085191/
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on March 25, 2022, 02:51:05 PM
Johnny Carson Biopic Series Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt From David Milch & Jay Roach Hits Marketplace
by Nellie Andreeva
March 22, 2022

EXCLUSIVE: The story of one of America's most beloved TV personalities, Johnny Carson, may finally be coming to the screen. A high-profile series, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Carson, written by Deadwood creator David Milch and to be directed by Jay Roach, was recently taken out and has been heating up the premium marketplace. The project, titled King Of Late Night, is a co-production between wiip and Anonymous Content.

The series will follow the life and career of late-night TV pioneer Johnny Carson from New York to Los Angeles to the Las Vegas strip. King Of Late Night will reveal how Johnny's diehard connection to his audience overlapped with his lifelong desire for a basic quality of life, and how his beloved on-screen persona came into conflict with the more colorful aspects of his personal life.

Carson, who grew up in Nebraska and served in the Navy in World War II before going to college, started his career in local radio and television before transitioning to network game shows and landing NBC's The Tonight Show, which Carson hosted for 30 years, from 1962-92. Famous for his nightly on-screen presence, Carson was very private off-screen, shunning the social circuit for a personal life that included four marriages.

King Of Late Night originated about five years ago when Milch was tapped by Anonymous Content to develop it. Roach subsequently came on board, with indie studio wiip joining as co-producer and Gordon-Levitt as star. Milch had already been working on the script for a couple of years when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2019.

Gordon-Levitt, Milch and Roach executive produce with wiip's Paul Lee and David Flynn as well as Paul Green and Salmira Productions.

There have been multiple previous attempts to mount a Johnny Carson biopic, including a feature and an NBC miniseries, both based on Bill Zehme's book Carson The Magnificent: An Intimate Portrait, which were announced about a decade ago but did not come to fruition. On TV, the late-night host was portrayed by Rich Little in 1996 HBO film The Late Shift. Additionally, the 2017 comedy-drama series There's... Johnny!, created by Paul Reiser and David Steven Simon, takes place in the 1970s and depicts the fictional goings-on behind the scenes of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Gordon-Levitt, Milch and Roach are all multiple Emmy winners. Gordon-Levitt currently stars as Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick in the Showtime series Super Pumped. Prior to that, he created, executive produced and headlined the Apple TV+ series Mr. Corman. His feature credits include The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Dark Knight Rises and Inception. Gordon-Levitt, who has two Emmys in the interactive programming categories, is repped by WME and Jackoway Austen Tyerman.

Milch co-created NYPD Blue and Luck, recently worked on the third installment of HBO's True Detective and on the Deadwood movie, a continuation of his cult favorite HBO drama series. Milch, who won three Emmys for NYPD Blue and one for Hill Street Blues, also just finished his memoir, Life's Work, which is slated for release in September. He is repped by ICM Partners.

Roach won four Emmys as a director and executive producer of the HBO movies Recount and Game Change. In features, he most recently directed and produced the feature Bombshell. Roach next has Apple TV+'s comedy series High Desert, which he is directing and executive producing. He is repped by WME, Mosaic and Behr Abramson Levy Johnson.

from:
https://deadline.com/2022/03/johnny-carson-series-joseph-gordon-levitt-king-of-late-night-david-milch-jay-roach-1234983801/
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on July 03, 2022, 10:58:12 PM
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.)

---continued
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on July 03, 2022, 10:59:40 PM
Milch was a child prodigy. He could read, understand and remember books, songs, faces, numbers, images, and stories. He never forgot anything, a trait that was perhaps not always to his benefit. Milch often tells how, in his childhood, a "family friend, a friendly uncle type," introduced him to a "gang of pedophiles who passed me around from the time I was 8." Even if most people prefer not to think about it, the trade of children is a lucrative feature of the mirror world, and the building of pedophile blackmail/control networks is the meat-and-potatoes of every intelligence service.

"The pain of the past in its pastness is translated to the future tense of joy," David Milch liked to say, quoting the great American literary figure, poet, author, and teacher, Robert Penn Warren, Milch's mentor at Yale. Milch had a spectacular undergraduate career at Yale. No undergrad in living memory is recalled by his peers as so brilliant, so charming, so candid, so amusing and so fucked up. Milch graduated first in his class. Of Penn Warren, Milch said, "He saved my life, just in terms of showin' an example of how to live a coherent life. He also engaged me to work on a history of American literature. 'I can't help you,' he said, 'until whatever is troubling you remits itself, but you can study during this period.'"

At Yale, Milch was a member of the same fraternity of which George W. Bush was president. The other brothers were the patrician, moneyed sons of established WASP families. Whatever the qualifications are for a cabinet post in the Underground Empire may be, David Milch, a Jewish doctor's son from Buffalo, met them. Once, on a duck hunting trip to Louisiana with some fraternity brothers, Milch was sitting in a swamp, slapping flies and attempting to avoid injuring any ducks. He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was a friend's father, then director of CIA, later president himself, who'd joined the hunt. "You're a good Jew, Dave, you're a white Jew. I like you," George H.W. Bush blessed him.

David Milch, whose mother ran the Buffalo school board, whose father tended to gangsters' hearts, and who was passed around by pedophiles as a child, was invited to join the most storied of all secret societies, Skull and Bones. There is a procedural ritual. The invitation is formally made and the candidate advised the only responses accepted are one word, either "accept" or "decline."

Today, Milch's fraternity brothers run Fortune 500 companies, intelligence agencies, and foundations which bend dreams into shapes that fit together in ways that the so-called beneficiaries can't see, but the grant-makers can. A tremendous opportunity for a (relatively) poor but talented Jewish child from soon-to-die Buffalo to have power and make money. Milch declined.

Milch tells a story about a bachelor party in Houston, which perhaps may shed some light on that choice. Milch and several of his fraternity brothers were invited to the wedding of another frat brother. The family jet of the future groom flew the groom's party to Houston for a week of pre-wedding festivities. The high-spirited youths were each given Mercedes to drive, compliments of somebody's father's dealership. The future operators of the world all got drunk and they took those Mercedes off-road, onto a golf course and had a Paris-to-Dakar rally on the local country club greens and fairways. You can imagine there was heck to pay, and quite a bit of shouting. In the end, somebody's father had to pay for the extensive landscaping that was needed to restore the Bob Rees' golf course.

Then came the night before the wedding, and the groom was asked, "is there anything special you'd like to do on this, your last night of freedom."

The groom replied he'd like to destroy an original work of art.

After a brief scavenger hunt, a Chagall drawing was located and ceremoniously incinerated in the wastepaper basket in the library of a Houston plutocrat's home.

There are mystics who believe it is wrong to retain beyond the immediate needs of self and family, riches that flow from a freely given gift of God. I don't know if Milch believed that. If he didn't, though, his lack of such faith could not be told from his behavior. David Milch made large amounts of money, but he gave it away almost as fast, constantly, in private and in public, making no distinction in persons on religious, racial, economic, or public health grounds, as long as they would share in his wealth.

Milch helped friends, relatives, friends of relatives, friends of friend's relatives, and thousands of strangers. He eased countless family emergencies, helped with hundreds, perhaps thousands of substance abuse disasters, broken cars, burned homes, dead batteries, and felony warrants. Milch was a source of unsecured, no-interest, often no-repay "loans" to the worthy and unworthy alike.

Milch's beneficiaries, erstwhile creditors where they had the brains, would find his advice more valuable than money. Rita, nee Rita Stern, David's long-suffering wife, would periodically purge the charitable rolls, evicting excessively tenacious clients. However, Milch is an earnest member of several recovery communities, which continuously provide an ethnically diverse multitude of worthy and unworthy persons in indubitable need.

Milch, under no illusions, loves them all. He loves the scamps, the wiseguys the perverts and fools, Mormons and Mormon-haters, good and evil; though the latter tended not to hang around long, due to Milch's long friendship and professional association with NYPD Detective Bill Clark. Milch's only close male friend in adult life, Clark is an Irish American Vietnam vet who began his career in NYPD's (then secret) Intelligence Division. On patrol in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Clark developed an eye for hidden trip wires and booby traps. As head of a big city homicide division, Clark's work involved handling hot cases, politically dangerous cases, involving powerful people and terrible secrets. Many of the stories on Milch's NYPD Blue police drama originated in Clark's case files.

David Milch's own celebrated descents into the world of addiction, compulsions, and the demonic occurred at long intervals separated by decades of productive work. The experiences informed his dramas, as did his childhood experience of sexual abuse. He elevated with love that fallen world, this realm with its multitude of addicts, golems, killers and demons inhabiting the walking wounded of diminished capacity. All dramas begin, "Back," Milch would quote the poet William Yeats, "where all the ladders start; in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

Besides opiates and the rest of pharmacopeia, Milch suffered from another, more dangerous addiction: high stakes gambling. He owned racehorses, and won the Breeder's Cup Juvenile back in 1992 with the beautiful filly Gilded Time. For this reason, he was hesitant about doing the dramatic series Luck, a story about organized crime and revenge set in the mirror world of horse racing.

In gambling parlance, David Milch was a whale—a high-net-worth individual who meets the definition of hope-to-die gambler, an addict who, once he "gets his nose open," will make million-dollar bets and find it difficult or impossible to stop. Las Vegas bookies offered a million-dollar cash reward for anyone who delivered Milch as a client.

What we know, for sure is that in the end, the house wins. Perhaps the mirror world takes the money back, or a beat forces the gambler to reflect on who he is and what he wants. "We let you walk around like a man for a while, then we turn you back into a little boy," is an old Vegas saying Milch liked to quote. Milch lost, they say, $70 million. I wasn't there and did not discuss his losses with him; we mutually acknowledged those facts through silence. It was a bad beat.

