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#21
General JFC / Re: Poetry Almanac
Last post by Sven2 - December 05, 2022, 07:28:15 PMHearing an Oriole at the Palace
In spring trees shrouding palace windows,
a spring oriole sings dawn light into song.
It sets out to startle the world, stops short,
flutters here, there. Return impossibly far,
it hides deep among dew-drenched leaves,
darts into blossoms and out, never settled.
We wander life, never back. Even a simple
birdcall starts us dreaming of home again.
--Wang Wei (701-761 CE)
translated by David Hinton
In spring trees shrouding palace windows,
a spring oriole sings dawn light into song.
It sets out to startle the world, stops short,
flutters here, there. Return impossibly far,
it hides deep among dew-drenched leaves,
darts into blossoms and out, never settled.
We wander life, never back. Even a simple
birdcall starts us dreaming of home again.
--Wang Wei (701-761 CE)
translated by David Hinton
#22
General JFC / Re: Poetry Almanac
Last post by Sven2 - October 26, 2022, 05:45:33 PMLiving
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.
A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily
moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.
Each minute the last minute.
--Denise Levertov
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.
A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily
moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.
Each minute the last minute.
--Denise Levertov
#23
General JFC / Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Last post by Sven2 - September 28, 2022, 11:22:45 PMDavid 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/
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/
#24
General JFC / Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Last post by Sven2 - September 22, 2022, 05:47:55 PMLegendary "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/
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/
#25
General JFC / Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Last post by Sven2 - September 20, 2022, 08:38:22 PMWe'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
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
#26
General JFC / Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Last post by Sven2 - September 11, 2022, 06:34:51 PMcontinued
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
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
#27
General JFC / Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Last post by Sven2 - September 11, 2022, 06:29:21 PMWhat 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...
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...
#28
General JFC / Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Last post by Sven2 - September 03, 2022, 09:20:37 PMIn 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
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
#29
General JFC / Re: Mr.Milch In The News
Last post by Sven2 - September 03, 2022, 09:14:21 PMDavid 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:
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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A Baby Hadn't Gained Any Weight in Months. Why Was It Failing to Thrive?
Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich: A Marriage Built on Monsters
Continue reading the main story
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:
#30
General JFC / Re: Poetry Almanac
Last post by Sven2 - September 01, 2022, 07:34:17 PM Transformation
I haven't written a single poem
in months.
I've lived humbly, reading the paper,
pondering the riddle of power
and the reasons for obedience.
I've watched sunsets
(crimson, anxious),
I've heard the birds grow quiet
and night's mutenness.
I've seen sunflowers dangling
their heads at dusk, as if a careless hangman
had gone strolling through the gardens.
September's sweet dust gathered
on the windowsills and lizards
hid in the bends of walls,
craving one thing only:
lightning,
transformation,
you.
--Adam Zagajewski
I haven't written a single poem
in months.
I've lived humbly, reading the paper,
pondering the riddle of power
and the reasons for obedience.
I've watched sunsets
(crimson, anxious),
I've heard the birds grow quiet
and night's mutenness.
I've seen sunflowers dangling
their heads at dusk, as if a careless hangman
had gone strolling through the gardens.
September's sweet dust gathered
on the windowsills and lizards
hid in the bends of walls,
craving one thing only:
lightning,
transformation,
you.
--Adam Zagajewski
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