Milch wasn't quitting, though. He thought he might have one arrow left in the quiver. He talked about a show set in a CIA-run bordello in London. The players were Sir James Goldsmith, several Rothschilds and Guinnesses, Lords Aspinall, Lucan, and a spectrum of addicts, occultists, extortionists, and spies engaging in espionage, extortion, entertainment, political blackmail in the treacherous hypersexed milieu of the London clublands.

We were driving to lunch in Santa Monica, discussing the prospective CIA project one afternoon, when Milch said he'd made an appointment with the former director of the CIA, James Woolsey, to meet at the LA airport to discuss the projected U.K. spy-honeypot project. An important meeting, a necessary conversation. Milch was to meet the former director between planes in the not-so-secret VIP spook lounge at LAX, when something entirely unexpected happened.

"I forgot," he told me.

David Milch didn't forget anything. Ever. We both knew that. If he forgot anything, it was a sign of something awry, an ominous warning of pathology at work. In retrospect, Milch recognized there had been other warning signs. It wasn't long, perhaps a week or two, between that conversation and Milch being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, a progressive dementia for which the only treatments are palliative. "It's not scary," he said soon after his diagnosis, "it's just like ... the world slipping away."

A bad beat. And yet, Milch had rejected the position on offer. He declined membership in the semisecret club, did not sleep naked in a tomb with a stolen skull; instead, by prayer, personal sacrifice and constant lifelong effort, he created redemptive works of dramatic art.

The worlds of Deadwood, of NYPD Blue and John from Cincinnati and every other dramatic world that Milch created stood opposed to the pure materiality and marketing of the mirror world. The economic and popular success Milch's shows enjoyed was outweighed in importance by the powerful and enduring effect on human consciousness of thousands of hours of dramatic entertainment which showed, and which itself is, a work of the spirit.

Prayer is how David Milch thought about his work, and stages of contemplative ascent occur in sequences of scenes. For some, an eschatological elevation of the soul occurs unexpectedly. While Milch always identified himself as a Jew, like another old friend, Kinky Friedman, he is somewhat estranged from traditional, formal practice of Judaism, as I am from the Anglican faith of my birth. My own interests and our irreligious times inclined many of us, "Christians, Jews and Sigma Nu's," as Kinky Friedman likes to say, to a semi-agnostic secularity that did not frown on prayer or the possibility of redemption. Once a fellow writer described the deity in Milch's presence as "the foul demi-urge that made this world." Milch was profoundly shocked. Not much shocked him, but his face showed unmistakable horror.

Milch was able to look with love on all the polar extremes of experience, a capacity that is especially necessary and lacking now, as times are changing. The world has a way of opposing and mistreating unusual people while the person is in the body, and so it is better they remain anonymous while within the world's reach. When they are beyond it, as David Milch now is, it is better their works be known. He was the "Rosh ha-Dor, the leader of his generation, in the spiritual sense of the person who lives in communion with God, but utilizes his power in order to draw his contemporaries upward with him.

Ted Mann is an Emmy award-winning writer who worked on NYPD Blue, Deadwood, Hatfield McCoy, and Homeland.

from: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/clearing-space-david-milch

Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on September 03, 2022, 09:14:21 PM
David Milch Still Has Stories to Tell

The TV producer and creator of "Deadwood" recounts his tumultuous upbringing, his trailblazing career and his experience with Alzheimer's disease in "Life's Work."

By Dave Itzkoff

    Sept. 2, 2022

LOS ANGELES — The door to a room at an assisted-living facility swung open, and out darted one of its occupants: a cat named Mignonne, who was eager for some fresh companionship. Then, with more deliberation, came the apartment's primary resident, David Milch, who was similarly happy to have visitors.

"I'm so grateful," he said, allowing entrance to the quarters where he has lived for nearly three years, but which still feel to him like an intermediate space. "As you may imagine, things are all in a state of flux."

To television viewers who have followed the medium's resurgence of erudition and artistic credibility, the 77-year-old Milch is a towering figure. A onetime writer-producer on the influential 1980s police drama "Hill Street Blues," he went on to help create boundary-busting programs like "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and his personal masterpiece, the uncompromising HBO western "Deadwood."

In his industry, Milch is well known for his writing style, which blends articulate grandeur with defiant obscenity, and for his appetites. He is a recovered drug addict and a compulsive gambler who, by his own admission, lost millions of dollars on horse racing and other wagers.

Now he rises each day in his modest accommodations here, decorated with family photos, some Peabody Awards near a sink and some Emmy statuettes on a shelf, and furnished with a bed, a small TV and a refrigerator containing a single can of LaCroix sparkling water. This is where he has lived since the fall of 2019, a few months after publicly disclosing that he had been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

Having welcomed me and his wife, Rita Stern Milch, into the room, Milch explained that he has not lost the powers of observation and articulation that have served him as a writer. Instead, he has found himself training those abilities on his own life as he navigates his experience with the disease.

"When you're in transition, there's a sense that life lives you," he said, fiddling with an elastic bracelet that he wore to keep his room key attached around his wrist. "You're holding on and trying to accommodate all of the impositions and uncertainties."
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Describing his present relationship to life and the way he once lived it, he added, "I'm estranged. I can kid myself, but I ain't a regular."

Preserving what he can remember about himself and sharing it with an audience are already demanding tasks for Milch, and now they have taken on a particular urgency. In the years since he received his diagnosis, he has been working on a memoir called "Life's Work."

The book, which will be published by Random House on Sept. 13, offers a poetic but unvarnished account of his personal history, abundant with the barbarity and grace that have animated Milch's fictional characters.

The project is a quintessentially Milchian lesson in accurately depicting a life, even one composed of events that he may not always be proud of having lived.

At the start of 2015, amid other health problems and difficulties with his memory, Milch received a neuropsychological evaluation and was told he had dementia; a few years later he was given a diagnosis of "probable Alzheimer's."

By the summer of 2019, he was becoming confused on car rides where he was a passenger and fighting with Rita over car keys he had forgotten he was no longer allowed to use. On one exit from his house, he had a particularly nasty, face-first fall on the steps. That October, he moved into the facility where he now resides.

Milch was already in the habit of composing his screenplays through dictation and had been recording his speeches at work for the past 20 years. His family members and colleagues expanded that process, recording his personal remembrances and reaching out to others for stories that could stimulate Milch's memories, all in the service of creating "Life's Work."

"There were days where the recordings are a lot more wading through confusion," said his daughter Olivia Milch. "And then there are days where he just rolls and it's stunning, how he's able to talk about the disease and what he's going through." The book's prologue was essentially transcribed verbatim, she said, including her father's ethereal opening words: "I'm on a boat sailing to some island where I don't know anybody. A boat someone is operating, and we aren't in touch."

As Rita explained, the memoir showed there was beauty in "how he took his life and turned it into art — all the experiences he had, which seemed so wild, he was able to tame in narrative and take back."

David saw an even more fundamental value in the project: "I have felt the blessing of feeling like I know who I am," he said.

A few days before the visit, Rita — who lives about 20 minutes away — had cautioned that he has bad days and good days; even on good days, he can be discursive in his thinking or unaware of his surroundings.
"He still thinks like a storyteller," she said. "And maybe because I love him, but I just find it fascinating. Even when it doesn't make a lot of sense, there's something in it that's just Dave."

On a Tuesday morning in July, David Milch was in a genial mood and voluminous in his affectionate praise for Rita. He said something elliptical about the difficult work that lay ahead, now that it was time for students to enroll in their classes. He saw me admiring a trophy he'd won for a racehorse he once owned and asked, with a gleam in his eye, if I liked going to the track.

"Life's Work" is by turns a brisk and brutal memoir, beginning with its author's upbringing in Buffalo, N.Y., at the hands of his father, Elmer, an accomplished surgeon as well as a relentless gambler and philanderer. Elmer operated on mobsters, scammed Demerol prescriptions for himself and enlisted David, while he was still a child, to run his bets for him.

The author himself grew up to develop his own crippling vices — he recalls being introduced to heroin as a high-school senior — as well as a prodigious writing talent. As an undergraduate at Yale, Milch studied with the Pulitzer Prize winners Robert Penn Warren and R.W.B. Lewis, and he vacillated between futures at Yale Law School and the Iowa Writers' Workshop while he made L.S.D. in Mexico and continued to use drugs. "I loved heroin," Milch writes in the memoir. "I loved checking out. You were here and you were not here at the same time. That has appeal."

continued below:

Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on September 03, 2022, 09:20:37 PM
In television, Milch writes that he found a constructive outlet for his energies and learned to open his "imagination to the particular truths of a different person and a different environment." He was hired at "Hill Street Blues" by its co-creator Steven Bochco, and together they created "N.Y.P.D. Blue," whose sophisticated storytelling and then-unprecedented use of nudity and explicit language influenced decades of prestige TV that followed.

Milch continued to gamble, betting tens of thousands of dollars on individual horse races; he had a heart attack, received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and got sober at the age of 53. Then in 2004, he created his magnum opus, "Deadwood," a drama set in the Dakota territory in the 1870s, a merciless era of American frontier expansion.

On that show, Milch writes, "It was time to listen, to find the characters up and walking and hear who they were and what they had to say." He adds, "The actors told me their characters' deepest truths. They gave themselves up, and they inhabited the parts they had come to."

Paula Malcomson, who played the saloon prostitute Trixie, said that Milch maintained a daily presence on the "Deadwood" set as a kind of wandering, salty-tongued philosopher.

"He granted us permission to be ourselves," she said. "He let us bring forth the things that most people would say, 'That's too much. This is uncouth."

Robin Weigert, who played Calamity Jane on the series, said her portrayal of the disenchanted sharpshooter was influenced by Milch's own language and physical demeanor.

"I will always feel that there is a little piece of David's soul that I got to dwell inside of," Weigert said. "It creates a different feeling than when you just work for somebody. I felt like I worked inside of him."

But "Deadwood" was canceled at HBO after only three seasons; other shows Milch made for the network, like "John From Cincinnati" and "Luck," had even briefer runs and still others weren't picked up at all.

In 2011, Milch writes, his wife went to their business advisers and learned that he had spent about $23 million at racetracks in the previous 10 years. They had $5 million in unpaid taxes and were $17 million in debt, she found.

A yearslong period of downsizing followed for the Milches, during which David was able to complete the story of "Deadwood" in an HBO movie that aired in 2019. He has been open about his disease with his colleagues and co-stars, many of whom remain in his life, and say that Milch has retained his fundamental expressiveness.

Weigert visited Milch while he was still living at his home. He had forgotten the names of some of his dogs, she said, and where his bedroom was, but "we had this high-level conversation about the transmigration of souls."

W. Earl Brown, who was an actor and writer on "Deadwood," visited Milch after he moved to the care facility. As Brown recalled, "Dave takes a long look around the room, leans into me and says, 'I have to tell you something, Earl: The indignities of decrepitude are boundless.' That quote perfectly encapsulates David Milch."

Malcomson described Milch as "the most human of anyone I've ever known."

"I comfort myself a little bit, thinking he burned so bright and there was so much life lived, and maybe that was his exact quota," she said. "I'm not saying he's not living life now, but I'm saying that it is a different version of it."

As the publication of "Life's Work" approaches, Rita Stern Milch said she was anxious about seeing so many intensely personal stories about her husband and their family shared with a wide readership. Having worked as a film producer and editor, she said, "I'm a background person, a behind-the-scenes person. It doesn't make me comfortable."

But she said those concerns were less important than allowing David to tell readers what he has experienced while he still can. "It's a horrible diagnosis and it ain't fun," she said. "But life goes on. You don't have to hide people away. They don't have to disappear."

Over a pizza lunch at an outdoor restaurant near the facility, David and Rita explained that they continue to work together on writing projects, whether they end up getting produced or simply provide David with a means of keeping his mind active. (As he writes in the memoir, "I still hear voices. I still tell stories.")

They had revisited an early screenplay of David's called "The Main Chance," which takes places at the Saratoga Race Course, but Rita said they backed off once David became agitated, thinking he was back at the track. They have also continued to develop a biographical series about the late-night host Johnny Carson.

On the car ride back from lunch, they listened to a radio station that was broadcasting news updates about Major League Baseball.

"Did we bet on baseball games?" David asked from a passenger's seat.

"No," Rita answered as she steered the car.

David smiled and seemed glad for the admonishment. "Nor are we going to," he said happily.

Dave Itzkoff is a culture reporter whose latest book, "Robin," a biography of Robin Williams, was published in May 2018. @ditzkoff

from:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/books/david-milch-still-has-stories-to-tell.html
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on September 11, 2022, 06:29:21 PM
What Happened When I Started Going Back to the Track How the HBO series Luck coincided with the biggest disaster in David Milch's life.

By David Milch

Writer-producer David Milch, author of a new memoir titled Life's Work, is one of the most brilliant creative minds in television. His life story is as multifaceted, mesmerizing, and infuriating as that of his most famous characters. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, to a mob-adjacent family, he learned about betting at the track from his father, a revered vascular surgeon who was also a chronically unfaithful substance abuser and compulsive gambler. Sexually abused at summer camp and repeatedly traumatized by his father, and by the death of his childhood best friend in a car accident, Milch started using alcohol and drugs (including heroin) in his youth. He followed in his father's footsteps by betting on horse races, sporting events, and anything else his bookies would say yes to.

Despite all this, Milch excelled at creative writing. He graduated from Yale and went on to teach literature there for 12 years. Then he wrote an Emmy-winning spec script for Steven Bochco's groundbreaking ensemble cop drama Hill Street Blues, got hired on staff, and joined Bochco in creating and producing another equally influential network series, NYPD Blue. His greatest achievement, the epic anti-Western Deadwood, was conceived and produced during a period of sobriety that followed a 1999 stint in rehab. Deadwood premiered on HBO in 2004, earned solid ratings, and was critically revered, but it still got canceled after three seasons owing to a series of complex factors; two big ones were Milch's self-described lack of impulse control and inability to accept compromise, which are not helpful when dealing with network executives. Milch's follow-up, the surfer parable John from Cincinnati, debuted the following year, satisfied almost no one, and was canceled after ten episodes.

What followed was a period of failed and aborted projects and chronic depression. Still, Milch managed to create, write, and produce one of the most fascinating works of his career, the HBO drama Luck, a loosely structured metaphysical ensemble piece set in and around a Southern California racetrack; this series, too, was canceled after one season, following a series of accidental horse deaths during filming. This tragedy was intertwined with the biggest personal disaster of Milch's life: the loss of almost his entire fortune to gambling, mainly at racetracks. Milch's wife, Rita, ended up suing her husband's accountants for keeping the most damning details of Milch's financial immolation a secret from her (the suit was settled out of court).

As the following excerpt makes clear, the production of Luck coincided with — and in Milch's mind, amplified — his tendency to take potentially ruinous risks at the betting window in the name of chasing another kind of self-destructive high, different from but equal to the drugs he gave up in the name of recovery. Milch now resides in a memory-care facility in Los Angeles, where he is being treated for Alzheimer's disease. Life's Work was written over a six-year timespan with help from family and friends who supplied him with several decades' worth of archival material and transcripts. It is a rumination on pain and growth and a record of thoughts, feelings, and insights that the author may no longer have access to. —Matt Zoller Seitz




Excerpt from 'Life's Work'

There's a line at the end of John from Cincinnati, where Ed O'Neill's character is talking to his dead wife, trying to describe to her what happened over the last week. He says, "Where do you start and stop? Every event and incident ..." That's how I feel trying to explain what happened when I started going back to the track, and working on Luck.

The track is such a rich world. The characters and setting, the beauty and majesty of the horses, and, on the deepest level, the purity of the connection experienced by everyone watching the race for that minute and a half, even while everything outside of that minute and a half, and even some of the things within it, are distorted in any number of ways — that's rich ground to till. I was compelled to tell this story for a variety of reasons, not least of which was my own cultivated and nurtured identity as and commitment to being a gambler.

Gambling and horse racing were inextricably associated with my relationship with my old man. The most time we spent together was at the track, sometimes also in the company of the man who sexually abused me, and almost always with my dad's ongoing narration of my degeneracy. That association came to inform my idea of relaxation, or enjoyment, or success. Ask my kids what it was like to go with me to the track, and they'll tell you it wasn't fun, or at best it was fun intermittently. They liked seeing the animals at the barn, and learning how to read the racing form so they knew who was the long shot and who was the favorite. But my eldest also describes being 5 years old, speed walking to chase after me through the clubhouse, trying to keep track of me as I went to the booth to bet, not running because she didn't want to draw anyone's attention, thinking, "I've got to keep my eye on him, because he sure isn't keeping his eye on me."

My wife Rita eventually started taking her own car when they did come, so she and the kids could drive home separate from me. When you win a race, they take your picture in the winner's circle. Almost every picture we have where the kids are there, we're all grimacing because we just ran through the track and I was yelling at them to hurry the whole way. At the same time, they knew if they made it through the day, I'd give them a couple hundred dollars at the end, and they liked that part too. We had a drawer in the dresser in our bedroom where I kept cash and race tickets. Sometimes there'd be hundreds of thousands of dollars cash in there. Each of my kids learned to steal with that drawer. They'd show it to friends who came over. It was one of the fun parts of our house, like having a pool but harder to explain. You pass on some lessons whether you want to or not. But making them chase after me was maybe also my way of telling them they didn't belong there. They weren't like me in that way. I found a way to say that too.

I wrote the pilot of Luck in 2009. After about seven years away, I was going to the track more throughout that year. HBO liked it, but I suspect they were also trying to figure out a way to get me a bit more under thumb, not rewriting things on set, which cost money. The script was sent to Michael Mann, and he ultimately came on to direct the pilot and as an executive producer as well. Part of his coming on was an agreement that he would have final say over casting, and on set, and in the edit room. I agreed to all of it, even though it was very different from the way I had grown accustomed to working, and different from television generally, where the showrunner, the final boss, is usually the head writer rather than a director. But I also knew I had had a few misses, and I think I felt compelled to show everyone I could go along to get along. It wasn't lost on me that Michael had made a great deal of wonderful art and that someone with his level of skill could do likely revolutionary work with the racing scenes in particular. People seemed excited about the prospect of our working together. It made Dustin Hoffman interested in being a part, and Nick Nolte and John Ortiz and a number of other great actors.

We shot the pilot in April of 2010. It was not a happy collaboration for me. Michael insists upon a single voice, especially on set. I couldn't go to the set — literally I was forbidden from going. That was a loss. If we're going to engage with him as a reality, then it behooves me to evaluate him, and I don't want to evaluate him. He's a driven, enormously articulate figure, but when I watched the pilot, there were moments or sequences where I thought he was wrong. Had I been directing the series, it would have been a different series. I don't think he knew enough about the world he was trying to portray. There are certain distortions that are his idea of the conventions of the story rather than the truths of the characters and situations. The last part of my writing is being on the set and working with the actors. I wanted the actors to live in the rhythm of walking with the goat, having the rooster around, feeding the horse a carrot. The animals are the measure of the capacity for gentleness. It's being around the animals that changes you, but I wasn't there with them, so I couldn't insist on that, couldn't see what happened in those moments. Not being in the editing room, not getting to see all the footage that was there and other discoveries that might have been, that was tough too.

After the pilot there were some real conversations about how we would continue. We all still wanted to do the show. At one point, we were discussing a different potential future project of Michael's but also about how we'd work together going forward. We were talking about what soldiers bring to and take away from battle. I said to Michael, "When your mother fell ill, was there any fucking question where you had to be?" He said, "No, of course not." And I said, "Don't say of course not. For you." For Michael, if your mother is ill, showing up at her bedside is a given. That's a good thing, but that's not true for me. I don't see any human behavior as a given. And that's just one way we see stories differently.

In July HBO announced they were picking up the show and then throughout 2010 and 2011 we were writing and shooting. I know there's a story that Nick Nolte told of me taking a bat and saying I was going to kill Michael. I don't remember that. But I remember feeling pretty fucking angry when I was waiting to see an edit. I felt so cut off from the process of the work. There were days I drove home and while I was at a red light I told my steering wheel, "This guy is an asshole and he hasn't lived very much." That kind of statement, ad hominem, ultimately diminishes the speaker. I know that. And yet I don't want to be perceived as bending over backward to avoid a fight. That was the question then, and in deciding how to talk about this it becomes the question now. At this stage in my life — old — I don't want to present a crippled version of my voice in order to defer. It's a pain in the balls. A moment has to come when you say your piece. But at the time I determined that bending was something I was going to have to live with. And while I couldn't be on the set, I could be in the clubhouse. I could still take people to the track and bet.

To better understand some of our characters who were also degenerate gamblers, Michael asked me what I felt when I won. I told him, "Nothing. Absolute contingency. Everything is at risk and the specific outcome doesn't depend on my character flaws, so that's a release." I have to risk my family's welfare, I have to risk every fucking thing, risk the humiliation afterward of, "'Here's a guy they say has made over a hundred million dollars in his life and may wind up under a fucking bridge.' But there's a chance I could win, and if I win, for about an hour and a half I get to give the money away to people and feel okay about myself."

Continued...
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on September 11, 2022, 06:34:51 PM
continued

In March of 2011, around when I was working on writing the eighth episode of Luck, our then–business managers got in touch with Rita to encourage her to transfer the title for our house on Martha's Vineyard to our children. We had hired them back when our children were born because I couldn't be trusted, and whenever we were going to spend money, Rita would ask them if we could afford it. They managed the kids' tuition, the payroll at my company, credit-card bills, taxes, the acting classes I paid for, the other tuitions and hospital bills and apartments I took care of for various people I crossed paths with. They had never raised any flags with her before, so the title change seemed strange, and Rita asked them to meet. She went into their office the next day, and they told her I had spent about $23 million at the track in the last ten years, and a lot of that in the last two, and between that, $5 million in unpaid taxes, a few mortgages she didn't know about, and the business managers' own fees, we were 17 million dollars in debt. Rita then asked them why they didn't pull the alarm to her years ago. They said they were afraid I'd fire them if they did. Back when Rita and I were dating, I was a heroin addict; she would come home and I'd say, "You're not going to believe this. They robbed us again." I was selling the furniture.

Sometimes we are blessed with what they call a moment of clarity. One day I was looking at her and she was nodding and I recognized that she weighed about 85 pounds because she was a codependent. As I was getting sicker she was getting sicker with me. The deepest truth of the situation was, "I'm killing her." As I've told the story within various anecdotes, with whatever transient charm, you may have been able to feel, "Oh, that's just a kind of shorthand." But when I linger to look at her and see that she was dying with me, it takes on a different dimension. And now she had learned how thoroughly I had put her and the kids at risk.

If you look at my behavior, that ambivalence toward order, toward reality, it proves out. During a brief law-school sojourn, I lived in a hotel room with a credit card I never paid. I sold my novel to multiple publishers. I don't believe money is real. I made whole shows about that. But what you believe about money is real. Money had been one way that Rita and my kids felt safe, that I helped them feel safe — generally there weren't too many ways I did that, and now that was gone. When she got home from the accountants that day, she had her steam-rage silence going. She handed me the list of payouts to the track. I looked at her and said, "Why are you showing me this?" I couldn't bear to talk to her. I said I was sorry and went to bed. Our daughter Elizabeth was coming home that night for a visit, bringing her then-boyfriend to L.A. for the first time. I hid for the first two days they were there. You think this is going to be the moment they realize what you really are, and they're going to turn away. But that's not what happens. They call you down to dinner and then you're all back in the kitchen together, and you keep going.

I kept working on Luck, but I didn't tell anyone what was happening. I couldn't go to the set and now I couldn't go to the clubhouse either. Rita called my psychiatrist and told him about the money. I likely would not have told him on my own. With my doctors I am usually well mannered but often evasive, which doesn't necessarily help them succeed in my treatment. But with the new context, my psychiatrist put me on Suboxone, an opioid substitute, to help dull my urge to gamble. That treatment didn't reach any of the fundament of what was going on. In a very ham-handed, intrusive way, it pointed me toward the necessity of mobilizing my denial and suppression. I became much more an actor playing a part, and it so happened the part I was playing was my life.

It was a sad time. I lost about 45 pounds in six months. The revelation has the effect of shaming you totally. It cuts you off from every other avenue of expression in connection with those you love. And there's a kind of doubleness, the first half of which is that you're ashamed about the defects of your personal, private behavior, and simultaneously you feel a profound, profound shame and divorce from the blessings of your relation with the person you love. A portion of that is the terrible sense of isolation and inauthenticity, knowing that if you ever get well, then you'll have to look at how utterly, and at some level viciously, you've wronged the person with whom you had promised to share your life. That final element of realization isolates you in your shame. It sequesters you so that you can never feel a genuine, unqualified love for the person you know you love. The more protracted and revelatory the confession is, the deeper, the more continuous the shame is, so as to make me inaccessible to anyone normal, including my own wife, and to compound my impulse to hang out in places of misdeed and treble my pain of various kinds in my relation with my parents and particularly my dad. You indwell with the feeling that you're a monster and capable of whatever's monstrous, and so there's nothing to impede your path to whatever kind of hellish behavior provides an externalized fantasy of what you think of yourself inwardly 24 hours a day.

That's when you start to worry about taking yourself out. It's a kind of jailing that feels permanent. It's a given. If you would pursue sobriety, that's the first thing you have to accept, and in another sense it's the last nail in the coffin, at least as you feel your situation when you're trying to get well. It's a bitter, bitter joke, the idea of getting well, when you feel so profoundly isolated and you feel that's properly so because of what you've done. I'm still on the Suboxone.

The show premiered in January 2012, and HBO picked it up for a second season after the first episode aired. In March, while we were shooting what would have been the second episode of the second season, a horse died. Two horses had died while we were shooting the first season. HBO paused production, and then HBO, Michael Mann, and I agreed to end the show. The official version was that it was canceled because those three horses died. They died in very ordinary ways — one got spooked by a rabbit and hit his head when he fell, one of their knees shattered, one broke its shoulder. We were working with the American Humane Association and following every protocol. PETA was doing a land-office business sensationalizing what happened and trivializing the love and care and effort of the people who cared for those animals and the spirits of the horses themselves. Whether or not you think thoroughbred horses should be bred at all is a separate question, but they exist, and running is in their nature; it fulfills the deepest movements of their spirit. I think animals should be a part of art. To exclude them would be life-hating. Any living thing is subject to the laws of mortality.

I was relieved when the show ended, and Rita even more so. I suspect HBO was too — we were way over budget. Still, I found some dear friends while making it. Dustin is one. The writer Eric Roth is another. Eric's attempts at helping Michael and me work together were heroic. That's a blessing of the work we do, getting to know and love people we wouldn't otherwise.

I wish I had more time with every one of those actors. I especially wish I got to spend more time with Kevin Dunn and Jason Gedrick and Ritchie Coster and Ian Hart, who played the Degenerates. What the four of them were able to play, what you were able to feel watching them, was the truth the characters themselves didn't understand. As individuals on the show, they have to lose — they win the big jackpot in the first episode, and over the course of the season each of them dissipates his quarter. But before they run completely out of money, out of some totemic impulse to memorialize the original victory, they buy the Cheap Horse, and thinking it's about the horse, they unite in friendship and their hearts open up. That process occurs in every one of the story lines in a different way. Ultimately, in the overall construction of Luck, by pulling back from the individual story lines, as you feel the simultaneity of all these different spirits moving in a kind of concert, drawn and brought together under the same sky, you find there is a unifying principle in the midst of all the seeming disparity and pathology. It looks as if the narrative is pathologizing everyone, but when you pull back and experience the story as a whole, you realize that what looks like pathological behavior is people vibrating according to their past experiences and the present coercions or liberations of their environment.

It's useful to think about what's involved in the process of gambling in its connection to Las Vegas, which is a much more comprehensive and straightforward symbol than the racetrack. Horse racing would never admit it, but Las Vegas has been one of the deaths of the sport. Casino gambling provides the ability to gamble beyond time, rather than the particular moment of a race, and of course doesn't have the inconvenience of having racehorses. The race itself, the creatures, the shared event, there's something there that still insists on life as lived in time. Casinos go beyond that. You can't find a clock in a casino. The difference between night and day, it's very hard once you're in the casino to see the outside. When you go to Las Vegas, that city is organized intentionally to obliterate the disciplines of time. The entire environment is contrived to assault the individual sensibility with the symbols of the American definition of success and to make accessible the most garish versions of the American definition of success, absent the constraints of time and history.

The ad campaign, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." That's not self-evident. It's a fiction that suggests, "Whatever you do in the real world, don't worry about it. You can come to Vegas and reinvent yourself and here are the instruments for reinvention. Craps, pai gow, slots. Talk about a range of possibilities! You can either be a pai gow degenerate, or you can be a slot degenerate. It's not like you have to confine yourself to one thing. You stay up, you don't have to sleep. The food's right here, if you happen to remember you're a creature who eats." That is the embodiment of a system gone mad, which has recognized that human beings can be made to want anything based on association. As long as you have the symbol agreed upon, which is currency, you can be a part of a self-sufficient and perpetual alternative reality.

As long as you're winning, you don't care about time, but the moment that you run out of the currency that entitles you to admission to the world, you're out, and back in the time you wanted to leave. The house is there forever. The house has inexhaustible currency, and you're there only as long as you can play within the rules of the game, which is as long as you have dough. Ultimately, since your energy is not inexhaustible, you're going to fuck up, and you're going to be out. People who have had that experience sit around with a kind of stunned, vacant look in their eyes asking themselves, "What just happened?" What happened was they were exposed to a false environment, an environment that reorganized the categories of reality, which seemed to deny the dominion of time, and whose predicate was ultimately revealed to be inimical to the human spirit.

Excerpted from the book LIFE'S WORK by David Milch, out September 13 by Random House. Copyright © 2022.


from:
https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/david-milch-on-luck-and-the-biggest-disaster-in-his-life.html


   
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on September 20, 2022, 08:38:22 PM
We've Waited Our Whole Lives to Help Our Father, David Milch, Tell This Story

Sept. 13, 2022

By Elizabeth Milch and Olivia Milch
Elizabeth Milch is a writer and consultant. Olivia Milch is a screenwriter and director.


We've heard the story of our dad shooting out streetlamps while on acid more times than we can count. Sometimes he does it with a shotgun, sometimes the New Haven cops know him by name (he'd been arrested before), but it always ends with him saying, "I refuse to speak to you until your badge stops melting." It's a good line.

Our father, the TV producer and creator David Milch, is a storyteller. Even before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, he was always a bit of an unreliable narrator. His penchant for embellishment, and at times ellipses, comes from his belief that in narrative storytelling, "what literally happened need not be overly determinative." Now, nearly a decade into his diagnosis, having finished his memoir, "Life's Work," he has shown us even memory itself is not entirely a requirement for finding truth.

When he first started to lose his memory, we thought it may have been hard living catching up with him. He was a guy with a lot of "city miles" on him. Remembering things like the location of an event or our friends' names was never his strong suit. But it became clear that this was more than age and disposition. He was sick. His brain, his greatest gift, was turning on him.

When we began in 2017 to piece together his story, the dementia he was diagnosed with in 2015 had already progressed. He was a different version of the person who had written hundreds of episodes of television, a different person from the one who used to hold court at any table. As a family, we knew he would need help to make his way and to finish.

This time, we weren't just another audience but interviewers, crate diggers and collaborators. In a certain sense, we'd been preparing our whole lives to help him tell this story. We'd always been listening.

He grew up the child of a venerated surgeon who was an absolute drunk, was sexually abused at camp beginning at age 6, and started drinking himself at 8 years old. He began writing in college after his best friend from childhood died in a car accident. After he graduated magna cum laude from Yale, he would continue years of what he referred to as "pharmaceutical research," including a long stint "studying" heroin.

None of this was kept from us. His stories were told freely and often, part of the large, uncensored tapestry of humanity he exposed us to as children. We could trace the tweaks, the shifts, the new lines when his jokes got better. But he always laid his truth bare.

Part of his tellings and retellings had to do with his own process of healing, of seeking the internal emotional coherence of his life. He pursued this same effort with his studies of character and language and morality on "Hill Street Blues," "N.Y.P.D. Blue," "Deadwood" and other TV series — his work has a fearless relish of complexity.

Getting to know your parents is a strange enterprise. They mediate so much of your understanding and experience of the world, including their own influence on you, and then you have to learn how that mediation is made up of their own experiences, and their parents', ad infinitum. All parents are unreliable narrators. Many conceal their personal histories from their children, or only offer an abridged version. That wasn't our dad's way.

His unreliability was its own established fact. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when we were in elementary school. He continued using drugs until 1999, when we were 15 and 10. His gambling addiction came to a head in 2011. In 2014, our parents sold the house we grew up in to pay off his horse racing debt and back taxes. Our father's demons were a part of our childhood, and our adulthood too. For better or worse, at every turn, we were privy to the truth of "life on life's terms" (one of his favorite phrases).

In that sense, there were no secrets to unearth as we worked with our dad, but there were variations, like the streetlamp stories. Versions of his time in Mexico working on an acid farm, of what happened to his first unpublished novel, of just how much money he lost at the racetrack (somewhere between $17 million and $100 million).

And there are different versions of our dad in the book. In 1966, a drunk college student finds a mentor in Robert Penn Warren and sees in Warren's discipline and enthusiasm for art a chance for another kind of life. In the summer of 1997, he claims to be sober when he isn't, pays for 30 college students to live in apartments for
the summer because he misses teaching, shows them episodes of "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and explains what he was doing line by line. In 2017, at home with Olivia and our mom, he speaks into the air, as he always would, the words that would be the prologue to his memoir. In 2021, from the memory care unit where he now lives, narrating the words that would be its final pages.

It's an odd thing to encounter so many different versions of a person simultaneously. Sometimes it would hit hard and we would be flooded with memories: Oh, wow, haven't heard that guy in a while. We remembered him and our feelings toward him at each of those different moments in his life and in our lives. We experienced a kind of mourning, too, as we said goodbye to different versions of him, imagining them gone forever, even while he was right there.

One of the strangest parts of this disease in our case has been associating a certain increasing sweetness with a sense of our father's decline. Now, when he isn't sure what else to say, he tells us he loves us.

We sometimes find ourselves missing the roughness and wildness of mind and speech that felt so core to his vitality. That was the part of him that could cause pain, but it also taught us there was no experience or feeling beyond comprehension, or beyond loving, which is another way of saying there's no experience or feeling that can't be made into art.

from:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/opinion/david-milch-memoir.html


Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on September 22, 2022, 05:47:55 PM
Legendary "Deadwood" Creator David Milch Remembers (Almost) All of It.

By Sheila McClear -
September 16, 2022


For more than 40 years, David Milch has produced prolifically and influenced immeasurably the landscape of television. He wrote his first episodes in the last days of pre-cable network television, then co-created NYPD Blue, gathering Emmys along the way. He based the acclaimed HBO series Deadwood on the actual residents of an 1870s mining camp, prefiguring the current rage for neo-westerns like Yellowstone by nearly two decades. (Milch is nothing if not nimble: he had originally set the series in Nero's Rome; when HBO informed him it already had a Roman show in development, he simply pivoted to the Old West.)

Throughout his career, Milch's dialogue has been grounded in realism that takes on an otherworldly quality when spoken by his now-indelible characters: Deadwood's Al Swearengen, spouting profanity-laced Shakespearean soliloquies to the whores and gamblers at his brothel; NYPD Blue's Detective Andy Sipowicz, struggling with sobriety and cynicism in equal measure. Milch wrote dialogue that had never been heard on TV—unsparing and sometimes cruel, but with an undercurrent of compassion and redemption—and it shone like new money. His relentless rewriting is legend, seeking always, with a musician's ear for precision, to get the rhythms right. (He dictated rewrites of entire episodes while lying on his side.)

Now, at 77, Milch has published the memoir Life's Work, an unflinching assessment of himself as an artist and a man. Having grappled for much of his life with bipolar disorder and multiple addictions, Milch starts the memoir by acknowledging that he has Alzheimer's. "I'm losing my faculties," he writes on the book's first page. "Things seem a continuous taking away."

For a writer audacious enough to convince HBO that there would be an audience for a metaphysical contemplation of surfing (there wasn't—Milch's 2007 series John from Cincinnati was canceled after one season), the irony of writing a memoir in the midst of losing one's memory must have resonated. But as ever, Milch adapted. He didn't write the memoir entirely alone, he explains. As his condition worsened, it became a collaborative process, a "past recollection of mine being shared with me now by my family who are helping me compile this book," he writes.

    "I'm losing my faculties," Milch writes. "Things seem a continuous taking away."

Milch's early life was marked by overcoming appalling events and extreme dysfunction. He grew up Jewish in Buffalo; his father, a surgeon, was a drinker and gambler who took young David to the track. (He would later kill himself in front of Milch's brother and mother.) While attending Yale, Milch continued a relationship with heroin begun during his senior year of high school ("I wasn't shooting. I was snorting," he clarifies), but otherwise thrived. He joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity; one of his brothers was George W. Bush ("I liked him"). Literary scholar R. W. B. Lewis passed along his writing to Robert Penn Warren, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet. Warren gave Milch an indoctrination into American literature—Faulkner, Melville, Twain, Poe, Hawthorne—that would deeply influence his TV writing. (Milch unfailingly refers to his mentor as "Mr. Warren.") 

Warren finessed Milch's admittance to the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he managed to receive an MFA in 1970 despite a detour to Mexico to manufacture LSD. ("There were a lot of guns. Several people expired . . . I didn't kill anyone, but I might as well have.") A draft-dodging stint at Yale Law School ended after Milch was arrested for shooting out a police cruiser's lights with a shotgun. Warren spirited Milch back to Yale in 1971 as a lecturer in English literature. After nine years, Milch later recalled, "My now-wife and I wanted to get married and have a family and I wasn't making any dough teaching and, of course, what I was making I was using to buy drugs."

And then Hollywood called, in the person of Milch's undergraduate roommate Jeff Lewis, who had been writing for a buzzy cop show called Hill Street Blues. Milch flew to L.A., met co-creator Steven Bochco, and wrote his first episode, "Trial by Fury." Right out of the gate, he won awards—an Emmy, a Writers Guild Award, even a Humanitas Prize, for exploring "the human condition in a nuanced, meaningful way."  In a portent of things to come, Milch used the $15,000 prize to buy a racehorse.

Hill Street wrapped in 1987, and, after sampling rehab, Milch, with Bochco, created NYPD Blue—a smart, literate cop drama that first aired in 1993. Milch's idiosyncratic work ethic quickly manifested itself once the shooting began. It was pointless memorizing lines, recalls Dennis Franz, who won four Emmys portraying Detective Sipowicz, because Milch's scripts were always in flux. There would be a final run-through but the writer would swoop in and demand sweeping changes—"getting Milched," as the practice was known. (Milch suffered a heart attack on the set while arguing with Franz's costar, David Caruso, over changes in a script.) The process was "extremely stressful, difficult, satisfying, and rewarding," Franz says. "As an actor, I loved trying to decipher what he was talking about."

Mark Tinker worked with Milch as an executive producer and director on NYPD Blue and Deadwood. "You really learned how to produce a show, with all of the hurdles that Dave put in your way," Tinker says. "But the most important thing I learned from Dave was compassion and a deeper understanding of the human condition—the difference between us all, but also the sameness."

For every impingement on people's time, there was a weekly raffle of Milch's own money to soothe their irritation. "He came on the set with a bagful of hundreds of dollar bills," Franz marvels, some of it winnings from Santa Anita racetrack, where Milch was steadily perfecting his gambling addiction. He left $100 tips on $5 coffee tabs, but with genuine empathy behind the largesse. He could spot an AA member in need across a smoky room; he paid for lessons for any waiter who wanted to be an actor. "He was very helpful to a lot of people," says Tinker.

Milch especially enjoyed giving actors second chances. He offered Ed O'Neill—then near the end of his run as Al Bundy in Married . . . With Children—the lead role on Big Apple, his 2001 CBS cop drama. O'Neill, who was not sure he would be hired again after 10 years on Married . . . With Children, took the job and soon landed another long-running hit with Modern Family. "I've always said that I owed him a tremendous debt," says O'Neill. "He gave me the best stuff I ever had in front of the camera."

While supporting close friends and complete strangers, Milch himself suffered from crippling anxiety and a "tendency to become suicidally depressed when not working." While heroin helped him "organize and structure a day," his gambling—he claims to have bet $1 million in a single day—was ruinous. Over a ten-year period, Milch pissed away $23 million on horse racing and sports betting, according to a 2015 lawsuit filed by his wife, Rita Stern Milch, against his business managers. Also, they were $17 million in debt. This, despite Milch having earned an estimated $100 million from Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and Deadwood. The matter was settled out of court, but the couple had to sell the Brentwood house where they raised their three children and move to a rental in Santa Monica.

"I think there were some tremendous psychological issues that weighed on Dave," says Tinker about Milch's self-sabotage. "I think his brain probably worked a little bit too hard, and he couldn't deal with it."

Milch would be in thrall to drugs until his early 50s. He's been off heroin and painkillers since 1999, and horse racing since 2002. In 2019, he moved into the memory-care unit of an assisted living facility. Eventually, his wife began picking him up in the morning hours—his most productive—and taking him to the guest house at their home, where he would work on the memoir and a Johnny Carson biopic script for HBO.

Milch's friends and associates observe that if his overindulgence in drugs was a compulsion, then writing is a drive. "He took it really, really seriously," says Carolyn Strauss, HBO's executive for Deadwood. "He's a person of great appetites, and he had a great appetite for writing." 

In Without a Net, a documentary about Milch's chaotic last weeks on NYPD Blue, Milch reflected: "I think it's too facile to say that [work] is an addiction—if you're referencing to my addiction to heroin to say that it's the same thing. Because an addiction to a drug is a way to not feel anything. And the work that I've tried to do is a way for sharing feelings."

from:
https://www.lamag.com/article/legendary-deadwood-producer-david-milch-remembers-almost-all-of-it/
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on September 28, 2022, 11:22:45 PM
David Milch on Language and Obscenity in Deadwood   

The Series Creator on Westerns, Civility, and Iambic Pentameter


By David Milch
September 28, 2022

It seemed so obvious to me that the West I had encountered in my research had nothing to do with the Westerns I had experienced as a kid—Hopalong Cassidy, The Cisco Kid—which weren't even good on their own terms. They didn't interest me particularly even then. And going back and watching some classic Westerns, those too had very little to do with the West that I was studying (though they told some good stories).

Then I did some research to figure out how that had happened, how the Westerns of the 30s, 40s, and 50s had developed, and what I discovered was that it had everything to do with what Hollywood was about at that time, and nothing to do with what the West was about.

There had been a period of five or ten years in the late teens and early 20s when films had gotten a little racy. The dream factory was operated exclusively by immigrant Jews, but then some of the other popular thinkers of the 20s were guys like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford, who were saying, "We've got to do something, the moneylenders are taking over," and worse than that. The Goldwyns and Lanskys and Mayers and Zanucks wanted to stay behind the scenes and keep making their movies and their money, and in order to keep doing that they wanted to send a message that they weren't going to rock the boat any more in terms of the stories they were telling.

They got together and hired a front Gentile named Hays, who instituted what was called the Hays Production Code that proclaimed, "Obscenity [. . .] in spoken word, gesture, episode, plot, is against divine and human law, and hence altogether outside the range of subject matter or treatment." That was the guys in Hollywood saying, let us run the show, and you will get 150 features a year that glorify innocence and an absence of conflict. And those rules governed all of television and film from 1934 to 1968.

But there's no rule that can stop art, though there are plenty that will change it. If you're an artist, when you're confronted with those kinds of strictures, you can refuse to participate or you can try and find a way to internalize them such that it doesn't distort the story you're trying to tell. And so some of the great storytellers in films of the 30s and 40s extrapolated a character who was very laconic. Not only didn't use swear words, this character just didn't talk much at all. His stoicism invoked a whole set of values.
The extremity of the language was, in its own way, one of the few alternatives to law.

There is a way to make a character like that credible, and that's part of what I saw in the historical Bullock and would explore in that character. But that's just one way to be, and I believed that would be a pretty rare, if important, type of person, very much the exception rather than the rule, and that what made him that way would be as dark and complicated, obscene let's say, as anyone else.

Every day, before I start to write, I pray, and I ask to be willing, and then I see what happens. "I offer myself to Thee to build with me and do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will." People who've been in recovery might recognize that as the third-step prayer, and that's the one I say every day. It's my asking to have the perspective of self lifted and to give myself to the situation and the characters. I find that I function most effectively when I sort of disembody myself. I lie there on the floor and I talk and the words come up on the screen and then I fix the words, but I never actually lay my hands on anything, a computer or a typewriter, none of that.

It was time to listen, to find the characters up and walking and hear who they were and what they had to say. In everything I read about the West, and gold camps in particular, one thing about which there was uniform agreement was the language that was used in these communities. The extremity of the language was, in its own way, one of the few alternatives to law. The same way that an ape may beat his chest to signify his willingness to do something that, if he had to do it every time he signified his willingness, he'd be in fights all the time, the obscenity was one alternative for people in the camps, and it was a crucial alternative for me to portray in the absence of these other ordering mechanisms.

It seemed to me that the people in that environment who had recourse to books were highly, highly motivated.

If you went out to an environment like this it wasn't because you were doing great in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. There were some personality attributes, maybe there was a warrant or two out. Because there were no laws, any question potentially had lethal implications. If I say, "Where are you from?" you're usually gonna say where you're from. In Deadwood, if you say, "Where are you from?," the response was, "What the fuck is that to you?" Immediately it becomes a potentially mortal situation. It was a way of announcing "Don't come in here with any weak shit." But the obscenity is not indiscriminate. It's calibrated according to the given personality and the given environment. The obscenity is meant to do a lot of different things.

The language, it seemed to me, had to serve two functions. The first was to beat down the viewers' preexisting expectation that any law would be obeyed, sentences so soaked with obscenity as to bleach out the expectation that civility could be expected to govern in any given scene. To ask the viewer to live in that emotional environment with the characters, that was the first part of it.

The second part was that I wanted to show how words generated meaning not because of any intrinsic quality but because of the context of emotional association in which they were expressed. The meaning would come from the community we build around and through the words. As the series unfolds, I wanted to show language complicating itself as one of the alternatives to statute, that people come to govern their own behavior as much through language as through law.

I was also interested in the patterns of speech and the distinction between people who had what was called book learning and people who didn't. The people who had book learning tended to speak in an almost Elizabethan way. This was Victorian times. For those who had book learning, it was the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Victorian literature, plus adventure stories, but that access wasn't strictly tied to class.

There's a story about Kit Carson riding seven days to get his new collection of Sir Walter Scott. It seemed to me that the people in that environment who had recourse to books were highly, highly motivated. It was an alternative state of being for them, which stood in contrast to the way they were living. And so I found it credible that people who had recourse to that sort of rhetoric would go for the gusto. Trying to get those rhythms right was a challenge, but it was one I very much enjoyed.

Most of the show is written in iambic pentameter. I believe one way God says, "I too have a hand here" is in the rhythms and metrics of speech, that the metrics of speech are important and representative of our fellowship even in those of us who feel, mistakenly, that we are separate from each other as individuals.

When a character in Deadwood, or anyone, talks in certain locutions, unbeknownst to themselves, they honor a divine presence.

_____________________________


Adapted from the book LIFE'S WORK: A Memoir by David Milch. Copyright © 2022 by David Milch. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

from:
https://lithub.com/david-milch-on-language-and-obscenity-in-deadwood/
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on January 03, 2023, 01:05:58 AM
How 'Deadwood' Updated the Traditional Western TV Series
By
David Hunter


How did David Milch's hit series Deadwood update the Western? Its several endings give us several answers.

Unlike most of the shows of TV's golden age, Deadwood was canceled prematurely. This bestowed a lot of unintended authority on the closing moments of its unexpectedly final episode. Over a decade later, the story was picked back up, as the cast reunited for Deadwood: the Movie. But the storyline was also continued, in another way, in a special feature on the DVD box set titled "Deadwood: the Meaning of Endings," a recorded conversation with iconoclastic showrunner David Milch in the immediate aftermath of the cancelation in which he spoke about how things might have continued if the show had gone on. He also offered, as consolation to disappointed fans, some paraphrased wisdom from the philosopher William James: "the idea of the end of a thing as inscribing the final meaning, is one of the lies... that we use to organize our lives."

So, we have a lot of endings to choose from when we try and decide what Deadwood means to us, and how it might relate to the Westerns before it. And on top of that, Milch gives us the choice to ignore all of them.

 Deadwood: A Show About Progress?


The final moment of the original run of Deadwood was a powerful bit of punctuation. It strongly compelled you to perceive the show in a certain way, a certain shape. The first three seasons of the show followed a distinct trajectory, one of growth. In the pilot, the town of Deadwood was just beginning to get off the ground. People were starting to flood the town, situated on the occupied ancestral land of the Sioux, Cherokee, and Iroquois, drawn by the gold recently discovered in the Black Hills.

Over the run of the show, Deadwood would prosper and grow. It would form an ad hoc government, and the new arrivals would form a community. Meanwhile, increasingly powerful and entrenched forces from within the United States would attempt to swoop in and usurp what Deadwood's founders had built. This conflict climaxes with the coming of the ruthless mining baron George Hearst (Gerald McRaney), who arrives in Deadwood for the third season, to oversee the consolidation of most of the gold-bearing land under his control. What Hearst discovers is that Deadwood is a strong enough community to, if not resist his will entirely, at least partially deflect it and make it impossible for him to personally stay in town. This is the culmination of two seasons in which the characters of Deadwood learn to care for each other, out of affection and need, and in the process become resilient.

The most dramatically important relationship is between the show's two leads, Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and Al Swearengen (Ian McShane). They begin as enemies — Bullock is a lawman, and Swearengen is a murderous saloon owner and pimp — but they learn they must rely on one another, and so form a symbiotic relationship. Bullock will become the face of lawful Deadwood, while turning a blind eye to Swearengen's crimes. Swearengen will do all the killing that needs to be done, but always in the service of the greater needs of the town.

We watch Swearengen kill a lot of people, always after a period of moral calculation. But the final murder is the worst. Series regular Trixie (Paula Malcomson) has attempted to assassinate the vile George Hearst, and failed, and Hearst is calling for her death. Instead, Swearengen murders Jen (Jennifer Lutheran), another one of the trafficked women under his control. She's a total innocent but is less familiar to him than Trixie, and Hearst is unlikely to be able to tell the difference between their dead bodies. After the ruse succeeds, Johnny Burns (Sean Bridgers), one of Swearengen's lieutenants, who had a crush on the murdered girl, asks if she suffered. Swearengen gruffly tells him that he made her death as painless as possible. Then, while alone, he delivers the iconic line "wants me to tell him something pretty," while scrubbing up the blood.

A Few Takes on Deadwood's Ambiguous Ending

Swearengen's line came to be seen as the message Deadwood existed to deliver. In fact, in the video above, even as Milch is urging viewers to resist the impulse to let the ending of a show define it, he quotes this exact line. The moment is overpowering because while it acknowledges the horrors of the American frontier, and expresses contempt for anyone who won't acknowledge them, it also implies that these horrors can be confronted, and accommodated. It echoes another famous Swearengen quote: "The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back."

But, context is important. What is the ultimate purpose that gives this suffering, both endured and inflicted on others, meaning? If you watched Deadwood as it aired, the pattern you saw was of a town that only grew in size and strength, acquiring increasingly powerful enemies, but able to battle them to a draw. In this context, the losses taken by the people of Deadwood are casualties in a larger ideological struggle against the wholly depraved forces of American capital, which would gladly accept a human toll hundreds of times worse than the cost of doing business. If the town of Deadwood is growing stronger by the season, perhaps Seasons 4 and 5 would have been the ones where the town would finally be able to triumph over its enemies. The premature cancelation allows these dreams, even as its final moments encourage hard-nosed realism.

Only listening to Milch explain what would have actually happened if the show had continued dispels this fantasy. What did Milch foresee for the town? Destruction by fire. That Deadwood might burn to the ground is signposted several times throughout the show, and happened in reality. But, though the town would rebuild, Milch imagined that the influence of Al Swearengen would be permanently diminished. Whatever you think about a Deadwood without Al, it's not one that continues to take on the forces of agglomerated capital. That might have led to an ending in which all seems to have been for nothing.

The Deadwood Movie Changes the Series' Ending While Best Summarizing Its Message

Of course, none of this story was ever put on film. Not only that, but when Deadwood: The Movie returned in 2019, in the digital age, none of these events seemed to have ever taken place. When we see Deadwood again, most of the characters are exactly where we've left them, seeming to have passed the entirety of the intervening years in cozy domesticity (cancelation treated them better than us). The movie displays a sentimentality that the Al Swearengen of 2006 might not have liked. Quite literally, in fact; the movie provides several of its characters with "pretty" deaths, even symbolically returning Jen to life.

But in all this sentimentality I do think you find the best summary of what Deadwood was really all about. Milch's great gift as a writer is his ability to empathize with all of his characters, high and low, and his willingness to put words of great eloquence and understanding in the mouths of all of them. He likes people, or seems to in his capacity as a writer, and the driver of his affection isn't what values they stand for, but simply proximity and familiarity.

The pain and damage of Deadwood isn't a calculated loss in a battle between two competing ideologies, either one of which could triumph. (Although, in the movie, Milch allows the possibility for the first time that George Hearst might not "own the... future.") That pain is only meant to pay for the momentary happiness of the people who happen to live in Deadwood, even if the town is eventually absorbed seamlessly back into the United States and that happiness disappears without a trace. And, even if those original townsfolk are simply lucky to have the purchase they do, other unlucky people had to die for them to have it. In Deadwood, any quantity of human happiness and freedom is precious and worth its price. That is not a morally impregnable ethos, for sure, but while you're watching the show, it feels like something you believe.

from:https://collider.com/deadwood-western-tv-show/
Title: Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Post by: Sven2 on December 14, 2023, 06:04:11 PM
David Milch has Alzheimer's disease. He also has a new screenplay
by Greg Braxton
Dec.14,2023


David Milch sat in a Playa Vista restaurant, eyeing a small cheese pizza in front of him. The story he was telling is true.
"I was running bets for my old man and half a dozen people when I was a boy," Milch said, flashing a soft smile at the recollection of hanging out at the racetrack. "They'd tell me, 'Bet $10 on the seven horse and shut up!' For the big races, it was frightening, carrying around $1,000 when I was 7 years old."
Encouraged by his companions in the nearly empty restaurant — Rita, his wife of 43 years, and his good friend, John Hallenborg — Milch continued to weave his memories of those bygone days into indelible images: magnificent horses thundering across the finish line and "degenerates" wagering staggering sums.
In many ways, it was a familiar scenario. Telling vivid stories populated with colorful characters, good and not so good, has been the defining work of Milch's life. That ability made him royalty in Hollywood as he wrote for the classic police procedural "Hill Street Blues" and created provocative fare such as the gritty cop drama "NYPD Blue," with Steven Bochco, and the acclaimed neo-western "Deadwood."
But this was not just a casual lunch to indulge in nostalgia.

While Milch, 78, can still tap into his past to construct a compelling yarn, his thoughts are filtered through a degrading lens. In 2019 he disclosed that he has Alzheimer's disease. After being at the center of the TV world, his career came to an abrupt halt. Many in the legion of friends and associates who used to surround him when he was a big shot gradually drifted away.
"I'm losing my facilities" he wrote in his 2022 memoir "Life's Work," composed with the help of his wife and children. "I wonder, and not infrequently, 'Is it gone for good?' My mind."
But as he picked at his pizza, Milch demonstrated that his mind is far from "gone." His vibrant spirit and artistry are thriving in a manner that might surprise the families of those affected by the degenerative disease.
David Milch has a new screenplay.

For more than a year, driven by a dual mission of keeping Milch's artistic muscles alive and shattering the stigma that shadows those who suffer from dementia and Alzheimer's disease, Rita and John Hallenborg have established a routine of working lunches intended to stimulate the TV legend's creative juices.

"Work is at the core of David's spirit — it's his essence," said Rita, sitting next to her husband at one of the lunches. "I really don't care about the end result or whether this gets made." The idea, Hallenborg added, "is to keep David engaged and bring him a source of joy."
The result, a feature called "The Last Horsemen," could return Milch to the spotlight nearly five years after his last produced credit, "Deadwood: The Movie," was released.
It's another unexpected twist in the life journey of Milch, who was known not only for his considerable showbiz triumphs but also his notorious dark side. In addition to being diagnosed with bipolar disease in the early 1990s, his addiction to gambling and drugs did extensive damage — he lost millions at the track and on sports betting. His volatile personality made him feared on and off the set.
"The Last Horsemen" is the realization of a Milch story that was never developed, a narrative set in the horse racing world that centers on a corrupt gangster and his son and their impact on a young couple. Like other Milch projects, it contains raw language, complex relationships and unflinching violence.

Elements of the story came together as Rita was focusing on "Life's Work." "David would ramble and tell me stories, and it was often the same story," she told The Times. "It was often David's story in different manifestations, and the characters were often him and his father. David was abused as a child. It was like all these things that he'd been working through his whole life."
"There was the outline of a story he would keep coming back to," so Rita called Hallenborg, who had worked with Milch on various projects. "I needed someone who could turn that outline into script form," she added.
She trusted Hallenborg, who had been visiting Milch at the assisted living facility where he now resides. In addition to writing, their bond was built on their mutual love for horse racing — they'd spent numerous afternoons at the track — and their shared experience with addiction.
"Rita told me that David was absolutely animated about this story," Hallenborg said.
At lunches during the next year, the tale was fleshed out. "We'd ask David, 'What do you think of this?' And it will be like the click of a light on his face," said Rita. "I push 'record' on the phone, and it goes from there. It's jumbled and confused, but in there is a kernel of something that's real David."
Rita would email the recording to Hallenborg, who "would take from that the gold that David had mined" and incorporate that with his own voice.
"David, I want to talk today about happiness for gamblers," Hallenborg said at one outing. "Did you feel happiest when you won at the track, or were you anxious to parlay your winnings back into the game?"
Milch replied that he "didn't feel any imperative to prove myself again."

"I think David is happy for a brief time when gambling ... minutes, hours," offered Rita. "His high was being at risk, having everything on the table."
"Absolutely," Milch said.
"When he was happy, I was happy," Rita continued. "But no, I didn't enjoy the gambling."
"She felt the danger, even at a remove," Milch said.
At times, the memories came flooding back. "My dad was a big tipper," Milch said. "He would take me down to the winner's circle, carrying me."
Recalling how he got more serious about gambling in high school, Milch said, "My old man tightened up the cashier to carry his bets. And I would have a little action on the side. There was so much action going on. At some level, I became an irritant because I was carrying all this stuff, and sometimes I would forget."
Although he was quieter at other moments, Milch was attentive as Rita and Hallenborg exchanged stories. "Even when he was working at the office, David was keeping tabs on what was happening at the track," Hallenborg said. "He would send people to the track to place his bets or pick up money. He would talk to the trainers."
"Now I'm the wretched wretch you see before you," Milch quipped, much to the delight of his tablemates.
Rita and Hallenborg were both stunned by Milch's enthusiasm when they presented him with pages of the script. They said his sharpest talent, still, is shaping and editing screenplays.
"He'll just start in on them," Rita said. "I compare it to a musician playing an instrument. He just starts riffing. He can still bring the magic, even though he'll forget or get disconnected."
That disconnection is visible in one draft of "The Last Horsemen." While making notes around lines of dialogue, Milch suddenly segued into composing a scene for "NYPD Blue," which includes exchanges between Det. Andy Sipowicz (played in the series by Dennis Franz) and other characters from the ABC TV show, which ran from 1993 to 2005.
As "The Last Horsemen" script reached its final stages with Milch adding his notes, Rita had other contributions and insights on characters that significantly improved the story, Hallenborg said. After those additions, they thought maybe, just maybe, "The Last Horsemen" might have enough commercial appeal to be produced.
While the screenplay is shopped around, the focus of the unusual partnership has switched to an idea hatched by Hallenborg that he hopes will lead to a TV series. The story is inspired by two young men he met on social media — one who has been in recovery and another who has been in and out of prison.
"He's a fascinating, talented, handsome, smart, charming sociopath," said Hallenborg of the second man. "I'm 38 years sober, but prior to that I had plenty of association with people who were outlaws. This is not unfamiliar ground to me."
Gambling and racetrack shenanigans are once again a key part of the narrative, and Hallenborg continues to prod his former mentor with questions about his racing past and the culture of gambling, using those details to add authenticity to the new story.
Hallenborg, who has a 40-year background as a freelance writer for business publications, is open about his own ambitions, keenly aware that any successful project that links him with Milch will heighten his own profile in Hollywood. He has optioned three screenplays that were never produced.
Even so, his work with Milch has an emotional element that's much deeper than any suggestion of fame or finances. Milch helped support Hallenborg years ago when he was in treatment for prostate cancer and could not work, once pre-paying him for two scripts that were never developed. Their new partnership is Hallenborg's way of returning the favor.
"From a spiritual standpoint, this is the most rewarding work of my life," Hallenborg said. "Yes, it would be great if this would lead to something. But my No. 1 priority is to keep David's engine going."
At one of their recent outings, Hallenborg expressed awe at what the trio have already achieved in helping to craft "The Last Horsemen": "Sometimes a little inflection from David, something that he just adds, will give insight into characters that was not there before. That is the magic of the guy."
Rita reached out and affectionately stroked her husband's hair. "See, Dave? You're magic."
Milch nodded his head and smiled: "Shows you what prison can do."
That exchange could easily fit into a Milch-penned drama, although it's hard to reconcile the mild-mannered person who slips $10 to the waitress before she even takes orders from the table ("Please indulge him — it's important," Rita advises the startled server) with the fiery force of nature who once referred to himself in an essay for young screenwriters as "David f— Milch."
:::
Although Rita is heartened by her husband's ability to remain creative at this stage of the disease, she acknowledges a harsher reality.
"David's mind is getting harder and harder to get to," she said later. "It's heartbreaking. He's leaving, piece by piece. He lives in a state of agitation, brought on [by] a sense of unfulfilled obligations. He has paranoid moments, which is common with dementia."
Two oddly kindred spirits wind up on the same page
That agitation can be explosive, as evidenced by an early-morning visit to the assisted living home. Hallenborg had arranged with Milch in advance to go over some script pages based on conversations the pair had a few days earlier.
But minutes after Hallenborg escorted Milch from his apartment to a conference room, it became clear that something was not right. Milch frowned as he riffled through the pages.
"Why haven't I seen this before?" he finally asked.
"Because I just wrote it," Hallenborg replied.
After a few tense minutes, Milch grew more confused.
Realizing the strain, Hallenborg apologized: "I tried to call you earlier, David, and there was no answer. You said I was imposing when I came to your room to get you, and that was not my intention."
"Well, your intention is not the be-all and end-all," Milch snapped.
"I never said it was."
"YOU JUST DID!" Milch fired back. "You just gave me this to read, and I don't know what the f— it is."
"OK, I apologize for imposing on your morning," Hallenborg said calmly. "It was not my intention to do that."
"It wasn't?"
"No, David. I've stopped by here many times. Today there's friction and bad communication between us and I have to accept that. I really am sorry for imposing on you."
"If you were really sorry, you wouldn't have done it!"
After returning Milch to his room, Hallenborg said the encounter would have been smoother if Rita had been present. It's a mantle she's become used to wearing.
"In horse racing, there's the goat, which is to keep the horse calm," Rita explained. "If I'm there, David can reach out and put his hand on my knee, and that will make him feel better. I see that as my role — the calming influence."
Milch's current situation might be compared to the later years of Tony Bennett and Glen Campbell, popular singers who were able to keep performing years after they were diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
Monica Moreno, senior director of care and support at the Alzheimer's Assn., said Milch's ability to access his talent for storytelling is similar to the experiences of the two singers.
"His ability to be a TV writer and producer was such a huge component of who he is," Moreno said. "Considering the work he had in this area, it's not uncommon to see where they're discussing things he's done his whole life that it stimulates those memories and allows him to engage."
:::
Milch first made his mark in the 1980s as a writer and executive producer on "Hill Street Blues," which was co-created by Bochco. He and Bochco went on to co-create "NYPD Blue," which broke network barriers, and frequently stirred controversy, with its foul language and nudity. The series was a massive hit and won numerous Emmy awards.
Milch's creation of the HBO series "Deadwood" in 2004 was another success, proving that he could extend his writing prowess far beyond the urban milieu of police precincts and crime scenes. The revisionist western, set in the real-life mining town of Deadwood, South Dakota, starred Timothy Olyphant and Ian McShane at the head of an ensemble of evocative characters and was marked by brutal violence and toe-curling obscenities, often projected with Shakespearean flair.
After "Deadwood," though, Milch struggled to match his earlier accomplishments. In 2007, HBO yanked his trippy surfer family drama "John From Cincinnati" after just one season, and the premium network also canceled his 2012 horse racing drama "Luck" after one season when three horses died during production.

Work was one of Milch's addictions, said Rita. "It was all very intense, and that's probably a part of the attraction — this heightened sense of reality. He worked seven days a week for all his working life. We lived separate lives, but it was always intense and scary. We would be walking on eggshells."
A typical day now for Milch begins in the morning, when he will read and edit scripts and manuscripts. "People bring him stuff to read, and he'll go over pages with a pencil," said Rita, who visits him several times a week.
"People ask me about him all the time," Hallenborg said. But "he doesn't get many visitors, versus the whirlwind of people who wanted his attention back in the day. They're scared of what he's going through."
Moreno said the main thing for families affected by Alzheimer's is that as the disease progresses, "there is still the ability for families and friends of the individual to maintain a connection to that person's likes and dislikes. It's important to treat them with dignity and respect."
Even though she is pleased with the breakthrough, Rita is realistic about the future.
"I'm aware of what David is able to do at this point, and what he was able to do when he was at his best," she said. "We're at a different point, and we have to accept that."
In the final pages of his memoir, Milch addresses his plight in another true story.
"I still hear voices. I still tell stories. There are those in my head and another in my throat and others in my work. There is the voice in my wife's head and the one in my children's heads. The deepest gift I think an individual can experience is to accept himself as part of a larger living thing, and that's what we are as a family. Shut the f— up, Dave. I still hear that voice too."

from:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2023-12-14/david-milch-deadwood-nypd-blue-alzheimers-disease-dementia-rita-stern-milch-john-hallenborg

or:
https://archive.ph/BLEAa#selection-2123.0-2319.388